to Read - International Psychoanalysis

REPETITION, AMNESIC MEMORY AND SOMA,
BERLIN, JULY- 07
Marilia Aisenstein
In her excellent paper Elsa Aisemberg writes :
“ Today we are faced with the challenge of exploring into the mise en scene of
the marks of the amnesic memory,as A Green calls it, of what has never
become conscious, of the proper of genuine unconscious ,with roots in the
soma, the id of the second topic, as Freud delineates in Lecture 31
(1933)…………………….Our current clinic and theoretical practice compels us
to create something new between patient and analyst……something similar to
the work carried out by an artist in the creation ,as he can by himself transform
into figurations his primitive traumatic traces.”
Among histories, in which illness is at first experienced as an opaque blow of
fate but becomes, in the course of psychoanalytic treatment, an object of
psychic working-through, I should like to give an example by speaking of
Makiko, she is a painter…..
Makiko
I have chosen her first name from Mishima. In Runaway Horses, the second
volume of Mishima’s final work, The Sea of Fertility, Makiko appears as an
eminence grise rather than a heroine. She is a young and beautiful woman, the
daughter of a general close to imperial circles. She divorces because she had
refused the submission required by husbands. She thus returns to live with her
father and becomes the driving force of a rebellious group of young people who
are prepared to commit the seppuku ritual1 rather than accept the social order.
I should recall here that Mishima himself committed suicide when he had
finished this magnificent epic, writing simply that he had said all he could in it.
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Japanese ritual suicide commonly called “hara-kiri.”
The woman I have called Makiko was referred to me by an eminent
psychomatician colleague who specified that she was Japanese, had colon
cancer, and that she was difficult to hear. He attributed this listening difficulty to
his own age and to the muffled voice of the young woman.
Makiko thus came to see me in my office and, beginning with the first interview,
began an odd habit which became a ritual between us. She would enter and,
on the doorstep, would slightly bend over an say to me, “Hello, Madame, how
are you?” I would then answer her immediately, “Well, thank you, and
yourself?” I next understood the immediate necessity of returning a standard
reply of the same length as hers, more tied to the rhythm of the expression than
to the choice of words themselves.
And, in effect, as soon as she began to speak, I was caught up by the
melopoeia of her discourse. The words were French but I heard a guttural and
stressed Japanese music which was effectively difficult to listen to even though
her French was excellent. In moments of suspended attention, I could hear
Japanese sounds and I lost the meaning of the sentences. I would like to note
this counter-transferential difficulty seemed enlightening, for Makiko would tell
me later that there had been times when she had lost “the meaning of
everything” during her depression.
I shall say very little of the first part of her psychoanalytic treatment, which took
place face to face in my private office twice weekly, except that it was difficult.
Makiko came because she had accepted her oncologist’s advice, her husband’s
psychoanalyst’s, who had suggested psychotherapy with a psychosomatician,
and her consultant’s. But she herself did not understand how words could help
her to recover. She offered me little information and I often had to urge her on,
to suggest topics for conversation with her. At this time, she was forty-five but
one could give her twenty-eight or thirty-eight. She was small and frail, her face
was smooth, she had the appearance of an adolescent, and she wore blue
jeans and a t-shirt.
The story she told remained mysterious for me for a long time, it was full of
holes. She had suddenly left Japan at twenty-eight in order to study art in
France. She did not know any French, but spoke English. Why France?
Because French painting interested her more due to its perspective. She did
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not know why she had to leave her country but spoke of it as an inner and
powerful necessity.
When I asked her if twenty-eight was not an age when a girl was supposed to
become married in Japan, she was very interested and said to me, “Perhaps I
didn’t wish to be a woman, neither a mother nor Japanese. . . . I’ve never
thought about that.”
She thus came to France and very quickly met her husband. They understood
each other right away despite the linguistic barrier. They “felt completely alike”
and communicated perfectly. He was then in analysis and Makiko thought that
he was in conflict with his own parents, although she found them kind and felt it
very strange that one could be angry with “elderly people.”
She completed her studies, she was a painter but was experiencing difficulty at
the time and was not working. She worked part-time as a saleswoman in a
high-end fashion boutique, which brought in a little money. As I was astonished
by this choice for a woman who was as highly qualified as she, and trilingual,
moreover, she replied that the Japanese do not have the same social values as
us and that this occupation did not pose any problem for her since it brought in
enough to pay for her studio expenses.
I told myself that there was no narcissistic stake for her in this “job.” And yet,
one day an unpleasant but minor remark for an older colleague—“You really
aren’t a good saleswoman”—threw her into deep despair and confusion. She
resigned the next day and sank into an incomprehensible depressive state in
the eyes of all. During the session she cried and her distress was still more
intensified by what she felt as incommunicable. Even her husband did not
understand. She asked me, “You, Madame, do you understand me?”
I was puzzled and told her, “I think that it is very difficult for us to understand
what a Japanese honor code is.” The words “honor code” moved her, she saw
something in them, and she told me that her father was a samurai from a very
noble family which had lost its money, and that he was now an insurance
salesman.
From then on she spoke in a way that enabled me to get a picture of her family.
She was an only child and her mother was Korean with a peasant background
descended from Shinto priests.
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Whenever I would point out something of the order of a possible conflict—Japan
and Korea (the Japanese hate the Koreans whom they consider as belonging to
a subculture), Buddhism and Shintoism, the samurai and peasants—Makiko
invariably replied that it was not like that at all in Japan, where different religions
co-exist in mutual respect and where social classes are naturally branded but
without rejection, disdain, or rivalry.
At the beginning I would listen to her and then one day I started to contradict
her by making reference to Japanese literature and works such as The Tale of
the Genji or Arioshi, an author whom she had known and whom she was
starting to reread. We thus had some very interesting exchanges during which
she wound up accepting that there exists in Japan—“because it’s been
described as such in literature”—feelings and moods that she did not wish to
see.
It is in this context that we went into illness and dreams. She told me very little
about her cancer, she showed herself reticent before the psychic dimension of a
somatic affectation. She had been operated on and was still undergoing
chemotherapy. She nevertheless told me that it was during the depression—six
months after she resigned from work—that the diagnosis was given. She
immediately felt better, as if “the cancer gave me back my dignity and meaning.”
I would say that the illness acquired the value of an internal object that gave her
back her lost honor code.
There was something else she noted in passing. Her husband, whom she
thought of as her twin, was going through a long hospitalization for a slipped
disk operation during the months when she was depressed. She was thus
alone, without work, and had stopped going to the studio. She cried
continuously, and she described a quasi-melancholic episode.
One day, apropos a book—The House of Sleeping Beauties by Kawabata, a
novel in which men, so that they may dream, sleep beside beautiful young girls
whom they do not touch—Makiko told me: “You asked me if I dreamt and I said
no. However, before I dreamt a lot.” Before, it was long ago, well before the
cancer, she could not say when. Her dreams had been very vivid.
She came to the following session with a discovery. “I thought about your
question. . . . I stopped dreaming when I lost Japanese.”
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She explained at length, with application, that the transcription of a dream
image into narrative is different in Japanese because the characters and the
way it is written differ. As she now only spoke French, she was unable to
recount her dreams to herself and they disappeared. “The words do not
summon up the same images, nor do the images summon up the same words.”
I was stupefied and in wonder at this insight in which she seemed to me to
describe with great delicacy the formal regression of the dream. This enabled
me to go into both dream life and regression with her, or rather, her refusal of
regression and passiveness. And she was someone who did not wish to be a
Japanese woman. . . .
We reached the stage where Makiko was beginning to seem different to me.
She found pleasure in the sessions, she thought about them at length, and she
dressed in a more feminine way and put on make-up. She once more took up
painting and spoke to me at length about her research into form and color. Her
narratives were more lively and embodied. However, something that remained
opaque left me highly prudent concerning her. I also wondered why I so often
evoked despite myself Mishima, who was seemingly so far from her text.
At that juncture, Makiko, who seemed to accord a still heightened interest in the
visual, often told me about films and it is thus that there returned to her, during a
session, the image of a childhood dream which was not truly a dream but a
waking vision which had imposed itself on her: she gently planted a knife into
her “belly” and drew the blade upwards. It seemed to me that this was quasihallucinatory material, of the order of the formal regression of thought which,
without the curbing of the preconscious, might lead to hallucination among non
psychotics. The hyper-condensation of this “dream”—penetration, rape, and
seppuku that only samurais had the right to commit, but not women and
Shintoists—was the subject of several sessions.
In order to shorten my presentation, I shall confine myself here to two key
moments in the process.
Summer vacation was drawing near and she was thinking about a short trip to
Japan. In this connection, she asked me if I was going to my country for, she
said, she had always known that I too was a foreigner. This information shed
new light on the transferential tone which had until then evaded me.
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At about the same time she suddenly spoke of Hiroshima. I was literally
knocked down when I learned that Hiroshima was her father’s city and that she
had always lived there. Deeply moved, I reminded her that she was born in
1945, the year of the atomic bomb. Very calmly, almost coldly, Makiko
explained to me that she was born in Korea where her mother, who had gone to
be with her own mother, had been saved or protected by her birth.
I will not dwell on what followed. After the bomb that was, for me, the
announcement that “Hiroshima, but that’s my father’s city,” the movements of
the cure would become stressed by a massive return of affects connected to
horrible childhood images which were until then emptied of any emotional
content. I could then attribute a meaning to her sublimation: the perspective in
painting happened to be the very opposite of the crushing through liquefying.
Makiko described for me a bench that had been preserved intact in the
courtyard of her school, the stone had become lava.
A great deal of work that brought together multiple associative chains enabled
us to correlate the bomb, her cancer in the “belly,” the shock of her first period,
the seppuku ritual reserved for the samurai, and the fact that she had never
even thought of having a child.
The image of a foreign mother who was held in low regard opened the way for
guilt but gave meaning to her refusal to identify herself with a “Japanese”
woman.
Here, I would like to quote a few words of Makiko which made me think about
the emergence of the transference. “I looked at a map and I was happy to see
that Athens is mid-way between France and Japan.” These were astonishing
words in the mouth of such a precise woman for, if the calculation was entirely
false, the words defined very exactly the right distance that we were able to find,
in this psychotherapy, between foreign Korea, which was too near, and France,
which was so far away.
The mention of the equidistance between Athens, Paris, and Hiroshima seemed
to belong to what are called “errors in the transference.” For me, it signaled the
institution of regressive potentialities within a psychic organization where the
refusal of regression was tied to the traumatic non working-through of the
passive tendencies and satisfactions. The work on the formal regression of the
dream in the après-coup of the sessions appears to have been central.
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. I would like to try and think of this analytic story as the construction of the
memory through the analyst’s mind and the working through in the transference
and counter-transferance.
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