“In these remarkable seminars Jean-Max Gaudillière guides us through encoun-

ters with madness – in the clinical setting, in literature, in the lives and thought
of scientists, philosophers, social scientists, psychoanalysts, political thinkers – as
a way of following the ‘erased traces’ of the stories that have been cut out from
official history. Moving among literary narratives, cultural rituals across the
globe, conceptual thought, personal biographies, and his own clinical experi-
ences, Dr. Gaudillière teaches us to recognize in madness a ‘research tool’ into
catastrophic pasts, a showing, in personal lives, of what has been muted and
remains unspeakable within a larger History. At the heart of this stunning book
is the exchange by which the ‘mad’ and the listener (in clinical settings, rituals,
literature, and conceptual writing) can together participate in the inscription of
these collective traumas. What is ultimately at stake in this utterly innovative
work – in Dr. Gaudillière’s profound and moving listening, reading and telling –
is the possibility of making the frozen time of lost histories move again, and
fighting the perversion by which history is lost. In a time in which we face the
renewed threat of totalitarian violence, the lessons of madness that emerge from
this book point not only to crucial personal, but also political truths.”
Cathy Caruth, Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane
Letters at Cornell University

“In the first of two volumes, seven years of seminars taught by Jean-Max
Gaudillière demonstrate the links between psychosis, literature, language,
history, and the psychoanalyst’s courage and persistence in understanding
madness in the clinical encounter. Moving between fiction, clinical stories,
and theory from a wide range of authors, Gaudillière brings the force of
both death and life into the psychoanalytic field of understanding trauma
and madness. Françoise Davoine has organized and transcribed the sem-
inars in a masterful way, allowing the reader to enter the profound depth of
Gaudillière’s thinking about the erasure of history and the production of
madness. Clinicians who work with patients who are delusional, trauma-
tized, or psychotic will find the book opens a space for new and fresh think-
ing about the meaning of madness. Full of humanity, wisdom, and
creativity, Madness and the Social Link teaches clinicians to listen simultan-
eously to what is said and what cannot be said because of the rupture of
the social link. This is a critically important book.”
Jane G. Tillman, PhD, Evelyn Stefansson
Nef Director of the Erikson Institute

“This lively and erudite double volume on psychosis showcases the work of
a master teacher and clinician who was already a post-Lacanian psychoana-
lyst in Paris while Lacan was still alive. Psychosis is the patient’s investiga-
tive tool, shared in the transference with the analyst, for naming the
traumatic catastrophe that has stopped time and destroyed all social links.
The author shows this process of inscription through many generous clinical
examples and by extensive examples from literature, political texts, social
thought, and other psychoanalysts. This rich work provides a much-needed
thoughtful perspective for those who work with patients.”
John Muller, Senior Erikson Scholar, Austen Riggs Center

“Françoise Davoine’s transcriptions of the seminars she conducted with Jean-

Max Gaudillière for thirty years in Paris brilliantly illuminate the psychic terri-
tory where the cataclysms of history intersect with personal story in trauma,
breakdown, and psychosis. Here, the texts of Cervantes, Sterne, Strindberg,
Pirandello, Charlotte Beradt, Kenzaburō Ōe, Toni Morrison, and others, along
with the words and gestures of particular patients, reveal the individual link to
collective horror, horror that cannot be assimilated or thought but is neverthe-
less embodied and enacted. It seems to me that in this moment of global polit-
ical nightmares, the lessons to be learned from reading Madness and the Social
Link are urgently needed.”
Siri Hustvedt, American novelist
Madness and the Social Link

This book provides a psychoanalytic reading of works of literature, enhancing

the illuminating effect of both fields.
The first of two volumes, Madness and the Social Link: The Jean-Max
Gaudillière Seminars 1985–2000 contains seven of the “Madness and the
Social Link” seminars given by psychoanalyst Jean-Max Gaudillière at the
École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris between 1985
and 2000, transcribed by Françoise Davoine from her notes. Each year, the
seminar was dedicated to an author who explored madness in his depiction
of the catastrophes of history. Surprising the reader at every turn, the sem-
inars speak of the close intertwining of personal lives and catastrophic his-
torical events, and of the possibility of repairing injury to the psyche, the
mind, and the body in their wake.
These volumes expose the usefulness of literature as a tool for healing,
for all those working in therapeutic fields, and will allow lovers of literature
to discover a way of reading that gives access to more subtle perspectives
and unsuspected interrelations.

Jean-Max Gaudillière studied classical literature at the École normale supér-

ieure (ENS) in Paris before becoming a psychoanalyst. He was a professor
at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and was
a member of the Center for the Study of Social Movements (CSSM),
founded by Alain Touraine, research director at the EHESS.
In the weekly seminar called “Madness and the Social Link,” held for
forty years at the EHESS, Gaudillière combined his clinical work with the
exploration of literary works dealing with the madness of war. The focus of
his clinical work was the impact of historical catastrophes on personal lives.
He is the co-author of two books written with Françoise Davoine: His-
tory Beyond Trauma (2004) and A Word to the Wise (2018, Routledge).
Madness and the Social Link
The Jean-Max Gaudillière Seminars
1985–2000

Jean-Max Gaudillière

Transcribed by Françoise Davoine

Translated by Agnès Jacob
First published in English 2021
by Routledge
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Names: Gaudillière, Jean-Max, author. | Davoine, Françoise, transcriber. |
Jacob, Agnès, translator.
Title: Madness and the social link : the Jean-Max Gaudillière seminars
1985-2000 / Jean-Max Gaudillière ; transcribed by Françoise Davoine ;
translated by Agnès Jacob.
Other titles: Lectures. Selections. English
Description: London ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | “Published in
French by Hermann 2020”–Title page. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020015256 (print) | LCCN 2020015257 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367523282 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367523299 (paperback) |
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Subjects: LCSH: Psychoanalysis and literature. | Psychic trauma in literature. |
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literature.
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ISBN: 978-0-367-52328-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-52329-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-05746-8 (ebk)

Typeset in Times
by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK
To Jeanne, Batiste, Emile, Kalea, his grandchildren
Contents

Prologue 1

1 Seminar 1: 1985–1986
Kenzaburō Ōe (1935–)
Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness 5
2 Seminar 2: 1986–1987
Gaetano Benedetti (1920–2013)
Madness: an exploration of the zones of death 33

3 Seminar 3: 1988–1989
Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936)
Madness in Pirandello’s work 42

4 Seminar 4: 1989–1990
Toni Morrison (1931–2019)
Beloved in dialogue with Frieda Fromm-Reichmann:
psychoanalysis and psychotherapy 66

5 Seminar 5: 1991–1992
August Strindberg (1849–1912) and Martii Siirala
(1922–2008)
The Inferno and From Transference to Transference 95

6 Seminar 6: 1997–1998
Pat Barker
The Regeneration Trilogy: objectivity degree zero 122
x Contents
7 Seminar 7: 1999–2000
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
Reading madness with Hannah Arendt:
the production of freedom 159

Conclusion 190

Index 191
Prologue

This book contains seven of fourteen seminars given by Jean-Max Gaudil-

lière at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) between
1985 and 2000, transcribed from my notes, since Jean-Max spoke without
preparing a written text. The other seven seminars, given between 2001 and
2014, are published by Routledge in The Birth of a Political Self (2020). We
held these weekly seminars alternately for nearly forty years, until his death
in March 2015. The seminars were held under the auspices of the Center
for the Study of Social Movements (CSSM), founded by Alain Touraine.
Our research, conducted under the title Madness and the Social Link, was
based on our experience as psychoanalysts in public psychiatric hospitals.
Although we were neither psychologists nor psychiatrists – our background
was in classical literature and sociology – we had joined Jacques Lacan’s
École freudienne and were welcomed by Edmond Sanquer, psychiatrist and
psychoanalyst, to work in the departments he directed in three successive
hospitals over thirty years.
The idea of transcribing my notes was born on the occasion of
a memorial for Jean-Max organised in the fall of 2015 by our friends at the
Austen Riggs Center, a clinic devoted to the psychoanalysis of psychoses,
located in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In 1979, we had been invited there
to speak about Lacan, by John Muller, director of training, Jim Gorney,
a psychoanalyst now practising in Knoxville, Tennessee, and philosopher
William Richardson, then director of research, who were introducing
Lacan’s teachings. At Austen Riggs, we met psychoanalysts working with
madness, from different orientations, particularly those of Harry Stack Sulli-
van and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, neither of whom we had heard of until
then. Regular visits to the United States followed.
In July 2017, Jane Tillman, director of the Erikson Institute of Research
at Austen Riggs, and Jerry Fromm, its first director, invited me to transcribe
my notes of Jean-Max’s seminars while in residence as an Erikson scholar.
This book is the result of that work.
Each chapter of the book is a seminar focusing on an author who lets
madness speak, at a time when the word “trauma” was not yet in fashion.
In Erasmus’ The Praise of Folly,1 she starts by saying: “For who can set me
2 Prologue
out better than myself ?” and ends her praise by asserting: “… if I shall
seem to have spoken anything more boldly or impertinently than I ought,
be pleased to consider that not only Folly but a woman said it.”
Our seminars were not recorded. But recently, one of the participants
gave me some photos he took, by chance, at the last seminar given by Jean-
Max in February 2015. On a video recording, he can be seen speaking hap-
pily while I am busy trying to take notes as fast as I can, like in a Charlie
Chaplin slapstick. Bursting out laughing, I remembered that laughter was
part of our seminars, where we transmitted the lessons taught by madness
on the catastrophes of history, on whatever scale.
Our national jester Raymond Devos claimed that laughter works on the
edge of tears, when silenced stories are expressed; it also works through
delusions, “at the crossroads of personal history and world History,” as one
of my patients said. Often these stories are related to the war, whose traces
I bear myself since my early years in my native valley in the Alps. These
traces resurface unexpectedly in my work as an analyst, resonating with
something I am being shown, when there are no words to say it.
Madness teaches us that it emerges out of the destruction of otherness,
and attests to truths without a witness in order to inscribe them in
a narrative. The word “transference” illustrates the search for this “other”
without whom no inscription is possible. For a long time, transference was
thought impossible in psychosis, and therefore no psychoanalysis could take
place. But in truth, it takes a different form, in which the place of the other
has to be created from scratch.
Each one of our weekly seminars spoke through the voice of a writer
acquainted with madness, whose voice resonated with our practice and
allowed us to preserve confidentiality. We followed Freud’s advice, recalling
that he called writers our “valuable allies,” for they know “a whole host of
things between heaven and earth” of which our institutes have no idea.2
Every other year, one of us chose a writer as a guide. For me, it was Don
Quixote, Wittgenstein and the medieval theatre of fools; these became the
subject of books that have been published. Now the time has come to pre-
vent the lessons learned from the authors who guided Jean-Max from dis-
appearing without a trace.
Their experience with madness intersects with that of the pioneers in the
psychoanalysis of psychosis, around the time of World War I. The seminars
provide a dialogue between writers and psychoanalysts, and are presented in
chronological order.
The first one is based on the work of Japanese writer Kenzaburō Ōe,
author of Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness. He responds to this request
by showing that his heroes outgrow madness through an enquiry into the
upheavals in the history of Japan.
The second seminar focuses on psychoanalyst Gaetano Benedetti, who
worked with schizophrenia in Basel. Being of Sicilian origin, he would often
refer to Pirandello when we used to visit him in Basel at Carnival time. So,
 Prologue 3
the third seminar is about the lessons of Pirandello, who drew inspiration
for his short stories of madness from sundry news stories in the local
papers. The stories were transformed into plays after 1915, constituting
what he called his “theatre of war.”
The fourth seminar is a dialogue between Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved –
on the complete destruction of the social link by slavery in the Southern
United States – and the psychoanalyst of madness Frieda Fromm-
Reichmann at Chestnut Lodge, near Washington where she had fled
Nazism – an experience which resonated with her patients’ traumatic life
experiences.
The fifth seminar discusses the impressive testimony given by Swedish
writer August Strindberg about his delusions in Paris, analysed day
by day through his book Inferno, written in French, all the way to its
resolution. For indeed, one can heal from madness when its tools are no
longer needed, since it is possible for the truths it insists on revealing to
circulate in an exchange again and, to use our leitmotif, find a way to be
inscribed.
The sixth seminar examines The Regeneration Trilogy written by British
author Pat Barker. The hero is the famous neurologist/anthropologist Wil-
liam Rivers. He becomes another pioneer of the psychoanalysis of psychosis
and traumas – pursuing the same field of research – when he is drafted as
a military doctor to work at the Craiglockhart Hospital in Scotland,
a treatment centre for officers returning from the front. He reads Freud and
modifies his technique, to find a way to reach suppressed zones in his
patients. One of Rivers’ disciples was John Rickman, Wilfred Bion’s second
analyst. Bion is the subject of the opening seminar in the second volume,
The Birth of a Political Self, composed of seven other seminars given by
Jean-Max Gaudillière at the EHESS.
These seminars have a common, insistent theme: the battle fought by
madness against a ruthless agency that erases traces by stopping time. The
authors quoted in this book show that it is possible to set time in motion
again, in spite of desperate and pessimistic diagnoses. Interaction in the
transference produces what Benedetti calls a “transitional subject,” which
we might also call a “political subject” since it emerges from resistance to
totalitarian perversion. This is the main focus of the seventh seminar on the
work of Hannah Arendt, which sets the stage for the second volume,
entitled The Birth of a Political Self.
The text I submit to the reader is not an exact reproduction of my notes.
As I transcribed them, I could not help pursuing my dialogue with Jean-Max
by inserting references and ideas like in the good old days of our conversa-
tions. I also had to modify the oral exchanges with seminar participants,
who year after year shared their experience with us. Unfortunately, I was
unable to convey the atmosphere of freedom and gaiety that reigned during
our gatherings.I remain grateful to the participants for their enthusiasm,
which helped this book to take shape.
4 Prologue
When I chose the title Madness and the Social Link for the first book of
the seminars, I was thinking, of course, of Erasmus’ The Praise of Folly.
Now that they are about to become public, I invoke his and her protection,
as well as that of Charlie Chaplin.
Françoise Davoine
August 20, 2019

Notes
1 Erasmus, D., The Praise of Folly, Aeterna Publishing, 2010.
2 Freud, S., Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva, S.E. 9, Hogarth Press, 1907.
1 Seminar 1: 1985–1986
Kenzaburō Ōe (1935–)
Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness

This seminar will examine two books: Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness
(1977)1 and The Silent Cry (1967).2
The first title is that of a collection of short stories, which in the Japanese
original also contains other texts. The English translation contains four
short stories. The second one, “Prize Stock,” earned Ōe, at the age of 23,
the highest literary distinction in his country. The title of the third story is
the one that was chosen for the book. The last story is called “Aghwee the
Sky Monster,” and the first “The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears
Away.” In Japanese, the title of the second book is Football in the First
Year of Man’en, the start of a new era (1860) just before Japan was opened
to trade with foreign countries by Emperor Meiji, that is, a century before
the time frame of the stories in the book. These facts were supplied by
Akira Mizubayashi, who has had several books published in French
translation by Gallimard, with the most recent being Un amour de mille ans
(A Thousand-Year Love) in 2017.

I. TEACH US OUTGROW OUR MADNESS: AN ANALYSIS OF

MADNESS AND TRAUMA

In “The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away,” the narrator

distinguishes several periods in the years of extreme poverty of his childhood.
The shortest period is the one in which he accepts his father’s madness, calling
it his “Happy Days,” after the title of an American song. After a violent scene
between his parents, his father – whom his mother would call “a certain party”
from then on – closes himself up in a storehouse, where the child joins him.
The war has just ended; Japan is on the brink of collapse. The boy’s
father, who is obese and has bladder cancer, sprays the child with bloody
urine. At the same time, the boy is made witness to his father’s madness. To
be saved, the emperor must be killed. A delusion takes shape; the child
never stops searching for its inscription. At the age of 10, he witnesses his
father’s death, when the latter is killed by machine-gun fire on August 16,
1945, the only occasion on which he ventured out, with officers who had
deserted, to bomb the imperial palace after the capitulation of Japan.
6 Seminar 1: 1985–1986
At the beginning of the story, the narrator thinks he will die of liver cancer
at the age of 35. He dictates a “history of the age” to an “acting executor of
the will,” who, at the end of the story, is revealed to be his wife. The writer
highlights the political dimension of the delusion present in the psychoanalysis
of madness and trauma, a process in which the patient and the analyst are co-
researchers, in a field of historical catastrophes whose inscription is the aim of
the therapeutic process. The writer provides tools designed to encourage what
British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, based on his experiences in World War I,
called “psychotic transference,” at work in madness and trauma.
This very particular transference brings into question the frame of
reference of traditional psychoanalysis when benevolent neutrality is
attacked by tempestuous outbursts. Recourse to family history is of no use
since time has stopped in the zones of catastrophe; causality is irrelevant,
since it needs the past for the cause and the future for the effect; the
destruction of all otherness obliterates identity and leads to absolute
loneliness. Unconscious processes such as repression are not expressed in
words – signifiers in Lacan’s terms – since speech is no longer trustworthy;
they are expressed through sensory images that survived the catastrophe.
The madness of Ōe’s characters is not an illness, but a strength which impels
them to fight against the erasure of traces. This madness uses specific tools to
explore the silent zones of catastrophe, at the crossroads of their subjective and
historical origins, and to inscribe them by means of fictional creations. What is
at stake here, the historical truth, is political in nature, as are the stakes in the
psychoanalysis of psychoses and traumas. A catastrophe is a near-history,
something which could have become History, but fell short. It could have been
History. In January 1946, God came down from the sky. That day, the emperor
spoke over the radio “in a mortal voice,” declaring that “he was of human
essence.” The Japanese were devastated and cried as they listened to their radios.
The emperor was no longer a god. History could instead have consisted of
a bomb being dropped on the palace, and the catastrophe would have been
averted. This is the father’s delusion in “The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My
Tears Away.”
For the narrator, this near-history took shape at the moment when he
became the puppet of this delusion in a space of arrested time he calls his
“happy days.” This song title also made its appearance in my work as an
analyst at the psychiatric hospital where I used to go every Monday.

Happy days at the psychiatric hospital

I had been seeing this delusional patient for twenty years. In the beginning,
for several months, he did nothing but swear at me, or he refused to speak
to me. At that time, he was very friendly with the intern, but he distrusted
me greatly.
Suddenly, he started to tell me about his delusion. I can reconstitute some
elements of his account. His father was a film projectionist, and his mother
 Kenzaburō Ōe 7
a cinema usherette. He had seen a great number of movies, and I presume that
the segments he described afterwards to compose delusional stories were taken
from various films. He dresses as a woman to play the heroine, using make-up.
He creates images that he puts inside the television. The television then speaks
to him by showing him these images.
The content of the delusion concerns some members of his mother’s
family, who are Nazis. His uncle is Hitler or Mussolini. We can suppose
this to be a metaphor, but it isn’t any longer. His suffering is real. He was
letting himself die of hunger in his bed when I was asked to help him. That
same day, when we talked again, he was critical of his delusion:
“Everything I said was a lie. My uncle is not Hitler, all of that doesn’t exist,
it was put in my head by someone else.”
A thought comes into my head. He has placed the origin of his delusion in
another person, another madman. How will I be able to become this other
madman in my work with him, to be truly in touch with his madness? He
describes the moment when he stops identifying his own mind as the source
of his delusion, but places this source in someone else. He has lent a record to
his uncle’s family, when they came to visit him; it was a recording of the song
“Happy Days.” Well, one may well be used to such coincidences, but they are
still startling. What can I do with this particular coincidence? I relate the story
written by Ōe, whom I happen to be reading at the time.
We start to talk. The other one – the mad one, who may still be positioned
in the television or the radio – usually displays intense psychic activity. Since
I don’t know what else to say, I ask myself out loud what I could be thinking
of. He looks at me and says with great conviction: “Why, nothing at all, of
course.” We stop there. He stops having delusions.
The coincidence created a social link at the place of a ruthless agency
from which his delusion was trying to escape.

Making use of coincidences

Coincidences are one of the tools of transference when we work with those
who are attempting to inscribe a cutaway history. They come from who
knows where, and pull at the analyst, grabbing him by some particularity that
ties him to the zone of catastrophe: in this case, two words: “happy days.”
In our youth, a stock phrase among psychoanalysts was: “It’s not by
chance that …” Well, precisely, I see no determinism of any kind here, not
even unconscious, unless I go mad myself. And I think that the old word
“asylum,” once used to designate psychiatric hospitals, was not so
preposterous, since these coincidences must be housed somewhere. In other
cultures, ritual spaces exist to provide a locus for them, for otherwise they
would be unbearable.
When I am tired, after months of work, I notice that patients who do not
know each other use the same word or the same image as a connecting
8 Seminar 1: 1985–1986
element between their sessions with me, as if they pass each other the word
unknowingly.
The British anthropologist William Rivers,3 who worked as a psychoanalyst
with officers returning from the trenches during World War I, said of this
phenomenon that on such occasions, he functions like a “pipe.” Similarly,
I find myself in the game of “the exquisite corpse” – “le jeu du cadaver
exquis” – in which a paper is passed around, where everyone writes a sentence
and folds the page before handing it to the next person. But here, so to speak,
I am the paper which holds the impression of a word or thing. In the absence
of a narrative that patients are at a loss to produce, they use me as their tool,
in their attempt to tell a story.
Coincidences punctuate the moments of what could be called a “degree
zero” of the encounter with the analyst, from which psychoanalysis may
proceed. Is this the “objective chance” surrealists talked about? Hanged if
I know! All I know is that the word “surrealism” was invented by
Apollinaire, the poet “with a starry head,” wounded by a bullet in the
trenches during World War I.
And so, when the patient and I – here, we could speak of Harry Sullivan’s
concept of self, designating the space of our interaction – were talking about
what I could possibly have in my head, something happened all at once: the
coincidence of the American song, which produced a sudden encounter and
put an abrupt end to the delusion, something that leaves one speechless.
In Lacanian terms, we can say that coincidences are an approach to the
Real, described as “that which never stops not being written,” or the
impossible-to-write. Lacan also says: “The Real is the impossible, it always
returns to the same place.”4 Still, this impossible is not destiny.
Paradoxically, the absence of symbolic articulation leaves no void, but only
a bottomless, compact pit filled with senseless productions, allowing no interplay.
Coincidences create an unprecedented interval – uncanny, Unheimlich – which
opens the possibility of an intermediary space, a time-space called ma or aida in
Japanese, and a “potential space” in Winnicott’s writing.5 This time-space
creates the possibility of otherness in the extreme solitude of madness, for which
no Other answers – except a ruthless intruding agency.
In such a space, a chance encounter triggers an interference with a possible
other. Our patients often ask us: “By what chance did I meet you?”

Conversion of a chance encounter with the witness of an

unwitnessed event
“Aghwee the Sky Monster” recounts the fate of a poor student paid by
a banker to accompany his delusional son on his walks. Designated by the
initial “D,” the madman is a musician-composer whose problem, similar to
that of the author, is the birth of an abnormal baby with a large lump on
his head. But unlike Ōe’s baby, the composer’s baby did not survive.
 Kenzaburō Ōe 9
D speaks to this infant, who has become a huge baby he alone can see
when it comes down from the sky. His father has named him Aghwee,
simply because between his birth and his death, he only spoke once, to say
“aghwee” (p. 241). D makes the student the terrifyingly generous offer of
changing places, by confiding his secret.
Ōe introduces this transformation in two stages: that of the gradual
unfolding of transference, first in the literal sense, as they continue to take
their walks, and then by writing the story more than ten years later. These
two stages are punctuated by two accidents. First, on the road while the
two young men are walking, D is struck and killed by a truck as he crosses
the street. Ten years later, the narrator is blinded in one eye by children
who throw stones at him for no reason. This is a recurrent theme in Ōe’s
work, in which often the narrators write in this blind state, explicitly called
at the end of the story “a gratuitous sacrifice” (p. 261).
As long as the student has two good eyes, imaginary stereoscopy can
build fictions and resistances, as it does for each of us. The first is that of
the diagnosis. “Depression? Schizophrenia?” the student asks himself, while
listening to the objective description the banker gives him of his son’s case.
This initial fiction sets the medical framework in which the disturbances
caused by the madman in public places can be given a socially acceptable
name. This diagnosis, always differential, answers the question: “Is there or
is there not psychosis?”
At first, the narrator complies: “I was to be a moral sentinel guarding the
family against a second contamination by the poisons of scandal” (p. 227).
The second resistance comes in the form of well-meaning neutrality. The
student waits for the patient’s nurse to tell him what to do. She advises him
to “play dumb” and not “get involved” (p. 237). After this, the student
keeps a sort of “clinical distance”: “I discovered that I was loving my job.
Not loving my employer or his phantom baby the size of a kangaroo.
Simply loving my job” (p. 244).
This reassuring distance can last forever, like psychoanalyses where
nothing happens, where the patient and the analyst grow old together: the
analyst likes his job. The composer, however, doesn’t want this distance to
persist, although he shows great understanding regarding his companion’s
difficulties. But he finds the situation very tiring.
Transformations of a relationship always take place when all forms of
resistance and understanding have been exhausted – through seminars,
supervisions, or comparisons with the stories of other patients. The tough
hide softens little by little, until the process comes to resemble a striptease
at the end of which the analyst finds himself naked.
The day when all imaginable limits are reached is a strange day. I don’t
know if it’s a “happy day,” or a “day of anger,” a Dies Irae, quite
unpredictable. On that day, the analyst faces what Raymond Devos calls
“the hard reality of fiction,” since he is called upon to become “the witness
of events without a witness,” an expression coined by the analyst Dori
10 Seminar 1: 1985–1986
Laub, one of the creators of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust
Testimonies at Yale University. At the end of Ōe’s story, the student joins
the composer in the sphere the latter inhabits “outside of time.”

Entering an anti-time
“I am a coded man of the anti-past.” These are the words with which I was
greeted by the patient I mentioned, the first time I saw him in his hospital
bed, where he seemed to be completely disoriented. I had introduced
myself, telling him my name and saying that I was a psychoanalyst on the
ward. The team had told me: “We don’t understand what he says.” This
coding was not the result of some logical reasoning that could give him
perspective on what was happening to him. It came to him directly from
the sphere he inhabited, when he had to face me, as someone who was
supposed to investigate his past. The problem was that past had not passed.
So he was coded by this anti-past. This is how he identified himself.
Recourse to anamnesis and family history was of no use. This is why, in our
seminar and with our patients, we cannot do without literature, where this
particular time-space unfolds.
In fact, Freud gave us this advice. At the start of his text Delusion and
Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva, in which the madness of the young hero
awakens the phantom of a young girl who had been buried in the ashes of
Pompeii, Freud wrote in 1907 that “creative writers are valuable allies and
their evidence is to be prized highly, for they are apt to know a whole host
of things between heaven and earth of which our philosophy has not yet let
us dream.”6
The gigantic baby in Ōe’s short story moves between heaven and earth, to
say the least. In this intermediary space, the analyst will not, as many
believe, look for the cause of madness by sifting through endless memories,
but will work on the erased traces on the anti-trace road.
D tells the student who accompanies him on his walks: “[…] since I’m
not living in present time, I mustn’t do anything here in this world that
might remain or leave an imprint” (p. 239). The only question he must not
be asked is the one pertaining to cause: “‘But why have you stopped living
in present time?’ I asked, and my employer sealed himself up like a golf ball
and ignored me.”
The analyst must not ask why either, but rather: “What am I doing in
this with you, presuming that there is something I can do?” As they
continue their meanderings side by side, the student changes places and
testifies, in his own name, to the need for D’s vision, in order to “outgrow
our madness.” When, at the end of the story, he visits the dying composer,
this shared vision is exposed for the first time in a final exchange: “Then my
throat was clogged with tears and I was surprised to hear myself shouting,
‘I was about to believe in Aghwee!’ At that moment […] I saw a smile
appear on D’s darkened, shriveled face” (p. 260).
 Kenzaburō Ōe 11
Ten years later, after the loss of his eye, the student confirms the validity of his
discovery, when the violence of their two stories intersected:

When I was wounded by those children and sacrificed my sight in one

eye, so clearly a gratuitous sacrifice, I had been endowed, if only an
instant, with the power to perceive a creature that had descended from
the heights of my sky.
(p. 261)

The critical moments in an analysis of madness or trauma, the moments

when something changes, occur when we survive the patient’s madness,
which is by then also ours, at the intersection of catastrophic zones, on
both sides.
A new agency of alterity is created in those circumstances, not without
difficulty, as Ōe illustrates in his first short story, “The Day He Himself
Shall Wipe My Tears Away,” which I mentioned earlier.

The psychoanalysis of madness: joint research

In this short story, the one who fills the function of the “other” also has
impaired vision. His vision is permanently blurred because he never takes
off the “underwater goggles with cellophane covering the lenses,” which had
belonged to his father. He “had originally prepared them to observe a solar
eclipse in Manchuria” during the war (p. 64).
We might think that this is a metaphor for their common inability to see.
But metaphors are not possible when “a certain party,” as the mother calls
him, has become a perfect stranger who greets his son’s arrival in the
storehouse “with an angry Shhh! as if he were shooing a chicken away.”
Metaphors can’t function outside the symbolic foundations of exchange with
a reliable other. The diving equipment covers the narrator’s eyes to adjust his
perception to the gaze of the alien, who cannot adjust to the catastrophe
suffered by Japan, as he tries to write the “history of the age” (p. 8). The
artefact of the goggles tends towards inscription of the catastrophe, but does
not depict it.
To carry out his writing, twenty-five years later, the narrator needs
someone to act as “executor of the will,” and to take down everything he
relates (p. 9). It is not easy to hold the place of “the other,” and they fight
constantly. “Must I put down even that kind of silliness?” she asks,
infuriating him. He can’t tolerate any questions from her, particularly those
concerning the man who bears such a strange designation. “Why do you
keep calling him a certain party? Can’t I change to ‘father’?” (p. 49). When
she is fed up with his demands, and when “he” insists on keeping this
violent designation – thereby excluding the name of the father – she says
that this name makes him sound “like an imaginary figure in a myth or in
history.”
12 Seminar 1: 1985–1986
For once, the narrator agrees to the need for creating imaginary figures of
myth and fiction when everything has collapsed. Out of the ruins of the
couple his parents once were, the child remains, in the place of the absent
message. And the child will never stop searching for the erased traces of the
phantom that haunts him:

When I left the valley once and for all and moved to a place where
there were no traces of a certain party, I gradually began to wonder
myself […] if I hadn’t created a certain party entirely in my imagin-
ation […]. At times, I’ve thought to myself maybe I have been mad
since I was three […] and someday if I recover my sanity the phan-
tom tormenting me I call a certain party will disappear. But I feel
differently now; if I’m a madman, fine, I’m resolved to stay that way
and continue sharing life with my favorite phantom, a certain party.
Ha! Ha! Ha!
(p. 50)

Madness never stays where it has been put by an institution or a diagnosis.

The narrator’s madness prompts him to consult official military documents,
as well as unofficial, reactionary sources, in which he comes across
“a certain party’s name frequently in accounts of anti-Tojo operations.”
(Hideki Tojo was the general of the Imperial Japanese Army and Prime
Minister during World War II.) Ōe does not stick to the foreclosure of the
name of the father, exhibited by the no-name “a certain party.” The same
thing applies to analytic work with madness: the analyst may seize the
initial moment when the signifier of the name of the father was pulled out
of the symbolic chain, the moment when everything fell apart, creating
a psychotic structure, according to Lacanian theory. In practice, structure is
quickly reduced to an illness, as if one could have foreclosure in the same
way one might have chronic whitlow on one’s toe. But what of it?
Ōe goes beyond this stereotype, by uncovering the historical field where
madness functions as a research tool. We have only to look at the landscape
a patient shows us when he tries to lend us the glasses that will allow us to
be his co-researchers. This is the start of a process in which the analyst’s
aptitude as a co-researcher is constantly tested, in which his attempts to
imagine the unimaginable will pile up on the floor like a pool of tears, tears
the principal investigator cannot shed. When all efforts prove useless, when
the analyst loses all his qualities and asks himself why he does this work,
this experience of worthlessness indicates that he has entered a sphere where
time has stopped. I will give you another example.
A young man who was coming to see me could not locate himself in
time, which had to be constructed in the sessions. He often changed his
appearance. I estimated that he had twenty different faces, which he created
with changes to his hair and beard. On some occasions I didn’t notice it,
and suddenly I would see the mask he had brought me.
 Kenzaburō Ōe 13
One day, I saw a face he had never shown me before: he looked like
a financier of the Second Empire – under Napoleon III in the second half
of nineteenth century. Indeed, the bank sent him, at tax time, a portfolio of
stocks, to lighten the assets owned by his father, who can thereby break the
law, and then take the stocks back at the end of that fiscal period. Of
course, the patient did not buy the stocks, for he had no money. By
coincidence, he had just lost his credit card, and mine had just been stolen
with my wallet. So I told him: “You put your card in my pocket, and that’s
where you lost it.” He had given me something to lose so that we could
both be losers in this business, instead of being associates in the stock
market game neither of us understood.
Now we had constructed a place for an “other” who might lose, in
a world governed by an all-powerful, lawless agency for whom the other
does not exist. After this, he came out of his paralysis. Not only did he
arrive on time for his sessions, but he wore several watches. He even started
to think about becoming a father – but that’s another story.

“My delusion emerges at the crossroads of my history and

world history”
This statement was made by a delusional patient whose madness was
elaborating its own theory. During periods of political upheaval, traitors
and dropouts appear in family lines, as was the case for this patient,
whose father’s collaboration with the Nazis had been kept quiet. Ōe
would no doubt agree, since he constantly portrays breaks in the social
link.
On a world history scale, the grandfather of the boy who joined his
father in the dark storehouse had been guilty of grand treason in 1912. He
had been “involved in a plot which had been exposed” (pp. 42–43). In the
next war, the boy’s father plots with dissident officers to “defend the
national polity” (p. 44). The foreclosure of this cut-out history resulted in
its persistent repetition in the aftermath.
At the level of personal history, a telegram announces that the boy’s half-
brother has deserted. A violent quarrel breaks out between his father and
his mother, the deserter’s stepmother. Both parents send back telegrams,
with opposite messages. Not understanding what is going on, the child
becomes the recorder of the event, “as if he were tracking [the telegram
delivery man] with a directional microphone” (p. 59).
The boy is then entrusted with the two cables in which his parents are
“trying to help my deserter brother in their own way, by different routes”
(p. 60). The father’s aim is to have the deserter “shot quickly and treated as
if he’d died in action so at least his ashes will come home to us.” The
mother tries to save him. She screams at her husband: “You’re trying to
have that child killed before he reaches the other side? You want your own
child shot in the back?” (p. 61).
14 Seminar 1: 1985–1986
Instead of receiving reassurances, the child, who witnesses this breaking
apart, enters a time “out of joint,” the time which Hamlet entered after his
father’s ghost revealed his uncle’s villainous betrayal. The child will have to fill
the void that annihilates all symbolic points of reference: “An emptiness the
volume of one obese adult had opened in this world” (p. 52). The child first
tries to fill the void with food, which he keeps procuring and preparing for his
father. Later, he tries to fill the void through his search for old documents, to
fill the pages of his “history of an age,” driven by a sense of urgency in the face
of impending death. “Once [he] began searching for a meaning, [the emptiness]
proved to be a vacuum powerful enough to pull in all of his thirty-five years of
life that protruded from his Happy Days” (p. 52).

Forms on the edge of catastrophe

In his catastrophe theory, formulated in the wake of a depression suffered
after being awarded the Fields Medal, mathematician René Thom described
forms emerging on the edge of catastrophes. In Ōe’s story, at the point of
rupture of the symbolic chain, a form is transmitted in the family through
calligraphy of haiku poetry: “There’s never been anything special about my
family, but we have produced a number of calligraphers” (p. 50).
A taste for the pleasure of language is passed down to the hero of the
story: “For all I know, whatever rhetorical skill I may have even now
originates in simple puns” (p. 55). When the tool with the name is broken,
as Wittgenstein says, puns and doggerels attempt to convey that which is
not finding inscription: “They say that certain manic-depressives are
fascinated by puns and anagrams. You’re suggesting I’m that type of
madman, and that all my chatter until now has been nothing more than
a madman’s raving, that everything recorded here about my past is therefore
untrue” (p. 55), the narrator says defiantly to the executor of the will.
A psychiatric diagnosis of psychosis, based on the use of neologisms,
could be applied to linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) and his
contemporary Jean-Pierre Brisset (1837–1919), both at times quasi-
delusional. They were from opposite backgrounds: Saussure the son of an
aristocratic family from Geneva, and Brisset a country boy who left school
at the age of 12 to work on the family farm, and then fought in the
Crimean War and the Franco-Prussian War. But they had one thing in
common: their passion for wordplay and anagrams.
In 1878, Brisset published The Logical Grammar, based, he says, on the
language of frogs; his works were discovered and enjoyed by the famous
French novelist and playwright Jules Romains. Brisset was elected “Prince
of Thinkers” in a rigged election set up by Romain’s friends, and became
the darling of the surrealists and of the college of pataphysics.
Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916,
is preceded by a text on Anagrams, which he thought to be the basis of
Latin Saturnian verse. In 1971, Jean Starobinski recounted the circumstance
 Kenzaburō Ōe 15
of this delirious discovery: how the linguist found, out of millions of
combinations, the foundation for the composition of these few lines, using
wooden letter tiles. In 1909, he stashed this device away in a safe-deposit
box in a Geneva bank. Stay put!
In Ōe’s story, the child’s mother tells him to shut his mouth. By shutting
himself away with his father, he tries to regenerate the symbolic chain through
a common sacrifice. But no one is there to validate the symbolic status of this
sacrifice, “tied into the knot of world history” (p. 54).
The father first shut himself in the storehouse in January 1943, after
Japan’s defeat in the naval battles of Midway and Guadalcanal:

Late in 1942, burdened with the hopes and expectations of […] the
invaders in Manchuria, [he] had boarded a special plane and secretly
had returned to Japan as a member of an underground group deter-
mined [to meet] Prime Minister Tojo. [They were] secret police officers
who had massacred proletarian activists at the time of the 1923
earthquake.

After the failure of this meeting with Tojo, a certain party had come back to the
valley and “had confined himself in the storehouse” for the first time (p. 54).
When the son finds “various so-called secret military journals,” he
recognises his father’s writing – very clear, in phonetic script in the style of
a famous calligrapher. The reference to that year (1942) brings back vivid
images of a time in the past that had existed for a certain party and for
himself, which they had shared, when he had longed “to die a mutual
death” (p. 51). These forms of words, letters and images that survive
catastrophe have been called “surviving images, Nachleben” by art historian
Aby Warburg, who went mad at the start of World War I, and did not
recover until 1923, when he presented his Lecture on Serpent Ritual in
Ludwig Binswanger’s clinic in Switzerland, where he was a patient.7 In his
lecture, he answers the plea: “Teach us to outgrow our madness” by
showing – through his description of the Snake Dance among the Hopis,
whom he had visited at the end of the previous century – how “a real and
substantial symbolism appropriates by actual gestures that symbolism which
exists in thought alone.”
The end of Ōe’s story comes back to the question of “how to outgrow
our madness” and to the theme of The Silent Cry, which we shall discuss
later. In Aby Warburg’s words:

To render things palpable, a being saturated with demonic energy is

needed, for a full understanding of mysterious events. What we have
seen in this all too brief summary of the snake cult is intended to show
the change from real and substantial symbolism which appropriates by
actual gestures to that symbolism which exists in thought alone.
16 Seminar 1: 1985–1986
For Warburg, the Lecture on Serpent Ritual served as a personal ritual
performed before the patients and staff of the clinic, allowing him to come
out of his isolation and take up his research again. In 1921, in the grip of
delusions that started during World War I, he was screaming that all Jews
would be exterminated – that they were threatened by genocide like
American Indians – after “the seismograph of his soul” had recorded, in his
childhood, the rise of mass anti-Semitism in Germany, threatening his
family of bankers in Hamburg in the years following the War of 1870.

Political stakes: what cannot be said can only be shown

The cover of a French edition of Jacques Lacan’s seminar Les écrits
techniques de Freud shows an elephant. This elephant that no one wants to
see in the china shop of psychoanalytic discourse is History. Lacan’s
“Remarks on Psychic Causality,” published in Écrits and delivered at the
Bonneval Conference in September 1946 – one year after “the Emperor
swiftly descended to earth to announce the surrender in the voice of
a mortal man” (p. 98) – makes no mention of the war. Yet the aim of the
psychoanalysis of madness and trauma is to detect the erasure of traces.
This is also the belief of the obese man at the crucial moment when he
decides to be the eyes of “his chosen son.” Just before dying in the suicide
military mission of the officers – who drew him out of the storehouse to
participate in the bombing of the imperial palace so that the emperor may
be spared the humiliation of defeat – the father passes on this injunction to
his son, who had been dragged along: “Have you seen what must be seen?
For the next quarter-century that you will live remember always what you
have seen. All has been accomplished, you have seen what must be seen.
Survive and remember” (p. 101).
Like Don Quixote, the child wears “his fake helmet down over his ears
and a rusty old broken bayonet tied at his side” (p. 89). In the prologue of
the first book of Don Quixote de la Mancha, Cervantes calls his hero “my
son,” a “chosen son” charged with transmitting to the reader, in
hallucinatory form, the author’s successive visions of war and captivity,
which were cut out once peace returned. These events, too often neglected
by psychoanalysis, are recounted with precision by Ōe.
The executor of the will insists on specifying that it was on August 16 –
“the day after the war ended,” and not on August 15 – the day Japan
surrendered – that the father was killed and the 10-year-old child “decided
the responsibility was all his [for an] action that turned the country’s
history upside-down” (p. 103). This event was not the cause of his madness,
but the start of a search for his co-researcher, the “acting executor of the
will,” who would be able to participate in his quest.
Of course, signifiers are missing from the account of what really took
place, at the macro and the micro levels of history. But are they lost for
everyone? Signifiers that have broken loose from the weave of history are
 Kenzaburō Ōe 17
referred to as “signifiers in the Real,” and they cannot be brought back into
the fold by the shepherd of the symbolic. They remain floating, sometimes
for a very long time, trying to grab on to something – to lives, to bodies, to
voices, to visions, to little things – until the day when a second catastrophe
occurs, prompting the need to explore, in order to inscribe it, the original
catastrophe that no one suspects. The son of the obese man searches for
them in unofficial documents – because a signifier is something that floats
and continues to live its life outside of the signifying chain. You’ll probably
ask: “Prove it then, show me a floating signifier.” And I’ll answer: “That
would be too dangerous!” as we will see in Ōe’s novel The Silent Cry.
Far from being rigidly embedded in the structure, madness is a means of
investigation that finds, beyond the impossibility of inscription, a way to
show that which cannot be said – for instance, phantoms coming through
walls and mirrors, or from clouds, like Aghwee, the giant baby. But these
forms have to be validated by another, who is guided by the “seismograph
of his soul.” Indeed, the “signifiers in the Real” are carrying violent affects
with them, ever since they were pulled out of the symbolic chain.
Paradoxically, these affects may not be felt, since the absence of the
reflecting quality of mirrors eliminates the capacity to feel.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein can testify to this. After his return
from the war and the suicide of his three older brothers, he spent ten years
in Vienna in a post-traumatic state. Then he went back to Cambridge at the
end of the 1920s and changed the last sentence of the Tractatus
Philosophicus, written on the front lines, from “Whereof one cannot speak,
thereof one should stay silent” to “… thereof one cannot help to show it.”
But shown to whom? The problem is to find an other who can grasp what
he calls an “ostensive definition.”
This relationship is depicted at the beginning of his Lectures on “Private
Experience” and “Sense Data,” written in 1934–1935. It begins with
a meeting between the philosopher and somebody “who looks lost and
speaks in a toneless voice,” unable to “communicate his true sense of
inferiority in any other way.” The philosopher expresses his dismay: “There
is something more about it, but you can’t say it. It is this idea which plays
hell with us.” By sharing his impression, the philosopher is able to engage
in dialogue with the person who has given up on the possibility of dialogue.
He remarks that in these circumstances, the inside and the outside are not
constituted. “Inside, outside!” the philosopher exclaims in exasperation.
As the Lectures continue, Wittgenstein describes the situation portrayed
by Ōe, in which “we are tempted to say I have gone mad,” when he
develops the idea of placing glasses of different shapes on a child, naming
a colour for each pair. For example, red for the round glasses, “in order for
the child to see what the adult has never seen,” like the son of the recluse
father, and like the child Ludwig, whose family had repudiated its Jewish
origins a century earlier. In these situations, Wittgenstein says, “the notion
of an ego inhabiting a body must be abandoned.” It is possible to feel
18 Seminar 1: 1985–1986
someone else’s pain; this is the origin of his famous phrase: “I don’t choose
the mouth which says I have toothache.”
French child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto (1908–1988) shared such an
experience with Sioux medicine men we had invited to Paris. They had
expressed the desire to come to Paris during one of our visits to the
Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where psychologist Jerry
Mohatt, who spoke their language, Lakota, had invited us to his ranch for
several summers. We had organised meetings at the École des hautes études
en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris and at the Maison de la culture in
Reims. One of them was held in our home, and we had invited Françoise
Dolto, whom we did not know personally.
Medicine man Joe Eagle Elk described the ceremony he had performed at the
request of doctors at a hospital in Nebraska for a Sioux child who was letting
himself die, locked in a morbid state impossible to treat. The ceremony took
place in his room, with several people from his tribe present, in accordance with
the ritual we had attended on the reservation. First, the medicine man calls forth
the spirits, his allies, and, speaking in old Lakota, he recounts the initial vision
that set him on the path of becoming a medicine man. Then each of the people
seated in a circle says what his own associations are, or skips his turn, saying
only “mitakuye oyasin” (“all my relatives”), including kinship with animals,
plants and rocks. On that occasion, Joe saw the child’s body on the ceiling,
alternately bathed in flashes of light and plunged into darkness. The spirits
present were those of thunderstorms, called heyoka. After the ceremony, the
child started to live again, to the surprise of the entire hospital staff.
What were Dolto’s associations? To our surprise, she nodded and said
simply:

For me, it’s exactly the same. When I’m faced with such a severe downturn,
I feel in the place of the child and I describe the primary opposites of hot
and cold, hard and soft, light and darkness, which he can’t feel.

It was a joyful gathering, because laughter is part of the ceremonies.

Gatherings are always held in the dark – a reminder that they were
prohibited until recently. Laughter is heard when the lights come back on,
while the person who requested the ceremony treats the participants to food
such as boiled beef, fried bread and wild cherry jam. Jokes are shared to
bring us back to earth. Likewise, ancient Greek drama included
Aristophanes’ comedies along with tragedies, and Kyōgen farces were part
of Noh theatre in Japan, to allow spectators to come back to everyday life.

II. MADNESS AND TRAUMA IN THE SILENT CRY

This book is difficult to read, even in Japanese, as Akira Mizubayashi

explained, suggesting that we give a brief summary of it. This difficulty was
intentional on Ōe’s part. When we met him at a conference he gave in Paris
 Kenzaburō Ōe 19
at the Japanese embassy, he insisted with great fervour on the influence of
his teacher, Professor Kazuo Watanabe, a François Rabelais expert, and on
his own strong will not to let his style go down, but “to raise it to a higher
sense” – Rabelais’ expression – to which we will return in Seminar 12. In
the novel, he relates the confrontation between two brothers with unusual
names, written in kanji characters. The first brother’s name, Mitsusaburo,
means “the secret,” and the sign following the kanji indicates his position
as third son, after two older siblings. Takashi means “falcon,” and is the
name of the fourth son. The brothers’ names indicate opposite positions in
the social link.
In the first chapter, “In the Wake of the Dead,” Mitsu is sitting at the
bottom of a pit in his yard, meditating on the suicide of a friend and on the
birth of his own child, who has the same brain anomaly as Aghwee, and as
Ōe’s own son. His friend killed himself after returning from the US, where
he met Mitsu’s brother Takashi, who had gone to America as a member of
a student theatre group. The members of the group had taken part in the
political riots of 1960, aiming to stop the signing of the Japan–U.S. Security
Treaty.
The second chapter, “Family Reunion,” describes Takashi’s return and his
intention to take his brother and his brother’s wife back to their native
village, to the valley deep in the forest where, 100 years earlier, their great-
grandfather’s brother had led a peasant uprising and had disappeared
mysteriously after it was suppressed. Takashi intends to sell the old family
house, with its adjacent pavilion, and then lead a revolt similar to that of
his ancestor. The confrontation between the two brothers reproduces the
conflict between their great-grandfather and his younger brother.
Their arrival in their native village is the subject of the third chapter,
“Mighty Forest.” In the village, Takashi feels impelled to draw the young
men of the valley out of their apathy by teaching them to play football, so
that he can incite them to rebel. In the next chapter, “Dreams within
Dreams,” we learn that their older brother, killed when he returned from
World War II, in which their father was declared missing, has not been
given a funeral, and that their mother went mad and their sister killed
herself.
The four chapters that follow recount the stages of a revolt against the
director of a supermarket chain, including the plundering of the local store.
While all this is going on, Mitsusaburo remains aloof, choosing to separate
himself from these events and to reconstitute the historical truth of past
events that his brother insists on enacting in the present. Takashi also
insists on reviving a lost ritual, the dance for the invocation of “forest
spirits,” while Mitsusaburo isolates himself in the pavilion, leaving his wife
alone with his brother.
Starting with the eighth chapter, “Truth Unspeakable,” the chaos
produced by the “communal madness” and the failure of the revolt drive
Takashi to more and more violent acts, escalating, in the penultimate
20 Seminar 1: 1985–1986
chapter, “A Way beyond Despair,” to the point where he tells his brother
the truth about their sister’s suicide, before taking his own life. The book
ends with the discovery of the cutaway truth about two successive
rebellions, led in 1860 and 1871 by the brother of their great-grandfather,
before and after the Meiji Restoration. These historical facts are discovered
in documents stored in the village temple, as well as in an unknown cellar
discovered when the pavilion was demolished. At the end of the novel,
Mitsusaburo and his wife Natusko decide to leave the valley for good, and
to raise the child they had placed in an institution.

The cutaway unconscious

Two opposite positions are involved: that of Takashi, who acts out like mad and
revives a sacred dance in an attempt to perform gestures that could become
symbolic in the realm of thought, and that of Mitsusaburo, who stands in the
very precarious position of the other whom Takashi talks to in a psychotic
transference, which against all odds sets time into motion again in the end.
Right at the start, the narrator, Mitsusaburo, who was blinded in one eye
by a stone, crouches in a hole excavated in his yard. Though psychoanalysis
associates blindness with the myth of Oedipus, let’s not rush to invoke the
famous complex: killing father, sleeping with mother – the hallmarks of
neurosis and castration. Sophocles went far beyond that.
Two decades after Oedipus Rex, he wrote Oedipus at Colonus,8 a play in
which the blind Oedipus arrives with Antigone and Ismene in this Athenian
suburb, where he will die. It is there that Sophocles (496–405 BC) was born
and died. Legend has it that at the age of 90, when he was accused by his
sons of losing his head, he read this play before the tribunal, which greeted
it with acclamation and acquitted him. In 401 BC, his grandson had the play
produced for the first time.
To reach the place where he intends to die, Oedipus crosses the “brass-
footed threshold” and asks his daughters to go away: “Leave this place
and do not think to look upon that which you must not, nor hear it”
(v. 1640). He is left alone with Theseus, the king of Athens, described
by the messenger with “his hand across his face uplifted, to withstand
the sight of some dread vision which no eye of mortal might endure”
(v. 1646). And he concludes: “For this tale if any deem me mad … for
such, I care not what they say” (v. 1665). The theme of the play is
political since Colonus will be a source of prosperity for Athens.
Oedipus tells Theseus:

Keep the secret safe and when you come to the end of life, reveal it
only to your closest heir, then let him teach his too, and so in perpetu-
ity. Thus you will keep this town of Athens safe from Theban warriors.
(v. 1530)
 Kenzaburō Ōe 21
At the end of Sophocles’ tragedy, like at the end of The Silent Cry, the
social link is re-established. Fate, atè, – from the verb aô, to drive mad –
encountered by both blind heroes, is thwarted through the cathartic ritual
of ceremonial theatre.

The mind and the brain

The first chapter of The Silent Cry, “In the Wake of the Dead,” starts with
Mitsusaburo’s meditation during the hours before daylight in a pit dug in
his yard for a septic tank. Huddling at the bottom of the pit, he sees with
his blinded eye that the suicide of his friend, who hung himself, is
connected with the chance meeting his friend had with the narrator’s
brother Takashi, when they were both in the US. He also sees the accident
that cost him his eye, and the expressionless gaze of his baby after the
operation that removed the lump on his brain. At the conclusion of the
novel, the narrator will take up this crouching posture again, at the end of
the long way he has come. The first meditation is not introspection, but
rather the observation of his own brain after the loss of his eye, which
occurred in “a nasty, stupid incident, one morning [when] a group of […]
hysterical school children flung a chunk of stone at [him].”
The blind eye has become a camera focused on his brain:

I [assigned] a role to this eye: I saw it, its function lost, as being forever
trained on the darkness within my skull, a darkness full of blood and
somewhat above body heat. The eye was a lone sentry that I’d hired to
keep watch on the forest of the night within me, and in doing so I’d
forced myself to practice observing my own interior.
(p. 2)

This observation is not unlike Freud’s in Project for a Scientific Psychology,

written in 1896 in pencil, on a train bringing him back to Vienna from Berlin,
where he had visited his friend Wilhelm Fliess. Observing neuronal connections
under a microscope, Freud describes a series of filters for the enormous quantity
of energy coming from the outside, which he calls omega. The first filter of the
primary process, called phi, is composed of “word and thing representations”
that are eventually transformed by the secondary process into “representants of
the representation” – called “signifiers” by Lacan.
Mitsusaburo’s blinded eye analyses the primary filter, when he becomes
aware that his “consciousness has caught something unexpected on its very
outer edge” (p. 17). This unconscious on the edge of the conscious, at work in
madness and trauma, is not the repressed unconscious, as Freud points out on
several occasions – for instance, in Gradiva, a story of madness and trauma. It
is constituted by “surviving images” that are not articulated through signifiers
since the symbolic chain is broken. According to Ōe: “The factors that remain
ill defined may sometimes lead a survivor to the very site of the disaster, but
22 Seminar 1: 1985–1986
even then the only thing clear to anyone concerned is that he has been brought
up against something incomprehensible” (p. 18).
For Ōe’s hero, one of these factors is the red of the dogwood leaves,
which remind him of the “picture of hell” his great-grandfather had
commissioned (p. 70). He was to find the painting, at the end of the novel,
in the temple of his native village, where it has been hanging ever since.
Having survived the disaster relentlessly unfolding in the novel, the narrator
understands this initial impression, and will be able to decipher its meaning
during his second meditation:

I’d seen the same flaming red on the backs of the dogwood leaves that day-
break as I lurked in my pit in the garden. It had summoned up memories
of the painting of hell back here in the hollow, and impressed me as a kind
of signal. The meaning of that signal, uncertain then, was readily under-
standable now. The “tender” red of the painting was essentially the color
of self-consolation, the color of people who strove to go on quietly living
their murkier, less stable, and vague every-day lives rather than face the
threat of those terrifying souls who tackled their own hell head-on. Ultim-
ately, I felt sure that great-grandfather had commissioned the hell picture
for the repose of his own soul. And the only people who had drawn con-
solation from it were those of his descendants who, like grandfather and
myself, lived out their lives in vague apprehension, unwilling to allow the
urgent inner demand for sudden, unscheduled leaps forward to grow to
the point where action was necessary.
(p. 271)

What has happened since? A story of madness at the crossroads of world

history and the subjective history of the narrator.
The “sudden leap” referred to in Mitsusaburo’s second meditation is the
one his brother will take, impelled by something he doesn’t understand.
A leap over the catastrophes of History, which arrested time in the village
for 100 years. Takashi explores this temporal discontinuity by identifying
with an event, in a present that lasts a century, since the period before the
opening of Japan by Emperor Meiji, which ended the country’s isolation –
sakoku – that had lasted since the seventeenth century.
On the level of personal history, a conflict between two brothers is
repeated, four generations later, after the collapse in the war of all
guarantees of the social link. Like in the psychoanalysis of psychosis
and trauma, the Furies waiting in arrested time go wild without
warning. The crisis falls on a fool because that’s what folly is about, to
show the unleashing of Furies. Still, there is nothing closer to madness
than normalcy, said Harry Stack Sullivan. He was speaking from his
experience as a psychoanalyst working with schizophrenics and from his
personal experience as the grandson of Irish immigrants fleeing the
Potato Famine on a boat. And he added: “Madmen are the subject of
 Kenzaburō Ōe 23
social sciences, at the breaking point of the elements holding society
together.”
Takashi appears to be a normal man. Nothing predisposes him to the
tragedy that will befall him. But little by little, the reader becomes aware
that, like in Greek tragedies, everything is timed with precision, like an
“Infernal Machine,” to quote the title of Jean Cocteau’s play about
Oedipus. Takashi is programmed to resolve the madness of the gaping hole
left in the family history. He reveals the “code of this anti past” in a final
confession to his brother, made in Chapter 11, “A Way beyond Despair”:
“Mitsu, I want to tell you the truth” (p. 234). Mitsusaburo chooses not to
follow his brother on the path of self-sacrifice. Instead, to “outgrow
madness,” he resorts paradoxically to a beneficial loss of identity.

Identity loss
Everyone in the narrator’s world has what it takes to go mad. His sister
committed suicide. Takashi confesses: “Although she was half-witted, she
was really a rather special kind of person” (pp. 235–236). She loved
music and listened to every note, never forgetting a single one, and
hearing even the intervals between the notes. She cried when she heard
engine noises or vulgar songs (pp. 236–237). The narrator’s wife is “a
rather special kind of person” as well; she is drowning her sorrow in
drink since the birth of the baby, and her husband does not try to stop
her. In fact, thinking of his friend’s suicide, he reflects: “I too have the
seeds of that same, incurable madness” (p. 10). At the start of the novel,
he is presented as he awakens:

Whenever I awaken, I seek again that lost, fervid feeling of expectation

[…]. Finally convinced that I’ll not find it, I try to lure myself down the
slope to second sleep: sleep, sleep! – the world does not exist. […] Sleep,
sleep! – if you can’t sleep then pretend you’re asleep. Fear threatens to
engulf me.
(p. 1)

This is the fear Winnicott described in his last article, “Fear of

Breakdown”: the fear of annihilation. This fear was experienced by
Mitsusaburo as a child when he was struck in the eye:

I lay where I fell on the sidewalk, unable to make out what had hap-
pened. […] Even now, I’ve never felt I understood the true meaning of
the incident. Moreover, I’m afraid of understanding. […] I was already
showing more and more clearly a quality of ugliness […]. The lost eye
emphasized the ugliness each day …
(p. 2)
24 Seminar 1: 1985–1986
Winnicott speaks of patients who fear a catastrophe when they wake up
each morning. And he declares:

[…] the breakdown […] has already been. The unconscious here is not
exactly the repressed unconscious of Freud’s formulation […], nor is it
the unconscious of Jung. […] In other words, the patient must go on
looking for the past detail which is not yet experienced. […] [But] if the
patient is ready for some kind of acceptance of this queer kind of truth,
that what is not yet experienced did nevertheless happen in the past,
then the way is open for the agony to be experienced in the transfer-
ence, in reaction to the analyst’s failures and mistakes. […] The patient
needs to “remember” [the agony] but it is not possible to remember
something that has not yet happened, and this thing of the past has not
happened yet because the patient was not there for it to happen to.
This past and future thing then becomes a matter of the here and now,
and becomes experienced by the patient for the first time. […] The
experience of annihilation as a reaction to environmental factors could
have caused a premature awareness awakened before birth because of
a maternal panic.
(p. 106)

The senseless incident that blinded Mitsusaburo in one eye did not happen
“to him,” because he was not there “for it.” He had removed himself from
his body in response to the incredible violence of the impact, which returns
in the form of terrifying expectation. This past and future thing will become
his experience for the first time if he can tie it in with the cutaway history
of his family and of the valley. He will then abandon the role of passive
victim, and become an active witness of the disaster, by deciding to survive.
His trajectory parallels that of the analyst who can’t help making
blunders when his ability to imagine is depleted. Aware of his uselessness
and of the inadequacy of all his qualities, he acquires the status without
status of the “true man of no rank,” as defined by Zen master Lin Tsi,
whose French translator Paul Demiéville compares him to Musil’s Man
without Qualities. In Chapter 2, “Family Reunion,” when the narrator, his
wife and a young couple are waiting for Takashi in a hotel room near the
airport, the narrator is the only one who senses an impending catastrophe.
The red painting of hell, which until then had acted like a mirror thanks
to its consoling tenderness, is no longer reflecting any image back to the
narrator: “The present ‘I’ had lost all true identity. Nothing, either within
me or without, offered any hope of recovery” (p. 58). The accusing voice of
the young man beside him in the hotel room, a fervent admirer of his
brother, blurts out: “You’re just a rat.”
Until then, the red colour in the painting had allowed him to keep the
phantoms of history at bay. “When the tool with the name no longer
exists,” says Wittgenstein in section 41 of his Philosophical Investigations, “it
 Kenzaburō Ōe 25
is still possible to imagine a language-game,” not necessarily verbal, “in the
place of the name that has lost its meaning.” In the language-game
involving the painting commissioned by their great-grandfather, “in the
place of the name of his brother which had lost all meaning,” there are
three possible roles to play: that allotted to Takashi, who will go mad and
step through the frame to the other side; that of the great-grandfather and
his great-grandson, who watch their brothers, seeing both their gentleness
and their violence; and that of Mitsusaburo, who rejects this position and,
at the limits of each attitude – between action and contemplation – decides,
at the end of the novel: “I would live on […], peering out timidly like a rat,
with my single eye, at a dim and equivocal outer world …” (p. 269).
His decision was already taking shape in an inaugural dream he had in
the airport hotel while waiting for his brother. In the dream, he is watching
a silent world filled with silent ghosts:

Large numbers of people bumped into my […] back incessantly […].

All the people […] were old. […] I [was] struggling to remember some-
thing that troubled me. Then I realized that my friend who had hanged
himself and the idiot baby consigned to an institution were both present
among the old men who filled the street […]. [They] were almost identi-
cal with the other old men […]; all the old men who filled the street
were in some way relevant to me. I tried to burst into their world, met
some invisible resistance, and gave a cry of despair: “I deserted you!”
(pp. 31–32)

For the first time, an “I” appears. It is the “I” that abandoned not only the
ancestors and his son, but also his own self at the moment of extreme
solitude of his accident, which was witnessed by no “other.” At the end of
the novel, he will decide not to abandon his son, or himself.
But first, when Takashi arrives, they all leave for the village in the forest,
where ghosts will make their presence felt and bring to light the truth about
the past, not only concerning their ancestors, but also concerning one of
their older brothers and their sister who committed suicide.

Relinquishing causality
Noh theatre presents two characters, the Waki, a pilgrim who “at the
crossroad of dreams” – as the little stage is called – witnesses the arrival
of the Shite, with his white mask, coming through the bridge in between
here and the beyond, to sing and dance untold stories of a remote past
that has not passed. Takashi is the Shite, who embodies the phantom of
their great-grandfather’s brother. He enacts his uprising in the present
under cover of training the youth to play football. Mitsusaburo is the
Waki, who stands apart and sees, at the crossroad of dreams, the
unfolding of cut-out truths.
26 Seminar 1: 1985–1986
Now, there is one question: “Why?” which must never be asked in
a context of madness, but I can’t help asking it: “Why are you doing this?”
This question is repeated several times by Natusko, Mitsusaburo’s wife, who
will also come a long way as the story unfolds. Having become pregnant
with Takashi’s child while her husband shut himself away in the pavilion,
she emerges from the abyss of alcoholism, after Takashi’s suicide, decides to
keep his baby, to leave the village with her husband, and to take back their
son from his institution.
When the story begins, she follows her husband to the village knowing
nothing about the family’s tragedy. In addition to the mystery surrounding
his great-grand-uncle, another enigma concerns his older brother, designated
only by the initial “S.” His story takes the reader back to World War II, in
which S fought, was killed after his return to the village, and incinerated
without any funeral rites.
The two brothers argue constantly about these things, as did their
ancestors 100 years earlier. Takashi, the youngest, idealises their older
brother, while Mitsusaburo, who was 10 at the end of the war, can testify to
a cut-out truth: S took part in a raid on the Korean settlement where black
market activities went on, and after a Korean man was killed, “he offered
himself as a scapegoat to be lynched. […] As a kid of ten, he says, I [wasn’t]
likely [to] have appreciated the inner motives for S’s behaviour …” (p. 76).
Their mother, already quite crazy, refused to see her son’s body and to give
him a burial on the pretext that beforehand, he had tried to take her to
a mental hospital.
Horrified by these stories, the narrator’s wife is impelled to ask: “Why?”
Takashi answers: “In my dreams, I’ve never had the slightest doubt why
S had to play the role” (p. 77). Concerning this inevitable question,
psychoanalyst Martin Cooperman, who worked with psychosis, used to say:
“I never ask a patient why, for only God can answer that question. The
only question possible is ‘how?’” During the Pacific War, in which the
father of the two brothers in the novel was killed, Cooperman was a young
flight surgeon on the Wasp aircraft carrier shot down by the Japanese.
The question of how to deal with the death of S is answered the
following summer by Mitsusaburo, who is 11 and performs a ritual
ceremony. At that time, the nembutsu dance was performed every summer
in honour of the “spirits.” Takashi revives this obsolete custom in Chapter
7: “Every year during the Bon festival, they came,” from the forest into the
hollow, “in a single-file procession”; these figures:

represented the malevolent “spirit” […] of one of the village ancestors

who had led a brutal life, or of some good man who had died an
unhappy death […] of men drafted from the valley who had been killed
in battle […] the “spirit” of a young man who had been working in
a Hiroshima factory and was killed by the atomic bomb.
(pp. 124–125)
 Kenzaburō Ōe 27
That summer, unbeknownst to his mother, Mitsusaburo had given the
tatami-maker, who also made masks, his dead brother’s winter uniform
jacket. “The next day, the party that came down the gravel road from the
forest included a ‘spirit’ wearing the jacket, dancing for all it was worth …”
(p. 125).
Lacan coins the phrase “a space between two deaths,” to speak of this
interval between biological death and a symbolic grave, in his seminar The
Ethics of Psychoanalysis, in reference to Sophocles’ Antigone, who enters
her tomb alive. The ghost of the sister who killed herself haunts this space,
in the last chapter called “Retrial,” in which Takashi confesses the truth to
his brother: “I’m going to tell you, Mitsu! […] you may have dimly
suspected there was something odd about her death” (pp. 234–235).
His confession comes after the failure of the revolt against the “emperor
of the supermarkets.” After the looting of the store, Takashi rapes and kills
a young girl belonging to the group of young people he had led into revolt.
It is then that he reveals to his brother that he had forced their sister into
an incestuous relationship, to which she later participated willingly. She
became pregnant and, after an abortion performed in the city, when she
sought solace from him, he had slapped her. And she, who had never lied,
told him: “It wasn’t true what you said, Taka. It was wrong, even though
we kept it secret.” And the next morning she killed herself (p. 239).
His one-eyed brother had indeed seen “something odd,” thanks to the
loss of his identity. The visions produced by madness and trauma are not
the kind that reflect themselves in mirrors. They can only be expressed when
they have been caught in the net of an interference, which starts a narrative.
As the story unfolds, Mitsusaburo, like all of Ōe’s narrators, becomes an
analyst and an “annalist,” leading an inquiry on facts cut out from history.
As Wilfred Bion says, after having recounted, when he was over 70, his war
years in two autobiographical books, The Long Week-End and All My Sins
Remembered, and in A Memoir of the Future, a book of fiction: “One is not
born a psychoanalyst, but becomes one.” One becomes a psychoanalyst by
creating a new language-game that, for the first time, brings otherness into
existence.

The different agencies of the other

What is a fiction as opposed to the thing, das Ding, which cannot be
symbolised? Faced with the unnameable and unimaginable of historical
discontinuity, the only possible approach is a work of fiction, telling stories.
This is how myths are used in Greek tragedies, because it was forbidden to
represent contemporary catastrophes on stage for fear that they may trigger
traumatic revivals. Fools will tell you that they are creating fiction. When
the fiction takes the shape of a delusion, they want you to answer the
riddle: “Do you believe it or not?” This question resembles a koan, an
aporia much appreciated in Zen practice, which poses a quandary in logical
28 Seminar 1: 1985–1986
reasoning. If you answer “yes,” you are thought crazy; if you answer “no,”
you are sent packing. In fact, the question is not about belief, but about
trust: “Do you trust what I am showing you?”
Such a challenge was presented to us by Alain Touraine, director of our
Center for the Study of Social Movements (CSSM) at the EHESS, when he
compared our research on Madness and the Social Link with that of
another researcher, Daniel Vidal, author of books on prophets from the
Cévennes region and on the writings of mystics: “Vidal, he said, makes the
dead talk; and you, the madmen: you can make them say whatever you
like.” In fact, madmen and prophets of all people are the ones who only say
what they want to say: they keep saying the same thing in a disorderly
flood that is also an organised sequence. By raising the question of the
breakdown of the symbolic Other, who vouches for the given word, and
that of the absence of a small other reflected by the mirror, they challenge
a ruthless agency whose favourite sport is “attacks on linking,” as Bion
says, to destroy any form of otherness.
In addition to these three agencies of otherness, the Japanese language
has a fourth, according to Augustin Berque, Director of the Center for
Studies on Contemporary Japan at the EHESS, which he calls tanin – the
others with whom one has no relation. The underlying logic is “areolar,”
progressing by successive extensions from the inner space uchi, home,
delimited by the raised threshold where people from outside stop and sit. In
The Silent Cry, the narrator thinks about his own relation to this agency he
calls the “absolute other,” the same one as in “The Day He Himself Shall
Wipe My Tears Away”:

My “new life” in the valley was only a ruse devised by Takahashi to

forestall my refusal and clear the way for him to sell the house and
land for the sake of whatever obscure purpose was firing him at the
moment. From the very outset, the journey to the valley hadn’t really
existed for me. Since I no longer had any roots there, nor made any
attempt to put down new ones, even the house and land were as good
as nonexistent; it was no wonder that my brother should have been able
to filch them from me with only a minimal exercise of cunning. […]
Now, even if the whole valley should charge me with being a rat,
I could retort with hostility, “And who are you, to insult a stranger
whose affairs are none of yours?” Now I was just a transient in the
valley, a one-eyed passerby too fat for his years, and life there had the
power to summon up neither the memory nor the illusion of any other,
truer self.
(pp. 134–135)

Another character, a hermit living in the forest – a teacher who has gone
mad – plays the role of go-between between the space of wilderness and the
space of the village. In Europe, the novels of the Middle Ages call the
 Kenzaburō Ōe 29
mountain and the forest “the space of the marvel,” where madness meets
beings that one never encounters, other than in fairy tales: fairies, ogres,
and other monsters or spirits.
The village in The Silent Cry is part of such a time-space. For 100 years –
since the failure of the revolt led by the great-grandfather’s brother – the village
has remained outside the social link. The bridge linking it to the rest of the
world is broken. It will be rebuilt at the end of the novel, when the stammering
of history, brought back into the present by the failure of the rebellion led by
Takashi, stops after his self-sacrifice. A new social link emerges on the political
front, as the young village priest informs the narrator:

You remember the spartan young man who worked with Taka? They
say he’ll get a seat on the council when the first elections since the
amalgamation of the village are held. Taka’s rising might seem to have
been a complete failure, but at least it served to shake the valley out of
its rut. […] I feel that a definite prospect for future development in the
valley has opened up at last.
(p. 266)

Madness: a battle against perversion

This does not mean that Ōe advocates suicide. At the end of the novel, he
makes a distinction between Mitsaburo’s attitude and that of his brother,
based on a criterion of good faith. Beyond the looking glass through which
pass the phantoms of history, a confrontation takes place between two
visions: that of Takashi, who denies what he sees, and that of Mitsusaburo
with his blind eye, who perceives intuitively what his brother is hiding.
Expecting to die after the raping and killing of the young girl, Takashi
wants to redeem himself by giving one of his eyes to his brother: “Then my
eyes at least will survive and see lots of things after my death […]. You’ll do
it, won’t you, Mitsu?” (p. 240).
Mitsu refuses, feeling indignant. He senses the fraudulent nature of this
deal that sounds phony, and he tells his brother:

Taka […] you’re the type who invariably has a way out at the last
moment. You acquired the habit on the day that sister’s suicide allowed
you to go on living without either being punished or put to shame. I’m
sure this time, too, you’ll work some nasty little dodge to go on living.
Then, having so shamefully survived, you’ll make your excuses to her
ghost: “In fact”, you’ll say, “I deliberately put myself in a tight corner
where I had no choice but to be lynched or executed, but a lot of inter-
fering bastards forced me to go on living.” […] but you’re expecting
somehow to survive. [You] deceive even yourself.
(pp. 240–241)
30 Seminar 1: 1985–1986
This refusal to accept the offer is followed by Takashi’s suicide; his brother
finds him in front of the outline of a target drawn on the wall:

the outline of a human head and shoulders was drawn in red pencil,
with two great eyes carefully marked in on the head. I took another
step forward and […] saw that the pencilled eyes had been blasted full
of shot.
(p. 244)

Is he then the cause of Takashi’s suicide because he refused to let him play
the role of a false hero? Ōe does not answer the question “Why?” but leads
us towards another truth cut away from history.
At the end of the novel, the storehouse – sold by Takashi to the
“emperor of the supermarkets,” owner of a chain of stores and the target of
the revolt – is dismantled before being transported to Tokyo to be made
into a “folkloric” restaurant. During the dismantling, under the
floorboards, a splendid stone cellar with two rooms is discovered. It
becomes clear that their great-grandfather’s brother had lived there,
voluntarily holed up in isolation.
The truth emerging from this cellar destroys the story Takashi had
believed about his ancestor’s heroic flight to the US, or even Tokyo, under
an assumed name, “after the 1860 rising […] and the tragedy” of his fellow
rebels’ decapitation (p. 257).
The truth continues to reveal itself in the documents given to the narrator
by the young priest of the temple. These documents, written by their
grandfather, describe another peasant uprising, in 1871, against the new
government officials, after Emperor Meiji abolished the clans. In these
accounts, there is mention of a mysterious leader who “disappeared as
though wiped off the face of the earth.” It is clear that he can be no other
than the recluse who came out of his hideout, and then went back again,
after the suppression of this second revolt.
Mitsusaburo retreats again, this time into the newly found cellar, where
he meditates upon his double refusal: “squatting with my back against the
white wall at the far end of the back room, just as the voluntary captive
must have done a century earlier.” He refuses to understand the man who
“had indeed shut himself up here and maintained his identity as leader of
the rising to the end of his days.” Then he struggles to understand himself,
and the fact that he had “refused aid in the face of [Takashi’s] pitiful
request made when death was already upon him” (pp. 268–269). After this,
he “saw another [him] slip free from [his] drooping shoulders […] and,
rising, crawl through the gap in the floorboards.” When the phantom
“arrived directly below the great wooden beam,” he suddenly had the
answer, not to the “Why?” but to how to outgrow madness: “I suddenly
realized […] that I still hadn’t grasped the ‘truth’ which, as I hanged myself,
I would cry aloud to those who went on living” (p. 269).
 Kenzaburō Ōe 31
Instead of a truth broadcast to attract followers, he finds a truth to pass
on, the truth that links him to his ancestors. Now he feels himself to be
“meekly beneath the gaze of the same family spirits who earlier had gazed
on Takashi at his death” (p. 270). After he and his wife decide to make the
journey back, crossing the wild space of the forest and of madness in the
opposite direction, never to return, he meets the tatami-maker who has
sculpted a mask of Takashi, like a split pomegranate, to be worn by one of
the spirits in the nembutsu dance of invocation, that summer. Before
leaving, Mitsusaburo gives the tatami-maker the jacket and trousers Takashi
had worn when he came back from the US.
The psychoanalysis of trauma is as old as the wars, as Socrates, a veteran
of the Peloponnesian War, teaches us. In Phaedrus,9 he evokes the violence
of an ancient wrath, palaiôn meni matôn, touching someone in a lineage, en
tisi tôn genôn, from a time no one knows about, which impels that one who
is rightly delusional, tô orthôs manenti, to find, through ceremonies, tele tôn,
a way to heal not only himself, but all his relatives. At that point, Socrates
invents an etymological fiction: madness, mania, becomes an art of
divination, mantikè, by adding the letter “t,” which comes from the word
“history,” istoria.
In the last pages of The Silent Cry, history speaks with the voice of
a silenced story, revealed in broad daylight when a cellar is discovered.
Time is reset in motion, and the generations assume their proper order.
Mitsu’s dream at the airport hotel, “I deserted you!” foreshadowed his
ultimate decision not to abandon his son. Unexpectedly, his therapon – in
the Homeric sense of the term, found in the Iliad, a second in combat and
ritual double responsible for funeral rites – is his wife: “Now you’ve seen
that the ties between your great-grandfather’s brother and Taka weren’t just
an illusion created by Taka, why don’t you try to find out what you share
with them yourself ?” (p. 272).
Tied to the memory of his ancestors who are now relegated to the past,
Mitsusaburo can take the risk of asking his wife:

If we fetch the baby from the institution, do you think we can get him
to adapt to life with us? “I was thinking about that for ages last night,
Mitsu, and I began to feel that if only we have the courage we can
make a start on it at least,” she said in a voice pathetic in its obvious
physical and spiritual exhaustion. […] Then […] I heard a voice inside
me reciting quite simply […] “Now that we don’t have Taka, we’ll have
to manage by ourselves.
(pp. 272–273)

Kenzaburō Ōe is not a clinician, but for his own survival, and ours, he
formulates essential concepts for the treatment of psychosis and trauma
that we will find in Benedetti’s theory, which requires courage to put into
practice.
32 Seminar 1: 1985–1986
Notes
1 Ōe, K., Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, Nathan, J. (Trans.), Grove Press,
1977.
2 Ōe, K., The Silent Cry, Bester, J. (Trans.), Kodansha International, 1974.
3 See infra, Seminar 6 on Pat Barker.
4 Lacan, J., Transference: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII, Polity, 2017;
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.
5 Winnicott, D. W., “Fear of Breakdown,” International Review of Psychoanalysis, 1
(1974): 103–106.
6 Freud, S., Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva, S.E. 9, Hogarth Press,
1907, p. 8
7 Warburg, A., “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual,” Journal of the Warburg Institute, 4
(1939): 277–292.
8 Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, Dover Publications, 1999.
9 Plato, Phaedrus, Focus Philosophical Library, 1998.
2 Seminar 2: 1986–1987
Gaetano Benedetti (1920–2013)
Madness: an exploration of the zones
of death

Gaetano Benedetti, a psychoanalyst in Basel, was a clinician who

devoted his life to working with schizophrenia.1 What is theorised in
his work at the limit of rationality resonates with what we find in the
work of Kenzaburō Ōe, and of Luigi Pirandello, whom we will discuss
in the next seminar.

Structural or psychodynamic approach?

The first point of encounter can be illustrated by a metaphor borrowed
from quantum physics. Just as it is not possible to calculate the speed and
position of an electron at the same time, it is not possible to describe the
structure of a psychosis and to establish its transferential trajectory at the
same time. Observing the symptoms prevents the analyst from entering into
a psychodynamic relation.
The adjective “psychodynamic” describes movement and its purpose. In The
Silent Cry, we are shown how madness emerges in the place where a historical
catastrophe having found no inscription in a family line is revived 100 years
later.2 Madness is not the consequence of this catastrophe. It is not an
archaeological site to be excavated in the psyche of the characters, which
would allow some writer or analyst with the talents of a Viollet-le-Duc to
reconstitute the original from its ruins. It is not a devastated landscape whose
original form has to be restored; it is, rather, a dynamic impetus towards the
inscription of erased events.
In that place, history stutters, spinning in mad repetition, in an attempt to
create otherness and set up a counter-history. This repetition stumbles over the
loss of that which guarantees speech. In Ōe’s fiction, there are betrayals of the
given word that impel characters to seclude themselves in a storehouse or
a cellar. When betrayal becomes the law, a new order prevails in which what
could have been otherwise is erased. Madness is a tool for exploring what
could have taken place without this erasure. Having escaped from the symbolic
34 Seminar 2: 1986–1987
chain, surviving images spin endlessly, kept outside of history and away from
any “other” able to take responsibility for them.
Benedetti asserts that these clinical manifestations, taking the form of
withdrawal, aggressiveness and fragmentation, are not deficiencies in relation to
the accepted norm. They exist only in a relation to an “other” to whom they
strive to give existence in the singularity of the transference. According to him,
the psychotherapeutic setting makes it possible to identify what happened in the
place where the “other” has been abolished. Outside of this context, madness is
treated like a disease or like an aesthetic object, and betrayal possibly like
a miscalculation. But this does not mean that no one is there. Madness deals
with a kind of other who is neither a thou nor the Other guaranteeing the
symbolic order, in Lacanian terms, but a lawless agency for whom the other
does not exist. In the face of such a danger, Benedetti asserts that it is possible to
establish a dialogue aiming for what Freud calls “the subject of truth.”3

“Being with”
Kenzaburō Ōe sets up a dialogue with the reader on the question of how “to
outgrow our madness,” which manifested its presence by halting time when the
atomic bomb was detonated, and when his handicapped child was born. His
own answer is to create a literary oeuvre in which he inscribes his truth.
In Chapter 8 of The Silent Cry, entitled “Truth Unspeakable,” Takashi, the
narrator’s brother, hints at a truth he will later confess, and which will drive
him to suicide. In the meantime, he raises a dilemma impossible to solve:

If the man who was supposed to have told the truth managed to go on
living without [being] killed by others, or [killing] himself, or [going]
mad and [turning] into a monster, it would be direct evidence that the
truth he was supposed to have told wasn’t in fact the sort – the bomb
with the fuse lit – that I’m concerned with.

His brother tries to propose a compromise: “What about a writer? Surely

there are writers who have told the truth and gone on living?”4
Benedetti also uses fiction, pictures created by his patients within the
framework of transference. His therapeutic stance can be expressed very simply
as “being with.” Starting with the negativism characteristic of schizophrenia,
he asserts positivity through unconscious interferences with the analyst. The
unconscious of which he speaks is not that of repression, formulated by Lacan
as the speech of the Other, since the collapse of the given word abolishes all
otherness, either big or small. Nor can we say that madness might have a key
for unlocking the analyst’s toolkit, or his beetle box.5 About this famous beetle
that each of us keeps in a private box, Wittgenstein says: “The thing in the box
has no place in the language-game at all, not even as a something, for the box
might even be empty.” Still, this unconscious cut-out of the symbolic chain
 Gaetano Benedetti 35
manifests its presence through interferences and may create a transitional
subject “in between” patient and analyst.
Benedetti gives an example of this interference. A patient has a dream that, in
its structure, brings to mind a split. Instead of interpreting this as typical of
schizophrenia, Benedetti realises that this dream touches upon a split in himself,
of which the patient is, of course, unaware. Instead of rummaging through his
diagnostic bag, he places something on the side of his patient, where there was
nothing. To speak of this, we are always searching for metaphors, since we can’t
always invoke the unnameable and unimaginable. Lacan turns to the Borromean
knot – made up of three linked rings, all of which separate if any one of them is
severed – to illustrate the structure of psychosis with the three registers of the
Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary getting loose, instead of staying knotted
around the lost object, the cause of desire.6
In Benedetti’s view, the cut-out unconscious does not fit this metaphor of
dispersion. He speaks of a chance encounter, in a fraction of a second, between
the narration of a dream by the patient and something similar on the part of
the analyst. The dream is not an interpretation of this “something,” but it
grabs hold of an experience of which it is unaware. If the analyst dismisses this
coincidence, the encounter fails. If he thinks that the patient has read his
thoughts, he becomes delusional himself, since what happened was
coincidental. If the analyst undertakes to interpret by giving explanations, he is
tacitly saying: “See how well I am doing? You’re not able to do this.”
This does not mean that he should say nothing. This is how Benedetti
defines “being with”: a transformation of the analyst by the irruption of
strange impressions, or what he calls “therapeutic dreams,” which have to
be related to his patient, for they stem from their work together. This, he
says, is the anthropological dimension of psychosis.
This overstepping of the characters’ limits is constant in Ōe’s stories,
which do not focus on individuals, and certainly not on the Oedipus
complex. This also applies to Benedetti’s experience, since his patients’
delusions are addressed to “all others.” However, he insists that they do not
proceed from a collective unconscious, since the frontiers between the
individual and the social have disappeared with the shattering of the mirrors
and the breaking of the symbolic chain. This “all others” is the plural
dimension of madness that speaks through the radio, the television or the
Internet, since it cannot say what is excluded from language.

Uncanny coincidences
The psychodynamics of madness force the analyst into strange
contradictions, similar to the logical impasses created by Zen koans. When
Wittgenstein declares, in his “Notes for Lectures on ‘Private Experience’”:
“I cannot choose the mouth with which I say ‘I have toothache’,” he points
out the dissolution of the limits of the subject in cases of madness or
trauma, where the affect may be in another person’s body.7 In such cases,
36 Seminar 2: 1986–1987
invoking the paranormal makes no sense, since this relies on causality
when, in fact, what is at work here is mere coincidence. The “calm block
fallen here from some dark disaster,” evoked by Stéphane Mallarmé in
“The Tomb of Edgar Poe,” is the only relevant thing in the context of
psychosis.8
Benedetti calls the work of transference, which admits the relevance of
these strange events, “counter-identification.” When Freud, in a letter to
Jung, in response to the latter’s interpretations of the meaning of the
cracking noises made by Freud’s bookcase, preferred to speak of the
“undeniable compliance of chance,” he stated the necessity for coincidences
to provide otherness where there is nothing.9
On this subject, Benedetti’s language becomes poetic: “There is no
madness other than psychotherapeutic […]. Psychoanalysis is the anchor
that madness has found in this century to be in contact with us.” In other
centuries, in other regions of the globe, this relation found its place in the
theatre of animist healing ceremonies.
Even in secular societies, madness alludes to the dimension of the sacred,
sacer in Latin, always defined as a space outside everyday life. When
Voltaire mocks the “sacred poems” of Lefranc Pompignan, he says: “They
are sacred because no one will touch them.” In Oedipus at Colonus, the
sacred grove where Oedipus will die is a place known only to Theseus, the
king of Athens, a place ultimately tied to political benefits for the city.10

Negative existence
Although madness is problematic, it is not unutterable, but a particular
place has to be built where it can speak. “Who can talk about me better
than I can? – unless there’s anyone who knows me better than I know
myself!” Erasmus has Folly say in his Praise.11 The major issue is to whom
these words are addressed, and this address is not easy to find since
madness wages war on perversion. At first, we try to capture delusion in the
net of our reasoning and try to fend off attacks on linking, as Bion says.
But when we least expect it, this murderous agency succeeds in taking our
place and making us responsible for the disaster, despite our efforts to
invoke external causes. Yet, these critical moments of transference are the
only times when this perverse agency can be confronted and defeated so
that a reliable form of otherness can be created from scratch.
Benedetti argues that causal explanations, even applied to structure, are pure
illusion when it comes to madness, for they explain nothing when nothingness
is at the core of experience. Of course, endless treaties and seminars elaborate
on the topic, as if they possessed the answer – the cause of psychosis – whereas
Benedetti speaks of “dispossession.” Even to speak of analysis is nonsensical,
as if it were possible to analyse nothingness – rien in French, which comes
from rem – “the thing” in Latin – and excludes speech. Benedetti gives us tools
to “be present” in what he calls “areas of death.”
 Gaetano Benedetti 37
When the identity criteria are destroyed, “I is another,” as Arthur Rimbaud
wrote, when he was 17, in a letter to Paul Demeny,12 adding: “I say that one
must […] make oneself a seer. The Poet makes himself a seer by a long,
immense, and rational dissoluteness of all the senses.” In schizophrenia,
Benedetti calls “negative existence” this dissoluteness of all the senses, which
reveals the collapse of the symbolic bearings in “areas of death” transmitted
through a lineage. This negative existence is impervious to shock treatments
and hypotheses, but it reveals the tearing in the social fabric, the foundation of
the political. Oedipus Rex is anything but a family story. Starting at the point
where the enemy brothers confront each other, there are over twenty-five words
to signify madness, always used in a context of breaking the law.
We might say the same thing about the stories of patients who don’t seem to
be mad. Benedetti says: “I met different patients whose mental functioning was
normal enough, although their functioning in non-existence was obvious.” He
presents the example of a young woman who disintegrates under the weight of
a past without memories, all the more heavy because it is empty and because it
gives her the sensation of nothingness:

In this state where the Nothing is present, we cannot speak of repres-

sion, or even of a healthy and an insane part of the ego. The psycho-
therapy is only analytical to the extent that the analyst is able to
analyse himself in order to find his way to the Nothing.

Psychotherapeutic technique
Psychoanalytic doxa asserts that there is no transference in psychosis.
Benedetti refutes this statement and contends that in the schizophrenic
void, the unconscious manifests itself through communication. The “areas
of death” are zones of intense interaction, not only in the “double bind”
mode, the paradoxical injunction described by Gregory Bateson, but also in
the development of untypical potentialities. When the symbolic sphere
collapses, the repressed unconscious, “structured like a language,” according
to Lacan, remains silent. When the Other’s speech cannot respond to the
call, “all others” start to speak through “the mouth of the universe.” These
areas, which are suppressed in a lineage, are like black holes, where the
arrow of time changes direction, where one becomes invisible to oneself,
and is identified with this area of death. Of course, we could explain this to
the patient, but it would be of no use to him whatsoever.
The only possibility is to insert into this compact void the weaving of
a dialogue in which the psychotherapeutic exchange may confront psychic
death. When Frieda Fromm-Reichmann writes: “Where they say there can
be no transference, there is transference to the world at large,” she is
confirming that where there is no other, the other is summoned with the
greatest intensity.13 Provided she is attentive to impressions arising from
similar zones in herself, the analyst can attest to the presence of an
38 Seminar 2: 1986–1987
otherness. Even when she is destabilised by a remark that is too close to
home for her, she is expected to validate a truth. If she does not, and
defends herself like a demon, the patient will conclude, like Hamlet when
his mother denied his father’s murder: “The lady protests too much,
methinks.”14
Hamlet plays the fool when “the time is out of joint.”15 Time becomes
unhinged regularly, when the analysis gets stuck. After making some
progress, the patient obstinately returns to square one and attacks the
murderous agency that took the place of the analyst after he made some
blunder. This is when he has to “claim an unclaimed experience,” by
honestly recognising his mistake.
As Benedetti points out, this situation is described as regression and
fragmentation of the patient’s self and his world. But in truth, what is
taking place is a reconstruction of his world by fragments, starting with
a long-ago explosion to which we have no access except in the present of
the session. These fragments are not scant traces in a desert, but elements
that may hook on to bits of the analyst’s history, gradually setting in
motion a process that can generate time, provided the analyst validates this
interference. Up until then, Benedetti says, the patient had remained
transfixed under the petrifying gaze of the Medusa: “Trapped in the
reification of his experience, he is dispossessed of any curiosity about the
most essential part of himself: his own subjectivity.”
Relying on the teachings of mainstream psychoanalysts, we are ill-equipped
to face such a rejection. Wittgenstein has better tools when he writes at the
beginning of his “Notes for Lectures on ‘Private Experience’” that he feels
tortured when confronted with “the lost look and toneless voice” of someone
is who is unable to tell him what he is feeling. At a loss, he conveys his
impressions to the person.16 Benedetti does the same thing when he tells his
patients about his “therapeutic dreams” stemming from a session, through
which a “transitional subject” may emerge from the in-between space, voicing
as best he can the unspeakable that should stay silent. This is how transference
enters the time of psychosis, but without falling into the strict repetition of the
hatred towards the one who is dispossessing you of your identity.
Benedetti contends that suppressing the tool of transference in the name of
scientific impartiality, or worse still in the name of analytic neutrality, relegates
psychiatrists and analysts to the medieval exclusion of the insane from medical
discourse. And yet, in the Middle Ages, madness had found refuge in
literature, as Jean-Marie Fritz tells us.17 The very place of madness was the
“space of the marvel,” where the madman, called “the Wild Man,” stepped
out of time. There, he encountered fantastical beings and confronted monsters,
in a specific transference Bion called “psychotic transference,” which elicits the
analyst’s dreaming, the “alpha function,” to connect up the “beta-elements,”
such as “thoughts without a thinker,” that find a thinker to think them when
“thoughts are things and things are thoughts,” “at the random intersection”
between his experiences and those of the patient.18
 Gaetano Benedetti 39
The search for the other
The title of Harry Stack Sullivan’s book Schizophrenia as a Human Process
reminds us that this transference is a life experience and not the observation
of a psychopathology.19 When his colleague and friend Frieda Fromm-
Reichmann emphasises that where there appears to be no transference, the
transference is to “the world at large,” she insists on the intensity of the
energy employed in the quest for another with whom what cannot be said
or imagined may be testified to. When the other has been destroyed, the
dialogical function is everywhere to compel him to appear.
The techniques that can accomplish this task consist in giving all psychotic
forms a chance, without any preference. Benedetti observes that “if the
language of psychosis is understood with different codes,” patients “do not
need accumulated knowledge to figure out what is the latest and best
treatment,” but rather conditions for joint research, which validates suppressed
historical truths, big or small, that have been thrown into the garbage bin of
history. He gives the example of the transformation of a mother’s face into that
of a terrifying witch. What must the person do? In order to avoid becoming
mad, he creates a myth in his delusion where he is the cause of this sudden
change, and by so doing justifies the madness he has to face. In the
transference, the delusion found its legitimation when it could respond to the
transformations of the analyst’s face, and be right to do so.
Thus, what are ordinarily called identity disorders, Benedetti insists, are in fact
the places where the identity attempts to emerge in the transference. It is the
patient who transforms his interlocutor into an analyst, not the analyst who
transforms the patient into an illness or a psychotic structure. Psychotic
transference is the only framework in which the vector of illness becomes the
vector of therapeutic work. Benedetti gives many examples of the analyst’s
impressions and dreams, which were triggered by the psychotic experience and
reveal elements of which he had no inkling in his own story. As we said earlier,
these coincidences happen by chance. Contrary to what young analysts are
taught, they are not the trap of “massive transference” to be avoided at all costs.
Or perhaps they are …. Still, in such situations, the impossible to say and to
imagine may become “the play” Winnicott speaks of, the playing with the
“psychotic core” of our dreams, which Freud calls “the umbilicus of dreams” in
Chapter 7 of Traumdeutung, instead of being relegated to the radical solitude of
madness.20
Benedetti noticed that the patient looks after the therapist, without
interfering in his affairs. But this ability to trigger the analyst’s cutaway
unconscious is not so much empathy as the faculty of “suffering in the
place of the other,” a skill acquired from his experience with parental
figures. When the analyst recognises this competence, the hierarchy between
them disappears, as they confront together what Bion calls “attacks on
linking.”
40 Seminar 2: 1986–1987
Positiveness of psychosis
Benedetti states that in neurosis, the negative is repressed, while in psychosis, it
is the positive that is suppressed. By saying this, he overturns the defective
image of madness, changing it into a dynamic point of view which contradicts
Lacan’s position that “it would be premature to speak of transference in
psychosis, because it would mean to go ‘beyond Freud’, and there can be no
question of Freud when post-Freudian psychoanalysis has gone back to an
earlier stage.” But Freud himself did not ask for such precautions. Before
going into exile in England, he indicated the path to follow in Moses and
Monotheism, while his books were being burned in Berlin. I repeat: this
annihilation was not a fantasy, but neither was it a threat that psychoanalysis
was doomed to disappear under the two totalitarian regimes.
Benedetti follows in the footsteps of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, William
Rivers and Harry Stack Sullivan, who acquired their experience as analysts
during World War I. They developed a psychodynamic perspective that
analyses what happens “at the intersection of world history and personal
history” – a phrase coined by a delusional patient – for the analyst as well.
Does this mean, as we often hear in repeated clichés, that treating psychosis
is a collective rather than an individual matter? To answer this question,
Benedetti refers to the concept of Theodore Lidz on the irrationality
transmitted in the families of schizophrenics, and to Franco Basaglia’s
conception relating madness to the contradictions of society.21 Both of these
authors raise the question of whether psychosis is psychological or social.
Benedetti sees no sense in this opposition. Since madness obliterates the
limits between the individual and the social, transference is the place where
the social link is reinvented on the very site of areas of death and of total
solitude, which were bereft of a witness, says Dori Laub.
We used to visit Benedetti every year in Basel, Switzerland, at Carnival
season, which opened with Fasnacht, when the masks overrun the streets of
the city with drums and piccolos. Benedetti was totally unknown in France
then. We had met him at the Austen Riggs Center in Massachusetts, at the
jubilee in honour of its former director Otto Will. They had both been
trained at Chestnut Lodge, another clinic near Washington, where the
psychoanalysis of psychosis had been introduced by Frieda Fromm-
Reichmann. Benedetti, who was of Sicilian origin, encouraged us to read
Pirandello, the subject of my next seminar.

Notes
1 Benedetti, G., Alenazione e Personazione nella Psicoterapia della malattia mentale
(Landscapes of Death of the Soul), Einaudi, 1960; Paziente e terapeuta nell’
esperienza psicotica (Patient and Therapist during Psychotic Experience), Bollati
Boringhieri, 1991; Psychotherapy as Existential Challenge, Vandenhoecht, 1992.
2 Ōe, K., The Silent Cry, Bester, J. (Trans.), Serpent’s Tail, 1988.
3 Freud, S., Moses and Monotheism, Vintage Books, 1955.
 Gaetano Benedetti 41
4 Ōe, K., The Silent Cry, op. cit., p. 157.
5 Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, section 293.
6 Lacan, J., Or Worse, Book XIX, Polity, 2018.
7 Wittgenstein, L., “Notes for Lectures on ‘Private Experience’ and ‘Sense Data’,”
in The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, Kuusela, O. and McGinn, M. (Eds.),
Oxford University Press, 2011.
8 Mallarmé, S., “The Tomb of Edgar Poe,” in Selected Poetry and Prose, New
Directions, 1982.
9 Freud, S. and Jung, C., The Freud/Jung Letters, McGuire, W. (Ed.), Princeton
University Press, 1994.
10 Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, Dover Publications, 1999.
11 Erasmus, D., Praise of Folly, Clarke, R. (Trans.), Alma Classics, 2008.
12 Rimbaud, A., I Promise to Be Good, Mason, W. (Trans.), Modern Library, 2004.
13 Fromm-Reichmann, F., Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy, University of Chi-
cago Press, 1960.
14 Shakespeare, W., Hamlet, Simon & Schuster, 1992.
15 Ibid., Act I, Scene 5.
16 Wittgenstein, L., “Notes for Lectures on ‘Private Experience’,” op. cit.
17 Fritz, J.-M.,. Le discours du fou au Moyen-Âge, Presses universitaires de France,
1992.
18 Bion, W., Elements of Psychoanalysis, Karnac Books, 1989.
19 Sullivan, H. S., Schizophrenia as a Human Process, Norton Library, 1974.
20 Winnicott, D. W., Playing and Reality, Tavistock Publications, 1971.
21 Foot, J., The Man Who Closed the Asylums, Verso, 2015.
3 Seminar 3: 1988–1989
Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936)
Madness in Pirandello’s work

Using literature in the analytic process

I could not do without literature in my work as an analyst. Literature acts as
a double of mad speech. Literary works drift in my head and connect, in the
form of quotes, with mad speech which until then had remained suspended in
the air. When I am dealing with someone who is delusional, to whom I appear
as a possible other on the horizon of this speech, a particular kind of
transference takes place; I catch words and images floating in the air, coming
from voices or visions that record, in traumatic memory, unforgettable
catastrophes, “at the crossroads of world history and personal history,” as the
patient quoted in the previous chapter said. These catastrophes wait to be joined
up with voices that answer on my side, in the form of literary quotes, for
example, so as to be inscribed in the repressed unconscious where they can be
forgotten and remembered.
Wilfred Bion said: “Only that which can be forgotten is remembered.”
Until then, “thoughts without a thinker desperately search for a thinker to
think them [and] give them a home.”1 I will develop this idea in a future
seminar on Bion,2 but right now it brings to mind Pirandello’s play Six
Characters in Search of an Author. I will comment on this paradoxical
formulation, which also describes psychoanalytic practice.

Inscription of an erasure
Mad speech testifies to catastrophes outside the realm of language whose
traces have been erased. It tries to authenticate them with the help of an
other who remains to be produced, since otherness has been destroyed on
this site of the catastrophe. Indeed, authenticating the catastrophe thanks to
the encounter with a double of mad speech, which the analyst brings from
literature, leads to the erasure of haunting voices and visions. The paradox
consists of fighting against the erasure of traces by erasing the phantoms
that emerge in the same place. This second erasure restores their traces
thanks to an inscription in the discourse of the Other.
 Luigi Pirandello 43
To handle this paradoxical situation, I think of Wittgenstein, who used
a technical rather than structural approach: “It is interesting to compare the
multiplicity of the tools in language and the ways they are used […] with
what logicians have said about the structure of language (including the
author of Tractus Logico-Philosophicus).”3 We can appreciate the difference
between his “structural” treatise written on the front line during the Great
War, which ends with the phrase: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one
must be silent,” and his second philosophy developed after his return to
Cambridge in 1929, in which what cannot be said is shown through an
“ostensive definition.”4
When I am shown by a patient what cannot be said in a case of madness
and trauma, I often think of Pirandello’s novel The Notebooks of Serafino
Gubbio5 or of his play Six Characters in Search of an Author. I grasp these
stories intuitively, although they suggest no interpretation before I use them
with the patient, before he can make use of them.6 “It is as if we could
grasp the whole use of a word in a flash,” Wittgenstein says, adding:

[…] we are led to think that the future development must in some way
already be present in the act of grasping the use and yet isn’t present.
For we say that there isn’t any doubt that we understand the word, and
on the other hand, its meaning lies in its use.7

There follows a sentence reminiscent of Bion’s “thoughts without a thinker”:

“Any interpretation (Deutung) still hangs in the air along with what it
interprets, and cannot give any support. Interpretations by themselves do not
determine meaning (Bedeuten).”
Indeed, we can have in mind tons of theories and literary references, but
these interpretations have no effect until they find their application through
a “language-game” with the patient, in which “the speaker’s tone of voice and
the look with which the words are uttered”8 play a major role. Bion and
Wittgenstein found themselves in the same traumatised state on either side of
the front line after the 1918 Armistice. Both of them experienced the absence
of recourse, which they would eventually find: Wittgenstein in philosophy and
Bion in psychoanalysis. Wittgenstein abandoned philosophy for ten years,
haunted by post-traumatic symptoms until he returned to Cambridge, where
he practised philosophy like a therapy of “the bumps that the understanding
has got by running its head up against the limits of language.”9 Bion left his
first psychoanalyst, whose head was full of ready-made theories, and found
John Rickman, a veteran of the recent war like himself, and a disciple of
William Rivers, who will be the subject of another seminar.10
Both Bion and Wittgenstein had to find a new paradigm for situations
where “the tool with the name is broken.”11 The erasure of traces leads to
traumatic revivals which show that which cannot be said. The second
erasure, in the transference, makes it possible to inscribe what is shown, as
long as it can be addressed to another who enables the inscription of
44 Seminar 3: 1988–1989
a name that “survives the death of its bearer.”12 This is the task Bion calls
“psychotic transference,” and it is not an easy task.
Later, Lacan would say: “The signifier is the murder of the thing.”13 Yet
he refused to address the question of “the use of transference in psychosis”
in his “On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of
Psychosis.”14 But when the murder of the thing threatens to be acted out in
a suicide attempt, for lack of someone to address in the transference, “to
understand a language means to be master of a technique,” as Wittgenstein
writes.15 Because, Freud says,16 the language of traumatic reviviscences
stemming from an unconscious not linked to repression, but to “word-
presentations and thing-presentations” of the primary process, requires
using a different language, which pioneers of the analysis of psychosis and
trauma invented while working in military hospitals during World War I.
To put it another way, let us turn to a book written by France’s great jester
Raymond Davos, Sens dessus dessous (Upside Down).17 Speaking of “the
protection of empty spaces,” those of madness, he advises us to catch
butterflies that do not exist and erase them, because otherwise we will have
delusional fantasies. These butterflies are the “surviving images” caught by the
inventor of this expression, art historian Aby Warburg, during his stay in
Ludwig Binswanger’s clinic, where he was a patient after World War I, which
had driven him mad. He spoke to moths and butterflies that he called “little
souls,” those of the dead, which helped him survive in “his Hell,” until the day
he was able to erase them by giving “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual.”18
I already mentioned the Hopi ceremony that consists of dancers seizing
rattlesnakes in their hands and carrying them in their mouths as “the
source and substitute of mysterious events.” After dancing for half an hour,
they release the snakes in the desert, where their lightning-like shape will
bring rain, a source of physical and psychic revival. Warburg’s lecture,
addressed to the clinic’s staff and patients, was a revival for him, once he
had released in words the mysterious cause of terror that filled his mouth.
He left the clinic soon afterwards and resumed his research, as he had been
encouraged to do by his disciple Fritz Saxl, who trusted that his intelligence
had remained intact, functioning in a psychotic mode, while Freud and
Binswanger did not believe he would ever go back to the status quo ante.
In the meantime, interpretations were suspended in the air and spoke
through little things, like his butterflies, or through “dreams which have
never been dreamed, those created by authors.” This is how Freud starts his
text on the Gradiva, written by the German author Wilhelm Jensen and
entitled Gradiva: A Pompeian Fancy. It tells a story of trauma and madness
that illustrates psychotic transference between a delusional young man mad
about a young girl, the Gradiva – the woman who walks – represented on
a bas-relief, and his neighbour, who accepts to enter his delusion on the site
of Pompeii. She enacts the death of the Gradiva under the burning ashes of
Vesuvius, and is reborn as Zoé – meaning “life” in Greek – out of the death
 Luigi Pirandello 45
zone they both share, she having lost her mother and the young man both
parents, in infancy.
At the time Freud wrote his text on the Gradiva, Pirandello was writing
short stories that would become the source of his theatre.

Madness as the stakes of Pirandello’s works

Madness is an ever-present element in the works of Pirandello, who witnessed
the catastrophes that befell his native Sicily. In 1903, an earthquake destroyed
the sulphur mines; revenue from the mines, his wife Antonella’s dowry, had
been the couple’s main income. News of this devastating loss left Antonella
paralysed. She slowly recovered physically but developed delusional jealousy,
which got worse over time. What role did the madness he lived within his own
household play in Pirandello’s work?
The play Right You Are! (If You Think So)19 depicts the curiosity of
a small town about a strange trio that comes from elsewhere: a man, his
wife and his mother-in-law. When they are asked to explain their behaviour,
each of them blames it on the madness of the others. The mother, Signora
Frola, sees in her son-in-law’s wife her daughter, who, according to her, is
still his first wife, although she died. Her son-in-law, Signor Ponza, claims
his wife is his second spouse and not the living daughter of this woman. In
the background, there is an earthquake that destroyed their families and all
their records. In the last scene of the play, when the mystery is still
unsolved, the daughter, veiled in black, enters to reveal the truth to polite
society. She says simply to the curious onlookers:

The truth? It is only this: that I really am the daughter of Mrs. Frola –
and also the second wife of Mr. Ponza. Yes – and for myself, no one!
I am no one! For myself, I am what others believe me to be.

The real madness is the earthquake that killed everyone and destroyed all
traces of their existence. When Folly speaks, as she does in Erasmus’ Praise,20
it is to answer Kenzaburō Ōe’s request, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness,21
and to testify before curious onlookers about a mode of survival.
In Pirandello’s play, interpretations float in the air, unable to ground
themselves on certainties, but merely on the coincidence of a similar situation
involving someone else that the coincidence was waiting for. I can’t help noticing
that the play was written in 1917, when whole villages in northern France and
Flanders were destroyed by the quakes of bombardments that drove people
mad. The solution offered by the play to this madness is coexistence based on
the respect each person has for the phantoms of the others.
According to Pirandello, those who have real problems are the observers
obsessed with diagnosis. Tormented by the impulse to violate the secret of
the one supposed to be crazy, they collect objective proof, of the kind
sought nowadays in the folds of the brain or through two-way mirrors. Of
46 Seminar 3: 1988–1989
course, a sudden and violent event has destroyed the social link, but
strangely the play relegates this event to the background.
This brings to mind Lacan’s passion for “neologisms” that are reputed to
denote psychosis. Unfortunately for him, the one he chose as an example,
“galopiner” (to act like a little rascal), had already been used by Maupassant.
His presentations of psychotic cases were an attempt to establish the
foreclosure of the name-of-the-father and frame it in a psychotic structure, like
an insect akin to Wittgenstein’s beetle, like a spider on its ceiling, which the
philosopher advises us to ignore. Like the French poet Robert Desnos’ “18-
meter-ant, which speaks French, Latin and Javanese, that doesn’t exist, that
doesn’t exist … and why not?”22 For we start to speak using a number of
phonemes with which I can make sounds like the “POW” and the “WHAM”
in comic strips. Even if people tell me: “That’s no way to talk,” I only need one
person to enter my comic strip and we can play the game. This person has only
to catch a slight deviation in the rhythm, and although the new language is
unknown to him, he will recognise that one other person speaks it.
In 1931, Lacan published an article entitled “Schizophasia” in La revue
psychiatrique. In this text, he was asserting that he had uncovered in the
writing of a woman patient “something indicating that the source of the
writing has been reached.” The conclusion of the article speaks of a mental
deficit as the foundation of the delusional beliefs. He states that in order to be
delusional, “one has to be in a state of frenetic overstimulation, with an
egocentric tendency towards hatred and pride.” This definitive conclusion was
later going to be applied to Artaud:

Nothing is less inspirational, in the spiritual sense, than this writing she
considers inspired. It is when thinking is insufficient and inadequate
that this kind of automatic writing takes its place; it is experienced as
external because it compensates for a deficit in thinking.

Around the same time, Harry Stack Sullivan and Frieda Fromm-
Reichmann were developing the use of transference in psychosis, which they
did not consider linked to a deficiency.
The only reference contributing a spark of intelligence to Lacan’s discussion
relates to the surrealists:

However, this writing also reveals a playful activity whose intentional

and “automatic” components should both be taken into consideration.
The experiments conducted by some writers on a type of writing they
called surrealist, whose scientific method they described in detail, show
the remarkable degree of autonomy that can be reached in automatic
writing with no hypnosis involved.

But let us be careful not to associate the nonsense of mental deficit with
science-certified surrealism. In 1933, in an article published in Minotaure on
 Luigi Pirandello 47
“problems of style,” Lacan seems better informed, after having defended his
thesis in psychiatry in 1932. He now sees so-called “morbid” experience as
“particularly conducive to symbolic modes of expression.” What a relief!
The worst has been avoided.
In fact, the new concept of “surrealism,” brought back from the front in
World War I by Guillaume Apollinaire, with its “objective chance,” is not
far removed from madness. It is a pity that Nadja,23 probably traumatised
by the war in Lille, a city she left for Paris after the war, ended up in
a psychiatric hospital in Perray-Vaucluse, where she died, and where André
Breton (1896–1966) never visited her.
In Pirandello’s theatre, set in the context of the same catastrophe, the
exiled subject is able to find himself.

The theatre of madness as a public place

During the war, Pirandello understood the affinity between theatre and madness.
Like psychiatric hospitals – and cafés, like my mother’s, where I spent my
childhood – theatre is a space with three walls, the red curtain acting as the
fourth. Gisela Pankow used to say: “There are no secrets in psychosis.” Contrary
to Leibniz’s monads, “spaces without doors or windows which keep out
accidents,” these places are completely open and only accidents can happen
there.
In a dream recounted by Charlotte Beradt in her book The Third Reich of
Dreams,24 a loudspeaker of the Nazi regime is heard ordering the removal of
the walls of houses. “One and a hundred thousand people” then become
identical and don’t recognise themselves in the mirror any more. A person who
knew himself inside out discovers that he has never seen himself before. The
others pass his strangeness along like the sticky tape in The Adventures of
Tintin, and the uncanny sensation (Unheimlich) keeps running like “the ferret
of the pretty woods, my ladies.” A public place in which the self disappears
makes room for 100,000 strangers, one of whom is the hero of the short story
“One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand”25 – written in 1927 – who goes
mad when his wife criticises the shape of his nose. Heinrich von Kleist
describes a similar adventure, in his essay On a Theatre of Marionettes,
involving a young man transformed into a puppet after his mentor refused to
recognise, for his own good, the statue of Apollo with a thorn in the pose he
struck when they went to the baths together.26 In his theatre, Pirandello
enacted experimentally such disappearances of the self.
The play was staged in Rome in 1921 and caused a scandal, since the
spectators entered a dimly lit theatre without a curtain and without stage
decor. The head carpenter was nailing something; the stage manager ran up
to tell him that the rehearsal was about to start. No one could make out
what was going on. The director came in, followed by the actors and the
prompter. Rehearsal has barely started when the Six Characters come
forward from the back of the house, but they are not real people. They
48 Seminar 3: 1988–1989
complain that an author created them and then abandoned them so that
the play was never written. They embody psychotic energy asking to be
inscribed. The director suggests that they play their parts so that,
afterwards, the play could be written and the roles given to actors.
The plot concerns a father who has abandoned his wife and legitimate son,
pushing her to become the mistress of one of his employees, with whom she
has had three more children: the eldest daughter, identified as the
Stepdaughter, the Boy, who is now an adolescent, and the youngest girl, the
Child. Another public place is mentioned: a brothel run by what was called in
the eighteenth century une marchande à la toilette, an outfit vendor. The
Stepdaughter works there as a prostitute until she finds herself face to face
with her father-in-law, in a quasi-incestuous situation. The play impossible to
write tries to be written to bring that tale of woe to an end. Two deaths will
occur in the wings: the Child drowns in a pool and the Boy commits suicide.
The Six Characters are not people and are not yet roles. To attain the
goals pursued by their mad energy, they will enter into conflict with the
actors on the questions of their “selves.” The father argues with the one
who is supposed to play his role:

As artists […] you have to create a perfect illusion of reality […] But we […]
have no other reality. […] that which is a game of art for you is our sole
reality. But not only for us, you know, by the way. (Looking him straight in
the eye) Just you think it over well. Can you tell me who you are?

A little later, he addresses the stage managers:

A character, sir, may always ask a man who he is. Because a character
has really a life of his own, marked with his especial characteristics; for
which reason he is always “somebody.” But a man – I’m not speaking
of you now – may very well be “nobody.”

The stage manager objects: “I should like to know if anyone has ever heard
of a character who gets right out of his part and perorates and speechifies
as you do.” The father answers: “You have never met such a case, sir,
because authors, as a rule, hide the labour of their creations.”
This identity problem has to be dealt with by Pirandello, who, in the preface
to his play, while his characters intrude on him, introduces his little maidservant
Fantasy. She wears the fool’s cap and bells that Laurence Sterne tells us he dons
in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.27 She:

[brings] to his house – since [he] derive[s] stories and novels and plays
from them – men, women, children, involved in strange adventures
which they can find no way out of […] with whom it is often very pain-
ful to have dealings.
 Luigi Pirandello 49
Fantasy often finds them in sundry news stories. The writer gives them an
appointment, as he used to do when he wrote short stories taken from
Sicilian newspapers.
In his short story “A Character’s Tragedy,” published in 1911, he
grants his characters an audience lasting five hours, on Sundays from
8.00 a.m. to 1.00 p.m.,28 and he writes:

I almost always find myself in bad company. […] I listen to them with
infinite forbearing; I take down each one’s name and circumstances. […]
Now, it’s often the case that at a certain question I pose they jib, they take
umbrage, they resist furiously. […] I do my best to make them see and per-
ceive that my question was perfectly à propos, because it’s easy for anyone
to wish to be one kind of person or another; the real question is whether
we can be the way we want to be. […] They can’t be convinced of this.

In the story “Conversations with Characters,” published in 1915, Pirandello

features himself as a character who, on the eve of Italy’s entrance into the
war, posts this sign on his office door:

NOTICE From this day forward, audiences are suspended with all charac-
ters, men and women, of any rank, age and profession, who have applied
and submitted credentials to be admitted to a novel or story. NB: Applica-
tions and credentials are respectfully held at the disposal of all characters
who, not ashamed to display their miserable circumstances, would like to
appeal to other writers, provided they find them.29

From 1915 on, Pirandello became a prominent playwright whose plays were
produced constantly, and characters continued to show up at his door. In
1917, in a letter to his son Stefano, who had been made a prisoner of war
in Austria, Pirandello wrote:

Six characters, caught in a terrible drama, who approach me asking to

be put into a novel, it’s an obsession. […] I tell them it’s useless, I’m
not interested in them, I’m not interested in anything, and here they are
showing me all their wounds as here I am sending them away.

These characters were reunited in the 1925 play Six Characters in Search of
an Author, whose preface reiterates the content of this letter. The play
reflects the violent shock of the Great War. Pirandello declared: “My
writing for the stage has been war theatre. The war revealed theatre to me.”

From trivial events to the theatre of war

Trivial events read in newspapers are not trivial for everyone. They wait for
the theatre of short stories, of plays, and of analytic sessions as well, to
50 Seminar 3: 1988–1989
testify and to bring on stage people to whom catastrophes happened and
“with whom it is painful to have dealings,” to bring them out of the
anonymity in which they were treated like things. One of the Six
Characters, the Stepdaughter, driven into prostitution by poverty, comes
face to face with her mother’s first husband who had repudiated her. On the
theatre stage, she shows him attempting to buy her sexual services while she
is wearing a black dress to mourn the death of her own father – the
employee who had given refuge to her mother.
This scene brings into existence the girls left on the street, the ones that,
at the same period, Yvette Guilbert30 – who called herself diseuse fin de
siècle, an end-of-century sayer, and was painted by Toulouse Lautrec
wearing long, black gloves – was holding up before the old gentlemen in
her audience. The abandonment of the girls they had seduced brings to
mind that of children who are left to become prey to voyeurs and perverts,
and that of young men left without a grave in the theatre of war.
The public space in which they have the good fortune to appear is
Pirandello’s theatre. On the stage, a monstrosity appears, of which
Pirandello learned through trivial events reported in newspapers, just as we
do in our work as analysts when we meet with lost souls attempting to
mend the social fabric in the face of cowardice. The aim, then, is to help
a political self emerge.31 What does this mean?
The subject of desire emerges from a psychoanalysis by successively
dropping his masks, but something terrifying happens when, like the mime
Marcel Marceau, he is unable to tear off the last one. An event becomes
madness as soon as the sundry incident falls upon – incidere – an I that
becomes an id, condemned to show the catastrophe on his face until he
meets an other who can recognise it. This coincidence brings about the
advent of a political self, in a context where an impossible-to-remove
diagnosis had been pronounced.
Spaces are unaware, but people know that they feel different than they
did before. They have been forced to acquire out of the ordinary knowledge
of which they cannot speak. How can this knowledge be reached? “I turn
into stone and my pain goes on,” says Wittgenstein.32 Try to get stones to
reveal this knowledge! Try to make them speak! They will tell you nothing,
unless someone starts to speak to the petrified mask, but this someone can
only speak if he is in the place where the other has turned to stone. In his
play At the Exit,33 Pirandello lets tombstones speak.
The action takes place at night, in a cemetery. Time and space are
inverted since the dead come out at night. They stay in during the day;
a tombstone has been thrown over them. They come out at night so that
their image may vanish, and work among themselves so that gradually the
appearances may fade away: that of the fat man, of the murdered woman,
of the man who laughs all the time. Like stones, they have no feelings. In
these public spaces where no one lives, although the dead cross paths with
the living, there is no need to make them feel anything, but they must
 Luigi Pirandello 51
account for what happened to them. Horror and pity are not “my” feelings
either, but those they ask me to feel.
A reversal takes place – the very dynamics of madness – when the object
represented – what is shown – becomes a means of representation,
a technique of inscription that occurs coincidentally, when the dead may
speak and I am summoned to answer during the sessions, like Pirandello
answers anonymous voices in newspapers, the voices of people to whom he
gives an appointment every Sunday morning.
As long as no one else comes to stand in this place from where the subject
must answer for catastrophes, when, as Wittgenstein says, “the tool with the
names is broken,” interpretations rush in from everywhere. Radio, television,
gossip, the bleating of goats, the sound of the wind in rose bushes try to find
a meeting point where at long last it becomes possible to name what has been
recorded by the body.34 For lack of that meeting, a regime of limitless
accumulation is instated in rooms filled with objects or trash, since nothing can
be thrown away, as if 20 million things had to be shown for one of them to
finally be recognised by someone who can answer for what took place.

Recording a catastrophe with no one to answer for it

The novel The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio35 is centred on “showing” –
literally, since it speaks of a camera that films on its own. The four main
characters are an actor, an actress, the cameraman who films the scene, and
a tigress. The actor is consumed with love and jealousy for the actress, the
cameraman films the scene, and the tigress – whom the script intends to be
killed by the actor – leaps to devour him after he shoots not at her, but at the
actress. The cameraman continues to film, instead of participating in the
general hubbub. This is when an incredible thing happens, a thing that could
not be written in the script since it was unforeseeable: a scene of horror
recorded mechanically by this man who has set his emotions aside. It will be
“the last scene” (the Italian title of the novel), because the man goes mad. The
scene illustrates traumatic moments when images are imprinted on the retina,
which can neither be erased nor recalled as memories. I am thinking of the last
look that film director Akira Kurosawa, still an adolescent, exchanged with his
older brother just before his brother went off to kill himself.
The cameraman keeps recording while his life recedes and he withdraws
from life. His excess of sensitivity has turned into insensitivity, the lethargy
of the living dead. Still, he cannot stop writing. The novel, based on
posthumous notebooks, is written by a ghost:

I satisfy, by writing, a need to let off steam which is overpowering. I get

rid of my professional impassivity and avenge myself as well; and with
myself avenge ever so many others, condemned like myself to be noth-
ing more than a hand that turns a handle.36
52 Seminar 3: 1988–1989
The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio is composed of seven notebooks written by
the cameraman. The last film sequence, described in the seventh notebook, is
the scene of horror in which, finding himself in the place of the inhuman
camera that records a random event, the cameraman becomes part of the
machine and loses his individuality. He says: “I was not a person, my person
was not necessary.” He had become “the Thing, das Ding,” or rather “the
representation of a thing,” as Freud puts it in his Project,37 whom no one
represents because nobody sees him. The cameraman is like a phantom, in
a space-time where, in Wittgenstein’s words, “language goes on holiday.”38
The horror and pity felt by the spectator or by the listener to whom this
story is told are cathartic, making it possible to forget the tragedy. But first,
the spectator must perceive the place in which the cameraman exists when
he confuses his eye with that of the camera and gives up his personality.
The truth is that he is not a camera and experiences incredible feelings that
remain outside any exchange. Normally, when I see a painful scene, I have
feelings that I can share with others. But if someone remains unmoved, we
say that he has a heart of stone. Does this mean that he has no feelings?
Pirandello speaks of relationships with madmen from the vantage point of
his thirty years of life with a wife whose delusional jealousy towards him
was a constant torment. In Chapter 3 of the fifth book of The Notebooks of
Serafino Gubbio, this madness makes its entrance.
The cameraman is staying with a family in which the mother is devoured
by delusional jealousy towards her husband. The latter, “infected” by his
wife’s madness, is driven to “eye askance, and […] touch with a sense of
misgiving some object in the room which was for a moment illuminated
with the sinister light of a new and terrible meaning by the sick [woman’s]
hallucinations.” Objects really become strange and frightening. “As falcons
from their native ayry soar” in De Hérédia’s poem,39 they wait to pounce
on the husband and drag him into her delusion, but thanks to the
cameraman’s presence, he can step back from the brink.
Through his character, Pirandello analyses his own reaction when faced
with the “diabolical fury” of his wife and the “bursting of a soul […] into
fragments of life not reflected by the light of reason.” He is seized by terror
born of recognising “with an appalling clarity, that madness dwells and
lurks within each of us and that a mere trifle may let it loose.”40 The
cameraman also feels pity for the young girl in the household when he
witnesses the “massacre of her heart” by an impossible love. But in the
horror scene he would film, no one would feel pity for him.
The cameraman finally shuts himself up in a residence for the aged,
where he continues to be a filming machine, the eye of the camera on
which all the things of life are imprinted: “What do I know about the
mountain, the tree, the sea? […] I am the mountain, I am the tree, I am
the sea. I am also the star, which knows not its own existence.”41 He
turned a handle and experienced incredible emotions, but he wondered if
he was really needed.
 Luigi Pirandello 53
Once the event took place, once the camera recorded the tragedy without
knowing it, he could no longer bear the physical proximity of others. Who
was he in his indifference to the scene? What will the man do when all the
cameras will turn by themselves?

Do you still retain, gentlemen, a little soul, a little heart and a little
mind? Give them, give them over to the greedy machines, which are
waiting for them! You shall see and hear the sort of product, the
exquisite stupidities they will manage to extract from them.

Who do they belong to, these objects that carry unbelievable feelings, and
feel in the places where humans can no longer feel? If the survivors are able
to come out of their sideration one day, and to filter what cannot be said
when everything breaks down, the ruins may start to speak to someone else,
with no need for metaphors. In the meantime, everything has stopped, as if
all the relational dials have been turned to zero.
The cameraman has only a public existence, and refuses anyone’s help. In
his last notebook, he writes:

No, thank you. Thanks to everybody. I have had enough. I prefer to

remain like this. The times are what they are; life is what it is; and in
the sense that I give to my profession, I intend to go on as I am –
alone, mute and impassive – being the operator. Is the stage set? Are
you ready? Shoot …

This is how the novel ends. The “public” functions as if no relation to

another is possible any longer. The last notebook written after the
catastrophe, “with a pen and a sheet of paper to communicate with my
fellow-men,” quotes a sentence he had written elsewhere:

I suffer from this silence of mine, into which everyone comes, as into
a place of certain hospitality. I should like now my silence to close
round me altogether. […] Well, it has closed round me. I could not be
better qualified to act as the servant of a machine.42

The subject of the novel is nothing other than the medium of a catastrophe,
which causes everything to be imprinted on a neutral support. There are no
more others since there is nothing but otherness. My intention is to show
that in the transference, things can be placed in the space between two
people so that they can be heard.

Clinical story
One day, a young man who had been considered retarded as a child came
to my office announcing: “I am early!” and adding: “I’ve come to see you
54 Seminar 3: 1988–1989
because I have nothing to say. We are very upset because my grandmother
died and I don’t feel sad at all.” He explained that for him, sadness was
a sadness-hand that passed over his body. But he experienced it as a film of
sadness disconnected from his feelings, which he could not share with
anyone. With him, my role could not be limited to that of an analyst
curious to see how mourning expresses itself in a feeble-minded youth. He
wanted to know my reaction: Did this disconnection frighten me? While
everyone was crying, he remained as insensitive as a stone.
In the face of a catastrophe with no other to share it, the dyad
individual/collective is broken. The seat of feelings in the body and the soul
outruns its limits, and madness waits for someone to see if he feels
something. “Prime words,” as Marcel Duchamp called them, “words
divisible only by themselves and by unity,”43 which Socrates described as
“the primal elements outside of reason (stoicheia aloga)”44 and Bion as
“beta elements.”45 They are not transferable to the symbolic level because
they are not connected, but simply deposited in public places, waiting for
an other to see if he is moved by them.
After a session when I could read the fear on the young man’s face,
I shook his hand to take leave of him; he made a grimace, as if I had
violated a minimal distance. That night I had a dream in which I am
travelling and I stop at an inn to have a meal. The hostess brings me
a plate with two boiled human hands. I tell myself that people eat pigs’
feet after all, and I wake up anxious, holding the plate in my hands.
I had a dream in the minimal distance in which I was the hand that can
kill at any moment.
This dream was not rooted in repression, but in the unspeakable trauma
that happened between us. I tell the young man this dream, connected to
the act of shaking a hand not held out, intruding on a margin of safety. In
the next session, the two hands that are neither mine nor his were able to
connect with us. I find him immersed in a terrible silence, a silence of stone,
shattered by unspeakable pain showing on his face. Why? I only know that
it is related to what is taking place between us.
I could transfer the responsibility to someone else, like Gavroche did in
Les Misérables when he fell to the ground under a shower of bullets: “I fell
to the ground, the fault is Voltaire’s; my face in the dust, the fault is
Rousseau’s.”46 But we are there together and an intense pain is shown to
me like a mask impossible to remove from the face I am seeing. I try to
imagine different scenarios; nothing happens. I try not to be simply
a spectator who describes what he observes, and finally I offer him my
poor, severed hands again. This earns me a smile, twenty seconds of a look
I hasten to forget. Before me I see not a young man who is sad, but
Sadness itself that slipped between us.
Just then, I hear a piano and I tell him that this happens sometimes in
my building. A melody comes to exist in my ears, as if the two hands on
the plate have become the two phantom hands playing the piano. Who do
 Luigi Pirandello 55
they belong to, these things that do not exist, and which are programmed
to experience feelings without a subject? If I insist that they should belong
to an “I,” I open the door to delusion. Indeed, hearing a piano that does
not exist is surely a hallucination. Surviving images look for a subject to
cling to, to avoid objectification. I play the role of a radio wave receiver, in
order to grasp something that exists in a demanding externality, to catch it
like a sensation, record it and hold on to it as long as it takes for the
incredible feeling to enter an interference in which I am involved.
The young man tells me about a phantom piano, passed on to him by his
grandmother who no longer played. The piano became forever silent,
because the house was destroyed. I ask him to sing the melody his
grandmother used to play, and I hear his voice becoming musical. I hear
the piano play through his voice, between the two of us.

Change of vertex
Let us imagine that in geometry, point K is outside a figure and is not part
of the statement, so that it has to be constructed. The same is true of
madness: the social group that comes across it distances itself from it, and
everyone says: “Point K is of no concern to me.” Pirandello says this better
than anyone in the short story “The Train Whistled,”47 quoted by his
countryman Gaetano Benedetti. The story is about Belluca, a man who is
delirious as a result of “cerebral fever.”48 In medical language, “scientific
terms” such as “encephalitis” describe what is seen from the outside,
without considering the patient’s life. But Pirandello constructs point K:
“… given the most unusual conditions in which that unhappy man had
been living […] his case could […] be considered quite natural.”
Nothing is more Cartesian than psychosis: if there is madness, some reason
has to be found. Descartes testified to this in his Discourse on the Method, in
1797, long after having had nightmares he thought would drive him mad.49
While he was a soldier in the army of the Duke of Bavaria during the Thirty
Years War, and stationed for the winter in Ulm, “alone in a stove-heated
room,” three nightmares terrified him on St Martin’s Eve, in November 1719.
In the first dream, wild winds pushed him violently, knocking him down; in
the second, he heard a deafening clap of thunder; and in the third, he saw his
bedroom full of sparks of light.50 Eighteen years later, he set out his method
of reasoning not as “the method,” for he did “not recommend to everyone
else to make a similar attempt,” but as a method for himself: like a man
walking alone in the dark, he “resolved to proceed slowly and with such
circumspection, that if I did not advance far, I would at least guard against
falling.”51
Martin Cooperman, another war veteran who fought in the Pacific War,
showed us how he constructed point K. At the Austen Riggs Center,
a clinic dedicated to the psychoanalysis of psychosis, he told us, pointing to
the window in his office:
56 Seminar 3: 1988–1989
Suppose that you see a patient gesticulating. Now, move a little to
change your angle of observation. You will see that he is fighting an
enemy. But the problem is that as soon as you get this glimpse, the
enemy occupies your place.

To ignore this is to cancel transference and assert that these symptoms do

not send any message, even though the other is ever-present in the form of
a lawless, unreasonable agency against which we and the patient must fight.
In this context, Wilfred Bion, another veteran of the First World War,
speaks of the need for a change of vertex.52
Pirandello constructs point K by assuming that Belluca’s delusion is
“quite natural.” As Wittgenstein says, a whole theory is condensed in
a bit of grammar – in this case, the use of superlatives:

And it did not occur to anyone that, given the most unusual conditions
in which that unhappy man had been living for so many years, his case
could even be considered quite natural, and that everything Belluca said
which everyone thought was nonsense, a symptom of frenzy, could also
be the simplest explanation of his quite natural case.

How does the symptom show the nature of this natural case? By taking
into account an external event. To explain nature in De rerum natura,
Lucretius describes his vision of the falling of atoms, saying that if they
never met, nothing would happen.53 Therefore, a clinamen (deviation) must
be hypothesised. The trajectory of one of these atoms has to deviate for
reasons we cannot know, since this trajectory is outside our system.
Belluca, the narrator of Pirandello’s short story, “lived with three blind
women: his wife, his mother-in-law, and the latter’s sister,” who made his life
hell (p. 103). As long as he found this normal, he was a model employee.
One day, “the train whistled.” This is how the clinamen intervenes: now, he sees
that he is living an “impossible” life, and he becomes the subject of the
madness around him.
This deviation from routine plays the role of the uneven paving stone on
which Proust tripped in the courtyard of the Guermantes Hotel, on his way
to a reception given there just after World War I.54 Proust writes that in
that moment, he had an experience of “time regained,” of a fragment of
pure time that triggered the writing of Remembrance of Things Past. When
he entered, he saw the reception as a ball of phantoms, where the guests
had been changed into mannequins. A psychiatrist seeing him that evening
would have labelled him schizophrenic. He was discovering:

moments of existence cut out of time […] not a past sensation, but
a new truth […]. As if our most beautiful ideas were airs coming back
which we have never heard, but which we endeavor to listen to and to
transcribe.
 Luigi Pirandello 57
What element transforms Belluca’s “delusion” into “the most natural of
cases”? There are multiple points of view, one cannot generalise, someone
else can always find another point K, as in this story Benedetti told us
about a patient who lived outside time.
Wherever she went, clocks were not working. He told her that this was not
possible. She insisted, and suddenly, in the session, he saw the hands of his
office clock spin furiously and then stop. Benedetti, who was not one to miss
transference, told her that he had just entered her timeless time. She replied:
“You are completely mad, Mr. Benedetti.” “What do you think?” he asked me.
“Can it be that psychic energy acts directly on matter?” That he asks himself
this type of question shows, at the very least, that he participates in the folly he
encounters: Folie à deux, “foliadiu,” as Martin Cooperman, his former
colleague at Chestnut Lodge, would call this necessary transference, with his
American accent.
It takes energy to construct point K, because the train opens the space
where the city and what lies beyond it start to exist:

A moment which ticked for him here in this prison of his, flowed like
an electric shiver throughout the whole world, and now that his imagin-
ation had suddenly been awakened, he could follow that moment, yes,
follow it to known and unknown cities, moors, mountains, forests, seas.
This same shiver, this same palpitation of time. While he lived the
“impossible life” here, there were millions of men scattered about the
entire globe who lived differently […]. The whole world, all of a sudden
within him — a cataclysm. Gradually he would regain his composure.
He was still tipsy from having breathed too much air; he could feel it.
(pp. 104–105)

Where was madness located: in the life he used to live or in the sudden
existence of the whole world? Pirandello never stops showing the rupture of
the limits between fiction and reality.
“I am in a scenario I know nothing about, but I play my role perfectly,”
a delusional young man used to tell me. The painter Bernard Réquichot
jumped out of a window when one of his friends, wanting to be helpful,
exposed his paintings entitled Reliquaires (Reliquaries), in which the artist had
taken refuge, in an art gallery. Réquichot used to say: “I don’t know what does
what to me.” When another person is not there to reanimate this “I don’t
know what” who doesn’t know, the exploitation can continue until the victim
is killed. Some psychiatrists are not safe themselves from objectification.
Gaëtan Gatiande de Clérambault, Jacques Lacan’s master, who theorised
“mental automatism,” was fascinated with cloth and its folds. He
photographed veiled women in North Africa, and he draped cloth around
wax mannequins in his house in the suburbs of Paris, where he sat facing
a mirror and, surrounded by his dummies, shot at them and then turned
the gun on himself.
58 Seminar 3: 1988–1989
The core of psychosis is like the eye of the cyclone. All around, it’s the
end of the world, while at the centre normal life continues its course. To say
that the problem is social and historical makes no more sense than to
say that it is psychological and individual, because the cyclone abolishes
the opposition between collective and singular. The cyclone descends
upon the analyst who tries to exist as the other by constructing point
K not on the basis of a learned professional position, but from a blind
point where he relies on the “seismograph of his soul”55 that records the
impressions cut off from the eye of the cyclone. These impressions are
the only way to transmit something that cannot be felt or imagined.
“The Man with the Flower in His Mouth”56 is a story about ordinary
people who are not ordinary. One of them asks a stranger who has just
missed a train:

I ask you whether you think it possible that the houses of Messina […]
knowing they were about to be smashed by an earthquake, would have
contentedly remained where they were, lined up along the streets and
squares […] No, by God, these houses of wood and stone would some-
how have managed to run away!

But in reality, they cannot run away because they don’t feel anything.
Everyone is surrounded by madness but, like the houses, no one feels
anything. Only through a delusion can one express, for instance, that his
seismograph tells him that someone will die, as the hero of “The Man with
the Flower in His Mouth” explains:

You’re walking down the street and some passer-by suddenly stops you.
Carefully, he extends just two fingers of one hand and he says, “Excuse
me, may I? You, my dear sir, have death on you!” […] Many of the
people you see walking around happily and indifferently may be carry-
ing it on them. No one notices it. And they’re calmly and quietly plan-
ning what they’ll do tomorrow and the day after. Now I … Look, come
over here, under this light … I’ll show you something … Look here,
under the moustache … There, you see that pretty violet nodule? Know
what it’s called? Ah, such a soft word – softer than caramel – epithe-
lioma, it’s called. Death, you understand? Death passed my way.57

The Pygmies say that “there are three kinds of humans: the not quite dead,
the long-time dead and the dead forever.” The long-time dead are
phantoms that come to life, and that’s a problem. In this short story, death
is hovering among the living. We who carry it “indifferently,” we give it
a dissociated position, but this elsewhere is as much our own as everything
else. It emerges in the transference with madness, when “the tool with the
names is broken,” like a language covered with scars in which the subject
tries to find himself.
 Luigi Pirandello 59
The witness of a catastrophe whom mirrors can’t reflect is closeted in the
silence of the disappearance of all others, and tries to show it in order to
give form to the unimaginable impossible to forget. In the absence of
a reliable other, he also addresses himself to the public, which disintegrates
into fragments as scattered as his image in the mirror. In this case, the
public is not a collective entity, but a collection of small pieces of pulverised
others, creating the need for ever-renewed efforts to add more, in hopes that
more + more + more will eventually lead to finding a guarantor at the
limits of language, in the form of God, the President, the Public Prosecutor
or even the Pope. Mathematician Georg Cantor (1845–1918), who was
persecuted by his colleagues for inventing set theory, demanded that the
supreme authority of the Church, Leo XIII, speak with him directly.
In the meantime, the collection is built stone by stone, letter by letter, and
eventually wears away, unless a coincidence occurs in the transference and its
linking effect upon these “elements without reason,” as Socrates calls them,
generates the logos, speech and reason.58 The effort to constitute a symbolic
Other mechanically, by collecting bits of the imaginary on the trajectory of
a vanishing point, will never lead to anything but a void. The one who
dedicates his life to enabling this emergence tries to create time out of space,
since in the absence of symbols time does not pass. In the space where there is
no forgetting, the present is everything. Nothing is ever lost in the capharnaum
of the more + more, which builds up in crowded rooms, and in stuffed
cupboards and refrigerators. In these conditions, the clock only serves to carve
up, in the present, the repetition of traumatic memory that cannot forget, but
without setting time in motion again. As Bion says, in order to remember, one
must forget; repression requires that time be in motion.
What makes it impossible to produce the signifiers of the symbolic chain,
in this never emptied overflow? To empty an overstuffed space, one must be
able to throw something away. But to destroy this or that element of the
collection is equivalent to sending oneself into space, for lack of an other
with whom to play at destroying the thing, since at this point of catastrophe
the limit between inside and outside has been abolished.
But the required play falls outside the framework of traditional
psychiatry and psychoanalysis, although the game was invented by a child
of wartime, the one who played at “Fort! Da!” with his grandfather
Freud,59 who feared the death of his sons fighting on the front line of
World War I.

The play of animistic practices

When dealing with abnormal things, which have destroyed all reliability,
abnormal instruments are needed. The short story “Dal naso al cielo”
(“From the Nose to the Sky”) opposes a senator who supports positive
science, and is recuperating from exhaustion in a countryside hotel, where
he runs into his former disciple who has taken under his wing a young girl
60 Seminar 3: 1988–1989
with what appear to be hallucinations. Coming back from a stroll, she
heard phantom organ and harp music in the ruins of a nearby convent. The
short story ends with the discovery of the senator’s body, “nose to the sky,”
connected to the top of a tree by a spiderweb, in the woods where he had
gone off alone, in order to contradict his disciple’s superstitions and
reaffirm his own diagnosis of the girl’s condition: “It is nothing, Gentlemen,
a slight passing psychosis, a hysterical crisis, nothing more.”60
Pirandello raises the question of the limits of what can be known when
science is powerless in the face of a phenomenon that cannot be repeated or
put to the test. The author relies on the senator’s former disciple to develop
the subject by discussing the animist world and the mythological universe of
legends:

He […] began speaking about occultism and mediumship, telepathy

and premonitions, and of materializations; and before the eyes of his
stunned audience, he populated the earth with wonders and phan-
toms, this earth that foolish human pride maintains is inhabited only
by man and the few animals known to him, which serve him.
A serious mistake! Other beings, which through our fault we cannot
perceive with our normal faculties, live on earth a natural life like
ours, and sometimes reveal themselves in certain abnormal circum-
stances, and fill us with fear; they are superhuman beings in the sense
that they exist beyond our poor humanity and are subject to laws
unknown to us, or more precisely, set aside by our consciousness, but
which we perhaps obey as well, unconsciously. These non-human
inhabitants of the earth, elemental essences, spirits of nature of all
kinds, live among us in the mountains and forests, in the air and in
the water, in the fire, invisible; but on occasion they are, nevertheless,
able to take material shape.

Pirandello accuses short-sighted science, which casts abnormal phenomena

into the mire of occultism, and he reanimates the “space of the marvel,”
which was the scene of madness in the Middle Ages. The contempt in
which this space is held today by a doctrine with just as magical a belief in
drugs and electroshock carries its own risks. Having declared that the music
heard by the young girl “is nothing, a slight psychosis or hysteria,” the
senator literally took a “path of no return.”
During the audiences he starts to give in 1907 in the short story “A
Character’s Tragedy,”61 Pirandello portrays himself as an author. These
audiences are demanding, because the characters “wish to be one kind of
person or another,” not what he wants them to be. When the characters
rebel, the author says, “being basically good-hearted, I’m sorry for them.
But is it ever possible to feel sorry for certain misfortunes unless you can
laugh at them at the same time?” He gives us some examples from his own
experience.
 Luigi Pirandello 61
There is the old man who had just returned from the United States, where
he was exiled in 1849, after the fall of the Roman Republic, for having set
a patriotic hymn to music: “I had him die just as fast as possible in a little
story titled ‘Old Music’.” In the same comic vein, Pirandello rejects a character
who finds himself unjustly mistreated by other authors. Yet, his luck is no
better with Pirandello, who mocks his special use of Time.
Dr Fileno, the creator of a “philosophy of distance,” begs Pirandello to
bring to life his “infallible prescription for consoling himself and all men for
every public or private calamity.” His method consists of “reading history
books from morning till night and looking at the present as history – that is, as
something already very remote in time.” This manipulation of the arrow of
time, which prompts many analysts to reject the present tense of traumatic
memory by attaching these reviviscences to a causalistic history, was ridiculed
by Bion when he returned from the Great War. He nicknamed his first analyst
FIP, since he advocated the same solution: “Feel it in the past.”
Like the psychoanalysis conducted by FIP, Dr Fileno’s prescription
consists of an optical illusion that produces a psychological view of history
and a historical view of the psyche, both relegated to the past:

In short, Dr Fileno had made a sort of telescope for himself out of that
method of his. He would open it, but now not with the intention of look-
ing toward the future, where he knew he would see nothing. He convinced
his mind that it should be contented to look through the larger lens […]
toward the smaller one, which was pointed at the present. And so […]
immediately the present became small and very distant.

This was to be the subject of his book The Philosophy of Distance.

The confusion between the repressed unconscious and the cut-out
unconscious brought about by the suppression of the symbolic leads to “a
psychoanalysis of distance” that points its telescope towards past causality,
when in fact the catastrophe in which the analyst has a role to play is
occurring in the present.

The in-between position of the transitional subject

When the actor abandons his personality to don the mask of Noh theatre,
he prepares to go on stage by crossing the bridge linking the here with the
beyond – an in-between space called ma or aida, shown by an ideogram
representing the sun through the opening of a door.62 His slow entrance,
punctuated by music, is that of a phantom wearing a white mask which
expresses indifference. Feelings like fear or dread are not hidden under the
mask, but produced by an effect of light on the mask in a play of
interferences between the stage and the audience.
Like in psychotic transference, something happens at the “crossroads of
dreams,”63 yume no chimata – the name of the little stage in Noh theatre –
62 Seminar 3: 1988–1989
which may be transmitted to an other – belonging to no one, unrelated to
the identity of the actor who brings it to life. In his comedy Man, Beast,
and Virtue,64 Pirandello reminds us that the actor was called upocritès in
Ancient Greece. He is “one who acts because it is his job.” The word means
“the one who gives an answer through dreams or oracles.” In the
transference, this function is attributed to the “transitional subject”
Benedetti speaks of, who emerges to give an answer when time has stopped
and all bearings have collapsed.
Japanese psychiatrist Kimura Bin calls the space where psychotherapy takes
place Hito to hito to no aida, the in-between man and ma (the gods). Anyone
prone to “mental illness,” he says – that is, divested of any individuality –
enters this space called ma or aida, provided by the theatrical performance
and the analytic session. In the Japanese language, personal pronouns
facilitate the grasp of this notion, since they indicate social relations, in
parenthood as well as in the context of a conversation. Kimura Bin also notes
that some words with a double meaning confer positive value to melancholia,
the fact that what is lost cannot be recovered – words like kamashi: love and
sadness; sabashi: beauty and solitude; and hashiki: beloved and archaic. These
words are also addressed to the dead who will never return.
In our work as analysts, when what we do is located in between the two
people present, we use a specific grammar. Since the subject’s syntax and its
object are unavailable, we have to deal with voices that speak from
everywhere, which King Midas believed to be the wind in the reeds, telling
his secret, that “he has donkey’s ears.” Could it be that Japanese
psychiatrists like Kimura Bin and Takeo Doi65 have better tools than we do
for identifying degrees of distance between people, and degrees of otherness
in social situations, especially when ghosts are afoot?
As I am about to close the curtain on this seminar, which started out by
transforming private life into a public space, I am no longer asking
Pirandello to carry all the weight. I venture to say that, like his theatre,
transference, when working with madness, gives access to a particular type
of logic. They both try to resolve the paradox of how to build a chain of
rationality when reason is irrelevant. How to bring the unprecedented out
of a crisis and find the angle from which madness becomes reason. For
madness is what exceeds rationality in order to bring this excess back to
a point of interference where transference finds support in the relevance of
some peculiarities that break the continuity of the sessions.
When he presented his “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual,” which allowed
him to leave Binswanger’s clinic where he was confined, Aby Warburg
spoke of the necessity of dealing with beings “saturated with energy” in
order to reach the symbolic dimension. We work with an almost-nothing
that takes on enormous energy in the setting of the sessions. We work on
problems we create by bringing them into the present. The only way for
psychic agony to be experienced in the transference, says Winnicott, is “in
relation to the analyst’s failures and mistakes.”66
 Luigi Pirandello 63
At last, we come to the question of the audience. What is the difference
between the audience we are part of when we go to see a play, and the
audience we might miss being in the theatre of madness, where speech finds
no reflection? The aim of mad speech is to create the fourth wall allowing
a performance to emerge, a representation of what is presented by Folly.
Until then, she hopes to create it by calling out to the whole world:
“Everyone blames me, so everyone must listen to me.” When voices come
from all sides, like the wind in the rose bushes spreading King Midas’
secret – that he has donkey’s ears – it’s enough for one spectator to change
places and, by chance, be able to link up a single element of what is being
shown, for the entire space to become a structure that allows reflection.
Still, you will object, it’s easier said than done, when your voice blends into
the rumble of voices speaking to the patient, when he or she stands in the
middle of a public place throwing things in all directions. I will answer your
objection by telling you the Japanese story of Satori, a murderous monster
coming from the four corners of the Earth. A lumberjack working in a forest
sees Satori coming and knows he can’t escape, since the monster can read his
thoughts and knows what he plans to do. But just then, the unforeseeable
happens. Believing his last hour had come, the lumberjack decides to continue
cutting down his tree. He raises his axe, its blade flies out and by chance hits
the monster, who could not have anticipated such a thing.
This is what happens in the psychoanalysis of madness, when the analyst
stays present. Unexpectedly, an improbable contact takes place with
traumatic zones, which the murderous agency cannot foresee. Everyone
carries a heavy past, and particularly analysts, or else why would they have
chosen this job? Our work is to recognise the relation between some detail
in our no-longer-private lives and the solitary speech for which madness has
been seeking an address for such a long time. This is the subject of Toni
Morrison’s novel Beloved, in which the madness of a runaway slave finally
restores her place in the community that had ostracised her.

Notes
1 Bion, W., A Memoir of the Future, Karnac Books, 1991, p. 84.
2 See infra, Seminar 8 on Wilfred Bion.
3 Wittgenstein, L., Tractus Logico-Philosophicus, Psychology Press and Routledge
Classic Editions, 2001; Philosophical Investigations (1945–1949), Wiley-Blackwell,
2010.
4 Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, op. cit., section 28.
5 Pirandello, L., The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Simborowski, N. (Trans.),
Hippocrene Books, 1990.
6 Pirandello, L., Six Characters in Search of an Author, Storer, E. (Trans.), University
of Adelaide Press, 1921.
7 Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, op. cit., section 197.
8 Ibid., section 21.
9 Ibid., sections 133, 119.
64 Seminar 3: 1988–1989
10 Barker, P., Regeneration Trilogy (based on W. Rivers’ clinical notes), Penguin
Books, 1998. See infra, Seminar 6 on Pat Barker.
11 Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, op. cit., section 41.
12 Ibid., section 40.
13 Lacan, J., Écrits, Tavistock/Routledge, 1977.
14 Ibid.
15 Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, op. cit., section 199.
16 Freud, S., Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’, S.E. 9; The Uncanny, S.E. 17; Moses and Monothe-
ism, S.E. 23; Project for a Scientific Psychology, S.E. 1, Hogarth Press.
17 Devos, R., Sens dessus dessous, Stock, 1976.
18 Warburg, A., “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual,” Journal of Warburg Institute 2
(1938–1939): 277–292.
19 Pirandello, L., “Right You Are! (If You Think So),” in Naked Masks: Five
Plays, E. P. Dutton & Co., 1952.
20 Erasmus, D., In Praise of Folly, Literary Licensing, 2013.
21 Ōe, K., Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, Grove Press, 1977.
22 Desnos, R., Un poète, Gallimard, 1980.
23 Breton, A., Nadja, Grove Press, 1994.
24 Beradt, C., The Third Reich of Dreams, Quadrangle Books, 1968.
25 Pirandello, L., One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, Hushion House, 1992.
26 Von Kleist, H., On a Theatre of Marionettes, Acorn Press, 1989.
27 Sterne, L., The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2009.
28 Pirandello, L., “A Character’s Tragedy,” in Eleven Short Stories, Applebaum,
S. (Trans.), Dover Publications, 1994.
29 Pirandello, L., “Colloquii coi personagii,” in Novelle per un anno, Vol. III, Mon-
dadori, 1990. Our translation.
30 See infra, Seminar 12 on François Rabelais and Yvette Guilbert.
31 Tweedy, R., The Political Self, Karnac Books, 2017.
32 Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, op. cit., section 288.
33 Pirandello, L., “At the Exit,” in Pirandello’s One-Act Plays, HarperCollins,
1970.
34 Van der Kolk, B., The Body Keeps the Score, Penguin Books, 2015.
35 Pirandello, L., The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, op. cit.
36 Ibid., Chapter 2.
37 Freud, S., Project for a Scientific Psychology, op. cit.
38 Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, op. cit., section 38.
39 De Hérédia, J. M., “The Conquerors,” in Sonnets of José-Maria De Heredia.
Done into English by Edward Robeson Taylor, William Doxey, 1897.
40 Pirandello, L., The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, op. cit., Book V, Chapter 3.
41 Pirandello, L., The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, op. cit.
42 Pirandello, L., The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, op. cit., Book VI, Chapter 4.
43 Duchamp, M., Duchamp du signe, Flammarion, 1976.
44 Plato, Theaetetus, Focus Philosophical Library, 2004.
45 Bion, D. W., Elements of Psychoanalysis, Karnac Books, 1963.
46 Hugo, V., Les Misérables, Signet Classics, 2010.
47 Pirandello, L., “The Train Whistled,” in Tales of Madness, Bussino, G. R. (Trans.),
Dante University of America Press, 2009.
48 Ibid., p. 98.
49 Descartes, R., Discourse on Method and Related Writings, Penguin Classics,
1999.
50 Baillet, A., “Olympica,” in La Vie de Monsieur Descartes, Books LLC, 2011.
51 Ibid.
 Luigi Pirandello 65
52 See infra, Seminar 8 on Wilfred Bion.
53 Lucretius, The Nature of Things, Penguin Classics, 2007.
54 Proust, M., Time Regained, Mayor, A. & Kilmartin, T. (Trans.), Modern
Library, 1993.
55 Warburg, A., “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual,” op. cit.
56 Pirandello, L., “The Man with the Flower in His Mouth,” in Pirandello’s One-Act
Plays, op. cit.
57 Ibid., pp. 227–228.
58 Plato, Theaetetus, Liberal Arts Press, 1955.
59 Freud, S., Beyond the Pleasure Principle, S.E. 18, Hogarth Press, 1955.
60 Pirandello, L., “Dal naso al cielo,” in Novelle per un anno, op. cit., pp. 162–163.
61 Pirandello, L., “A Character’s Tragedy,” in Eleven Short Stories, op. cit., p. 145.
62 Bin, K., Hito to hito to no aida, Kobudo, 1972.
63 Sieffert, R., Nô et Kyôgen, Presses orientales de France, 1979.
64 Bin, K., Hito to hito to no aida, op. cit.
65 Bin, K., L’entre, Vincent, C. (Trans.), Jérôme Million, 1985.
66 Winnicott, D. W., “Fear of Breakdown,” International Review of Psychoanalysis,
1 (1974): 103–106.
4 Seminar 4: 1989–1990
Toni Morrison (1931–2019)
Beloved1 in dialogue with Frieda
Fromm-Reichmann: psychoanalysis
and psychotherapy2

Storytellers are valuable allies

Freud’s text Delusions and Dreams in Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva starts with
a statement that could serve as a motto for this seminar: “Storytellers are
valuable allies, bundes genossen,” meaning travelling companions. The German
writer’s “A Pompeian Fancy” is a story of trauma and madness that ends with
the healing of the delusional hero thanks to the transference made possible by
his young neighbour Zoe.
We might wonder if the short story, published in 1902, did not prompt
Freud to go back to his “Neurotica,” his theory of trauma, which he published
with Breuer in 1895,3 and then announced to Fliess he was abandoning, in
a letter written in September 1897.4 Freud himself suggests this possibility
when he writes in 1907: “Everything that is repressed is unconscious, but we
cannot assert that everything unconscious is repressed.”5
This year’s seminar could be called “Delusions and Dreams in Toni
Morrison’s novel Beloved,” which is at once a story of slavery in the
Southern United States and the story of a therapy of madness. To introduce
the novel, I will give you an example taken from my practice.

A clinical story
At the psychiatric hospital, I speak with a woman whose age is impossible
to tell, afflicted with delusions of persecution. She is a recognised expert in
English literature. After she is discharged, I continue to see her at the clinic.
Suddenly, she disappears for eight months, and then returns:

– I couldn’t come any more when you started to talk foolishness.

– What foolishness?
– You told me that Beckett was alive.
– It’s true, I sometimes see him on the Boulevard du Montparnasse. Have
you seen any of his plays?
– No, but someone who says things the way he does can only be dead.
 Toni Morrison 67
For her, Becket is not a person someone can brag about meeting on the
boulevard, but an author who stands in the “space between two deaths,”
described by Lacan in his seminar “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis”6 as in
between the moment of death and its symbolic inscription on a grave by
a ritual. This intermediary space was familiar to her. Judging that I was not
up to the task, she disappeared again and came back two years later to
verify scientifically if I had made any progress. Indeed, I had read Toni
Morrison’s novel where this place is displayed, where the ghosts return,
bringing with them a particular way of knowing. Beloved is a ghost story as
well as a story of Folly – praised by Erasmus, who has her ask at the start:
“Who can set me out better than myself ?” and say to conclude: “’tis Folly,
and a woman, that has spoken.”7

Beloved
Folly has enigmas to solve. They manifest themselves in the sphere of
history, with unknowns and “whys” that prompt a delusional search, as
a life-or-death necessity, to look for a co-researcher. If one is not found, out
of desperation, she addresses the whole world. We are not able to
appreciate this rigorous logic. Only Folly can judge, like the folly of the
heroines of Beloved: Sethe, a fugitive slave, and her daughter Denver. They
live in a house cut off from others, and periodically shaken up by the ghost
of a baby that Sethe has named Beloved.
The plot takes place in 1873, after the Civil War, in a haunted house of
the outskirts of Cincinnati, Ohio. The character entrusted with the mission
of inscribing an impossible history is the ghost of the baby, who says “I.”
We are not dealing with an illusion. In fact, this situation is similar to
what happens in the psychoanalysis of madness and trauma, where ghosts
impose their presence just as forcefully, to say what they have to say, in an
exploded time through which the slow and gradual inscription of their
stories can be carried out.
At the end of Beloved, Sethe and her daughter Denver find their place in
the community once again. Yet recovery from “acute psychosis,” as
Binswanger called it, is often regarded with scepticism by psychoanalysts.

Pioneers in the psychoanalysis of madness and trauma

In regard to the treatment of psychosis, Lacan did not go beyond
a “preliminary question,”8 and did not venture to explore the sphere of
transference, on the pretext that “it would be premature to speak of
transference in psychosis, because it would be to go ‘beyond Freud’, and
there can be no question of Freud when post-Freud psychoanalysis has
gone back to an earlier stage.” He does not mention the psychoanalysis of
psychosis pioneered during World War I. For the Great War not only drove
Freud to go beyond the scope of the “Pleasure Principle,”9 but prompted
68 Seminar 4: 1989–1990
his disciples, drafted in military hospitals, to explore the transference
specific to madness and trauma. On the brink of the next war, when his
books were being burned in Berlin, Freud wrote that what was at stake in
psychoanalysis was the subject of “historical truth.”10 I will now list some
of the names we will be referring to in this seminar.
Thomas Salmon,11 psychiatrist at Ellis Island and author of the four
principles of “forward psychiatry.”
Harry Stack Sullivan,12 grandson of Irish refugees, first a physician in
Chicago, where the immigrants from Ellis Island arrived, and later liaison
officer for the St. Elizabeths military hospital in Washington, who invented
psychoanalysis with young patients labelled schizophrenic at Sheppard Pratt
Hospital in Baltimore.
William Rivers,13 neurologist, anthropologist and psychoanalyst at
Craiglockhart, near Edinburgh, who treated officers returning from the
trenches. John Rickman, Bion’s second analyst, was his disciple.
Frieda Fromm-Reichmann,14 neurologist at the same period in a military
hospital in Königsberg – where Hanna Arendt grew up – worked with
soldiers who had suffered brain injuries. When she fled the Nazi regime and
settled in the United States, she introduced the psychoanalysis of psychosis
at Chestnut Lodge, in Maryland. I shall have her converse with Beloved. In
this seminar, both will be our valuable allies in the political fight waged by
Folly against perversion.
Speaking of these explorers, let us remember that Proust, their
contemporary, wrote In Search of Lost Time at the end of his life, closeted
in his cork-lined bedroom to cut himself off from the outside world and
“regain time,”15 at an end-of-the-world moment in history, when his era
was sinking into war.
I could also mention Daniel Paul Schreber,16 the judge whose madness
emerged at the intersection of his particular history, shaped by the black
education – Alice Miller’s expression – he received from his father, and by
the Franco-Prussian War in which German principalities were abolished, to
be replaced by a unified German state. Schreber is in direct contact with
this upheaval in his position as magistrate. In Austria, Joseph Roth, author
of The Radetzky March,17 witnesses the end of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, described by Robert Musil in his novel The Man Without
Qualities.18 On the American continent, Sioux medicine man Black Elk
entrusts poet John Neihardt with the book Black Elk Speaks,19 which
testifies to the disaster suffered by the Lakota people during the American
Indian Wars waged at the end of the nineteenth century.
Folly is rigorous and always proceeds from an absence of text, which
prevents transmission. Here, Freud’s sentence quoted from the Gradiva comes
to mind: “Everything that is repressed is unconscious, but we cannot assert
that everything unconscious is repressed.” We call a cut-out unconscious that
which is not repressed and tends towards inscription. The new text to be
written has a literary character, since mere information is not enough. The
 Toni Morrison 69
subject of the story has to be born, and be able to bleed, laugh, cry and be
affected by connecting with another endowed with the “porosity” Socrates
spoke of in The Symposium, based on his experiences in battle during the
Peloponnesian War. Asked to give his definition of Eros, he quoted a woman,
Diotima – “the stranger” – a medicine woman who postponed the outbreak of
the plague in Athens. According to her, Eros is the child of Poros, the
passage – “porosity” – and of Penia – “penury” or “poverty.”20
This kinship links transference to catastrophic situations such as wars,
situations familiar to Toni Morrison and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann.

Circumstances in which it is normal to go mad

“The man who does not lose his mind over certain things has no mind to
lose,” Nietzsche wrote; Frieda Fromm-Reichmann quotes him in her book
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.21
The ghost of the baby who haunts 124 Bluestone Road, where Sethe, the
runaway slave, and her daughter Denver are living in seclusion, doesn’t
prevent life from following its course. When it first came, the enraged ghost
cast “a powerful spell.” “No more powerful than the way I loved her [when
I cut her throat],” Sethe tells Denver.
This event took place after a feast celebrating Sethe’s family’s freedom with
her neighbours, once she arrived at 124 Bluestone Road. Suddenly, Sethe saw
three men approaching on horseback; one of them was Schoolteacher, the
vicious new owner of the plantation following the death of the previous owner
who considered his slaves men. Understanding in a flash that Schoolteacher
was coming to retrieve his property, Sethe cuts the throat of her 2-year-old
daughter to save her from slavery. Since then, the ghost of the girl Sethe named
Beloved on her tombstone has taken possession of the house, which she turns
upside down, while her mother and her sister give her every sweet thing of
which she was deprived. She doesn’t know that she is dead, and therefore
cannot know her “birth certificate as a ghost.”22
The course of life at 124 Bluestone Road is perturbed by the arrival of
Paul D, “the last of the plantation men” – a plantation called “Sweet
Home.” He reappears eighteen years after Sethe escaped, pregnant with
Denver, who was born during her mother’s flight and was only a baby when
she narrowly escaped being slaughtered. By driving the ghost away, Paul
D sows discord in the house; his arrival “[left] Denver’s world flat,” but for
Sethe “[e]motions sped to the surface in his company.” For the first time,
she asks herself if it might be “all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and
count on something?”
How real is the phantom that haunts the house? Boris Vian answers this
question in The Foam of the Daze, when he introduces his story: “The story
is entirely true, because I imagined it from one end to the other.”23 The
only thing we can say is that “it” speaks. Not the “it” of the repressed
unconscious, but that of a real presence trying to say something, to which
70 Seminar 4: 1989–1990
all cultures testify. Indeed, I who don’t believe in ghosts encounter them
every day in my office, where they gather to have their say about the family
lines of those who come to see me.
If I adopt a critical position or an anthropological view of beliefs in the
Deep South of the nineteenth century, if I leave patients to deal with their
ghosts alone while I observe how the situation unfolds, nothing will happen,
since ghosts claim their right to exist and to speak. They don’t care whether
we believe in them or not. What they want is to see to it that the true
version of falsified stories is inscribed at last.
In her article “Remarks on the Philosophy of Mental Disorder,” Frieda
Fromm-Reichmann deplores the fact that:

most psychiatrists have more respect for the society which pays them their
services than for the patients who need their help. […] Mentally disturbed
persons […] are refreshingly intolerant of all kinds of cultural comprom-
ises; hence they inevitably hold the mirror of the hypocritical aspects of the
culture in front of society. […] Considering relationships with mental
patients from this viewpoint, it is no overstatement to say that the mentally
sick, who allegedly have lost their minds in their interpersonal struggles,
may be useful to the mentally healthy in really finding their minds, which
are all too frequently lost, as it were, in the distortions, the disassociations,
the hypocritical adaptations, and all the painful hide-and-seeks which
modern culture forces upon the mind of man.

At the end of Beloved, Sethe and her daughter escape the deadly cat-and-
mouse game, through a catharsis orchestrated by the novelist, whose
ancestors were part of the history she brings to life. Her novel also
resonates with the two principles of the psychoanalysis of psychosis:
Sullivan’s24 “one-genus postulate: we are much more simply human than
otherwise; our differences are of degree and not of kind,” and Frieda
Fromm-Reichmann’s assertion that “when there is no transference,
everything is transference.” Hence the value of having her converse with
Toni Morrison’s novel.

Who is Frieda Fromm-Reichmann?

A disciple of neurologist Kurt Goldstein, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann had
been in charge of a ward for brain-injured soldiers at the Königsberg
military hospital in Germany25 during World War I. At a 1942 conference
held in Baltimore, she remarked:

War psychotherapy is of rather recent origin. Its use […] was first initi-
ated during World War I. […] additional experience [came] with the
Spanish Civil War and the present world war. […] What can we learn
from our experience in peacetime psychiatry?26
 Toni Morrison 71
She asserted that psychiatric patients are ready to fight, in the name of
freedom and democracy, against totalitarian submission in the domestic and
political spheres.
Her discovery of psychoanalysis in the early 1930s was decisive:

Before I was acquainted with Freud’s teachings, I realised, with dis-

tress, that something went on in the patient’s relations with me, and
in my relations with them, which interfered with the psychothera-
peutic process. Yet I could not put my finger on it, or investigate it.
What a relief it was to become acquainted with the tools furnished
by Freud for investigation into the awareness of the doctor–patient
relationship.27

But she was not in complete agreement with Freud, especially concerning
the role of historical events:

Freud speaks of an objective “reality” of the outside world in contradic-

tion to the private and frequently unreal inner world of the neurotic.
While he clearly points out how greatly the person’s immediate sur-
roundings are determined by changing environmental influences, he neg-
lects to see that the same holds true for the world at large.

She gives the following example:

The “reality” to which, for instance, a Vienna girl of the upper middle
classes had to adjust in the period before World War I is a long way
from the “reality” to which an American salesgirl has to adapt herself
in this year of 1941.28

Let us note in passing that she does not mention the sexual abuses suffered
by young Viennese girls in their protected environment, just as Freud chose
to ignore the subject when he set aside his “Neurotica,” to avoid
“incriminating the father, not excluding my own.” Yet eight months earlier
he had written to Fliess that “my own father was one of those perverts, and
is responsible for the hysteria of my brother and several […] younger
sisters.”29
Frieda herself was raped as a young girl, in Königsberg, by a man on the
street. Her mother considered that such a thing happening to a young
Jewish girl from a good family, and before marriage, was an abomination;
she simply washed and mended her daughter’s underwear and ordered her
to put it on. Nothing had ever been said about the traumatic event again,
and it remained a secret from then on.30
Fromm-Reichmann’s second disagreement with Freud, just like Ferenczi’s,
concerned the analyst’s neutrality:
72 Seminar 4: 1989–1990
Freud taught us that, ideally, the analyst, as nearly as it is possible,
must be a blank to the patient. […] [The analyst’s] aloofness [could]
also become a means of protection against his patient’s legitimate reac-
tions to him […] whether resentment if he blundered or appreciation
when he struck the right chord […]. Of course, the analyst will [not]
talk about his personal life […]. He will […] not use the patient to serve
his own needs. But he should make use of his emotional counter reac-
tions for the purposes of the treatment.

Frieda Fromm-Reichmann protests against stereotyped interpretations and

jargon: “Freud warned us to bear in mind that analysis is a procedure
designed to cure the patient, not to show him how clever his analyst’s
interpretations are.” For instance, sexual feelings towards the analyst do not
always originate in the Oedipus complex: “They may be an expression of
insecurity.” When Beloved asks Paul D to have sex with her, it is to sweep
him up and drive him away from her mother. Indeed, he leaves the house to
live outside like a tramp.
According to Frieda:

Another advance in analysis comes from the change in the choice of

patients. During the last fifteen years [since the beginning of World War
I] attempts have been made to adjust the analytic method to the needs
of psychotic patients.

In 1924, tired of wasting energy on people who did not interest her, she
decided to devote herself to those who really needed psychoanalysis. She
made this decision after the death of her father. Like her mother, he had
become deaf and was threatened with losing his job; he fell into an elevator
pit, an accident she took to be disguised suicide.
In 1926, Frieda married Erich Fromm, who had been in analysis with
her, and who soon left her for Karen Horney. She remained alone and had
no children. Encouraged by the revival of the Jewish culture in the Weimar
Republic, she opened a psychoanalytic clinic in Heidelberg, near her friend
Groddeck’s sanatorium in Baden-Baden. She often exchanged ideas with
Groddeck, as well as with members of the Frankfurt School.
When Hitler came to power, and Jewish doctors, teachers and lawyers
were forbidden to practise, kidnapped and shot, she realised that a male
nurse had her under surveillance. After telling her patients that she would
not return, she left Heidelberg for good in 1933, on the pretext of
a weekend in Strasburg. After trying to go to Palestine, she immigrated to
the United States, from where Erich Fromm, who was already there, sent
her the necessary papers. Once in the United States, she was offered
a summer job in Dexter Bullard’s Chestnut Lodge clinic near Washington.
Soon, impressed with her experience, Dexter Bullard decided to dedicate his
institution to the psychoanalysis of psychoses under her direction, and built
 Toni Morrison 73
a cottage for her on its grounds, where she lived until her death in 1957. At
Chestnut Lodge, she developed the new paradigm for intensive
psychotherapy of psychosis31 with Harry Stack Sullivan, who gave seminars
at Chestnut Lodge on a regular basis. It was there that the future analysts
of psychosis, Harold Searles, Otto Will, Martin Cooperman, Gaetano
Benedetti and many others, received their training.
During a 1942 conference organised under the auspices of the William
Alanson White Institute, which she contributed to create with Sullivan,
Fromm-Reichmann analysed an article by British psychiatrist George
Brown, which presented the positive results obtained by psychoanalytic
psychotherapy for civilian victims of air raids in London during the Blitz.
This psychotherapy was probably influenced by William Rivers’ experience
during World War I, as well as by Thomas Salmon’s four principles32
developed during his military mission in England in 1917, before the United
States entered the war.
Frieda Fromm-Reichmann’s work was based on the principle that
everything patients experience exists in a cancelled place, which is the
opposite of nowhere, and remains invisible until they find elements to which
they can bind, on the side of the analyst. Her other principle, as we already
mentioned, concerns the role of historical events. When men, women and
children are treated like things, their emotional and sensory experience
cannot fade away. Traumatic memory persists, literally “outside” the
subject. Hence, the necessity for “proximity” with the therapist – one of
Salmon’s principles – who becomes “a passionate witness,” as Dori Laub33
says, of “events without a witness,” bringing them back from dissociation –
a dissociation maintained today by “therapies” such as shock treatments
that prevent the subjective appropriation of the events in question.

Beloved: the subjective appropriation of a mass crime

The therapist must fill in the missing details, with the feelings awakened in
him, so as to bring the erased scene into existence, between the patient and
himself. Likewise, Toni Morrison’s novel unfolds the subjective
appropriation of particulars that are usually lost in general discourses.
These specific elements never disappear, since they are not filtered through
the symbolic chain; they come back into the present through sensorial
images saturated with energy.
One day Denver sees her mother kneeling in prayer, embraced by a white
dress. This tender embrace reminds her of the details of her birth, of the
miraculous encounter of two women helping each other so that she might
come into the world. The midwife Amy is a young white girl on her way to
Boston. The account of Sethe’s exhaustion, labour and delivery on the
banks of the Ohio River, before she reaches freedom on the other side, ends
with Amy telling her, while she rubs her wounded feet: “It’s gonna hurt
now. Anything dead coming back to life hurts.”
74 Seminar 4: 1989–1990
After her vision, Denver thinks: “Maybe the white dress was in pain. If
so, it could mean the baby ghost had plans.” Entering the room, she tells
her mother what she saw and asks what she was praying for. Sethe answers:
“I don’t pray anymore. I just talk.”
This is where Toni Morrison provides us with a formidable analysis of
the workings of madness and trauma:

– “I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things
go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my memory. […]
But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone,
but the place – the picture of it – stays […]. What I remember is a picture
floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think of
it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there.
Right in the place where it happened.”
– “Can other people see it?” asked Denver.
– “Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you will be walking down the road and
you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s
you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into
a memory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here,
that place is real. […] It’s going to always be there waiting for you. That’s
how come I had to get all my children out. No matter what.”
– “If it’s still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies.”
Sethe looked right in Denver’s face.
– “Nothing ever does,” she said.

Then she told her about the arrival, after the death of Mr Garner, of the
new master Schoolteacher, whose cruelty replaced the kindness of the
previous couple. At the end of their conversation, both of them agree that
“the ghost baby could have plans.”

Harry Stack Sullivan’s interpersonal approach

In 1949, the year when Sullivan died in Paris, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann
insisted on his interpersonal approach. Personality can only be understood
in terms of relationships, real or imagined, through transference that places
the catastrophe at its centre and brings back out-of-reach emotional
experiences, in a collaboration between equals: “Due to the dangers they
faced early in life,” says Sullivan:

psychotic patients are driven into a state of continuous vigilance, so

that they become highly efficient eavesdroppers […] who may know or
sense character traits or emotional problems in their doctor […] of
which he himself is unaware, and which he is asked to validate.
In his view, “patients are participant-observers” in the collaborative
endeavour. This is what allows many schizophrenics and people with other
 Toni Morrison 75
schizoid disorders to recover. The therapist must know that adherence to
conventionalities should never be used as a measuring rod for mental
health.34

Remaining outside conventionalities includes, among other things, the

freedom to ask oneself how ghosts come into being. For, not knowing that
they are dead, they must wander, waiting for a space between two beings
from which they could be called. This in-between space is created at the end
of Beloved thanks to the spontaneous reaction of a neighbour named Ella.
She is the one who opens the space of transference.
The ghost has become increasingly tyrannical. Sethe no longer has the
strength to go and cook at the restaurant where she works, and so can no
longer bring food from there. Starving, Denver decides to do something: “she
had stepped out the door, asked for the help she needed and wanted work.”
Ella had been repeatedly raped in puberty by a father and son who
owned another plantation. When she heard that:

124 was occupied by something-or-other beating up Sethe, it infuriated

her. […] There was also something very personal in her fury. […] Ella
didn’t like the idea of past errors taking possession of the present.
Sethe’s crime was staggering and her pride outstripped even that; but
she could not countenance the possibility of sin moving on in the
house, unleashed and sassy.

For her, “the future was sunset” and the past was something to leave
behind. “And if it didn’t stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out.”
Denver’s decision to leave the house and ask for help for the first time
touches Ella: it resonates with the deep wounds of her own adolescence, and
prompts her to gather the other women in the neighbourhood, to bring Sethe’s
house out of isolation. Enough is enough! “As long as the ghost showed out
from its ghostly place – shaking stuff, crying, smashing and such – Ella
respected it. But if it took flesh and came in her world, well […] this was an
invasion.”
The ghost has no name. The seven letters in “Beloved,” etched on the
tombstone, do not make up its first name, which is absent from the novel.
The string of letters is not inscribed in a chain of signifiers. “Ten minutes
for seven letters,” spelled out for the engraver, enough:

to answer one more preacher, one more abolitionist and a town full of
disgust. […] she had forgotten […] the soul of her baby girl. Who
would have thought that a little old baby could harbour so much rage?
[…] Not only did she have to live out her years in a house palsied by
the baby’s fury at having its throat cut, but those ten minutes she spent
[…] her knees wide open as the grave, were longer than life, more alive,
more pulsating than the baby blood that soaked her fingers like oil.
76 Seminar 4: 1989–1990
The origin of the name Beloved emerges when the “tool with the name is
broken.” It comes from a passage in the Bible, quoted as an epigraph in the
novel: “I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her
beloved, which was not loved.”
This contradiction is the space in which the tragedy seeking catharsis is
played out, creating terror and inspiring pity for a mother who kills her
child in the name of liberty. Caught in the dilemma “live free or die,” she
cannot pronounce her baby’s name. The seven letters of “Beloved” carved
on the grave have a negative meaning: “the one not loved.”
In a sense, this is not an inscription. Indeed, Sethe shows not the slightest
annoyance when the ghost turns the house upside down. When a tragic
time-space opens, with edges that will not come together, sculptors may
etch stones tirelessly, writers may fill endless pages, nothing is inscribed,
though everything tends towards inscription.
Frieda Fromm-Reichmann warns that if therapists cling to stereotyped
interpretations, encouraging patients to write without involving themselves,
they will miss “meeting them on an equal footing, and not in the spirit of any
pre-established authority.” And she goes on to say that this encounter
requires – in the words of a young military psychiatrist working with soldiers
during the war – “that the doctor possess tact to a superlative degree.”
When, at the end of the novel, the two edges – impossible to join – of
freedom and maternal love come together, the book becomes the monument
on which a plural memory is inscribed. Toni Morrison needed 400 pages to
arrive at the point where Sethe is reintegrated into the community at the
end of a story that unfolds over fifteen years.
No psychotic structure can tell such a story. In this space between two
deaths where nothing makes sense and everything makes sense, the analyst’s
puns are futile syllables thrown at the patients. On the other hand, when
history finds a Toni Morrison, a Kenzaburō Ōe or a Pirandello, the works
they create are the crucible where ghosts emerging from the disasters of
History may carry out their plans.

The plans of a ghost

One of the expressions of madness in Beloved takes the form of a house
that cries like a person, which sighs and screams, a colourless house in
which two orange patches in a quilt “looked wild – like life in the raw.”
The second form is the white dress with its arm around Sethe, which makes
Denver say: “Maybe the white dress was in pain.” The mother’s relation to
suffering is disconnected. Things suffer on her behalf. The plan of the ghost
is to raise the subject of this pain. For the role of ghosts is not only to
trouble us, but to make that trouble stop. The fate of a ghost, we are told
at the end of the story, is to be forgotten.
In every culture, ghosts return from the beyond, as if their one-way
journey was from there to here. But this viewpoint is too simplistic.
 Toni Morrison 77
Although we don’t always see them, they walk alongside us towards the
future. A ghost can come from a future that has not taken place. Sethe is
not surprised by the presence of the ghost actively interacting with them as
a young girl. For her, the image of the crime is wavering; it belongs to
another temporality. She is “wrapped in a timeless present” without any
tomorrow.
It is possible to make contact through things, or clustered words that are
not symbols. They exist rather than not existing; they are something rather
than nothing. At the start of the novel, the reader is bombarded with
a myriad of sensations, which Sethe eliminates one after the other:

All her effort was directed not on avoiding pain but on getting through
it as quickly as possible. […] Unfortunately her brain was devious […]
and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before
her eyes […] in shameless beauty. Boys hanging from the most beautiful
sycamores in the world […]. It shamed her – remembering the wonder-
ful soughing trees rather than the boys.

This memory belonging to no one, bringing back the disasters of History, is

not a collective memory, nor a storehouse of signifiers, but an active place
in motion, a poem that looks back at you. When you are nothing, a certain
word thinks of you, a certain rhythm stirs you, a nursery rhyme, a circle
dance, a song. Psychosis and trauma are to be explored by moving
backwards, in search of another who has run away, as Freud did, in
September 1897, the day he revealed to Fliess “the great secret: I no longer
believe in my Neurotica,”35 his psychoanalysis of trauma.

Frieda Fromm-Reichmann’s debt to Freud

Frieda Fromm-Reichmann did not hold this against him. On the contrary,
she thanks him for having changed his mind, and for anticipating
“modifications and changes in [his] technique” so that it would become
applicable to the psychoses, in which mental and emotional content is
“barred from awareness,” rather than repressed.36
Her controversial article attacks his disciples’ indiscriminate adoration:
“Marx countered [this] with his famous statement: ‘I am not a Marxist’.”
Let us remember that Freud also said in spirit, time and again: “I am not
a Freudist.” Far from not daring, like Lacan, “to go beyond Freud,” she
recognises him to be a pioneer of the psychodynamic psychotherapy of
psychoses, which remained unknown in France for many years, while in the
United States it was refused the name of “psychoanalysis.” She claims that
name for her approach, as it is founded on the principles below.
First, exclude all those who attempt to be more Freudian than Freud by
generalising the sexual causality of trauma. Second, abandon the structural
approach in favour of a dynamic perspective. Freud’s formula “Wo Es war,
78 Seminar 4: 1989–1990
soll Ich werden” – “Where ‘Id’ was, ‘I’, the subject, must become” – induces
the future, in the sense of an induced current. Where the id imposes the
past on the present, – since an affirmation, Bejahung, of what took place
has been denied – there, in the actual context of the sessions, what has been
barred entry to any relationship must be transferred to the analytic
interaction. Finally, she objects to the couch and to the analyst’s neutrality,
which reinforce the absence of otherness, when we know that cut-out
elements are only accessible through interferences.
This barred content is embedded in a permanent anxiety, revealed not so
much by the patient’s unintelligible discourse as by his total helplessness,
comparable to that of the soldiers with brain injuries in the Königsberg
military hospital during World War I. Recalling her experience there, she
refers to the words used by her teacher Kurt Goldstein to describe this
“abject feeling” he calls “nothingness,” when the soldiers were faced with
a task which they […] could not accomplish for reasons unknown to them.
Goldstein calls this deep anxiety a “catastrophic reaction,” which makes
them say: “I am an imbecile, my brain doesn’t work anymore, I’m done
for.” From that point on, anxiety is not so much a psychological reaction as
the symptom of a threat to the subject’s existence. Hence the paradox that
defines catatonia as the impossibility of transference, when in fact
“everything is transference.”
In the presence of a threat to existence, the only thing that remains is the
relation to others, and this is what is frightening, since others are not
available – like in a play when insensitive monsters come on stage – except
that here theatre is daily reality. Frieda does not mince words in her
criticism of psychoanalysts who, instead of climbing on the stage, are
content to comment on the situation, deploring their patients’ fragility. The
patient’s purported fragility, she says, is as solid as that of the Glass
Graduate in Cervantes’ short story.37
In her article “Transference Problems in Schizophrenics,”38 Frieda
Fromm-Reichmann contradicts another psychoanalytic dogma which holds
that schizophrenic patients are too narcissistic to develop an interpersonal
relationship with their therapist. Therefore, they are unsuited for
transference and psychoanalytic treatment. Yet the new technique invented
during World War I by Freud’s disciples, such as Ferenczi, Rivers, Karl
Menninger in his clinic, Sullivan, herself and many others, led to the
conclusion that the problem was not the patient’s inability to form
a personal relation, but his very intense transference reactions that re-enact
severely traumatic experiences.
Like the pearl in an oyster, transference often crystallises around an
impurity, a blunder made by the analyst, foreseeable in its unpredictability,
given that “our access to the schizophrenic’s means of expression is blocked
by […] our own adjustment to a world [he] has relinquished.” In reality,
what is seen as a symptom denotes particular knowledge of a landscape of
destruction. It is an end of the world that mixes together “yes” and “no,”
 Toni Morrison 79
“I” and “others,” “here” and “elsewhere,” “yesterday” and “today.” The
symptoms attempt to inscribe this indescribable state, always imminent,
prophesised by Cassandras and enacted in the sessions by the analyst’s slip-
ups:

If the schizophrenic’s reactions are stormier and seemingly more unpre-

dictable than those of the psychoneurotic, I believe it is due to the inev-
itable errors in the analyst’s approach to the schizophrenic, of which he
himself may be unaware, rather than to the unreliability of the patient’s
emotional response.

And she goes on to say: “If the analyst is not able to accept the possibility
of misunderstanding the reactions of his schizophrenic patient and, in turn,
of being misunderstood by him, it may shake his security with the patient.”
A little further, she adds:

If the analyst deals unadroitly with the transference reactions of

a [patient], it is bad enough, though as rule not irreparable. […] To
summarise: […] successful psychotherapy with schizophrenics depends
upon whether the analyst understands the significance of these transfer-
ence phenomena and meets them appropriately.39

She answers critics by saying:

Other analysts may feel that treatment as we have outlined it is not psy-
choanalysis. The patient is not instructed to lie on a couch, he is not
asked to give free associations (although frequently he does), and his
productions are seldom interpreted other than by understanding
acceptance.

Then she turns to Freud to support her argument:

Freud says that every science and therapy that accepts his teachings
about the unconscious, about transference and resistance, and about
infantile sexuality may be called psychoanalysis. According to this def-
inition, we believe we are practicing psychoanalysis with our schizo-
phrenic patients.

Le parti pris des choses

This title, translated into English as The Voice of Things, was given by the
French poet Francis Ponge to a collection of 32 prose poems published in
1942.When words fail, things begin to speak.
One of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann’s catatonic patients would repeatedly
stroke his blanket with a tender expression that would light his rigid face:
80 Seminar 4: 1989–1990
When he felt that I had noticed these mechanical movements, his
expression would simultaneously become withdrawn, if not actually hos-
tile. After a while I discovered that he strokes the blanket as disguised
evidence of his tenderness until he was sure of being understood.

After giving other examples, she concludes: “The stereotyped actions of

schizophrenics serve to screen the appropriate emotional reactions which
are at their bottom.”40
The emotional significance of gestures that seem ridiculous can only be
understood in an interpersonal context, as enacting the repeated rebuffs
that forced the patient to hide behind “a screen,” to remain invisible. When
communication is re-established, he can again express himself clearly. This
screen will appear in the novel.
In Beloved, we also encounter evidence of a screen when the ghost asks
her sister to tell the story of how she was born. “Tell me how Sethe
made you in the boat.” Denver now revealed the details to the alert and
hungry face, which took in every word. Up to that point, she appeared
psychotic to the reader, but in the telling she gradually becomes the
subject of her own birth. In that narrative, the white girl Amy, whom she
calls the midwife, is suddenly there to help Sethe, who can’t walk any
longer, deliver her baby.
We know how Sethe recounted these events when Denver questioned her
after seeing the white dress with its arm around her. We’ve heard about the
bank of the Ohio River, facing the land where freedom starts, about the boat
in which Sethe lay exhausted, her feet bloody, and about Amy, the white girl
in rags who suddenly appeared, with “arms like cane stalks,” which later, “as
it turned out, were as strong as iron.” We know that the runaway girl lost her
mother soon after her birth, and that she is on her way to Boston, her
mother’s home town, intent on finding carmine velvet in a shop called
Wilson, where her mother used to work.
When Denver told the story to Beloved, she “began to see what she was
saying” and not just hear it. She saw the 19-year-old slave girl, a year older
than herself. She was feeling, through Beloved, in minute details what her
mother must have felt. Her monologue became a duet, allowing them “to
create what really happened.” Denver now feels Amy’s “tender-hearted
mouth,” as the girl looked after Sethe’s feet, treated her whipped back with
spiderwebs, and sang her a song while she delivered her baby.
When chance brought her this vagrant girl, Sethe briefly saw the future
open for her. When their work together was done, just before continuing on
her way, Amy tells Sethe her name: “You better tell her. You hear? Say
Miss Amy Denver of Boston.” This reveals the origin of Denver’s name.
Moreover, in the retelling, Denver becomes aware of the hidden meaning
behind “the screen” of velvet.
In the story Sethe told her daughter, the runaway girl is identified with
velvet: its colour, its feel, its texture, which she tirelessly describes to the
 Toni Morrison 81
exhausted slave. Amy got hold of velvet and used it to soften the ravaged
landscape, on the other bank of the river, of the history of slavery. Had it
not been for velvet, she might have gone past Sethe without seeing her.
Velvet takes the place of what Folly can transfer to another, as a promise
for the future. With Amy’s arrival, Sethe receives strange things that have
no meaning in her usual language, but are the language of a new world
without slavery: “What’s it like, velvet?” Sethe asks. “Well […] velvet is like
the world was just born. Clean and new and so smooth,” Amy answers.
About to continue on her way, she changes her mind. Still speaking of
velvet and Boston, she helps Sethe walk to a cabin and makes her feel that
“maybe she wasn’t, after all, just a crawling graveyard for a six-month
baby’s last hours.”
Velvet is the screen through which Sethe receives the message of life
beyond death and slavery, which is the fabric of the novel. Velvet is an
object allowing love – Eros, son of Poros, the passage, and Penia,
poverty – to bring Denver into the world. A strange soft thing like Amy’s
velvet speaks to other awful things like Sethe’s ravaged feet and the tree-
shaped scars on her back, which she can’t see, for life to be set in motion
again.
At Chestnut Lodge – when people still smoked in psychiatric hospitals –
one of Frieda’s patients lost his right to have matches because he was in the
habit of setting fires. To show that she trusted him, Frieda gave him her
matches and stayed with him. He took a cigarette from a red package,
which he “put […] close to the red trimming of his pyjamas and said:
‘Look how it matches, don’t you like that?’” And he added that he felt like
setting a fire that day, but that “it had nothing to do with them both, for
they [other people on the ward] don’t understand what it means.”
This is how words act like things. The word “match,” a singular noun
until then, has entered into the language-game of an agreement, “to
match,” and showed that the part of himself that had set fires everywhere
until then becomes an in-between which “matches,” thanks to a new
convention. Similarly, velvet turns into a brand-new word for “two lawless
[women] […] wrapping a ten-minute-old baby in the rags they wore.”
Sometimes, though, word-things regain their power instead of entering
a language-game. At the end of the novel, a choir is formed to bring Sethe
and Denver out of their reclusion. But the path to healing is blocked by the
return of the scene of murder.

The choir
In Greek tragedies, people who think of themselves as individuals become
a plural entity. The choir, with its singing and dancing, draws everyone –
people like you and me – into a dynamic where there is no longer an “I”
and a “we,” but only a rhythm going back farther than words.
82 Seminar 4: 1989–1990
At the very end of Beloved, the choir of freed slaves gathers around the
haunted house where Sethe is starving in order to feed her ghost. For the
first time, Denver has gone out to look for help and brings 124 Bluestone
Road into existence for those who pretended it did not exist. The choir is
the opposite of the ghost, which is like a hole in the universe that people
ignored, until it entered this world and forced them to take it into
consideration.
When Denver tells the neighbours what is happening in the house, the
women divide into three groups: those who believe the worst, those who
don’t believe her at all, and those who think. From then on, the women
who form the choir are no longer themselves. Just like the analyst when,
losing his bearings after a blunder, he is transformed into a choir: he must
think or give up.
Thirty women set out and come together in front of number 124, as if
keeping an appointment. The dynamic driving the choir towards the
haunted house has a religious dimension. The women mumble prayers, and
fall to their knees as if for an exorcism. The abolition of slavery is not
a self-evident matter; hundreds of years cannot simply be erased.
What happens when the choir approaches number 124? The first thing it
sees is itself. The women remember the celebration, twenty years earlier, just
before Sethe killed her baby. It was a wild party, to celebrate her daring
escape. Ubris – Greek for “excess” – usually ends in tragedy, for the gods
punish humans who try to surpass them.
Seeing this mother reduced to a shrunken shell by the ghost which
tyrannises both of them after having made them love it madly, the black
women tell themselves that they have been racist. They are moving towards
the house driven by an unconscious force, in a joint gesture, a common
rhythm and a voice that has lost contact with the words it utters.
This choir, as I already said, could also be the analyst when he loses his
head and becomes the screen on which unclaimed experiences, as Cathy
Caruth calls them,41 are recorded, waiting for an answer. The expected
messages are unrelated to the understanding of what happened, or to the
reconstitution of a past drama. They are more like trifles without value, like
those sifted through by archeologists, except that in this instance they
belong to the present.
In the present, Sethe is breaking a lump of ice into chunks when she sees
not only the choir of women, but also a white man in a horse-drawn cart,
holding a whip, a wide-brimmed hat hiding his face. Everyone knows him.
He is the owner of the house at 124, an abolitionist who saved Sethe from
being hanged 20 years ago. But she feels her eyes burning, she hears, as she
did then, the wings of hummingbirds that stick their beaks into her head,
and she rushes at him to strike him with an ice pick. Denver and the other
women take hold of her and drag her back. The traumatic revival brought
together the same people, in the same place, and voiced Sethe’s mute cry:
“No, no. Nonono!”
 Toni Morrison 83
But the choir acted like a screen on her path, when she was ready to
destroy everything. It became the social link, illustrating precisely what
Sullivan calls “interpersonal relatedness.” But to do so, one must be willing
to lose one’s identity, that is, go through an interval of temporary madness.
The women had become nameless and did not even form a group. This
allowed Sethe and Denver to inscribe their story in History at last, thanks
to support from the plural mouths and hands of those who saw them, and
not only heard them.
By extending the psychoanalytic approach to traumas produced by the
catastrophes of history, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann acknowledges her debt
to Freud once again:

Through our experiences with psychotic patients, we have been com-

pelled to discover zones that escape sexual repression. But we must not
forget that it was only when the taboo concerning sexuality was lifted
that Freud’s teachings made this discovery possible.42

The paradoxes of dissociation

In 1948, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann referred once again to Freud’s
abandonment of his “Neurotica,” confirmed by his 1925 article “On Narcissism:
An Introduction”:43

The reluctance to apply psychoanalytic knowledge and technique to the

psychoses stems from Freud’s paper on narcissism. This concept of the
narcissistic origin […] of schizophrenic disorders excluded, according to
him, the possibility of establishing a workable relationship between the
schizophrenic and the psychoanalyst. It is true that the schizophrenic is
hit by initial traumatic warp and thwarting experiences at a very early
period of life when he has not yet developed a […] stable degree of
relatedness to other people. It is also true that the final outbreak of
schizophrenic disorder will be characterized by regressive tendencies in
the direction of this original early period of […] traumatisation.44

Still, Freud hopes that the analytic technique might be modified in that case.
She answered his expectancy: “The goal of interpersonal relatedness is
not to try to ‘interpret’ content, and translate the manifestations of that
which is barred from awareness. The schizophrenic is swamped by
unconscious material which breaks through the barriers of dissociation.” As
a matter of fact, “the neurotic and the healthy person have succeeded in
keeping this material dissociated, whereas most of the time this material is
within the schizophrenic’s awareness. He knows the meaning of his
psychotic productions.”
Then what should the analyst do? Certainly not fight them, for his
problem is to be able to convey this production to another person. But
84 Seminar 4: 1989–1990
when this other tries to discourage his irrational attitude by making
meaningful interpretations, his is only encouraging the patient to continue
to cut out, as he has been doing, what he tries to show, for lack of words to
say it. “At times ‘acting out’ is the only way of communicating available to
the inarticulate schizophrenic. The acting out, per se, has to be accepted.”
Not only do psychotic patients know what they are doing, but they know
that they use showing devices. We might ask what good it is to use such
complicated devices to obtain such modest results. Still, the problem is not
the devices, but rather the absence of someone who can witness what they
show.
The end of Beloved is a meditation on interpretation. Its refrain – “It was
not a story to pass on” – is contradicted by the story we are reading,
written for us, the readers. Toni Morrison quilted a text by sewing together
pieces of material of different textures. The ghost is the instrument that
“typed” the text. The story not to pass on is transmitted regardless, and
circulates through the symptoms of a mother and her daughter. The story
cannot be lost since no one is looking for it. Still, the ghost claims it, but it
remains unclaimed until the choir confirms its reception. After this, Beloved
can be forgotten “like a bad dream” and her story can be made into myth.
Before commencing the ritual leading to the forgetting of the one who
was “disremembered and unaccounted for,” Beloved speaks in epic terms
that allow the passage from images to words for us, the readers, since in
a context of catastrophe images need such a rhythm to be told. They need
what Jean-Jacques Rousseau calls “the social link,” which means – when all
is well, that is to say never – “what holds individuals together.” This link is
usually a matter of political management, except when it breaks and when
it explodes.
Then identity criteria are abolished, the space between individuals is
erased: “I am Beloved, and she is mine,” says the ghost daughter about her
mother:

how can I say things that are pictures I am not separate from her there
is no place where I stop I am not dead her face is my own All of it is
now it is always now it is the face I lost she is my face smiling at me.

The ghost asks questions, like children do, in the form of statements, which
are both ethical and political. Sethe’s statement “If I hadn’t killed her she
would have died” takes us to a totalitarian space where freedom is
conquered at the price of death.
When Schoolteacher took over the plantation, his nephew stole Sethe’s
milk with his “mossy teeth,” while another man held her down.
Reproduction was organised so as to prevent children from knowing their
fathers, and breastfeeding was ended quickly to prevent maternal
attachment. Sethe barely knew her mother, who was hanged for trying to
run away. For her, being separated from her children is out of the question,
 Toni Morrison 85
although her two sons fled from the haunted house and were later killed in
the Civil War, fighting on opposite sides.

Don’t take my symptoms away

Sethe’s aporia, death or death, can only be resolved by showing “things that
are pictures,” and by “acting out” in the sense of staging a play – if the
analyst is able to climb on the stage, like Ella, the neighbour who gathered
the choir together, dared to do.
Frieda Fromm-Reichmann writes:

An insecure psychiatrist will be made anxious by being exposed to the

schizophrenic’s empathic capacity tosense some of the psychotherapist’s
liabilities. Some analysts have misevaluated the significance of the mean-
ingfulness of schizophrenic communications by operating on the faulty
conclusion that they can, for example, try to “talk” the patient “out” of
a delusional system.45

However, “[as] Freud demonstrated most convincingly in The Problems of

Anxiety,46 mental symptoms can be understood in their bipolarity as uno
acto, an expression of anxiety and a means of warding it off.”
At the prospect of being dispossessed of her symptoms, a patient at
Chestnut Lodge shouted at her therapist: “You’ll take my gut-pains, and my
trance, and my withdrawal states away from me! And where will I be then?”
We all know that when delusion loses its hold, the risk of suicide is the
greatest. After having identified with her symptom, the patient now has no
place in which to exist. One of my patients at the psychiatric hospital used
to say: “When I am ill I am cured, and when I am cured, that’s when I am
ill.” The therapist must reassure her that he will not take her symptoms
away, nor interpret their content, but rather find, with her, the place of the
subject who is shouting, while they both participate in “the vicissitudes of
the doctor–patient relationship.”
Sometimes the place is that of a feeling without object which overwhelms
one of them in the transference, like in Charles Trenet’s song: “Il y a de la
joie” (“There is joy, there is love!”). There can also be fear or hate. When
the feeling is love, erotomania which shouts “I am loved” and tries to
attach this love without an object to causal reasoning: “There is love
because of me,” it may be that one is invaded by cut-out impressions which
make themselves known that way. Likewise, voices and visions may be the
intrusions into the body and mind by cut-out perceptions, which in this
fashion find a way to be acknowledged. Here, psychic and physiological
systems function backwards, in order to produce the sensation by projecting
it through voices and visions that invade the ears and eyes, and nevertheless
preserve their truth.
86 Seminar 4: 1989–1990
In Beloved, the ghost is truly born when Sethe “empties out her eyes” to
revive the unnameable and unrepresentable sensation of the child she killed.
The ghost wants to know where her place is:

Tell me the truth. You rememory me? You never forgot me? Why did
she do that when she was just about to smile at me? I will not lose her
again. You are my face; I am you. I will never leave you again.

Telling a patient that her visions come from her inner world is stupid.
Above all, don’t fake anything. To say: “You see pink elephants and I see
them too” is to underestimate the patient’s acute ability to spot anything
fake. A hypocritical attitude is quickly identified, after years of facing
denial, cognitive dissonances and contempt for her intelligence. This is why
she built a barrier against the stupidities thrown at her, and refuses to talk.
What’s the use?
The analyst should admit his mistakes quickly, rather than trust the
patient’s polite acceptance of useless comments, while showing his
disagreement through his posture or facial expression. By talking instead of
staying silent, the analyst “wants to say,” not in the sense of “to mean,” as
Wittgenstein points out,47 but in the sense of “wanting to tell” what he
experiences in the transference.
Just before the choir sets out for 124 Bluestone Road, Denver speaks, to
express a feeling of terror:

Beloved is my sister. I swallowed her blood right along with my

mother’s milk. […] All the time, I’m afraid the thing that happened […]
could happen again. […] Whatever it is, it comes from outside this
house. […] I shouldn’t be afraid of the ghost. […] I just [have] to watch
out for it because it [is] a greedy ghost and [needs] a lot of love. And
I love her. I do. She’s mine.

She uses the present tense in the arrested time of the catastrophe. Time is
a major actor in the novel.

Continuity
It is quite difficult to read Beloved without interruption, because of Toni
Morrison’s use of flashbacks throughout. The reader is puzzled, but
gradually pieces the puzzle together. We are constantly forced to go back
and forth, creating a rhythm that breaks up time, like Laurence Sterne does
in Tristram Shandy.48
Three years before she died, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann published a text
on continuity,49 discussing transference with her traumatised and psychotic
patients, who regularly go back to square one and give a false impression of
relapse: “From the experience with these patients we learned [to advocate]
 Toni Morrison 87
the same type of psychoanalytic approach through all phases: during
a psychotic illness and after recovery.” This confirms that there is
“continuity between the person in the psychosis and the one he is after his
recovery.”
This is illustrated by a patient who used to mutilate herself during her
two-year stay in the disturbed patient ward at Chestnut Lodge. After her
release from the hospital, she continued her analysis with Frieda, while
enrolled in college. But one symptom persisted, resisting the effects of
analysis: by pulling the skin off her heels, she continued to injure herself.
A positive comment made by the analyst about her transformation was
followed by a state of great anxiety. This is when she had the following
insight: “I am [so] surprised […] about the change which I have undergone,
and [I am] maintaining the continuity and the identity between the girl who
had to stay locked up, and the successful college girl of today.”
Frieda concluded: “She could be well and ill at the same time, and
preserve her continuity.” She then took the opportunity to condemn
severely the attitude of some psychiatrists and psychoanalysts “who hold
that recovering patients should learn to detest and eject their psychotic
symptomology, like a foreign body, from their memory.”
As we already mentioned, she also disagreed with prevalent views on
schizophrenic withdrawal and catatonic stupor, seen as abandonment of all
external investment, saying:

These patients are, more frequently than not, keen observers of what is
going on. This comes about not only in response to the threat of rejec-
tion by others but much more for fear of their own hostility or violence
in response to actual or assumed acts of rejection from other people.

Once again, the problem stems from interpersonal relations that were
severely warped in a past that does not stay in the past.
“We could even say,” she added, “that in these cases investment in the
external world is greater than usual. Fear of dependency is increased, since
dependency has condemned the subject to death.” At the psychiatric
hospital where we worked as analysts, Françoise and I, a patient calling
herself Sissi, the Austro-Hungarian empress, used to say: “The babies work.
They work day and night. One night, there was a full moon, the wand of
history turned everything to stone.” The hand holding the wand was an
abusive father.
When time is petrified, modes of communication are filtered in a different
way. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann observed that she was tempted to make her
presentations more dramatic than academic protocol required. But she
accepted to do this in order to illustrate that she felt:

inclined to duplicate [in the sessions] tone and inflections of the patient’s
and my voices, the concomitant gestures, changes in facial expression, etc.
88 Seminar 4: 1989–1990
This comes about because the doctor’s non-verbal concomitants of the
therapeutic exchange […] are equally, if not at times more, important than
the verbal contents of our therapeutic communication.

She created a first reflection when all mirrors were shattered.

In a presentation she gave in Boston, at a conference of the International
Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis (ISPS) –
founded by Gaetano Benedetti in the 1950s to foster the psychoanalysis of
psychosis – Frieda’s patient Joanne Greenberg, who describes her
psychoanalysis in her best-selling book I Never Promised You a Rose
Garden50 – was asked about her analyst. She remembered the extreme
mobility of Frieda’s face, and her bursts of laughter: “she laughed her head
off.” Fortunately, she added, she was “a virgin” in regard to chemical
treatments, which had not been invented yet. By expressing her reactions,
and by revealing bits of her own history, in the mayhem of their sessions,
Frieda provided continuity in their relationship through the relational
distortions – anti-Semitism, exile – that had taken place during her lifetime
and before her birth. The therapy, says Frieda, addresses time frames which
become superposed in a process that “depends on coincidences which vary
according to the clinical experience and personality of the therapist.”
Beloved opens with a coincidence: the arrival of Paul D, “the last of the
Sweet Home men.” He tells Sethe what happened while she was being
tortured, when her milk was stolen, when her back was being whipped
while Schoolteacher took notes. The father of her children saw everything
from a loft, could do nothing, covered his face with butter and disappeared.
Paul D went mad, wanted to kill, was imprisoned, with an iron bit in his
mouth, in Alfred, Georgia, where he kept trembling until he escaped during
a hurricane. He came to the camp of Cherokee Indians suffering from
a disease. They told him to follow the flowering trees going north: “You
will be where you want to be when the tree flowers are gone.”

The eavesdroppers of history

This expression, in Beloved, replaces the predictive inadequacy of diagnoses.
The epigraph of the book, which we have already quoted, is taken from
Romans 9:25. The words are those of the prophet Hosea: “Those who were
not my people I will call ‘my people’ and her who was not beloved I will
call ‘beloved’.” Israel has betrayed God – like a prostitute. But intercession
is possible. Those who were cursed, who were not beloved, do not have to
remain unloved. Hosea speaks of a time of political upheaval, of a timeless
present with no tomorrow. “Today is always here, tomorrow, never,” Sethe
says. In moments of catastrophe, such words describe the annulment of time
and people. Still, the double negation opens the future.
Psychotic transference functions like this grammar, in which speech
acquires coherence by acting out catastrophes that cannot be inscribed in
 Toni Morrison 89
the social link. The choir of voices that gathers in front of the house meets
the thoughts of the two women at 124 Bluestone Road: unspeakable and
unspoken thoughts. Their grammar, different from that of ordinary speech,
functions in a poetic mode, omitting logical links and making a particular
use of negation.
In his commentary on Freud’s text Negation,51 the philosopher Jean
Hyppolite refers to the “negativism displayed by some psychotics.” Still,
Hosea’s prophetic discourse transforms this negativity through the double
negation that is rooted in otherness: “I will call them my people which were
not my people and her beloved who was not beloved.” The negativism
alluded to is not the devastating description of a field of ruins, but
a construction site, in which the prophet eavesdropping at the doors of
History becomes its spokesman.
In Beloved, negativism aims at pushing back the ghost into a memory that
can forget, which then replaces traumatic memory, which never forgets: “So
they forgot her. Like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep.”
Harry Stack Sullivan’s phrase “We are much more simply human than
otherwise” leaves open the possibility that man can be inhuman. There is
God’s wrath that Hosea speaks of, and there are terror and hate without
a subject. Patients are extremely vigilant regarding their analyst’s ability to
face inhumanity. Instead of avoiding it by means of humanitarian slogans,
we would be better advised to think of Virgil’s verse, quoted by Freud in
The Interpretation of Dreams.

Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo

Following the example of Freud’s Gradiva, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann
begins her article on intensive psychotherapy with manic-depressive patients
by stressing the use of literature, legends and folklore to understand
psychotic productions.52
When Freud cannot move the heavens and sets out to stir the Acheron in
Chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams,53 he does not tell us that line
312 of Book VII of the Aeneid54 is spoken by Juno, enraged when she
learns that seven ships of Aeneas’ fleet found a safe harbour. Aeneas is
about to marry the daughter of the king of Latium; Juno summons Allecto,
“the grief-bringer, a monster hated by her own father Pluto, since she brings
the scourge and the funeral torch into the houses.” The inhuman enters the
scene.
Allecto has cut off all access to the symbolic chain. Therefore, it is
impossible to carry out the substitutions and displacements that require an
empty space to make metaphors and metonymies. In the place of the
unconscious defined by Lacan as the speech of the Other, where inscription
is possible, a foreclosure, Verwerfung, which he first translated by
“retranchement, cutting off,” makes it impossible for any signifier “to
represent the subject for another signifier.” At the level of the structure, the
90 Seminar 4: 1989–1990
Real is silent. This does not mean that nothing is possible in that situation.
The analyst may manifest his presence, saying: “I know, I am here,” as
Frieda Fromm-Reichmann did with patients withdrawn into loneliness, the
topic of a text written when she became deaf, just before she died in 1957.
In Beloved, this loneliness happens to Denver, and takes the form of
sudden deafness at school – where she liked to go – after Nelson Lord,
a boy as smart as she was, asked her a question about her mother out of
curiosity, meaning no harm: “But the thing that leapt up in her […] was
a thing that had been lying there all along.” She never went back to school;
she felt terrified: “For two years she walked in silence too solid for
penetration. For two years she heard nothing at all.” Then her brothers left.
The cutting out of history, through several generations of slavery, cuts off
Denver’s hearing. It will only be restored when the ghost, who until then
had signalled her presence by wreaking havoc, speaks only words from
beyond the grave, with the successfully realised intention of bringing back
unspeakable stories of slavery.
Beloved shows that ghosts come out of diagnostic categories, to return
from Acheron with a mission. When the social link is in danger, enormous
energy is mobilised to stir the Acheron. Living myth is needed, not of the
stereotype: “My son didn’t get over his Oedipus complex,” but myth in the
making, in which Oedipus who slept with his mother becomes Oedipus at
Colonus,55 arriving at the sacred place where “invariable, untrod; goddesses,
Dread brood of Earth and Darkness […] abide.” Oedipus’ death in that
sacred place, in the suburb of Athens, will be a political asset for the city.

The gods have fallen on their heads

Juno’s rage against the Trojan fleet is translated in Greek by the word
menis. The Indo-European root “mn” is found in the Greek words mania:
madness, mainomai: I am mad, menô: I desire, and mimneskô: I remember,
as well as in the Latin mens: mind and the Sanskrit word mana: life force.
Plato has Socrates speak these words to Phaedrus, his disciple, in praise
of folly.56 These words resonate with Beloved and Frieda Fromm-
Reichmann: “In reality, the greatest of blessings come to us through
madness” (section 244a). In support of his argument, Plato refers to the
delirium of prophetesses who “conferred many splendid benefits upon
Greece both in private and in public affairs, but few or none when they
have been in their right minds” (section 244b).
More precisely, he gives us a lesson in psychoanalysis based on etymology:

And it is worthwhile to adduce also the fact that those men of old who
invented names thought that madness was neither shameful nor dis-
graceful; otherwise they would not have connected the very word mania
with the noblest arts, that which foretells the future, by calling it the
mantic art, t inserting a T in the word.
 Toni Morrison 91
(section 244c)

In fact, says Socrates, this added letter comes from the name of history:
historia.
Socrates then goes on teaching us about the psychoanalysis of madness,
through different stages:

Moreover, when diseases and the greatest troubles have been visited
upon certain family lines through some ancient guilt, mania […] has
found a way of release for those in need […] and so, by purifications
and sacred rites, he who has this madness is made safe for the present
and the after time.
(section 244e)

The stages of analysis are represented by the myth of the souls, psychai,
circling around the Real, to on, in a chariot pulled by two winged horses,
following a procession of gods: “In the revolution, Psyche beholds […]
knowledge, not such knowledge as has a beginning and varies” (section
247d), “[but] the colorless, formless, and intangible truly existing being with
which all true knowledge is concerned” (section 247c). Still, the situation is
far from ideal, and there is turmoil in this celestial revolution.
Some souls, which have grown heavy with forgetfulness and perversion,
see nothing and fall to the earth (section 248c). Others keep the memory,
anamnesis, of what they have seen, kateidos, when they looked for what was
truly real, by gathering a multitude of sensations into a unity through an
act of reflection. But, says Socrates, it is precisely when a man uses
judiciously the recollection of what he has seen that he can be accused of
being mad: “Since he separates himself from human interests and turns his
attention toward the divine, he is rebuked by the vulgar, who consider him
mad and do not know that he is inspired” (section 249d).
Socrates talks to himself when his daimôn visits him and keeps him
stalled for hours in the middle of the road. Alcibiades tells this story when
he arrives, completely drunk, at the end of The Symposium,57 and is asked
to praise Socrates. He describes his unusual habit to stand in the same spot,
listening to his daimôn, an aptitude that made him an exceptional therapist
during the Peloponnesian War, when he fought under his command as
a hoplite, helping his companions and his general, Alcibiades himself, when
he was wounded.
In the Phaedrus, Socrates describes how he tries to be worthy of this
therapeutic gift; his ideas are not unlike those of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann:

it is not easy for all souls to gain from earthly things a recollection of
those realities. [Many], after falling to earth […] do not understand
their condition, because they do not clearly perceive. So, they have to
analyse themselves, dia nistha nestai.”
92 Seminar 4: 1989–1990
(section 250a)

This is the knowledge brought into play in transference involving delusions

and trauma, which Socrates calls prophetic and poetic.
The word for divination, mantis, is linked to the verb for knowing,
manthanô, which means “to learn.” They contain the root “mn,” also
present in the word Mânes, the souls of the dead to whom ghosts urge us to
speak words of anger, madness and recollection, to “become such as we
are.” This injunction, Genoi oios essi, taken by Nietzsche from Pindar’s
Pythian II, leaves out the word mathôn; “Genoi oios essi mathôn: Become
such as you are, having learned to know yourself” (verse 131).
Learning what “you” are, in the animist societies of Ancient Greece and
in Native American societies, does not limit the “you” to an individual, but
expands it to include “all my relatives,” everything to which I am
connected, as is repeated in the ceremonies of the Sioux Lakota American
Indians of South Dakota, which we attended.
At the end of Beloved, the reader attends such a ceremony. Every
Saturday afternoon, Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother-in-law, in whose house she
has found refuge, takes “her great heart” to a clearing in the forest,
“followed by every black man, woman and child who could make it
through.” Sitting on a huge flat rock, she prayed silently. Then she called all
of them, in turn: “Let the children come! Let your mothers hear you
laugh […]. Let the grown men come […]. Let your wives and your children
see you dance.” Then she told them all to cry for the living and the dead.
She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could
imagine. If they couldn’t see it, they wouldn’t have it: “O my people […]
they do not love your flesh. You got to love it, you!”
Freedom tries to be admitted into the circle of the ancient gods. The
novel tells the story of winning this place. Throughout the story, something
strives towards the impossible inscription that the choir makes possible
when it starts to reflect on its own madness. It came together once more
after the forest ceremony ended in the aftermath of Sethe’s incarceration
and her hospitalisation in an asylum, which forced the grandmother into
seclusion in the haunted house. Now the baby ghost can rejoin the souls of
the dead, from which slavery had cut them off.
Beloved also provides an analysis of Denver, the schizophrenic, as
psychiatry would call her, who, when she was a baby, almost died as well.
She went to prison with her mother and lived as a recluse for about ten
years. Her life, after the cutting of her sister’s throat and the family’s
exclusion from the community, takes on a dynamic spurred forward by the
ghost’s plans. It is Beloved’s ferociousness that impels Denver to seek help
by visiting the teacher who taught at the school she had left; now, Denver
becomes who she is by taking another road than the old familiar anger,
after having learned some things from Paul D as well.
 Toni Morrison 93
No, foreclosure is not irreversible. It triggers a process of striving for the
freedom of a “political self,” a process we will see at work by following the
Swedish author August Strindberg as his delusions guide him through the streets
of Paris.

Notes
1 Morrison, T., Beloved, Alma Classics, 2017.
2 Fromm-Reichmann, F., Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, University of Chicago
Press, 1959.
3 Freud, S. and Breuer, J., Studies on Hysteria, Basic Books Classics, 2000.
4 Masson, J. M. (Ed.), The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess,
1887–1904, Harvard University Press, 1985.
5 Freud, S., Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva, S.E. 9, Hogarth Press,
1907, Chapter 2.
6 Lacan, J., “Antigone between Two Deaths,” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan,
Book VII, Porter, D. (Trans.), W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
7 Erasmus, D., The Praise of Folly, Aeterna Press, 2010.
8 Lacan, J., “On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,”
in Écrits: A Selection, Sheridan, A. (Trans.), Tavistock/Routledge, 1977.
9 Freud, S., Beyond the Pleasure Principle, S.E. 18, Hogarth Press, 1955, pp. 44–61.
10 Freud, S., Moses and Monotheism, Vintage Books, 1955.
11 Davoine, F. and Gaudillière, J.-M., History Beyond Trauma, Other Press, 2004.
12 Sullivan, H. S., Schizophrenia as a Human Process, W. W. Norton & Company, 1974.
13 Barker, P., Trilogy, Penguin Books, 1994–1998.
14 Fromm-Reichmann, F., Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy, University of Chi-
cago Press, 1960.
15 Proust, M., Time Regained, Modern Library, 1993.
16 Schreber, D. P., Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Macmillan, 2000.
17 Roth, J., The Radetzky March, The Overlook Press, 2002.
18 See infra, Seminar 11 on Robert Musil.
19 Neihardt, J., Black Elk Speaks, Bison Books, 2014.
20 Plato, The Symposium, Penguin Classics, 2003.
21 Fromm-Reichmann, F., “Remarks on the Philosophy of Mental Disorder,” in
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, op. cit.
22 Davoine, F. “El acta de nacimiento de los fantomas,” Seminar July 2008, Cor-
doba, Argentina. Ediciones Fundacio Mannoni, Argentina, 2010.
23 Vian, B., The Foam of the Daze, Tam Tam Books, 2003, p. 3.
24 Sullivan, H. S., Schizophrenia as a Human Process, W. W. Norton & Company, 1974.
25 Hornstein, G., To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World: The Life of
Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Free Press, 2000.
26 Fromm-Reichmann, F., “Insight into Psychotic Mechanisms and Emergency
Psychotherapy,” in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, op. cit., p. 55.
27 Fromm-Reichmann, F., “Notes on Personal and Professional Requirements of
a Psychotherapist,” in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, op. cit., p. 63.
28 Fromm-Reichmann, F., “Recent Advances in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy,” in
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, op. cit., p. 51.
29 Masson, J. M., The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, op.
cit., letters February 11 and September 21, 1897).
30 Hornstein, G., To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World, op. cit.
31 Fromm-Reichmann, F., Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy, op. cit.
32 Davoine, F. and Gaudillière, J.-M., History Beyond Trauma, op. cit.
94 Seminar 4: 1989–1990
33 Laub, D., Une clinique de l’extrême (Treating Extreme Trauma), Le Coq Héron,
2015, no. 220.
34 Fromm-Reichmann, F., “Personality of the Psychotherapist and the Doctor-
Patient Relationship,” in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, op. cit.
35 Masson, J. M., The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess,
op. cit.
36 Fromm-Reichmann, F., “Psychoanalytic and General Dynamic Conceptions of
Theory and Therapy: Differences and Similarities,” in Psychoanalysis and Psy-
chotherapy, op. cit., Chapter 8.
37 De Cervantes, M., Exemplary Stories, Lipton, L. (Trans.), Oxford World’s Clas-
sics, 2008.
38 Fromm-Reichmann, F., “Transference Problems in Schizophrenics,” in Psycho-
analysis and Psychotherapy, op. cit., p. 117.
39 Ibid., pp. 119–126.
40 Fromm-Reichmann, F., “A Preliminary Note on the Emotional Significance of
Stereotypes in Schizophrenics,” in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, op. cit., pp.
129–131.
41 Caruth, C., Unclaimed Experience, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
42 Fromm-Reichmann, F., “Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy with Psychotics: The
Influence of Modifications in Technique on Trends in Psychoanalysis,” in Psy-
choanalysis and Psychotherapy, op. cit., p. 135.
43 Freud, S., “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” 1925.
44 Fromm-Reichmann, F., “Notes on the Development of Treatment of Schizophren-
ics by Psychoanalytic Therapy,” in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, op. cit.
45 Fromm-Reichmann, F., “Some Aspects of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy with
Schizophrenics,” in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, op. cit., p. 175 and p. 168.
46 Freud, S., New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, S.E. 22, Hogarth Press, 1932.
47 Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations (1945–1949), Wiley-Blackwell,
2010.
48 Sterne, L., The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Alma Classics,
2017.
49 Fromm-Reichmann, F., “Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia,” in Psychotherapy and
Psychoanalysis, op. cit.
50 Greenberg, J., I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, St. Martin’s Paperbacks,
2008.
51 Lacan, J., Écrits, Fink, B. (Trans.), W. W. Norton & Company, 2007.
52 Fromm-Reichmann, F., “Intensive Psychotherapy of Manic-Depressives,” in Psy-
choanalysis and Psychotherapy, op. cit., p. 221.
53 Freud, S. The Interpretation of Dreams, S.E. 5, Hogarth Press, pp. 509–625.
54 Virgil, The Aeneid, Fagles, R. (Trans.), Penguin Classics, 2008.
55 Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, Dover Publications, 1999.
56 Plato, Phaedrus, Focus Publishing/R. Pullins Co., 2003.
57 Plato, The Symposium, op. cit.
5 Seminar 5: 1991–1992
August Strindberg (1849–1912) and
Martii Siirala (1922–2008)
The Inferno and From Transference
to Transference1

Two Scandinavian practitioners of psychotic transference

Martti Siirala is a Finnish psychoanalyst, a colleague of Gaetano Benedetti,2
whom he met when he was young, at the Burghölsli Hospital in Zürich.
Siirala’s book From Transfer to Transference is about the prophetic abilities of
schizophrenic patients. These patients are trying to pass on their prophecies to
a co-researcher who cannot remain simply an observer.
The book begins with the delusion of a patient, involving an Egyptologist in
the year 2000 BC who discovers the secret hidden in a pyramid: a prisoner
buried alive. The Egyptologist, henceforth called “the helper,” is able to pass
food and drink to the prisoner through an aeration vent but is unable to free
him. The prisoner finally rebels against his helper and wounds him with an
arrow, causing him to fall into his prison. Only then does the helper turn into
a therapist, after accepting to be treated by the prisoner.
This story touches Siirala deeply. His patient’s delusion brings to light,
through this timeless tale, the humiliations inflicted on his own family of
peasant origin during the Finnish Civil War that followed World War I,
humiliations locked away in secrecy once the family acquired a certain
social status. After the next war, the Winter War against Russia, the young
Finnish Republic proclaimed in 1919 was amputated of a part of Karelia.
The loss of this legendary region, where the Finnish epic The Kalevala takes
place,3 was felt as a profound injury by the psychoanalyst, who participated
regularly in demonstrations demanding its return. In Helsinki, we saw this
old gentleman disguised to personify the lost region, wearing the traditional
costume of a young Karelian girl.
For Siirala, his patient’s delusion is illustrative of transference in the
treatment of psychotic patients: “Less the repetition of affects directed towards
the analyst, than a shared investigation of historical situations” (p. 30).
Situations buried alive, carried by the patient beyond any temporal limits, are
transferred to analogous zones in the analyst, who is also healed in that
process.
The gods must not be excluded from this story either, Siirala says. After
all, Hippocrates, born around 460 BC, was said to be a descendant of the
96 Seminar 5: 1991–1992
famous Asclepiades family – who claimed to be descendants of the god
Asclepius – on the island of Kos, where there stands a temple to this deity.
In the Epidaurus Sanctuary, honouring the same god, several buildings were
dedicated to therapy. One was the famous theatre where tragedies and
comedies intended to produce catharsis were presented. Another was the
thalos, a round white marble building, dwelling of the sacred serpents so
dear to Aby Warburg. In Ouidah, in Benin, we saw such a circular building
housing serpents, in the sanctuary dedicated to Python, the god of
medicine. At a third site, the Abaton brings psychoanalysis to mind. It is
a hall where patients lay during the night while Asclepius’ serpents roamed
free among them. In the morning, priests interpreted their dreams, to which
inscriptions carved in the stone testify.
Michel Foucault4 states that scientific clinical practice, born in the
eighteenth century, transformed madness into an illness by eliminating the
divinities.5 Later, historian Jean Marie Fritz showed that in the Middle Ages,
madness was already subject to organicist medicine, and treated with shock
treatments and pharmacological drugs. But the real place of madness was
literature, “the space of the marvel,” where knights ventured to meet fairies
and fight monsters, losing all sense of time.6 In those days, the madman was
called “the wild man,” who can still be seen parading during the Basel
Carnival, in Benedetti’s home town. Another space assigned to madness
during the Renaissance was that of the Sotties, where fools came on stage
called by Mother Folly – who was praised by Erasmus – for a mock trial of
political abuses. This seminar testifies to the fact that today, madness still has
its place in literature, as evidenced by August Strindberg’s work, the topic of
our seminar this year.

Inferno:7 a delusional experience in Montparnasse

The Inferno, written in French in 1897, focuses on the analysis of
Strindberg’s delusions during the three years when he wandered through the
streets of Montparnasse. He was assailed by the same social humiliations
buried in his family’s past as those of Siirala’s patient. No doctor
understood his condition. The Finnish analyst points out that in
a psychotic transference, the subject cannot exclude himself from his
investigation. While psychoanalysts try in vain to pass this hot potato to
each other, madness ceaselessly tests their own story, so that it becomes
unclear whose hot potato they are dealing with.
“Being sick can serve the purpose of making those who are well come
out of their stubborn denial,” Siirala says. “The prophecies of
schizophrenics reveal illnesses and murders left untold in our societies for
generations” (p. 16). This is the conclusion Strindberg comes to at the end
of Inferno, after he discovers, in his own analysis, the works of Swedenborg.
Up until then, writing had not been enough to allow for the inscription of
that which was cut out of his family history.
 August Strindberg and Martii Siirala 97
In his works, where fiction and life are intertwined, Strindberg gives literary
form to a narrative in the present tense, for it is not inscribed in the past. The
first chapter of The Son of a Servant,8 entitled “Fear and Hunger,” reveals that
madness possesses the skill of a historian: In Sweden:

the 1840s were over. The Third State, which had gained a number of
human rights through the 1792 revolution, had just been reminded that
a fourth and fifth state were also aspiring to their place in the
sun […]. After the turbulent events of 1848, the movement was taken in
hand by the enlightened despot Oscar I, who gained the sympathy of
the bourgeoisie by granting it economic freedom and free trade, dis-
covered the power of women, and allowed daughters the same inherit-
ance rights as those assigned to sons.
(p. 25)

After this flashback, he exposes the rift between social classes on the
different stories of the house where he was born, and in his parents’
marriage. His father, from a bourgeois family, begets eight children –
August being the fourth – with the servant-maid, before marrying her.
When August was 13, she died of tuberculosis, and was quickly replaced by
the governess, who became his father’s second wife. After going to an
extremely severe school, August took refuge in Pietism and studied
chemistry, which he later abandoned to study journalism and literature.
His writing, refused at first by publishers, eventually made him famous.
In his plays – The Father, Miss Julie, Creditors9 – he depicted social and
political violence, masked by hypocritical conventions. He was considered
a spokesman of socialist ideology with Rousseauist overtones and had
connections to anarchist circles, but he was criticised for his anti-feminist
views. Despite these controversies, Hjalmar Branting, the founder of the
Swedish Social Democratic Party, remained his lifelong friend.
His delusions of persecution in Paris were not so delirious, since he had
really been persecuted and forced to leave his country in 1883, on account of
his writings, which attacked the monarchy, the army and religion. In
Switzerland, he wrote his pamphlet “A Catechism for Workers,”10 reminiscent
of Livy’s “Apologue on the Limbs and the Stomach,” written during unrest in
the Roman Empire, when the people gathered on the Aventine Hill. This
allegory, taken up by Jean de La Fontaine11 centuries later, raises the question
of who is crazy, of the two parties involved. Is it not society that claims to be
sane when it rejects the part of madness in itself? Strindberg’s solution goes
beyond the duality of the apologue: “I am crazy so others can be sane,” or: “I
am in the dark so that social sunlight can shine on others.”
In 1991, he divorced his first wife and was separated from his three
children. He went to live in Paris and travelled to Denmark and to Berlin,
where he befriended Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, met a young
Austrian woman and married her. The couple returned to her native
98 Seminar 5: 1991–1992
mansion in Lower Austria, where she gave birth to a little girl. But once
they were back in Paris, they quickly separated.
The English translation of the Inferno12 begins with the hatchet blow of
this separation:

With a savage joy I walked away from the Gare du Nord, having parted
there from my sweet little wife as she set off to rejoin our child who
had fallen sick in a distant country. The sacrifice of my heart’s love –
finished! Our last words to each other – “When shall I see you again?”
“Soon.” – still echoed in my ears like one of those lies whose true
nature one won’t admit even to oneself, although something told me
that we had parted forever. And those farewells exchanged in November
of 1894 were indeed the last, since up till this moment, in May 1897,
I have not seen my beloved wife again.

The Inferno, a reference to Dante’s Inferno, ends with Strindberg’s reunion with
“Beatrice,” his little daughter, who brings him back to the world of the living.
In the meantime, he has delusions. We can’t help but think of his mother’s last
farewell, when she was the living-dead prisoner of the lies told by the paternal
side of the family, which tried to refuse her a tomb in the family vault, and
falsified her testament.13 But this explanation did not stop his madness from
trying to inscribe the persecution inflicted by visible or invisible enemies, until
he finally met some therapists worthy of the name at the end of the book.
Madness takes hold when double-talk pushes your speech back into your
throat, when erased events come back to say: “But we are the real history,”
when a cancer eats away the place that guarantees the truth. For Strindberg,
God is an insurrection, because nothing guarantees God. The task of the
madman is to warn of this deficiency. He tries to repair the absence of the
Other who guarantees the given word, by filling the hole with patches, in an
impossible attempt at totalisation. “When mysteries are beyond us, let’s
pretend we’re organising them,” Jean Cocteau says in The Eiffel Tower
Wedding Party. Strindberg asserts that it is logical for him to be persecuted by
a sick society, but invoking social madness means losing oneself in generalities.
Strindberg’s delusion is much more specific. After his wife’s train leaves the
station, he decides to give up literature, go back to the study of natural sciences
and make gold in his “poor student’s room in the Latin Quarter.” His aim is to
find the touchstone of values falsified by lies. His burned hands testify to the
physical struggle in which he engages daily, in his fight against perversion.
Taking the same stance, the analyst Gisela Pankow (1914–1998) used to
tell her psychotic patients: “Bring me monsters. I am a monster monger,”
insisting on the catastrophes that had occurred in family lineages. Having
herself been persecuted in Germany at the end of the 1930s for her family’s
anti-Nazi views, she was familiar with the work of Frieda Fromm-
Reichmann,14 and participated in the first congresses of the International
Symposium for the Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia (ISPS), founded in the
 August Strindberg and Martii Siirala 99
1950s by analysts treating psychosis: Christian Muller in Lausanne and
Gaetano Benedetti in Basel.
The main features of this new paradigm of psychoanalysis, to be reinvented
each time, are all present in Inferno, carefully laid out by Strindberg chapter
after chapter.
Madness is addressed to a lawless agency, which can be personified by
the Devil. Like Faust,15 the Inferno starts with a prologue in Heaven, in
which the Lord is conversing with Lucifer about the latter’s new plan to
create a world of madness, the world of the Inferno. Written in French
between 1894 and 1896, the story is set in the Montparnasse quarter, where
Strindberg wanders in a delusional compression of time and space, about
which he writes day after day.
“The style is the man himself,” said Count de Buffon – in this case, the style
of a narrator to whom madness imposes its dynamics and its uneven tempo.
The text proceeds very quickly. Its speed and ubiquity are a response to the
break which has occurred in the symbolic chain, and strive to ensure that
space has the least possible void to fill, because the signifying play through
which the repressed unconscious can be heard is ineffectual now that the
symbolic chain is broken. Strindberg creates a text that takes over the entire
space. The intensity of psychic, social and historical phenomena spills onto the
streets and ends up turning Paris into a space too small for him. Finally, his
delusion extends to Europe, by contiguity, in the present from which he is
unable to escape or create the least distance. The more he says about it, the
greater his impression that he is saying nothing.
Of course, the foreclosure of the name of the mother’s father is interesting to
note, but it is powerless in the face of the exhausting dynamics of his delusions
that gradually open, in this compactness, a zone where otherness finally
emerges, where affect appears behind the fortifications built to keep it out, and
where “the tiniest flower is a thought.” His eyes fall on this quote when he
opens Balzac’s Séraphîta16 at random – a book inspired by Swedenborg, an
unforeseen other encountered at the end of his hell.

The heuristic influence of delusions17

Strindberg begins by sketching the voluntary loss of his identity. After
savouring the “worthless victory” of having one of his plays presented in
a Parisian theatre, he abandons literature to return to his first subject of study:
chemistry, or alchemy to be more exact, which he practised in his “poor
student’s room in the Latin Quarter.” The rest of the time, he roamed
aimlessly, like a Don Quixote, in search of small adventures.
Alone, he walks on “dreadful Rue de la Gaieté,” turns onto rue Delambre,
“more conducive to despair than any other street of the [Montparnasse]
quarter,” reaches the Boulevard du Montparnasse and “lets himself fall on
a seat, on the terrace of the […] Lilas,” where “driven [away] by furies,” he
leaves his glass of absinthe and hastens “to seek for another in the Café
François Premier on the Boulevard St. Michel,” and finally flees home (p. 35).
100 Seminar 5: 1991–1992
The first encounter that breaks through his solitude is therapeutic both
physically and psychically. The burns to his hands caused by his experiments
force him to seek medical assistance at St Louis Hospital, where he can call
“mother,” a nun who, in turn, calls him “my child.” The veil surrounding the
affects associated with these words is lifted: “It does me good to be able to say
this word ‘mother’, which has not passed my lips for thirty years.” An “Invisible
Hand” has intervened. “Must I be humbled in order to be lifted up […]?
Providence is planning something with [me], and this is the beginning of
education.” He pursues his mission in the quixotic style of wandering, which
drives him into the streets of his neighbourhood, where seemingly “insignificant”
things attract his attention and he says: “my nightly dreams assume the form of
premonitions.” The absence of an ego is not such a negative thing as traditional
descriptions might suggest. On the contrary, it opens new, potential spaces for
him: “I am born into another world […] and the consciousness that the
unknown powers are on my side lends me an energy and confidence which impel
me to unwonted efforts of which I was formerly incapable.” This energy, not
filtered by the ego, brings him in contact with the beyond:

The Unknown has become for me a personal acquaintance with whom

I speak, whom I thank, whom I consult. Very often I compare Him in my
mind with the “demon” of Socrates […]. A bankrupt as regards society,
I am born into another world where no one can follow me.18

As these improbable encounters continue, another name surfaces, that of

the chemist and toxicologist Orfila, which he happens upon in a bookshop
on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, and again on a white marble medallion in
the Montparnasse Cemetery, and yet again a week later on Rue d’Assas, on
the wall of “a house which looks like a convent, Hôtel Orfila.” Today,
a plaque on the façade of this building commemorates the illustrious
resident. When he discovered his name, Strindberg felt him to be his “friend
and protector who […] often guided me through the labyrinth of chemical
experiments.” He now senses that the future is opening before him:

Can it be […] that [St Louis] is my patron, my guardian angel, who

drove me to the hospital, so that I […] should win (glory) again […]?
Was it he who directed me to Blanchard’s book-shop and hither also?

He promises to tell us in the next chapters what happened in this old house,
“when the Invisible Hand chastised me, taught me and, why not,
enlightened me.”
Having no one else to talk to, he pursues his enlightenment by conversing
with the dead and with nature. In the Montparnasse Cemetery, where he
goes every morning, the tombstones predict that henceforth he shall have
neither love, nor money, nor honour, but shall follow “the Way of the cross,
 August Strindberg and Martii Siirala 101
the only path leading to wisdom” (p. 54). This path requires renouncing the
principle of objectivation of the subject of knowledge:

Dead to the world, as I have renounced the vain delights of Paris, I remain
in my quarter […] and thence descend to the Luxembourg Garden to greet
my flowers. […] a kind of religion has been forming in me.
(p. 55)

His “conversion” brings to mind that of Auguste Comte, after his attack of
madness, which he called his “cerebral episode,” in the spring of 1826. He
was hospitalised in Dr Esquirol’s clinic, from which he escaped, to invent
his “subjective method,” as a pact with madness:

Wisely given over to its spontaneous course, this crisis would undoubt-
edly soon have reestablished the normal state. But thanks to the disas-
trous intervention of an empirical medication, in the establishment of
the famous Esquirol, the most absurd treatment led me rapidly to
a very pronounced alienation.

He goes on to say that after medicine “fortunately, declared [him] incurable,”

he continued his research and condemned the “materialistic and doctrinal
vertigo of the objective.”19
Seventy years later, Strindberg salutes in the same manner “the call to
arms raised by the critic Brunetière about the bankruptcy of science.” He
announces his change of perspective:

I had been well acquainted with the natural sciences since my childhood
and had tended towards Darwinism. But I had discovered how unsatis-
fying can be the scientific approach that recognizes the exquisite mech-
anism of the world but denies the existence of a mechanic. […] I went
further […] and eliminated the boundaries between matter and what
was called the spirit.
(p. 57)

The fundamental power of delusion

In 1897, Strindberg published a treatise entitled “Purgatory or Sylva
Sylvarum.” In it, he describes how the “soul of plants” was revealed to him
when, like Dante:

in the middle of my life’s journey, I sat down to reflect. Everything I had

audaciously desired and dreamed had been granted. Satiated with shame
and honour, pleasure and suffering, I asked myself: to what end? […]
A generation that had the courage to eliminate God, to demolish the
State, society and customs, was still bowing to science. Where freedom
102 Seminar 5: 1991–1992
should reign, the watchword was: believe in authority or die. […] I heard
an old woman’s voice telling me: Come, child, don’t believe a word of it.

After this injunction, he in turn addresses the reader, and invites us to

accompany him on the path where plants converse with each other through
mimicry: “Passer-by, if you want to follow me, you shall breathe freely, for
in my universe disorder reigns, and disorder is freedom.” We think of
Paracelsus’ doctrine of signatures, of Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondences”:
“Nature is a temple in which living pillars / Sometimes give voice to
confused words,”20 and of Nerval’s sonnet “Golden Verses”: “Each budding
flower is a soul.”21 Both poets were inspired by Emanuel Swedenborg’s
Doctrine of Correspondences and Representations, whose author would soon
play a major part in Strindberg’s life, through the intermediary of two old
women conjured up prophetically by his madness, as Siirala pointed out.
The poetic language-game between beings opens communication between
the dead and the living. A moth called “death’s-head hawkmoth” – like
those Aby Warburg called “little souls” when he was a patient in
Binswanger’s clinic – incites Strindberg, whose soul is in a state of chaos, to
meditate on phantoms: “What, then, are life and death? The same thing?
What if the dead are not dead and the indestructible nature of energy is
immortality?” He would find the answer at the Montparnasse Cemetery:

The din of the streets dies away, and is replaced by the peace of the
dead. As I am always alone here at this early hour, I have grown accus-
tomed to regarding this public place of refuge as my pleasure garden
[…]. The dead and I! […] Yes, I know how to revive the dead, but
I don’t try it again, because the dead have foul breath, like revelers
after a night on the town.
(p. 75)

In other words, he is done with spiritism. He prefers to analyse his impressions,

making him rethink his earlier convictions: “During this whole year I have not
brought a single friend here; no man or woman who would, perhaps, have left
some memory behind to intrude upon my personal impressions.” These
impressions lead to a path of spirituality:

I became an atheist ten years ago! Why? I don’t know exactly! I was
bored with life, and I had to do something, above all something new.
Now, when all that is old, my wish is not to know anything, to leave
questions unresolved, and wait.
(p. 77)

His quest is clear. Like Siirala’s patient, Strindberg is trying to free the
prisoner buried under the dead without tombs: his shabbily buried mother
and a murdered child, who will be evoked in the next chapter.
 August Strindberg and Martii Siirala 103
As we read this diary, we realise that Strindberg’s dialogue with the dead
brings him into contact with the cutaway part of himself. As a result,
traumatic memory emerges. The scene takes place on the Right Bank, near
the de la Madeleine Church, Rue Chauveau-Lagarde, where “the mysterious
murder of an old lady occurred […] and the two murderers were never
discovered!” Strindberg continues his self-analysis:

Accustomed to observing everything that happens in my soul,

I remember having been seized with familiar terror while the images
crowded in one upon another, helter-skelter, like the imaginings of
a madman. […] What was all that? I’ve no idea! A tempest of memor-
ies, of dreams, conjured up by a tombstone, dispelled by cowardice.
(p. 78)

This renewed dialogue with the “inner thou,” to use Dori Laub’s expression,22
allows Strindberg to set aside political generalities, and become aware of the
particular distress of a young woman who:

seemed to be waiting for someone […]. Each morning she was there,
ever paler; sorrow had brought refinement to her plain features […].
She waits here all day and every day. A madwoman? Yes, someone who
has been struck by the great madness of love!

He speaks to the clouds, to children, to birds. A blackbird looked at him

and flew off, then:

returned from its excursion and calls to me with his harsh cry. […]
When I approach, the bird flies off leaving his prey behind on the top
of the railing. It is the chrysalis of a butterfly […]. A terrifying picture,
a monster, a goblin’s hood, which is neither animal, vegetable, or min-
eral. A shroud, a tomb, a mummy […]. And this splendour is endowed
with life, with the instinct of self-preservation […]. A living corpse,
which will assuredly rise again!
(p. 87)

The poetry of surviving images, as Aby Warburg calls them, moves through
the zones of death to bring back life.

Back to the beginning in search of unsymbolised elements

This crucial period follows any progress made in an analysis of madness
and trauma, which strives to gather new elements “without reason – aloga,”
as Socrates said,23 elements outside of language:
104 Seminar 5: 1991–1992
For four days I had let a nut germinate, and now detached the germ.
This had the shape of a heart […]. One may imagine my surprise when
I saw on the glass-slide of the microscope two tiny hands, white as ala-
baster, folded as if in prayer. Was it a vision, an hallucination? Oh, no!
It was crushing reality which made me shudder. […] immovable, as if
adjuring me. I could count the five fingers […] – real woman’s or child’s
hands. […] The fall has happened. I feel the mercilessness of the
unknown powers weigh heavily upon me. The hand of the invisible is
lifted and the blows fall thickly upon my head.
(p. 90)

Per Olov Enquist’s biography of Strindberg24 comes back several times to

the death, when she was 3 days old, of Strindberg’s first child, a baby he
had with his first wife Siri; the baby was killed by an “angel maker,” paid
for her services. The terror provoked by the little ghost caused Strindberg to
leave his lodgings: “Weary of struggle, I bid farewell to the hotel and
restaurant, and depart, plundered to my last shirt, leaving behind my books
and other things. On February 21st, 1896, I entered the hotel Orfila” (p.
92). The crisis was brought to an end by this new solution, entitled
“Purgatory,” to escape the Inferno.25
The invention of Purgatory in the second half of the twelfth century,
according to historian Jacques Le Goff, paralleled authorisation by the
Church of dialogue with the deceased, a practice previously condemned as
being pagan. It seems as if Strindberg also discovered the forbidden road to
“the souls of Purgatory,” whom one can now appease by soothing oneself.
The future is hopeful, because contrary to Dante’s inscription at the
entrance to Hell: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” Le Goff defines
Purgatory as a transitional hell, “a hell for a period of time.”26
“That which never ceases not to be inscribed,” the Real, according to
Lacan, emerges in the process of an inscription, thanks to the encounter
with an other who can be addressed, in the shape of an American painter:
“He becomes my sole companion.” This man, as lost as Strindberg himself,
prefigures a possible therapist – the therapon, in The Iliad, second in
combat, and “ritual double” in charge of funeral duties. But contrary to the
narrator, the painter leads a double life: “after he has spent the evening in
half-philosophic, half-religious discussions with me, he is always seen late at
night in Bullier’s dancing-saloon.” The two men finally separate, dissolving
“the partnership we had entered on for mutual help” (p. 104).
At that point, the Sunday before Easter, by coincidence, the encounter
with Swedenborg takes place – Swedenborg, who will be a reliable other for
him. When the symbolic chain is broken, precluding any recourse to
causality, the only way to create a link in the midst of what Bion called
“attacks on linking”27 is the “undeniable compliance of chance,” as Freud
once wrote in a letter to Jung.28
 August Strindberg and Martii Siirala 105
After crossing the Luxembourg Gardens and reaching the arcades of the
Odeon, Strindberg came across “an edition of Balzac in a blue binding, and
by chance picked up the novel Séraphîta.”29 The novel tells the story of the
love of a young man and a young girl for an androgynous being,
Séraphitüs-Séraphîta, whose parents were disciples of Swedenborg. “Why
just that [novel]?” Strindberg asks himself, analysing his spontaneous
gesture in the most Freudian fashion. “Perhaps it was an unconscious
recollection of reading a criticism of my book Sylva Sylvarum in [a]
periodical, in which I was called ‘a countryman of Swedenborg’” (p. 105).
Henceforth, other coincidences pop up from all sides:

When I got home I opened the book, which was almost entirely
unknown to me, for so many years had passed […]. It was like a new
work to me, and now my mind was prepared for it, I swallowed down
the contents of this extraordinary book wholesale. I had never read
anything of Swedenborg, for in his own native land and mine he passed
for a charlatan, dreamer and quack. But now I was seized with enthusi-
asm and admiration, as I heard this heavenly giant of the last century
speak by the mouth of such a genial French interpreter. I read now
with religious attention, and found on page 16 the 29th of March given
as the day on which Swedenborg died; I stopped, considered, and con-
sulted the almanac; it was exactly the 29th of March, and also Palm
Sunday.
(p. 105)

Here, the past encounters the present.

Now, the past encounters the present. This is a turning point in The
Inferno, where thanks to the psychodynamic analysis of his delusional
experiences, Strindberg turns his life in a new direction, owing to his
encounter with the exceptional character who will act as analyst for him:
“Swedenborg […] was to play […] a great part [in my life] as judge and
master, and on the anniversary of his death he brought me the palm,
whether of the victor or the martyr – who could say?” A little later,
Strindberg reconfirms the names of those who opened the door to his exit
from madness: Orfila and Swedenborg, and of course Balzac: “Séraphîta
became my gospel, and caused me to enter into such a close connection
with the other world.” Hope is reborn. He felt deliverance was near, and
wrote: “The spirits had become positivist, like the times, which were no
longer content with visions” (p. 107). Indeed, the inventor of positivism,
who had suffered the same torments, confirmed the “positivity of madness.”
The house known as that of Auguste Comte (1798–1857) was the site of
our research centre at the EHESS, before we moved to the Maison des
sciences de l’homme; Alain Touraine’s sociology laboratory was located
there, at number 10, Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, near the Luxembourg
Gardens, on the itinerary of Strindberg’s daily walks. The intuitions
106 Seminar 5: 1991–1992
triggered by the “cerebral episode” of the man who invented the words
“sociology” and “positivism” were to be developed up to the 1850s through
a critique of the objectivist interpretation of his theory. Auguste Comte’s
“subjective positivism” considers madness to be an “excess of subjectivity”
that perceives upheavals in history (a view that agrees with Strindberg’s): the
1848 Republican crisis, the 1850 dictatorial crisis, and of course the French
Revolution, just before he was born. These ruptures of the social link
endanger the subject who is part of them.
In Comte’s view, madness renews “the link between the dead and the
living by blurring the boundaries between outside and inside, through the
intensity of memories and images competing with present perceptions.”
Instead of reducing the subject to a debilitating diagnosis, “these images,
which evoke the past and suggest the future strengthen his consistency and
place him in a continuity.” According to Paul Arbousse-Bastide, Comte’s
originality consists in the fact that he stopped focusing on structure and
equated the course of madness with that of history.
From this point of view, the brain is more than the encephalon: “It is
a device by which the dead act upon the living;” it is what allows us to fight
the “Western disease” described as “a continuous insurrection of the living
against the dead.” This is what constitutes the “positivity” of madness: it
allows access to astonishing resources of knowledge and sensitivity, best
exemplified by Don Quixote, according to Auguste Comte:30 “Cervantes’
admirable work describes in-depth how our emotions alter our sensations,
sketching the true theory of madness before any biologist.” And he adds, as
Strindberg did after reading Balzac’s novel: “The only effective theory should
resemble a conversion process, in order to make a pact with time.”

Positive subjectivity
In neurosis, Benedetti explains, the negative is repressed, but in psychosis
the positive is cut away, a fact that causes analysts to become fascinated by
horror and emphasise the negative instead of seizing upon small details
which make it possible to reverse the perspective. The “positive subjectivity”
of Strindberg’s experience is made possible by “small daily occurrences”
accumulated in the vicissitudes of life. One of these occurrences took place
in the Observatory Garden at the foot of the Carpeaux fountain, when he
found two pieces of cardboard with the numbers 207 and 28, the atomic
weights of lead and silicon. A year later, a sculptor in Lund gave him “some
glaze composed of lead and silicon.” In the world of false pretences that
drove him into solitude, chance encounters were veritable gifts. To the
question “Is one to call it ‘accident’ or ‘coincidence’, this sign of an
irrefutable logic?” Strindberg replies: “I repeat that I have never been
plagued by visions, but actual objects sometimes seem to me to assume
a human shape in a grandiose style. […] The old gods return.” And with
 August Strindberg and Martii Siirala 107
them, “thoughts without a thinker,” as Bion called them, find a thinker to
think them:31

When I came home last evening the pansies – pensées in French also
means thoughts – in my window-box looked at me like so many human
faces. I thought it was a hallucination of my overexcited nerves. And
here are these pictures drawn a long time ago. It is then a fact and no
illusion, for this unknown artist has made the same discovery
before me.

And he concludes: “We make progress in the art of vision” (p. 110),
echoing Rimbaud’s sentiments in his 1871 letter to Paul Demeny: “I say
that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer.” But let us not rejoice too
quickly, for we know by now that every advance is followed by a renewed
intrusion of catastrophe:

Why am I here? Because loneliness compels me to seek human society

and to hear human voices. Just as my mental suffering reaches its high-
est pitch, I discover some pansies blooming in the tiny flower-bed. They
shake their heads as though they wished to warn me of a danger […]
“Go away!”

Strindberg feels the hatred of a Polish pianist he met in Berlin, who wants
to kill him. The feeling tortures him: “I had sinned through conceit, the one
sin which the gods do not forgive” (p. 150).32
The psychoanalysis of psychosis teaches us the hard way not to cry
victory too soon. The Tarpeian Rock is not far from the Capitoline Hill. To
name a thing requires that “the object be destroyed,” according to
Winnicott, Wittgenstein and Lacan. Attaining otherness is a gradual
process that alternates destruction with construction, in a back and forth
resembling the “Fort! Da!” game of Freud’s grandson. In 1915, when facing
not only the absence of his mother, but also the anxiety of his grandfather
whose two sons are away at the front, the baby plays at throwing a bobbin
out of his crib. Freud is intrigued by the fact that the baby’s excitement is
visibly greater when he casts the bobbin away, shouting: “Oh – fort – gone!”
than when he retrieves it, saying: “Ah – da – there.” This observation led
Freud to conclude that “The unpleasurable nature of an experience does
not always unsuit it for play”33 or theatrical performance. It is clear that
the grandson alleviates his grandfather’s distress by helping him to think in
the middle of this zone of death that was to last another three years.
Once again, Strindberg throws his identity overboard:

Everything i.e., the little which I know, goes back to the Ego as its cen-
tral point. Not the cultus, indeed, but the culture of this Ego seems,
therefore, the highest and ultimate aim of existence. […] To combat for
108 Seminar 5: 1991–1992
the preservation of my ego, against all influence which a sect or party,
from love of ruling, may bring to bear upon me, that is my duty
enjoined on me by conscience; the guide which the grace of my divine
protector has given me.
(p. 132)

In the urgency of his new combat, Strindberg confesses a secret, in spite of

his fear of calling down upon himself the wrath of Nemesis. For the first
time, he links the fluctuations of his ego, as Auguste Comte would have
done, to the political upheavals to which he had lent his voice:

It was ten years before this time, during the most stormy period of my
literary life, when I was raging against the feminist movement, which,
with the exception of myself, everyone in Scandinavia supported. The
heat of the conflict hurried me on, so that I so far overstepped the
bounds of propriety that my countrymen considered me mad.
(p. 133)

But this anamnesis does not provide an answer, because for him this past is
present: “At the beginning of July the [hotel] is empty, [and] the students have
gone for their holidays.” For the first time, he loses faith in his scientific
experiments. The loss of the security he thought he would find in them leaves
him naked, feeling like a forsaken child, with the sensation of electric currents
going through his body. Unable to take any more, he packs his belongings and
tells a coachman to drive him to Rue de la Clef, near the Jardin des Plantes,
where he plans to “complete [his] studies incognito,” before going back to
Sweden, where the Pole Star and the Great Bear have been calling him, from
above the roofs of the Rue d’Assas and the Rue Madame: “To the North, then!
I take the omen!” Having left, he feels momentarily appeased. He meditates in
the Jardin des Plantes – “This wonder of Paris, unknown to the Parisians
themselves, has become my park” – where he spends hours there looking at the
flowers, especially the hollyhocks, the flowers of his youth, while reflecting on
the past: “At length a pause ensues in my sufferings.” But the calm is broken
when, abandoning the shelter of his incognito, he informs the Hotel Orfila of
his new address: “At the moment that I write this, I do not know what was the
real nature of the events of that July night when death threatened me, but I will
not forget that lesson as long as I live.”
At last, it has become possible for him to look back on the distress of his
childhood, and understand how it has shaped his life:

Born with a heavenly homesickness, I wept as a child over the filthiness

of life, and felt strange and homeless among relations and friends. […]
I have wandered through a thousand hells, without trembling, and have
experienced enough of them to feel an intense desire to depart from the
vanities and false joys of this world, which I always despised.
 August Strindberg and Martii Siirala 109
For the first time, he dares to ask for help, and leaves for Dieppe “to find
shelter with some friends, whom I have neglected as I have all others, but
who are considerate and generous towards the fallen and shipwrecked.” But
the boundless hospitality of his friends’ beautiful home does not suffice to
allay his distress: “The idea that I am being persecuted by means of
electricity again takes possession of me.”
Telling himself that he probably has a “nervous illness,” he wants to seek
medical help and leaves Dieppe for Sweden, to stay with a friend who is
a physician. This man wants to hear everything that happened to him. The
answer is foreseeable, resembling what happens in a first session when the
patient checks if his analyst is worth talking to: “But I tell him nothing special,
for my first thought is one of suspicion. He is prejudiced against me, has made
inquiries about me in some quarter, and wants to have me confined.”
Since the physician does not venture out of his neutrality, the transference
turns sour, until a frightful night when Strindberg knocks on his friend’s door:
“What is the matter? – I begin my report by giving an account of the attack in
the Rue de la Clef.” The diagnosis is prompt and unforgiving: “Stop, unhappy
man! Your mind is affected.” Strindberg tries to fend off the diagnosis that
attacks his mental faculties: “Test my intelligence, read what I write daily and
what is printed. – Stop!” the doctor orders. “These stories of electricity are
frequent in asylum reports. Treaties on mental illness have described them in
detail.” The official argument reduced his intelligence to zero, as Antonin
Artaud found out through personal experience.

Strindberg and Antonin Artaud: the same combat

Artaud (1896–1948) was examined by Jacques Lacan at the Sainte-Anne
Hospital in 1938 and was given the same diagnosis: “Unable to continue his
literary activities.” The difference was that by then, electricity had made
progress. Artaud was transferred to Rodez psychiatric hospital, to be treated
by Dr Ferdière; there, he escaped the famine that devastated psychiatric
hospitals during the war, but could not escape 50 electroshocks, recently
imported to France by German doctors, who had first conducted
experiments on pigs: “It provoked the loss of my memory, numbed my
mind and body, turned me into an absence aware of this absence, into
a dead man next to the living man who is no longer himself.”
“Doctor L” (Lacan)’s diagnosis, on the brink of World War II, which
Artaud had predicted in his Theatre of Cruelty, echoed the diagnosis Freud
and Binswanger gave Aby Warburg, whom they judged “unable to pursue
his scientific activities.”34 History contradicted this judgement, showing that
the intelligence at work in a delusion is not incompatible with literature and
scientific research. Aby Warburg proved this, when he published The
Mnemosyne Atlas,35 assembled after he left the psychiatric clinic. Antonin
Artaud proved it again, when he published Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by
Society in 1947. In this book, he settles the score with Doctor L and “his
110 Seminar 5: 1991–1992
grotesque terminology” with a violence of which Strindberg would have
approved: “This is why a tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend
itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties
of divination would be troublesome.”36
Like Strindberg, Artaud was also plagued by “stories of electricity.” As
a child, he suffered from migraines, and at the age of 4 was treated with an
electric machine whose electrodes were applied to his head. A little later, he
lost his 7-month-old baby sister, killed by the “unfortunate action of
a servant.” Artaud’s version of events eliminates the euphemism:

Germaine Artaud, strangled at seven months, watched me from the St

Peter’s Cemetery in Marseille, until the day in 1931 when, in the middle
of the Dôme [café] in Montparnasse, I had the impression she was
[right there] watching me.

The affinity between Strindberg and Artaud was confirmed when Artaud
directed Strindberg’s A Dream Play in 1927 at the Theatre Alfred Jarry,
which he founded with Robert Aron after he broke away from the
surrealists. His refusal to adhere to communism as they did, “kneeling
before fetishes in human form,” caused him to be called a “rotten bastard”
by surrealist luminaries. The two authors had this in common too.
Strindberg’s transference to his doctor had been similar, when he saw the
latter as both the cause and target of his madness, as is often the case in
critical moments in the transference, when the perverse agency takes our
place, giving us the opportunity to identify it by recognising in ourselves the
flaw through which it got in: “Grant that I am suffering from persecution-
mania, but what smith forges the links of these hellish syllogisms? The
discoverer would have to be killed.” Once the true goal of his combat has
been stated, sleep overtakes him before sunrise.
The doctor tries one thing after another. His transference goes from
showing neutrality to being comforting, and then authoritative. His patient
watches him closely and identifies his superiority complex:

The doctor seems to me to be struggling with conflicting emotions. At

one time he seems prejudiced against me, looks at me contemptuously,
and treats me with humiliating rudeness; at another he seems himself
unhappy, and soothes and comforts me as though I were a sick child.
But then again, it seems to give him pleasure to be able to trample
under his feet a man of worth for whom he has formerly had a high
regard. Then he lectures me like a pitiless tormentor. I am to work […]
I am to fulfill my duties …

In fact, madness has attained its goal, as it does each time when the
analyst, pushed to the limit, commits the blunder that projects him into the
place of the perverse agency for whom the other does not exist. Through
 August Strindberg and Martii Siirala 111
his madness, Strindberg notices the shift in his doctor’s attitude: “I forcibly
suppress the growing hatred which I feel towards this unexpected
tormentor.” There is proof. His eyes fall upon a whole panoply of torture
devices: axes, saws, hammers, guns and poisons, and he exclaims: “Druggist!
Are they slowly poisoning me with alkaloids such as hyoscyamin, hashish,
digitalis …?” But he changes his mind:

They do not dare to murder me, but they are trying to drive me mad
by artificial means, in order to make me disappear in an asylum. […]
Everything which he says contradicts itself the next moment, and when
confronted by a liar my imagination takes the bit between its teeth and
rushes beyond all reasonable bounds.

Strindberg is aware of the psychotic transference involved in “the effort to

drive the other person crazy,”37 and analyses it as a phenomenon of
traumatic revival: “There occur in life such terrible incidents that the mind
refuses to retain the memory of them [at the] moment, but the impression
remains and becomes irresistibly alive again.”
He is in a state of heightened vigilance, sensing that “a turning-point in my
destiny is at hand.” Indeed, critical moments always usher in something new,
provided the analyst can analyse and tell the patient what is taking place
between them, as far as he is concerned as well. As is usual in such a case, the
doctor remains silent. Fortunately, a letter from Strindberg’s wife invites him to
come and see his little daughter, in her family’s ancestral house on the banks of
the Danube. This call from afar creates another place in which speaking, above
all with his child who has just learned to speak, becomes possible: “I part from
my friend – my executioner – without bitterness.”

Achieving alterity
Beatrice is the name given to the child Strindberg thought he had lost. He
had left a 6-month-old baby and is reunited with a little girl of two and
a half: “She turned on me a searching look […] as though she wished to
find out whether I had come for her own or her mother’s sake. After she
had assured herself of the former, she let herself be embraced.” The child
tested him, before granting him her trust, just as he had tested his doctor.
As a matter of fact, during the Middle Ages, fools were celebrated on a day
called the Feast of the Holy Innocents.
The Feast of Fools, which opens Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame,38
was also the Feast of Children. For an undisclosed reason, the mother of
Strindberg’s mother-in-law puts him out of her house after a few months, and
sends him to live with her other daughter, in the next village. In spite of their
mother’s orders, the two elderly women, his mother-in-law and her twin sister,
are going to act as therapists, in a way he could not have expected.
112 Seminar 5: 1991–1992
In his first conversation with the two sisters, thanks to the confidence his
little girl gave him, he confides in the two women. They react with
immediate sympathy and are eager to help. Strindberg is astonished. No
one had ever talked to him like this before: “You are where we have already
been”: sleepless nights, mysterious accidents, terrible fears, attacks of
madness and indifference to religion, before they encountered Swedenborg.
Surprised that he does not know the writings of his countryman, they give
him an old volume in German: “Take it, read, and don’t be afraid.” He
opens the book at random and comes upon a description of hell to which
the Swedish philosopher likens life on earth.
What he reads gives him access to his first years of life:

When I go over my past, my childhood already appears to me like

a prison house or torture chamber. In order to explain the sufferings
inflicted upon innocent children, one has only to suppose an earlier
existence, out of which we have been cast down in order to bear the
consequences of forgotten sins.

The transgenerational transmission of traumas that occurred before his birth is

written there in black and white, and triggers the usual blocking of his affects:
“With a docile mind, which is my chief weakness, I receive a deep and sombre
impression from my reading of Swedenborg. And the powers let me rest no
more. […] The image of Dante’s hell […] rises before me.” Don Quixote’s hell
comes back also, as it is staged by Cervantes in the episode of the treading
hammers. The noise of a waterfall, a mill, a smithy or a waterwheel frighten
Strindberg as much as it frightened the knight and Sancho Panza when they
heard at night the rhythm of deafening blows stricken by the Devil, which in
the morning turned out to be treading hammers.39
The gift of the two sisters provokes a powerful transference:

The reading of Swedenborg occupies me during the day and depresses

me by the realism of its descriptions. All my observations, feelings, and
thoughts are so vividly reflected there, that his visions seem to me like
experiences and real “human documents.”

His mother-in-law confirms the documentary value of the text when she
relates to him, in the evenings, the history of the district:

What a monstrous collection of domestic and other tragedies, consisting

of adulteries, divorces, lawsuits between relatives, murders, thefts, viola-
tions, incests, slanders. […] I cannot take my walks without thinking of
Swedenborg’s hells. Beggars, imbeciles of both sexes, sick persons and
cripples line the high roads.
 August Strindberg and Martii Siirala 113
The positive truth conveyed by the appearance of madness, as Auguste
Comte would say, is validated.
Strindberg confides in his mother-in-law, who confirms his discovery:
“Certainly, you must be doing penance, for sins which you committed
before your birth” (p. 183). From then on, “restored to self-respect by
Swedenborg,” he sees himself as a worthy man. Witnesses have appeared, to
testify to the hellish agonies passed down to him.
Swedenborg (1688–1772) had also “already been there” after he suddenly
abandoned his scientific research. He was considered one of the most learned
men of his time, known all over Europe for his encyclopaedic knowledge, for
which he was ennobled and given a seat in the Swedish Parliament. Like
Strindberg, he experienced humiliation through the disdain of his colleagues
for his newly acquired nobility. At 53, he went through a mystical crisis period,
and developed a passionate interest in dreams, angels, spirits and visions. Once,
while in Gothenburg, he saw a fire threatening his home in Stockholm,
hundreds of kilometres away. Accused of being a madman and a heretic, he
was forced to go into exile in England, where the number of his disciples grew,
although he never considered himself the leader of a sect. After his death, he
was buried in his native land, among the kings of Sweden, at the Uppsala
Cathedral.

The emergence of a subject

The awareness of himself as a subject, which emerges from Strindberg’s
readings and the mirror lent him by the two women, in a place where he saw
nothing reflected before, is consciously transmitted to his little girl, as he
himself recounts: “From my early days I am accustomed to plan out the day’s
work during my morning walk. No one, not even my wife, has ever been
allowed to accompany me on it.” The child says she wants to go with him on
his walk. He refuses, she cries. “I have not the heart to sadden her today, but
make a firm resolve not to allow her again to misuse her rights.”
His daughter tries to attract his attention. He becomes paranoid, seeing
her “as jealous as a lover about my thoughts; she seems to watch for the
exact opportunity to destroy a carefully-woven web of thought with her
prattle.” Ready to accuse the innocent child of this dark design, he starts to
think. The ability to reflect was given back to him literally and figuratively:
“I go on with slow steps […] my brain [is] exhausted by the effort of
continually having to descend to a child’s level.”
The place of the other, which Swedenborg’s writing and the presence of
the two elderly sisters bring into existence for him, is transferred to the
child. He can see her feelings in the way she looks at him, with reproach,
and notices that she retreats little by little, “because she thinks I find her
a nuisance, and imagines that I love her no longer.” Contrary to the silence
in which his own withdrawal was buried when he was a child, and from
which no one came to free him, now he is touched by their shared sorrow:
114 Seminar 5: 1991–1992
“I feel myself bereft of the light which this child had brought into my dark
soul.” He kisses her, carries her in his arms, gathers flowers and pebbles for
her, and plays with her.
The unrelenting unhappy fate transmitted for generations is outwitted
through these simple gestures more eloquent than a seminar on psychosis.
Besides, he analyses the mechanism of projection:

I have sacrificed my morning hour. So do I atone for the evil which in

a moment of madness I had wished to conjure down on this angel’s
head. […] Truly the powers are not so cruel as we are!

A cruel agency can be defeated by replacing it with the presence of an

other, vulnerable and trustworthy, and able to play. But this happy interlude
was not to last, because ghosts now seized the opportunity to return.
A dialogue takes place between Strindberg and his mother’s ghost, who
reproaches him for his divorces. After all, she had to wait a long time to
become a wife, and was not recognised by her in-laws the way he is now. He
blames her, in turn, for his own woes, and calls her a devil. This is enough
to provoke the Furies to invade the present scene: “The spirits of discord
are abroad and despite the fact that we are quite aware of their game and
our freedom from blame in the matter, our repeated misunderstandings
leave a bitter wish for revenge behind them” (p. 194).
Awareness is no protection:

The wrath of ancient memories Socrates spoke about in the Phaedrus

attacks those who “are rightly mad” in a lineage. But they also make it pos-
sible to transform madness, mania, into mantike, the prophetic art, by insert-
ing the “t” of history, provided one “gives a correct analysis of the self.”40

But Strindberg is fighting another battle. The Erinyes are chasing him. The
house is haunted: “The black window opening gapes at me.” Only the birds
and ladybugs speak to him: “I curse the ever-present, unavoidable ‘chance’
which persecutes me with the obvious purpose of making me fall a victim to
persecution-mania.” The delirium reaches a pitch. Feeling condemned to die,
he prepares to leave and waits for a sign. On this November day, a “ray of light
abides in my heart like a happy smile […]. Then suddenly there is a single
thunder-clap over my head. […] The Eternal has spoken!”41 But he is not
appeased.
In Chapter 16, “Hell Let Loose,” he recognises that his little daughter
is able to heal him. She follows him to his room, forces him to draw with
her and, when an organ grinder is heard playing outside, he improvises
a dance for all the neighbourhood children: “This goes on for an hour,
and my sadness is dispelled.” His mother-in-law tells him that just then,
in the village, an old woman gone mad dances without stopping, to avert
 August Strindberg and Martii Siirala 115
death. Like in Swedenborg’s Treaties, the phenomenon defies scientific
explanation:

Explain that [to] me, O doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, or acknow-

ledge the bankruptcy of science! My little daughter has exorcised the
evil spirit who, driven out by her innocence, has entered into an old
lady who used to boast of being a free thinker.

Socrates would say that mania has been transformed into mantike through
its extension to the history of the country, and freed him from the trap of
negativity.
On the eve of his departure, Strindberg climbs to the summit of
a mountain, which offers a splendid view of the valley of the Danube and
the Styrian Alps. There, he can finally recall the most beautiful moments of
his life. The sound of a bridal march sung by triumphant voices reaches
him: “Childish enough and unhappy enough to give a poetical colouring to
the most ordinary occurrences, I take this as a good omen.”42 He comes
down into the valley with a piece of mistletoe for his Beatrice. Little things,
like “My Favourite Things” sung by Julie Andrews in The Sound of
Music,43 set in the Austrian Alps, help to lighten the imminent separation
from his daughter.
Back in Sweden after a six-year absence, Strindberg starts by visiting
doctors. Each one gives him a different diagnosis: “The first speaks of
neurasthenia, the second of angina pectoris, the third of paranoia, a mental
disease, the fourth of emphysema. This is enough to ensure me against
being put into a lunatic asylum.” But a sense of humour doesn’t protect
him from noise, which pursues him everywhere, in his hotel room and in
the restaurant. In Lund, he is reunited with an old friend from his student
days, who appears very demoralised. The members of their former student
association (called the Young Old) are “dead, [downtrodden], turned into
Philistines and steady members of society. […] they complain of nightmares,
constrictions of the breast and heart.”
His friend is melancholy until Strindberg mentions Swedenborg. The
friend’s mother has the writer’s books: “I thank Providence which has sent
me into this small despised town to expiate my sin and to be delivered.”
Once again, this name produces a rallying effect, “when the tool with the
name [was] broken,” as Wittgenstein44 says, saving both of them from
depression by prompting a new language-game.
All of Strindberg’s torments are described in Swedenborg’s works, and
resumed by the word “devastation.” But his redemptor Swedenborg, instead
of resigning himself to the sheer repetition of misfortune, brings about
a sacrificial catharsis, like in Greek tragedies, where “the flesh is destroyed,
so that the spirit might be saved.” Swedenborg considers that dead spirits
are survivors who continue their relationships with the living. Therefore, evil
spirits are not so evil and their intention is good; he proposes calling them
116 Seminar 5: 1991–1992
“corrective spirits,” for they eliminate fear and despair. Strindberg expresses
his relief: “Be comforted, and be proud of the grace bestowed upon you, all
ye who suffer from sleeplessness, nightmares, apparitions, palpitations, and
fears of death! Numen adest! God is seeking for you!” Now, the place of the
symbolic Other is assured and signals a turning point in his analysis. Time
measured by symbols is set in motion again, allowing him to analyse his
past: “I engage in the terrible fight against my worst enemy – myself.” Let
us review the various stances he adopted throughout his life: first he was
pious, then a freethinker, then an atheist, and finally he was inspired by
humanitarian ideas. But he admits he was disillusioned: “I have been
a herald of socialism. Five years later you have shown me the absurdity of
socialism; you have made all my prophecies futile.” After the collapse of his
illusions, he may become the subject of his life. He has gained enough
hindsight to be able to say:

Ah, what a game the gods play with us poor mortals! And therefore, in
the most tormented moments of life, we too can laugh with self-
conscious raillery. How is it that you wish to take earnestly what is
nothing but a huge bad joke?

Medicine is also a joke: “Go to the asylum, and ask the doctor; he will talk
to you about neurasthenia, paranoia, angina pectoris, and stories of that
kind, but will never heal you.” Still, he is not tempted by nihilism: “But
when night, silence and loneliness reign, the heart beats, and the breast
suffers from constriction, then […] seek someone to share the sleeping
chamber” (p. 234). The function of the therapon is now exerting its effect.
From this perspective, which offers the possibility of an exchange, traumatic
revivals can be seen as a dynamic able to “grind” terrible things into words,
those, precisely, that we read in The Inferno:

Have you in the solitude of night or in broad daylight observed how

memories of the past stir and arise, singly or in groups? Memories of
all your faults, crimes and follies which make your ears tingle, your
brows perspire, your spine shudder? You re-live your life from birth to
the present day, you suffer over again all the sorrows you have endured,
you empty again all the cups which you have drunk to the dregs so
often; you crucify your skeleton when there is no more flesh left to cru-
cify; you consume your soul when your heart is reduced to ashes! You
know all that? Those are the “mills of God” which grind slowly but
exceedingly small!

At the very same time, Freud was writing Project for a Scientific
Psychology, in which the colossal energy of the Real goes through
a succession of filters that reduce it to signifiers.45
 August Strindberg and Martii Siirala 117
Swedenborg does not deny the aporias madness comes up against: “To
seek out the demons in their dens within myself, and there to slay them,”
including when they wear the mask of love for humanity:

I try to love mankind in the mass; I shut my eyes to their faults, and
within exhaustible patience endure their meannesses and slanders, and
one fine day I find myself a sharer of their crimes. Whenever
I withdraw from society which I consider injurious, the demons of soli-
tude attack me, and when I look for better friends, I come on the track
of the worst.

The solution to this dilemma, particular to the enquiries of madness, will be

given in the last chapter, which solves the aporia: “How is one to explain
the fact that every step of progress in virtue gives rise to a fresh sin?” The
answer to this question is given in the last chapter of the book, entitled
“Whither?”

Strindberg the therapist

Delusions return, as they do each time there is progress:

a wintry sadness still weighs upon our spirits, for so many weird and
inexplicable things have happened, that even the most incredulous
waver. The general sleeplessness increases, nervous breakdowns are
common, apparitions are matters of every day, and real miracles
happen. People are expecting something.

In his case, the expectation is answered by a visit.

This time, a young man knocks on his door. For once, he does not turn
him out as an enemy. The visitor asks: “What must one do in order to sleep
quietly at night?” Instead of pondering over his neurosis, Strindberg voices
the simple question that must be asked: “What happened?” The young man
answers that when he opened the door of his room at night, someone seized
his arm and shook it. But there was no one in the room. Again, instead of
thinking that this is psychosis, Strindberg enters his visitor’s delusion and
asserts: “It is the invisible.” And he tells the young man his story:

Listen, young man, I am neither a physician nor a prophet. I am an old

sinner, who does penance. Demand therefore neither preaching nor
prophecy from an old gallow-bird, who wants all his leisure time to
preach to himself. I have also suffered from sleeplessness and paralysis
of the arms; I have wrestled eye to eye with the invisible, and finally
recovered sleep and health. Do you know how? Guess! The young man
guesses my meaning, and casts his eyes down. – You guess it! Go in
peace, and sleep well!
118 Seminar 5: 1991–1992
After his departure, Strindberg ponders over the session that just took
place: “Yes! I must be silent and let my meaning be guessed, for if I began
to play the preaching monk, they would turn their backs on me at once.”
He knows this by experience? (p. 240). Indeed, silence had allowed the
young man to regain his grip on himself, but only after his therapist
recounted his own experience. Without fearing the loss of his neutrality, or
claiming a false brotherhood, he took on the role of second in combat – the
therapon in the Iliad – against the invisible. The young man was no longer
alone on his journey towards the unknown. He has learned that his
symptoms are not an illness, but rather an investigation he has shared with
a co-researcher.
In the epilogue of the book, he concludes: “Such then is my life, a sign,
an example to serve for the betterment of others,” like a toy in a child’s
play, to demonstrate the nothingness of fame and of celebrity, and show the
younger generation how they should not live. Anticipating Winnicott,
Strindberg concludes in a playful tone: “Here you have, my brothers, the
picture of a human destiny, one among so many, and now confess that
a man’s life may seem – a bad joke!”

The mad teach us to write history

This is Martti Siirala’s way of saying that madness is not reasonable, since it
insists on validating and putting back into circulation voices and visions
testifying to what was cut out of history. Le parti pris des choses (The
Nature of Things) – the title of Francis Ponge’s collection of prose poems46
– offers a poetic space needing no objectivation, when words break down.
Sharing this viewpoint, Boris Vian, who translated Strindberg’s
Miss Julie, ridicules – in his own book Foam of the Daze47 – Sartre’s
Nausée,48 presented as the chronicle of madness. He calls Sartre: “Jean Sol
Partre, the author of Spew (Dégueulis).” Sartre intended to give a scientific
description of everyday events, by objectifying the things around him
without any emotion, until nausea set in at the end of 150 pages. Published
in 1938, the text is not a narrative, and excludes any irrational effects and
any references to history, so that it culminates in the absurd. Boris Vian, on
the contrary, wants to force nausea to stop; to this end, he turns to fiction,
where events set the plot in motion.
Martti Siirala also speaks of a malignant violence that the social order
gets rid of through “vicarious transference” onto people diagnosed mad.
This is attested to by Louis Althusser (1918–1990) in his book The Future
Lasts Forever,49 which exposes the historical stakes involved in his tragedy.
As soon as he met his future wife Hélène Rytmann in 1947, Althusser was
hospitalised and given, like Artaud in the same period, a series of
electroshocks. At the end of a long analysis in parallel with hospitalisation,
sleep therapies and heavy medication, he strangled his wife in 1980 in their
living quarters at the École normale supérieure (ENS). Another episode in
 August Strindberg and Martii Siirala 119
the life of the couple brings Artaud to mind. In 1948, Hélène was excluded
from the Communist Party by a tribunal whose members were to become
celebrities. The wording of their edict advised Althusser to leave her. Is it
possible that, as was the case for Strindberg, the writing of his book was
a search for catharsis?
I do not know, but I remember clearly the impression he made on us at
the Hotel PLM on the Boulevard Saint-Jacques, on March 16, 1980. The
members of the École freudienne were gathered there to hear Jacques Lacan
announce the dissolution of his School. Just as Lacan finished saying, in
a weary voice: “Je dis solution: dissolution!” (“My solution: dissolution!”),
Louis Althusser entered the room like a ghost. This is how he himself
describes the scene:

Conspicuously, coming down the wide aisle that divided the silent audi-
ence, I was advancing very slowly, my pipe in my mouth. I stopped
and, with a deliberate gesture, I knocked my pipe against the heel of
my boot, filled it and lighted it, then walked towards Lacan and shook
his hand warmly. He was clearly exhausted after his long presentation.
I endeavoured to show by my attitude all the respect I had for this
great, elderly man dressed like a Pierrot. Then I spoke “in the name of
analysands, reproaching strongly the audience for its silence. I don’t
remember what I said, but I remember the silent commotion that fol-
lowed my speech.” I remembered too. None of the 500 people present
reacted, except to voice inane witticisms such as: “La colle de l’école
doit être dissoute” (“The glue of the school has to be unglued”).

Two members of the audience escorted Althusser to the back of the room,
like an uninvited guest at a family reunion, gathered to tacitly assess an
inheritance before the anticipated death occurs.
Back in the days when we threw snowballs from the rooftop terrace of
the ENS on fur-clad ladies and elegant gentlemen who came to hear
Lacan’s seminars, we didn’t know that Althusser had been the one who put
at his disposal the Dussane lecture hall. It looked out on Rue d’Ulm,
“which, says Althusser in his book, quickly became cluttered, every
Wednesday, with expensive English cars encroaching on the sidewalks,
causing outrage among the residents of the neighbourhood.” But this time,
fifteen years later, the outrage was the deathly silence that ostracised him: “I
wanted to continue the discussion after Lacan’s speech, but everyone left.”
Indeed, they rose and left to have a drink, leaving Althusser standing there,
completely alone. We went up to him to try to say something, but he was
speaking aloud to himself, in his flawless rhetoric. It was impossible to get
a word in! Eight months later, on November 16, he strangled his wife while
giving her a massage. A year later, on September 9, 1981, Lacan died.
In his book, Althusser, like Strindberg, examines the trials of his family .
He was born in Algeria. His mother too was the daughter of poor peasants.
120 Seminar 5: 1991–1992
His father’s father came from Alsace, and had to emigrate to Algeria after
the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by Germany, following the Franco-
Prussian War. His father fought during World War I and came back
traumatised. His brother, Althusser’s uncle Louis, whose name he was
given, had been his mother’s first love, and was killed in combat. His father
succeeded in rising to a high position in a bank, but he could not express
himself in public because of his Alsatian accent. He had nightmares every
night. In 1939, Louis Althusser passed the competitive entrance exams to
the ENS, after having been drafted and spending five years as a prisoner in
Germany. He finally came back in 1945, to start his studies at the school
where he had passed the entrance exams six years earlier.
Our next seminar will focus on the discovery by William Rivers,
neurologist and anthropologist, of the psychoanalysis of trauma, during
World War I.

Notes
1 Siirala, M., From Transfer to Transference, Therapeia, 1983.
2 See infra, Seminar 2 on Gaetano Benedetti.
3 Lönnrot, E., The Kalevala, Bosley, K. (Trans.), Oxford Paperbacks, 2008.
4 Foucault, M., The Birth of the Clinic, Routledge, 2003.
5 Fritz, J. M., Le discours du fou au Moyen-Âge, Presses universitaires de France,
1992.
6 De Cervantes, M., Don Quixote, Canterbury Classics/Baker & Taylor, 2013.
7 Strindberg, A., Inferno, Mercure de France, 1966.
8 Strindberg, A., “Le fils de la servant,” in Œuvres autobiographiques, Vol. I, Mer-
cure de France, 1990.
9 Strindberg, A., Twelve Plays by Strindberg, Constable, 1955.
10 Strindberg, A., “A Catechism for Workers,” in Sinclair, U. (Ed.), The Cry for
Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest, Sinclair, 1915.
11 De La Fontaine, J., “The Limbs and the Stomach,” in The Complete Fables of
Jean de La Fontaine, University of Illinois Press, 2007, p. 57.
12 Strindberg, A., Inferno, Alone and Other Writings, Coltman, D. and Sprinchorn,
E. (Trans.), Anchor Books, 1968.
13 Enquist, P. O., Strindberg, une vie, Flammarion, 1985.
14 See infra, Seminar 4 on Toni Morrison and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann.
15 Von Goethe, J. W., Faust, Oxford Paperbacks, 2008.
16 De Balzac, H., Séraphîta, Kessinger Publishing, 1997.
17 Subsequent quotes from Strindberg, A., The Inferno, Field, C. (Trans.), G.P. Put-
nam’s Sons, 1913.
18 Strindberg, A., The Inferno, op. cit., p. 45.
19 Comte, A., Course in Positive Philosophy, Vol. 6, Cambridge Library Collection,
1842, Personal Preface.
20 Baudelaire, C., The Flowers of Evil, CreateSpace, 2009.
21 De Nerval, G., The Chimeras, Black Swan Books, 1985.
22 Laub, D., “Rétablir le ‘tu’ intérieur dans le témoignage du trauma” (“Re-
Establishing the Inner Thou in Testimony of Trauma”), in Une clinique de l’ex-
trême (Treating Severe Trauma), Le Coq Héron, 2015, No. 220, érès.
23 Plato, Theaetetus, Liberal Arts Press, 1955.
24 Enquist, P. O., Strindberg, une vie, op. cit.
 August Strindberg and Martii Siirala 121
25 Strindberg, A., “La chute du paradis perdu,” in Inferno, op. cit., Chapter 8.
26 Le Goff, J., The Birth of Purgatory, University of Chicago Press, 1986.
27 Bion, W., “Attacks on Linking,” in Second Thoughts, Karnac Books, 1993.
28 Freud, S. and Jung, C., The Freud/Jung Letters, McGuire, W. (Ed.), Princeton
University Press, 1994.
29 De Balzac, H., Séraphîta, op. cit.
30 Comte, A., The Positive Philosophy, Calvin Blanchard, 1855.
31 Bion, W., A Memoir of the Future, Karnac Books, 1991.
32 Strindberg, A., “Extracts from the Diary of a Damned Soul,” in The Inferno,
op. cit., Chapter 9.
33 Freud, S., Beyond the Pleasure Principle, S.E. 18, Hogarth Press, 1920.
34 Freud, S. and Binswanger, L., The Freud-Binswanger Letters, Fichtner, G. (Ed.),
Open Gate Press, 2000.
35 Warburg, A., L’Atlas Mnémosyne, L’Écarquillé, 2012.
36 Artaud, A., “Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society,” in Antonin Artaud:
Selected Writings, University of California Press, 1988.
37 Searles, H. F., “The Effort to Drive the Other Person Crazy,” British Journal of
Medical Psychology, 32 (1959): 1–18.
38 Hugo, V., The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Wordsworth, 1998.
39 De Cervantes, M., Don Quixote, op. cit., Vol. I, Chapter 20.
40 Plato, Phaedrus, Focus Publishing/R. Pullins Co., 2003.
41 Strindberg, A., “The Eternal Has Spoken,” in The Inferno, op. cit., Chapter 10.
42 Strindberg, A., “Hell Let Loose,” in The Inferno, op. cit., Chapter 11.
43 Wise, R. (Dir.), The Sound of Music, 1965.
44 Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
45 Freud, S., Project for a Scientific Psychology, S.E. 1, Hogarth Press, 1895, pp.
283–397.
46 Ponge, F., The Nature of Things, Fahnestock, L. (Trans.), Red Dust, 1995.
47 Vian, B., Foam of the Daze, TamTam Books, 2012.
48 Sartre, J.-P., Nausea, Penguin Books, 2000.
49 Althusser, L., The Future Lasts Forever, The New Press, 1995.
6 Seminar 6: 1997–1998
Pat Barker
The Regeneration Trilogy:1 objectivity
degree zero2

A subjective story
Pat Barker’s Trilogy deals with the psychoanalysis of war traumas, as it was
practised by William Rivers in England during World War I. This practice
is in stark contrast to the absence of such an approach in France, where the
dominant practice was traditional psychiatry, according to historians
Stephane Tison and Hervé Villemain in their recent book Du front à l’asile,
1914–1918 (From the Front to the Asylum, 1914–1918).3
How did we come across the Trilogy? In 1977, we were invited by the
Appalachian Psychoanalytic Society in Knoxville, Tennessee, to speak about
Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!4 which starts with an old maid, Miss Coldfield,
who has a “rapport with the […] cradle of events,” summoning a young man,
Quentin Compson, about to go off to Harvard, to listen to the tragic story of
her family, caught in the Civil War, which she has recorded since childhood by
“eavesdropping at the door of History.” Faulkner’s novel brought to mind the
wars fought by our fathers and grandfathers, of which we and our patients
were contemporaries in the arrested time of the madness of wars. After our
presentation, Bill MacGillivray, a member of the Society, suggested that we
read Pat Barker’s books, which had to do with the things we were talking
about.
At the same time, I read Jean-Baptiste Duroselle’s work about World War
I, entitled La grande guerre des francais, 1914–1918 (The Great War of the
French, 1914–1918).5 In the preface, the historian explains the subjective
nature of this book: his father had been wounded in Verdun, and his
professor, historian Pierre Renouvin, came back from the war with one arm
missing, as well as three fingers on his other hand. Duroselle’s vocation as
a historian was inextricably linked with the history of war traumas. More
recently, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, a World War I specialist, made the
same admission when, as a historian, he told the story of his paternal
grandfather, who had met with contempt when he came back from the
front traumatised. His book Quelle histoire (What a Story)6 was published
on the occasion of the centenary of the Great War.
 Pat Barker 123
The Sassoon case
The first book of the Trilogy, Regeneration, starts with the diagnosis that
William Rivers, neurologist, experimental psychologist, anthropologist and
psychoanalyst, must make in the case of the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who
left his army unit in 1917 and published a sensational anti-war Declaration.
Too old to be sent to France during the war, Rivers was recruited as
a military doctor and assigned to work at the Craiglockhart Hospital, near
Edinburgh, where shell-shocked officers were treated. Sassoon was brought
to him by his friend Robert Graves – future writer of Good-Bye to All That7
– in the hope that Rivers could help him. Rivers is caught in a double
bind – which Americans will call a “catch-22” after the next war, from the
title of Joseph Heller’s novel.8 The patient does not seem shell-shocked, and
the military expect an answer: Is he mad or not? One answer is as
problematic as the other. Graves has chosen Rivers knowing that he does
not consider war trauma a pathology, but rather the greatest catastrophe
that could befall the social link.
Sassoon is a poet9 and a hero who had been awarded the Victoria Cross
for having saved wounded men at the risk of his own life. His problem
started when he tore off his medal and threw it in the river. A ship sailed
past; Sassoon reflected that throwing the cross in the water to stop the war
was like trying to stop the ship with his bare hands. Then he devised a new
strategy: he wrote a letter addressed to the House of Commons. Dated
July 1917, it is entitled “Finished with War: A Soldier’s Declaration.” The
text reads as follows:

I am making the statement as an act of willful defiance of military

authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged
by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that
I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the war upon which
I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of
aggression and conquest. […] I have endured the sufferings of the
troops and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for
ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against
the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities
for which the fighting men are sacrificed. On behalf of those who are
suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being
practised upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous
complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the con-
tinuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not
enough imagination to realise.10

Thus, Rivers is faced with a dilemma: either he judges Sassoon to be mad and
invalidates his act, or he judges him to be sane and sends him to face court
martial. Since Rivers does not like the usual tests, his first neurological exam is
124 Seminar 6: 1997–1998
a tea party session, which goes quite well – the patient presents no tics or
trembling. The second test is political. Rivers reads to him, from his medical
file, his military citations and the support he received from pacifists like
Bertrand Russell and Lady Ottoline. Sassoon rejects any political uses to which
they might be put. Rivers concludes: “the Declaration is logical and coherent.”
Now a psychiatric exam has to be performed: Is this a case of war
neurosis diagnosed just recently? Not really. Sassoon’s last nightmare
occurred in April, when a friend died in a useless mission. He even
hallucinated piles of corpses, on whose faces people were walking in
Piccadilly. But there had been no nightmares or hallucinations since:
“Sometimes a dream seems to go on after I’ve woken up […]. I don’t
know whether that’s abnormal.” – “I hope not,” Rivers answered. “It
happens to me all the time” (R, p. 13).

Psychoanalysis of traumas

Sassoon: the analyst’s “I”

Rivers reads Freud, but differs from him because he remains personally
involved with patients. Of course, their clinical practices are radically
different. The Craiglockhart Hospital is filled with catatonic men, silent or
delirious, who scream during the night. From a window of this loony bin
comparable to Dante’s Inferno, we see Rivers watching Sassoon arrive with
his friend. He perceives the poet’s fear: “After paying the driver, Sassoon
lingered for a moment, looking up at the building. […] Sassoon […] took
a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and ran up the steps.” River’s
sensitive “seismograph” is also recording his own impressions: “Rivers
turned away from the window, feeling almost ashamed of having witnessed
that small, private victory over fear” (R, p. 9).
His shame disqualifies him at once from representing the figure of the
traditional psychiatrist, who is personified at the end of the book by Lewis
Yealland, the “great dissector of the brain,”11 advocate of electroshock, the
British equivalent of France’s Vincent Clovis, who considered the soldiers’
symptoms malingering and cowardice. Rivers did not believe that
objectivity was the golden rule in psychiatry.
The Trilogy is dedicated in great part to the conflict between subjectivity
and objectivity, centring around a signifier inscribed in the title of
the second book, The Eye in the Door. This signifier plays on the
homonymy of the words “eye” and “I,” depending on whether Rivers
observes through the door, like a voyeur looking through a peephole, or is
involved as a subject, “I,” at their side. Pat Barker based her story on
Rivers’ clinical notes and the ethnographic journal he kept in Melanesia.
The interplay between the researcher and his field of enquiry, and later his
patients, is the main focus of his interest, and of our seminars.
 Pat Barker 125
Not only does Rivers trust his subjective impressions, but he shares his
questioning with his patients: “Do you think you were shell-shocked?”
Sassoon doubts it, because he has been writing poems he considers good.
“Would it be possible for me to see them?” his future analyst asks. Sassoon
agrees and enquires about his diagnosis:

You said […] you didn’t think I was mad? – The point is you hate civil-
ians, don’t you? […] You seem to have a very powerful anti-war neur-
osis. You realize […] that it’s my duty to … to try to change that?
I can’t pretend to be neutral. Sassoon’s glance took in both their uni-
forms. No, of course not.

End of the first session (R, p. 15).

The approach to this complex situation is described by Harry Stack
Sullivan – their contemporary, liaison officer at the St. Elizabeths Hospital in
Washington, and later psychoanalyst of young schizophrenic patients at the
Sheppard Pratt Hospital in Baltimore – as a “twosome laboratory” that brings
together “all the elements of the social sciences”12 and takes into account the
lineage of analysts, as we shall see. From the start, Sassoon points out the
break in the social link between civilians, on the one hand, who exclaim
indignantly that war is horrible and deplore the losses while they sip their beer,
and, on the other, those who have seen men die in a shell-hole (R, p. 14).
Bryce, Rivers’ colleague, asks him what he thinks of the newcomer: “I found
him … much more impressive than I expected,” Rivers answers. Contrary to
other patients, Sassoon’s efforts are not directed at forgetting, as families and
doctors often advise, but rather at remembering and inscribing. He has agreed
to spend a little time each day speaking to Rivers about that.

The analyst’s standpoint

In one of his poems, Sassoon expresses his desire to remember:

I am back again from hell …

That shall not be unsaid, …
And the wounds in my heart are red
For I have watched them die.

Rivers, who is not well versed in poetry, doesn’t know what to say. But
these verses are addressed to a therapist, not to a literary critic. He
understands that writing the poems was therapeutic, just as writing the
Declaration had been; both sprang from the same source. Yet he has taken
a stand, which he made clear to his patient, and at the same time he
worries that Sassoon’s return to the Front would be a “risky business […]
and might well precipitate a relapse.”
126 Seminar 6: 1997–1998
Their second meeting is more eventful, since Rivers does not intend to let the
patient unfold his family history without saying anything. Sassoon begins to
recount his life from the beginning, as he thinks he is expected to do: his
father’s death when he was 8, his loneliness, not going to the funeral. The army
was the first place where he felt he belonged: “And yet you’ve cut yourself off
from it,” his analyst cuts in. – Yes, because … Rivers interrupts him again,
knowing from experience that in the field of trauma, causality does not apply:

I am not interested in the reasons […]. I’m more interested in the result.
The effect on you. – Isolation, I suppose. I can’t talk to anybody. – You
talk to me. Or at least I think you do. – You don’t say stupid things.

Rivers turned his head away: “I’m pleased about that.”

The transference has been established. Sassoon has found someone to
talk to, as it becomes clear when the analyst challenges him again:

You can’t bear to be safe, can you? […] If you go on refusing to serve,
you’ll […] spend the remainder of the war in […] Complete Personal
Safety. You don’t think you might find being safe while other people die
rather difficult?

Sassoon is enraged: “Nobody else in this stinking country seems to find it

difficult. […] I’ll just learn to live with it. Like everybody else.” Rivers takes
the risk of jeopardising a positive transference and frustrating the patient’s
desire for their relationship to continue this way. Revealing his own shame
at “having witnessed” Sassoon’s “small victory over fear,” he introduces
Shame into the session.
But other patients don’t allow him the time to reflect at length on this heated
exchange. Campbell, Sassoon’s room-mate, is convinced that Sassoon is
a German spy, since his first name is Siegfried. Rivers assures him that
German spies never call themselves Siegfried. Relieved, Campbell taps him on
the shoulder, explaining: “Just thought I’d mention it.” Rivers thanks him:
“Much appreciated.”

Burns: failures of analysis

The life of a chrysalis

Sassoon’s anger is nothing compared to the violence reigning in the ward,
and Rivers’ helplessness in the midst of it. Burns is creating havoc. He is
constantly vomiting since he was thrown in the air by the explosion of
a shell and landed head first on a German corpse, rupturing its gas-filled
belly. The fact that was unable to heal him “drained [Rivers] of energy that
rightly belonged to his patients.”
 Pat Barker 127
In Chapter 4, Burns puts on his mackintosh and goes out. The nurses let
him leave. He takes the bus, travels across Edinburgh and trudges through
a muddy field fenced in with barbed wire. He is soaked, seeks shelter under
some trees, sits down to rest, and sees animal corpses hanging from a tree:
foxes, magpies, weasels, ferrets. He hears Rivers’ voice telling him: “If you
run now, you’ll never stop.” But he wants to be in this place where he feels
he belongs. His body remembers the trenches. After untying all the “ghosts
in the making” – referenced in the title of the third book – he lays the
corpses on the ground in a circle around him. He takes off his clothes, folds
his uniform and waits, naked, for the whistling of shells, surrounded by his
companions.
The hospital staff is panicked when he does not return, fearing he might
have committed suicide. When he comes back in the evening, he is scolded
by a nurse, who warms him up, gets him food and calls Rivers. Burns will
see what’s what. Rivers sits at Burns’ bedside while he sleeps and smiles at
him when he opens his eyes. Observing him stealthily, Burns realises that he
has come back “for Rivers” (R, pp. 38–40), for a witness to what he did. By
enacting an experience impossible to convey in words, he transformed it
into a ritual that Rivers, the anthropologist, is able to authenticate. But ten
chapters later, the reader learns that Burns has relapsed to his initial state
(R, p. 167).
He has returned to his family’s seaside home. Rivers, exhausted, has
taken a vacation, and visits him at his request. Burns is still unable to eat.
Rivers is struck to see that “a prematurely aged man and a fossilized
schoolboy seemed to exist [in him] side by side,” giving him a “curiously
ageless quality.” And now Burns disappears once again, on a stormy night,
after a distress rocket was sent up and sandbags were piled up to protect
the house. This time he went to bury himself in the moat of a medieval
castle, where violent deaths had occurred when the site was a battlefield in
various wars – the perfect site for re-enacting the trenches in France. Rivers
carries the emaciated body back to the house; in his arms, the body loses its
stiffness and becomes a rag doll. Rivers puts him to bed and then prepares
him breakfast, thinking that “nothing justifies this.” But this time, when
Burns is himself again, he tells Rivers, for the first time, about the Battle of
the Somme, a futile attack in a place that was not on the map, and his field
promotion, when all he could hope for to avoid atrocious mutilation was
a bullet in the heart.
For the first time, Rivers sees the possibility that he might be healed, for
he is now able to put into perspective the decomposed body into which he
fell, by remembering more bearable events. Rivers knows only too well how
closely the first stages of improvement resemble deterioration. To describe
this paradox, he uses an image that should be taught to every “embryo
analyst,” as Bion, who fought in the same battles, calls his young
colleagues: when one cuts a chrysalis open, there is a rotting caterpillar
inside. The chrysalis’ transformation resembles decomposition. After this
128 Seminar 6: 1997–1998
transforming episode, Burns thinks he can go back to his studies, now that
he has been able to face, at last, his war experiences in France, where “he
has missed his chance to be ordinary” (R, p. 184).

Anderson and Billy Prior: the analyst’s dreams

Despite the idealised view others had of him, Rivers did not consider himself
a saint. He could involve himself with experiences of this kind because they
had something to do with him, as shown by his own dreams, elicited by
patients. Gaetano Benedetti called them “therapeutic dreams,” the birthplace
of a “transitional subject.”13 Anderson’s dream is particularly unexpected
since he hates psychoanalysis. A surgeon in civilian life, he can no longer bear
the sight of blood after he was unable to save a young Frenchman covered in
mud, screaming in pain and bleeding to death. Anderson never tells Rivers his
dreams, although on his floor everyone awakened by his screams knows about
them, especially his room-mate, who is getting worse.
In his dream, Anderson is threatened by snakes, the ones on Rivers’
caduceus; Rivers himself is dressed like a forensic pathologist. When his
analyst asks the routine question: “Do you often dream of snakes?”
Anderson goes into a harangue against “Freudian Johnnies” and their
stupid interpretations. This dream haunts Rivers while he makes his rounds
in the ward. He asks himself whether being attacked by the serpents on the
rod of Asclepius, and therefore unable to work as a surgeon and support
his family, might not, at the same time, announce Anderson’s possible
suicide, offering up his corpse to the doctor in medical examiner’s garb.
Rivers’ feeling of powerlessness is amplified the next day when he meets
Prior, another new patient on the ward, who is just as recalcitrant. The 22-
year-old Prior is a fictional character, invented by Pat Barker based on
Rivers’ clinical notes. He comes from a working-class family in the North
of England, speaks with a local accent, and is tied to the historical context
of the social movement in that region during the war – the theme of the
next book. When Rivers asks him what happened, because his file has not
yet arrived, he indicates that he cannot speak by writing in capital letters
on a notepad: “I don’t remember.”
Rivers examines his throat and Prior writes the diagnosis himself:
“There’s nothing physically wrong.” Rivers suggests: “[…] we’re going to
have to try to get a history together […]. And that’s not going to be easy. –
Why? – Because I need to know what’s happened to you. – I don’t
remember. – No, not at the moment, perhaps, but the memory will start to
come back. A long silence. At last Prior scribbled something, then turned
[…] to face the wall. Rivers leant across and picked the pad up. […] ‘No
more words’” (R, p. 43).
The next night, Rivers has a dream that says a lot about his involvement
with his patients, for it is triggered by both these patients: the medical
examiner in Anderson’s dream and the lack of words on Prior’s notepad.
 Pat Barker 129
Experiment with Head on nerve regeneration
Rivers’ second dream, which he analyses in two stages, brings back the
neurological experiments he conducted between 1903 and 1907, as an
assistant to neurologist Henry Head, well known for his discoveries on
sensory-motor nerves. The book’s title, Regeneration, is an explicit reference
to these experiments that Head carried out on himself, while Rivers tested
the regeneration of a nerve that Head had cut in his own arm.
In the dream, Head has his eyes closed and his arm bared, showing the
full length of a purple scar. Rivers’ task is to map the area of sensitivity to
pain by pricking the forearm with a needle in different places, and with
different degrees of intensity. In the dream, as he is pricking his arm, Head
cries out with pain. Rivers would like to stop, but he knows he must
continue.
So far, the dream describes the real experiment that led to the discovery
of two stages of pain. At the first stage, called “protopathic,” pain is
extreme regardless of the intensity or nearness of the needle prick. At
the second stage, called “epicritic,” differentiated thresholds appear, making
it possible to identify areas and variations of sensibility. Then Rivers’ dream
takes a different turn. He has to mark in pen, on the neurologist’s arm, the
outline of the protopathic area. Head hands him a scalpel, saying: “Why
don’t you try it?” Before he can utter a word, Head makes an incision near
his elbow, drawing blood. At that point, he wakes up (R, pp. 45–46).
Rivers analyses his dream. The overt content is striking in its precision. It
was he who suggested that Head become the guinea pig in an experiment
that would require rigorous observation. It had been conducted for five
years, and was extremely painful, especially at the protopathic stage, when
pain was extreme regardless of the circumstances, in an “all-or-nothing”
manner. Although at the time they never considered interrupting the
experiment, the desire to stop was intense in Rivers’ dream.
The dream’s latent content brings into question Freud’s theory. Although
on the surface it seems to validate his conception of dreams as wish
fulfilment – Rivers wanted to return to Cambridge to pursue his research –
this interpretation overlooks the fact that the dream expresses fear and
horror. Did the dream express Rivers’ desire to torture one of his best
friends? No doubt, the staunchest of Freud’s supporters would have
accepted this hypothesis, but Rivers could not. Instead, he felt the dream
reflected his own conflict between his duty and the fact that he was
inflicting pain, between his support for the continuation of the war and the
horror to which Burns, Anderson and Prior were subjected.
Lately, all his dreams were about the conflict each patient triggered in the
course of a treatment, which was, after all, his experimentation with
psychoanalysis. Confronted with the paralysis of their sensibility, was he not
awakening the protopathic pain of an unspeakable memory for the sake of
an experiment?
130 Seminar 6: 1997–1998
Through transference, Rivers applies the neurological metaphor to
emotional amputation. Something has cut off the circulation of information
to which memory has no access. Dissociated states are reintegrated when he
makes his patients talk, but at the cost of bringing back an overwhelming
terror that could drive them to suicide. In his dream, he is experimenting on
himself, as Head forced him to do, with the terror he tells his patients is not
shameful, any more than the tenderness so prevalent between men fighting
together. But, at the same time, his duty, after the epicritic stage of
transference, is to have them sent back to the front line in France
(R, p. 48).

Prior’s psychoanalysis

Class struggle in analysis

The effect of Rivers’ dream on his work with patients is immediate. Prior
recovers his voice by screaming during the night: “Suddenly I realized
I could talk.” But Rivers’ troubles are not over, since now his patient
constantly questions him about himself. When the analyst tries to bring
Prior back to his war memories, his patient replies: “All the questions from
you, all the answers from me. Why can’t it be both ways?”
His refusal to cooperate takes different forms: contempt for the analytic
approach, to which he prefers hypnosis; contempt for the officers in the
army – considered “one big family” – for the “WC” (working classes) (R, p. 52);
and contempt for his father, about whom Rivers said, after having met him: “I
liked him.” “Oh yes,” Prior agrees: “Outside the house. [Inside] I’ve seen him use
my mother as a football” (R, p. 61). Rivers tells Prior that he is grateful to his
father for having informed him that he has had asthma since childhood. He then
examines Prior’s lungs and cannot understand why he had not been found unfit
for service.
The next night, Sassoon is woken up by screaming. Soon afterwards, he
hears Rivers’ and Prior’s voices. As he goes back to bed, Prior is analysing
transference: “I supposed most of them turn you into daddy, don’t they?
Well, I’m a bit too old to be sitting on daddy’s knee. – Kicking him on the
shins every time you meet him isn’t generally considered more mature. –
I see. A negative transference. Is that what you think we’ve got?” Rivers
asks him where he learned all that: “I can read.” The book beside his bed is
entitled The Todas; Rivers wrote it after his second expedition to southern
India in 1901 and 1902, two years after he participated in an expedition to
the Torres Strait Islands, north of Australia, which revealed his vocation as
an anthropologist.
Their conversation soon takes a more aggressive tone, when Prior launches
into a harangue on class discrimination. He is enraged by snobbery in the
military. Rivers is unable to bring Prior back to the nightmare that propelled
 Pat Barker 131
him out of bed, leaving him crouching on the floor, as if he was trying to get
through the wall – like Rivers had found him (R, p. 67).
Prior’s hostility increases. He asks if he can smoke, and when Rivers
refers to his asthma, he replies in a mocking tone: “Do you know how long
an average officer lasts in France? – Yes, three months. You’re not in
France.” Rivers has now read Prior’s file and continues to question him
about the nine days he refuses to talk about: “Do you remember the
attack?” To his surprise, Prior gives in: “All right.” The debriefing begins,
and stops at the question: “What did you feel? […] you’re describing this
attack as if it were a – a slightly ridiculous event […] but you’d have to be
inhuman to be as detached as that.” “All right,” Prior said with a smile: “It
felt … sexy” (R, p. 79).
Rivers tells himself that if he were to undergo the same questioning, he
would have a similar reaction. After this implicit recognition, the
unspeakable is about to emerge, from the shell-hole where Prior lost
consciousness. But he pulls back and tells Rivers: “You always want to
win.” Rivers protests: “I had been […] assuming we were on the same side,”
but in vain (R, p. 80). The class struggle gets the upper hand:

Officers’ dreams tend to be more elaborate. The men’s dreams are much
more a matter of simple wish fulfilment. […] I suppose officers [have] a more
complex mental life. – You honestly believe that that gaggle of noodle-
brained half-wits […] has a complex mental life? Oh, Rivers! – What you
tend to get in officers is stammering […] not just muteness. – It’s even more
interesting that you stammer.

Rivers is taken aback, and ventures: “It may even be genetic.” But Prior
suggests: “You might sit down and work out what it is you’ve spent fifty
years trying not to say” (R, p. 97).

Regeneration of otherness
Late that night, Prior knocks on his door to apologise, and asks Rivers to
hypnotise him. Rivers agrees. Under hypnosis, Prior is in a dugout; he has
first trench watch, at dawn, and goes past two buddies making tea and
grilling bacon. Then he hears a shell, a cry, and comes running back to see
a conical black hole and nothing else – no kettle, no frying pan, no sign of
the two men. He and another man shovel into a bag the mud mixed with
human remains. He vomits. When they have almost finished, he finds
himself staring into an intensely blue eye that he is holding between his
fingers. It’s the eye of one of the two dead men. “What am I supposed to
do with this?” he asks. The man who is shovelling with him takes hold of
his wrist, making the eye fall into the bag. “After that, my face became
numb and I couldn’t speak” (R, p. 101).
132 Seminar 6: 1997–1998
When he comes out of the hypnosis, Prior continues to deny what he felt:
“It was nothing.” Then he starts to cry and pummel Rivers on the chest
with his fists. The analyst takes this to be the closest Prior can come to
asking for physical contact. Prior’s story continues with the “friendly fire”
in which more men are killed by the British in trenches, where compasses
don’t work because of all the metal in the barbed wire.
The regeneration of otherness, after all others had disappeared, was not
achieved through conversation, but by fist blows, after which Prior
continues to check if the other is solid. He does not accept his own
breakdown: “Most people could break down,” Rivers tells him, “if the
pressure were bad enough, I know I could. – Did the wallpaper speak?”
Prior asks him, adding, as he is leaving the room: “He has very blue eyes,
you know … we used to call him the Hun.” Once again, Rivers reflects that
his patients are not mentally ill; they constantly test their analysts with
“shrewd X-ray eyes,” to see if they can trust them (R, p. 107).

Changing places: prerequisite to accessing trauma

Prior’s analysis culminates in the second book, The Eye in the Door, when
he insists that his analyst analyse his own symptom. They are both in
London, where Rivers now works in a hospital of the Royal Flying Corps,
and Prior in the Intelligence Service of the Ministry of Munitions. Prior has
had “fugue states,” seven to be precise; he knows exactly how long they
lasted, but not what he did during that time. The analyst is back to square
one, as always happens in such cases, when all the previous progress is
followed by backsliding to the zone of death, from which other elements
have to be brought back to be regenerated. For all its familiarity, this
impasse is hard to bear each time it happens. Prior speaks to Rivers “as if
he was talking to the village idiot,” and Rivers tells himself that they have
gone back to the worst moments at Craiglockhart (E, p. 133).
Prior’s antagonism is so great that Rivers strikes back: “I’m not here to be
liked. – For somebody who isn’t here to be liked you have the most wonderful
manner,” Prior replies. Rivers sweeps his hand across his eyes: “… most
therapists are interested in dissociated states and so they […] encourage the
patient further down that path. And that’s dangerous. – Is that why you do
this?” Prior asks, imitating his gesture. “… it’s just a habit. – No […]. You do it
when … something touches a nerve. It is a way of hiding your feelings. You’ve
just said it yourself, the eyes are the one part you can’t turn into wallpaper.”
Disconcerted, Rivers thinks that the confrontation is unavoidable, and he
finally admits that he has no visual memory. As a result, he can focus more
easily on what a patient says. Prior dismisses this rationalisation and asks:
“Have you always been like this?” It is now Rivers’ turn to decide: “All
right.” He stands up and changes seats with Prior. Surprised by the actual
enactment of what, in fact, has been going on for some time, Prior asks:
“Isn’t this against the rules? – I can’t think of a single rule we’re not already
 Pat Barker 133
breaking. […] I’m going to show you how boring the job is,” Rivers
answers. “Go on,” Prior prompts him in an empathetic tone, adopting the
pose of his analyst, his hands crossed under his chin (E, p. 136). Rivers
does not intend to reveal anything other than what he has already
published. But Prior’s quality of listening would abolish these limits. In the
meantime, the history-taking begins.
“When I was five …” Rivers describes their house in Brighton, and stops at
the top floor, where, facing the stairs, he sees his father’s priest’s gown hanging.
“… something happened to me […] that was so terrible that I simply had to
forget it.” Having learned from the best, Prior proposes an interference with his
own story: “You were raped. Or beaten.” Rivers dismisses this interpretation,
saying that things happen to children of that age which seem terrible to them,
but would seem neither terrible nor important to adults. “And equally things
happen to children which are genuinely terrible. And would be recognized as
terrible by anybody at any age,” Prior answers.
Transference has changed direction. Now it’s Rivers’ turn to ask: “How old
were you? – Eleven.” We naturally think of mutual analysis, tried by Ferenczi,
who at the same period was serving as an army surgeon in a hospital in
Hungary. In the exchange between Rivers and Prior, child sexual abuse is
placed on the same plane as war trauma: “It was on the tip of Rivers’ tongue
to say that no doubt Prior had been ‘raped’ in a number of places.”
For the first time, Prior talks about being raped by the parish parson, to
whom his mother gave a shilling a week – which she couldn’t afford – as
tuition for his instruction. And he tries to joke: “He got paid in kind, that’s
all. […] Don’t look so shocked, Rivers. – I am shocked,” Rivers answers.
Prior cannot bear the condescension often hidden behind indignation, and
reinstates equality between them by grasping Rivers’ knee and asking:

This terrible-in-big-black-inverted-commas thing that happened to you,

what do you think it was? […] How old were you when you started to
stammer? – Fi-ive. – For god’s sake. Whatever it was, you blinded yourself
so you wouldn’t have to go on seeing it. […] And what do you feel? – Fear.

Prior applauded. Three loud claps.

After some hesitation, Rivers suggests the image of medieval maps in which
unknown spaces are filled with monsters. A more astute analyst than Rivers in
this instance, Prior asserts the existence of real monsters and of images that
stand in their way – Aby Warburg’s surviving images – like the dressing gown
on the threshold of the unknown. And he concludes: “Do you know, Rivers,
you’re as neurotic as I am? And that’s saying quite a lot” (E, p. 140).

The birth certificates of ghosts

Reflecting on this exhausting session, Rivers admits that Prior is a “formidable
interrogator” who uncovered the doubtless traumatic origin of the loss of his
134 Seminar 6: 1997–1998
visual memory. Prior made him face a deep division in himself that had
oriented his research with Head (E, p. 142).
A nightmare confirms this interpretation: Head is performing an autopsy,
but something is wrong. Rivers tries to say: “No, he is alive.” Head doesn’t
hear him and continues. A hand grabs his wrist, and the cadaver stands up,
displaying all his hideous nudity. So, Head, the kindest of men, who had
a gift for involving his patients in the study of their own conditions, could
also set his empathy aside and work in a completely dissociated state.
Prior has in fact told Rivers: “Your case interests me.” He has read his
analyst’s writings, and makes use of his geographic metaphor of unmapped
zones where the subject disappears in the presence of real monsters. He now
acts as the principal investigator of their co-research, and makes use of
Rivers’ own method by asking what happened just before, and holding up
the mirror of his own story when there are no more images.
The child Prior was comes to the aid of the child Rivers was. But unlike
Rivers, who blocked out all visual images, as a child, Prior lost himself in
the yellow glow of a barometer on the wall, when the atmosphere in his
home was too frightening. This yellow light attracts him again as he drinks
a glass of beer in a pub, after reading in The Times about the death of
a friend on the front line. He would have liked, just then, for a tank to
come through the door and crush all these “prosperous-looking men” with
their contented smiles, as it crushed the wounded at the Front who could
not get out of the way in time. Then he dissociates for three hours,
absorbed in the yellow light: “He had about twenty minutes left, the rest
was blank” (E, p. 122).
Prior arrives at his next session speaking of himself in the third person,
and ends up announcing, in the first person: “I was born in the Flanders
clay two years ago, in a shell-hole in France. I have no father.” Then he
describes, in the third person, a violent scene between his parents, in which
he tried to intervene and was thrown against a wall. After that, he started
staring at the barometer and blotting everything away: “He wasn’t there.”
To prove it, he burns his hand with a cigar, remaining totally impassive.
Rivers tells him: “And now you have taken your little blue-eyed boy back.”
Prior had a dazed, faraway look, like that of a drug addict. Abruptly, his
features convulsed with pain. Rivers dresses his wound, gives him brandy as
an anaesthetic, makes up a bed for him in the hospital, calls him Billy, and
says, leaving the room: “… and don’t get depressed. We’ve made a lot of
progress” (E, p. 242).
Instead of observing the foreclosure of the name of the father, Rivers is
for Prior, and Prior for him, a warrior double – the Iliad’s definition of the
therapon: second in combat and ritual double, charged with funeral rites.
For the first time, Prior dissociated in the session, bringing back the child
lost in the yellow glow, to regenerate him, literally, by having him be born
in the shell-hole, with his dead buddies, and with the analyst as a reliable
witness.
 Pat Barker 135
Another dream Rivers has the following night gives shape to the transference.
While turning restlessly in his bed, thinking that he is dreaming the dreams of
his patients rather than his own, he sees himself in a dreadful place where
nothing human could live, and he is completely alone. Then he sees the mud
begin to move, to gather itself together: “It rises and stands before him in the
shape of a man who turns and starts walking towards England.” Rivers tries to
call him, but “the mud takes the shape of a man again, and then of many more
men, until the night is filled with creatures made of Flanders mud, moving their
grotesque limbs in the direction of home” (E, p. 244).

Time is set in motion

Prior had been able to create a persistent psychic state free of fear and pain,
inaccessible to normal consciousness. Still, he and Rivers brought back from
the Flanders clay those who had disappeared there, and took them home. The
next morning at breakfast, Rivers decides to have Prior revisit the landing at
the top of the stairs in the house where the barometer had been.

… when you were quite small you discovered a way of dealing with
a very unpleasant situation […]. And then in France, under that intoler-
able pressure, you rediscovered it. All I’m suggesting is that you redis-
covered a method of coping that served you well as a child. […] I think
there has to be a moment of … recognition. Acceptance. There has to
be a moment when you look in the mirror and say, yes, this too is
myself.

Traumatic memory gives way to memory that forgets, and can therefore
remember, as Wilfred Bion would say.14 Childhood memories come flooding
back to Prior, who feels “like a sort of lifelong hopeless neurotic,” like he’ll
never be able to do anything. Instead of invoking the Oedipus complex of
the little boy who defended his mother against the father, Rivers, who is in
touch with the child’s helplessness – now cut out – gives Prior hope: “I
shouldn’t worry about that. Half the world’s work’s done by hopeless
neurotics.” Without prolonging the anamnesis, he testifies to a similar
experience, in his own life, and offers him an initial mirror for a situation
when time stops. Prior starts to feel more consolidated and he offers to type
Rivers’ texts, telling him that he writes like he stammers (E, p. 256).
The only thing that actually matters to him now is “new loyalties,”
formed in the Picard clay, which swallows up the living but creates new ties
to which civilians and their good conscience have no access. Prior agrees:

none of them is the same person he was before the war, the person his
family still remembers. If you asked those who fought in France if they
were the same when they came back, all of them would say no.
(E, p. 255)
136 Seminar 6: 1997–1998
Rivers has created a new loyalty to his patients and to their ghosts, who
may come home now. Contrary to Lacan – not much younger than they
were – who could not bear the fact that he hadn’t recognised his father
when he returned from the Front (twelve years later, Lacan turned to
psychiatry, introducing a new diagnosis: “self-punishment paranoia”), and
who stopped practising psychoanalysis during World War II – Rivers and
other analysts of psychosis and trauma created new ties of loyalty with
people who had abandoned all hope. One of these analysts was Françoise
Dolto (1908–1988), who had been a child during World War I. Seven years
younger than Lacan, she was 6 years old at the onset of the war and wrote
letters to her beloved godfather who was on the front line. When he was
killed in 1915, she declared she was a “widow,” like the women around her,
who were mad with grief after the loss of a son or of a husband. She
became a child analyst, and during World War II worked with children such
as Leon, a Jewish boy.15 All day long he was attached to a chair, in his
parents’ clandestine tailor shop, so that they could go on working. He was
unable to stand on his feet, until Dolto spoke to the chair, which had
become part of his self. The family escaped deportation. Like Rivers, in
desperate situations Dolto made use of the dissociation she experienced as
a child during the previous war.
In the transference, what takes place is the encounter of two dissociations.
At this unpredictable point of coincidence, the meeting of two disconnections,
which Rivers calls “suppressions”16 – distinct from “repression” – there is
likely to be a connection in the arrested time where patients wait for us.

First electric shocks

The other method, very widespread today, consists of deepening
dissociation by mechanical means, using electric shocks, administered under
anaesthesia nowadays. In Rivers’ era, this procedure was known as
faradisation. Pat Barker illustrates its use at the end of Regeneration,
through the portrayal of the famous psychiatrist Lewis Yealland, who
claimed that shell-shocked men were degenerates (R, p. 115). Today, it is
more polite to speak of “genetic defects.”
Rivers accepts Yealland’s invitation to visit him at the National
Hospital in London, and makes the morning rounds with him and two
young doctors. Their attitude is cheerful; they are not interested in the
patients’ psychological state and they ask no questions, since the only
thing that matters is rapid suppression of the symptoms, which are
supposed to disappear within a week. The learned party stops before
a man who has become catatonic after a shell exploded next to him,
burying him up to his neck. Since then, he has remained in the same
position, unable to lie in his bed, his torso leaning forward, his head
twisted to his side, seeing lights dance before his eyes, although he
suffered no physical wounds. Yealland informs him, “in an almost god-
 Pat Barker 137
like tone,” that he will receive an electric treatment that afternoon, and
warns: “The electricity may be strong, but it will be the means of
restoring your lost powers. – Will it hurt?” asks the young man, seized
with a fear Rivers remembers only too well. Yealland dismisses it with an
impatient gesture: “I am sure you understand the principals of the
treatment […] questions, never” (R, p. 225).
The last bed is occupied by Callan. He has become mute, like Prior had
been, and is “very negative,” according to Yealland, who recites the names
of the places where he was stationed: “Mons, the Marne, Aisne, Ypres […]
Neuve-Chapelle, Loos, Armantières, the Somme and Arras.” He broke
down while feeding the horses, remained unconscious for five hours, and
came round shaking all over and unable to speak. Very strong electric
current had been applied to his neck and throat, and lighted cigarettes to
his tongue. “I’m sorry?” Rivers protested. “What was that?” Callan smiled.
Yealland admonished him: “I understand your [indifference] and it makes
no difference to me […]. You must recover your speech at once.” He asks
Rivers if he has time to witness a treatment, on condition that he shows no
reaction: “The last thing these patients need is a sympathetic audience”
(R. p. 228).
The treatment room is in darkness, except for a small circle of light
around the battery. Yealland locks the door and puts the key in his pocket:
“you will not leave me until you are talking […]. Remember you must
behave as the hero I expect you to be.” He straps him in the chair. After
an hour of weak current, Callan managed to say: “Ah.” Yealland
encourages him: “Do you realize that there is already improvement?” The
electrode is applied again, and Yealland asks Callan to repeat the sound of
the letters of the alphabet after him. Callan is falling asleep after
a half hour of only saying: “Ah.” Yealland brings him out of the chair and
forces him to walk up and down in the room, repeating the letters endlessly.
Callan runs to the door. “You do not understand your condition as I do,”
says Yealland, whose desire to strike is obvious to Rivers, as is the patient’s
submission. He is strapped in again and told: “You must speak, but I shall
not listen to anything you have to say.”
Once he is back home, Rivers realises that he is sick. During the night,
he has a nightmare in which a man is tortured by having a horse’s bit
forced into his mouth – like the slaves in the novel Beloved17 – the horse
might have been the one Callan was feeding when he collapsed. He screams.
This dream is certainly not wish fulfilment of a sexual nature: it depicts oral
rape. The next day, Rivers stutters when he sees Yealland again. Of course,
he remembers that Prior’s silence had exasperated him, but the pain he had
inflicted was not in any way equivalent. That treatment aimed at controlling
patients engaged in self-destructive behaviour. In fact, Callan later
committed suicide. The first part of Rivers’ nightmare reiterated Sassoon’s
Declaration (R, p. 258).
138 Seminar 6: 1997–1998
Sassoon’s psychoanalysis continued

Visions
What would have happened if Sassoon had been given faradisation? In
a meeting with another doctor who is sceptical about his method, Rivers
declares: “I am not going to give him electric shocks, or subcutaneous
injections either. I’m simply asking him to defend his position” (R, p. 175).
Sassoon continues to write poetry. There is another poet at Craiglockhart,
young Wilfred Owens, Dr Brock’s patient. He also stutters when he asks his
idol for an autograph for his mother. Sassoon alludes to his own mother,
devastated by the death of his brother, killed at Gallipoli in 1915. We also
learn that Siegfried’s father died when the boy was 5, after having gone
away two years earlier. Siegfried tells Owen that he owes his first name to
his mother’s love of Wagner, adding in jest that fortunately he was not
a girl, for he might have been named Brünehilde.
Sassoon’s conversations with Rivers go beyond the former’s intentions, when
he hears himself describing a strange impression: “Sometimes when you’re
alone, in the trenches, I mean, at night you get the sense of something ancient.
As if the trenches had always been there.” Outside of time, he perceives that
the skulls around him are those of Marlborough’s men:

as if all other wars had somehow … distilled themselves into this war.
[…] It’s like a very deep voice saying: “Run along, little man. Be thank-
ful if you survive.” […] A hundred years from now, they’ll still be
ploughing up skulls. And I seemed to be in that time and looking back.
I think I saw our ghosts.
(R, p. 84)

Speak of a Memoir of the Future!18

Pat Barker has read Tristram Shandy.19 Her Captain Rivers resembles
Captain Shandy, who served under General Marlborough. In her Trilogy,
Rivers even repeats Toby Shandy’s famous gesture of setting a fly free by
letting it fly out a window, telling it: “Go poor devil, get thee gone, why should
I hurt thee? – This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.”
Toby Shandy was to be reincarnated in Captain Bion in A Memoir of the
Future, written fifty years after he had fought in the same places20 – like
Françoise’s grandfather, a stretcher-bearer – in the Vosges, at Verdun, in the
Arras mud and on the Chemin des Dames ridge. He would whistle “The
Sombre and Meuse Regiment,” evoking the confluence of the rivers where
Uncle Toby, in Tristram Shandy, “had the honour to receive his wound.”
Sassoon sees in Owen a junior officer, like Bion and Wittgenstein had
been, and like all the patients in Pat Barker’s novel are. Sassoon asks the
young poet what he is writing. Owen admits that he is not writing about
the ugliness of war. Sassoon takes him to task, telling him that he has to
 Pat Barker 139
face the facts, and offers to publish him in the hospital’s literary magazine.
“You’ve got to sweat your guts out. […] You don’t wait till you feel like
doing it” (R, p. 125).
Not long before, Sassoon himself had had to face the death of a buddy:
“Gordon’s death had woken him up […]. That moment when he’d […] glanced
at the casualty list and seen Gordon’s name had been a turning point …” The
ghosts he glimpsed from the future are coming home. The scene takes place in
Owen’s room, where Sassoon is helping him rework one of his poems. The
young poet has made progress sweating his guts out; he no longer stutters. The
wind has risen. Sassoon looks up: “What’s that noise?” Owen hasn’t heard
anything. “Must be imagining things,” Sassoon says, adding at once: “They
don’t wail. They hiss. […] I hear hissing” (R, p. 142).
The next night, he hears tapping: “On such a night it was impossible not
to think of the battalion.” Memories of his last weeks in France resurface
in a flood: “He saw his platoon again, and ran through their names […].
Many of them were almost incapable of lifting their equipment […].” He
sees himself “pushing two of them in front of him […] [kneeling] to inspect
their raw and blistered feet.” Of this little band, how many were still alive?
The windows rattle; he thinks he hears tapping. Rats? How is it that he
can’t sleep here, where he is safe, when in France he slept anywhere?
When he wakes, Orme is there, standing just inside the door, wearing his
beige coat, not the colour of the British army uniform: “After a while he
remembered that Orme was dead, which did not seem to trouble him as he
stood quietly on the threshold.” But it troubled Sassoon. After a moment,
he turned towards the window, then looked back at the door. Orme was
gone: “I need to talk to Rivers.” The next morning, Rivers was not there.
Sassoon looked in the mirror and saw the face of a small child, himself
around 5 years old. A day of shouting and slammed doors. The day his
father died? Or rather the day he left home: “Sassoon smiled, amused at the
link he’d discovered […]. Rivers had […] come to take his father’s place.
[…] After all, if it came to substitute fathers, he might do a lot worse,” he
thought, beginning to shave (R, p. 144).

A story of spirits in Melanesia

Rivers had been to London, where Head had offered him a position in an
Air Force hospital. When he returned to Craiglockhart, he met Sassoon,
who downplayed his visions: “Oh, it was nothing. I just … saw something
I couldn’t possibly have seen.” Rivers can see that he is afraid of ridicule
for being irrational, so he goes first: “I did once see … well, not see … hear
something I couldn’t explain.” And he recounts an episode from his stay in
the Solomon Islands (first in 1907–1908 and then in 1914). Somebody had
died, and spirits came in canoes to carry away his soul. The whole village
was gathered together, sitting in silence. Suddenly, the house was filled with
whistling sounds, heard by everyone: “I could see all the faces. Nobody was
140 Seminar 6: 1997–1998
making those sounds. […] That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a rational
explanation. Only I don’t think [it] fits all the facts” (R, p. 188).
Now that his analyst had created this context, Sassoon was able to tell
his story in detail: “What happened to me started with a noise,” up to the
moment when Orme appeared, then vanished: “Nice lad. Died six months
ago.” Rivers asks him to be specific: “The same man?” Sassoon ventures to
go further:

No. Various people. – What do you feel when you see them? – I don’t feel
anything – You’re not frightened? – No. That’s why I said they weren’t
nightmares. – Afterwards? – Guilt. – Do they look reproachful? – No.
They just look puzzled. They can’t understand why I’m here.

After a pause: “I wrote about this. I’m sorry. I know you hate this.” Rivers
takes the sheet of paper: “I don’t hate it. I just feel inadequate.” He reads
the poem:

When I’m asleep, dreaming and drowsed and warm,

They come, the homeless ones, the noiseless dead.
While the dim charging breakers of the storm
Rumble and drone and bellow overhead,
Out of the gloom they gather about my bed.
They whisper to my heart; their thoughts are mine.
“Why are you here with all your watches ended?”
“From Ypres to Frise we sought you in the line.”
In bitter safety I awake, unfriended;
And while the dawn begins with slashing rain
I think of the Battalion in the mud.
“When are you going back to them again?”
“Are they not still your brothers through our blood?”

This last verse echoes Sterne’s question when he took a stand against slavery,
while Voltaire was investing in the slave trade: “Am I not a brother and
a man?” The phrase was adopted by the abolitionists at the end of the
eighteenth century, etched on Wedgwood medallions, and distributed widely.21
“Don’t feel you have to say something.” Sassoon’s courtesy turns out to be
superfluous. Rivers is not capable of saying a word, since he is choked up with
tears. The poet doesn’t know what to do. “Does the question have an answer?”
his analyst finally asks, wiping his eyes. “Oh, yes. I’m going back.”
They would resume their meetings in the next book, after Sassoon is
repatriated to London, with a head injury. Prior returns to the Front as
well. Yet neither he nor Sassoon like war, any more than Rivers does. But
there is something stronger than pacifism. What is it? To help the reader
understand it, Pat Barker describes the political and social context in
 Pat Barker 141
England, at a time when what dominates the news is the prosecution of
conscientious objectors and homosexuals.

Social movements
In The Eye in the Door, the second book of the Trilogy, Billy Prior makes
use of his official status at the Munitions Ministry to return home, near
Manchester, and visit a woman in prison. She was falsely accused of having
intended to poison Lloyd George. He knows her well – this generous
neighbour who owned a grocery store and took care of him while his father
brutalised his mother and cheated on her, buying his son’s silence with
sweets, which he regularly threw up. Prior wants her to speak to him, so
that he can obtain a retrial for her. She intends to say that she had bought
curare to paralyse dogs and free conscientious objectors, including her son,
Prior’s childhood friend, held in another unheated cell, naked, with his
uniform lying beside him.
“The eye in the door,” which looks through the peephole of the cell, is
the eye Prior wants to pierce with his “I.” The drama is Cornelian. Rivers
understands that Prior’s fugue states are more frequent now, taking him
down another road than that of political and psychoanalytic clichés.
Another “I” emerges in this situation: that of a plural body of survival, in
an exchange of mutual care, both physical and psychological, including an
intimate relation between the living and the dead, like the buddy whose eye
he picked up in the trenches (E, Chapter 3).
By this yardstick, Freud’s interpretation of repressed homosexuality in
the army seems secondary, as does the prison cell holding Prior’s childhood
friend, a cell Prior describes to his mother, to her great shock, as being
more comfortable than the mud, the cold and the smell of bodies in the
trenches. While strikes were multiplying in the munitions factories in the
North of England, Prior was witness, on the battlefield, to bullets rendered
useless and cannons destroyed by their own shells. Both Prior and Sassoon,
who is strongly supported by pacifists, find their words hollow in respect to
the men left behind on the front line.
In the meantime, Rivers goes up in a plane with Dundas, a pilot who
takes him on board to show him his symptoms. Rivers sits in the observer’s
seat and observes his own fear. Pilots are said to be less susceptible to war
neurosis because they are kept active. This does not apply to the observer.
Dundas strokes the plane’s fuselage, smiling. Rivers tells himself that he is
part of the experiment, and that a researcher’s hypothesis is rarely
confirmed by his gut. On this occasion, his gut does its best to confirm his
hypothesis. When Dundas loses his sense of the horizontal, Rivers
understands what is meant by gravity squashing your head into your body.
Still, when the plane drops and the pilot seems to have trouble focusing on
the instruments, he feels very calm, telling himself there are worse ways to
die, yet shouts: “DOWN!” The landing is chaotic, but not worse than
142 Seminar 6: 1997–1998
others he has known. On the tarmac, his legs are shaking. He is annoyed to
be in such a state, minimises his fright; in short, does everything he tells his
patients not to do (E, p. 65).
Another trial is making headlines in London: that of Noel Pemberton
Billing, who is accusing homosexuals and Jews of demoralising the nation.
He is acquitted. It is soon learned that a paranoid forger, Captain Harold
Sherwood Spencer, had been circulating a Black Book with the names of
47,000 British citizens supposedly collaborating with German propaganda
(E, p. 24). At the same time, a million young men had died in France.
A justice system that acquits scoundrels destroys the link between the living
and the dead.
Billy Prior picks up Charles Manning in Hyde Park, apparently in
a quasi-fugue state, since he doesn’t recognise him, although they work
in the same Ministry. Prior plays the working-class bloke to seduce him,
and after their sexual encounter he asks him where his leg wound
comes from. The name “Passchendaele” jogs his memory. They were
both treated by Rivers at Craiglockhart and are pursuing their therapy
with him in London. Together, they attend a banned performance of
Salome, which according to rumour is supposed to be shocking, but
they remain unmoved, wondering if Oscar Wilde could have imagined
that for some spectators, severed heads were not made of papier-mâché
(E, p. 78).

Manning’s psychoanalysis

A shell-hole speaks
Manning is hospitalised due to panic attacks triggered by the war, about
which he refuses to speak, and by the fear of being denounced, because he
is married. Seeing an opportunity to bring together his two fears, Rivers
asks him if he is familiar with Freud’s text on homosexual and sadistic
drives, released during battle. “I am not a repressed homosexual,” his
patient objects. Rivers’ objective is not to confront Manning with his
sexuality, but to reveal suppression, precisely because it is not repression.
He gives him the example of Sassoon, whom Manning knows well, who
“contrives to be two totally different people at the Front: […]
a tremendously successful and bloodthirsty platoon commander, and yet [a
poet who afterwards writes] another anti-war poem.”
Rivers offers him the company of the poet, which he accepts; he then
speaks in the first person plural:

We all hate [the war]. […] It’s just a bloody awful job, and we get on
and do it. I mean, you split enormous parts of yourself off, anyway. –
Is that what you did? […] You know we are going to have to talk about
the war.
 Pat Barker 143
The occasion presents itself the next night. London is being bombarded.
The target is Vauxhall Bridge. “Though we don’t need to worry when they
hit it. Only when they miss,” Manning comments laconically, when he runs
into Rivers during his night rounds. The nurse asked the doctor to tell
Manning not to smoke on the ward where there are men who have been
gassed. “Yes, of course,” says Manning.
Through the window, they hear the soft murmur of a song soldiers sing in
the trenches. It triggers the bit-by-bit recall of a terrible scene, finally addressed
to another, a scene where a shell will speak. Manning is standing before the
shell-hole like in a waking dream: “It’s nothing very much actually […]. Just
a line of men marching along duckboards wearing gas masks and capes.
Everything’s sort of greenish-yellow […]. The usual … porridge. If a man slips
off […] he just sinks.” Rivers gets right to the point: “If you had to pick out the
worst thing, what would it be? – There’s a hand coming out of the mud. It’s
holding the duckboard and … nothing else. Everything else is underneath.”
A short silence. “Oh, and there’s a voice. […] – What does it say? – Where’s
Scudder? It’s a nasty, knowing little voice: Where’s Scudder? Where’s
Scudder? – Do you answer? – No point. It knows the answer.”
Silence. Gunfire is heard in the distance. Rivers suggests that they go to his
room so Manning can smoke. “There,” he says, putting an ashtray at
Manning’s elbow: “One of the reasons I don’t talk about it, apart from
cowardice, is that it seems so futile. – Because it’s impossible to make people
understand? – When you go into the Salient, you really do say goodbye to
everything” – the title of Robert Graves’ future book: Goodbye to All That.
Rivers goes on relentlessly: “You were going to tell me about Scudder. – Was I?
Their eyes met. […] – He was a man in my company. […] He was hopeless. He
knew he was. […] he’d been treated for shell-shock the previous year. With
electric shocks. I didn’t know they did that. – Oh, yes, Rivers said. They do.
[…] – The night after he had the treatment he didn’t dream about mines. He
dreamt he was back in the trenches having electric shock treatment.”
Manning goes on:

He couldn’t switch off … function like an automaton. He couldn’t … turn

off the part of himself that minded. […] I can see the same sort of thing
happening to me. […] Anyway, we moved forward. It was raining. And we
were told to report to the graveyard. […] there were corpses everywhere.
The whole business of collecting and burying the dead had broken down.
Scudder was fascinated by these people [who] were really dead, and the
corpses by the road weren’t. Any more than we were really alive.

The lady of thoughts

The narration goes on for a long while, until the day Scudder disappears. The
men look for him everywhere, and finally find him. Then there’s an attack.
They advance between crater holes. And again: “Where’s Scudder?” Has he
144 Seminar 6: 1997–1998
deserted? This time, he is in a shell-hole, mired to his waist, then to his chest.
The men form a chain, but they slide as well and are unable to pull him out:

I have never seen anything like his face. And it went on and on. He was
slipping away all the time, but slowly, pleading with us to do something.
I knew what I had to do. I got the men lined up and told him we were
going to try again, and while he was looking at the others I […] fired.
[…] I missed. And that was terrible, because then he knew what was
happening. I fired again, and this time I didn’t miss. We spent the rest
of the night there, in that hole. It was very odd. You know, I don’t
think any of the men would have said: “You did the wrong thing. You
should have let him die slowly.” And yet nobody wanted to talk to me.
They kept their distance.

“A long silence. ‘His mother wrote to me […]. To thank me. Apparently

Scudder had written to her and told her I’d been kind to him.’ Rivers said
firmly, ‘you were’,” validating his action, like an inscription on the muddy
soil. And then there was Hines: “We staggered down the road giggling like
a pair of schoolboys […] when the shell got us. […] I crawled across to him.
And he look straight at me and said, ‘I’m all right, mum.’ And died.”
One of my grandfathers, who had been gassed during the war, had seen,
as he sat astride his horse, soldiers mowed down in a wheat field, calling
out “mummy” with their last breath. One of Rivers’ patients perceives him,
in his transference with them, as a masculine mother. This feminine agency,
found in the pockets of soldiers on the battlefield in the letters addressed to
their mothers, their wives, their sweethearts, their wartime pen pals, plays
more than a maternal role. Don Quixote called her Dulcinea, the “Lady of
his thoughts,” the only reference that remains and allows one to think when
the law of the fathers has collapsed. She was given this name in the time of
the troubadours, by warrior poets. She is the earth that protects you and
buries you, writes Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War
I, in All Quiet on the Western Front.22

Sassoon’s psychoanalysis continued in London

A head injury
The Eye in the Door also lets in through the door the gaze of the gods
whose disappearance Plutarch deplored when a cry was heard on the
Aegean Sea: “The great god Pan is dead!” amidst weeping and
lamentations from every corner.23 Rabelais evokes the scene in The Fourth
Book,24 and José-Maria de Heredia in a verse of his Trophées, speaking of
“the purple shroud where dead gods sleep,”25 a scene of mourning that
would be taken up again by Ernest Renan at the end of his Prayer on the
Acropolis.26 Lacan also observes that what we have put in the place of “the
 Pat Barker 145
sphere of the gods we Christians have erased is what is at stake here, in the
light of psychoanalysis.”27 But Rivers does not put anything in the place of
the gods. He makes them act directly in the transference with his patients.
Rivers had mentioned the gods in his last session with Sassoon at
Craiglockhart, when Sassoon had spoken of his visions and of his desire to
return to France, and he himself had mentioned his experience with spirits
in Melanesia. Now, when he sees him in London, hospitalised with a head
injury, the gods are still there.
Sitting by his bed, Rivers waits for Sassoon to wake up. When he does,
he touches Rivers’ sleeve. “He’s making sure I’m real,” Rivers thinks.
Sassoon starts to talk at once. He is different, his speech is rapid, his eyes
riveted on Rivers. He complains about all the pacifists that have visited him,
filling the room with treats that he would like to send to his men: “I don’t
belong here. […] the Germans on the Marne, five thousand prisoners taken
and all you read in the papers is who’s going to bed with whom […]. thirty
yards of sandbags, that’s the war.” Now he can see all of it – as Don
Quixote saw from the top of a hill, through a herd of sheep:28 “vast armies
[…] millions of people, millions, millions.” A circling movement of his arms:
“And it’s marvellous in a way, but it’s terrible too. […] you’d have to be
Tolstoy.”
“How’s the head?” Rivers asks, wanting to hear what happened. “It’s
a scratch. […] the timing was perfect. Did you see my poem in the Nation?
‘I stood with the dead’. BANG! Oops! Sorry. Missed. – I’m glad it did. –
I’m not.” Rivers wonders if it was a suicidal gesture. He has seen Sassoon’s
file. He does not understand how it could have happened and asks him
where he was hit on the head. Sassoon attempts to explain: “I was in No
Man’s Land. – No, I mean under the helmet. – I’d taken it off.” An
awkward pause. “We’d […] re-established dominance. […] I was so happy.
[…] Oh, god, Rivers, you wouldn’t believe how happy. And I stood up and
took the helmet off, and I turned to look at the German lines.” Rivers was
furious: “… you wanted to get killed. – I’ve told you, I was happy.” Rivers
took a deep breath, “schooling himself to a display of professional
gentleness.” Sassoon tries to joke: “I must say, I thought the standard of
British sniping was higher than this. – British sniping? – Yes, didn’t they tell
you? My own NCO. Mistook me for the German army.” He thinks about
the raid his men are going on today: “They’re not your men now, Siegfried.
[…] You’ve got to let go. – I can’t.”
When he comes back the same evening, after having dined with Head,
Rivers finds Sassoon sweating profusely in his bed, and talking without
stopping. The partition between the separate parts of himself is gone: the
commander who loves his men but doesn’t hesitate to send them to their
deaths, and the anti-war poet whom the latter supplies with material.
Sassoon is aware of all this:
146 Seminar 6: 1997–1998
You know, Rivers, it’s no good encouraging people to know themselves
and … face up their emotions, because out there they’re better off not
having any. […] [People] need to be trained not to care because if you
don’t […]. It’s too cruel.

Rivers doesn’t argue, and thinks only of calming him. After three hours,
when Sassoon has fallen into a deep sleep, Rivers starts to think about
what he said. His dissociation can’t be called pathological, since his
experience as an officer confers moral authority to his Declaration.
Rivers falls asleep on the unoccupied bed in Sassoon’s room; he dreams
he is in Melanesia, on a crowded ship. He wakes up feeling nostalgic, and
realises that he too is split between his Melanesian self and his frustration,
when he was back in Cambridge, at being unable to integrate that part of
himself in his scientific work. Sleeping in a room with another person re-
establishes the contact with his Melanesian self. He is lulled to sleep by the
rhythm of Sassoon’s breathing. When he wakes up, he finds Sassoon
kneeling by his bed, completely calm: “I seem to have talked an awful lot of
rubbish last night.” He touches Rivers’ sleeve: “I don’t know what I’d do
without you.”

Rivers’ Melanesian “I”

And what would Rivers have done without the headhunters? His two
expeditions took place in 1907–1908 and 1914, after the experiment
conducted with Head. He came back from Melanesia transformed. Around
the same time, art historian Aby Warburg had a similar experience. He
travelled to the territory of Hopi and Pueblo Indians, to explore the “living
archaeology” of the rites of Antiquity that surfaced again in Renaissance
paintings. And later, during a period of psychic upheaval connected to the
Great War, he used his research to cure his own madness. In Binswanger’s
clinic where he was a patient, he gave a one-hour lecture on Serpent Ritual
among the Hopis, using this lecture for his own therapy.29 He was helped in
this by his disciple Fritz Saxl, who had just come back from combat. Rivers
proceeds in the same way.
In the last chapter of Regeneration, a story he tells Head and his wife Ruth
illustrates how he participates subjectively in the construction of kinship:

I don’t know whether you’ve ever had the experience of having your life
changed by a quite trivial incident. […] It happened to me on that trip
[in the Solomon Islands]. I was on the Southern Cross – That’s the mis-
sion boat and there was a group of islanders there – recent converts.
[…] and I thought I’d go through my usual routine, so I started asking
questions. The first question was, what would you do with it if you
earned or found a guinea? Would you share it, and if so who would you
share it with? […] to them it’s a lot of money, and you can uncover all
 Pat Barker 147
kinds of things about kinship structure and economic arrangements,
and so on. Anyway at the end of this – we were all sitting cross-legged
on the deck, miles from anywhere – they decided they’d turn the tables
on me, and ask me the same questions: What would I do with
a guinea?
(R, p. 241)

This question: “And you?” is regularly asked in the transference with

madness and trauma. Prior asks it at Craiglockhart and Rivers does not
dismiss it:

I explained I was unmarried and that I wouldn’t necessarily feel obliged

to share it with anybody. They were incredulous. How could anybody
live like that? And it was one of those situations […] where one person
starts laughing and everybody joins in and in the end the laughter just
feeds off itself. […] And suddenly I realized that anything I told them
would have got the same response. I could’ve talked about sex, repres-
sion, guilt, fear – the whole sorry caboodle – and it would’ve got
exactly the same response. They wouldn’t have felt a twinge of disgust
or disapproval […] because it would all have been too bizarre. And
I suddenly saw that their reactions to my society were neither more nor
less valid than mine to theirs.

At that point, it’s true, Rivers was in the same situation as these people,
carried off their island by the British and drifting towards an unknown
destination.
As it happens in this kind of critical session, the outcome is amazing for
the analyst as well. Rivers bears witness to his own transformation:

And do you know that was a moment of the most amazing freedom.
[…] It was … the Great White God de-throned, I suppose. Because we
[…] quite unselfconsciously assumed we were the measure of all things.
[…] And suddenly I saw not only that we weren’t the measure of all
things, but that there was no measure.

But nothing changed when he returned to England, where “you know

you’re walking around with a mask on, and you desperately want to take it
off and you can’t because everybody else thinks it’s your face.” He would
recover this freedom in his interactions with his patients: “[They] have done
for me what I couldn’t do for myself.” He smiles: “You see healing does go
on, even if not in the expected direction” (R, p. 242).
World War I was the crucible of the psychodynamic psychoanalysis of
madness and trauma; William Rivers was one of its pioneers, along with
others who were “trained” by the war, such as Sándor Ferenczi, Thomas
148 Seminar 6: 1997–1998
Salmon, Harry Stack Sullivan, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Françoise Dolto
and Wilfred Bion.

Katherine Rivers, “Alice in Hysterialand”

Prior’s question: “What about you?” led Rivers to the unexpected
exploration of his lack of visual images. His thinking differs from Freud’s
interpretation, presented in his analysis of Hoffman’s tale “The Sandman,”
who tears out children’s eyes: “This infantile fear is a frequent substitute for
the fear of castration.”30 It may also reveal the analyst’s blindness when he
refuses to see the traumas affecting his lineage. In September 1897, when
Freud abandoned his “Neurotica,” his psychoanalysis of trauma, “so as not
to incriminate the fathers, including his own,” he blinded himself to a fact
he had confessed to Fliess the previous February: the sexual abuse inflicted
by their father on his younger brothers and sisters.31
The Ghost Road leads us down a path where children betrayed by their
relatives are likened to young veterans betrayed by their command and by
civilians when they come home. Betrayal by one’s own people is Jonathan
Shay’s definition of trauma,32 which holds the analyst accountable for his
blind spots, transmitted along his lineage. This word, “lineage,” usually
designating peoples we no longer call primitive or savage, has been banished
since the disastrous attempt of last century’s totalitarian regimes to purify
the line of descent and create a “new man.” Nevertheless, Rivers contends
that ancient peoples like headhunters have preserved funeral rites that were
lacking for millions of the dead in civilised countries in World War I, and
again in the next war.
He decides to visit his younger sisters Katherine and Ethel, who live in
Ramsgate. The three of them, and their brother Charles, are the children of
Reverend Henry Rivers, a minister specialised in the treatment of stuttering,
a practice passed down to him by his father-in-law Thomas Hunt and his
brother-in-law James Hunt. The latter had also founded the
Anthropological Society of London, where his racist theories were well
known. One of Reverend Rivers’ famous patients was Charles Dogdson,
better known as Lewis Carroll, who often stayed at their home. In The
Ghost Road, Rivers’ childhood memories and his expeditions to Melanesia
are intertwined with the treatment of patients like Moffett, whose legs
remain paralysed without any organic reason, and Wansbeck, whose
olfactory hallucinations resist all treatment. In that context, he is ready to
examine his own family history more closely.
His sister Katherine had been exceptionally beautiful; she “combined
a childlike innocence with a child’s sharpness of perception” and was
a model for Alice in Wonderland.33 Indeed, Charles Dogdson almost never
stammered when he was talking with the girls or reading them his stories.
Rivers wonders: “Was it because these were his words and he was
determined to get them out?” One day, the writer confessed to their mother
 Pat Barker 149
that he loved girls and hated boys. His phrase “boys are a mistake” haunted
Rivers for a long time.
When he was over 50, a thought occurred to him: suppose that an
“innocent young boy becomes aware that he is the object of an adult’s
abnormal affection. Put bluntly, the Rev. Charles […] Dogdson can’t keep
his hands off him, but – thanks to that gentleman’s formidable conscience
nothing untoward occurs” (G, p. 90). Rivers pursues his train of thought:

The years pass, puberty arrives […]. In the adult life of that child no
abnormality appears, except perhaps for a certain difficulty in integrat-
ing the sexual drive with the rest of the personality. – What do you
mean “perhaps”? he asked himself.
(G, p. 25)

Indeed, although “sometimes he understood Katherine’s childhood better

than his own,” he began to find an answer to the questions the islanders
had asked about him on the boat, while roaring with laughter. He thought
especially about their loneliness: both his and Katherine’s.
“Poor Kath, she’s had little enough to smile about” since the time they
called her the Cheshire Cat because of her wide grin as she “sat enthroned
in Dogdson’s lap,” on so many occasions. Her vital essence drained by the
writer’s love, her life had been constricted into a smaller and smaller space,
until she was confined to her bedroom, and then to her bed. In the
meantime, her brother had gone around the world as a ship’s doctor:
Australia, India, the Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides. He had also lived
in Germany. “Yet she was no more neurasthenic than he was himself. But
he had found his nourishment out in the world, while she had fed on
herself” (G, p. 91).

Moffett: a failed magic treatment

Rivers’ patient Ian Moffett can’t leave his bed any more either, since he
suffers from “hysterical” paralysis for which there is no organic cause. He
had collapsed at the first sound of a cannon. Could he have applied for
dispensation? In his family, that was inconceivable. Rivers can’t help
thinking of his sister, “Alice in Hysterialand.” After having tried everything
with Moffett, except electric shock and injections, he suggests a therapy
inspired by Njiru, his informer, witch doctor friend on the Solomon Islands:
after a massage, he performed the concrete extraction of the illness,
“literally drawn out of the body” (G, p. 49).
Rivers enacts a similar scenario by sketching on Moffett’s legs the tops of
stockings, which he rolls down each day by a few fingers, drawing the ink
circle lower and lower, removing with it the veil of paralysis. His patient
asks him ironically if he knows what century they are in. Although he
himself is not convinced, Rivers uses the power of suggestion, and says with
150 Seminar 6: 1997–1998
authority that the area freed from the stocking would recover normal
sensation the next day. Moffett does not believe it, but it works.
At the same time, Major Telford, another patient who plays a role in the
story, complains, after a riding accident, that his penis is missing. Nurses
have amputated it and put it in a jar, like a pickle in brine. After a futile
discussion, Rivers finally asks what part of his anatomy he urinates with:
“M’cock, you stupid bugger, what do you pee out of ?” Before slamming the
door as he leaves, he asks Rivers to call him “Major,” saying that of the
two of them, he is the better doctor – which soon proves to be true
(G, p. 55).
Now Moffett can walk again, and takes a few steps. Later that afternoon,
the Major informs Rivers in a conspiratorial tone that someone has been
locked in the bathroom for hours and keeps groaning. Rivers kicks in the
door and finds his patient in the bathtub, his wrists slashed, a bottle of
whisky by his side. “Dead, is he? The major asked cheerfully? – Dead
drunk. I think he’ll be all right.” Indeed, Moffett recovers, but the
mechanical suppression of his delusion has resulted in pushing him to
suicide. The death of his legs protected him from actual death. At the same
time, Rivers hears a metallic jangle that reminds him of the offerings of
seashells in the skull cave where Njiru had taken him. Rivers realises that
when he used Njiru’s magic recipe, he left out the witch doctor’s skills with
ghosts, who would soon confront him as well.

Rivers’ psychoanalysis
They manifest themselves the next weekend, when he is visiting his sisters in
Ramsgate. The town had been bombarded heavily; many civilians, men,
women and children, had been killed. Katherine’s health had dramatically
deteriorated. Ethel leaves William alone with Katherine, going off to have
a few days’ rest. The brother and sister remember each other’s childhood.
William recalls that once, on the river, Dogdson had tried to pin up Kath’s
skirts so she could paddle. But that time she had pushed him away: “Some
intensity in his gaze? Some quality in his touch? Their mother had spoken
sharply to her, but Dogdson had said, ‘No, leave her alone’.” Katherine
regrets the loss of Dogdson’s letters and drawings. That is when she
mentions the painting of Uncle Will, at the top of the stairs.
Although he is ten years older than his sister, he doesn’t remember the
painting: “What was it of ?” The painting marks the place where his
visual memory stops. Proud to have a better memory than her older
brother, Katherine describes the picture to him. It depicts the
amputation of Uncle William’s leg, while somebody waits nearby with
a cauldron full of hot tar to cauterise the stump. Rivers can hardly
believe his ears: “Are you sure?” Katherine assures him that he hated the
painting (G, p. 92).
 Pat Barker 151
Memories came flooding back. As the eldest child, he had served as a guinea
pig for their father’s treatment of stammering, which in the young boy’s case
remained unsuccessful. Rivers has a vague sensation of being carried by his
father to look at something. How strange that he finds it impossible to
remember this painting, although he knows its subject very well. Their
ancestor, named William Rivers like him, was the midshipman who shot the
man who shot Lord Nelson on the Victory, at the Battle of Trafalgar, on
October 21, 1805. According to family legend, the admiral’s words had been:
“Look after young Will Rivers for me.” When he had been wounded himself,
he had to have his leg amputated with no anaesthetic other than rum. Another
family legend said that he had not once said a word or cried out.
Now Rivers remembered. His father had carried him to the top of the
stairs to see this painting. It was the day when the boy had had his hair cut
for the first time. At the barbershop, he had cried loudly, embarrassing his
father, who finally slapped him on the leg, and later took him up the stairs
to show him the painting. “He didn’t cry,” his father had said […]. “He
didn’t make a sound.” That is when his stammer began. Although the
Napoleonic Wars meant nothing to a 5-year-old, he had perhaps concluded
that this was what happened to you if your name was William Rivers.
Indeed, as he had said to Prior, “children can be terrified by things which
do not seem important to adults” (G, p. 95).
Trafalgar, mournful sea!34 which swallowed up all visual images. Yet his
father was not at all a sadist. What had terrified the boy was not the blood,
the knife or the hot tar, but that resolutely clenched mouth. Now, every day
of his working life he told his clench-mouthed patients:

Go on […] cry. It’s alright to grieve. Breakdown’s nothing to be ashamed

of […]. But he also said: “… stop crying. Get up on your feet. Walk.” He
both distrusted that silence and endorsed it […] being his father’s son.
(G. p. 96)

Here, discourses on castration lose their meaning. In the Battle of Trafalgar,

in London and in Ramsgate, dispersed body fragments were not fantasies.
The silence the child was being taught brings to mind the French poet
Alfred de Vigny, author of Military Servitude and Grandeur, who ends his
poem “The Death of the Wolf” by verses we used to learn by heart when
we were children:

To, groan, to cry, to seek for aid

Is cowardice. With energy and strength
Perform thy long and often heavy task.
And walk […] along
The way where fate has placed thee […].
Then, after that […], without complaint
Suffer and die […].35
152 Seminar 6: 1997–1998
All my relatives
The recollection of this episode in his life – a decisive flaw – makes
Rivers aware of his patients’ stoicism. Despite their symptoms, they keep
their mouths clenched, not on repressed fantasies, but on real events
glued to their retina, and thus rendered invisible. Rivers recovers such an
event in his own life, after validating his sister’s impression of something
strange in Lewis Carrol’s attitude towards her, which their mother had
denied. In their happy family, a child’s life was sacrificed to the work of
the great man, as were the lives of the men lying on the battlefield,
whose deaths Prior informs Rivers about in the letters he sends him from
the Front.
The absence of cathartic rites, to purify the stain of deaths and abuses,
awakens, for Rivers, the teaching he received from Njiru, his crippled
informer, the son of a chief and, like himself, unmarried: “His abilities [as
a healer] would have made him remarkable in any society.” Njiru told
Rivers about his suppositions and doubts when their ritual ways of dealing
with death were labelled cruel by the civilised world, and he allowed him to
attend their funeral rites (G, Chapter 10).
The body of a chief was propped up in a sitting position on the beach, in
an enclosure of stones. Njiru has destroyed all his possessions except his
axe. Now he prays: “Be not angry with us, be not resentful, do not punish
us. Let them drink and eat […]. Let the children eat, let the women eat, let
the men eat.” Then Njiru takes Rivers into a cave full of bats, where the
new ghost will be brought, to be greeted by old ghosts. In the village, they
would wait about eighteen days for the body to decay, in the midst of
stench and flies, until the sound of a conch announced the return of the
headhunters with a captive to be sacrificed. This time it was a child from
a neighbouring island. This is when Rivers had heard the whistling sounds
he told Sassoon about. After this, the skull of the dead man is brought to
the skull house where Njiru takes Rivers. The anthropologist is relieved to
see that the captive child is there alive, with the mortuary priest. After
a prayer of purification, there is an abrupt transition to everyday life,
although not quite like before, when the victim was sacrificed.
The destruction of the islanders’ rites by civilising humanism has resulted in
lethargy, loss of meaning, forgetting of lineages and, above all, a dramatic
increase of infertility, as if they were dying of no longer waging the ritual war of
headhunting. In their culture, knowledge is linked with power, measured by the
number of spirits who are your allies. This was also what we heard medicine
man Joe Eagle Elk say on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota,
where his tribe of Lakota warriors, the famous Sioux Indians, are confined. “All
my relatives” was the ritual formula used during ceremonies; it linked the
participants to the living, to spirits in nature and to the souls of the dead,
including soldiers fallen in recent wars.36 Rivers revives his Melanesian teachings
 Pat Barker 153
to reconnect with “all his relatives” and appease the ghost that haunts
Wansbeck.

Psychoanalysis of Wansbeck and Harrington

The stench Wansbeck has been hallucinating since killing a German prisoner
with a bayonet is gone, only to be replaced by an apparition standing by his
bed every night. Rivers asks him if he believes in life after death: “Not since
I saw the unburied corpses swarming with flies on No Man’s Land, the
smell …” Rivers remembers the ritual words spoken by Njiru, as well as the
flies and the smell. He asks Wansbeck what he thinks is happening to him.
Wansbeck rationalises, saying: “A projection of my own mind. – Of your
guilt? – No, guilt’s what I feel […]. Guilt as objective fact” (G, p. 226).
Like in ceremonial theatre all over the world, in Antiquity during the
Middle Ages, or in Noh theatre today, the embodiment of psychic agencies
by concrete characters makes it possible to address them, to feel and put
into words that which cannot be said. Why couldn’t the unspeakable forces
that haunt us have the right to concrete existence as beings endowed with
language?
Njiru would have agreed completely with this description of the spirit of
Guilt. Rivers applies this animistic logic, asking Wansbeck:

What language does it speak? […] – English. Has to be. – So why don’t
you speak to it? – It’s only there for a second. – You said it was end-
less. – All right, it is an endless second. – You should be able to say
a lot, then. – Tell it my life story? – It knows your life story. – All right,
it’s bloody mad, but I’ll have a go.
(G, p. 226)

In the “vision quest” among the Lakota people, the one who is searching
for a vision is taken to the top of a hill and left there alone, naked under
a star blanket. One of them told us: “When you see or hear something, you
better not remain spellbound, but speak to it.”
When Wansbeck leaves, Rivers remembers the severed heads, torsos and
limbs that assailed Harrington at Craiglockhart. The face of a buddy blown
up next to him, without lips, without a nose or eyelids, would lean over him
and make him vomit and soil his bed. The interesting thing had not been
the analysis of the nightmares themselves, but the fleshing out, night after
night, of his buddy’s face, while Harrington spoke to him of his life at the
hospital and of his psychiatrist. After several weeks, he woke up with the
memory of the hour after the explosion. He had crawled through artillery
fire to pick up fragments of the body, and he had sent his buddy’s mother
the pieces of his gear that he had found. The fact that Rivers pointed out
his loyalty to the friend killed in the explosion produced a great
improvement, and culminated in him waking up one morning in tears,
154 Seminar 6: 1997–1998
“crying not only for his own loss but also for his friend’s, for the unlived
years” (G, p. 229).

Matthew Hallet’s death

By relaying the messages of his patients’ ghosts, Rivers considers himself “a
conduit,” a pipe, at the risk of combining their stories into a single story,
and blending their voices into a single cry of pain. A whispered cry came
from young Hallet. In Prior’s diary entry dated October 5, 1918, he
recounts how he followed a gurgling sound that led him to Hallet in a shell-
hole, with half his face blown away: “He’s going to die anyway. I think
I thought about killing him […]. Bastards, bastards, bastards […]. Die, can’t
you? For God’s sake, man, just die. But he didn’t” (G, p. 197). They had
sailed to France together; it was Hallet’s first time. And Prior had had
a premonition: “Ghosts everywhere. Even the living were only ghosts in the
making. […] in trench time […] a generation lasted six months, less than
that on the Somme […]. He was this boy’s great-grandfather” (G, p. 46).
Hallet is taken to a hospital in London, where Rivers goes to see him,
and speaks to his family, gathered around his bed and waiting: “Keep
talking to him. He does recognize your voices and he can understand” (G,
p. 265). They hear a heart-wrenching whisper: “Shotvarfet.” Bending over
his gargoyle face, Rivers thinks: “Why are you alive?” Njiru would have
seen him as being dead already. His father asks: “Not long now, eh? – No,
not long.” On the night before he left Melanesia, Njiru had said: “And […]
now you will put it in your book.” But the war had broken out, and he
hadn’t had time. Instead, he had put it all in his patients’ therapy.
Hallet starts to cry louder and louder. His family tries to soothe him. Behind
the screens shielding his bed, they hear chanting murmured by the patients in
the common room, “each man lending the little strength he had to support
Hallet in his struggle.” And on the same November day in 1918, Prior and
Owen die defending a bridge during a useless offensive. Rivers was finally able
to make out Hallet’s mumbling: “Sotwafet: It’s not worth it,” which he kept
repeating. And then suddenly it was over. Rivers raised the sheet, arranged his
arm by his sides and withdrew silently. On the edge of the canal, Owen and
Prior’s regiment, the Manchesters, lie, “eyes still open, limbs not yet decently
arranged, for the stretcher-bearers have departed with the last of the wounded,
and the dead are left alone” (G, p. 275).
At dawn, when he leaves the hospital exhausted, Rivers sees Njiru, who is
dead, not as a ghost, but as he was in life, coming towards him to sing the
words that tell ghosts to depart:

There is an end of men, an end of chiefs, an end of chieftain’s wives, an

end of chief ’s children – then go down and depart. Do not yearn for
us, the fingerless, the crippled, the broken. Go down and depart, oh,
oh, oh.
 Pat Barker 155
Bent over Rivers, he stares into his face with his piercing eyes, then fades
into the light of day (G, p. 276).

Man is a ceremonial animal

The end of the last book of the Trilogy is an ascending movement towards
death, like Bach’s St John Passion: “Ruht Whol, Rest in peace,” endlessly
repeated. Hallet’s cry was taken up by the other soldiers, whose rhythmic
chant supported him in his final struggle. Gregory Nagy tells us that in
Homer’s epic the Iliad, the name Achilleos is composed of Achos, meaning
pain, and Laos, meaning the people armed for war. Nagy’s book gave us
the word therapon, taken from the Iliad, meaning the second in combat and
the ritual double charged with funeral duties. Rivers personifies both these
functions, and relays the murmur of his peers, philoi, singing an Elegy,
which in ancient Greek means “Alas! Alas!” endlessly repeated.37
A place was created apart, where Oedipus wants to die, at Colonus:
a sacred place, chôro sieros, holy ground removed from daily life where the
collective and the singular are entwined. Oedipus enters this sphere and
says that this is where he will stay.38 This retreat is also sought by patients
who must accomplish a nomination ritual, the “ceremony of the name,” as
Laurence Sterne calls it, not because they fear other people, but in order to
be in a protected place. This enclosure, clearly demarcated in tragedy,
delimits the nucleus of the political. When the social fabric starts to come
apart, a place must be found for a second, symbolic death, where the social
link can be recreated.
At the psychiatric hospital, we meet people who have been looking for
this place for generations. When they encounter someone like Rivers, who
has been taught the need for such a place by the headhunters, they know
that they do not have to kill themselves to accomplish the sacrifice required
on the brink of a new nomination. All that is needed is that their analyst
sacrifices a part of his neutrality. Here, Freud tells us in Moses and
Monotheism that the unconscious is neither that of repression nor
a collective unconscious. Its dynamic is aimed at producing the subject of
historical truth, where everything has been erased, like Pharaoh
Akhenaton’s civilisation.39 This subject is not collective, but the subject of
a plural body of survival, which is vital in catastrophic times and cannot be
fitted into the opposition between normal and pathological.
Socrates, a veteran of the Peloponnesian War, tells us in Phaedrus:

The greatest blessings come by way of madness, dia manias, that is

heaven sent. […] these trials, the most rigorous of all, carrying old
resentments, menis, bred in certain lineages, genos, will lead the one
with right delusions, orthôs menenti, to perform purification rites which
deliver him of present ills.
156 Seminar 6: 1997–1998
To illustrate, American Indian rites called “potlatch” on the West Coast of
the United States and “giveaway” ceremonies among American Indians of
the plains are not quid pro quo arrangements. In catastrophic situations, we
do not bargain with the gods, but carry out ceremonies addressed to them.
Cathartic rites are meant to wash away stains; as for ceremonies, telestai,
their name comes from telos, the goal, the accomplishment, not an
obsessive routine: telomai means “I set myself in motion.”40
Once the limits of this space have been set, the therapeutic and political
stakes can be expressed, as Wansbeck says when he invokes the Guilt of
England instead of dragging the smell of putrefaction everywhere.
Harrington can tell Rivers about the gesture of piety he accomplished after
his buddy was blown up, as a funeral rite. Psychoanalysis allowed these
young men who had gone through the looking glass to perform a Nekuia,
a visit to the dead such as that made by Ulysses to the Elysian Fields,
where Achilles’ shadow tells him: “Say not a word in death’s favour;
I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man’s house and be above
ground than king of kings among the dead.”41
By listening to his patients, Rivers felt he had become a pipe through
which “the hard-earned experience of a man for his self healing was made
available to another.”
This space produces time originating from the temporality of aion, the
eternity of arrested time, provided that the analyst, like Rivers, testifies to
experiences he has had himself. This artfulness – ararisko, the etymology of
“art” – points to and articulates clearly what is not acceptable in the social
link, or in classical science. When Erwin Schrödinger wrote the equations of
the new paradigm for quantum mechanics in Arosa, Switzerland, he felt
great joy, as if he were receiving “a gift from a fairy.”42 Rivers experiences
extraordinary freedom when he leaves behind the dogmas of anthropology
and mainstream psychoanalysis.

Ground zero of objectivity

This is my tribute to all the soldiers who might be forgotten. Not out of an
obligation to remember, now that remembrance has become a slogan, but
because of a particular transference with those who are called mad, with
whom I speak about the Trilogy, celebrating its author, Pat Barker, who
introduced me to Rivers. The transferences he describes, which Bion will
call “psychotic transferences,” come from confrontation with trauma, in the
most brutal sense of “inexplicable blows.”
When one recovers one’s wits, it is clear that they have been scattered,
and that gathering them together is not so easy. I will summarise that task
in two stages.
The first stage of analysis consists of resisting negative forces by
connecting the dispersed elements in a fictional narrative, which keeps
trauma at bay for some time, in an attempt to conjure malediction. At
 Pat Barker 157
the second stage, the analyst steps into the area of death. Rivers becomes
aware that he has been changed by his field of enquiry, in anthropology and
in therapy. Affected, as a first witness, by what he is shown, through
resonance, he discovers that trauma speaks to trauma, and only to trauma,
in an artistic adjustment, where things get stuck and crackle, as the poet
Sassoon shows him when he fills his anti-war poems with his combat
experience. This second stage generally unfolds in one or two critical
sessions, for one does not linger in the sphere of the sacred. When the birds
have made their omens in the celestial space drawn by the augur’s wand,
they can go on to peck in neighbouring fields.
In conclusion, I shall quote Wittgenstein, who was drafted into the
Austrian army in the same war, and came back in a state similar to
that of Rivers’ patients. Indeed, although Lacan went so far as to call
him psychotic,43 in Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough Wittgenstein
provides a special perspective on Rivers’ contribution to this seminar.
His aphorism “One could almost say that man is a ceremonial animal”
is based on his experience with ghosts: those of his three older brothers
who committed suicide, and that of his English friend Pinsent, a pilot
who crashed during the war. As Rivers knows, Wittgenstein states that
“there is something in us which speaks in favour of those savages,” and
he goes on, contradicting Frazer’s “objective approach”: “Nothing
shows our kinship with those savages better than the fact that Frazer
has at hand a word as familiar to us as ‘ghost’ or ‘shade’ in order to
describe the views of those people.” The aim is “to make death die,”
and to do so: “Personification will, of course play a large role, for, as
everyone knows, men (hence spirits) can become dangerous to
mankind.” As a result: “One could very easily invent primitive practices
oneself, and it would be pure luck if […] we did not happen to
encounter [them] somewhere in the real world.”44 This is just what
Rivers brought about.
William Rivers died in 1922, the year when Aby Warburg was shouting,
in Binswanger’s Bellevue clinic overlooking Lake Constance, that all the
Jews would be assassinated. The “Long Week-End” between the two world
wars had begun. But the madness would go on, with Hannah Arendt as
a witness, as we will see in the next seminar.

Notes
1 Barker, P., The Regeneration Trilogy, Hamish Hamilton, 2014.
2 The three separate books of the Trilogy will be referred to as “R” for Regener-
ation, “E” for The Eye in the Door and “G” for The Ghost Road.
3 Tison, S. and Guillemain, H., Du front à l’asile, 1914–1918, Alma, 2013.
4 Faulkner, W., Absalom, Absalom! Random House, 1966.
5 Duroselle, J. B., La grande guerre des francais, 1914–1918, Perrin, 1994.
6 Audoin-Rouzeau, S. A, Quelle histoire, Gallimard, 2013.
7 Graves, R., Good-Bye to All That, Vintage, 1958.
158 Seminar 6: 1997–1998
8 Heller, J., Catch-22, Simon & Schuster, 1994.
9 Sassoon, S., The War Poems, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1983.
10 Biagini, A. and Motta, G. (Eds.), The First World War: Analysis and Interpret-
ation, Vol. 2, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015, p. 203.
11 Sheppard, B., A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Cen-
tury, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
12 Sullivan, H. S, Schizophrenia as a Human Process, W. W. Norton & Company,
1962.
13 Benedetti, G., Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia, Jason Aronson, 1977.
14 See infra, Seminar 8 on Wilfred Bion.
15 Dolto, F., L’Image inconsciente du corps, Seuil, 1984, pp. 288–299.
16 Rivers, W. H., “The Repression of War Experience,” Lancet, 2 (1918): 531–533.
17 See infra, Seminar 4 on Toni Morrison and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann.
18 Bion, W., A Memoir of the Future, Routledge, 1991.
19 Sterne, L., The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Alma Classics,
2017.
20 Bion, W., A Memoir of the Future, op. cit.
21 Ross, I. C., Laurence Sterne: A Life, Oxford University Press, 2001.
22 Remarque, E. M., All Quiet on the Western Front, Ballantine Books, 1987.
23 Plutarch, “On the Obsolescence of Oracles,” in Moralia, Loeb Classical Library,
1936.
24 See infra, Seminar 12 on François Rabelais and Yvette Guilbert.
25 De Heredia, J.-M., Sonnets from The Trophies, HardPress Publishing, 2013.
26 Renan, E., Prayer on the Acropolis, Culture Edition, 1963.
27 Lacan, J., The Seminars of Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,
W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
28 De Cervantes, M., Don Quixote, Canterbury Classics/Baker & Taylor, 2013.
29 Warburg, A., “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual,” Journal of the Warburg Institute, 2
(1938–1939): 277–292.
30 Freud, S., The Uncanny, S.E. 17, Hogarth Press, pp. 217–252.
31 Masson, J. M., (Ed.), The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess,
1887–1904, Harvard University Press, 1985.
32 Shay, J., Achilles in Vietnam, Touchstone Books, 1995.
33 Carroll, L., Alice in Wonderland, Firefly Books, 2006.
34 Hugo, V., Selected Poems of Victor Hugo: A Bilingual Edition, University of Chi-
cago Press, 2001; Blackmore, E. H. and A. M. (Trans.). “Waterloo,” which
starts: “Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo! Mournful Plain …”
35 De Vigny, A., Military Servitude and Grandeur, University of California Librar-
ies, 1919; “The Death of the Wolf,” in A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields, Dutt,
T. (Ed.), C. Kegan Paul, 1880.
36 Mohatt, G. and Eagle Elk, J., The Price of a Gift: A Lakota Healer’s Story, Neb-
raska University Press, 2000.
37 Nagy, G., The Best of the Achaens, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.
38 Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, Dover Publications, 1999.
39 Freud, S., Moses and Monotheism, Jones, K. (Trans.), Vintage Books, 1996.
40 Plato, Phaedrus, Focus Publishing/R. Pullins Co., 2003.
41 Homer, The Odyssey, Book XI, Classic Books Library, 2007.
42 Moome, W., Schrödinger: Life and Thought, Cambridge University Press, 1989.
43 Lacan, J., Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XVII: The Other Side of Psycho-
analysis, W. W. Norton & Company, 2007.
44 Wittgenstein, L., “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough,” in Wittgenstein: Sources
and Perspectives, Luckhardt, C. G. (Ed.), Cornell University Press, 1978.
7 Seminar 7: 1999–2000
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
Reading madness with Hannah Arendt:
the production of freedom

The subject of this seminar is not Hannah Arendt. I do not read Hannah
Arendt through the prism of madness, but rather explore madness through the
prism of Hannah Arendt’s thought. The Origins of Totalitarianism1 was con-
ceived with Heinrich Blücher in New York during the war, published in 1948,
and only twenty years later in France, as if, to quote Claude Lefort’s title
Complications,2 translating her analysis would have been too complicated.
Whereas, in fact, reading her work allowed me to come to the simple conclu-
sion that madness is a resistance to totalitarianism on whatever scale.
Hannah Arendt and her second husband Heinrich Blücher, a former com-
munist militant, experienced both forms of totalitarianism. In 1933, she
went into exile in France with her first husband Gunther Anders, whom she
later divorced. In 1940, she was sent to the Gurs internment camp with
many German Jews, and escaped in extremis during the summer, before
deportations began. In May 1941, she immigrated with Blücher to the
United States, where she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism, in American
English with German syntax, since she continued to think in her mother
tongue.

The connection between the psychoanalysis of madness and Arendt’s

analysis of totalitarianism
One point of entry into this discussion is our 1993–1994 seminar “Madness:
A Social Pre-Science,”3 which discussed Charlotte Beradt’s book The Third
Reich of Dreams,4 published in the United States, and later in Munich, in
German. In 1932, one year before Hitler came to power, this journalist
undertook to keep a record of the dreams of those around her, harbingers
of the terrible things to come.
The intensity of these dreams with their clear-cut contours, like trau-
matic dreams, testified to the fact proclaimed by Robert Ley, head of the
German Labour Front and organiser of the Nazi Party: “The only
person in Germany who still leads a private life is the person who
sleeps.” These dreams revealed a freedom prohibited by propaganda and
by the police, among dreamers of various social origins. They show that
160 Seminar 7: 1999–2000
which cannot be said and cannot be repressed but is recorded in a cut-
out unconscious, after the destruction of all otherness – except a ruthless
other for whom there is no other.
Despite the danger posed by the regime, Charlotte Beradt collected
dreams secretly, calling Hitler “Uncle Henry” and the Nazi Party “the
family.” She hid 300 dreams in the books in her library, which she sent to
the United States in 1938, before going into exile herself. In New York, she
befriended Hannah Arendt and joined the small group of German immi-
grants who came together every week to talk, among other things, about
the creation of the State of Israel.
Hannah Arendt encouraged Charlotte Beradt to publish her book in
1966, while she herself was in a difficult situation after the publication of
Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963. Her use of the expression “banality of evil”
and the mention of the role played by Jewish Councils, Judenrat, in the
deportations created a scandal. The controversy that followed led her to
write a postscript to the 1964 edition, in which she defends her right to
judge:

The argument that we cannot judge if we were not present and involved
ourselves seems to convince everyone everywhere, although it seems
obvious that if it were true, neither the administration of justice nor the
writing of history would ever be possible. In contrast to these confu-
sions, the reproach of self-righteousness raised against those who do
judge is age-old; but that does not make it any the more valid.5

In the same way, during an analysis of madness or trauma, the analyst must
exercise judgement in the face of abuses most often trivialised, including his
own at critical moments, instead of hiding behind “benevolent neutrality.”
Our second meeting with Hannah Arendt’s work takes place on the
battlefield of wartime psychoanalysis. Hannah Arendt did not like psycho-
analysis. But in this seminar, I will contend that her thinking was close to
the psychoanalytic approach of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (1889–1957).6
Exiled like Arendt in the United States, she became an analyst of psychosis
at Chestnut Lodge, after her experience with treating soldiers with head
injuries during World War I in the military hospital of her hometown,
Königsberg.
War traumas, as well as the abuse of women and children, raise the ques-
tion of the collapse of the symbolic order, and make it necessary for psycho-
analysis to change its paradigm. We discovered this new approach in 1980,
at the clinic of the Austen Riggs Center, where we met analysts treating
psychosis, such as Otto Will and Martin Cooperman, who had been vet-
erans of Guadalcanal during World War II, and introduced us to Harry
Stack Sullivan and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann.
In fact, this new paradigm was discovered during the previous war.7 Still,
we need Hannah Arendt’s analysis to apply this approach to our work with
 Hannah Arendt 161
patients who bring us situations marked by lies, secrets, betrayals and the
crumbling of the given word. We are confronted with the impossible to say,
to imagine and to inscribe, situations that Arendt does not cease to chal-
lenge by writing relentlessly. This paradigm, as old as war, is illustrated by
the following two stories.
In Chapter 55 of Rabelais’ Fourth Book,8 published in the middle of the
sixteenth century, telling the story of Pantagruel’s voyage to the Oracle of
the Holy Bottle to learn whether Panurge would be made a cuckold if he
married, Pantagruel hears voices. The pilot informs them that a “great and
bloody battle” took place on that site on the frozen sea the previous winter,
during which the clamour of the war was frozen as well. Indeed, frozen,
silenced words fall on the deck like sweets of various colours, which thaw
when Pantagruel catches “them in his hands: the red ones crying out from
sliced throats,” and others coming from women, children, horses, even the
sound of cannons. Henceforth, they all find an inscription in Rabelais’ tale.
The need for an inscription of surviving images, voices and visions is also
the theme of Masaki Kobayashi’s film Kwaidan,9 which takes place on the
other side of the globe, on the site of the Battle of Dan-no-ura in the
twelfth century, during which the Minamoto clan was defeated by its rival
clan, the Taira. Here, frozen words are warmed in the mouth of a blind
monk who plays the biwa in a convent nearby. One night, a ghostly samurai
hijacks him to sing before the phantom court that had sunk into the sea in
front of the convent. Haunted by these ghosts, he languishes during the day,
until the abbot makes him confess what has been happening, and covers his
body with inscriptions, forgetting his ears. This renders the rest of him invis-
ible, but the next night the sight of his ears infuriates the samurai, who
tears them off. Now blind and deaf, he continues to sing his epic poem,
enhancing the fame of the convent. Like in an analysis of trauma, terrible
words from a timeless time are called upon to make themselves heard and
be inscribed in memory. Such words can only be transmitted using special
instruments in a specific transference.
Hannah Arendt’s writing unfreezes the “ice-cold reasoning” of ideologies
and the terror felt by men “squeezed together violently,” when the social
link is completely destroyed. With great foresight, at the end of Totalitarian-
ism, she speaks of “an ever-present danger.” I suggest that we call totalitar-
ian “the death zones” – an expression coined by Benedetti10 – explored in
transference by our patients’ folly.

Madness explores totalitarian zones trivialised by psychoanalysis

Of course, as Hannah Arendt stresses, totalitarian regimes are an invention
of the twentieth century, while madness has existed since the beginning of
time, long before Nazi and Stalinist regimes assassinated the mad, “in
a temporary alliance between the elite and the mob.” But she adds that “in
this present calamity, the seeds of freedom” continue to exist in madness
162 Seminar 7: 1999–2000
since one must be mad not to follow the movement, especially when it pro-
claims its good intentions.
Arendt speaks of the seeds of freedom, not of “the limits of freedom,” to
which Lacan referred at the Bonneval conference, on September 28, 1946,
published under the title “Comments on Psychic Causality” in Écrits:11
“Not only can man’s being not be understood without madness, but it
would not be man’s being if it did not bear madness within itself as the
limit of his freedom.” At this conference, organised by psychiatrist Henri
Ey to condemn the organicist approach to psychosis, Lacan named as an
advocate of brain supremacy neurologist Kurt Goldstein who, on the con-
trary, had been greatly influenced by psychoanalysis, and had also been
Frieda Fromm-Reichmann’s teacher. He remained a model for her psycho-
dynamic psychoanalysis of psychoses at Chestnut Lodge.12
Lacan’s doctoral thesis, “Paranoid Psychosis and Its Relation to the Per-
sonality,” praised by Joë Bousquet, Léon-Paul Fargue and “dear” René
Crevel, gives the impression that he was unaware of the psychoanalytic
approaches to trauma and psychosis practised since the previous war, not
only by Fromm-Reichmann, but also by Harry Stack Sullivan and Thomas
Salmon in the United States, Sándor Ferenczi in Hungary and William
Rivers in England, to name just a few. The war, during which Lacan
stopped practising psychoanalysis, seems to offer him an excuse:

For several years I have kept […] from expressing myself. The humiliation
of our time under the subjugation of the enemies of human kind dissuaded
me from speaking up, and following Fontenelle, I abandoned myself to the
fantasy of having my hand full of truths so as to better close it on them.
I confess that it is a ridiculous fantasy, marking, as it does, the limitations
of a being who is on the verge of bearing witness.13

After this brief allusion, the war is never mentioned again in his presenta-
tion. Still, “the enemies of humankind” and “the limitations of their
beings” did not dissuaded the analysts I mentioned – including Wilfred
Bion, whom Lacan would visit after the war14 – from opening their hands
and warming up their patients’ frozen words, bringing to bear their clinical
practice in wartime. Eight years later, in his “Response to Jean Hyppolite’s
comments on Freud’s text Negation,” Lacan speaks of Verwerfung, the
future “foreclosure,” retranchement in French15 – meaning “cutting out.” In
Écrits, the phrase “What does not come to light in the symbolic appears in
the real”16 applies to the case of the Wolf Man, whose analysis was inter-
rupted on the day of the Sarajevo assassination in 1914.17 When the young
Russian patient came to see Freud again in 1919 to talk about his financial
ruin during the 1917 revolution, his analyst sent him to some colleagues.
Then the famous patient started to have delusions, raising the question of
transference in psychosis, considered impossible until then.
 Hannah Arendt 163
But Freud did not keep his hand closed on that question. Twenty years
later, he wrote Moses and Monotheism,18 after his books were burned on
May 10, 1933 in an auto-da-fé on the Opera Platz in Berlin, in front of the
university, organised by Goebbels and the totalitarian regime that was to
kill four of Freud’s sisters in 1942. At the end of the book, he wrote: “We
have long since understood that in every delusion there is a kernel of forgot-
ten truth […]. We have to admit such a context of ‘historical truths’.” This
is the challenge he set for psychoanalysis before his death in 1939. Yet in
1954, in his “Response to Jean Hyppolite,” Lacan still persisted in believing
that “what is foreclosed to the subject, appears in the real erratically in rela-
tions of resistance without transference, or as a punctuation without text.”
For their part, Hannah Arendt had analysed the deliberate foreclosure of
true speech by totalitarian agencies, and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann had
stated long since, from her experience of totalitarianism, that “where there
is no transference, everything is transference.”19
The foreclosure of the name of the father, which Lacan pointed out during
the case presentations we attended at Sainte-Anne Hospital, stands in sharp
contrast with the analysis of the transference of “surviving images,” ousted
from the symbolic chain, and submitted to the analyst’s “seismograph of the
soul,” as historian of Renaissance art Aby Warburg called it.
Aby Warburg went mad at the start of World War I; confined in Bins-
wanger’s clinic, he shouted that all the Jews would be assassinated. His pres-
cience was rooted in knowledge stored in traumatic impressions recorded by
the seismograph of his soul when, in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian
War of 1870, he had witnessed, as a child, the rise of “mass anti-Semitism”
– which Hannah Arendt dates to that period – a threat to his family of
Jewish bankers in Hamburg. During the war, his mother and himself had
almost died of typhus; after France lost the war, the overflow of gold
coming from French reparations had destabilised German banks and Jewish
bankers were held responsible. The first Antisemitic League was created in
Hamburg by the anarchist Victor Marr, when Aby was 13 years old. This is
also when he made a pact with his younger brothers to relinquish the direct-
orship of the bank against their promise to buy him all the books he
wanted, for the rest of his life. Hence the famous library built by his broth-
ers in Hamburg, according to his plans. The library became the Warburg
Institute in London when the books were smuggled there in 1933, after his
death. His delusional cries in the early 1920s were expressing the historical
truth, which no one wanted to see.20
In Moses and Monotheism, Freud also refers to “surviving images,” a phrase
coined by Warburg: “The strongest obsessive influences derive from those [early]
experiences, while the child’s psychic apparatus is incompletely fitted for accept-
ing them.” Freud compares them to photographic negatives, which “can be
developed after a short or long interval.” In Aby Warburg’s case, this interval
lasted as long as the period between two wars, 1870 and 1914. Speaking of this
phenomenon, Freud quoted E. T. A. Hoffmann, who “explained the wealth of
164 Seminar 7: 1999–2000
imaginative figures in his stories by citing the quickly changing pictures and
impressions he had received during a several weeks’ journey in a coach, while he
was still a babe at his mother’s breast.”
This pre-Oedipal analysis was familiar to the writers Freud advises us to
read at the beginning of his Gradiva, since they “are valuable allies, Bundes
genossen.”21 Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy,22 Bion in A Memoire of
the Future23 and Carlos Fuentes in Christopher Unborn24 have all created
prenatal characters – speaking gametes that Sterne calls “Homunculus,” and
Bion “Somites.” Not only do they keep the score of intergenerational trau-
mas, but they may bring about new beginnings. Hannah Arendt calls them
by the Greek term oi neoi, “the new ones.”

Christopher Unborn (Cristobal Nonato)

The model for Carlos Fuentes’ book is clearly Tristram Shandy, which
begins with the hero’s first cry as an embryo: “I wish.” He wishes that his
parents “had minded what they were about when they begot me.” Like
Sterne, Fuentes starts off with this incredible “I,” spoken by a character
barely out of his father’s testicles and his mother’s egg. From this place, he
raises the question of the radical novelty of a newborn, a central theme for
Hannah Arendt, who had no children.
Conceived on a beach in Acapulco by his father Angel and his mother
Angeles, Cristobal, – whose birth is planned to coincide with the anniver-
sary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World – would cling des-
perately to his mother’s oviduct, during nine months of solitude, like the
embryo of the future Tristram, terrified by the “long, long months” he
would spend without holding, “in his way alone” – as Winnicott was to
remember – an unaccompanied “little gentleman.”
Following, like Sterne, in the footsteps of Cervantes in the author’s pref-
ace to the second Don Quixote, and of Wittgenstein in the preface to his
Philosophical Investigations, Carlos Fuentes speaks directly to the reader –
lector in Spanish, whom he calls elector:

It’s time I reveal myself before you, Reader, and tell you I have already
returned by way of my genes, which know all, remember all, and if,
a bit later, I, like you, forget everything when I’m born and have to
learn it all over again before I die, who would deny that in this instant
of my gestation I know everything because I am here inside and you,
Reader, are you out there?
(p. 64)

The fertilised ovule asks his father: “But my grandparents, Dad, tell me
about my grandparents” (p. 54). Angel is the son of the Mexican equivalent
of Pierre and Marie Curie, “The Curies of Tlalpan.” “They believed in sci-
ence with all the love of novelty and all the fury of liberal, emancipated
 Hannah Arendt 165
Mexicans and rejected both inquisitorial shadows and the sanctimonious-
ness of the past.” Moved by the scientific and humanitarian desire to put
an end to hunger in Mexico, they invented the Inconsumable Taco, made of
a tortilla that could not be eaten by rodents. The two scientists fell victim to
this invention, which ended up choking them, but in the meantime they had
invented a mousetrap for the poor that needed no cheese. Instead, their idea
was to slide a photograph of a piece of Roquefort in the mousetrap, which
they placed in the basement. The next day they hurried downstairs to see
what happened. The trap had worked: the photograph had disappeared, but
in its place they found the photo of a mouse.

A make-believe universe
Cristobal’s grandparents never intended to foster their procedure on the
whole society by creating what Hannah Arendt calls a fictitious universe,
founded on absolute faith in science – whether embodied by racial laws or
by historical determinism. She insists on the absurdity of such beliefs held
to varying degrees: from the “abnormal credulity” of companions who
maintain “contact with the normal world in an atmosphere of honesty,” to
the cynicism of the party elite, constituting a “hierarchy of scorn” for the
useful idiots.25
In the third part of The Origins of Totalitarianism, entitled “Totalitarian-
ism,” Hannah Arendt borrows many terms from the sphere of madness:
concentration camps are “an experimental madness” she describes as
“insane.” For her, the word “madness” is not a metaphor, since metaphors
do not function when the symbolic chain is broken. The camps are not
“like” an experimental madness; life without freedom is not “like” life in
a concentration camp. The expression “It’s like” does not apply here. No
other meaning is hidden behind the actual word.
Magritte pointed out that in his painting of a man wearing a bowler hat
seen from behind, one must not try to imagine what the face is seeing.
Behind the head, there is the canvas; thank goodness, since there might not
have been anything. Beyond the illusions maintained by the hidden face of
“secret societies established in broad daylight for the conquest of the world
or for world revolution,” Arendt says, “there is the void.”
On the other hand, the analyst of madness and trauma provides a canvas
on which images without reflection may begin to leave an imprint on the
background of the analyst’s story. Hannah Arendt’s relentless writing, which
springs from her own story, constitutes this backdrop on which she catches
the productions of totalitarianism ruled by the principle of “everything is
possible,” which she differentiates from “everything is permitted” in imperi-
alism, where a law exists and is broken. When everything is possible, “the
delusion of omnipotence” gives “the most aberrant procedure a chance to
succeed,” and provides the certainty that “power of organization can des-
troy power of substance.”
166 Seminar 7: 1999–2000
Totalitarianism where everything is possible encounters the obstacle of
madness as a technique and art of survival. For instance, it allows the pris-
oner incarcerated by the Argentinian junta to hallucinate in his cell that his
friends are there to visit him, so that solitude does not drive him mad.26
Regimes of terror know this well and kill the mad at once, whether their
madness is real or feigned. Any unpredictability threatens their system.
Indeed, Folly is unpredictable with unforeseeable manic and depressive
phases, or traumatic revivals that attempt to show what cannot be said.
When the only answer is electric shock and medication, after some respite
the result is a feeling of annihilation, of belonging to a subhuman species.
According to Hannah Arendt, the destruction of symbolic bearings by
totalitarian systems renders human beings “superfluous,” mere material for
the production of the new man. Individuals are reduced to a collection of
compressed identities, 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. Percentages and statistics prevail, with-
out ancestors and with a falsified language, analysed by Victor Klemperer
in his book LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii, (The Language of the Third
Reich).27 Explanations for the world’s unhappiness, bearing no relation to
reality, uphold an atemporal system, limitless and without borders, like
“communism in a single country” or Lebensraum on a planetary scale.
In such systems, psychoanalysis has no right to exist. Arendt shows the
systematic “attacks on linking,” as Bion calls them, carried out against the
given word, and sworn faith in totalitarian systems that spread forgeries.
When madness is reduced to genetic, statistical or structural categories that
dismiss transference, how can a therapist reach the other side of an Iron
Curtain where everything seems unreal, Arendt asks, but where folly waits
for a second in combat with whom to fight perversion?

The analyst’s commitment

When encountering madness, we conduct research in a sphere we describe
as totalitarian, in search of another, a witness to an unimaginable world.
Hannah Arendt is this witness. To explore this field of research, she cannot
adopt objective detachment. When she conceives her book in 1943 with Blü-
cher in New York, where they arrived stateless in 1941,28 the Nazi and Sta-
linist camps are operating at full capacity. She is not content to give
descriptions, but speaks as a subject, using the words of the philosophical
and literary tradition, maintaining a tension between her analyses and the
therapeutic process they prompt.
In the chapter on propaganda,29 she describes a “psychological war”
waged by means of subliminal images: “people are threatened by Stalinist
propaganda with missing the train of history, with remaining hopelessly
behind their time […] just as they were threatened by the Nazis with living
against the eternal laws of nature and life” (p. 349). The laws of historical
determinism or racial purity spare no one: “Stalin prepared the physical
liquidation of deviationists, representatives of ‘dying classes’” (p. 73). Hitler
 Hannah Arendt 167
exterminated Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, the mad and the incurably ill (p.
74). A rhetoric of scientific prophecy “shapes the life of their people accord-
ing to the verdicts of genetics,” or economic forces that have the power of
a verdict of history, promoting “gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods as
unquestioned facts” (p. 333).
Words are tantamount to actions. Aryan children are produced in the
Lebensborn or kidnapped in great numbers among Polish blonde, blue-eyed
tots (p. 68). The expression “the living dead” is the demented reality of “the
mass production of corpses” in Nazi and Soviet concentration camps (p.
441). The term “experimental madness,” which Arendt employs often,
describes real experiments conducted by perverse imaginations, which defy
all “common sense, whether of a psychological or sociological nature”
(p. 441).
In these conditions, her therapeutic process is inspired by Karen Blixen’s
phrase: “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell
a story about them.” Mary McCarthy said of her friend Hannah that she
had the magnetism of an actress, but had learned to control her stage fright
by placing herself in the service of History and of the stories she told.
Arendt held storytellers in high regard and admired the formal perfection
of their art.30 She found this admirable talent in Danish author Karen
Blixen, who used the pen name Isak Dinesen. Arendt met her in New York
a short time before Blixen’s death in 1963:

She was very old, terribly fragile, magnificently dressed. She narrated,
without any notes, passages from her book Out of Africa,31 almost
word for word. She seemed to be an apparition from some unknown
time and place.

It was this grand Lady who provided Arendt with the phrase, quoted above,
at the start of Chapter 5 of The Human Condition.32
When it is impossible to speak and to imagine, stories allow impossible
things to enter the body of the storyteller sideways, through the action of
storytelling. Creating fiction is radically opposed to falsification, on condi-
tion that one trusts one’s own impressions.

The fearful imagination

Only the fearful imagination of those who have been aroused by such
reports but have not actually been smitten in their own flesh, of those
who are consequently free from the bestial, desperate terror which,
when confronted by real, present horror, inexorably paralyzes every-
thing that is not mere reaction, can afford to keep thinking about
horrors.
(p. 441)
168 Seminar 7: 1999–2000
Hannah Arendt asserts this impression without letting it paralyse her judge-
ment. She states: “The fearful imagination has the great advantage to dis-
solve the sophistic–dialectical interpretations of politics which are all based
on the superstition that something good might result from evil.”
Arendt is clear in her radical condemnation of any attempt to erase
traces, a question that concerns the psychoanalysis of madness and trauma
most particularly:

Such dialectical acrobatics had at least a semblance of justification as

long as the worst that man could inflict upon man was murder. But, as
we know today, murder is only a limited evil. The murderer who kills
a man leaves a corpse behind and does not pretend that his victim has
never existed; if he wipes out any traces, they are those of his own iden-
tity, and not the memory and grief of the persons who loved his victim;
he destroys a life, but he does not destroy the fact of existence itself.
(p. 442)

The deliberate disappearance of the dead goes hand in hand with that of
the living:

The real horror of Nazi and Soviet concentration and extermination

camps lies in the fact that the inmates, even if they happen to keep
alive, are more effectively cut off from the world of the living than if
they had died, because terror enforces oblivion. […] David Rousset
called his report on the period he spent in a German concentration
camp Les Jours de notre mort, The Days of our Death.33 […] nobody is
supposed to know if they are alive or dead.
(p. 443)

Descartes’ evil spirit is embodied in reality:

The human masses sealed off in [the camps] are treated as if they no

longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of any inter-
est to anybody, as if they were already dead and some evil spirit gone
mad were amusing himself by stopping them for a while between life
and death […]. It is the skilfully manufactured unreality of those whom
it fences in, that makes extermination look like a perfectly normal
measure.
(p. 445)

The emergence of totalitarian systems in the twentieth century is “an unpre-

cedented phenomenon” which she distinguishes from the tyrannies and
imperialism that had existed previously:
 Hannah Arendt 169
There are no parallels to the life in the concentration camps. Its horror
can never be fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that
it stands outside of life and death. It can never be fully reported for the
very reason that the survivor returns to the world of the living, which
makes it impossible for him to believe fully in his own past experiences.
It is as though he had a story to tell of another planet.
(p. 444)

Except if the survivor encountered a witness to these “events without

a witness,” whom Dori Laub – co-founder with Steven Spielberg of the For-
tunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies – calls a “passionate wit-
ness,” who shakes off the fascination with horror and can hear, against all
odds, stories that had remained impossible to tell until then.

The therapeutic art

The only text possible – from textum in Latin, from the verb texere, to
weave – when there are no more words or images is to interweave a new
weft in the warp of a text in the making. To create otherness where there is
no inscription is the true objective of The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Part 1, “Antisemitism as an Outrage to Common Sense,” opens Arendt’s
discussion on the “dubious honour” conferred upon the Jewish problem “of
setting the whole infernal machine in motion.” Given the actual events:

all explanations of antisemitism [be it the scapegoat theory or the

revival of Dark Ages superstitions], look as if they had been hastily and
hazardously contrived, to cover up an issue which so gravely threatens
our sense of proportion and our hope for sanity.34

Part 2, “Imperialism,” prepares the reader for the emergence of the Totali-
tarian System, which she considers an enactment of Jonathan Swift’s
Modest Proposal, quoted at the end of Part 3, “Totalitarianism.” Swift sug-
gested solving the problem of famine in Ireland by raising children in view
of eating them:

The Nazis and the Bolsheviks can be sure that their factories of annihi-
lation demonstrate the swiftest solution to the problem of overpopula-
tion, of economically superfluous and socially rootless human masses.
[…] Wherever it rose to power, [totalitarianism] destroyed all social,
legal and political traditions of the country, and established a foreign
policy openly directed toward world domination.35

The beginning, archè, through which each new birth reinvents the world, is
replaced by the elimination of individuals, for the sake of creating “One
Man of gigantic dimensions” as the ultimate product of the regime (p. 466).
170 Seminar 7: 1999–2000
How can one report on that which defies imagination? The fearful
imagination is what drives Hannah Arendt to think and write constantly. In
his article “Art and Trauma,” Dori Laub differentiates “a depositary art,”
which traumatises the reader or spectator, from “therapeutic art,” whose
goal is psychic survival.36 On this point, Arendt’s writing coincides with the
analytic scene, which is also the tragic scene of ceremonial theatre. Accord-
ing to Aristotle, the fearful imagination, together with pity, was
a therapeutic incentive of the tragedies that Greek citizens were required to
attend. Many of these tragedies depicted the madness of war, experienced by
their authors. Aeschylus had fought in the Battles of Marathon and Sala-
min; Sophocles acted as “strategos” on two occasions; and Socrates, his
contemporary, fought bravely as a hoplite in the Peloponnesian War, as
Alcibiades praises him for doing at the end of The Symposium.
The madness of Ajax, in Sophocles’ tragedy, is that of someone trauma-
tised by war, since he rightly asks for the arms of Achilles, which have been
given to Ulysses. To take revenge on the commanders of the Greek army
for their betrayal, Ajax kills their cattle and sheep – vital food supplies –
while hallucinating that he is slaying Agamemnon’s companions. When he
recovers from his delusion, Ajax kills himself.37 Likewise, Euripides’ Hera-
cles also carries out a massacre. When he goes off to capture Cerberus in
Hades, he leaves his wife and his children with their putative father Amphit-
ryon. In his absence, his enemies are plotting to kill his heirs in order to
seize power, but Hera has sent Lyssa, the goddess of rage, to drive him
mad, so that he kills his wife and children while he is hallucinating. When,
emerging from his delusion, he wants to end his life, his friend Theseus
stops him.38
In Ancient Greece, authors of epic tales and tragic theatre have the gods
intervene in the excess, ubris, of the heroes, and they do not reduce madness
to the brain.39 Gregory Nagy,40 quoted by Jonathan Shay in Achilles in Viet
Nam, describes Achilles’ wrath, at the beginning of the Iliad, as a response
to the betrayal of Themis, Fairness, by his commander Agamemnon when
he claims the captive Briseis, who should have been rightfully his. Homer’s
epics were recited every four years during the Athens Festival, Panathénaia,
by a bard who was identified to Homer while he sang. The rhythm and the
tales were a therapy of war traumas for citizens who had been in battle.
According to Gregory Nagy, expert on the Hellenistic period teaching at
Harvard, epics are war stories told by veterans to their grandchildren, in
the present tense of trauma, over the heads of their immediate descendants,
who are fed up of hearing such stories over and over.
Hannah Arendt strives to transmit what cannot be transmitted, in the
face of an ever-present threat. Her purpose is not to inform people by the
documents she gathers, but to create, for herself and for her readers, an
otherness to which one can speak. Although she did not like psychoanalysis,
she gives us tools not only to analyse the “iron logic” that transforms
humans into things, but also to resist it (p. 120). Systematic destruction of
 Hannah Arendt 171
man’s civic and moral identity produces “the submission of populations ren-
dered apathetic and compliant” (p. 291). The historian and the analyst do
not escape this fate. How can we resist apathy and not be compliant with
rationalisations that make us lose our bearings? How can we reach our
patients in their abysmal solitude?

From loneliness to the creation of otherness

David Rousset wrote: “Here, hundreds of thousands of us know that we are
living in absolute solitude” (p. 191). In the last chapter of Totalitarianism,
“Ideology and Terror,” Hannah Arendt discusses the difference between
solitude and loneliness: “What makes the loneliness so unbearable is the
loss of one’s own self,” whereas in solitude “identity is confirmed by the
trusting and trustworthy company of my equals.” In loneliness, “man loses
trust in himself as the partner of his thoughts. Self and the world, capacity
for thought and experience are lost at the same time” (p. 477).
Our task, says Dori Laub, is to “re-establish the lost internal Thou – as
Martin Buber, in I and Thou (1923), calls this “you” which allows one to
speak to oneself41 – when loneliness is incommunicable, when total absence
of empathy has destroyed alterity.42 “Real loneliness,” which cannot be con-
ceptualised, is often experienced through cut-out feelings that another may
feel in your place.
“On Loneliness” is the title of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann’s last article.
The manuscript was found on her desk in her cottage at Chestnut Lodge
after her death in 1957.43 In this article, she speaks of her patients’ isolation
at a period when she herself is afflicted with deafness, as were both her par-
ents. Before immigrating to the United States in 1935, she had worked as
a neurologist at the Königsberg hospital where Hannah Arendt’s father, suf-
fering from syphilis, was a patient between 1911 and his death in 1913. His
condition had deteriorated to the point where he no longer recognised his
daughter, who was 6 years old. The child’s fright at the sight of him was
trivialised by her mother, as the latter admitted later. The words she often
uses – “insanity, lunacy, abnormal and senseless” – testify to her early lone-
liness upon witnessing her father’s madness.44
Frieda Fromm-Reichmann’s father committed suicide by throwing himself
down an elevator shaft after losing his job due to his deafness. How can
a child understand a parent’s suicide, remarks Jane Tillman,45 without being
drawn into the zone of death that entraps her in the incomprehensible
“mysterious object”?
Arendt rejects the attraction of endless speculation in the face of absurd
political terror, which triggers an endless search for causes and swallows up
life. According to her, the most effective weapon of totalitarianism is logical
seduction, which traps the masses in the “ice-cold reasoning [of] the mighty
tentacle of dialectics.” Both appear falsely as the last support in a world
where no one can be trusted and nothing is reliable:
172 Seminar 7: 1999–2000
What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian
world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually
suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become
an everyday experience of the evergrowing masses of our century.

In everyday life, perversion takes people in distress as its target of choice.

The three words Hannah Arendt uses to describe this psychical experi-
ence – “solitude, isolation, loneliness” – and their opposite – “consolation” –
do not have a common etymology. “Isolated” comes from insula, island;
“solitude” comes from solus, alone; and “console” comes from solari, to
soothe. Loneliness is the exclusion of all others, in which abused children
and victims of trauma take refuge, when they no longer expect anything of
anyone. Out of despair, they may then become attracted to the infernal
machine of totalitarian discourses, which “use reason to destroy reason by
teaching and glorifying the logical reasoning whose content is nothing more
than a refusal of contradictions.”
She describes a situation resembling a psychotic experience, in which time
stops after the suppression of ancestors and private life:

Isolation and loneliness are not the same. I can be isolated – that is in
a situation in which I cannot act, because there is nobody who will act
with me – without being lonely; and I can be lonely – that is in
a situation in which I as a person feel myself deserted by all human
companionship – without being isolated.
(p. 474)

The dying classes, races and individuals, unfit to live, no longer have a past
and their future is programmed elimination.
Space is both destroyed and limitless:

By pressing men against each other, total terror destroys the space
between them. The ability to think is abolished by a logic without
a subject, which eliminates the limits of the self. Isolation is different
from loneliness, which preserves the limits of the self; isolation creates
confusion.

Psychosis-like states are induced, and the self deserts the individual.
In order to differentiate these states from the philosopher’s solitude,
Hannah Arendt cites the anecdote about Hegel on his deathbed, saying:
“Nobody has understood me except one; and he also misunderstood” (p.
477). But under totalitarian conditions, the only way to avoid madness is to
yield to organised dementia by surrendering one’s singularity to terror,
which annihilates “even the productive potentialities of isolation” and elim-
inates the chance that loneliness may become solitude, by “eradicating the
love of freedom from the hearts of men” (p. 466).
 Hannah Arendt 173
For Hannah Arendt, love of freedom is the way out of the hopeless
double bind that blocks the future through a fascination with the end of the
world. In the last page of Totalitarianism, she says: “… such considerations
as predictions are of little avail and less consolation.” Following advice
from Kafka,46 who tells us that to write is to “leap out of the ranks of
assassins,” she leaps out of the “iron band” of totalitarian assassins, to call
for “a new beginning” (p. 478). Without quoting him, she also follows in
the footsteps of La Boétie, who beseeches us not to fall into voluntary servi-
tude: “Ô foolish people! … What evil change has so denatured man that he,
the only creature really born to be free, lacks the memory of his original
condition and the desire to return to it?”47

The production of freedom

Folly aims for freedom, in a battle against ruthless agencies that treat
human beings like things. Hannah Arendt points out that common sense
remains powerless against crimes of unprecedented magnitude, as powerless
as the human sciences, including mainstream psychoanalysis, whose “stock
phrases” and failures with extreme trauma she criticises. Still, she received
the Sigmund Freud Prize, awarded to German-language writers. And this
recognition was well-deserved, since her writing supports the psychoanalysis
of madness and trauma, which has elicited severe criticism from colleagues
shocked by this involvement in “psychotic transference,” as Bion calls it.
In her postscript to Eichmann in Jerusalem, which she added in response
to the controversy triggered by the book, she rejects the maxim still in
vogue today: “One should not judge.” Defying her own critics, she defends
tooth and nail her thou: “That which you say to yourself to exercise your
judgement,” whose loss, Dori Laub confirms, characterises a totalitarian
world. “If you invoke,” she writes, “the argument that we cannot judge if
we were not present,” or worse, “in his place, I would perhaps have done
the same,” you are lost (p. 137). The production of freedom which acknow-
ledges soul murder, honours the dead without a grave and detects lies
enshrouded in silence involves risks she is willing to take. In the span of
time between her two books (1948–1963), her tone has changed. She is now
attacked for her arrogance and her persiflage.
Eichmann in Jerusalem is the result of Arendt’s self-analysis, which she
calls cura posterior in a letter to Mary McCarthy. Her initial reaction at the
trial was a state of shock at discovering how normal the accused looked in
his glass booth. She had expected to see, for the first time, a flesh-and-
blood Nazi responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews transported to
extermination camps thanks to his zealous organisation. Stunned, she has
to admit that Eichmann is incapable of self-analysis, although he consented
“enthusiastically” to being interviewed by an Israeli officer. The tale of his
life is a series of exculpatory stereotypes, downplaying his role in the Nazi
Party; he refuses responsibility for the crimes of which he is accused by
174 Seminar 7: 1999–2000
arguing that he never killed a Jew with his own hands, and that he even
had a certain admiration for them. Arendt concludes her portrait with La
Rochefoucauld’s maxim: “It is very difficult to live with a criminal, espe-
cially when he is you.”
The controversy surrounding her book concerns her criticism of the legal
characterisation of facts in Eichmann’s prosecution. Although the charge
“crimes against humanity” had been created in 1945 for the Nuremberg
trials, the Israeli court did not make use of it. Arendt is accused of putting
herself in the place of the judges when she writes in the epilogue what the
court should have told the accused:

And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to
share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of
other nations – as though you and your superiors had any right to
determine who should and who should not inhabit the world – we find
that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to
want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only
reason, you must hang.
(p. 139)

The psychiatric evaluation was inconclusive. One of the psychiatrists even

went so far as to state: “He is more normal than I am, at any rate, after
having examined him.” This does not surprise Hannah Arendt, since to be
normal in this system means to be a criminal prompted into action by the
commandment: “Thou shalt kill.” The trial confirmed her analysis in Totali-
tarianism. She admitted this to Mary McCarthy, writing to her, while
assailed by critics: “You were the only reader to understand […] that
I wrote this book in a state of euphoria.”
Her confidence in her own analyses allowed her not only to weather the
storm, but to reaffirm, in the postscript, her criticism of human sciences and
psychoanalysis: “True, we have become very much accustomed by modern
psychology and sociology, not to speak of modern bureaucracy, to explaining
away the responsibility of the doer for his deed in terms of this or that kind of
determinism” (p. 139), such as the unfairness of the Treaty of Versailles, an
unhappy childhood, or obeying orders. After listing other excuses, she adds:

Another such escape from the area of ascertainable facts and personal
responsibility are the countless theories, based on non-specific, abstract,
hypothetical assumptions – from Zeitgeist down to the Oedipus complex –
which are so general that they explain and justify every event and every
deed.
(p. 140)

Hannah Arendt insists on the need for a new paradigm when dealing with
“an unprecedented crime” that requires testing the limits of legal discourse,
 Hannah Arendt 175
and concepts such as the “subjective factor” taking into account “intent to
do wrong. Where this intent is absent, when the ability to distinguish
between right and wrong is impaired, we feel no crime has been committed”
(p. 110). But when the abolition of this distinction is raised to the status of
an absolute principle by a system that annihilates millions of people, holes
in memory are created to swallow up murders without a trace.
The analyst must testify to events fallen into the trash bin of History, not
from a position of neutrality, but out of analogous zones in his own story.
Then a subject may emerge, able to judge and take responsibility. This
transformation is performed in the third part of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, “The
Eumenides,”48 when, during the trial of Orestes, Athena votes to exonerate
Orestes from matricide, taking him from a guilt transmitted through gener-
ations, to his responsibility as a subject, according to Solon’s laws (636–558
BC) on individual responsibility. Then the Erinyes, goddesses of revenge,
become the Eumenides, goddesses of benevolence.
Hannah Arendt ridicules the contemporary obsession with finding excuses
for criminals, “as if our humanity resided in this sceptical attitude.”

“Consent lights up the face. Refusal gives it its beauty.”

This phrase, written by René Char in “Leaves of Hypnos” during World
War II,49 shows the kinship between psychotic transference and Hannah
Arendt’s work. They have in common the “consent” to truths that have
been cut out and the refusal to eradicate traces.
René Char was writing while he fought in the French Resistance, and his
words echo those of Hannah Arendt, written at the same period:

This war will stretch beyond platonic armistices. The implanting of pol-
itical concepts will proceed with the convulsive stealth of an hypocrisy
certain of its rights. Don’t smile. Thrust aside both scepticism and resig-
nation and prepare your mortal soul to face an intramural confronta-
tion with demons as cold-blooded as microbes.

Five years earlier, going beyond the ready-made phrases to which psycho-
analysis had been reduced, Freud expressed his loneliness, in the prefatory
note of the Moses dated “before March 1938” and written in Vienna:

All that […] would probably lead to our being forbidden to work in
Psycho-analysis. […] I know that this external danger will deter me
from publishing the last part of my treatise on Moses. […] So I shall
not publish this essay. But that need not hinder me from writing it. […]
Thus it may lie hid until the time comes when it may safely venture
into the light of day, or until someone else who reaches the same opin-
ions and conclusions can be told: “In darker days there lived a man
who thought as you did.”50
176 Seminar 7: 1999–2000
Hannah Arendt echoes the same loneliness in Chapter 7, “Truth and Polit-
ics,” of her book Between Past and Future51, in which she identifies three
types of truths: “rational truths,” which are mathematical and moral; “opin-
ion truths,” which politics endeavour to change; and “factual truths,” which
Lenin called stubborn, since that which existed cannot be erased. And yet,
she says, this is exactly what happened in Russia and in Germany, as well as
in France, where “the majority of the population denied facts when they
contradicted ideology.” No one cares about a factual truth that is crushed
by the steamroller of pseudoscience. Everyone ceases to see people cut out
from the photographs, as well as pages torn out of schoolbooks, so that his-
tory can be rewritten.
One could easily think that the destruction of all truth – so that nothing
is guaranteed by anything any longer, “nothing is any truer than any other
thing,” no one can count on anyone, and peoples are manipulated by
propaganda – is a hopeless phenomenon. Yet Arendt maintains, in conclu-
sion: “Truth, though powerless and always defeated possesses a power of its
own: the voice of the truth teller,” of the herald who has found refuge in
the solitude of research, or among famous storytellers like Isak Dinesen,
who bring us joy (p. 259). One of the places for truth-telling, we might add,
is the psychoanalysis of madness and trauma.
Hannah Arendt’s first husband, Gunther Anders, whom she met while
attending Heidegger’s lectures, wrote two open letters to Eichmann’s sons,
under the title We, Sons of Eichmann.52 The first letter was addressed to the
17-year-old adolescent, and the second to the man he had become twenty-
five years later. Gunther Anders, whose actual family name was Stern, came
from a family of child psychologists with ties to Piaget, and he was Walter
Benjamin’s cousin. The intention of his letters, signed by “the Jew Anders,”
the personified Other, is to bring the son of a monster back into the realm
of truth thanks to the pronoun “we.” In his second letter, he writes: “We
know not what we do; we could be the sons of Eichmann, and participate
in horrors without being able to imagine it.” In the background, Anders’
vision of the world is apocalyptic: “We are threatened by a universe of
machines, and the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are only the
beginning.”
But Hannah Arendt never agrees with doomsday prophecies. In her post-
script to the second edition of Eichmann in Jerusalem, she expresses her
opposition to those “who will not rest until they have discovered an ‘Eich-
mann in every one of us’” (p. 458). In her view, there is no excuse for ignor-
ance: “We must be conscious of what we do.” So, she asks herself what she
is doing when she uses the German language.

The gift of language

In the United States, she continues to write and to think in German. After
having almost completed (except for the last two chapters) the manuscript
 Hannah Arendt 177
53
of her thesis on Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, she left Germany
for Paris in 1933 and reflected on the fact that, as a Jew, like Rahel, she
could not do without the German language, although it carried the orders
of the Führer’s killing machine. “Language has not gone mad, all the
same,” she says, but some work is needed to deal with the stigmata left by
what it was forced to do. The Life of the Mind54 discusses these questions.
Reflecting about thought, she uses the Greek expression logon didonai, to
give logos, which she translates as: “to give account is to justify in words”
(p. 102). Before the mind can travel through the words, poreuesthai dia
logon, as Plato says: “The sheer naming of things is the human way of
appropriating and, as it were, disalienating the world into which, after all,
each of us is born as a newcomer and a stranger” (p. 99). In order to appro-
priate the world, the subject needs “plurality.” There can be no subject
without otherness, including that of other peoples and civilisations: “The
crime of totalitarianism consisted in the total suppression of an element of
this plurality, the Jewish people, condemned to disappear from the surface
of the earth.”
It is essential to give the other his place, even in catastrophic times. “Wo
es war, sol Ich warden,” Freud writes:55 “Where id was” – the obscure and
impenetrable part of our psyche – “there ego must be.” Sollen is an ethical
imperative. According to Arendt, “thoughts do not have to be communi-
cated in order to occur, but they cannot occur without being spoken –
silently or sounded out in dialogue.” She knows that speech comes from the
place of the Other: “To reason silently with oneself is to come to terms with
whatever may be given to our senses in everyday appearances; the need of
reason is to give account, logon didonai, as the Greeks called it with great
precision” (p. 101). Even in the face of a totalitarian movement that does
its best to destroy the logos and the gift of it, we feel that language is there,
even if it is contaminated, even if it can only enumerate “elements without
reason, stoicheia aloga,” as Socrates states in the Theaetetus.56 It strives
with wild freedom – like children do when they learn to speak – to inter-
weave these elements with those coming from a potential other, in order to
create logos.
The one who has been ousted from logos strives at once to rejoin the
order of language. This task is carried out, everywhere in the world, through
cathartic ceremonies that perform the destruction of the thing, das Ding, in
order to allow its name to exist “without a bearer,” as Wittgenstein says.57
The word “dog” does not bite, the word “mouse” eats no cheese, the word
“grinder” doesn’t grind anything.” Arendt writes: “no language has a ready-
made vocabulary for the needs of mental activity. […] Language is ‘vitally
metaphorical’, as Shelley says” (p. 102). “The life of the mind” manifests
itself through “the carrying over – metapherein – of an intuitive perception
of similarity in dissimilarities.” For instance, “Kant gives an example of
a despotic state as a ‘mere machine’, like a hand mill, since it is ‘governed
by an individual absolute will’” (p. 103).
178 Seminar 7: 1999–2000
But in the language of the Third Reich, this metaphor is impossible,
because words are taken literally and the concentration camp machine actu-
ally crushes living corpses without a tomb. Cristobal Nonato’s mice had
grasped this strategy when they were given photographs of cheese to eat,
and they sent back photographs of mice caught in the trap. Totalitarian tor-
turers would not have appreciated the joke, since they lack all sense of
humour, and when they give people lies to eat, they have already trans-
formed them into lifeless Figuren.
To define this unprecedented regime of terror, Hannah Arendt refers back
to the principles of action attributed by Montesquieu to different regimes:
honour for the aristocracy, virtue for democracy and fear for tyranny.
According to her, the action principle of totalitarianism is logic: an ice-cold
logic for Hitler, a metallic logic for Lenin, about whom Stalin said that he
was not a great speaker, but fascinated the crowds with his iron logic. In
either case, this kind of logic allowed Eichmann and other “apparatchiks”
to justify their actions by claiming to be mere cogs in the wheel of the
system.

Subverting the principle of neutrality and objectivity

The second chapter of Beyond Past and Future is entitled “The Concept of
History.” Hannah Arendt examines her experience as a subject of history, in
the face of totalitarianism. The name Istôr appears in Song 18 of the Iliad,
in the description of the shield of Achilles, made for him by Hephaestus. It
is one of the Wonders of the World and depicts Greek society. Istôr appears
in a scene where two judges compete, so that the best judge can be chosen.
He is the judge of judges, the one who confers the prize and testifies to the
judgement.
In the fifth century BC, Herodotus, a contemporary of Socrates and Peri-
cles, wrote the story of the Greco-Persian Wars, calling his work Istoria,
meaning “Enquiries.” Hannah Arendt’s enquiry is that of a witness horrified
by the monstrous deeds of man. Deinos anthopos, sings the choir in Antig-
one: “Of all terrifying things, nothing is more terrifying than man.” Arendt
translated the Greek adjective deinos correctly: “terrifying.” She observes
that for the Ancient Greeks, history:

is not seen as parts of either an encompassing whole or a process; on

the contrary, the stress is always on single instances and single gestures
[…] which interrupt the circular movement of daily life. The subject
matter of history is these interruptions – the extraordinary, in other
words.58

Mnemosyne, the muse of history, mother of all the muses, allows facts and
feelings condemned to non-existence to come to light, in order to be
inscribed in the past and the future, particularly facts and feelings
 Hannah Arendt 179
eradicated by totalitarian logic, according to which: “What was originally
nothing but a hypothesis to be proved or disproved by actual facts, will in
the course of consistent actions always turn into a fact, never to be
disproved.”59 But coherence is no guarantee of truth. We have only to con-
sider the overused Oedipus complex that may serve to ignore the factual
truth of traumatic events, of which Oedipus has had his fair share. The ana-
lyst cannot simply remain silent behind the patient on the couch, saying: “I
am listening to you,” but has to enter the cut-out scene and say: “I,” even if
his colleagues don’t like it.
To shed light on this point, Hannah Arendt refers to the Feast of the
Phaeacians in The Odyssey.60 After the shipwrecked Ulysses, who has lost
his identity, has been led by Nausicaa to her father’s palace, he is invited to
the king’s table, where he listens to the blind bard Demodocus, who sings
the epic of the Trojan War. Hearing his own name mentioned when he
enters the conquered city, he begins to weep. Homeric tradition comments
that the tears running down his face are those of Andromache seeing the
death of Hector, knowing she will be sent into slavery. The voice of the
bard, at the scene of his present trauma, allows him to recover his senses.
Arendt notes: “The scene where Ulysses listens to the story of his own life
is paradigmatic for both history and poetry.”
This scene was invoked again by Gregory Nagy, when he spoke in our
seminar, at Nicole Loraux’s invitation. He connected it with a similar situ-
ation in the first chant of the Aeneid, which contains the famous verses:
“Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangent” – “There are tears of
things, and mortal things touch the mind.”61 Gregory Nagy analysed this
verse, describing Aeneas’ psychical state when, after leaving behind the
destruction of Troy, and after the loss of his companions at sea, he landed
in Carthage. While waiting for Dido, he contemplates the temple built by
the queen. When he sees himself on the bas-relief recounting the Trojan
War, he begins to weep as well. As was the case for Ulysses, another has
entered the scene of his present traumas. This other is Dido, about whom
we will learn that she has also escaped massacres in her native Phoenicia. In
both cases, a witness was needed, allowing the heroes to become the subjects
of their stories, after crying tears impossible to shed.
Tears remain in things, when mortal things lose access to the mind, after
the falsifications of history. The analyst, called upon – like Istôr – to testify
to these cut-out things, may be affected by the tears of the things. He has to
give them back – sollen – to the one who is then able to come out of trau-
matic numbness and become the subject of his story. This solution, which
Hannah Arendt considers “paradigmatic for history and poetry,” concurs,
she says, with that offered by quantum physics – developed between the two
world wars, as were her own ideas and those of Schrödinger, who disagrees
with the principle of objectification and includes the observer in the field of
observation. Arendt refers to this explicitly, pointing out that “there could
be no answers independent of a question-asking being. The old quarrel,
180 Seminar 7: 1999–2000
therefore, between the ‘subjectivity’ of historiography and the ‘objectivity’
of physics has lost much of its relevance.”62
Her criticism of social sciences and psychoanalysis, “when they treat
human relations more carelessly than natural sciences do,” agrees with Witt-
genstein’s assessment at the end of his Philosophical Investigations: “The
physicist sees, hears and informs us about these phenomena, while the
psychologist merely observes external reactions” (section 571). That is why
Schrödinger, in his Tarner Lectures at Cambridge in 1956, launched an
appeal to analysts to relinquish the illusion of neutrality.63
Hannah Arendt concludes her chapter on “the concept of history” by
condemning the confusion between the social and the political, which
reached its paroxysm with “the experimentation of a classless society organ-
ised among human beings when they maintain relations with each other but
have lost the world of common experience they once shared.” This confu-
sion is also maintained by psychoanalysts who rely only on the social treat-
ment of madness, refusing any involvement in the political challenge their
patients bring them, such as the erasure of traces.
By dismissing transference in psychosis, as Lacan did at the end of his
“On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,”64
analysts ignore History and their own history, “as if the best thing to do
with history,” in Arendt’s words, “is to forget this sad affair for the sole pur-
pose of eliminating oneself.” Still, if we do not have access to history, we
can turn to mythology.

The madness of the daughter of Minos and Pasiphae

In a lecture entitled “History, Turbulence and Temporality,” I spoke of
Hippolytus, Euripides’ play.65 In this tragedy, the characters are sick,
nosoi; their illness, which affects their phrèn – the diaphragm, solar
plexus – is closely tied to the existence of gods. Phaedra has gone mad,
and when her Nurse hears her delusions she cannot believe that “the
daughter of Minos and Pasiphae” could be in love with her stepson.
When the Nurse informs the young man, he hurls insults at his step-
mother. Phaedra hangs herself, after accusing Hippolytus of raping her.
Having returned from the underworld just in time, Theseus curses his son
and banishes him, while Poseidon sends a sea monster to devour the boy.
When Artemis tells Theseus the truth, the father forgives his dying son
and promises to avenge him.
There are certain words that “speak to” this seminar. Standing in front of
his wife’s corpse, Theseus cries and analyses madness, invoking fate:
“O Tucha! Fortune! […] How heavy this Fate has fallen upon my house!
Upon my head! Some unspeakable stain, aphrastos” (verses 818–820). There
are no words. Theseus cannot say what struck him, literally, something
coming from a place that doesn’t forget, ex tinos alastorôn – the privative
prefix “a” precedes the past participle of lanthanô, to forget. The Erinyes,
 Hannah Arendt 181
with their serpent-entwined hair, are the goddesses of a memory that
doesn’t forget.
Theseus’ life has become “unlivable, abiotos biou,” through a tragic fault,
amartia, coming from the dawn of time. “Aïai! Aïai! Melea, meleapathè!”
Theseus cries out in agony: “How can I bear the horror of this Fate? This is
the doing of some ancestor! The evil deeds of long ago brought back by
a demonic fate, tuchan daimonôn” (verses 831–832). Traumatic memory has
broken through actions without words, and returned in the form of
a monster sent by Poseidon. Phaedra’s lineage is not devoid of monsters
either. Her mother Pasiphae slept with the white bull of Crete, and gave
birth to her sister Ariadne as well as to the Minotaur.
The gods inhabit a sphere without words and without forgetting where
there is betrayal. Minos, Phaedra’s father, betrayed his brother Rhada-
manthus. Likewise, Hitler and Stalin created regimes where brother kills
brother and children betray their parents, but these tyrants are not gods.
Indeed, Zeus, who guarantees the Oath, orchos, sleeps with whoever
pleases him, but he is a god, and in the sphere of the law his function is
not threatened by his whims. The word “oath” involves a commitment,
just as the word “link” involves the given word, logon didonai, and refers
to alliances. The term “social bond” involves a bond tied by the given
word. The word “oath” is linked to the guarantee provided by the god.
Without it, the whole symbolic chain is broken, and nothing more can
be said.
The French word for oath, serment, comes from sacramentum, a deposit
given in the form of money or livestock by a plaintiff at a trial, which will
be offered to the god if the plaintiff loses his case – hence the need to tell
the truth. Totalitarian systems function inversely. Hannah Arendt speaks of
“complete retextualisation of the order of discourse” by propaganda that
eliminates not only factual truth, but even the possibility of lying, since gen-
eralised lying has become the norm. Words such as lineage, genos, kinship
and contract become meaningless.
The breakdown of the symbolic order is also that of morality. Today, this
word has been replaced by the more elegant term “ethics,” which means the
same thing in Greek – the Latin mos, morisis being the equivalent of the
Greek ethos. But no matter: when morality is replaced by criminality, there
will always be Don Quixotes to rise up, driven by the political necessity to
defend the honour of women and defiled young girls, of abused men and
children, and of the dead without a grave.
Madness attempts to weave the social link when the words connecting
people through interest – interesse, that which is in between – and with their
ancestors have been devalued. As Erasmus says in his In Praise of Folly,
Folly knows what she is doing when she drives the analyst to occupy the
places where true speech can start again.
182 Seminar 7: 1999–2000
Archè: the commandment of a commencement
In “Moral Considerations,” Hannah Arendt insists on the double meaning
of the word archè: to command and to begin. In totalitarian systems, belief
in the causality of natural or historical determinism is a way of denying any
new beginning. Hannah Arendt concludes the third volume of The Origins
of Totalitarianism with these words: “This beginning is guaranteed by each
new birth; it is, indeed, every man” (p. 222). She bases this statement on
a quote by Luther: “Man, before whom there was nothing, was created so
that there may be a beginning.”
There are solitary children having to begin again a lineage destroyed by
murder and betrayal, so that arrested time can be set in motion: “The time
is out of joint: O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right.”66 Hamlet
plays the fool to this aim. Arendt refers to children as “the new ones,” oi
neoi in Greek, who reset the limits needed for the law. Orchos, “the oath,”
also means “enclosure.” Similarly, work with madness consists of setting
limits when faced with the unleashing of hate, which in totalitarian systems
creates constant instability through “attacks on linking” – Bion’s expres-
sion – which these children try to weave again.
Chapter 5 of Between Past and Future, entitled “The Crisis in Education,”
takes a critical look at the disappearance of parents’ authority when they
delegate responsibility to their children:

as though parents daily said: “In this world, even we are not very
securely at home […]. You must try to make out as best you can; in
any case you are not entitled to call us to account. We are innocent, we
wash our hands of you.”
(p. 245)

Arendt’s tone is very sharp; she uses the words “betrayal” and “abandon-
ment” when speaking of parents who treat children like adults, and act like
their children’s buddies or rivals, to give themselves an illusion of youthful-
ness. Under the pretext of making their children independent, they do not
preserve the home as a secure place. The public sphere invades the private
space, whereas “the child requires special protection and care so that noth-
ing destructive may happen to him from the world” (p. 241).
Her conclusion is an apparent paradox:

Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child,
education must be conservative. […] And education, too, is where we
decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our
world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their
hands their chance of understanding something new, something unfore-
seen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing
a common world.
 Hannah Arendt 183
She objects to the manipulation of children when they are used to serve the
causes of adults, seeing this as a confusion between the sphere of the social
and the political.
This is the paradox of the production of freedom discussed in the previ-
ous chapter, “What Is Freedom?” It is the ability to seize the unexpected
and break the unalterable chain of causality, like in an analysis of madness
where the analyst breaks the chain of genetic and structural causes, in order
to grasp interferences that often emerge by chance. Hannah Arendt recom-
mends the creative use of “coincidences stranger than fiction,” which
accomplish miracles by subverting automatic reliance on historical and bio-
logical determinism. This is what initiates a new beginning.
Thus, freedom is not simply free will, but the freedom “to act,” a verb
to which she confers a double etymology: Greek and Latin. In Latin,
agere, “to set in motion,” and gerere, which links the actions to those of
ancestors, res gestae, without any determinism. And in Greek, prattein,
meaning to complete what was started. In both languages, freedom is
associated with authority, implied by the Greek verb archein, “to com-
mand” and “to start,” and by the Latin word auctoritas – the origin of
the word “author” – coming from the verb augeo, “to increase.” In
Arendt’s words:

[Education] must preserve what is new in every child and introduce it as

a new thing into an old world, which, however revolutionary its actions
may be, is always from the standpoint of the next generation, super-
annuated and close to destruction.

On this condition, a new political self may emerge.

A political self67
One of the first to create confusion between the social and the political
sphere was Seneca when he translated Aristotle’s phrase “Anthôpos phusei
politikon zoon” – “Man is by nature a political animal,” by “Homo est nat-
uraliter politicus, id est socialis” – “Man is by nature a political animal, that
is, social.” The loss of this distinction – which Arendt strives to restore –
has serious consequences for the treatment of madness.
Indeed, this distinction has existed since the Middle Ages. Of the many
discourses on madness produced in that era, be they theological, legal, med-
ical or literary, as they are presented by historian Jean-Marie Fritz in
a fascinating book,68 we will examine two more closely: the one he calls “lit-
erary discourse: madness in the space of the marvel,” and “the discourse of
medicine, an infinite discourse.” The first is political, since it concerns
breaks in the social link; its dwelling place is literature, where the madman
becomes “the Savage Man” on the outskirts of the civilised world. There, he
fights monsters and meets fairies who reveal unheard-of truths, abolished by
184 Seminar 7: 1999–2000
denial, in a space where time stands still. When he returns, he is literally as
out of date as the Knight of the Sad Countenance.
Medical discourse has never stopped making use of humoral theory,
still manifest today in mood stabilisers and in an organicist approach
that looks for the cause of madness inside the skull or in the genes. Now,
as then, the treatments are more or less the same, medication and shock,
in an attempt to reintegrate madness socially into the collective, though
with a difference. Equal access to care distributes the same old shocks,
but under anaesthesia and reimbursed by insurance companies or by
social security, in a confusion between the social and the political, if
I am to believe Folly as presented by Erasmus, whom I take as an
authority on the subject. At the end of his Praise,69 she claims: “But
I forget myself and run beyond my bounds […]. If I shall seem to have
spoken anything more boldly or impertinently than I ought, be pleased to
consider that not only Folly but a woman said it.”
Aristotle did describe man as: “Zôon politikon,” but he added “logon
echôn,” endowed with speech. In Latin, a second misinterpretation was
introduced when the second part of the phrase was translated as animal
rationale: “man is a political and rational animal.” Still, when Aristotle
wrote that “man is endowed with speech” – that is, able to relate to his
fellow men, omoioi – he excluded women and slaves, who are part of the
household, oikos. Citizens must be free of domestic cares, so they may go to
the agora where they speak.
So, when Erasmus’ Folly speaks “as a woman,” she oversteps the bounds
of her social role, refuses to become a statistic, and begins by stripping her
analyst of all his social attributes, in order to reveal in his place the totali-
tarian agency she is fighting. Then a political subject can emerge at this crit-
ical moment, provided the analyst is able to acknowledge his failing and
pass judgement on this agency overtly. This is how a new freedom and
a new otherness emerge. In Hannah Arendt’s words:

totalitarian government does not just curtail liberties or abolish essen-

tial freedoms; nor does it, at least to our limited knowledge, succeed in
eradicating the love for freedom from the hearts of man […]. But it
cannot deny the fact that each man is a new beginning, begins, in
a sense, the world anew.

The political theatre of Fools in the Middle Ages, called sotties in French,
was led by Mother Folly,70 who calls her children – the Sot and the Sottes –
“jesters” in English. They come bumbling onto the stage to show the abuses
of the times through their brilliant delirious words and gestures, and to
judge political crimes. At some point, they drag on the stage some worthy
personage whose fancy clothes they tear off to reveal the fool’s costume
hidden under the double-talk. This theatre illustrates the paradigm of the
psychoanalysis of madness as a fight against perversion.
 Hannah Arendt 185
For Hannah Arendt, the stakes are the same. Her book Rahel Varnhagen:
The Life of a Jewess71 reveals the existence of a reality hidden under the
ideals of equality promoted by the Enlightenment.

Hannah Arendt, psychoanalyst

Although she did not like psychoanalysis, her biography of Rahel (1771–1833),
which she started to write in 1932 and published in New York in 1958, resem-
bles an analysis taking place between Hannah and Rahel, her “closest friend
though she has been dead for some hundred years.” Arendt read Rahel’s diary
and her correspondence published in Ein Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde
(A Souvenir Book for Friends), after ending her liaison with Heidegger, during
the year she attended his courses in Marburg in 1924, when she was 18, seven-
teen years younger than him.
Through her transference to Rahel, she discovered – as did Frieda
Fromm-Reichman, (also 17 years her senior), in Hannah Arendt’s home
town of Königsberg – a new paradigm for psychoanalysis, focusing not on
the repressed unconscious, but on injury to otherness. Rahel, a German
Jewess like her, a writer like her, infuriates the young Hannah Arendt, who
hurls passionate invectives at her, mocking her stupidity and naivety, born,
like in her own case, of an obsessive desire for assimilation. The chapter
“Day and Night” is dedicated to the analysis of Rahel’s recurrent dreams,
like visions persisting into wakefulness. They open a space where Jewishness
manifests itself, cut out from her ancestry during the day.
Who dreamed these dreams? The transitional subject of this analysis is
also Hannah Arendt, for whom these dreams are a way to express melan-
cholia and nocturnal terrors after her separation from Heidegger. She
experiences the absolute loneliness described by Frieda Fromm-Reichmann
in her last article, which finds an address thanks to Rahel’s dreams that
explore a catastrophic area cut out by denial. We come to know these
dreams, with their prophetic dimension, through the friendship, philia,
Hannah Arendt felt for Rahel, who had been, like her, the target of anti-
Semitism – overtly professed by Heidegger’s wife Elfriede, who was
a member of the National Socialist Party.
Arendt starts Rahel’s analysis in a chapter entitled “Jewess and Schle-
mihl,” which reveals at the outset the cutting out of age-old history through
assimilation:

It had taken her sixty-three years to come to terms with a problem

which had its beginnings seventeen hundred years before her birth,
which underwent a crucial upheaval during her life, and which one hun-
dred years after her death – she died on March 7, 1833 – was slated to
come to an end.
(p. 19)
186 Seminar 7: 1999–2000
Described as a Schlemihl, the beggar by the roadside, Rahel deliberately
chose to live a lie: “Lying is lovely when you choose it” (p. 49). At the end
of her life, she had fallen prey to “loneliness that drives you mad” because
she had shielded herself against the course of events, and “retreated from
the society that had made her an outcast.” But despite herself, she recorded
in her diary and in her letters the impact of facts not subjectively integrated.
Her torment comes from having “deprived the other of any possibility of
responding to her, in order to preclude rejection” (p. 41).
Arendt restores Rahel’s authority as an author, and becomes “the other”
for her across the distance of a century, especially by analysing her dreams,
in the chapter “Day and Night” (p. 161). These are traumatic dreams that
Freud would agree do not follow his theory of dreams as wish fulfilment. In
1920, he writes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle:

If, in spite of the quality of dreams or traumatic neuroses, we want to

maintain the conception of dreams as wish fulfilment, we have to
acknowledge that in such states, the function of the dream has been
greatly disturbed, that it has been diverted from its aim.

The new aim of the dream had been discovered by analysts like Frieda
Fromm-Reichmann, William Rivers and Sandor Ferenczi during World War
I in military hospitals, and by Thomas Salmon who worked with immi-
grants at Ellis Island. Unknowingly, Arendt’s approach follows his prin-
ciples of proximity, immediacy, expectancy and simplicity, in the
psychotherapy of traumatised soldiers.
The subject of Rahel’s first dream is closeness, proximity, with an
undefined animal that “loved me tremendously,” and stayed with her when
she found herself cut off from the company of others. This animal is a white
sheep – tragos in Greek, the root of the word tragedy. She alone knows that
it can speak, in a society that not only ignores her soul and the history of
her ancestors, but would later cooperate in the plan to murder them all.
Arendt is reading Rahel’s testimony while Hitler is writing Mein Kampf in
jail. At the end of her dream, Rahel finds the animal dead at the foot of
a tree, reduced to nothing but black fur (p. 170).
The second dream is a scene announcing an imminent ordeal, immediacy,
in which she is hurled like a scapegoat from the last rampart of a fortress in
an ancient city (p. 174). The earth is parched, a “waste land” where nothing
grows, and the “too bright shafts of the sun […] pierce their way through
no bracing air.” This dazzling light, compared by Arendt to the ideology of
the Enlightenment, which, in order to preserve its purity, sacrifices singular-
ity through assimilation, gives Rahel the impression that the story in the
dream is true. Her march towards the abyss, dragged by the mob, is made
possible by the complicity of her Spanish lover Urquijo, whom she keeps
asking: “You won’t say yes, will you?” In the face of his hesitation, which
foreshadows other deadly indecisions, Rahel “fell from stone to stone,”
 Hannah Arendt 187
murdered by “the collusion, between the elite and the mob,” Arendt would
later write in Totalitarianism.
In another “dream of the same sort,” Rahel kills her lover and thinks of
killing herself: “What use was the day […] when the ‘other land’ of night,
forever presented opaque riddles and again and again conjured up delusory
visions of ‘freedom, truth, unity, native soil’?” (p. 176).
The fourth dream is cathartic; it renews hope, expectancy. Rahel is no
longer alone: “I lay on a wide bed […] on the edge of the world.” Another
woman is there with her. They are sharing their thoughts:

“Do you know mortification?” and we asked each other if we had ever
felt this particular form of suffering in our lives. We said: “Yes, that
I know” […] and the particular form of suffering we were speaking of
was rent from the heart […] we were rid of it forever and felt wholly
sound and light.
(p. 177)

Hannah Arendt has taken that place beside Rahel, on the edge of the world.
These dreams were repeated, with great clarity, for ten years. Like the ones
collected by Charlotte Beradt, they testified to Rahel’s history – a history of
shame about her origins – intertwined with History. Contrary to Heraclitus’
Fragments, where the world shared with others in the daytime, koinos, is con-
trasted with retiring, at night, into a singular world, idios, Hannah Arendt points
out that Rahel’s dreams are not only connected to the world at large, but reveal
elements of it that are suppressed during the day. Rahel “could no longer trust
her opinions because she had become lost to herself.” Still, “Unhappiness, ban-
ished from the day, flees into the night, [where it] contracts into a tightly sealed
container of despair” (p. 168). Thus, the repetition of dreams, where “phantoms
and shadows” that pursue her during the day have taken refuge, is a dynamic,
starting with the loss of her soul, reduced to an empty skin, towards regeneration
started by her writing, all the way to the emergence of the subject of cut-out his-
tory, in the hope – as Freud says in his Moses – “that some day, somebody will
say ‘in dark times there was a [woman] who thought like you.’”
Beyond the “stock phrases” of mainstream psychoanalysis, and the
abstractions inherited from the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which
Arendt strongly opposes, she analyses her special transference to Rahel and
interprets her dreams as a means of searching for the historical truth. This
analysis no doubt provided the fundamental elements of The Origins of
Totalitarianism, just as his war experience provided Bion with the elements
of his psychoanalysis of madness and trauma. When she pursues her search
for historical truth, Arendt is agreeing with Freud who, at the end of his
life, persecuted by the Nazi regime, like she was, designated this truth as the
goal of psychoanalysis, in Moses and Monotheism. At the end of Rahel
Varnhagen, Arendt too emphasises that dreams are fearless: “… night turns
into a specific night, when dreams insist […] upon certain contents,
188 Seminar 7: 1999–2000
darkening the day with excessively distinct shadow-images, again and again
reverting to things past …”

Notes
1 Arendt, H., “III: Totalitarianism,” in The Origins of Totalitarianism, World Pub-
lishing Company, 1962.
2 Lefort, C., Complications: Communism and the Dilemma of Democracy, Colum-
bia University Press, 2007.
3 Unpublished.
4 Beradt, C., The Third Reich of Dreams, Quadrangle Books, 1968.
5 Arendt, H., “Postscript,” in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Viking Press, 1964, pp.
280–298.
6 See infra, Seminar 4 on Toni Morison.
7 Rivers, W., “The Repression of War Experiences,” The Lancet, February 1918;
see infra, Seminar 6 on Pat Barker.
8 See infra, Seminar 12 on François Rabelais and Yvette Guilbert.
9 Kobayashi, M. (Dir.), Kwaidan, 1964. Based on Hearn, L., Stories and Studies of
Strange Things, Rutland Publishing, 2005.
10 See infra, Seminar 2 on Gaetano Benedetti.
11 Lacan, J., Écrits, Fink, B. (Trans.), W. W. Norton & Company, 1966, p. 144.
12 Hornstein, G. A., To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World: The Life of
Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, The Free Press, 2000.
13 Ibid., p. 660.
14 Lacan, J., “La psychiatrie anglaise et la guerre,” in Autres écrits, Seuil, 2001.
15 Lacan, J. Écrits, op. cit., p. 386.
16 Ibid., p. 324.
17 Freud, S., Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, S.E. 11, Hogarth Press, 1910.
18 Freud, S., Moses and Monotheism, S.E. 23, Hogarth Press, 1939.
19 See infra, Seminar 4 on Toni Morrison.
20 Chernow, R., The Warburgs, Vintage Books, 1993. See infra, Seminar 11 on
Robert Musil.
21 I thank Jeanne Wolff Bernstein for the German literal meaning: “enjoyment
companions.”
22 Sterne, L., The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, W. W. Norton
& Company, 1980.
23 Bion, W., A Memoir of the Future, Karnac Books, 1991.
24 Fuentes, C., Christopher Unborn, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989.
25 Arendt, H., The Origins of Totalitarianism, op. cit.
26 Vinar, M. and Vinar, M., Exil et torture, Denoël, 1989.
27 Klemperer, V., The Language of the Third Reich, Bloomsbury Academic, 2006.
28 Young-Bruehl, E., Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, Yale University Press,
1982, p. 183.
29 Arendt, H., “III: Totalitarianism,” in The Origins of Totalitarianism, op. cit.
p. 342.
30 Joung-Bruehl, E., Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, op. cit.
31 Dinesen, I., Out of Africa, Modern Library, 1992.
32 Arendt, H., The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, 1998.
33 Rousset, D., Les jours de notre mort, Pluriel, 2005.
34 Arendt, H., The Origins of Totalitarianism, op. cit., p. 3.
35 Swift, J., A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from
Being a Burden to Their Parents, or the Country, and for Making Them Beneficial
to the Public, Nonesuch Press, 1968, p. 460.
 Hannah Arendt 189
36 Laub, D., “Art et Trauma,” Le Coq-Héron, 221 (2015): 35.
37 Sophocles, Ajax, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
38 Heraclitus, Fragments, Viking Press, 2001.
39 Shay, J., Achilles in Vietnam, Scribner, 1995.
40 Nagy, G., The Best of the Achaeans, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
41 Laub, D. “Reestablishing the internal ‘Thou’ in testimony of trauma,” lecture,
Portland, May 9, 2013.
42 Felman, S. and Laub, D., Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psycho-
analysis and History, Routledge, 1992.
43 Fromm-Reichmann, F., Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, University of Chicago
Press, 1959. See infra, Seminar 4 on Toni Morrison and Frieda Fromm-
Reichmann.
44 Young-Bruehl, E., Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, op. cit., p. 18.
45 Tillman, J., “The Intergenerational Transmission of Suicide: Moral Injury and
the Mysterious Object in the Work of Walker Percy,” Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association 64/3 (2015).
46 Kafka, F., The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910–1923, Schocken Books, 1988.
47 La Boétie, É., Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, Kurtz. H. (Trans.), Columbia
University Press, 1942, p. 187.
48 Aeschyles, The Oresteia, University of California Press, 2014.
49 Char, R., “Leaves of Hypnos,” in Furor and Mystery and Other Writing, Com-
monwealth Books, Black Widow, 2011, p. 133.
50 Freud, S., Moses and Monotheism, op. cit.
51 Arendt, H., Between Past and Future, Penguin Books, 1977.
52 Anders, G., Nous, fils d’Eichmann, Payot & Rivages, 1999.
53 Arendt, H., Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1997.
54 Arendt, H., The Life of the Mind, Harcourt Brace, 1978.
55 Freud, S., New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, S.E. 22, Hogarth
Press, 1933.
56 Plato, Theaetetus, Liberal Arts Press, 1955, 202 b.
57 Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, Oxford University Press, 1983, sec-
tion 43.
58 Baehr, P. (Ed.), The Portable Hannah Arendt, Penguin Books, 2000, p. 279.
59 Arendt, H., Between Past and Future, op. cit., p. 88.
60 Homer, The Odyssey, Penguin Classics, 1999, Song VIII, verses 62–64.
61 Virgil, The Aeneid, Penguin Classics, 2003, Song I, verse 442.
62 Arendt, H. Between Past and Future, op. cit., p. 284.
63 Schrödinger, E., “The Principle of Objectivation,” in What Is Life? with Mind
and Matter, Cambridge University Press, 1967.
64 Lacan, J., Écrits: A Selection, Sheridan, A. (Trans.), Tavistock/Routledge, 1977.
65 Euripides, Hippolytus, Focus, 2001.
66 Shakespeare, W., Hamlet, Simon & Schuster, 1992, Act II, Scene 5, verses
189–190.
67 Tweedy, R., A Political Self, Karnac Books, 2017.
68 Fritz, J.-M., Le Discours du fou au Moyen Âge, Presses universitaires de France,
1992.
69 Erasmus, D., The Praise of Folly, Aeterna Publishing, 2010.
70 Davoine, F., Mother Folly: A Tale, Stanford University Press, 2014.
71 Arendt H., Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, op. cit.
Conclusion

Madness and the Social Link

The birth of a political subject able to inscribe historical truths erased by the
“banality of evil” – a term coined by Hannah Arendt – is what opens the
future in a psychoanalysis of madness and trauma, at critical moments when
the analyst is pushed out of his entrenchment behind mainstream discourse.
The authors with whom we conversed in this book showed us the way to
a process of “psychotic transference” – Wilfred Bion’s expression” – consisting
in joint research into the unsymbolised matters that are at stake, for the
patient and the analyst, in the dynamic process of madness and trauma. Jean-
Max Gaudillière used to say that on these occasions, “trauma speaks to
trauma,” allowing events that made a powerful impression, recorded in a flash
but cut out of speech, to be validated. An underground “intelligence” finds its
expression through the discovery of otherness, and resonates with the art of
the storytellers who accompanied us throughout the seminars.
These authors, in their various ways, all portray the emergence of
a political subject who comes back from exile, as we shall see in the next
volume, The Birth of a Political Self.
Index

abnormal phenomena 59–60 Beloved 67, 69, 70, 72; choirs 81–83;
Absalom, Absalom! 122 coincidences 88; continuity 86;
acting out 84, 85 loneliness 90; negativism 89; plans of
Aeneid 89, 179 ghosts 76–77; screens 80–81;
Aeschylus 175 self-learning 92–93; social links
Aghwee the Sky Monster 8–11 84–85; space between deaths 75–76;
All Quiet on the Western Front 144 subjective appropriation 73–74;
Althusser, Louis 118–120 visions 86
anagrams 14–15 Benedetti, Gaetano: “being with” stance
anamnesis 10, 91, 108, 135 34–35; negative existence 36–37;
Anders, Gunther 159, 176 positiveness 40, 106; psychotherapeutic
animism 60, 152, 153 technique 37–39; Train Whistled,
Antigone 27 The 55, 57
anti-past 10, 23 benefits, of madness 90, 155, 166
anti-Semitism 16, 163, 169 Beradt, Charlotte 47, 159–160, 187
anxiety 78, 85 Berque, Augustin 28
Apollinaire, Guillaume 47 beta elements 54
Arbousse-Bastide, Paul 106 Between Past and Future 176, 178,
Arendt, Hannah 159, 160–162, 163, 182–183
165–166; children and new beginnings Beyond the Pleasure Principle 186
182–183; Eichmann in Jerusalem Billing, Noel Pemberton 142
173–175; fearful imagination Bin, Kimura 62
167–169, 170; history 178–180; Binswanger, Ludwig 15, 44
language 176–178; loneliness 171–173; Bion, Wilfred 27, 162; attacks on linking
political freedom 183, 184; propaganda 28, 104, 166, 182; beta elements 54;
181; as psychoanalyst 185–188; change of vertex 56; erasure of traces
therapeutic art 169–171; truth and 43; forgetting and remembering 42, 59,
ideology 175, 176 135; Memoir of the Future, A 138,
Aristophanes 18 164; past causality 61; psychotic
Aristotle 170, 183, 184 transference 6, 38, 44
Aron, Robert 110 Black Elk Speaks 68
arrested time 156, 182 blindness 20, 21, 148
Artaud, Antonin 109–110 Blixen, Karen see Dinesen, Isak
At the Exit 50–51 Blücher, Heinrich 159
attacks on linking 104, 166, 182 Borromean knot 35
Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane 122 Branting, Hjalmar 97
Breton, André 47
Barker, Pat see Regeneration Trilogy, The Breuer, Josef 66
Basaglia, Franco 40 Brisset, Jean-Pierre 14
192 Index
Brown, George 73 Desnos, Robert 46
Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte Devos, Raymond 2, 9, 44
de 99 Dinesen, Isak 167, 176
Discourse on the Method 55
Cantor, Georg 59 dissociation 83, 130, 136
Carroll, Lewis see Dodgson, Charles Doctrine of Correspondences and
castration 20, 148, 151 Representations 102
catastrophe 6, 11, 33, 59; and dreams Dodgson, Charles 148–149, 150
185; fear of 24; forms on the edge Doi, Takeo 62
of 14–16; and language 42, 88; Dolto, Françoise 18, 136
signifiers 17 Don Quixote 16, 106, 144, 164
catatonia 78 Dream Play, A 110
cathartic rites 21, 152, 156, 177 dreams 35, 54, 159–160, 185, 186–188; of
causality 6, 25–27, 36, 77, 126, 182, 183 analysts 128–130, 134, 135, 137
Center for the Study of Social Duchamp, Marcel 54
Movements (CSSM) 28 Duroselle, Jean-Baptiste 122
ceremony 21, 155–156, 177
Cervantes, Miguel de 16, 106, 164 Eagle Elk, Joe 18, 152
Char, René 175 École des hautes études en sciences
Character’s Tragedy, A 49, 60–61 sociales (EHESS) 1, 18, 28, 105
Chestnut Lodge 72–73, 81, 85, 87, 162 École normale supérieure (ENS) 118, 119
childhood 108, 182–183 Écrits 16, 162
choirs 81–83 ego 17, 100, 107–108
Christopher Unborn 164–165 Eichmann in Jerusalem 160, 173–174, 176
class struggle 130–131 Eiffel Tower Wedding Party, The 98
Clérambault, Gaëtan Gatiande de 57 electroshock treatment 109–110, 118,
Cocteau, Jean 23, 98 136–137
coincidences 7–8, 35–36, 45, 88, 105 Enquist, Per Olov 104
comedy 18 Erasmus 36, 45, 67, 181, 184
Comte, Auguste 101, 105–106, 108 erasure of traces 42–45, 168, 180
concentration camps 165, 167, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, The 27, 67
168–169, 178 etymology 90–91
Conversations with Characters 49 experimental madness 167
Cooperman, Martin 26, 55–56, 57 Eye in the Door, The see Regeneration
co-researchers 12, 118 Trilogy, The
Course in General Linguistics 14
crime 173–175 Faulkner, William 122
cruel agency 114 fearful imagination 167–169, 170
cutaway unconscious 20–21, 39, 68 feminine agency 144
fiction 27–28, 34
Dante 101, 104 fictitious universe 165
Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Finland 95
Away, The 5–6, 11–17 Foam of the Daze, The 69, 118
death: among the living 58; fear of 23–24; foreclosure 162, 163
space between deaths 27, 67, 75; Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust
spiritism 102, 152; zones of 37–38, Testimonies 10, 169
44–45, 103, 107, 161, 171 Foucault, Michel 96
Death of the Wolf, The 151 fragmentation 38
Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva Frazer, James George 157
10, 66, 164 freedom 75, 76, 84, 159, 161–162,
Demieville, Paul 24 172–173, 183, 184
depository art 170 Freud, Sigmund: analysts’ neutrality 72;
Descartes 55, 168 anxiety 85; blindness 148; coincidences
 Index 193
36; dreams and visions 129, 148, Hyppolite, Jean 89
186; ego 177; and Freudism 77–78; hysteria 149
literature and language 10, 44–45,
66, 89; loneliness 175; neuroscience 21; I Never Promised You A Rose Garden 88
objective reality 71; play and id 78
unpleasurable experience 107; identity loss 23–25, 83, 99
schizophrenia 83; sexuality 83; Iliad 31, 155, 170, 178
signifiers 116; surviving images In Praise of Folly 36, 45, 181, 184
163–164; transference 40, 67–68, In Search of Lost Time 68
79, 162–163; truth 187; in-between position 61–62, 75
unconscious 155 Inferno 96, 98–101; Emanuel Swedenborg
Fritz, Jean-Marie 38, 96, 183–184 104–105, 112–113; positive subjectivity
From the Nose to the Sky 59–60 106–109; self-awareness 113–116;
From Transfer to Transference 95, 96 spirituality 102–103; Strindberg as
Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda 40, 68, 69; patient 109, 110–111; Strindberg as
background of 70–73, 160; continuity therapist 117–118; unsymbolised
86–88; and Freudism 77–78; hypocrisy elements 103–104
of culture 70; interpersonal approach inscription 5, 33, 42–45, 51, 67, 76, 89,
74, 83; loneliness 90, 171, 185; 96–97, 104, 161
schizophrenia 78–80, 83, 85; sexuality intellectual function 109–110
83; stereotyped interpretations 76; interference 35, 62
transference 37, 39, 46; use of International Society for Psychological
literature 89 and Social Approaches to Psychosis
Fuentes, Carlos 164–165 (ISPS) 88
Future Lasts Forever, The 118–120 International Symposium for the
Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia
Ghost Road, The see Regeneration (ISPS) 98–99
Trilogy, The interpersonal approach 74–75, 80
ghosts 69–70, 75–77 Interpretation of Dreams, The 89
gods 90–92, 95–96, 144–145, 170, interpretations 43, 44, 84
180–181 isolation 171, 172
Goldstein, Kurt 78, 162 Istoria 178
Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy 21, 44–45,
66, 68 Jensen, Wilhelm 44, 66
grande guerre des français, 1914-1918, judgement 160, 173
La 122 Jung, Carl 36
Graves, Robert 123
Greek tragedies 27, 81, 115, 170 Kafka, Franz 173
Greenberg, Joanne 88 Kant, Immanuel 177
Guilbert, Yvette 50 Kleist, Henrich von 47
Klemperer, Victor 166
Hamlet 38, 182 Kobayashi, Masaki 161
Head, Henry 129 Kwaidan 161
Heidegger, Martin 185 Kyogen farces 18
Herodotus 178
Hippocrates 95–96 La Boétie, Étienne de 173
Hippolytus 180 Lacan, Jacques 16, 119, 136; coincidences
history 16–17, 31, 33, 40; personal 8; diagnosis of Artaud 109; foreclosure
history 13–14, 22–23, 187; subjects of 162, 163; gods 144–145; inscription
73, 178–180 104; mental deficit 46–47; signifiers 44;
Hoffman, E.T.A. 163–164 space between deaths 27, 67; structure
homosexuality 141, 142 of psychosis 12, 35; transference 40, 67
Human Condition, The 167 Lakota tribe 18, 152, 153
194 Index
language 42–45, 46, 62, 176–178 neutrality 6, 9, 38, 71–72, 78, 155, 180
language-games 25, 27, 43, 81, 102 Nietzsche, Friedrich 69
Laub, Dori 9–10, 40, 73, 103, 169, 170, Noh theatre 18, 25, 61–62
171, 173 normalcy 22–23
Le Goff, Jacques 104 Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, The 43,
Leaves of Hypnos 175 51–53
Lecture on Serpent Ritual, A 15–16, 44, Notes for Lectures on ‘Private
62, 146 Experience’ 35, 38
Ley, Robert 159 nothingness 36–37, 78
Lidz, Theodore 40
Life of the Mind, The 177 objectivity 179–180
lineage 37, 125, 148, 182 Odyssey, The 179
literature, use of 42, 89, 96 Oe, Kenzaburo: Aghwee the Sky Monster
Logical Grammar, The 14 8–11; Day He Himself Shall Wipe My
logos 177 Tears Away, The 5–6, 11–18; Silent
loneliness 90, 171, 175–176, 185, 186 Cry, The 18–31, 33, 34; Teach Us to
LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii 166 Outgrow Our Madness 5–6, 8–18
Oedipus at Colonus 20–21, 36, 155
mad speech 42 Oedipus complex 90, 179
Mallarmé, Stéphane 36 Oedipus Rex 37
Man, Beast, and Virtue 62 On a Theatre of Marionettes 47
Man with the Flower in His Mouth, On Loneliness 171
The 58 On Narcissism 83
Man Without Qualities, The 24, 68 Oresteia 175
McCarthy, Mary 167, 173 Origins of Totalitarianism, The 159,
medical discourse 184 161–162, 165; analysts’ commitment
Meiji, Emperor of Japan 5, 22 166–167; children and new beginnings
Memoir of the Future, A 138, 164 182; fearful imagination 167–169;
mental deficit 46–47 loneliness 171–173; therapeutic art
metaphors 11, 35, 165 169–171
Minotaure 46–47 ostensive definition 43
Misérables, Les 54 otherness 27–29, 34, 36, 37, 98, 107,
Mizubayashi, Akira 5, 18 131–132, 169, 185
Mnemosyne Atlas, The 109 Owen, Wilfred 138–139
Modest Proposal 169
Mohatt, Jerry 18 Pankow, Gisela 47, 98–99
Montesquieu 178 parti pris des choses, Le 79–80, 118
Morrison, Toni 67, 70, 84; see also past causality 61
Beloved past-present encounters 105, 108
Moses and Monotheism 40, 155, 163, perspective, change of 55–59
175, 187 perverse agency 110–111, 172
murderous agency 38, 63 Phaedrus 31, 91, 155
Musli, Robert 24, 68 Philosophical Investigations 24–25,
mythology 90–92, 95–96, 144–145, 164, 180
180–181 pioneers, psychoanalytical 67–68
Pirandello, Luigi 43, 45; Character’s
Nagy, Gregory 155, 170, 179 Tragedy, A 60–61; Man with the
near-history 6 Flower in His Mouth, The 58; From the
Negation 89 Nose to the Sky 59–60; Notebooks of
negative existence 36–37 Serafino Gubbio, The 51–53; theatre
negativism 89 and madness 47–49; Train Whistled,
neuroscience 21 The 55, 56–57; transitional subjects 62;
neurosis 40, 106, 124, 141 trivial events and war theatre 49–51
 Index 195
Plato 90, 177 Remarks on the Philosophy of Mental
Plutarch 144 Disorder 70
point K 55–59 Remarque, Erich Maria 144
political freedom 183–184 Remembrance of Things Past 56
Pompignan, Jean-Jacques Lefranc, repression 6, 37, 42, 59, 66
Marquis de 36 Réquichot, Bernard 57
Ponge, Francis 79, 118 Rickman, John 68
positive subjectivity 106–109 Right You Are! (If You Think So) 45
positiveness 40, 105–106 Rimbaud, Arthur 37, 107
potential space 8 Rivers, Katherine 148–149, 150
Problems of Anxiety, The 85 Rivers, William 8, 40, 68, 73, 122; see
Project for a Scientific Psychology also Regeneration Trilogy, The
21, 116 role reversal 132–133
prophetic abilities 95, 96 Romains, Jules 14
Proust 56, 68 Romans 9:25 88
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy 69 Roth, Joseph 68
psychoanalysis of distance 61 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 84
psychoanalysts, becoming 27 Rousset, David 171
psychoanalytic pioneers 67–68 Rytmann, Hélène 118–119
psychodynamism 33, 35, 40, 77, 105,
147, 162 Salmon, Thomas 68, 73
psychotherapeutic technique 37–39 Sartre, Jean-Paul 118
psychotic structure 12, 35 Sassoon, Siegfried 123–126, 138–140,
psychotic transference 6, 38, 39, 67–68, 144–146
88–89, 111, 175 Satori (fictional character) 63
puns 14 Saussure, Ferdinand de 14–15
purgatory 104 Saxl, Fritz 44, 146
schizophrenia 34–35, 37, 78–80, 83–84,
Quelle histoire 122 85, 95, 96
Schizophrenia as a Human Process 39
Rabelais, François 19, 161 Schreber, Daniel Paul 68
Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess Schrödinger, Erwin 156, 179, 180
185–188 science 21, 59–60
reasoning, method of 55–56 screens 80–81, 83
Regeneration Trilogy, The 122; Burns self-analysis 91–92, 114, 173
case 126–128; ceremony 155–156; Seneca 183
dreams of analysts 128–130, 134, 135, Sens dessus dessous (Upside Down) 44
137; electroshock treatment 136–137; sensory images 6
Hallet’s death 154–155; Head’s Séraphîta 105
neurological experiments 129–130; sexuality 79, 83, 141, 142
Katherine Rivers 148–149; Manning Shay, Jonathan 148, 170
case 142–144; Moffett case 149–150; signifiers 16–17, 21, 59, 89, 124, 141
Prior case 128, 130–135; Rivers’ Siirala, Martti 95, 96, 118
psychoanalysis 150–153; Rivers’ Silent Cry, The 18–31, 20–21, 33, 34
transformation 146–148, 156–157; Sioux medicine 18, 68
Sassoon case 123–126, 138–140, Six Characters in Search of an Author 42,
144–146; social movements 141–142; 43, 47–50, 49
Wansbeck and Harrington 153–154 social madness 97, 98
regression 38, 83 social movements 141–142
Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough 157 Socrates 31, 54, 59, 69, 91, 155, 177
Remarks on Psychic Causality 16 Son of a Servant, The 97
196 Index
Sophocles 20–21, 27, 170 Unborn 164–165; Eichmann in
Starobinski, Jean 14–15 Jerusalem 173–175; fearful imagination
Sterne, Laurence 48, 86, 140, 155, 164 167–169, 170; history 178–180;
storytellers 66, 167 language 176–178; loneliness 171–173;
Strindberg, August 96–101; as patient mythology 180–181; political freedom
109, 110–111; positive subjectivity 184; totalitarian zones 161–164; truth
106–109; self-awareness 113–116; and ideology 175–176
spirituality 102–103; and Swedenborg’s Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 50
works 104–105, 112–113; Sylva Touraine, Alain 28, 105
Sylvarum 101–102; as therapist Tractatus Philosophicus 17
117–118; unsymbolised elements Train Whistled, The 55, 56–57
103–104 transference: “being with” stance 34;
structural approach 77 catatonia 78; coincidences 7;
subjective appropriation 73–74 continuity 86–88; counter-
subjective positivism 106 identification 36; dissociation 136;
subjectivity-objectivity conflict 124–125 Freud’s theory 162–163; in-between
subliminal images 166 position 62, 75; psychotherapeutic
suicide 29, 44, 85, 171 technique 37–39; psychotic 6, 38, 39,
Sullivan, Harry Stack 68, 73, 89, 125; 67–68, 88–89, 111, 175; Regeneration
interpersonal approach 74–75; Trilogy, The 126, 130–134;
normalcy 22–23; one-genus postulate schizophrenia 78–79; space between
70; psychodynamism 40; self-system people 53–55; Strindberg’s experience
concept 8; transference 39, 46 110–111
suppression 136, 142 Transference Problems in
surrealism 8, 46–47, 110 Schizophrenics 78
surviving images 15, 21, 34, 44, 55, 103, transitional subjects 61–62, 128, 185
133, 161, 163–164 Tristram Shandy 86, 138, 164
Swedenborg, Emanuel 102, 104–105, trivial events 49–51
112–113, 115–116, 117 truth 30–31, 176
Swift, Jonathan 169 Tsi, Lin 24
Sylva Sylvarum 101–102, 105
symbolic chains 14, 33–35, 59, 89, 99, unconscious 24, 34–35; cutaway
104, 165 20–21, 39, 68; repression 6, 37,
Symposium, The 69, 91, 170 42, 59, 66
symptom remembrance 85, 87 unsymbolised elements 103–104

Tarner Lectures 180 Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society

Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness: 109–110
Aghwee the Sky Monster 8–11; Day He vertex, change of 55–59
Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, Vian, Boris 69, 118
The 5–6, 11–17 Vidal, Daniel 28
therapeutic art 169–171 Vigny, Alfred Victor, Comte de 151
therapon 31, 104, 116, 118, 134, 155 Virgil 89
Third Reich of Dreams, The 47, 159–160 visions 27, 85–86, 107, 138–139, 148
Thom, René 14 Voltaire 36
time-space 8, 10, 12–13, 14, 28–29, 52
Tojo, Hideki 12, 15 war theatre 49–51
Tomb of Edgar Poe, The 36 war trauma 160–163, 165–166, 169–171;
totalitarianism 159–161; analysts’ see also Regeneration Trilogy, The
commitment 166–167; children and Warburg, Aby 15–16, 44, 62, 102, 103,
new beginnings 182–183; Christopher 109, 146, 163
 Index 197
Watanabe, Kazuo 19 World War I (1914-1918) 8, 16, 40, 44,
We, Sons of Eichmann 176 47, 67–68, 70, 78, 122; see also Regen-
why? question 26 eration Trilogy, The
Winnicott, Donald 8, 23–24, 62 World War II (1939-1945) 26,
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 17–18, 35; beetle 136, 162; see also
box 34, 46; ceremony 157; erasure of totalitarianism
traces 43; language 14, 24–25, 43, 44;
Philosophical Investigations 164, 180; Yealland, Lewis 124, 136–137
psychotherapeutic technique 38;
transference 86 zones of death 37–38, 44–45,
word-things 81 103, 107, 161, 171