Teresa, My Love

by Julia Kristeva

  Other events modulated your withdrawal and your rejection of the family. María, the offspring of your father’s first marriage, and her husband Martín Guzmán de Barrientos attempted to sue the executor of don Alonso’s estate; you squabbled over rings and bracelets, even over the parental bed, in between vitriolic arguments about your parents’ respective characters. The family hearth was left deserted: Lorenzo and Jerónimo departed for the antipodes in 1540, followed by Pedro and Antonio after Alonso’s death. “I am a daughter of the Church,” you would announce on your deathbed, in a statement that is, as I have suggested, only apparently banal. I do not only read it as the ultimate assertion of your monastic condition. Not even as a “refusal of origins,” because the modern concept of “origins” was not in your habits of thought and you had no need to allay the meaninglessness of life by a wager on the “nature” or the “history” that preceded you: in your day those forces were in gestation, they had not yet supplanted “fate.”

  From that fateful day at Uncle Pedro’s, which decided you to take the veil, and through the first years of your novitiate, you plowed a singular furrow of your own: both submissive and recalcitrant toward both origins and institutions. A reformer within. You needed His Majesty, the God-man proposed by Christianity. Your longing for an ideal Father found echoes in evangelical and biblical texts, and was informed by new dissident movements as much as by the teachings of the Church. You appropriated all these, just as His Majesty became yours: He was part of you, you took part in Him. The wandering continued, but in new forms, centered on the ideal Father: a Father who was ever more loving, protective, absorbed, resorbed…

  Chapter 10

  THE IDEAL FATHER AND THE HOST

  There’s no need to move the hand or raise it—I’m referring to reflection—for anything, for the Lord gives from the apple tree (to which [the soul] compares her Beloved) the fruit already cut, cooked, and even chewed.

  Teresa of Avila, Meditations on the Song of Songs

  Teresa was not averse to self-mortification; but she would not be like those nuns of old, light-headed with fasting and pain, or like the teenagers of today who puncture their skin with nails and needles for the scary thrill of the forbidden. Teresa was not the sort of hysteric who deprives herself of feeling in order to avoid the agony of eternally unsatisfied desires. She certainly knew phobic moments of frozen affect, withdrawal from the world, nausea. But these alternated with hypersensitivity, and heightened perceptions craving words, from which she managed to extract formulations as poised and accurate as they were profuse.

  She sought this rendering fiction, this verbal sap, in continual dialogue with her confessors. They struggled to keep pace with her at times, they flagged, they let her down; but they were the ones who urged her to write, the better to explain herself. If the Dominican friar Pedro Ibáñez reckoned she should commit her life to paper, that’s what she would do. After a quarter century of convent life, Teresa embarked on a first draft of The Book of Her Life.

  Living in the bosom of the vast Cepeda y Ahumada tribe, she sensed early on that desires, helplessly intense because reciprocated, are condemned to remain unfulfilled in the game of supply and demand. Onto this incestuous trunk was grafted the insecurity of her converso ancestry. But it was the fervor of Christ’s message that activated the magnetism of the Word upon which that attraction in turn depended. In a sixteenth-century Spanish family mixing converts with Old Christians, utterance and writing were the ultimate bonds of a communication in which ineluctably lethal passions might take refuge, find clarification, and be relieved. Teresa’s lovesickness did not stop her embracing the dogma shared by her parents: if the Word was made flesh in Christ, it continued to be made flesh, or truth, in the everyday stuff of conversations whose inescapable falsehood or contentiousness endowed them with relentless immediacy. Teresa deftly conveys early on the importance of the truthfulness that makes for intimate unions and underpins familial desire: “My father believed [me when I said: me creyó] that my illnesses were the reason for my not praying; for he did not lie, and by this time, in accord with the things I spoke of to him, I shouldn’t have lied either.”1

  It’s springtime, a season for mellow dumbness and living life for its own sake; Jérôme Tristan is courting me, in his own peculiar way. My learned colleague tirelessly documents and enlightens me as to how he, at any rate, would tackle the subject of my saint. Last night, as we were coming out of a Psychology Society meeting, he lectured me as follows:

  “As you are no doubt aware, dear girl, psychiatry has a word for hysterics who are emotionally unresponsive due to their inability to interpret their own feelings: we call them alexithymics. Their perceptions are conveyed by the senses and received by centers in the brain, as usual—there’s no neurological deficiency associated with this disorder—but the perceiving subject refuses to ‘read,’ if you will, the neuronal signals, and to create the psychical representation of them which normally forms the grounding of self-awareness and is the precondition for language. Isn’t that so, Sylvia?”

  Oh well, I’ll walk him to his car, parked miles away, just to stretch my legs. As we stroll along the railings of the Luxembourg Gardens I am entranced by the horse chestnut candles and the sound of bees reveling in the pleasure of a job well done. We kiss goodbye next to the Observatoire. Drunk on the notion of alexithymia I dash for home, deep in cogitation, blind to the parade of automobiles, traffic lights, and bright, bare shop windows.

  By excluding the spoken word, Teresa’s mental prayer may well have fostered the development of alexithymic states and even triggered the fits that plagued her during the first years of her novitiate; and yet her culture, education, temperament, and genius conspired to rebel against this verbal anesthesia. I am impatient to put Jérôme straight, and present him with the paradox that Teresa was actually hyperlexithymic. For not only was she a virtuoso at “reading” the least shiver of feeling and perception, she also registered in body and mind the cleavage (word vs. drive, language vs. affect, the verbal vs. the carnal) first displayed outrageously, inspiringly, by Christ—whose death and resurrection unfolded in and through the Word.

  “And the Word was made flesh” (John 1:14). In her groundbreaking, personal way, Teresa recognizes herself in Christ’s incarnation and resurrection and appropriates them, using them as a template and retracing their stations in her fiction. Following in Christ’s wake, from the starting point of her family history and within the critical limits of her physiology, she rediscovers willy-nilly how intrinsic to the human condition is the capacity for representation-sublimation-idealization, and how perpetually under threat. Then she takes on board, illustrating it in her own impassioned way, the biblical and evangelical intuition to the effect that humanization—understood as the ability, always in jeopardy, to make meaning—depends on the celebration of an ideal Father.

  I don’t suppose Jérôme will be following me down that road.

  And yet he knows that Freud traced the “construction” of that ideal Father, Father of the Law or loving Father (the model was constantly being refined by the Viennese thinker) to the “prehistoric fable” of the murder of the father by his sons, the brothers of the primal horde. Only because they have killed him can they found a society in the name of his law. The ideal Father is the recto of the verso that is the dead Father. This fable expresses an anthropological truth that is confirmed by what we hear from our patients, right, Jérôme? Broadly speaking, Freud invites us to accept that the Bible and the Gospels reveal the truth of the psychic workings of countless generations of Homo sapiens for the last hundred thousand years. To acknowledge this truth might help us, Freud thought, not perhaps to believe in the ideal Father or to delegate ourselves in Him, but to make a go of reuniting words and drives with a view to moderating the latter and speaking more truth, indefinitely speaking.

  Now, could this human-specific capacity for making sense “in the name of the Father” be on the wane, not to say on the way out? My le
arned colleague would certainly concur with me on that. If Dr. Tristan has a fault it would be to overdo the Lacan, working back from the Seminars to that “seminal essay,” as he calls it, “‘Family Complexes in Pathology,’ from 1938, Sylvia dear, do you know it? Bang in the middle of the rise of Nazism comes a text that emphasizes the determinism of psychosis as found in the failure of fathers, and hence mothers, to stick to their roles. Do you follow my gist?” (He’s asking me?)

  Either way, many contemporary scholars—philosophers, anthropologists, and psychoanalysts, not forgetting the feminists whom he finds so annoying, including Aude, his therapist wife—are currently trying to work out the constructions-deconstructions of the paternal function by following the path of “eternal recurrence” toward myths, beliefs, and mystical experiences. They are interested in the maternal function, too, but that’s a different and rather trickier story.

  Teresa of Avila contributes to this research with her own experiments in faithful infidelity to the dogma of the ideal Father; her testimony enables us to measure its necessity and probe its impasses, while opening up dizzy vistas of its overcoming, of freedom. So, what is an ideal Father?

  I have been following his emergence in Teresa’s autobiography, observing the way family and personal vagaries combined with the dogmas of faith. The ideal Father is one who refrains from enjoying his children (in the sexual sense of jouissance), just as he refrains from sacrificing them, in order for frustrated desire (his and theirs) to metamorphose into a capacity for imagining and thinking. This myth goes back to Isaac’s aborted sacrifice at the hands of Abraham, and culminates in Christ’s Calvary on Golgotha, abandoned by his Father, before rising from the dead to sit at His right hand in Heaven; it rests on a complex perlaboration of Father–Son desire. First, this desire must be conceived as susceptible of deferral: it must be frustrated, suspended, forbidden, and yet sustained, indeed fueled. A late flutter of the amorous imaginary attributes this original suspension of desire to the Father Himself: unlike animal progenitors, this Father is already a Subject who cares about his offspring’s future and the quality of relationships among them. Freud tracks the formation of this figure through the mutations of the “father of the primal horde,” the sexual tyrant and omnipotent killer who, once dispatched by that band of brothers, his sons, is gradually transformed into a symbolic authority that no longer threatens but protects bonds that become, by the same token, cultural bonds.

  At this point of my private novel, Dr. Marianne Baruch objects that this fanciful construction, invented by the celebrated founder of my discipline and updated by me with the help of Jérôme Tristan (not that she knows the last bit, she’s jealous enough already), which I’m running past her as a distraction from the rather tiresome routine of the MPH, simply adds to the myths she’s out to demystify.

  “Look, Freud tells a story that repeats the story that certain anthropologists and psychologists got out of this or that myth. These days, they don’t even agree among themselves about the dead Father. It’s what you call the ‘unconscious.’ Whatever! Except nothing like that ever comes up on my MRIs. Scientifically speaking, I’m afraid all your precious Freud discovered was the power of fiction. People tell each other fictions and it makes them feel better, period.” Marianne shoots me a commiserating glance; she doesn’t want to lose me.

  She’s had to postpone her Spanish trip by a month. Hardly surprising. Director Toutbon was never going to let her waltz off just like that, on a whim, with no notice. “Where’s your sense of responsibility? What about your patients?” Poor Marianne, the one time she had something other than the office on her mind! Disgraceful! But let that go, we’ll deal with it later.

  So, our house psychiatrist reckons I’ve been snared by a fantasy, Freud’s and mine. She’s not wrong.

  “A fantasy? And why not? Because fantasies think, like dreams think; and their thinking—which is not the same as reasoning—uncovers emotional truths that are opaque to reason.” I’d ask her to lie on the couch and try it out, but I’d be wasting my time.

  Marianne makes a face. But, pill-pusher though she is, she can’t entirely fend off what she calls “your goddam psyche-schmyche stuff,” and lets me carry on. Why, the august Doctor may even be lending an ear.

  “I’d go further,” I tell her. “What if the fantasy of the ideal Father wasn’t just a story, a fiction, a fantasy as you say, but the prototype of every fantasy?”

  Or maybe she isn’t listening after all, just pretending. That business about her father, now there’s a story…Will she be able to understand, being so tied into her love-hate for dear Daddy, who’d wanted a boy? Too bad, on we go. The ideal Father is the fantasy, I say, being a gendered representation that rises above sexuality: he is a “father,” and so a progenitor, but “ideal” because defined by his symbolic function. A crossroads figure that stands between desire and meaning, passion and thought. By “fantasizing” over the “ideal Father” I’ve reached the same crux, the origin of imagination and thought.

  Marianne stops teasing. She’s paying attention, for once. This ideal Father who spurs us to imagine and think, is he a sublimating father, then, after having been—or while still being—a procreative one? (I wonder if my crazy notions are initiating her into psychoanalysis. Unlikely. But she’s storing them up for her trip with Haïm, for sure!) He’s a “dead” father in the fathering sense, because having “lived” by begetting, he is now forced to find himself a new purpose, to be reborn, this time in a symbolic role: that of laying down the Law, forbidding what lies outside it, making us think in our turn. So, if we need the father who defers his desires in order to speak-imagine-think, it follows that for us—speaking-imagining-thinking beings—there can be no other father but the dead Father? I pause, to give Marianne a breathing space: her convoluted backstory with Aimé-Haïm, added to my talk of ideal Fathers who are, for good measure, dead, have shaken her. She is about to say something. But her pager goes off: a resident is having a fit.

  I carry on with my novel in my head—accompanied by my roommate, naturally. The paperwork can wait: Paul is on an outing, and Élise is staying with her dismal father. I’ve got time.

  The price of this fantasy of the ideal Father as dead Father can only be anguish. If, before and after becoming the I of cogitation, I is a fantasizing subject, and if I fantasize the ideal and/or dead Father, this means that I am owed at once to a desire and its frustration, a begetting and a sublimation together. How am I to keep my equilibrium over this foundational imbalance, this trial, this Cross?

  Christianity leads the subject into this anguish as its own special truth, it fans and embeds it. Woven into the very structure of the desire for meaning, Christianity is the paradise of neurosis, lined with hopes for its appeasement. It will be sorted out in the fullness of time, for ever and ever, amen! With neurosis aplenty for eternity and beyond, Christianity is in no hurry. Especially as it is not satisfied with perpetuating anguish: it illuminates it. A procession of apostles, saints, martyrs, and mystics have mapped the highways and byways of love unto death. In these explorations of the heavens and hells of desire, anthropologists and psychoanalysts were quick to pick up that anguish is the compulsory tribute exacted by the very activity of fantasizing, in other words the imaginary buttressed by desire. You can dispense with the fantasy of the ideal Father and/or the dead Father, you can stop fantasizing, but you will thereby be deprived of the imaginary itself: such is the gist of the message sent down by these observers of the soul’s journey toward the Other. You are left to tick over in the realm of calculating, operational thinking. You become superhuman, you start somatizing, or you sign up as a suicide bomber.

  Religion as an institution coalesced around the foundational fantasy of the ideal Father, embodied in a wide variety of complex hierarchical “father figures”: shamans, wizards, high priests, gurus, monks…The Catholics were especially proficient here, leading to a highly centralized papacy with aspirations to universality. By decanting the fant
asy of the ideal Father into a class of men (the clergy), Catholicism conducted the paternal function through a doubling or splitting of male sexuality, with consequences that ranged from the glorious to the appalling. On the one hand, the erotic, channeled into human procreation; on the other, an ideal, sublimated fatherhood, steeped in death to self and haloed with eternity.

  In so doing the Church authorities entrusted to the “Holy Fathers,” the men of God, the task of relieving ordinary men of that impossible and yet essential “paternal function” that presided over our humanization in some remote prehistory, and whose civilizing works are the milestones of history. It did not follow, however, that this exemplary figuration of the ideal Father exempted the mass of the profane from the effort required by civilization to shoulder, willingly or otherwise, this impossible, symbolic “paternal function” at the same time as carrying out the everyday chore of biological paternity.

  With regard to the female religious state, where it exists (as in Christianity), it is predicated on the same sublimated renunciations as the male, with an added prohibition against acceding to higher office, the latter reserved for the paternal function. However, although treated as secondary, “spiritual maternity” does not appear, any more than the “maternal function,” to differ in specific ways from the “spiritual paternity” of the ideal Father. In fact, nuns are expected to turn themselves into homologues of this ideal paternity. Thus Teresa can be “the most virile of monks” without forfeiting her genius for springing very feminine, very personal surprises. But she strains toward the ideal Father, and it is with Him she seeks to be conjoined.