So there’s my profession of faith signed and sealed, you asked for it!
Otherwise, everything’s fine. The MPH keeps me busy, the sun is shining, and Andrew sends his love. He’s in Paris, sitting right here, listening to news bulletins about cars ablaze in the suburbs and bunches of men hollering about the cartoons of the Prophet. He says to tell you that Paris, far more than New York, is the place to write about whatever’s wrong. Will you come over and see us some weekend soon?
Looking forward to it, with lots of love,
Sylvia
Chapter 26
A FATHER IS BEATEN TO DEATH
The “Christian”—he who for two thousand years has passed as a Christian—is simply a psychological self-delusion. Closely examined, it appears that, despite all his “faith,” he has been ruled only by his instincts—and what instincts!
Friedrich Nietszche, The Antichrist
“I love because I am loved, therefore I am”: that seems to be your credo, Teresa, my love, but this solar face of your rapture is dependent on a bizarre figure: the man who loves you and whom you love is both suffering son and suffering father, scourged and put to death before resuscitating. As you will have guessed, my dialogue with you is also a dialogue with Freud: the founder of psychoanalysis believed that the “beaten child” we are in fantasy can (sometimes) resort to the paradoxical solution (as in your case) of another fantasy: a son-father is put to death.1 Is this not the basis of Christianity? Or one of its bases, at the very least, in my atheistic eyes! I will here insert a parenthesis in the story of my cohabitation with Teresa, addressed to my psychology colleagues, as well as to believers who might be interested to see how their experience can be approached from the outside. I shall inquire into the fantasy of the “father beaten to death,” arguing that it is a cornerstone of Christian faith, and I shall do so via Freud’s text upon that other fantasy: “A Child Is Being Beaten.”
A Coptic manuscript, translated from the Greek in the third or fourth century and exhumed during the 1970s, appeared in National Geographic in April 2006. Its gist was that Judas did not “betray” Jesus so much as “fulfill” the latter’s design, which was to be put to death. Thus the image of the bad disciple, which had fueled Christian anti-Semitism for two thousand years, was shattered. The analyst, for her part, has no need of this kind of “evidence” to know that the execution of Christ was not an unfortunate accident (due to some betrayal or some internecine quarrel in Judaism, etc.), let alone a Gnostic revival of the Platonic soul (which must discard the body in order to ascend to the idea of Goodness and Beauty). At the intersection of “A Child Is Being Beaten” with Totem and Taboo, and in light of what Freud called “the desire of the father,” of sadomasochism and its sublimation, it seems to me that the scenario of the “father beaten to death” expresses a logical necessity in the Christian construction of the subject of desire.2 Indeed, the Passion displaces upon the son-father the guilt and pain inflicted on us by the prohibition of incest and by abandonment (it is not me but him who is punished, who undergoes the passion of pain); it cannot be otherwise, if love of and for the father is finally to be authorized in a “reconciliation” wrought by “infinite intellectual love,” by sublimation.
Postulating the unconscious existence of primal fantasies (Urfantasien) derived either from the witnessing of certain events or from a “pre-historic truth” going back to the “earliest times of the human family,” Freud evokes the “primal scene,” “castration,” and “seduction.” Introduced in the same breath, the fantasy of the beaten child seems to occupy a specially privileged place among these primal fantasies, which are set to structure the psychoanalytic reading of desire and the range of sexual scenarios in which each person’s specific eroticism may be deployed. Halfway between the primal and the individual, between myth and poetry, “a child is beaten” constitutes the dawn of individuation—the decisive moment when the subject begins to sketch out his or her sexual choice and speaking identity in the ternary structure of kinship. Whether male or female, excluded from the primal scene, “I” seek my place between father and mother, both to mark my difference from them and to enter into bonds that are the inseparable ties of love and speech, erotic and signifying.3
It was Christianity’s genius to appropriate this fantasy (unwittingly, needless to say) in order to recast it and proclaim it urbi et orbi in the shocking, unbearable, and ultimately liberating—despite its ambiguities—form of Christ’s Passion. Only thus can the Man of Suffering, beaten to death, abandoned by his Father, reach the Father, and resurrect.
Jesus is human, like me, says the believer (and a fortiori Teresa). He is a brother beaten to death before coming back to life. But this human is also a god, the only God. After the Last Supper and before the Passion, the man who calls himself the Son of God tells Thomas: “If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also; and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him.” He tells Philip: “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father…Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me?”4 Since Jesus is consubstantial with the Father in the knot of the Trinity—Teresa leans heavily on this point—Jesus is also a beaten father.
The outrageous idea of the violent killing of a Father, a martyred God, is repulsive to many rebels against Christianity, the most inspired being Friedrich Nietzsche. To abase God the Father to the level of a Man of Suffering could only, for him, produce a slave religion, fit for weaklings and infrahumans.5 How wrong he was! Teresa does not separate the Father from the Son; the praying woman likes to feel that she receives into her soul, by means of Communion, both Christ and his Father, thanks to Jesus’s sacrifice: “How pleasing to the Father this offering of his Son is, because He delights and rejoices with Him here—let us say—on earth.”6 “How did the Son take on human flesh and not the Father or the Holy Spirit?” she wonders, struggling with the idea that the three Persons are really “separate.” She goes on, archly: “This I haven’t understood. The theologians know.”7 I don’t mean to shock you, Teresa, my love, but Freud’s audacity is what encouraged me, Sylvia Leclercq, to detect in this divinized suffering a gigantic defensive scaffolding against the surfeit of desire and a hefty dose of sadism. It seems to me that the paschal scenario satiates desire and violence, but by turning these in every direction to play with them, defuse them,…and appease them.
The better to convince you, I must go back to childhood, it’s an occupational deformation of mine! The narrative of “A Child Is Being Beaten” opens with a scene in which I see someone being beaten. I don’t know who it is, but it’s not me, it’s him—someone else. The narrative progresses through three phases:
“Daddy loves only me,” says the little girl or little boy. “He cannot love anybody else, because whoever he is beating, it is somebody else.” I, the author of this fantasy, am not being beaten. I am only a budding sadistic voyeur. Why? Because my desire for Daddy is so great, I have to repress it into guilt. And so “this early blossoming is nipped by the frost,” as the Viennese doctor put it, in such a way that precocious genital arousal undergoes a regressive debasement to the lower level of orality, anality, or onanism, and becomes crystallized in the pleasure of whipping-punishment…displaced onto the anal zone of another. Thus the sadistic pleasure in the spanking meted out by Daddy to another in fact curbs my own genital excitement and guilt toward the all-powerful father I desire.
Note that at this stage of the script, the fantasizing child is not itself being abused, and the beaten “object” remains as yet indeterminate. The fantasizing subject is dominated by the excitement of its voyeurism alone, which arose as a bulwark against its genital organization. This voyeurism is “not clearly sexual, not in itself sadistic,” Freud hazards cautiously, “but yet the stuff from which both will later come.” That is to say, voyeurism contains genital excitement and sadism in embryo. We will remember this when we encounter a believer prostrate in unnameable veneration of his ill-treated God, his speechless contemplation les
s a matter of decorous discretion than of shameful relish.
The scenario changes in the second phase of the fantasy. “Daddy does not love me: he is beating me,” says the little boy or little girl; but this masochistic inversion does not mean the same to both sexes.
To the boy, “Daddy is beating me” signifies that he is guarding against his passive desire to be loved by his father, as well as against latent homosexuality, before attempting to invert this passivity and feminization and turn them into weapons against the father, waging an oedipal war that launches him on the high road to male emancipation. Unless the boy enjoys masochism, in which case he changes the sex of the punisher: “Daddy loves me, and so the person beating me can only be a woman, it’s Mom! She’s the one I have to separate from, and yet it’s her place I want to take beside Daddy. Hateful Mom, that evil, desirable witch, she’ll never stop taking it out on me!” That’s how the script reads for a man who feels the thrill Sacher-Masoch described under the lash of a Venus in furs.8
But in girls like you, Teresa, matters are more warped still. The defensive inversion of potentially sadistic voyeurism (“A child is being beaten, I don’t know who, but it’s not me”) into masochism (“I am being beaten”) remains unconscious. Because you don’t experience this inversion as a punishment alone; it also implies the “secondary erotization” of the pregenital zones, as the same Viennese doctor explained; a regressive substitute for genital satisfaction. Sure enough, in the fantasy “A Child Is Being Beaten,” that satisfaction is discharged in masturbation. And since this intense, victimized, and self-focused eroticism is as much a source of guilt as a yearning to be loved, it too will be repressed into the unconscious. That’s how the permanence of unconscious female masochism becomes instilled, on top of the passivity expected of women and drummed into them by traditional cultures.
Finally the second phase of the fantasy is inverted in its turn, still as an effect of repression, and safeguarding the little girl’s masochism even more effectively, the better to impress it into the unconscious. “It’s not me who Father is beating, it’s a boy,” runs the formula for the third and last defensive step. It’s not me, and not a woman at all, it’s a man who undergoes the physical action of the Great Other! This has the effect of excluding the little girl from the erotic scene and, moreover, from any “scene” at all: social, political, cultural, and the rest.
Let us attempt to understand the stages of this progression. The little girl (and the woman) shields herself from her incestuous love for the father (phase 1: “He loves me”) and from her own masochism (phase 2: “He is beating me”) by projecting them in inverted form onto another, preferably of the same sex as the coveted paternal object (phase 3: “He is beating a boy”). How does this delegation of female desire onto another object of the same sex or the other sex take place, to safeguard her from being a subject of desire? How does this inverted delegation of desire come about, when it is not a repression properly speaking, but what I call an introjection of paternal attachment, of perversion (père-version)?
Unlike the boy, who concentrates the desires of the entire lineage and posits himself as a fairly happy Narcisssus from the moment of the primal scream (why has it been forgotten that Narcissus, in the eponymous myth, is a young man? Why is the “second sex” generally regarded as more narcissistic?), the girl, from earliest childhood, always compares herself to someone else. A woman exists only as a function of this other, who is, in the first instance, the mother. As I have noticed with my female analysands, little girls have their first “oedipal complex” toward their mother: they turn the mother into this premature otherness, this sensible, preverbal presence, this pole of simultaneous attraction and adversity they can never stop comparing themselves to, measuring up to, separating from.9 You or me? That’s the little girl’s initial question, for she is incapable of setting herself up as a self-complacent Narcissus, replete with his own image. She tries to put herself “out of bounds,” to safeguard herself from the unsettling excitement running through her. She defends herself from her passion—first incestuous, then masochistic—by focusing it on another: “He doesn’t love you,” she says, “because he is beating you.” Who is that “you,” that abused second person who shields my little-girl desire, guilty as I am of loving and being loved?
Every little girl, says Freud, has an irrevocable childhood memory of the way little boys are the ones who are given the rod. In his interpretation, the repression that succeeds desire inverts the father’s love into the punishment of another person who is the object of the girl’s jealous hatred. The prototype of this other beaten person can only be the mother, enabling a due humiliation of the little girl’s rival, even in the best patriarchal families. In Teresa’s family, the dignified, handsome Beatriz de Ahumada—prematurely ravaged by continual pregnancies and rapidly succumbing to sickness—could easily have been regarded as a “beaten woman.”
And yet the little girl’s ambivalent love for her mother persists in protecting the envied matron and seeks out other targets to deflect the beating from the loved/hated maternal object. In the girl’s fantasy, other children take the place of the abused rival, drawing on the parents’ libidinal transference to her siblings. Why this displacement, this masquerade?
Freud points to everyday scenes children witness at home or at school. When a child is punished, he is viewed by the others (inevitably in competition with him) as having forfeited the father’s love, leaving the father available for the not-beaten, unscathed onlookers or voyeurs; or more precisely, for the unscathed voyeuse!
But Freud goes further. He suggests that it is the guilt inherent in the repression of the voyeur’s desire that creates the necessity of punishment, irrespective of whether scenes of punishment have been observed. His inquiry now goes deeper, asking what is the source of that guilt-inducing repression of love felt for and returned by the father, which peaks in fantasies of punishment, of whippings?
There can only be one answer: this repression, whose violence depends partly on personal factors (such as the premature development of genitality in some children between the ages of two and six, or the excessive sensitivity and vigor of the sexual drive in others), partly on the nature of incestuous currents within the family, is simply the reiteration of the incest repression that underlies human history and is prescribed by it. As the founding element of the culture that distinguishes our species, the repression of incest necessarily and universally engenders guilt and its corollary, masochism. In specific circumstances, however—such as a highly strung family background and the exceptional sensibilities of someone out of the ordinary (like you, Teresa)—this prehistoric guilt entails a marked regression to earlier stages of psychical development, before the development of genitality: to the oral/anal level (spanking), to onanistic relief, or to the variations on punishment-whipping that treat the whole body as an erogenous zone.
All this resonates with us, doesn’t it? But I follow you, Teresa, my love, when I say there may be “something” wanting in Freud’s neat explanation; something that would account for your manner of jouissance, side by side with your “guilt” and your worship of the “Tortured Man.” We saw this in the course of your foundations/persecutions/jubilations: you are extraordinary. The physical suffering that inflames you carnally is gradually deployed just as much, and then more, in your mind. It invests language, writing, the multiplicity of attachments, and remains sublime. Better still, it becomes ever more sublime, ever more verbal and active. Bodily and spiritual, your suffering is always reversible, and that’s how it gives itself the chance to be distilled into an intense symbolization-elucidation-creation.
I suggest, then, that to the Freudian view of endogenous masochism ensuing from the repression of incest be added the fact that incest provokes a final displacement of arousal, not this time onto a different “object” (a boy), but onto the means of expression and communication itself. The repression of incest leads to an investment…in language and thought! Do you fo
llow?
So, in parallel with the fantasy that “someone else is being beaten,” which protects me from forbidden genital pleasure and/or from the incestuous desire to love and be loved (by Daddy, but also by Mommy; Freud has less to say about her, since her love strikes him as more natural, less prohibited; I wonder!), in parallel with that fantasy, then, I the little girl will transfer the intensity of my desire onto words and thoughts, onto representation and psychic creativity.
This displacement is more than a barricade against culpable genital desires, creating a new object of desire that proves to be a new source of satisfaction, complementary to the pleasure of the erogenous zones; it consists of an infinite capacity for representing and naming, to the point of endowing genital arousal with words and meanings or nonmeanings, besides the exaltation of masochism itself. All this in hopes not only of finding partial substitutes for the forbidden love that is incest, in the shape of my own symbolic activities or works, but also of meriting that forbidden love, rendered guilty and reversed into masochism. Meriting it through the wild capacity for sublimation all humans possess, a skill that I, smart little girl that I am, noisier than the others and Daddy’s favorite to boot, employ to outdo everyone else.
To perversion in its masochistic (“I enjoy the fantasy of being beaten”) or sadistic (“I enjoy seeing a boy being beaten”) forms is added the sublimatory jouissance of my own power to speak and think for and with the beloved/lover. You see, at the beginning, sublimation accompanies the perverse (père-vers) defense, and perversion (père-version) is the other face of sublimation. It is easy to imagine the possible variations of their joint destinies: sublimation and perversion can splice together, or part, or cross paths; they can be mutually oblivious, or reunite, or jointly stimulate each other…
Teresa, My Love Page 47
