The starting-point of this work is contemporary clinical experience which is the outcome of Freud's writings. I have not adopted the usual course, namely to begin by seeking out the new approaches that Freud's work opens up, but have preferred on the contrary to leave this until the end of the chapter. In fact it is only at a late stage, almost at the end of proceedings, that repression in me has lifted, and that I have remembered retrospectively something in Freud that can be related to my subject. It is not in 'Mourning and melancholia' (191 78) that I found Freud's support, but in The Interpretation Dreams (1900a).
In the last chapter of the Traumdeutung, and already in the first edition, Freud tells a final personal dream concerning the arousal by dreams (ibid., p. 583). It is the dream of the 'beloved mother', and the only childhood dream he recounted, either in this work or in his published correspondence. In this matter, Fliess' psychical deafness made one of Freud's dead mothers of him, after having been his eldest brother. With the help of previous interpretations by Eva Rosenfeld and Alexander Grinstein, Didier Anzieu (1986) gives a remarkable analysis of it. Here I cannot go into all the details of this dream or the multiple commentaries to which it gives rise. I shall limit myself to the reminder that its manifest content shows 'my beloved mother, with a peculiarly peaceful, sleeping expression on her features, being carried into the room by two (or three) people with birds' beaks and laid upon the bed'. The dreamer awakes in tears and screaming, interrupts his parents' sleep. It is an anxiety dream which is interrupted on waking. The commentators who analyze this dream, beginning with Freud himself, do not pay sufficient attention to the fact that it is a dream that could not be dreamed, a dream that may have been a dream, if ever it had been dreamed through, one would almost have to construct the end. Which, the two or the three -an essential hesitation -, will join the mother in her sleep? In his un- certainty, the dreamer can stand no more; he interrupts, killing two birds with one stone -the dream and the parents' sleep. Detailed analysis of the dream, both by Freud and his commentators, ends up with the conjunction of two themes: that of the dead mother and that of sexual intercourse. In other words, we find confirmation of my hypothesis concerning the relation between the dead mother, the primal scene and the Oedipus complex; here, besides the object of desire, two (or three) people with birds' beaks are brought into play.
The associations shed light on the origin of these people derived from the Philippson Bible. Grinstein's enquiry (1972)allows one to attach this representation to figure I 5 of this Bible, which was a gift ofFreud's father, an illustration which becomes theobject ofacondensation. In effect, in this illustration, it is not a question ofgods with falcons' heads, which was Freud's first association, but of two pharaonic personages of Lower Egypt -I emphasize Lower -while the birds surmount the columns of the bed. I think this is an important condensation, for it displaces the birds from the mother's bed to the head of the personages, who are two here, and not three. Thus the mother is perhaps attributed with a bird-penis.【4】The corresponding text illustrates the verse 'King David follows the litter (of Abner)', which, as Anzieu remarks, abounds with themes of incest, parricide and, I stress this, fratricide.
【4】Bird = oirrau, also a familiar term for penis. [Translator's note.]
Anzieu interprets the two personages correctly, I believe, as the representations of Jacob Freud, grandfatherly image, and Philipp, the younger half-brother of Freud, paternal image. This because, as every-one knows, Philipp, who was born in 1836, was himself only one year younger than Freud's mother, and Freud had Philipp's eldest son Emanuel as a playmate. In the dream the dead mother has the express- ion of the maternal grandfather on his deathbed, on October 3, 1865, when Sigmund was nine and a half. Thus this is a bereavement which must have resonated upon the relationship between Amalie Freud and her son. The commentators have noted the erroneous dating in this dream, which was not rectified by Freud. He says he dreamed it when he was sevenor eight yearsold, i.e., a year and a halfor two years prior to the time of the grandfather's death, which is impossible. Whereas others have simply noted the error and corrected it, it seems to me a revealing lapsus, and it leads me to conclude that it is not the bereavement of the maternal grandfather that is in question, but a former bereavement. The significant period in the error -a gap of one and a half to two years -reminds me of another bereavement of the mother: that of Freud's younger brother, Julius, who was born when Sigmund was seventeen months old (almost a year and a half) and who died when he was twenty-three months old (nearly two). Hence the double explication: two (or three) people, namely Jacob, Philipp or Jabob, Philipp and Philippson: Philipp's son, Julius; because in 1859, when Freud was three, he dreads that his mother might be pregnant again, like the Nanny, and that Philipp might have shut her in the cupboard, have her 'boxed up'.
This, I shall note in passing, is why the young initiator, the cm.erge's son who reveals the information on sexual intercourse, is supposedly called Philipp. It is Philipp who copulates with Amalie, and it is Philippson (Julius) who allows Sigmund to understand the relation between copulating, giving birth and dying . . .Julius' name will be forgotten, that of the painter Julius Mosen, who Freud writes about in his letter to Fliess, on August 26, 1898 (Masson, 1985). Mosen-Moses, we know what follows and also Freud's insistence on making an Egyp- tian of Moses, namely, to make the point clearly, the son, not of Amalie and Jacob, but of the concierge, or if need be, ofAmalie and Philipp. This also sheds light on Freud's conquest of Rome, ifone remembers that he quotes Livy (Freud ~gooa, p. 398n) in connection with the incestuous dreams of Julius Caesar.
I understand better the importance of this age, eighteen months, in Freud's works. It is the age of his grandson playing with the wooden reel (mother dead-mother resurrected), who died when he was about two, and which will be an occasion for intense mourning, though it is minimized. This is also the age at which the Wolf Man supposedly witnessed the primal scene.
Anzieu makes two remarks which link with my own deductions. He shows, concerning the preconscious elaboration of Freud, the rapproche- menfthat there is between Freud and Bion, who, besides love and hatred, gave a specific place to knowledge as a primordial reference within the psychical apparatus: the quest for meaning. Finally, he concludes that one should hold suspect Freud's insistence on reducing the specific anxiety of the dream, anxiety over the mother's death, to something else.
There is only one other hypothesis pending, that of the oral rela- tionship. Another dream which is in keeping with that of the 'beloved mother' refers to this, where the mother appears to be alive: the dream of the 'Three Fates' (tgooa, pp. 204-5). In this dream Freud's mother is making KnÖdel, and while little Sigmund is waiting to tat them she
intimates that he should wait until she is ready ('these were not definite spoken words', Freud adds). One knows that his associations with this passage concern death. But further on, when he has put the analysis of the dream aside, he comes back to it, to write: 'My dream of the three Fates was clearly a hunger dream. But it shifted the craving for nourishment back to a child's longing for his mother's breast, and it made use of an innocent desire as a screen for a more serious one which could not be so openly displayed' (ibid., p. 233). Probably, and how can one deny it when the context is so pertinent, but here again it would be as well to remain suspicious. One should especially question this triple image of woman in Freud's thinking, which is examined again in the 'Theme of the Three Caskets': the mother, the wife (or beloved), and death. The censure of the beloved has been much discussed in recent yean (e.g. Fain and Braunschweig, 1971).I in my turn wish to point out the censure of the dead mother: the mother of silence as heavy as lead.
Now our trilogy is complete. Here we are again referred to the metaphoric loss of the breast, interrelating with the Oedipus complex, or the primal scene fantasy, and that of the dead mother. The lesson of the dead mother is that she too must die one day so that another may be loved. But this death must be slow and gentle so that the memory of her love does not perish, but may nourish the love that she will generously offer to her who takes her place.
Thus we have come full circle. It is again significant retrospectively. I have known of these dreams for many years, as well as the commentaries to which they have given rise. One and the other were printed in my mind as significant memory traces of something that seemed to me to be obscurely important, without my knowing exactly how or why. These traces have been recathected by the discourse of certain analysands whom, at a given moment, I was able to hear, though not before. Is it this discourse that permitted me to rediscover Freud's written word, or is it the cryptomnesia of this reading that made me permeable to my analysands' words? In a rectilinear conception of time, this hypothesis is the correct one. In the light ofFreud's concept ofdeferred action, it is the other that is true. Be it what it may, in the concept of deferred action, nothing is more mysterious than this preliminary statute of a registered meaning which remains in abeyance in the psyche while awaiting its revelation. For it is a question of 'meaning', otherwise it would not have been able to be recorded in the psyche. But this meaning-in-waiting is only truly significant when it is reawakened by a recathexis which takes place in an absolutely different context. What meaning is this? A lost meaning, refound? It would give too much credit to this presignificative structure, and its rediscovery is much more of the order of a discovery. Perhaps potential meaning which only lacks the analytic -or poetic? -experience to become a veridical experience.
www.psychspace.com心理学空间网
