One of the failings of some of the cruder versions of psychoanalysis, whether in looking at literary texts or examining individuals, is a preoccupation with objects over relations and functions. (As well as the presupposition that origin is goal).
Let’s take this from Wordsworth:
“That one, the fairest of all Rivers, lov’d / To blend his murmurs with my Nurse’s song.”
The crudest of ‘psychoanalytic’ equations here is Nature (river) = Mother (nurse). Nature is described in terms of the maternal role (here performed by the first mother-substitute, the nurse), and so much of how Wordsworth relates to nature is really a relation to the Maternal object. His relation to nature is only a shadow play, through which he enacts the longing for the maternal Thing etc. The Mother is the original, nature is a copy. Nature is the merest of stand-ins for something now absent.
The point, however, is that the relation to the mother is precisely that, a relation. If this relation – of an impossible proximity but also a 'slow ecstasy' – can be repeated with another ‘object’, all well and good, for what is sought is the relation. The relation escapes its object and becomes desired in its own right. Alternatively, you can think of this in terms of function. The nurse’s song functions to, say, lull him to sleep. The child, in discovering that function elsewhere is content at that. He does not need the object that in the beginning provided that function. Relations and functions are not glued to objects, nor do they serve simply as signs of those objects with which they were originally associated.
5 comments:
Nicely put.
True.
As always, your (the author's) certainty has become, through the medium of a special (how?) text, my (the reader's) truth. (I'm sure you already feel the certainty in terms of a great gift for writing! Hope it's OK to be reminded.)
But is truth not that which an individual can only find out about after reaching a state of maturity? Isn't it the tenet and teaching of every mystic: It's not the goal, rather the path to it, that gets you "there".
So much can be missed in such substitutions. For example, the delicate, slightly sinister reach of "murmurs," which, guided by the river's love, blend with the song. A tension between singing and murmuring. An insinuation. It's as if the passage is somehow about the too easy inattention to difference in just such "felicitous" acts of blending as you describe.
Anon, please feel free to leave a name. Yr prose seems vaguely familiar..? And thanks Tom, maybe i'll come back to the Wordsworth.
(You are correct, but I seem also to have developed a namesake, so please bear with my anonimity.)
It makes idiosyncratic sense, doesn't it, since psychoanalysis is all about psyche considered - as much as possible - in isolation. I suppose what the founders must have been concerned with is the "initiation" of a fresh mind. Relations only come afterwards apparently, are chronologically always "post-", or relegated to some symbolic future, so that the model can be said to have remained free of unaccountable influences.
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