Civilisation and Its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur), Chapter one, part three
part 1.2.2 – development and dependency as the source of oceanic (word to your mother)
Having summarised what clinical psychoanalytic experience can tell Rolland, and us, about the link between the feeling of the oceanic and adult ego, Freud then deals with the oceanic aspect, by giving an outline of the psychoanalytic account of development and dependency.
(Side note: it’s worth mentioning that Freud’s account in C&ID was ‘sketched’, in contrast to the highly elaborated theoretical work on ego and id, pleasure and reality, Eros and Thanatos [from Interpretation of Dreams to Beyond the Pleasure Principle]. There’s a huge corpus of work in the lineage of object relations from Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and Nancy Chodorow that looked critically at these basic insights and developed them much further, in ways still widely used in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. In 50s parallel, Fromm relied on a developmental account doubly [because historico-cultural and familial-relational] for his basic universal anthropology of ‘man’, and later returned to look at matriarchy via Bachofen, in ways influential on the women’s movement by the 70s; in Fromm’s books, the focus is on the species-specific prolonged period of helplessness, and the mother is ‘literally a metaphor’ for unconditional love).
Our ‘stable’ sense of self as ‘sane’ adults is both a big delusion (see last post) and a miraculous-and-banal developmental achievement. We began as a portion of ourselves inside our father, flew out the hole in the tip of his penis, wriggled ‘our’ way to where it met our other, more intimate half, nestled for decades inside the mother. Even the division and multiplication implicit in meiosis, the embedding and distinction of our ova-part in-and-of-the-mother, as well as the fact that it must have happened when your father had an erection pointed at and in close proximity to your mother, already contains a discomforting basic truth about our emergence, beyond and behind and before the sexual division of labour in patriarchy that transforms the subjection of women in all of this in to ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. We do not think about this enough, I think; like death, we tend not to stare back into the ‘whence’ from which we came. Plato’s cave, indeed.
To amplify this further, consider that every single one of your mother’s eggs was fully formed when she was only 20 weeks old, and still forming inside her mother (I was alerted back to this uncanny fact in Nelson’s On Freedom but can’t find the page). This sets up a Matryoshka Doll regress of interpenetration that, to my knowledge, no culture has fully acknowledged – with the notable exception that this is precisely what the Russians were getting at with the nested-doll-principle. Thus in a sense, your oval (ovic?) self not only inhabited your mother for decades, an aspect of who you intimately and actually are spent nearly twenty weeks, 140 days or so, in the nested depths ((inside the (placenta)), ((inside your mother’s (ovaries)), (inside the (uterus) of your maternal grandmother)). For me, I variant of who I necessarily was lived in that strange mother country in the spring of 1949 and the summer and early autumn of 1950. My grandmother and I, we go way back. You too, every one of us; a universal truth of origin. We are so much more intimately (of) our (grand)mothers, we have all been held safely inside our matrilineal ancestors, protected and waiting until such time as our time came around, which was pure contingency.
I note how this makes strange the cultural-legal-inheritance practice of taking the father’s name, on the pretence that He names ‘our’ family. But as Lacan acerbically notes: one is never truly sure who the father really is. Your father knew your mother (at least once); but you never really know the father.
MANDY: Oh.
OFFICER: Good afternoon.
MANDY: Oh, ah. Hello, officer. Ehh. I'll be with you in a few moments. All right, dear?
BRIAN: What's he doing here?
MANDY: Now, don't start that Brian, and go and clean your room out.
BRIAN: Bloody Romans.
MANDY: Now, look, Brian. If it wasn't for them, we wouldn't have all this, and don't you forget it.
BRIAN: We don't owe the Romans anything, Mum.
MANDY: Well, that's not entirely true, is it Brian?
BRIAN: What do you mean?
MANDY: Well, you know you were asking me about your, uh...
BRIAN: My nose?
MANDY: Yes. Well, there's a reason it's... like it is, Brian.
BRIAN: What is it?
MANDY: Well, I suppose I should have told you a long time ago, but...
BRIAN: What?
MANDY: Well, Brian,... your father isn't Mr. Cohen.
BRIAN: I never thought he was.
MANDY: Now, none of your cheek! He was a Roman, Brian. He was a centurion in the Roman army.
BRIAN: You mean... you were raped?
MANDY: Well, at first, yes.
BRIAN: Who was it?
MANDY: Heh. Naughtius Maximus his name was. Hmm. Promised me the known world he did. I was to be taken to Rome, House by the Forum. Slaves. Asses' milk. As much gold as I could eat. Then, he, having his way with me had... voom! Like a rat out of an aqueduct.
BRIAN: The bastard!
MANDY: Yeah. So, next time you go on about the 'bloody Romans', don't forget you're one of them.
BRIAN: I'm not a Roman, Mum, and I never will be! I'm a Kike! A Yid! A Hebe! A Hook-nose! I'm Kosher, Mum! I'm a Red Sea Pedestrian, and proud of it!
!slam!
MANDY: Huh. Sex, sex, sex. That's all they think about, huh? Well, how are you, then, officer…
And your mother is a separate being, and she has desires, and secrets of her own. Shh.
(For anyone wishing to go further into the deepest crannies of these uncanny granny valleys, read Sloterdijk’s perhaps too detailed account of the placenta as the ‘third’ here, an organ that is neither the foetus, nor the mother, and an entity that carried our lives for months, but that we tend to incinerate [if we’re hospital normies], or freeze and then eat [if we’re homebirth hippies who also have freezers])
Back to the deep point about our common passage of emergence: you were your mother, inside her insides, then you differentiated from her – and the placenta – while still carried inside your mother, then you swam around inside your mother for months, kicking her from time to time, before being expelled by her. But this expulsion from that strange Eden common to us all was also involuntary for both parties. The contractions are, as we also know (like the erection) beyond ego control: they take hold and ‘come over’ us, with an archaic animal intensity that is one of those visceral, experiences of life happening to us. Like needing to shit or vomit, or being very thirsty or hungry, the onset of contractions strike as an overwhelming animal urge that fully possesses women, and that friends I know have likened to heavy psychedelic trips.
Moreover, the contraction is social, and where it leads is already quite a crowd: it happens to the mother on our behalf, at a moment whose onset and recurrence and precipitous intensification she does not control, and it happens inside her but ‘to’ us, with the enigma of the placenta in between, and an increasing number of people in the room, ready to slap us on the bottom and say ‘we’ve been waiting for you’. Some may die alone, but like believing, being born is and always has been a social process: no one was born alone, your mother, at the very least (and don’t forget the placenta too) was with you every step of the way, although it hurt her, and through the balance of ‘civilised’ history, was one of the most dangerous things a person could do. In defiance of the whole history of natural law from Hobbes to contemporary libertarians who gave birth to themselves, this means the (social) contraction came before the (social) contract. There was society at birth, and society before birth. Life is always a game for two and more players.
Psychoanalysis brought all this right to the fore in early 20C western European cultures who were extremely prudish about and hung up on all this stuff. We all emerged into the light of the world, surrounded by strangers peering down, carrying us, wrapping us up, and, C section aside, expelled from between the place between where our mother pisses and shits, or enjoyed (or just put up with) getting penetrated by your father’s erection (whoever he may actually be), whether big or small. Less than ten years ago, a friend of mine followed the normal-until-recently cultural tradition of forbidding the father from being down the business end during labour and birth. Her fear was that, having seen her genitals in that state, he would not want to return later for erotic purposes. For many people, labour and birth is still split off from Eros, the woman and child from the presumptive father, even if he has spent huge chunks of his life searching for and trying to find his way back to the mother.
Freud doesn’t detail these points in this section of C&ID, but I’m riffing on them because, like the discovery of the delusional stability and boundedness of the ego, the re-introduction of these facts of life and their essentially developmental, processual, sexual nature was an important addition – that psychoanalysis gave us – to the critique of prudish sexual mores and monotheistic creation myths that Nietzsche demolished in the generation before Freud. We tend to totally take this for granted now, and – since perhaps the 1980s, so recently – we’ve been teaching about sexual reproduction to children properly, finally. But we should all consider this massive unbehagen in der kultur more than we do. A frank and biologically correct description of how we all came to be eluded most human cultures until the twentieth century: either this, or it was knowledge that was – and is – voided, avoided, evaded, or violently repressed. Enormous and prolonged efforts of all the patriarchal monotheisms have been directed toward the organised repression of sex and women’s reproductive bodies, social control over women via their bodies and reproduction, and allocation into a sexual division of labour (and highly unequal and unfair access to opportunities and resources) on this basis. Religion isn’t just about a group’s regression into an unbounded narcissism of eternal protective salvation, inside nearly every group, across nearly all cultures we know of, religious practices have been about the violent repression of the sexual fact of life and the primacy of the mother, and the violent keeping-in-dependency of the protected (gendered as women and children) by the masculinist protector.
For Westerners at least, ‘sexual reproduction’ and ‘vaginal birth’ – incarnation as common knowledge – are late modern facts, so recent, so fragile, still passionately contested and repressed. It took ‘us’ until the twentieth century to place this power/knowledge of ourselves at the centre of political contention, and it’s not as if it’s something that many people have yet become comfortable with.
Moreover, the carnal truth of all of us is one of the only true human universals. Catholicism, Sunni Islam, liberal human rights, Leninism, and socialist humanism all base their claim to status on supposedly universal truths, although genealogical analyses show us that creator Gods and human rights are historical, cultural, creations whose contingent origins and murky bases can all be deconstructed (also why kulturkampf reactionaries hate poststructuralism so very much). Unlike that pantheon of invisible fathers, all of us wereconceived ‘in that sensual music’. For us now, this means that the essentially sexual origin and genital nature of human development is one of the true human universals we now – but only so recently, and that is still violently repressed in many parts of the world – have a deep and detailed understanding of. Universal cultural-cognitive access to humanity’s home in the uterus, by way of the vagina, is very late modern carnal knowledge.
Yeats suggests himself intuitively:
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
From all of this, Freud reckons that development might contain within it some archaic memory of the oceanic: this is the key point he’s taking from sexual incarnation back to Rolland. We do not separate, at first, because we were not separate, at first.
After separation, dependency: for a prolonged period of time (often, decades). Even once we were finally born, pushed through our mother’s vagina or, like Macduff, ‘from our mother’s bourne untimely ripped’, we remained intimately attached to and utterly dependent upon our mothers and other carers. Of these, the father came and went, and maybe came back, but any number of other parents will do from here. Thus not only is the status of the father always open to question (who was your real father, really?), any person can inhabit the role well; some stepfathers are much better fathers to us than our fathers were, and any number of partners, of any gender, can do this care work. Romulus and Remus got by with one she-wolf (of whom more soon), Mowgli, more Deleuzo-Guattarian, was raised well in the jungle by a pack of wolves. But to return to the mother: only later and little by little did our separation come to pass, and we remained (for a good long while) happily in dependent attachment to the mother.
Freud to Rolland, with my extrapolations: the ocean was placental life, is the river of milk passing through the mother’s nipple, into the baby’s sucking mouth. The source of the oceanic is the mother, the feeling the ego’s wishy memory of the mammory, the loving other whose body was us, who we were safely in, and who supported us unconditionally, fed us until we were full, responded to our every cry.
But do we remember? This is a paradoxical in Freud’s theory and clinical application, Later in the chapter, Freud insists that “in mental life the retention of the past is the rule, rather than a surprising exception” (10), this is the basis of the theory. Nothing is truly forgotten, and a very many things can be recovered and remembered and worked through. Yet everything in clinical psychoanalysis also remonstrates: no, we forget, forgetting that we’ve forgotten and repeating what we’ve forgotten is the rule, the very bullshit of our neurotic lives.
Do you remember….
…President Nixon?
Do you remember…
…the bills you have to pay
– or even yesterday?
Neuroses are repetitions based precisely on our failure to remember. In ‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through’, Freud distils the therapeutic purpose of psychoanalysis as showing us back to our ‘genetic derivation’, reminding us about the profound effect these forgotten formative influences have had on our mental life, including (to come full circle), our later ‘stable’ (precious) ego and its defended territories and nagging undermining uncertainty, or the million and one ways in which we try so hard to forget the mother, or go looking for her everywhere, or blame her for everything in our lives, and cannot forgive her, cannot find her in our hearts. The capable cowgirl, the dungeon master, that paltry thing, an aged man, “A tattered coat upon a stick”; again, all of us forget, and wish to forget, the oceanic, ‘whence’ from which we all came. Oedipus ‘knew’ his mother, but tragically, he did so because he didn’t know Jocasta was his mother, because he never knew his mother.
As a process of development, come full circle, sum up and move on, the ego was oceanic, it was all inclusive,
“but later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present sense of self is thus only a shrunken residue of a far more comprehensive, indeed all-embracing feeling, which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world around it. If we may assume that this primary sense of self has survived, to a greater or lesser extent, in the mental life of many people, it would coexist, as a kind of counterpart, with the narrower, more sharply defined sense of self belonging to the years of maturity, and the ideational content appropriate to it would be precisely those notions of limitlessness and oneness with the universe – the very notions used by my friend to elucidate the oceanic feeling” (6).
So then: for Freud, Rolland is dreaming about those lost months and years in – and of and with – his mother, and now he’s hallucinating that the cosmos, and an oceanic feeling he consciously has about it, is ‘out there’, when in fact it is ‘in here’, a primary sense of self that has survived in mental life, because he was once inside and then, for a good long while, not separated from and still dependent upon the mother. And (bridging to later chapters of C&ID), the breast was very good, we really enjoyed it, we loved it and it satisfied us, more than anything else can since. The unifying experience, a paradise now lost, was the greatest pleasure and fullest satisfaction we will ever know – a great pleasure barred to us by adult reality.
‘Another thickshake?’
‘…I need another beer’.
But is this lost world of the mother retained in adult mental life, and how, if so? Does this primary sense of self, or its vestiges, survive ‘in there’? What are its effects on the ego, and by extension the illusions of religion? And how do we know?
Freud leans back on clinical experience once more, and suggests that, like snacks from a factory that also processes nuts, ‘traces may remain’. To misquote Metallica and spiral into Boston’s cousin Marianne: but the mammory remains.
Fortune, fame
Mirror, vain
Gone insane
Fortune, fame
Mirror, vain
Gone insane
But the memory remains
In fact, Freud goes so far as to suggest that, as forgetful as we are, none of this primary experience and self is ever truly or totally lost, that, “in mental life, nothing that has once taken shape can be lost, that everything is somehow preserved and can be retrieved under the right circumstances” (7). This is the paradox I was gesturing to above. To explain this, Freud uses one of his most beautiful metaphors, the development of the Eternal City.
(One of Freud’s lifelong hobbies was archaeology, classics, and Egyptology. He was also massively into Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allen Poe, with the former, can’t remember if it’s Freud saying this or secondary literature, giving him his model of the clue-finding riddle solver; it’s all of its time. This returns with Lacan and Poe and the agency of the letter).
Freud steps through the historical phasings of Rome’s construction: Roma quadrata, the Septimontium, and then “still later, after all the vicissitudes of the republican and early imperial age, the city that the emperor Aurelian enclosed within his walls”(7). As modern visitors, even ones with good knowledge like Freud, what remains? In some cases, whole structures are intact and visible; other traces have been revealed by excavations and restored as new tourist attractions; elsewhere, traces and ruins; in some cases, there is nothing, all was burnt down and destroyed, leaving “scattered fragments in the jumble of the great city that has grown up in recent centuries, since the Renaissance. True, much of the old is still there, but buried under modern buildings. This is how the past survives in historic places like Rome”(8).
Freud’s metaphor of Rome is beautiful, and strikes me as capturing something very true about the human psyche – and our mind-made cities. I have a strong memory of reading C&ID about ten years ago on a plane from Melbourne to Sydney, seeing Tullamarine as the plane taxied, and Melbourne as we took off, thinking in a completely different way about the depth and breadth of topography, and how urban life ‘works over’ the landscape, covering space, over time, with millions of scarring lines and bold constructions, most of which will fall to ruin, and be abandoned and forgotten.
A little further on, Freud strikes on what is, to me, the key distinction between historical traces in extended physical spaces like cities, and experiential traces in the physical space of memory, as in the psyche: “[i]f we wish to represent a historical sequence in spatial terms, we can do so only by juxtaposition in space, for the same space cannot accommodate two different things” (9). By implication – and this is something everything in the swirling montage of mental life and cultural memory tells us – our psyches contain this juxtaposition of traces, our minds are this overlay of memories and experience, and this does contribute in profound, complex and subtle ways to the formation and function of our ego, the orientation of our subjectivity, how we filter sense data, and what triggers and enraptures each of us, differently alike. If ‘developed’ subjectivity is a mediation of desire, I think of the desiring subject in the supermarket of the contemporary city re-rendered as a psychic-subjective picture of the 1970s city here by Sigmar Polke, in his ‘Supermarkets 1976’ (one overlay in the overlay here is that this also reminds me somehow of the supermarket subscene in the sunglasses scene in They Live).
Obviously, this is Polke’s rendering of the post Nietzschean Superman in the 70s West German supermarket; each one of us carries our own ‘supermarket’, our own ‘love’, our own ‘mother’ (note to self: buy milk), our own wish to save and protect Lois, undercut by a vague yearning to return to planet Krypton. These are very strong and ‘deep’ sunglasses, and we all wear our own pair around, they’re heavy ones that we can’t take off.
Polke’s vision is half a century on from Freud, who, as often in C&ID has recourse back to biological-developmental metaphors. Then he says: “the embryo cannot be discovered in the adult”. In the sense Freud intends that phrasing, of course not; the butterfly does not turn back into a caterpillar, and one cannot ‘see’ the latter in the former. Yet in all the ways I’ve been riffing on, the embryo is (discovered) in the adult (mother), and the ova in the foetus, and the ((mother) in the grandmother). There is thus a biological-physical regress of interpenetration that puts paid to the idea that our lives are a neat sequence of one-way metamorphoses: pupa to butterfly, pup to walrus. The Oedipal turns out to be even more complex than when Freud conceived. And more physical: Freud returns to his refrain that “in mental life the retention of the past is the rule, rather than a surprising exception” (10, italics mine). Yet in physical life all the more so: we were incarnated in the mother in the mother.
The bit that then always grabs me is right at the end. Freud spends pages amassing evidence in one direction, then misses his own clue, and circles back to the father and the demolition of religion he began the chapter with: “[t]o me the derivation of religious needs from the helplessness of the child and a longing for its father seems irrefutable… I cannot cite any childish need that is as strong as the need for paternal protection”(10, italics mine). Yet this logic of the masculinist protector, developed much further by Iris Marion Young with recourse to Hobbes and all its intrications of natural law and the state of nature, is, as I’ve sketched above, much later, and always secondary. We can stay in Rome and its foundation: Romulus and Remus could only be suckled by a she wolf. It was Lupa Capitolana who was the mythical mother of Rome, she had the milk, she shared the milk, she gave the milk, she protected the pups. No Rome without wolfmilk; no shewolf, no Romulus, no Rome. Julius Caesar and all the Popes did what men always try to do, they came later (or too soon) to claim Rome for themselves in the name of the Empire and then the Church, lord it over the plebs, and have sex with lots of men. But these too were later developments, more recent Romes and Romans; first we were suckled by our fierce mother.
So Freud misses his missus. “Most understanding is a misunderstanding that has no understanding of the mis-”, as Luhmann quipped. A couple of concluding side notes here that strike me when I go back to this section. Above all Freud misses, or does not directly address, the looming figure of Mother Mary in Catholicism, in his account of religion. How could he miss Mary? For him, as a secular Jew in very Catholic Kakania, this seems like a big omission, perhaps an instance of what Nietzsche earlier called ‘active forgetting’. At the end of the chapter, after spending paragraphs on maternal oneness and the prolonged period of dependency, there’s a bait and switch. The mother vanishes, and Freud switches back to explaining religion by way of the father. Forget the mother, Freud says, it’s the father’s protection: our need for fatherly protection, grounded in our vestigial feelings of infant helplessness. What of Mary? In doing this, I think, Freud commits the perennial sin of the male author in a patriarchal culture: not the first, and not the last. We owe it to the women’s movement to bring our attention to the negation of the mother, this other unbehagen of European kultur, written as it was for so long by men who wished to make themselves the centre of its universe.
As a second side note against his response to Rolland, Freud is so intent on pointing us back to our dependency on the protection of the father that he also misses the equally empirical fact that all of us are of the earth and in the cosmos: our mother’s vagina is not floating pinkly in space; planet earth is blue, it is mostly ocean, it does surround and support us, soil beneath, sea around, sky above, our middle-aged planet bearing us up as we and it orbit a middle-aged, middling star; all our mothers, all mothers, and all of us, are animals ‘in’ it. To join the wolf to the moon, without the latter, our planet would wobble in its orbit, and we would have an unstable climate; perhaps we would not be here. Your dad would have had a rough time of it (even if he’d taken his protein pills, though especially with a helmet on). Whoever he was, your father’s semen would never have made it at all without gravity and some friction: lupe to lube, not too much, not too little. One need only spend a moment thinking about Space Station sex to see how dependent we are on the Earth – and the moon – just for routine success and enjoyment in sexual reproduction. We have always been serviced by the heavenly bodies, prior to our own bodies in motion, prior to every luge and bobsled and skeleton race. So there is an epistemological cost to giving primacy to biology, as Freud’s psychoanalytic theory prefers to do, without placing it in its planetary home, Mother Earth. The biology Freud gives primacy to is, like our emergence and sometime wishful dependence on masculinist protection, a development, a more recent contingent emergence on a life-supporting planet whose favourable conditions are ‘located’ in a specific galaxy in our expanding universe. So Freud doesn’t say why Mother Mary comforts me, but his model can’t, cos this is not its purview. And he also doesn’t consider Mother Earth, the moon, or the Universe, that mother of all eternals beyond the maternal.
I can only speak of my own oceanic feelings; these are subjective experiences. But do I have direct apprehension of what Rolland says every time sunshine falls on my face, every time I see the sun setting over the Pacific Ocean knowing it is a star in the universe. Daddy is usually nowhere in this picture; he need not be. The sun’s radiance is the basic predicate of all our lives, and it is basically good and immediately available, it shines on us. Sunshine is basic loving, the sun is love at its most basic and generative (even this gets complicated and ambivalent when thinking about 21C sunshine, but that was us doing it to ourselves). To me, I need to posit any kind of theism or trippy dippy hippy stuff – like Star Wars recourse to ‘the Force’ –to say how astonishing and numinous this vast cosmic enigma, the luminous reality of our existence, truly is. Freud misses the moon and the universe somehow, and he misses it in his (also fascinating) correspondence with Einstein, ‘Why War’: there are lost opportunities here, failures of imagination and perspective. It is possible to stare too long at our ‘genetic derivations’, which are not all that we are. For me, the absence of Mother Earth and our more fundamental dependence on it and its favourable continent ‘Goldilocks’ place in an expanding entropic universe indicate what I think are the first of several limits to using psychoanalysis as the final explanation over our existence (again, I’ll return to these). And like Leninism posits the economic as the determining factor ‘in the final instance’, psychoanalytic theory nearly always wants to be the ‘last word’ explanation. I would hand it back to the mother; she was our beginning. In the beginning was the Mother, and she was word.