Lana Lin - Freuds Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer

FRACTURED SUBJECTIVITY IN THE FACE OF CANCER

LANA LIN

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York 2017

Copyright 2017 Fordham University Press

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Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

AUDRE LORDE

Every text poses itself as a demand for survival...

AVITAL RONELL

In his autobiography, Roland Barthes relates that a piece of his rib was removed during an operation and subsequently returned to him by his doctor.

Freuds Jaw and Other Lost Objects examines loss and bodily disruption through a psychoanalytic lens. I track three exemplary figures who, like Barthes, grappled with life-threatening illness that is fundamentally destabilizing. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud battled oral cancer for sixteen years; poet Audre Lorde endured breast cancer for fourteen years; and literary It lays bare the illusory aspects of our feelings of bodily stability and the unconscious assumption that our bodies and psyches are and will remain invulnerable to disrepair. The subjects I investigate are in the process of devolving into fragmented partial objects and must devise means to reinstate, at least temporarily, their physical and psychic unity. This, I propose, is accomplished through creative reparative projects such as love or writing.

In the following chapters, I scrutinize theoretical, literary, and artistic texts that chronicle the psychic life and death of objects. Each chapter focuses on a different type of object, which bears a relation to the psychoanalytic lost object: the prosthetic object, the breastwhich is considered the first object according to psychoanalytic theory, love objects, and reparative objects. I will explain more fully in what follows what I take to be a lost object, but for now I emphasize its multiplicity, that it can be a lost loved person, a lost part of oneself, both physical or psychic, as well as a lost thing. Barthes shelters his severed rib much as one might stow away fears, anxieties, unwanted or outgrown parts of the self in the recesses of the unconscious. In hanging onto his partial body object, he attempts to retain this part of himself that may have signified a prior felt wholeness. When he comes to terms with his mortality, he is able to relinquish the fetish object that had protected his illusions, flinging it out the window. Like Barthess enigmatic tale, the stories I narrate take the form of atypical autopathographies. Over the course of their slow acting but ultimately fatal affliction, Freud, Lorde, and Sedgwick were in many ways undone. Even as it confirmed their human embodiment, cancer was dehumanizing and objectifying, rendering them into objects at odds with themselves. Moreover, being the object of recurrent threats to their life forced into disturbing consciousness what people ordinarily repress, namely the heightened awareness of deaths immanence in life. As Lorde phrases it, death is the fractured border that runs through the center of my days.once released cannot be put back into the drawer. This is what makes cancers intrusion irreparable, even as organs are replaced and tissues healed. The realization of self-difference cannot be put back, which may be why Barthes casts his bone away.

The figures I study illuminate some of the features of a subjectivity of survival. Survival for Freud meant maintenance and adjustment of his oral prostheses, addiction to smoking cigars, and the collection of thousands of antiquities. Survival for Lorde was bound up with a politics of self-preservation that involved mobilizing the mothering instincts of comrades with shared oppressions. Survival for Sedgwick was explicitly a reparative project composed of disseminating love through creative works and pedagogy. I draw on the theories of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein for the concept of reparation, which she proposes as the creative and constructive forces that one harnesses to repair damage to ones internal psychic objects. For Klein, reparation is a means of countering the psychic fragmentation of sadistic aggression, and thereby establishing a relationship to whole objects (e.g., mother,) as opposed to partial objects (e.g., breast). I discuss the ways that Freud, Lorde, and Sedgwick attempt to make good on the losses that cancer produces, but I want to stress that this does not equate to a reintegration or a making whole. Reparation implies that something is repaired to the extent that life can go on. For Lorde and Sedgwick, at least, community secures an always contingent whole.

Cancer, as Siddhartha Mukherjee notes, is the emperor of all maladies, but it might also reasonably hold the title of the emperor of metaphor.The treatment of this too-muchness often entails enforcing absence upon an excessive presence.

There have been innumerable studies on cancer from medical, sociological, anthropological, historical, cultural, and psychological perspectives. What does psychoanalysis offer that so many of these other studies do not? While previous studies have tended to concentrate upon cancers conscious effects, one of the hallmarks of psychoanalysis is that it attends to the unconscious dimension of human experience. Psychoanalytic intervention can clarify the problems that cancer stages across the tenuous divide between the conscious and unconscious. Cancer can be seen as doing the work of psychoanalysis in making conscious what was once unconscious. Affliction has the capacity to uncover knowledge that is typically repressed in order for humans to carry on quotidian existence, for instance, our susceptibility to damage, the awareness of ones mortality, and deaths immanence in life. What is fundamentally lost as a result of a cancer diagnosis is the reassuring sense of wholeness that comes from feeling at one with oneself. This is related to what Freud, referencing Romain Rolland, has called oceanic feeling. Freud and Rolland described the feeling of being at one with the universe. Trauma, such as cancer, can unmoor ego and self-object, producing the disconcerting feeling that a foreign object has intruded upon the ego.

Physical calamity shatters the sensation of unity with oneself, resulting in the experience of an alien version of oneself intruding upon oneself. In Less to do with bodily impairments that can be repaired, cancer can awaken core primal fears: doubt, dread, anxiety. The self no longer feels at home with itself. The ailing subject loses its relationship to itself. Psychoanalysis can get at this particular species of subjectivity because it has dealt with it with regard to infantile psychic life as well as psychotic episodes. In Melanie Kleins language, the infant feels itself and its environment to be made up of disconnected partial objects. Recognizing and interacting with whole objects (both internal and external) is a developmental achievement that may not be secured in the case of psychosis or may be derailed through trauma that thrusts the sufferer back to an infantile stage when the self as a coherent bodily and psychic entity was not yet established.