Guys and Dolls: Exploratory Repetition and Maternal Subjectivity in the Fort/Da Game

Psychoanalysis, whether it posits in the beginning maternal presence or absence, has yet to develop a story of the mother as other than the object of the infant’s desire or the matrix from which he or she develops an infant subjectivity. The mother herself as speaking subject, as author, is missing from these dramas.

(Garner, Kahane, and Sprengnether 1985, 25)

For the first psychoanalyst, the “navel” of psychic development is identification with the mother. It is “unknown” to him not because it is unknowable but because he is a man, because manhood as patriarchal culture creates it depends on denying, in myriad ways, the powerful ambivalence that the mother inspires.

(Kahn 1985, 88)

The notion that another tragedy of motherhood may lie in the conflict between the mother’s desire for self-realization—a self-realization that has nothing to do with her being a mother—and the child’s need for her selflessness seems never to have entered the psychoanalyst’s mind. . . . It is as if, for psychoanalysis, the only self worth worrying about in the mother-child relationship were that of the child.

(Suleiman 1985, 355–56)

[E]ach of us enters the world through the body of a woman—a carnal enigma that has virtually baffled our systems of understanding. Rather than felling, condemning, or idealizing the body of the (m)other, we need to recognize her in ourselves.

(Sprengnether 1990, 245–46)

[O]ur critical perspective enables and indeed solicits the retelling of the Oedipal story from . . . the perspective of the mother as subject.

(Flieger 1989, 206)

What these women are saying with such unanimity and conviction is that retelling the Oedipal story from the mother’s perspective requires us first of all to recognize the mother as a woman who acts, a woman who desires, a woman who speaks, and a woman who moves, in both the transitive and the intransitive senses of the word. Psychoanalysis may indeed have “entered the history of consciousness in dialogue with the subjectivity of women” (Hunter 1985, 114), but that dialogue has not always incorporated women as equal partners. In particular, the so-called “phallic mother,” the mother endowed with subjectivity, emerges in full voice only rarely in Freud’s theoretical or analytical writings. More often, she is relegated to the background, a shadowy presence whose power and personhood go for the most part unrecognized, if not willfully misrecognized. ¹ A spectral mother, Madelon Sprengnether has called her, repressed to the margins of Freud’s discourse, where she appears only in much-diminished, castrated roles.

To an extent not yet recognized by even the most (re)visionary of Freud’s feminist readers, however, the spectral mother materializes with clarity and force in the well-known fort/da episode from the second chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), where Freud offers a brief, tantalizing account of a small child’s game with a cotton reel and a piece of string. Leo Bersani (1986) has complained of the “oppressive exegetical literature surrounding and smothering” Freud’s analysis of the fort/da game (57), which ought to give one pause before embarking on yet another discussion of this short anecdote and its theoretical implications. But beneath the wide-ranging field of debate on fort/da lies a silent consensus which needs to be unearthed and questioned: an unexamined premise, shared by nearly everyone who has written about the subject, that aligns the objectives of the child’s game itself and the objectives of Freud’s analysis of the game, ² linking Freud and his infant subject in a tacit conspiracy to render the mother into a manipulable object and to engineer her fading from materiality and power. It is this tacit conspiracy theory I wish to challenge here by carefully distinguishing between the child’s agenda and Freud’s. As I hope to demonstrate, the fort/da anecdote is an especially illuminating and distinctive Freudian text in its specific acknowledgment of and affirmative stance toward the mother as a speaking, desiring subject. Credit for this stance, however, is due...