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2 / Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, and the Breast
- University of Washington Press
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2 / Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, and the Breast Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, a phenomenology of the intimate spaces we associate with childhood memories of home, concludes with a phenomenology of roundness. On the basis of four isolated and historically diverse assertions respecting the roundness of being (statements by Karl Jaspers, Vincent van Gogh, Joë Bousquet, and La Fontaine), he argues for a process of phenomenological reflection that brings us back to a primary, even primitive, sense of roundness as the perfect initial quality of being. On the face of it, one would expect that a phenomenology of roundness would share goals and strategies with psychoanalysis . In other words, one would suspect that any phenomenology of roundness would have to take account of the breast. But Bachelard cautions against relying on either philosophy or psychoanalysis. Philosophy , he says, is culturally laden; accumulated convictions regarding scientific thinking prevent us from experiencing “the shocks that being receives from new images [the kind of images of roundness enunciated in the statements of Jaspers, van Gogh, and so on], shocks which are 50 always the phenomena of youthful being.”1 As for psychoanalysis, the temptation to resort to it is very strong. Bachelard admits that “some five or ten years ago, in any psychological examination of images of roundness , but especially of solid roundness, we should have laid stress on psychoanalytical explanations, for which we could have collected an enormous amount of documentation, since everything round invites a caress.”2 Even in denying the ultimate usefulness of psychoanalysis for his project, Bachelard nevertheless flirts with the breast. Where psychoanalysis parts company with the sort of phenomenological metaphysics Bachelard is practicing here is with respect to attaining what he calls an ontological determination. Bachelard and his readers must undergo a process of “dephilosophizing” and “depsychoanalyzing”—in a word, a process of “dematurizing.” We must “shun culture” and rid ourselves of a “past of dreams and thoughts” in order to be invited “to actuality of being.”3 It would be too easy to claim that these directives, proceeding from what Bachelard calls a “neological fit,” are symptoms of a return of the repressed, although there is something to that claim. At the same time that he dismisses psychoanalysis, he directs us to return to what can only be called a pre-Oedipal state. “When we are at an age to imagine, we cannot say how or why we imagine. Then, when we could say how we imagine, we cease to imagine. We should therefore dematurize ourselves .”4 The trade-oª he oªers is between culture, dreams, and thought, on the one hand—that is, the stuª of philosophy and psychoanalysis— and actuality of being, on the other. Since we have a pretty good idea of what he means by the former, we should more closely examine the latter . It may turn out that the breast as an image of solid roundness exceeds the grasp of philosophy and psychoanalysis, and that it, too, extends an invitation to “actuality of being.” In other words, Bachelard’s project of dematurization may amount to a metapsychoanalysis of the breast. The images of roundness that first roused his attention have the ability to immediately impart a sense of the “actuality of being.” They “bear the mark of primitivity. They suddenly appear and, in a twinkling, they are completed. [. . .] They blot out the world, and they have no past. [ . . . ] If we submit to the hypnotic power of such expressions, suddenly we find ourselves entirely in the roundness of this being, we live in the round51 phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and the breast ness of life, like a walnut that becomes round in its shell.”5 It is di‹cult to get a purchase on these nuggets of poetic insight, precisely because it is their nature to be divested of or to precede all cultural determination . Nevertheless, one word that Bachelard uses in his attempt to convey the nature of this phenomenological enterprise is telling and may be helpful in forging, on another level, a link between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. I am referring to the word hypnotic. Etymologically, the word hypnosis is derived from the Greek word hypnos, or sleep, and has to do with inducing a sleeplike state. Although Freud did not devote much attention to the wish to sleep, as the American psychoanalyst Bertram Lewin points out, several other, lesser known analysts, among them Lewin himself, did.6 In particular, Lewin cites a 1936 essay by Otto Isakower, “A Contribution...