Love's Body, Reissue of 1966 edition

VIII: Boundary

mi ^Boundary Originally everything was body, ONE BODY (Novalis); or Freud: "Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling—a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world." The possibilities adumbrated in infancy are to be taken as normative: as in Wordsworth's "Ode": before shades of the prison house close in; before we shrink up into the fallen condition which is normal adulthood. Novalis, Hymne, "Wenige wissen das Geheimniss der Liebe," Geistliche Ueder. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 13. Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the sun and moon; from man, the sun; from woman, the moon. The laws of his mind, the 141 LOVE'S BODY 142 periods of his actions externized themselves into day and night, into the year and the seasons. But, having made for himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no longer fills the veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. He sees, that the structure still fits him,but fits him colossally. Say,rather, once it fitted him, now it corresponds to him from far and on high. Emerson, Nature, ch. VIII. Psychoanalysis can be used to uncover the principle of union, or communion, buried beneath the surface separations, the surface declarations of independence, the surface signs of private property. Psychoanalysis also discloses the pathology of the process whereby the normal sense of being a self separate from the external world was constructed. Contrary to what is taken for granted in the lunatic state called normalcy or common sense, the distinction between self and external world is not an immutable fact, but an artificial construction. It is a boundary line; like all boundaries not natural but conventional ; like all boundaries, based on love and hate. The distinction between self and not-self is made by the childish decision to claim all that the ego likes as "mine," and to repudiate all that the ego dislikes as "notmine ." It is as simple as that; but here is Freud's more formal description: "The objects presenting themselves, in so far as they are sources of pleasure, are absorbed by the ego into itself, 'introjected' (according to an expression coined by Ferenczi); while, on the other hand, the ego thrusts forth upon the external world whatever within itself gives rise to pain (themechanism of projection)." "Thus at the very beginning, the external world, objects, and that which was hated were one and the same thing. When later on an object manifests itself as a source of z^j Boundary pleasure, it becomes loved, but also incorporated into the ego." Freud, "Instincts and their Vicissitudes," 78, 79; cf. "Negation," 183; Civilization and Its Discontents, 12. Here is the fall: the distinction between "good" and "bad," between "mine" and "thine," between "me" and "thee" (or "it"), come all together—boundaries between persons; boundaries between properties; and the polarity of love and hate. The boundary line between self and external world bears no relation to reality; the distinction between ego and world is made by spitting out part of the inside, and swallowing in part of the outside. On this Freudian insight Melanie Klein and her followers have built. "Owing to these mechanisms [of introjection and projection] the infant's object can be defined as what is inside or outside his own body, but even while outside, it is still part of himself and refers to himself, since 'outside' results from being ejected, spat out': thus the body boundaries are blurred. This might also be put the other way round: because the object outside the body is 'spat out,' and still relates to the infant's body, there is no sharp distinction between his body and what is outside." Heimann, "Certain Functions of Introjection and Projection in Early Infancy," 143. The net-effect of the establishment of the boundary between self and external world is inside-out and outsidein ; confusion. The erection of the boundary does not alter the fact that there is, in reality, no boundary. The net- LOVE'S 'BODY effect is illusion, self-deception; the big lie. Or alienation. "Le premier mythe du dehors et du dedans: 1...