In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

c h a p t e r t h r e e Profit and Loss in Belonging Joũyow• ¡ acomai• koū r̆usiázv, tāmà d≤ eŭrískv fíla Xouthos: I will embrace you—I’m not seizing goods in reparation! I’m finding my own dear possession. e u r i p i d e s , Ion Freud was of the opinion that at the end of treatment a gift from the patient could contribute, as a symbolic act, to lessening his feeling of gratitude and his consequent dependence on the physician. So we agreed that I would give Freud something as a remembrance. t h e w o l f m a n (Sergei Pankejeff ) He was in fact unable to pay Freud for his last analysis; on the other hand, he had formerly as a rich patient paid enough to feel somewhat justified in accepting gratis treatment now. r u t h m a c k b r u n s w i c k The calculations that determine who belongs in a family can be a matter of life and death, and afterwards, humans conceal the cost-benefit analysis, if possible. When Xouthos tries to embrace Ion as his own dear possession (tāmà . . . fíla), he contradicts the more legalistic act of seizing goods in reparation (r̆usiázv). Despite his refusal to characterize his new acquisition as such, his denial that he is ‘‘seizing goods in reparation’’ expresses a reality that cannot be completely refuted . Both perspectives are necessary in the final dispositions for Ion; both the technical and the personal belong in the Athenian royal accounts. Freud and the Wolf Man are also caught up in a complicated dance of recompense and gratitude . Pankejeff has been paying bills for his analysis for years, but in Freud’s opinion, the flow of indebtedness still runs from him to his doctor. A gift is proposed to end the calculation of cost and benefit by changing the terms to the symbolic, but the patient, as we shall see, calculates anyway and chooses an expensive artifact. When we study the romance of belonging as a site of transaction, we learn a Profit and Loss in Belonging 105 great deal more about the psychic costs of its choices. Although ancient Athens and early twentieth-century Vienna understood commercial transactions in different terms, Euripides’ Ion and Freud’s ‘‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis ’’ are in agreement that the foundation of a family can be read as a commercial act. For Freud, sex is the ground in which parents give and receive payment, and the infant wants to participate by offering its feces as a gift in order to enter the drama. In the Ion, a child is a commodity and parenting is a kind of investment with expectations of future yield. Abandonment is the alienation that stops further resources from being expended on something not worth raising. When parents accept ownership of a child, they are deciding that it will produce sufficient profits or yield (tokos, a Greek word that also means offspring). But the romance of belonging is not just about possession of the child, because that child also engages in transactions of desire, with the possession or rejection of its parents at stake. Freud’s discussion of the primal scene makes this claim explicitly, and Ion’s acquisition of parents is shot through with the calculation of costs against the promises of return. His parents become objects that he needs to possess, both conceptually and in reality. The romance of belonging objectifies those in a family by its reckoning of their worth as possessions, but there is also the self-deceptive longing to conceal the transaction. The slippage between real and psychic cost accounting is another sign of the trauma of belonging—we cannot find the figures that balance costs against gains. This chapter studies the representation of the romance of belonging in economic terms, as a site in which a decision to own or dispossess is made based on profit or loss; it looks at how cultural differences regarding the alienability of a child once chosen for rearing affect the basis for the calculations. For Freud, while in theory no child can be abandoned, no child is ever fully inalienable. The possession and nurture of a child is always tinged with possibility of cutting losses, and the parent, whether natal or psychoanalytic, can use abandonment as a useful threat to...

Share