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c h a p t e r f o u r Recognition Embracing a Deadly Flame ‘‘Father, can’t you see I’m burning?’’ This sentence is itself a firebrand—of itself it brings fire where it falls—and one cannot see what is burning, for the flames blind us to the fact that the fire bears on the Unterlegt, on the Untertragen, on the real. j a c q u e s l a c a n ‰Ivn• oƒ utoi sùn ¡ oploiw ß hlyon ēw th̀n sh̀n xyóna. Kréousa• málista• kāpímprhw g≤ ≤Erexyévw dómouw. Ion: I didn’t attack your land under arms! Kreousa: You certainly did; and you were going to set the house of Erechtheus on fire! e u r i p i d e s , Ion Fiery images are unexpectedly important for understanding the romance of belonging in both Euripides and Freud, because an odd association of figures comes together in their recognition scenes: stereotype, embrace, and fire. The stereotype substitutes for identity, while the embrace forecloses further inquiry into its nature by changing perspective so that the trauma cannot be seen. Such seems to be the strategy for dealing with the trauma of belonging, which otherwise exhausts the unconscious in attempts to repeat scenes in which it is created. Fire burns at the site of this strategy: what burns is obscured but its presence is made visible by the fire itself. This chapter attempts to make sense of what this collocation means. In the preceding chapter, my focus was on the more obviously dangerous outcome of the romance of belonging: abandonment. It is the grim choice lurking within calculations of loss, even if people talk out loud in terms of yield. But the outcome of embrace is also traumatic, even the embrace of a mother, and it is time to examine moments in each text when recognitions between parent and child are staged as an embrace. In ‘‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,’’ a Recognition: Embracing a Deadly Flame 155 scene plays out between a mother-figure and child that might be seduction or rejection, but Freud does not parse it in either set of terms. Instead, he recognizes a restaging of the primal scene. In the Ion, two recognition scenes are the anchors of the play’s action, which flows from their pointed antitheses: parody leads to near-disaster; murderous anger leads to the embrace that settles the future of Athens. For both texts, the recognition about mother and child, whether Freud’s inspired interpretation of a cryptic early memory or the thrilling embrace of mother and son, is meant to bring to a close the search for the child’s identity (although, as we saw in the previous chapter, Ion’s literal-mindedness about his father’s identity requires a further deus ex machina). The closure is cast as a relief to the repetition that has driven each text thus far, suggesting that when we wish to stop our search for identity, we can turn to a platitude based on stereotype. Yet it remains unclear why the platitude is deployed just at this point and not somewhere else. Nor can we get behind the stereotype for further analysis, even if we recognize that it marks an earlier, more fundamental layer of identity. When we long to stop asking about our identity, do we sense that we finally know who we are? Or have we simply found the cliché that substitutes for that knowledge and stops our search for something more? Fire is the strange clue that guides our answers to these puzzles. Freud finally made sense of everything having to do with the Wolf Man’s infantile neurosis, he tells us, when his patient’s preoccupation with the fiery martyrdom of Jan Hus, who was burned at the stake for heresy in 1415, allowed him to interpret memories of a terrifying butterfly and a beloved nursery-maid kneeling with a bucket and broom.∞ These recollections arose from the earliest recoverable replication of the primal scene: the maid was kneeling before the toddler, who urinated on the floor in his excitement, and she threatened in jest to castrate him for the mess. Here Freud found, to his immense satisfaction, unmistakable evidence of a ‘‘normal ’’ oedipal complex, about to be perverted into the Wolf Man’s peculiar neurosis as defined by later events but connected with and activating the primal scene. The martyr...

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