Aberrations of Mourning

9. The Unborn

CHAPTER NINE THE UNBORN In his ultimate reckonings with melancholia, Freud found himself pushed back against the threshold of the womb. Two melancholies, Wolfman and Rank, delivered, on separate occasions , fantasies of traumatic birth and prenatal existence which threatened, in theory, to preempt Freud's Oedipal interpretation of anxiety. The patient and the colleague each in turn introduced into psychoanalysis the unborn child who, because either normal or neurotic on arrival, depending upon the impact of arrival, never runs up against the Oedipus complex. By thus anchoring neurosis in the unborn state, Rank leaves out the father, which was his aim and inspiration, but only by effacing, as in all fantasies of the unborn, the influence of the mother. In the course of demonstrating the mother's exclusive rights to the child—his other aim, according to Jones—Rank removed the mother entirely, a secret assassination attempt which prompted Freud to keep in place— while acknowledging for the first time—the centralityof her role in early childhood.1 Taking up Rank's challenge, Freud traced the anxiety that betokens, up front, the double urge to return to the womb and be born again away from the prenatal zone to the maternal province 333 Aberrations ofMourning of fort Ida. Freud detects in the typical anxiety-producing situations , which range from birth, to separation from the mother, to dread of castration, removal in each case of some cherished object which the mother was thus the first to embody. Separation from the mother, which, in the fort Ida game, finds mournful commemoration through reversal of its administration, not only anticipates castration, which represents it, but also faces the other way to produce the fantastic past of prenatal existence to which the child henceforward seeks and fails to return, either as whole body or as genital part.2 Whenever Freud had hitherto touched on the infant's maternal bond, he had contrasted the young child's innate narcissism with the anaclitic outlet onto the other which the mother first proffers. Through anaclisis, sexuality proper emerges only by 'leaning on" a relation already established solely for the purpose of satisfying the hunger of the little narcissist, who remains concerned only with his autoerotic self-sufficiency and survival. The other thus first appears when the breast that feeds the infant becomes , through anaclisis, exciting as well. Though at this juncture the infant, who does not yet distinguish between the breast and his own body, retains and secures his narcissism, a separation has emerged between the urge that sucks for pleasure and that which sucks for nourishment.3 The infant cannot help but develop along lines of anaclisis to the point of taking the fort Ida line into his little hands; inversion, however, may at this point turn around the perspective of a scene that otherwise remains the same. In "On Narcissism: An Introduction ,11 Freud contrasts to anaclitic selection the narcissistic choice which also takes the mother-infant relation as model, only to do a double take: the child assumes the mother's position by identifying with her to the point of always choosing images of that part or version of himself his mother adored. What is born again, in any case, is the narcissism of the parents, whose hard-pressed conviction that the ego is immortal, for example, takes refuge in the infant, their prosthetic part and portrait. While the infant approaches or departs anaclitically, the parents adore or grieve over the little placeholder of their own narcissism.4 The "caesura" of birth, Freud argues, hardly punctuates the continuum covering pre- and postnatal existence. The maternal 334 The Unborn body is the fetus's object to the extent that it has no objects within its maternal surround. The mother thus emerges as full-fledged object for the child's psyche because she already embodies the child's fetal, objectless past.5 Gunter Grass has denned melancholia as Utopian objectlessness,6 a conjunction of ahistorical zones which, as transmitted through Grass's The Tin Drum, for example, returns to that commencement of a modern history of melancholia which, in the eighteenth century, finds the melancholic and the unborn each the other's analogue and condition. At the other end of this history we find Oskar, the now midget, now dwarf protagonist of The Tin Drum, taking pictures: "real sorrow is in itself already objectless. . . . If there was a possibility to flirt with our sorrow...