I
THE SPECIMEN DREAM
He had been giving psychoanalytic treatment to a young lady. She was on friendly terms with him and his family, a matter of certain discomfort to him for it was a mixed relationship between private and professional lives. The treatment ended, with partial success only, for some somatic symptoms remained; he proposed a solution she would not accept and at variance, they broke off for the summer holidays. He met a colleague who had been staying at her country house, who reported that she was better, but not quite well, and he detected a note of reproof in his friend’s words. That evening he wrote out her case history, intending to justify himself. That night, or perhaps that morning, he dreamt a dream, the first dream he was to submit to a detailed interpretation. There was a large hall, many guests, she was among them and he took her to one side to reproach her, telling her that her pains were her own fault. She told him of the pains in her throat, her stomach, her abdomen, how they were choking her, but she had never in waking life complained of pains in the throat and abdomen or of constriction in her throat, though she often complained of nausea and disgust. She looked so pale, so puffy, he wondered if he had missed some organic cause when he set out to get rid of her hysterical pains to which he had attributed a great number of symptoms. He was surprised, for usually she was so rosy in complexion that he wondered if another woman was substituted for her, a woman who was another patient perhaps, or indeed, the woman who was his wife. He took her over to the window to look down into her throat; she responded with recalcitrance, as though she was a woman with artificial dentures, and he thought there was really no need for her to behave like that, no, no need for such feminine resistance. He had never, no, never, had any occasion to examine her oral cavity. Later he understood there was a concealed meaning – he was comparing her with other patients, more sensible more intelligent, or with his wife with her abdominal troubles, but he did not carry this interpretation far enough to follow what was concealed. When she opened her mouth properly, opened her mouth wide to him, opening up, yes, there on the right was a big white patch, and elsewhere many whitish grey scabs on some curly structures like those of the turbinal bones of the nose, the turbine bones and their remarkable connection with the female organs of sex. He called over Dr M. Then there was also Otto, and then standing beside her, Leopold, who was percussing her through her bodice, who found a dull area low down on the left and an infiltrated portion of skin on her shoulder. In spite of her dress, he saw this, they all saw this, and he had no desire to penetrate more deeply at this point. M. said there was an infection, and oh yes, they all knew the source of the infection, that Otto had given her an injection, one that should not have been made so thoughtlessly, and the syringe may not have been at all clean as its needle penetrated her.
II
THE WOUNDS
Five red nails. A stain or reproach. Self-mortification. Eucharistic frenzy. Extreme asceticism. Illness and suffering. I was stabbed in my throat. Profuse weeping. Denial of the body. Starvation. Paralysis. Bleeding flesh. Lactating flesh. Wounded, bleeding flesh. Openings and exudings and spillings forth. I was broken on the wheel. Nosebleeds. Hemorrhoidal bleeding. My eyes were gouged from my head. Fainting fits. Flesh swallowing flesh. Horrible pain, twisting of the body, bleeding. I cut off pieces of my own flesh and buried them in the ground to keep secret what I had done. I drove the middle finger of my hand, hard as a nail, through the palm of my opposite hand, until the room rang with the sound of my hammering. I thrust a nail completely through my hands and only clear water flowed from the wound. I drank the scabs from leper’s wounds. I thrust nettles into my breasts. I wore a hair shirt. I bound my flesh with twisted ropes. I prayed barefoot in winter. I rolled in broken glass. I lacerated my body until the blood flowed, with all kinds of whips. I rammed twigs down my throat. I sought to leave the world. I had three wounds. I placed the heads of my sons into the wound to drink. I spit or blew into the mouths of others. I ate pus and lice. I jumped into ovens or into icy ponds. Bloody flesh. Trances, levitations, catatonic seizures. Bodily rigidity. Swellings of sweet mucus in my throat. Bodily closure. Bodily swelling. Voracious hunger. Inability to eat. Pain and delight. A vision of bleeding hearts. I was pierced between my bones, but when the swordsman’s hand wandered I set it upon my own neck. I would kiss the soles of my feet with greatest affection. The wound of love in my heart. I pulled out a hank of my hair to use as a device to cure the sick. I was bound on the rack, beaten with sharp instruments until my bones were laid bare, burnt with torches, and plunged into water. Stigmata. I greet that which I love with the blood of my heart.
III
BÉANCE
Or, The other side of the body of the mystic
Béance is the opening of the larynx, trachea, bronchial tubes, or the abnormal gap between two groups of opposing teeth – it is a rare French medical term. It is also a literary term for a large hole or opening. Figuratively, it is an opening, one that is impossible to fill. In Freud’s dream of Irma’s injection, a mouth opens to him, no, he asks it to open to him but it opens only as an interrogative gap. The question is not quite one of what is in Irma’s throat after all. Freud is thinking about defence and writes to his friend Wilhelm Fliess: ‘All I was trying to do was explain defence, but just try to explain something from the very core of nature!’ He writes to Fliess of passivity and femininity, hysteria. Anxiety is the only reaction. when there are no signifiers, and what is repressed is always feminine, or so he suspects, situated outside psychical economy or elaboration. The white patch he sees in her throat, the turbinal bones covered in scabs, remind Freud of his daughter’s serious illness two years earlier, and his fear that she would die. In Irma’s throat, he also confronts his own mortality, for he has been using cocaine to reduce some nasal swellings and had just heard of a woman patient, who, having done the same, has recently developed an extensive necrosis of her mucous membranes. He recalls the death of a patient, his only loss, who had the same name as his daughter, Mathilde. He thinks ‘this Mathilde for that Mathilde’. He thinks of his friend Fliess, and the connection Fliess makes between the turbinal bones and the female sexual organs (and I think of a nineteenth-century medical illustration of a view into the aperture of the larynx that makes it looks like female genitalia, and Galen’s remark that the uvula gives the same protection to the throat that the clitoris gives to the uterus). He thinks of his wife, the thrombosis she suffered during pregnancy. ‘I had no desire to penetrate more deeply at this point,’ he writes when it comes to a matter of undressing the patient, as you know from my first account. He sees more than he wants to see, a beyond of flesh, beyond the face, a place where there is no meaning and everything threatens to open and swallow him, béance. In the back of the throat, in the ‘abyss of the feminine organ from which all life emerges’, something unnameable is revealed. The mouth or hole does not speak and no longer has a name, and yet an image arises from it, an image that is masked (must be masked if the image of one’s body is not to fall apart), and yet, yes, and yet, an image is broken, like bodies may be broken, wounded or scarred, facing obliteration. It is a thing that is pushed away, for it is horrifying. It is a thing that may be pulled apart, that will not close (unless, of course, one were to lay one’s mouth over it, gently, laying lips to lips, sealing edge to edge, cleaving, but that is in another story, not this one). It is, says my dear Doctor Lacan, the flesh one never sees, the flesh from which everything exudes, the flesh in as much as it is suffering, the other side of the head, of the face.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 4, ed, & tr. James Strachey, London: Hograth P, 1953.
—, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess.1887-1904, ed. J.M. Masson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984, Letter of 16 August, 1895, p. 136.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, tr. Sylvana Tomaselli, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990.
Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essay on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, New York: Zone Books, 1991.
Jean-Noël Ruaret, Extases féminines, Paris: Hattier, 1991.
Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, Chicago: U of Chicago P, [1983] 1996.
Sharon Kivland is an artist and writer. Her work considers what is put at stake by art, politics, and psychoanalysis. She is currently working on the natural form, fables, and the furies. She has been called a poet, to her surprise. She is also an editor and publisher, the latter under the imprint MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE. Her novel Abécédaire was published by Moist Books in July 2022, and she has just completed a new book, entitled Almanach.
minor literature[s] 