The Child Outside the Door: Primal Scene,Caesura, and the Primary Trauma of Race

ABSTRACT

We are supposedly a “postracial” America, yet we cannot contain our own excess, cannot keep the unmetabolized beta elements of our racial history out of the bedroom or let race stay in the bedroom so the mature genital couple can do what it pleases. Not only do we surveil, police, and monitor race’s own primal scene but also we continuously break and enter into its most intimate chambers, guns drawn, tanks crashing in, in order to prevent the primal scene from ever taking place. This article explores the idea of race in America as denied its own primal scene and the ways in which, contrary to the importance to Bion (1991) of preventing “someone who KNOWS from filling the empty space” (p. 578), we cannot allow race to hold open its own empty space, find its own manifestations of O. I draw from the work of Wilfred Bion, Fred Moten, Jean Laplanche, and others to attempt to theorize the complexities of “postracial” America’s relationship with race vis-à-vis the primal scene.     

The Primal Scene: The Enigma of Knowing

ABSTRACT

This article explores the ways in which the privileging of the Oedipus complex in psychoanalysis has signaled a forgetting of the primal scene. Through a close reading of Bion’s Cogitations (1992) and Pasolini’s film Oedipus Rex (1967), this article examines the Oedipus myth in relation to the primal scene as represented by Oedipus’s encounter with the Sphinx, hence establishing the Oedipus myth as the ultimate story about the acquisition of knowledge. Drawing on Bion, Laplanche, Faimberg, and others, this article grapples with the paradoxes involved in the process of “getting to know something,” querying the limits of knowing and not knowing, and the nature of such knowledge.     

A Beginner’s Mind: On Beginning Psychoanalytic Schooling … Bion,Keith Jarrett,and the Primal Scene

ABSTRACT

Free associations structure … and loosen … what follows. In midair, having sprung from a high dive of 20-plus years of psychoanalytically informed professional work, the author free-falls into formal psychoanalytic training—meditating on the memory that his father was a jazz musician. The meditation strays to the author’s own jazz education … then wanders to a consideration of a primal scene interpretation emerging from Bion after he listened endlessly to a psychotic patient’s vamp—”I don’t know what I mean.” Bion’s (2013) stance of waiting for O links associatively to jazz pianist Keith Jarrett’s solo improvisations, what Jarrett calls his “epic journeys into the unknown.” The author hears a fugue in Bion’s primal scene interpretation—back to Freud and Klein and forward to Bion’s psychoanalytic students invited to compose using Bion’s unsaturated concepts. The author worries how he will communicate with his new psychoanalytic colleagues and considers the usefulness of origin myths (such as the primal scene) in such lateral communications. And, finally, the author loops back again to consider repetition when listening to Jarrett … repetition when listening to Bion … and repetition when listening to patients.     

Introduction

ABSTRACT

This essay develops several perspectives on Bion’s concept of primal scene and introduces a series of sex papers on aspects of the primal scene: its developmental implications, implications for thinking, a way of examining the forces of silence and transgression in psychoanalytic institutions, the mythic dimensions of the primal scene and its lens into considerations of race and racism.     

The Primal Scene in and about Psychoanalytic Institutions

ABSTRACT

Drawing on notions of primal scene and Bion’s theorizing of groups, this essay looks at the elements in institutional groups where transgressions and corruption may appear and develop and examines the difficulties group members have in working through the violations and potential disruptions to the institution’s functioning.     

In My Mother’s Tongue

ABSTRACT

By way of a vignette about my childhood mix of British and American accents, I explore how the Mother of the primal scene becomes a nodal point in the recursive iteration of psyche and society that is given voice in the child’s mother tongue.     

Minute Particulars of the Counter- Culture: Time,Life, and the Photo-poetics of Allen Ginsberg

Abstract

Recent exhibitions of Allen Ginsberg’s photographs, which feature 1950s snapshots of his fellow-Beats Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, have been dismissed by some as marketing exercises for the Beat myth that promote their biocentric image. Ginsberg himself invited comparisons between his work and Robert Frank’s The Americans. However, a detailed material analysis of his work as a poet-photographer, paying close attention to his handwritten captions, recognises it as a complex hybrid that extends his prophetic poetics. In particular, contextualising his work in relation to the 1950s photojournalism of Life and Time establishes the ways in which Ginsberg, and Burroughs, responded to the attacks made on the Beats in those magazines on behalf of Henry Luce’s ‘American Century’.     

The Wish to Know/The Wish Not to Know: Curiosity and the Primal Scene

ABSTRACT

This article explores the developmental experience of curiosity and how it relates to the primal scene. Bion’s concepts of K and –K, alpha function, and containment are used to think about the wish to know and the wish not to know (or to “titrate” knowing). Clinical vignettes trace the experience of curiosity as it plays out in the analytic relationship, and they illustrate instances when thinking becomes confused and boundaries collapse in response to “too much” information. Curiosity, when worked through, may become an analytic object, a vehicle for intimacy, and a possible third position between K and –K, one that leads the way toward creativity and play.     

The bothersome details of the world: Richard Byrd,Little America,and the problem of retreat

Abstract

In 1934, Admiral Richard E. Byrd retreated from his crew at the remote Little America encampment in Antarctica to an even more isolated setting: a small underground shack on ‘the dark immensity of the Ross Ice Barrier, on a line between Little America and the South Pole’. Byrd remained there in solitude for a little over four months and later wrote about his ordeal in Alone. This essay considers Byrd’s account alongside his earlier Antarctic writings in order to ask what they reveal about the difficulties of retreating and maintaining critical distance from ‘civilisation’.     

Home of the Brave,Frantz Fanon and cultural pluralism

Abstract

This article examines Mark Robson's Home of the Brave (1949, USA), a Hollywood social problem drama about anti-black racism, and the brief but vivid response to the film presented in Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Fanon enables a rethinking of some of the film's most central assumptions and the discourses upon which the story relies. At the same time, Fanon's response conveys information about his own biography and his perspectives on cultural representation generally. The article examines the film as a document that reveals competing claims about anti-black racism and, through Fanon's commentary, revisits the relationship between cultural pluralism and racial ideologies in the mid-20th century USA. The article explores the nature of Fanon's anti-racist commentary on the film as a form of 'cultural studies' that offers transnational historical insight and simultaneously provides ways of re-examining the national specificity of race thinking.     

A trembling voice in the desert: Jean‐Luc Nancy's rethinking of the space of the political

Abstract

This essay explores Jean‐Luc Nancy's rethinking of political space in terms of an ontological ‘being‐with’. It elucidates how Nancy's thinking of community emerges out of the French philosopher's reworking of Heidegger's crucial notion of Mitsein. For Nancy, although Heidegger argues that Dasein is always already also Mitsein, Mitsein is nonetheless also occluded by the priority accorded to Dasein. The consequences for the way in which community or the space of the political is configured are profound since traditional conceptions of the subject of community thus remain unreconstructed. Nancy however does reconstruct community by emphasising that the primal ontological conditions of community are not conceived as the One, the Other or the We, but as the ‘with’, ‘relationality’, and the ‘between’. The question of being (Seinsfrage) thereby becomes the question of being‐with (Mitseinsfrage).     

Revivifying Russia: Literature,Theory, and Empire in Viktor Shklovskii's Civil War Writings

Abstract

When in 1924 Iurii Tynianov identified Viktor Shklovskii's memoir A Sentimental Journey as a work 'on the margin of literature', he was commenting on the text's generic experimentation. But he also provided an apt label for its geopolitical setting, as war drives Shklovskii back and forth from Russia's dying imperial centre Petrograd to the country's peripheries. The sometimes uneasy relationship between Shklovskii's literary theory and his movement through the disintegrating Empire is this essay's main focus. Drawing on recent scholarship that identifies a fundamental paradox of modern literary theory as both the cosmopolitan study of literature per se and a discipline validated by national literary canons, the essay proposes that Shklovskii negotiates cosmopolitan and national impulses by exploring Russian literature as the expression of a multi-ethnic and multilingual empire. In analogy with Shklovskii's famous dictum that art exists to 'make the stone stony', the argument is made that in his Civil War writings Shklovskii strove to revivify the Russian Empire, that is, to 'make Russia Russian', by presenting his readers with a new and strange view of Russia from its imperial borders.     

Understanding Georg Simmel

Abstract

This paper makes two basic claims. First, Simmel was aware of the Als-Ob (“As-If”) before Vaihinger published his Die Philosophie des Als-Ob (The Philosophy of As-If) (Vaihinger, 1911 [1935]), and he used the As-If in his epistemology of the social sciences. It is difficult to understand Simmel's sociology without recognizing the role of the As-If. However, this essential part of Simmel's epistemology of the social sciences almost has gone unreported in the standard literature. Second, Simmel formulated a concept of relativity. This concept, too, is an important part of his epistemology, yet it is not understood well. Only through an appreciation of his view of relativity can Simmel's concept Wechselwirkung (usually translated as “reciprocal interaction” but more exactly translated as “reciprocal effect”) be interpreted properly. Without an understanding of his concept of relativity Simmel's form-content relation does not convey the sense intended. This paper demonstrates that the form-content relation as used by Simmel is, in current terminology, the theory-model relation. Finally, use is made of my explication of Simmel's epistemology to clarify some relations between Simmel's ideas and Durkheim's position.     

History,Politics, and the Cartography of Sexed Bodies in Iurii Illienko’s A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa

Abstract

This article explores the “corporeal” dimension of Iurii Illienko’s reconstruction of cultural and historical discourses in the 2002 film Molytva za het'mana Mazepu [A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa], which focuses on the hetman’s drama, his relationship with Peter I, and the defeat of Swedish and Ukrainian joint forces at the Battle of Poltava in 1709 that signified Ukraine’s submergence into a supranational, imperial community. Illienko’s cinematic space, in which plots of history and sexual politics are mapped onto one another, allows for conceptualizing the body as a site of political and cultural construction, contestation, and radical resistance. Demanding an intertextual approach that involves an open exchange between his cinematic domain and a “universe” of intersecting historical, cultural, ideological and political discourses, his multilayered re-memoration strategies expose both the fictionality and the political dogma surrounding the inherited mythologies. As a decentred reflection of the past, the film poses critical questions about competing histories and the dynamics of historical agency in colonial and postcolonial contexts, thus making a contribution to the protracted process of decolonization in Ukraine.     

Moses and nation-building Zora Neale Hurston's Moses,Man of the Mountain and Edward Said's Freud and the Non-European

Abstract

This article examines the significance of the representation of Moses as an Egyptian in Zora Neale Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain and Edward Said's Freud and the Non-European. Pairing Hurston and Said continues Said's project of seeing authors 'contrapuntally', so exposing imperialism as a neglected, if submerged, context for Hurston's response to nationalism in Moses. I argue that Hurston's novel cannot be read as a straightforward critique of race-based nationalism. Although Moses is of a different ethnic group to the Hebrews he leads, Hurston's portrayal of his rule is haunted by imperialism, in which one ethnic group exploits another. In this sense, Moses, Man of the Mountain bears the signs and strains of her struggle against racialist thinking.     

Edward Gibbon Wakefield,England and 'ignorant,dirty, unsocial, . . . restless,more than half-savage' America

Abstract

Edward Gibbon Wakefield is usually credited with devising a new, 'rational' system of colonization, propounded in a series of books and articles between 1829 and 1837. Certainly, this is what his contemporary champions would have us believe but, rather than identifying what he propounds as an entirely new way of understanding colonization, it is more correct to characterize Wakefield's system as a careful decoction of existing ideas, practices and proposals trailed in earlier 19th-century British writings on the Cape, Australia, Canada and America. Published in London in 1833 and New York in 1834, England and America consequently represented a particularly selective reading of contemporary British writings on America, a highly-coloured portrayal of the country designed to demonstrate how emigration and settlement was better not conducted, and a striking contrast to his own, idealized vision of how colonies should be peopled.     

Parting words: Trauma,silence and survival

Abstract

This article examines an enigma at the heart of Freud's work on trauma: the surprising emergence, from within the theory of the death drive, of the drive to life, a form of survival that both witnesses and turns away from the trauma in which it originates. I analyse in particular the striking juxtaposition, in Freud's founding work Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of his two primary examples of trauma: the repetitive nightmares of battle suffered by the soldiers of World War I, and the game of the child, faced with the loss of its mother, who plays fort and da (there and here) with his spool. My own understanding of Freud's insight did not emerge, however, simply through a reading of his text but began, in fact, in my encounter with a real child in Atlanta, a child whose best friend was murdered in the street and who is interviewed by the friend's mother. I thus read together the language of the nightmare and the language of the child in Freud's text, and then attempt to understand how Freud's text and the language of the real child shed light upon each other.     

‘The Rule of Men Entirely Great’: Republicanism,Ritual, and Richelieu in Melville’s ‘The Two Temples’

Abstract

This article explores the complex and multifarious reasons behind Herman Melville’s decision to refer to the English playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1839 work Richelieu, or The Conspiracy in his 1854 diptych ‘The Two Temples’. It responds to a critical consensus that has seen the reference merely as a sarcastic attack on William Macready (whose rivalry with the American actor Edwin Forrest was the nominal cause of the bloody 1849 Astor Place Riot in New York), by contextualizing the play within traditions of antebellum American Anglophilia. By using a combination of new critical work on Anglo-Americanism and anthropological ritual theory, I show how Bulwer-Lytton’s play was significant to Melville’s artistic development. In particular, I demonstrate how the play influenced his increasing engagement with republican and theatrical forms of expression that emphasized the importance of filial relationships between America and Britain in a period of increasing hostility between the two nations.     

Truth,lies, and racial consequences in Ernest Hemingway's True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir

Abstract

This article examines Ernest Hemingway's posthumously published novel True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir, by relating the author's vision of the role of Africa in the literary imagination to issues the novel raises for postcolonial cultural and historical criticism. Analyzing the novel's narrative, which draws upon Hemingway's second safari to Kenya in 1953–4, offers insight into Hemingway's 'African American' consciousness, and the new awareness that he was able substantively to arrive at for the first time in this novel, less than 10 years before his death. This awareness inaugurated what might be called a fictional reverse migration, whereby Hemingway reconnects with the black native perspective on Africa that he encountered on his first safari in 1933–4, in order to acquire material insight into what blacks were experiencing in America at the time of his second safari. Identifying this awareness also leads to the possibility of (re)reading Hemingway's racial perspective in his earlier works with African settings.     

The urban psychology of Stanley Milgram

Abstract

Although his obedience research will always remain Stanley Milgram's most important work, his involvement with the social psychology of the city occupied a much larger portion of his professional career. This article traces the evolution and intensification of Milgram's interest in cities, starting with his pre-professional years, through his early research at Harvard, culminating in his multifaceted engagement with urban psychology at the Graduate Center of CUNY. There, as head of the social psychology program, he was able to infuse it with an urban emphasis. He created and taught a variety of courses on urban psychology and got his students involved in a potpourri of experiments comparing behavior in cities and towns. Those experiments provided much of the substance for Milgram's seminal article in Science, “The experience of living in cities,” in which he also introduced the theoretical concept of stimulus overload to help account for the city-small town differences he and his students found. This article evaluates the overload concept and concludes with Milgram's overarching legacy for the study of city life.