The Return to Melanie Klein:
Acquiring Knowledge
The work of Melanie Klein can not only reveal one hypothetical
source of the ambivalent attitude towards the other, but it will also refer us
back to the question of the difficult relation between a self and its
outside. Klein came to England in the
late 1920’s and helped to found what is now known as the Object-Relations
school of psychoanalysis. She presided
over the British School and her work on child analysis is now legendary. Klein describes the earliest stages of
infantile psychic life in terms of a successful completion of development
through certain positions. A position
for Klein describes a set of psychic functions that correspond to a given phase
of development, always appearing during the first year of life, but which are
present at all times thereafter and can be reactivated at any time. There are two major positions. The paranoid-schizoid
position occurs at the earliest phase of development and it is
characterised by the relation to part objects (parts of the mother etc.), the
prevalence of splitting in the ego and in the object, and paranoid
anxiety. The depressive position
is ushered in when the infant recognises the mother as a whole object. It is a constellation of object relations and
anxieties characterised by the infant’s experience of attacking an ambivalently
loved mother and losing her as an external and internal object. The experience, according to Klein, gives
rise to pain, guilt and feelings of loss.
For either paranoid-schizoid (PS)
or depressive (D) identification to
occur, two processes are needed. On one
hand an object is introjected
into the ego, which then identifies with some or all of the object’s
characteristics. On the other hand the projection of parts of the self into an
object results in the object being perceived as having the characteristics of
the projected part of the self, which also results in an
identification. For instance, in PS the ego will split the object into
an ideal satisfying part, and a persecuting part, in order to achieve an at
least partial identification with a good object. The result of this defence mechanism, which
is essentially a denial of persecution, may be that the ego is itself split
into two so that identifications can be made with a persecuting part object
that can then be projected outwards. But
the projection is now in danger of infecting the good object, threatening to
destroy it, or provoking the possibility of retribution.
In her 1940 paper, “Mourning and its relation to manic
depressive states,” Klein describes the depressive position as a process of
early “reality testing” and argues that this is a prototypical form of what
will later become the process of mourning (Klein 344). She writes:
The object which is
being mourned is the mother’s breast and all that the breast and milk have come
to stand for in the infant’s mind: namely, love, goodness and security. All these are felt by the baby to be lost, and
lost as a result of his uncontrollable greedy and destructive phantasies and impulses against his mother’s breasts. (345)
So for Klein the earliest active relation to reality, to the
outside, begins with an awareness of one’s own uncontrollable greed and an
inconsolable sorrow for a plenitude one feels one has destroyed. What really distinguishes Klein’s theory is
her notion of phantasy
describing the arena in which these processes are played out. For the child the outside world is nothing
more than a series of images and passing forms that are used to characterise an
inner world of phantasies. The form of the mother, for instance, is
“doubled” and “undergoes alterations” as it is internalised (346). In this way, external reality can be read so long as the forms of the outside
world can be “fitted into the patterns provided by the psychic [inner] reality
which prevails at the time” (347).
Klein’s work can thus be read as entering into disputes concerning
epistemology, particularly where her account of the process of reality-testing
is given in terms of an acquisition of knowledge:
In the process of
acquiring knowledge, every new piece of experience has to be fitted into the
patterns provided by the psychic reality which prevails at the time; whilst the
psychic reality of the child is gradually influenced by every step in his
progressive knowledge of external reality. (374).
It is important to recognise that the child’s use of external reality is never anything more
than an attempt to better understand inner
psychic reality. Reality is itself
understood in terms of the doubling bifurcation of images. So there is, in effect, nothing but
unconscious phantasy, on one hand, and the forms and
images that flit across the perceptual screen, on the other. This argument reinforces the sense, which we
have already noted, that psychoanalysis remains within the structures defined
by the difference between the empirical and transcendental. The difference is now understood in terms of the difference
between external form and internal phantasy. Jacqueline Rose argues that it lies at the
heart of what is most controversial in Klein, both within and beyond
psychoanalytic institutions. The
implications are philosophical and concern the status of traditional notions of
truth and certainty themselves. What
Rose suggests is that Klein’s development of Freudian psychoanalysis loosens up
the scientific, objective notion of truth, which inevitably informs Freud’s
discourse (though as we have seen Freud himself has gone some considerable way
in shaking these notions up). With Klein
truth “does not belong to an order of scientifically verifiable knowledge”
(Rose 147); but rather Klein’s notion of truth at the very least puts the
possibility of any objective truth in suspense.
Donald Meltzer describes the philosophical problem like this:
It requires an
immense shift in one’s view of the world to think that the outside world is
essentially meaningless and unknowable, that one perceives the form but must
attribute the meaning. (86)
So in Klein’s
version of reality objective truth is suspended, debarred from any
epistemological privilege and thus held in an indeterminate state. A kind of radical form of expectation that
defers knowledge also informs knowledge.
It excites a desire that cannot be fulfilled for a kind of knowledge
that cannot be presented as such. This
“attribution of meaning,” then, as an inevitable element in the formative
process of psychic development, cannot but be a kind of hypothesising about a
reality that is never itself presentable as such. The only clues available for the acquisition
of knowledge are the forms that correspond in some way to the patterns of
psychic life prevalent at any given time.
The Ruined World “et in Arcadia ego”
According to
Freud and Lacan we begin with the awareness that something has been lost. The first thing is something missing. All attempts to make up for this loss, to
find a substitute for the lost thing, intensify the sense of loss, emphasise
all the more painfully that the substitute is not the object at all. There can be no replacement for something
that was never there. So the search
continues as a quest to replace the unsatisfactory substitute with one more
satisfying, one that is perhaps not perfect but good enough for the time
being. That is the now classic
psychoanalytic narrative of psychic development. Melanie Klein in a controversial move that
still provokes violent debate in psychoanalytic circles went back before this
beginning, this Freudian beginning in loss, to its prehistory. She filled out the details with graphic
imagery wrenched from the symbolism of children at play. Freud’s little melancholic was not the
beginning, according to Melanie Klein.
For her, psychic life starts with the vivid destruction of an object,
the chaotic ruin of what ought to have been a nurturing environment. Out of a nightmare of terror and outright war
emerges the melancholic child fully aware of its responsibility for destroying
a world and doubled up with loss and guilt.
Desire for Freud is played out in restless attempts to complete and
fulfil an emptiness that is both produced and maintained by these
attempts. But for Melanie Klein desire
is tinged with the guilty knowledge of responsibility. The object is not so much lost as ruined and
the infant, in Freud’s own phrase, becomes “criminal from the sense of
guilt.”
Two distinct
patterns of phantasy can be outlined according to
this basic difference between Freud and Klein.
Freudian fantasy, on the model of the Fort Da game played by his grandson
during long absences of the mother, attempts to control the loss by making it
good symbolically. The conservatism of
fantasy is exemplified in a defence that is the equivalent of a lie: the mother
is not gone (Fort), look! She is here (Da). The cotton reel is like the fetishized commodity--manifested in an endless series of
objects that are each time symbolic of the one missing thing--circulating in an
endless chain where each link refers metonymically only to the next link, as
close as you’ll get to a random process.
This may seem close to the experience of the mass media, including
mainstream cinema where, if you go often enough, you will be aware only of a
kind of continuous series of parts never quite adding up to a single film. The plot for each film is in the most basic
sense the same as the others. The
narrative is reducible to two movements repeated endlessly. We begin with the awareness that something
has been lost or is in danger of being lost (Fort!). The first thing is something missing. Then the loss is made good, the missing
object replaced, the ruined world mended or replenished, or a fulfilling
substitute, more fulsome than the lost or ruined original, is found (Da!).
The variations are illimitable.
Kleinian desire, on the other
hand, forces us to work a little harder.
Perhaps, as violent as the phantasies are,
they present a more substantial kind of promise than the hopeless Freudian ones
do. But the promise, like all promises,
comes with a warning. The Kleinian answer to the question “is that a threat or a
promise?” is always “both, of course.”
The desire to make reparation demands not only a capacity for tolerating
destructive impulses, but also a willingness to return
to the scariest environment imaginable, the anxious core of the self. Symbolic substitution may be necessary but it
is certainly not sufficient, for to make reparation, to move forward into an
ethical state one must learn to move backwards into the state that produced the
ruin in the first place. On must learn
to rediscover the terrifying first months of life, to re-enter the schizoid
state of the neo-natal infant. In
science fiction cinema it is possible to read an analogue of this state,
represented in the ruined and hazardous landscapes on which so much of the
action is played out. By what looks like
a coincidence, Klein’s descriptions of the ravaged world of infantile phantasy compare with some representations in contemporary
science fiction cinema. In the following
sections I will provide a reading of a popular cinema genre through the
theoretical matrix of psychoanalysis. I
then want to use this reading to fold certain assumptions about analysis back
onto psychoanalysis itself. In this way
we will be able to better understand what is at stake in analysing cultural
texts. The key word here is analysis and the key problem concerns
what remains unanalysed.
Kleinian
Scientificity (Klein and Bion).
It is claimed
that psychoanalytic theory is of a special kind. Its interest is in areas that are shared by
philosophy, psychology and cultural theory, yet its purpose is always practical
and clinical. Psychoanalytic hypotheses are
designed for perpetual restatement by practising analysts in terms of empirically
verifiable data. The violent controversy
over Klein’s quite radical restatement of Freud’s hypotheses seems to have
taken even her a little by surprise because from her own point of view she had
simply maintained the ideals of the rational scientist that were Freud’s
own--at least some of the time. If her
theories were modifications of Freud’s theories that was because they were
based on what her follower Wilfred Bion would later
call negative realisation. A negative realisation occurs when a preconception
fails to find support in experience. The
most common defence against this, which is a dreadfully frustrating experience
for a vulnerable ego attempting to build itself on good preconceptions, is to
counteract it with a variety of possible responses. I can ignore it, pretend that there has been
no negative realisation at all and stick to my preconceptions. Or I can indulge in phantasies
of omniscience and omnipotence and hallucinate a world
changed to conform to my preconceptions.
Either way my experience is dominated by the pathological organization
known to psychoanalysts as the schizoid state.
If, on the other hand, I have the capacity to tolerate the anxiety
caused by negative realisation the thinker in me emerges. Bion calls an event
of negative realisation a thought. A
thought needs a container and thus the self must become a thinker in order to
contain the thought--that is Bion’s theory of
thinking. Most of the time the thinker
coexists with parts of the self that remain organised pathologically, which, in
terms of thought, cling to the lie rather than the truth of the thought that is
produced in negative realisation. The
difficulty here of course is that you don’t even get negative realisation without
the preconceptions into which the truth comes crashing like a bad dream or your
worst nightmare. The preconceptions are
built on the conservatism of defensive phantasy,
which is basically reactionary. Negative
realisation is like a tool that the infant must learn to use in order to adjust
the frameworks of his internal world. It
is the condition of the internal world that interests the psychoanalyst.
The first
patterns of phantasy are very crude and seem to have
been the consequence of extreme terror.
The Kleinian ego is willed into life through
an unbearable sense of persecution. Any
of the frustrations of the first stages of life would, one might suppose, be
enough to have you crying out for your mother.
Just the failure of a finger in the mouth to maintain the hallucination
of food turns the absence of the breast into some vile and ruthless monster,
the notorious bad breast. But Klein
insists that the violence of these early persecution phantasies
originates within as an archaic negativity, not a negative realisation as
such--there’s nothing to be realised at all yet--just negativity pure and
simple. The disappearance of the
satisfying breast has been prepared for, in other words, by the harassing
presence from the beginning of the death instinct. When you are hungry the lie that you are not
is a difficult one to maintain. So your
hunger takes the shape of a monster. At
the infantile stage the distinction between the self and the object is not clear
but it follows the pattern of splitting and is manipulated through the two mechanisms
of projection and introjection. Projection throws undesirable, monstrous
parts of the self out into the object, which is either expected to contain and
neutralise them or to be infected and ultimately destroyed by them. Introjection is
supposed to extract good aspects of the good object and use them to build up
the internal object, the rudimentary core of what will one day be the
self. The trouble is introjection
can often bring in fragments of the destructive object too and by the same
token the bad self can easily, in extreme hate or envy or in the glory of an
omnipotent rage, just destroy the only hope of survival, the good object on the
outside. The thing to stress here is
that everything, parts of the object and parts of the self, are just that,
parts. It is a world of part objects
divided crudely into good and bad, internal and external. This is the PS position.
The next
position for the infant, moving in at a speculative three months, according to
Melanie Klein, is the depressive position (D),
which plays two important functions.
First the force of the violent phantasies is
reduced. The world is less frightening,
less violent. The PS violence is considerably lessened. The key to this function is the capacity for
toleration. The second function is
integration. The split off parts of the
object, representing a now ruined and all but destroyed external environment,
are brought together to form a single unity.
All the attacks on the monstrous bad breast are now revealed to have been
ruinous for the good one too, good and bad now integrated.
I’ll return to
the depressive position a little later.
For the moment we don’t need to explore it in any depth, because it
plays a very small role in the first film I want to look at. The extremely popular Armageddon is a phantasy played out
entirely on the PS level and
culminates in an omnipotent destruction of the bad object, after it has been
filled, literally implanted, with all the bad parts of the mythic self. A meteorite the size of Texas is hurtling
towards the earth and promises to hit it with the force equivalent to 10,000
nuclear warheads. There are four main
aspects to bear in mind during my analysis.
The first concerns the role of the mother, the archetypal Kleinian object, of course, and as potent as a symbol could
be, but who is missing here from the beginning.
This is the standard narrative where the father exchanges his daughter
with a surrogate son in an ecstatic symbolic union, a classical mythic
structure, on the surface at least. The
second point, which is intimately related to the first, concerns the obsessive
gendering of both the earth and the rock that threatens it. The grouchy amateur astronomer who discovers
it names the rock “Dotty,” after his wife, because “she’s a vicious
life-sucking bitch from which there is no escape.” There are echoes of Aliens here too of course.
More important than the misogyny, which is an inescapable component of
the pathological organisations at work here, is the explicit characterisation
of the rock, and spectacularly its cinematic realisation as “the scariest
environment imaginable” with razor sharp ice, unpredictable winds and exploding
potholes. And fourth, the structural key
to the whole film is coupling. The rock
is attempting to couple with the earth.
Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler are attempting to
couple against the wishes of her father Bruce Willis. The NASA shuttles couple with the Russian
refuelling space station. The drill
mechanism is coupling with the earth in order to extract oil and with the rock
in order to implant a nuclear bomb.
Numerous incidental couplings or attempted couplings occur along the
way.
The
Analysis
1. The
absent mother.
2. The
gender of the earth and the rock.
3. The
rock as the scariest environment imaginable.
4. Coupling.
At this stage I can make use of some critical methods
that we have already explored. Following
the method of Levi-Strauss’ structural analysis, I’ll take the events of
the film as if they were the terms of a system and replace them on a grid that
indicates the structural relations between them.
1. A rock
threatens the Earth.
2. A boy
threatens the daughter.
3. The Father threatens
the Boy.
4. The mother
is absent (“She left us both”)
5. Drilling
strikes oil.
6. Only
drilling, rather than assaulting, can save the earth.
7. Drilling
team in 17 day training.
8. Shuttles
refuel in space (destroying the Russian space station in the process).
9. Shuttles
arrive on the rock (one badly damaged).
10. Drilling
takes place on the rock.
11. Father
sacrifices himself so the boy can return home to the daughter.
12. Earth is
saved.
The grid looks something like this:
Valued Devalued Implanting Extracting
Earth rock rock into earth oil from earth/Russia
non-military military boy into girl blood into syringe
oil bomb bomb into rock father into daughter
At the level of myth Armageddon
can thus be seen as a deeply conservative and collusive text. According to the structuralist formula:
Fx (a): Fy
(b) -- Fx (b): Fa-1 (y)
The myth makes the function of extracting equivalent to the
valued terms (oil, earth, non-military personnel) but dissolves a contradiction
by privileging implantation as the destruction of the non-valued terms (rock,
bomb). The contradiction is solved at
the level of the relation between father and boy, through the sacrifice of the
father. But beneath this the film solves
a series of problems. It takes the
problems of technological progress--nuclear war, destruction of ecological
resources and devastating pollution--and solves them by dumping them into the
symbolic evil of the rock and then exploding it. All within the technological process itself.
The Kleinian terminology, which gives
flesh to the abstraction of structuralist terms and functions, and which
corresponds to the visual field of cinema rhetoric, can add further
insights. Part objects in the
unconscious take the form of greedy vaginas, monstrous breasts and
pseudo-penises. This corresponds in
obvious ways with the iconography of Armageddon.
The grid now looks something like this:
Valued Devalued Implanting Extracting
good breast bad breast projection introjection
earth rock rock into earth oil from earth/Russia
non-military military boy into girl blood into syringe
oil bomb bomb into rock father into daughter
So it might be easy to argue on the basis of this grid that far
from arriving at any sense of depressive realisation of responsibility, Armageddon simply satisfies the desire
for omnipotent destruction of all that is bad in order to preserve all that is
good. The ruined and destroyed object is
replaced through the sacrifice of the father, which allows the fantastic
replacement of the object in terms of the endless boy-gets-girl narrative of Fort-Da.
Something like
the process of negative realisation that produces thinking grounds Kleinian aesthetics too.
The difference here is that the capacity for toleration is directed
towards the inner world of phantasy as opposed to the
outer world of events. The artwork, for
the Kleinian, is the result of two special talents
and it allows for two types of identification.
The artist, according to Hannah Segal, must have an intimate knowledge
of their material (clay, words, rhetoric, paint, etc.) and must also have the
capacity to tolerate the internal death drive “as fully as can be borne.” She says that the work must embody “the
terrifying experience of depression and death.” (219). The artist must be able to acknowledge
the death instinct, both in its aggressive and self-destructive aspects, and
accept the reality of death both for the object and the self. The spectator thus identifies the artwork as
a reparative recreation of the ruined inner world and identifies with the
artist as another through the medium of the work. In this case phantasy
is not just the conservative force that militates against the truth. We see that it is the very principle and
power of world creation. There would be
no world without it. The artwork reveals
the source of the world in negativity, but in a negotiated way, in a way that
can be borne. These identifications
allow vicarious access to the negativity of the death-drive upon which all
experience is grounded. An omnipotent phantasy like Armageddon
would not pass the test for while in terms of cinema rhetoric it is exemplary,
in terms of its presentation of negativity it is just an infantile phantasy.
Soldier on the other hand
provides a glimpse into something a bit deeper.
Soldier at least takes us out
of the paranoid-schizoid position. This
is how Hannah Segal describes the depressive position:
[It]
is reached by the infant when he recognises his mother and other people, and
among them his father, as real persons.
His object relations then undergo a fundamental change. Where earlier he was aware of ‘part objects’
he now perceives complete persons; instead of ‘split’ objects, ideally good or
overwhelmingly persecuting--he sees a whole object both good and bad.
It is during
the depressive stage that a sense of an inner reality is developed in
contradistinction to a sense of outer reality.
The infant now has to be able to tolerate not only the frustration of
learning that its preconceptions about the object world are wrong but also the
guilt in becoming aware of its own ambivalence to the object world, which
includes large amounts of hate and envy previously projected into its objects. Inability to tolerate this--especially at
first--results in varying degrees of regression into PS and its defences: splitting, idealisation, denial, projective
identification. Phantasies
like Armageddon represent a kind of
cultural version of this regression--there are many other examples. Soldier
seems to me to present a slightly different kind of phantasy.
One of the
things that critics didn’t like about Soldier
was Kurt Russell’s character. One
popular critic said that, if we are going to have another gun toting kill-em-all hero, then at least he should be of the
wise-cracking slick and articulate kind.
But no, Kurt Russell says virtually nothing throughout and every short
clipped phrase is closed off with a barked out “sir”: “Yes, Sir,” in
response to an order at the beginning; “I was replaced Sir,” when asked why he
was separated from his company; “I’m going to kill them all Sir,” as an answer
to the woman who asks, “what are you going to do?” just before the bloody
denouement. It is an essential part of
his character once we see the film as an allegory for PS and D in the
development of psychic life.
Please be aware that it is by no means necessary that we see the
film as an allegory for anything. What interests me, in the context of critical
theory, is the possibility of allegory.
My reading is based upon an analogy between psychoanalytic and cinematic
presentations and as such any authority governing my reading rests on the
accidental, on analogy itself. Later we
must explore the grounds of analogy in order to tighten up the reading.
Russell’s
character Todd is a veteran soldier of the future, a survivor of numerous
galactic conflicts. The beginning of the
film shows his selection at birth and consequent training. The story proceeds with the
arrival of a new breed of genetically engineered soldier, one of who fights off
three of the old kind, including Todd himself, in an exercise to prove the
superiority of this new breed.
Todd loses the fight but not before prising an eye from his enemy’s
head. The unconscious Todd is then
discarded on a planet that is used only for dumping waste. He becomes conscious on this wasteland
littered with sharp-edged rusting metallic technological waste and is almost
immediately attacked by a sudden ferocious wind that threatens to pick him up
and dash him onto some jagged shard.
Welcome again to the scariest environment imaginable.
However this
deserted planet of the Arcadian system, whose name turns out to be “Arcadia
234”, is not deserted after all. A
community living in the protective dome of some discarded rocket has
crash-landed on this planet on the way from Earth to a utopian new
beginning. They gather what they can use
from the wasteland around them dodging the persecuting and unpredictable winds
as well as they are able. They take Todd
in on the word of their leader, a firm but fair matriarch, who says, “we must
do the decent thing and the decent thing is to help him.” The core for Todd of this community is the
small oedipal family of Case, his wife and their son Nathan who has been struck
dumb from a snake bite--another of the significant terrors of Arcadia 234. The crucial identification is the one between
Todd and Nathan, the two near speechless, perhaps autistic children, who form
the core of the film’s own ego. Let’s
map it out. It is a terrifying and
persecuting wasteland, in which a small and vulnerable yet nurturing society
maintains a semblance of gentle civility.
The most obvious associations of Todd’s name are first, from the
colloquial “On your Todd” meaning on your own and second, probably more
significantly, from the German Tod for
death. Death comes into Arcadia. There is an irony of course here. Arcadia is at once the determined innocence
and the stubborn pastoral of the new Arcadians, but this Arcadia is number
234. How many are there? They must be cropping up in the universe like
shopping arcades in California. Into
this Arcadia comes death. This nurturing
society is built on matriarchal lines exemplified in all kinds of ways by the
rhetoric, which aligns it with the quiet strength of femininity.
Despite the
fact that Todd has saved someone’s life from the ferocious wind the community
find they cannot incorporate this efficient death-machine into their
society. The crux comes not after Todd
has in a pathological moment of confusion almost killed the hapless Jimmy, who
has knitted him a scarf in repayment for saving his life. It rather comes when Todd fails to kill a
snake in an attempt to teach young Nathan to do his own killing. For this he is cast out. Here is the significant scene. He sits outside in the dubious shelter of a
huge cast iron pipe and a tear forms on his cheek causing him some
surprise. This is the beginning of two
realisations. The first amounts to
mourning the destroyed world, as the first sign of realization that the
external world is peopled by beings that one might not want to kill. And the second is that for the first time Todd’s
inner and outer world become distinct; he is able to reflect on his own role in
the ruinous destruction of his life.
When Nathan
does kill a snake that is just about to bite into his sleeping father the
parents and the rest of the community realise their error. Even the most nurturing environment must find
a place for Todd, the extreme vigilance of the soldier, just as the soldier
must find an integrated world in order to exist. So far so good. Except the new breed make their inevitable
reappearance on manoeuvres as an irrational and persecuting force more
terrifying than the landscape itself.
After blowing off Case’s leg they proceed by disintegrating the
community’s matriarchal leader, followed by the community itself. All that is left now is for Todd to “kill
them all sir”.
In classic
omnipotent style Todd does indeed kill them all and joins up with the now
disarmed members of his old company to steal the spaceship and take off with
the survivors from Arcadia 234, just before it is blown to fragments by the
bomb left on there by the evil commanders, who of course get blown to pieces as
well. The film ends with young Nathan in
Todd’s arms, the ship on course for the original utopian planet—we might
suggest it represents the idealised good breast. It is not so much the narrative, but rather
the manipulation of cinema rhetoric and imagery that is interesting. The narrative mates Todd with Nathan rather
than boy with girl. As such it is an
allegory of the ego built on the integration between PS and D elements. As cinema rhetoric it succeeds as a vivid
evocation of the inner world. The
problem with D is that there is now
no way of allowing access to the shocking, surprising, contingent newness of
events. Whole objects tend to be what
you expect them to be and the patterns of phantasy
that maintain your expectations are now hidden from consciousness. The return to PS can culminate in radical defence, but it can also open
experience to unpredictable changes, if the anxiety can be tolerated. Todd represents, in the combination of fear
and discipline, the capacity for tolerating extreme danger, yet he has no
capacity for social integration. His
super-ego sets Doberman dogs onto squealing pigs and shoots children if thay
cannot run fast enough. Nathan on the
other hand is too protected by his parents’ depressive anxieties. His super-ego keeps him from reality. It is too nurturing. The film’s fundamental drive is to unite Todd
with Nathan, to bring PS and D together, to unite the persecuting
super-ego with the satisfying one. It
culminates in a satisfying way, with an all out omnipotent phantasy
that places the utopian good breast in sight through the outright destruction
of the bad one, with all the bad elements of the self on it. As in Armageddon
there are two planets and one must be destroyed. This is a rapid retreat from mourning and
perhaps represents the ultimate capitulation to pathological forces of
organisation. We begin with the
awareness that something has been lost.
The first thing is something missing.
Et in Arcadia ego.
Problems
There is a
problem with the analysis I’ve just provided that is a concern both for
psychoanalysis and for the process of analysis generally. Analysis, as we have seen, involves the
division into subject and object. As
such it depends upon an unanalysed distinction between the transcendental (as
theoretical matrix) and the empirical (as the passive object or example). I’ve just mapped a fully formed theoretical
matrix derived from structuralism and psychoanalysis onto a couple of examples
from contemporary mainstream cinema.
What I have failed to analyse is the distinction between the analysing
subject and the analysed object (the transcendental matrix and the empirical
event). On what grounds can I privilege
the psychoanalytic representation over the cinematic one? How can I support the implicit assumption of scientificity in psychoanalysis against the fictionality of
film? It seems to me, in looking back
over my analysis, that I have been using the psychoanalytic apparatus, the
instruments of analysis, to probe these textual objects, drawing out of them
what I need to support the argument and then demolishing what is left,
exhausting the signifying potential of these films. The psychoanalytic apparatus is thus left
untouched, not at all affected by the ruin it finds about itself, whereas the
wretched films are shredded to nothingness by my analytic acuity. But then if that is the case, Armageddon could even be read as a kind
of satire on psychoanalysis. Let’s have another look at that grid:
Valued Devalued Implanting Extracting
good breast bad breast projection introjection
psychoanalysis cinema analysis interpretation
science fiction insight into film truth out of fiction
earth rock rock into earth oil from earth/Russia
non-military military boy into girl blood into syringe
oil bomb bomb into rock father into daughter
It seems now that the whole analytic, interpretative enterprise
(science approaches its object fiction) is thematised
and contained, dramatised and satirised, within the object itself (science fiction). What this perhaps illustrates is the way in
which the undoubtedly illuminating theoretical turns in the works of Freud,
Lacan, Klein and others can too easily give rise to a kind of analytic triumphalism similar to that portrayed in Armageddon. Psychoanalytic interpretation tends to find itself in the texts it analyses. And this finding
itself is how psychoanalysis, as an institution, founds itself rhetorically. According to what we should now recognise as
a circular argument, its truth is an interpretation of the other. But, as Klein herself teaches, our analytic judgements
of the other should rather teach us more about the phantasy
of analysis itself, its projections and introjections and its positive and
negative identifications.