Iakov Levi


AN OBSESSIVE NEUROTIC SYMPTOM

May 1, 2004 (Updated)

Some time ago, a psychoanalyst discussed with me the symptom of one of his patients, who was affected by an obsessive neurosis. The symptom was so intense and charged with energies, to the point of seriously disrupting the patient's daily life.
The patient was a Yeshivah student in his teens. He was so overwhelmed by sense of guilt, that he himself turned to his Rabbi in search for help and relief. Fortunately, the Rabbi in question was an enlightened man, who referred the student to the psychoanalyst.

The symptom, which materialized as an obsessive representation, was as follows:
The patient fantasized of staring at the scrolls of the Torah, while they were open and displayed before all, and at the same time he saw a column of faeces descending on them right in the middle. The symptom took also another form. The patient fantasized of defecating on the open scrolls of the Torah. Being a very religious person, he was so distressed that he tried to avoid or to delay his natural urges of evacuation. In this way, the byproduct of the obsessive representation was also a chronic constipation.
The patient was a very intelligent young man, with no signs of psychosis or hallucinations of any kind. Therefore he was correctly diagnosed as an obsessive neurotic.
When I asked for some more details, I was told that the column of faeces, eventually took the form of a grumus merdae, composed by three pieces overlapping each other.

In Jewish symbolism, the Torah represents the Mother, as is written: "My son, hear the instructions of thy father, and do not forsake the Torah of thy mother" (Prov.,1:8 and 6:20).

Furthermore, In the legends we are told:

In the beginning, two thousands years before the heaven and the earth, seven things were created: the Torah written with black fire on white fire, and lying in the lap of God […] When God resolved upon the creation of the world, He took counsel with the Torah […] The advice of the Torah was given with some reservation. She was sceptical about of an earthly world… (Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews ,The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1998, vol.1, p.3.)
We can see that the Torah is indeed a parental instance, like a wife of God, and therefore mother of man. She underwent a strong process of personification.

In Synagogues, three times a week, the Torah is taken from Sacred Closet (Haharon Haqqodesh), to be slowly undressed by a man, while she is closely held by another man. Then, the scrolls are opened and publicly displayed. Members of the congregation, who are always males after the age of thirteen (the age of the puberty rites), are then called to read from the open Torah, usually holding a silver hand with which they penetrate, in its double meaning, the Sacred Scripture.
Then the Torah is dressed again, and brought among the believers, who kiss the fringes of her dress. Like the Catholics kiss the dress of the Virgin Mary.
The sexual symbolism of the ceremony is obvious and needs no further explanation*.

Henceforth, it became clear that the patient, having experienced a bitter disappointment and an injury from the relationship with his mother when he was at the Oedipal level, had regressed to the anal sadistic stage and expressed - through the symptom - his aggressive drive and hatred towards the mother.
At the conscious level, he was totally unaware of any aggressive feeling towards his mother, of whom he sustained of being very fond and respectful.
The most interesting part was the grumus merdae which took its final form as three overlapping pieces.
Freud showed us that the number 3 is the symbol of the male genital ("Symbolism in Dreams" in Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis 1916-1917, St. Edition, Hogarth Press, London 1963, vol.XV, p.163)

Therefore, it seems that the grumus merdae in its tripartite form is to be interpreted as if the patient, having regressed from the Oedipal level, took with him into the anal stage also the original form of his drive versus his mother, namely, the level of genital penetration.
Symptoms, like dreams, are always a condensation, therefore it cannot be excluded that the libido retained a component from the original layer from which it had regressed. Having experienced an erection towards his mother, he was now staging it again, albeit with the tool of the anal stage triggered by the regression.

However, I suggested another interpretation which, according to the unfolding of the psychoanalytic treatment, proved to be correct.
Freud, in his Sexual Theories of Children (1908), tells us that the child is convinced that women have a penis like the one of the males. Therefore the tripartite grumus merdae, just in the middle of the open and displayed part of the scrolls, symbolizes the female genital. That is also the place, which is touched by the reader through the silver hand during the ceremony. Therefore, a tripartite object exactly in the middle represents the feminine penis, perceived by the child as similar to the one of the male. The patient had, in this way, restored the fantasized feminine penis through the symptom.

At the same time, through the condensation peculiar to symptoms, he expressed his anger and aggressiveness towards the penis of the mother who had rejected him, because that had also been the target of his genital drive.
It is like saying "You see, you have rejected my penis, which was loving and directed at you, and now I am defecating on your penis, as you have "defecated" (= rejected - despised) on mine". The element of retaliation, in every neurotic symptom, is always there.
My explanation did not invalidate the psychoanalyst's. Part of the libido trapped in the symptom proved to be genital. The number 3 of the grumus merdae contained the libido energies of the erection experienced by the child, which had encountered the primal injury. However, the symptom could not be solved until the economic distribution of the libido had been reconnected to all its sources. A symptom is never partially solved because, even if it is deprived from part of the energies nurturing it, it still holds on the grounds of the unsolved parts.

* Theodor Reik has written on the Torah as symbol of the repressed Mother in "The Re-Emerging Mother-Goddess" in Pagan Rites in Judaism, Farrar Straus and Company, New York 1964, pp.66 - 68.



Perversion and neurosis

Jan. 20, 2004.

Now, I would like to add a reflection on why the patient we are dealing with became a neurotic and not a pervert. After all, there are people who reach erotic gratification urinating or defecating on the object of their lust, usually the woman. They are not neurotics but they are pervert. As in the case of our patient, the pervert regresses, too, from the genital stage to the anal stage because of a similar injury suffered from the mother at the Oedipal stage. The difference is, of course, that our patient was inhibited from achieving the regressive erotic gratification by his Super -Ego. The result was not a perversion but a neurotic symptom, which always condenses the drive and the inhibition, and it is a compromise between the two. The aggressive drive is partially discharged, but the inhibiting instance, the Super Ego, prevents real erotic gratification. The outcome is not pleasure, as in the case of the pervert, but suffering.

In both cases, the regression is rooted in the bad relationship with the mother. The difference between the two consists in the inhibiting instance, which in the neurotic is very strong, while in the pervert is very weak or absent. Since the Super -Ego is the internalized image of the father, we can now understand why a Yeshivah student, with all the baggage of inhibitions rooted in Judaism and its Father religion, became a neurotic and not a pervert. After all, the Torah is his Torah (of the Father), as the mother is his woman (of his father), and the child is not allowed to perform on her any act of erotic gratification.
At this point, we can see that concomitantly to the regression to the anal sadistic level, there is also a regression to the Cloacal Theory of children (See: S.Freud, "On the Sexual Theories of Children", in op.cit, vol IX, p.215). As Freud has shown, there is a stage in which children think that the way of procreation is anal. They also begin to suspect that the father has something to do with their mother becoming pregnant, and eventually, particularly in families where the father is the dominant presence, they become convinced that it is the father who has "created" the child. Monotheistic religions reconnect to this fantasy, and God the Father is considered the "only" creator, dismissing and repressing the role of the mother.

In the case of our neurotic patient, the Father was perceived being the only one who is allowed "having intercourse" with his mother. In the regressive fantasy, "having intercourse" is equivalent to defecating on.
Through the translation of the mother into the symbolism of the Torah, the patient on one hand identified with the father defecating on her, but on the other hand, being inhibited from acting out the fantasy by the strong Father presence, tried avoiding the urge in a struggle between drive and counter-drive whose outcome was the symptom and the sufferance.

In perversion, we have two stages: 1) Regression. 2) Fixation of the libido on the regressive level.
In neurosis, the process is more complicated: 1) Regression. 2) Fixation. 3) Guilt. 4) Removal (repression). 5) Displacement (in our case from the mother to the Torah). 5) Emergence of the repressed regressive urge. 6) Symptom.
That is the reason why a pervert will not search for psychoanalytic treatment, while the neurotic sometimes does. The first is not sick, because he is not suffering. He is content with the way he is, and he is able of reaching erotic satisfaction, even if a normal person does not call it that way. The second is suffering, and he is consummated in the struggle between his Id and his Super - Ego.

Fixation

I disagree with those psychoanalysts who think that a fixation happens during the progressing stages of psycho - sexual evolution. Namely, that an anal fixation occurs at the anal stage, or that an oral fixation occurs at the oral stage, and so on, because of deprivation or over - stimulation. Accordingly, some think that a homosexual, or an anal personality (today they are called Narcissistic Personalities, which is more or less equivalent to an anal character), or an oral sadistic personality (today they are called BPD) they never reach the Oedipal stage. In my opinion, such speculations are wrong. Everyone reaches the Oedipal stage, because that is part of the psycho - sexual evolution of the human race, unless they are a drastic case of genetic mutation.

During the progressive stages of evolution, the libido remains free of fluctuating from one stage to another. The fixation occurs only if there is an obstruction of the flowing libido at the Oedipal stage, and the genital level cannot be sustained. The regression is fixated, and the libido ceases of being mobile, because the memory of the injury prevents a return to the higher psycho - sexual level. This is what is called psychic trauma, namely an injury which, preventing the normal flowing of the libido, induces into a regression.

In the same way, there is no "birth trauma", but, with the words of Jones (reporting Freud's opinion on Rank's book The Birth Trauma): "...a painful experience of being born, when suffocation inevitably brings the infant into mortal peril, was a prototype of all later attacks of fear" (Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, abridged, Basic Books, New York 1961 p.418). That "painful experience of being born", when there is regression to that stage, is perceived as a trauma. When Melanie Klein speaks of the new - born that experiences a urge of breaking back into the mother's body, it does not mean that the libido remains fixated. At that stage, the libido, of which the event of birth and the "event" of the regressive urge of returning into the maternal womb are invested, is still mobile. The libido channel is still open into progressive stages. Otherwise, since we all have experienced that painful experience, we all would remain fixated into the so called "birth trauma". It is the injury at a higher level of psycho - sexual evolution, which induces into a fixation at a lower level. If the regression and the fixation cause a Super - Ego induced sense of guilt, the outcome will be a neurosis (fixation at the anal sadistic stage) or a psychosis (fixation at the oral sadistic or intrauterine stage).
The latter, being a regression to a level where there still was not a differentiation between subject and object (the Klenian good - breast, bad - breast) is concomitant to the loss of the Reality Principle.


Links:
Myth and the Cloacal Theory
Rapunzel and Other Stories of Beautiful Hair
Caravaggio and La Madonna del serpente
Caravaggio and the Deposizione nel sepolcro
Who Burns the Books?
Three Women: the Penis

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