Bizarre Objects in the Cinema of David Lynch

Just how is it that a ceiling fan, an appliance designed to aid in relaxation and comfort by cooling the home, can seemingly manifest the very essence of evil and foreboding?

I suggest that through a brief survey of object-relations theories in psychoanalysis we can find some compelling answers to this question. To fully grasp the argument I’m about to make we must first have some acquaintance with Melanie Klein’s important contributions to our understanding of schizoid mechanisms (schizoid as in to ‘split’). In Klein’s formulation, beginning in early childhood, unbearable affects are defended against by the fracturing experience into what she called ‘part-objects’. These are typically split representations of other people, usually as all good or all bad, idealized or devalued, a source of pleasure or of agony. Readers familiar with Hegel or Derrida will instantly recognize this as binary thinking in need of dialectical synthesis and transcendence.

However, the trouble is the complex and disappointing nature of reality can often be too much to bear even for those equipped with a rudimentary education in dialectics. By this I simply mean that some affects are perceived as so sinister and threatening that they cannot be accommodated by the ego-self and are liable to become split off with great fervour. For Wilfred Bion, a protege of Klein, this situation differs from the part objects she described in a few fundamental ways. For Bion, this more extreme variety of splitting is central to his theory of psychosis wherein those psychic structures responsible for keeping the subject in touch with reality and morality are violently attacked and externalized.

Although they are in this way obscured, these elements do not simply vanish, rather they are projected out into the external world. This results in the uncanny state of mind wherein the subject may perceive inanimate objects as carrying certain alienated elements of his or her own psychic structure.

“If the piece of personality is concerned with sight, the gramophone when played is felt to be watching the patient; if with hearing, then the gramophone when played is felt to be listening to the patient. The object, angered by being engulfed, swells up, so to speak, and suffuses and controls the piece of personality that engulfs it: to that extent the particle of personality has become a thing … The consequences for the patient are now that he moves, not in a world of dreams, but in a world of objects which are ordinarily the furniture of dreams” (Bion, Differentiation of the psychotic from the non-psychotic, 1957, p. 51).

“We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives inside the dream” – Lines delivered within a dream sequence by Monica Bellucci playing herself during an episode of Twin Peaks: The Return.

In Lynch’s Twin Peaks the notorious ceiling fan which apparently comes to life every time Laura Palmer suffers incestuous abuse at the hands of her father Leland can be viewed from this perspective as a bizarre object which contains a plethora of projections of family pathology and casts a very dark shadow. The suggestion that the fan’s electrical current is the medium by which the evil spirit BOB possesses Leland during his acts of abuse, and his use of it’s blank noise for the purpose of secrecy, shows it to be a vessel for the affects generated in the conflict between the lecherous desires of his id and the moral masochism of his super-ego.

Lacan on Drugs: Substance as Sinthome

In Lacan’s 1975 seminar on his theory of the symptom, he relies upon the archaic latin sinthome to differentiate his own views from the biologism of earlier psychoanalytic formulations. For Lacan, there is nothing instinctual in the symptom. Rather, it is a function of language and subjectivity. In his earlier work, Lacan thought this meant that symptomatology signified something for the subject and thus could be deciphered, interpreted, made sense of and thusly transcended. However in his later work, Lacan characterizes the sinthome as ‘unanalyzable’. This internal tension within Lacan’s oeuvre should certainly give us pause and I will try to weigh his claims in relation to my view that the substance of addiction shares this structure. I think we can agree that we see distinct characterological traits and patterns amongst users of different substances. Indeed it is a pop-culture trope that the substances themselves seem to have a character of their own and are often anthropomorphized in film, television, and literature. This would seem to me to suggest an argument that the addictive symptom or sinthome is engaged in signification. Further to this is the whole vexed issue of drug paraphernalia, which can be said to possess certain psychosexual characteristics such as the orality of smoking or the penetrative nature of syringe use. To complicate matters further, there are aspects of Lacan’s later view which also seem to apply. For instance, his notion that the sinthome functions like a suture knotting together the three orders of the psyche (i.e. the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real) and protecting the subject from fragmentation. As a result of Lacan’s late assertion that meaning already occurs at the intersection of the imaginary and the symbolic, he views the symptom/sinthome as beyond meaning. I think this is perhaps where I diverge with his later view in favour of the original concept, however he does continue to characterize the sinthome as a trace of the subject’s schema for enjoyment and the strong association between intoxication and pleasure seems to evidence the claim that substances of addiction may be conceived in this way also. Therefor I propose an integration of Lacan’s versions of the symptom/sinthome by suggesting that the sinthome is able to prevent the unraveling of psychic structures by performing a delimiting function, that it is it works precisely to suggest particular meanings where unbearable affects and a sense of meaning-less-ness threaten to overwhelm the subject’s capacity to think. Here I owe much to Wilfred Bion’s 1959 paper Attacks on Linking where psychopathology is described as a sort of endogenous albeit unconscious subversion of associative cognition. It seems that intoxication, by loosening associations without altogether disrupting them, is able to serve the defensive function of mediating meanings for the subject who cannot bear the pain of facing reality nor the dis-integration involved in a complete regressive flight from it.

In Defence of Psychoanalysis: Why Social Work Needs the Unconscious

Central to the profession of social work are certain core values such as social justice and solidarity with the oppressed and/or marginalized. This implies a major commitment to the transformation of society and opposition to social structures which undermine the rights and freedoms of individuals and groups. Many of the injustices we militate against  through our work can be theorized as taking place within society’s responses to that which is perceived as other. While developmental psychology and psychoanalysis in particular have historically raised the ire of feminists and others for engaging in so-called ‘mother-blaming’ or ‘parent-bashing’ when examining the object-relational impact of what is, inevitably for all of us, a flawed family experience. Inquiry of this kind can shed light on some of the origins of our whole difficulty with otherness, through the explanatory concept of transference (i.e. the myriad ways in which past relationships can haunt our present ones). Perhaps those who criticize Freud and Klein on points such as this have failed to grasp the universalist spirit in which their claims are made. If we wish to fight racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism and the like then we must be equipped with a non-naive theory of human nature. A theory that is able to comprehensively approach the pathological narcissism which is fundamental to the formulation of prejudices and identitarianism. I suggest that psychoanalysis is precisely this theory. Psychoanalysis teaches that we are deeply irrational beings possessing destructive and aggressive drives, as well as needs for attachment and the capacity to love. It is therefor natural that hate is a strong current within society, and that thin-skinned egos cling to identity in the face of outward challenges to self-esteem and self-concept. It should give us great hope that all this may be worked through with effort but first we must come to terms with the fear that a majority of relational life springs from somewhere beyond our conscious awareness or control.

Erich Fromm’s Post-Lapsarian Ontology of Addiction

“Alcoholism and drug addiction are the forms which the individual chooses in a non-orgiastic culture. In contrast to those participating in the socially patterned solution, such individuals suffer from guilt feelings and remorse. While they try to escape from separateness by taking refuge in alcohol or drugs, they feel all the more separate after the orgiastic experience is over, and thus are driven to take recourse to it with increasing frequency and intensity” (Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, 1956, p. 12).

The above quotation is certainly compelling and it is indeed possible that addiction today stands in to replace the ecstatic tribal rituals of the primordial past. The sense of separateness to which Fromm refers is nearly theological in it’s parallels with the biblical doctrine of the lapse or ‘fall of man’. In Fromm’s formulation man is irreconcilably split from nature through his unique linguistic capacities. The development of symbolic consciousness has come at a certain cost and has alienated us from the absolute. This inaccesable and evasive fundament of experience has been called by many names by different theorists. Emmanuel Levinas called it ‘totality’. For Lacan it was ‘the real’. Wilfred Bion gave it a letter ‘O’ for ‘the ineffable’. However, if we frame this absence at the basis of addiction totally in terms of the escape from separateness we are left with the problem that most substances of abuse offer us no such transcendence of individuality. In fact on the contrary, many of the more addictive substances can be said to intensify the sense of individuality rather than nullify it, these substances of abuse can even be characterized as amplifying narcissism understood in this instance as the exaggeration of egotism and grandiosity. To Fromm’s credit however, his discussion of guilt feelings and remorse in addiction in contrast to socially sanctioned methods for escaping separateness demonstrates his insight into the role of social stigma and shame in the perpetuation of intractable drug taking behaviour.

Psychotherapy and Issues of Substance

“Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward, you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough, or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.”

— A love letter from Freud to his fiancée.

If we read Freud’s words above through the lens of his own theories, we can surely observe that substance-use involves cathexis or libidinal investment. This to say that a user’s attachment to the drug almost approaches an identification with it. He wishes to incorporate the psychoactive effects into his own ego or self-concept. This has important ramifications for clinical work with addictions where intoxication has mediated an individual’s psychic experience for lengthy periods of time. If we are to remove the substance prematurely by demanding abstinence as a condition of treatment for example, we may risk identity diffusion and malignant regression in our patient. Therefor, one of the most important questions a clinician can ask in initial consultations with an addict is to simply explain what he obtains through his use and to give his view of the role of these effects in his life. Through this inquiry we may gain an understanding of the symbolic value of the drug and begin to place this material in connection with the patient’s history and present conflicts.

 

On mathemes, graffiti and community (un)consciousness.

According to the French psychoanalyst Serge Leclaire who broke with his mentor Jaque Lacan around 1975, Lacan’s ‘mathemes’ for representing the intersubjective components of discourse should be considered as nothing more than graffiti despite their apparent didactic value. This strikes me as intellectually dishonest for a host of reasons, not least of which is the obscured Lacanian influence on Leclaire’s own theoretical work. Moreover, it occurs to me that Leclaire’s statement itself requires analysis. Graffiti is a psychosocially significant medium. If one intends to study unconscious forces on a communitarian scale it would be wise to begin with the local graffiti because it functions to confront the observer with precisely that which cannot be openly spoken in these social spaces. Graffiti is therefor a form of cultural expression which allows for a return of the repressed. In this light Leclaire’s devaluation appears banal. Is it not possible that working with the mathemes to analyze discourse may afford similar opportunities for insight?