Silences from the Deep: Mapping Being and Nonbeing in The Piano and in a Schizoid Young Woman

I was struck while viewing the film The Piano at the similarity between the heroine of the film and a current patient in analysis with me. Both women had profound disturbances in their ability to speak. The woman in the film, Ada, does not speak at all when we meet her and we learn that she stopped speaking at six years of age. While the precipitating event was her father's sharp rebuke at the dinner table, we learn that her mother had died when she was born and we know that the morals and manners of England in the nineteenth century defined women in very restrictive ways. Women were cut off from public life; they were not allowed to pursue higher education or training and they were not to serve in political offices of any kind including the church. Above all else they were not to speak in public. (Later in this article I will provide a summary of The Piano for those readers who may not have seen it.)

My analytic patient was not mute. However her social and personal speech was severely constrained and was cut off from her emotional life. In the sessions my patient spoke, but her use of language was badly compromised. Her words seemed to float without any connection to her inner world or to either of us. She often lapsed into deadly silences. The presence of a vital and forceful subject would disappear behind a shell that prevented contact and the inner subject was left feeling hopeless and lost. As I thought through the etiology of the mutilated speech of these two women, the functional Ada and my analysand Molly, I was confronted with the interrelationship between prevailing gender concepts and restricted subjectivity, as well as their personal pain and schizoid withdrawal.

As we know, Freud had made a case for women's inferior intellect and character. Freud tied women's lesser abilities to the absence of a penis or an already existing castration. The zeitgeist of his society and culture still based many of its beliefs and mores on the superiority of the male gender.