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“There is much more continuity between intra-uterine life than the impressive caesura of the act of birth would have us believe.” I don't know if I am misinterpreting this quotation, but I think it is not inappropriate that Freud says, “the impressive caesura … would have us believe”, as if it were the caesura that governed us. This reminds me of the early Homeric description from which one gets the impression that the phrenes is really the origin of human thoughts and ideas – a very reasonable scientific conclusion because it is obvious that when a person expresses himself the diaphragm goes up and down. The diaphragm, the caesura, is the important thing; that is the source of the thinking.
Picasso painted a picture on a piece of glass so that it could be seen on both sides. I suggest that the same thing can be said of the caesura: it depends which way you look at it, which way you are travelling. Psychosomatic disorders, or soma-psychotic – take your choice – the picture should be recognizably the same whether you look at it from the psycho somatic position, or from the soma-psychotic position.
I want you to join me and try to achieve the same depths of ignorance I have managed to reach, to get back to a frame of mind which as nearly as possible is denuded of preconceptions, theories, and so forth. What I am asking is really something of a mental acrobatic feat. I can well appreciate that; it is not easy for people well versed in anatomy, physiology, psychoanalysis and psychiatry to get back to a state of primary ignorance.
I want to say something which sounds just like saying something for the sake of saying it; and perhaps it is. ‘Bloody cunt’. ‘Bloody vagina’. The first phrase is, I suspect, part of a universal language. It is not sexual; it is not physiological or anatomical, not medical; it is
something quite different. But ‘bloody vagina’ might be the sort of thing about which doctors talk, probably obstetricians or gynaecologists. What about the other one?
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