Turning Heads: A Commentary on ‘A Man Who Was Tied up’

We owe many thanks to Dr Susann Heenen-Wolff for her clear account of the analysis of Mr B. Their work together appears to have fostered a significant change in the psychic structure of her patient, and one she illustrates by presenting a series of dreams occurring in sessions over a period of five years. We begin with Mr B's initial psychically real self-perception, “parts of me are dead,” or, in another possible translation, “parts of me have died.”1 If we are to trust, as I shall, to the revelatory power of the contiguity of the author's sentences, this decline unto death begins in adolescence when Mr B's hair thins and falls out and he withdraws from the social (though not the academic) world into himself. This moment coincides with that period when he might otherwise have explored his sexuality, consolidated his self-and object-representations, established a boundary between them and reworked the resolution of his oedipal conflict. Instead he withdraws. One imagines him blocked up, unable to move forward, unable to live except by dying; however, although he detests belonging to the masculine gender and believes male sexual desire to be evil, he has no doubt about his belonging to that gender, has married and has a child.

One wonders what, in particular, made him choose this moment to begin an analysis. In the account of the first consultation, the description of the dying and aging of parts of himself is associated with the dying of his mental functions: he hardly ever dreams. He also eschews a traditional paternal role: he is a teacher, runs the household and cares for his son while his wife has the more demanding job. We learn as well, in order, that his parents are strict Protestants, from a rural part of the country, distant and cold with him; that his mother defers to and serves his father and is also ill with what I take to be multiple sclerosis. In the French text, there is some ambiguity as to which parent is ill. Emotional coldness, strict morality, sel