The Double Taboo on Touching

A patient suffering from an obsessional neurosis had often evoked the memory of an everlasting nightmare going back to his infancy in which a black cat looked at him with terrifying luminous eyes. A detail, emerging late in the treatment, had helped him understand this better. As a young child, he had always wanted to touch his mother, especially her hair. Nobody could stop him. The doctor consulted had recommended that they buy a cat. And this trick had succeeded! He had thenceforth ceased to annoy his mother, accepting the cat as a substitute.

However, after telling this story in the session, he was overcome by a rush of rage: his quest for meaning and his analysis were not leading to anything concrete, leaving him just as miserable as ever. Fascinated by mythology, he then compared the permanence of his suffering to the punishment of Ixion, who was condemned to turn for eternity, chained to a wheel of fire, for having betrayed his benefactor Zeus by wanting to kiss his wife Hera. The punishment was all the more cruel and humiliating because the cunning Zeus, having guessed his intention, had created a lure, a cloudy form in the shape of Hera, so that Ixion had embraced only a cloudy form.

“Embracing a cloudy form” described both the impossibility of satisfying his oedipal desire for his mother and the frustration inherent in the transference love, both united by the theme of unconscious guilt. The myth of Ixion even illuminated his complaint about analysis, which he described as “a bed of embers”. The patient had found in this myth of sexual desire and its frustration a means of bringing thoughts hitherto forbidden to associativity into contact. Interpretation, wherever it comes from, makes this contact real, this touching of words and being touched by words. The patient understood this well, because he had wanted, in a previous session, to hand the analyst a collection of poems written during his analysis. The latter's refusal to accept them had surprised him, and