Stuttering

Aren’t we all somehow the toad buried alive under the stone?

This is an image offered by Frau Emmy von N, one of Freud’s first patients, in his 1895 case study with Josef Breuer as a metaphor for her psychic position. Emmy’s image of the toad is one that has never left me. For me, it captures not only what becomes of the psyche through trauma, excruciating losses, and unimaginable circumstances, but what our psychic apparatus à la fin at times precisely wishes for. To be still, silent, unexposed. To be spared the friction of connection, of linking, of binding and the ambivalence of desire. To be released of linking, of pleasure, of love, and of the erotic.

The buried/alive toad is not simply a victim; the unfortunate situation she is finding herself in is part and parcel of the core and essence of her being. It is an unconscious fantasy, a way of surviving just beneath life, in retreat from the unbearable risk of fully being alive. For within Freudian metapsychology there is nothing more horrifying than pleasure.

The wish is not to die, but to attack linking, to slip beneath the weight of the symbolic, to no longer be a fully speaking/desiring subject.

Bion’s (1959) “Attacks on Linking”: “the destructive attacks which the patient makes on anything which is felt to have the function of linking one object with another” (p. 308). So not on the object but on linking. To link, for Bion, is to bring thoughts and feelings into relation, to allow meaning/thinking to form and transform. But there are times when that capacity is handicapped not merely under unbearable or traumatic events but under the most ordinary of life’s circumstances, when our psychic apparatus, unconsciously wishes to unbind, to sever its own capacity to think, to symbolize, to be in relation to an “Other.” This is what I wish for us all to acknowledge first and foremost, this human, all too human, condition inherent in our being. There is a fundamental inescapable wish in all of us to disconnect, certainly