It's Out There Somewhere

Rosebud? Maybe it's something he couldn't get or something he lost

Orson Welles (Citizen Kane, 1941).

The absence of the satisfaction hoped for, the continued denial of the desired baby, must in the end lead the small lover to turn away from his hopeless longing Sigmund Freud (The Dissolution Of the Oedipus Complex, 1924).

Oedipus represents something like a high tide in the development of our capacity for frustration. It's here that we find Freud's small hopeless lover washed up on the shoreline, the flotsam and jetsam left with him are the tools he'll use to get by in this new land. The land before - dwindling to the point where sea melds with horizon – was a life where a completeness of satisfaction seemed obtainable. It's still out there somewhere.

Frustration—which in this essay I use as a polite word for oedipal rage—has an impressive provenance in psychoanalytic thinking. If we weren't frustrated Freud's entire theory wouldn't get going. As Adam Phillips points out; ‘without incestuous desire the Freudian unconscious doesn't make sense, the unacceptable has to start somewhere and it's incest that sets it off.’ (Phillips, 1995: 10). In Freud's scheme also, it is frustration that leads the small hopeless lover to accept reality over hoped for pleasure, establish a superego. Klein and Bion considered the ability to bear frustration, (to not do something terrible with our oedipal longings like have a jealous rage), was what enables a thinking capacity, to make connections and links, to not go mad. Our experience of frustration, which can be so maddening, might be something that saves us from insanity. This begins to sound like a cautionary tale; keep taking the medicine rather than suffer even worse consequences—castration, murder, madness. Perhaps frustration, this fundamental human experience that Freud in his Project (1950) suggests has to be felt

in order to survive, has something more attractive going for it. Perhaps their betrayal of us, (our parents), our wretched casting out by them, has another function. Feeling frustrated – which here seems to be at best about being led astray, at worst duped - has another function. It's not just about avoiding catastrophe, it's also about the potential for pleasure; we have to be frustrated because without frustration how can we experience hope? Hope is a precondition for frustration; you have to want something to feel frustrated by not getting it. So a life that avoids frustration may also be a life that avoids hope.

Adam Phillips speaks of tantrums as ‘the magical act of a desperate person’ (Phillips, 2013) The babies discovered in Ceausescu's orphanages lay listless, undemanding; for them there was no illusion of frustration's magic power. ‘Helplessness is an experience that is available only to those who were once omnipotent; lack is an experience that is available only to those who were once, if only in fantasy, complete. …it's the wound of need that constitutes the human subject’ (Phillips 2010: 161). Bion's inference that all babies are psychotic reflects something of the omnipotent infant's refusal to accept that hope can remain frustrated.

Anne Patchett's brilliant novel State of Wonder (Patchett, 2012) is all about hope and the dangers of getting what we yearn for; the boy hero (aptly named Easter), epitomises hope yet he is cruelly sacrificed; the tyrannical septuagenarian spinster becomes pregnant and gives birth—mother and baby die gruesomely. It's the young female heroine—a virgin who never gets the man she yearns for - who remarks, ‘hope is like having a fish hook your mouth,’ that finds her way through the story and survives to experience a type of hopeful future. So what are we hoping for?

Oedipus is about something we at least once had the illusion of once having had. When Winnicott remarked that the child who steals show signs of hope, he was referring to a sign that the child hasn't given up, is attempting to retrieve something, to ‘reach back to a time before the deprivation’. (Winnicott D, 1990: 93) It is implicit here that hope is a good thing and that it might lead to a recovery of something good. Do

we steal, as Winnicott suggests, in an attempt to get back what's lost, to be re- found? Perhaps what the child is looking for harks back to some distant forgotten knowledge of something good, of what Freud describes in his Project for a Scientific Psychology as ‘an experience of satisfaction.’ (Freud, 1950: 316.)

In his Project Freud precisely describes the process, of what occurs when a baby feels discomfort, (stimulus). He describes the sequence from stimulus to hope and so to frustration, which invokes response through provision, and so ultimately to satisfaction:

The removal of the stimulus can only be effected by an intervention which will temporarily stop the release of quantity in the interior of the body…this involves …the supply of nourishment or the proximity of the sexual object…, the attention of an experienced person is drawn to the child's condition by a discharge taking place along the path of internal change (child's screaming). This path of discharge thus acquires an extremely important secondary function- viz, of bringing about an understanding with other people; and the original helplessness of human beings is thus the source of all moral motives. When the helper has carried out the action on behalf of the helpless subject, the baby is in a position to remove the endogenous stimuli. This total event then constitutes an experience of satisfaction which has the most momentous consequences in the functional development of the individual (Freud 1950: 316).

The baby not getting what he hopes for, those feelings that frustration invoke, are vital links in the chain of consequences which lead to the ‘experience of satisfaction’. The consequences of this entire process are momentous because the experience of getting it, (which Freud regards also as our first moral experience), embeds an expectation, yet our development is all about getting less and less of it. We adapt to not getting it. Freud suggests that this adapting and the feelings invoked by it, reach a type of crystallization during what he calls the resolution of the oedipal complex.

When Laplanche and Pontalis suggest that ‘the relationship between the child and his parents is destined to be internalised and survive in the structure of the personality’(Laplanche, J & Pontalis, J-B 1973 :286), they imply that what we felt then provides the markers of how we conduct adult relations. By age 5 there's a blind imprint. The Oedipus complex is about how we bore the cultivation, and subsequent rejection, of our incestuous desires. Whether these feelings of rejection, rage, loss are ever abolished as Freud suggests, isn't really clear. Perhaps this is because this first moral act, that gave the feeling of complete satisfaction, was also the start of a most powerful seduction, a cultivation of incestuous desire for our parent. ‘Here’, said Freud of his seduction theory ‘I had stumbled for the first time on the Oedipus complex’, (Freud, 1926: 33).

I am using the term primal seduction to describe a fundamental situation in which the adult proffers to the child verbal and non verbal signifiers pregnant with unconscious sexual signification (Laplanche, 1989: 126).

Were we cruelly seduced, as Laplanche suggests, into believing that a feeling of complete satisfaction might be for life? Our endless attempts to retrieve that feeling through all the things we can do with our frustration—tantrums, furies, spiteful rages deceptions—don't disappear easily. As Laplanche would have it in his reformulation of Freud's theory of seduction; ‘The first crime, the origin of sexual action, is not on the side of the child as Freud claims, but on the side of the parent’, (Laplanche, 2010). So the child is cultivated, for a time there was everything to hope for.

So it's both a loss - the wound of oedipal frustration has to be born, in order that we adapt to reality, for our sanity, for the survival of the human race - but it's also a gain because frustration means we know about wishes, wants, imaginings, even magic. Frustration keeps hope alive. It's the nature of the oedipal encounter and configuration, the roughness of the awakening, or the form the rejection took, that throws light on the reasons for our adult limitations; for why something may be

unbearable.

Charles Foster Kane, an enormously wealthy media proprietor, was given up by his mother age five. Kane, now a recluse, lives out his final years in a palatial estate named Xanadu; a ‘No Trespassing’ sign on the gates. On the brink of death, he lies in bed clasping a snow globe and murmers ‘Rosebud’ as the globe slips from his dying hand and smashes to the floor. Kane's death is a global news sensation. Reporter Jerry Thompson investigates Kane's private life and attempts to unravel the enigma, the meaning behind his dying word. As the film ends, it's revealed that Rosebud was the name of the sled from Kane's childhood – an allusion to the only time in his life that Kane was truly happy.

Rosebud was Kane's boyhood sled—the sled abandoned in the snow on the day his parents abruptly gave him up. Something profound eluded Kane, he is never satisfied; the man who had everything couldn't get what he wished for, something he once had. As a substitute, or a protection from the unbearable knowledge that he'd lost something forever, Kane attempted to reconstruct it. Xanadu, Gracelands, Neverland; worlds of zero frustration, doomed attempts to magic the impossible, to re-enter a lost paradise. Perhaps the way Kane was frustrated, the crudeness and cruelty of the rejection, meant the cut was too deep, the wound remained open, and open wounds need regular attendance. One way Kane retraced, tried to return to that blissful state of primary satisfaction, was by creating a pleasure dome mansion Xanadu named after Coleridge's Kubla Khan:

Kane's palace Xanadu is named after Coleridge's Kubla Khan—a vision of paradise. Lacan's mirror phase, (occurring around about the same time in the child as the Kleinian depressive phase), when the child sees an

illusion of something that's complete, is the point at which Lacan might say, the child sets off on a never ending voyage of desiring what cannot be had.

Kane's attempt to return, ‘to make the dim and lovely forms unite’, was doomed to failure. Kane died a lonely death, all relationships trespassers on his grief. He may have lost the object of his desire in a riddle—the riddle of the unconscious - but he never lost his desire for it.

If we do not lose our incestuous desires, our desire for something we can never have, it may be because frustration is a constitutive human experience. Described in Freud's Project, frustration is the link that led from the feeling of helplessness, to the moral act, which led to the momentous experience of satisfaction that we seem never able to obliterate from our memory. In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxieties Freud writes about the biological factor—how, in comparison with most other animals there is such ‘long period of time during which the young of the human species is in a condition of helplessness and dependence’, (Freud, 1926: 161). Over and over that process, the chain of emotions set off by the state of helplessness, then frustration and so to satisfaction is, according to Freud, utterly essential for survival. It had to happen for the biological survival of the human race. What's more, Freud suggests that frustration is integrally linked to the source of all moral motives.

The period of helplessness wasn't only prolonged, it was intertwined with a process of seduction. Laplanche remarks that Freud ‘recognised late all that was positive and foreboding in the seduction theory’, (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973: 282). If we go with Laplanche's theory of seduction; encouraged to hope, seduced into believing that the satisfaction of our desire had a potentiality then this prolonged situation of primal seduction with its implantment from the other of unconscious

sexual signifiers, was necessary for survival. It was too lengthy, too embedded with undecipherable message, for there to be such a thing as an abolition of those feelings of memory and desire that Freud speaks of in ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’. ‘The process if ideally carried out is equivalent to a destruction and an abolition of the complex’, (Freud, 1924: 176). But there's little chance of abolition - the hope stays alive, and just as well because hope is not just about remembrance of things past, it can lead to new beginnings. We don't give up on hope, not even if we want to.

Speaking of our unconscious oedipal desires Bollas coins the term ‘unthought known’ a sort of preverbal, unschematised early experiencing that's barred to conscious thought but determines unconscious behavior. Ronald Britton describes how our oedipal desires are harbored in the unconscious; ‘The parental relationship has been registered but is now denied and defended against by what I call an Oedipal Illusion’, (Britton, 1989: 85). Laplanche and Pontalis describe ‘a fantasy world, not unlike a nature reserve, set up to preserve the original natural state of the country’, (Laplanche & Pontalis 1968). Life thrives in a nature reserve, the conditions are optimum, and perhaps that's why Freud saw the Oedipus Complex as not limited to normal development, but also as something that was at the heart of psychopathology formation. Speaking of the obsessional's ambivalence for his parent, Freud describes how ‘the hate, safe from the dangers of being destroyed by the operatives of consciousness is able to persist and even to grow’, (Freud, 1905: 116). Little Hans' phobia lay in the fact that he repressed his fear of castration and oedipal rage against his father by developing a phobia instead for horses, but he kept his rage and fear alive in his unconscious.

The experience of frustration is what we know after helplessness and before satisfaction. We have made a riddle of our feelings of frustration, of our fury, our hatred. It was barred from Kane's conscious thought; even as he lay dying it was a sledge Kane called for, not his mother. The riddle Orson Welles sets out for journalist Jerry Thompson to unravel is that of Kane's unconscious – how did Kane stop the knowledge of the frustration of his incestuous desire from becoming conscious? Loss, rage,

longing. Incestuous, unbearable feelings. It's turned into a riddle because we can never go there, turn back, must never get what we want, and yet we never stop wanting it.

‘In the 20s everything had the oedipal complex at its core, yet I knew the troubles started earlier’, (Winnicott, 1962: 172). Winnicott was talking about frustration's complex relationship with satisfaction. The way our incestuous desire becomes an enigma or an ‘unthought known’ is what sets us up: it's how w e have dealt with that frustration that defines it's clandestine influence. Winnicott believed it was a good enough mother that sets the child up: ‘The good-enough mothers…starts off with an almost complete adaptation to her infant's needs, and as time proceeds she adapts less and less completely, gradually, according to the infant's growing ability to tolerate the results of frustration’, (Winnicott, 1972: 95). Winnicott's good enough mother spoons out doses of frustration according to what she feels her child can bear In this way she oversees an environment in which the infant might invent, create, can become, because it's an environment where the doses of frustration can be borne; the known does not need to be thought about. Winnicott's attention to the capacity to be alone is essentially connected to this.

This good enough person upon whom the child can depend manages the child's feelings of frustration in such a way that the child can adapt his expectations of omnipotence. Wilfred Bion had a more dramatic take; to avoid frustration, to fail to adapt, might be the start of a potentially catastrophic journey that; ‘involves the assumption of omniscience as a substitute for learning from experience and of thoughts and thinking’, (Bion, 1961: 112). These are the omnipotent expectations of satisfaction that are set up in the chain of reactions Freud speaks of in The Origins of Psychoanalysis. Expectations embedded long before Freud's grandson played fort da—a paradigm moment in Freud's thinking on frustration and satisfaction - and the emergence of any principle of reality. This may be why Winnicott was so sure that

…there is no possibility whatsoever for the infant to proceed from the pleasure principle to the reality principle…unless there is a

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good enough mother (Winnicott, 1972: 28).

Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Bion, Lacan; there's some convergance. Unless Freud's small lover can turn away from his longing there is a more ominous potentiality. Each make connections between the negotiation of frustration and considerations on sanity.

‘The fundamental thing, and the criterion for all later capacity for adapting to reality is the degree in which they are able to tolerate the deprivations that result from the oedipal situation’, (Klein, 1926: 128). Fifty years earlier Freud was theorizing that if disturbing, (frustrating) ideas couldn't have emotional charge displaced, (ie repressed), they might be totally abolished, as if cast out of the psyche; ‘the ego rejects the incompatible idea together with its affect, and behaves as if the idea had never occurred to the ego at all. But the moment this has been successfully done the subject is in psychosis’ (Freud, 1924: 149).

Ronald Britton explores deprivations, frustrations, intolerable thoughts, from a Kleinian perspective:

If this link between the parents can be tolerated it provides a prototype for an object relation of a third kind in which the child is witness and not a participant. A third position comes into existence providing us with a capacity for seeing ourselves in interaction with others and for entertaining another point of view whilst retaining our own. With the psychotic this may not be possible as he lacks the third position (Britton, 1989: 83).

Part of what Britton suggests here is that unless we can bear the frustration there's an incapacity for thinking. This is one view. Lacan makes clear that the key is not in the content of the disturbing idea, but in the mechanism of its rejection, what he called foreclosure.

But without frustration there's no need for the reality principle to triumph over the pleasure principle. I cannot have my parent as a lover so I must look elsewhere for what I can realistically get. Adam Phillips in his essay ‘Negative Capabilities’ writes:

What we never lose, Freud insists, is the wish for complete satisfaction. It is not desiring per se that's the problem, it is being able to bear and bear with the inevitable repetition of incomplete satisfaction (Phillips, 2010).

Unless we feel helpless we don't stand a chance of feeling satisfaction – helplessness and the feelings of frustration invoked in turn by the state of helplessness is part of the process by which we get what we want. Being incapable (helpless), is a negative capability because it's something that can get us what we want. It is also a point of entry into a moral universe; the child needs and cannot get it alone and someone thinks it would be good for them and good for the child to help the child get what it wants. But how to advocate helplessness and its accompanying desperate feelings of frustration as a desirable state to be in? Why in particular, would the victims of abuse, people who seem trapped in a time warp where helplessness is linked to a horror, how might someone with this experience think helplessness might be desirable? Despite efforts to protect themselves from a place of helplessness, the feeling is repeatedly returned to – or perhaps never left. Maybe it's a place that cannot be left because it's only there that can be found hope. Hope that a need will be satisfied.

In Adam Phillips' essay on Negative Capability, (Phillips, 2010), he's suggesting that if we can't be helpless we cannot be satisfied, but also we cannot be frustrated. And if we cannot be frustrated, we cannot not get what we want, and if we cannot tolerate not getting what we want, we can never ever emerge on the other side of the stormy seas, the seductive paradise islands, or the deadly whirlpools of the Oedipus complex in a vessel that's still serviceable for use and adapted to reality.

So a capacity for incapacity keeps us sane and hopeful? Frustration; hateful but vital – it kick-starts the incest taboo…it may even help us stay sane ….and it keeps hope alive. Hope after all, was all that remained in Pandora's box.