The good old myth about the psychoanalytic consulting room as a space for people to complain about their mothers seems not only like the return of the repressed but also like the revenge of this repressed in light of Yael Pilowsky Bankirer's new book. In it, she psychoanalyses psychoanalysis and its tremendous difficulty in conceptualising the maternal, and the constant effort it has made to negate or deny maternal power.
In incredible detail and backed up by a theoretical proficiency to evoke envy, Pilowsky Bankirer shows how Freud created an elaborate theoretical movement in many of his texts that amounts to double matricide. Freud's constituting myth, the Oedipal one, is portrayed as a mechanism to separate the boy from his mother and his identification with her; a rebirth into the masculine designed to console the boy for not being able to be the mother by murdering her subjectivity and positioning her as an object of desire. Moreover, the Oedipal myth negates the mother's ongoing importance even after she is supposedly already dangling dead from the ceiling, silencing not only her death but her survival of it. But somehow in the Freudian text a curious trace, stela, key fossil of this process is left behind: circumcision. Through following the mentions of circumcision in the Freudian corpus and through paying close attention to what Freud leaves by the side of the road – footnotes, ideas he raises and rejects, and misinterpretations of his patient's speech – she shows us the path on which he was lost.
The book is divided into three parts. The first deals with three of Freud's case studies, the second with Totem and Taboo, and the third with Moses and Monotheism. This structure allows Pilowsky Bankirer to write two parallel narratives: one is a history of the psyche and the other is a history of culture.
The three case studies of the Wolf Man, Little Hans, and Leonardo shed light on different key concepts of Freud. The Wolf Man is read
as a man who identifies with his mother but at the same time cannot bear this identification, as it posits him as castrated, vulnerable, and passive. One of the highlights of this chapter is the many, many times in which Pilowsky Bankirer finds actual castration threats, which Freud sees as coming from the father and constituting the castration anxiety of the Oedipus complex, actually coming from the women in the young Wolf Man's life. She then analyses the way Freud refuses to concede even this power to the mother. The positioning of the father as the castrating subject, according to Freud, is our phylogenetic inheritance, a remnant of an archaic history when the father would punish his son by castrating him, supposedly to defend his place. This is later substituted by the ‘lighter version of castration’, that of circumcision, but creates the same effect: a dichotomy of male/female, active/passive, subject/object, doer and done to. Trouble begins when the boy must choose a side with which to identify, instead of being able to identify with both positions or not seeing them as binary oppositions.
This inability to remain in the playful, triangular, multi-universe of identification with the mother by grown-up men, as opposed to boys, is brought to full light in the analysis of the case of Little Hans. Pilowsky Bankirer shows how Freud and the boy's father make it a project to turn the mother from an object of identification to an object of desire, even before Hans develops his horse phobia; and how both collude to hide Hans's matricidal jealousy of his mother and her pregnancy under the mound of the Oedipus complex and imagined patricide.
In her reading of Freud's Leonardo, Pilowsky Bankirer shifts our attention from what Freud saw as central – the absence of his father in the first years of his life and the overbearing presence of his mother – to the other trauma of Leonardo's early history: the sudden separation from his mother when his father abruptly decided to claim him, somewhere between the ages of three and five. The chapter wonders why Freud would choose a poor, simple woman as a representation of the phallic mother. It exposes what the baby and perhaps Freud cannot tolerate: the imagined self-sufficiency of the mother not posing a danger to the male child or adult. The discussion of Freud's refusal to reach a
depressive position, if you will, carries on to the next parts of the book, dedicated to his socio-anthropological studies, Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism.
In the chapter dedicated to Totem and Taboo, Pilowsky Bankirer tries to show how the questions raised by Freud about the ‘universal’ ban on murder and incest shift when one (individually or as a culture) remembers that one has a mother, not just a father. She uses Julia Kristeva, Jessica Benjamin, Amber Jacobs, and Juliet Mitchell to think of the mother as the one who connects not only the siblings but also the father and the child. She explores how the law of the mother, based on maternal subjectivity, can create some cracks in the psychoanalytic palace through which light can come in. If dependency on the mother is not repressed, what happens to the idea that the taboo of incest relies on the power of the father, that the father is the one who introduces the child to the symbolic order and imagines the Other as intolerable?
In the longest and most touching part of the book, ‘Following the Jewish Key Fossil’, Pilowsky Bankirer shows how Freud hides a persecuted little circumcised boy behind the facade of the great man, the lawgiver, the ‘orphan’ reared by fate, Moses. In this chapter, circumcision emerges as a way for the Jews to both remember and forget Egypt and with it the maternal as the real marker of Jewish identity. Following Freud's idea that Moses was a follower of Akhenaton and his monotheistic reform, prescribed on the flesh by the removal of the foreskin, she shows how Freud ‘forgets’ not only the agency of women in raising and saving Moses (both his mothers, his sister, his wife), but also the presence of circumcision in Judaism before Moses. She shows how Freud posits as the hero, his hero, the man who rises against the ‘father’ and wins, while the story he relies on in the book of Exodus is one in which the collaboration of two mothers, two mythical families, is what allows him to thrive. She exposes Freud's holding on to circumcision as a way to hold the relationship to his Moses, an Egyptian who did not know oppression, at a time when he, a Jew, was in the wilderness. Circumcision comes to mark the loss of the mother: be it Egypt or Vienna, and coming under the wings of the father, wilfully or not.
The book as a whole is a journey through Freud's psychoanalytic paths of amputating maternal subjectivity from the male psyche, and the traces and hidden trails left behind to tell a different story. It is also a book with a promise: if the maternal were allowed to operate, if the triangular space were to remain open, if the law of the mother enforced by symbolic power and not violence were to be given a chance, maybe we could stop wounding ourselves and inflicting wounds on others to remember who we are.
Psychoanalytic Explorations of the Masculine and the Maternal: Uncovering the Image of Circumcision in Freud’s Works by is published by Routledge (2024),