octulpemama: paranoia and foreclosure
Music: Broken Social Scene: Feel Good Lost (2001)
Nadya Suleman, the now infamous Alien Breeder who spawned eight children in January, has fired her free nursing help. Today the Associated Press reports that Suleman believed the nurses were spying on her, presumably to collect information to report to authorities about her unfitness to mother. To the psychosis of overproduction, then, we can add another classic symptom: paranoia.
In general, paranoia is a symptom of the enflamed ego. Because of its onerous role, the ego is fundamentally a paranoiac agency and this quality is exacerbated in psychosis. From a Lacanian perspective, obvious paranoia is a classic consequence of foreclosure, which is the denial of the paternal metaphor. In plainer English, foreclosure is a denial of the daddy function (the "no" of language) and an inability to separate from mommy. Foreclosure is akin to refusing that the father exists (imaginary, symbolic, and real). It's akin to never wanting to leave the womb, metaphorically speaking. This results in a disavowal of speech and the symbolic.
This week for the psychoanalysis seminar we are reading Julia Kristeva's challenging tome, Black Sun, where she advances a theory of melancholia and depression. It's tough reading both because Kristeva can really get her jargon on, and because the material she's working with is . . . uh, depressing. As I was reading along, it occurred to me that (a) I've been depressed before, but I've never had melancholia (as if I have ever lost my speech); (b) I've known a few, severely depressed melancholics in my life, two of whom were my "significant others" (reading Kristeva describe the symptoms, I was frequently astonished by how vividly they were demonstrated to me in real life); and (c) Suleman's overproduction is probably indicative of a psychosis brought about by a deep depression; or, she is simply a melancholic. Of course, I could be wrong since I don't know the woman, but at least the media reports about Suleman are indicative of a depression fantasy. That is, the "script" of depression is definitely being trotted out to help explain Suleman's behavior.
Black Sun is heavily indebted to Melanie Klein and her focus on primary identification. In particular, the narcissism of a tacit psychotic sadness is specified vis-à-vis projective identification (sorry, that's jargonish; projective identification is the underlying logic of scapegoating; think here of Burke and community belonging via exclusion and overprotectiveness). A key passage:
In order to better account for it, we must come back to the notion of projective identification suggested by Melanie Klein. The study of very young children, and also the dynamics of psychosis, leads one to conjure that the more archaic [that is, pre-Oedipal] psychic processes are the projections of the good and bad components of not-yet self onto an object not yet separated from it, with the aim less of attacking the other than of gaining a hold over it, an omnipotent possession. Such oral and anal omnipotence is perhaps more intense as certain biophysiological particularities hamper the ideally wished for autonomy of the self . . . . The behavior of mothers and fathers, overprotective and uneasy, who have chosen a child as a narcissistic artificial limb and keep incorporating that child as a restoring element for the adult psyche intensifies the infant's tendency toward omnipotence.
To recontextualize: Octuplemama's overly protective stance toward her many children is a "replay" of her own infantile fantasies of omnipotence. These children are hers to hoard; paranoid fantasies about having them taken away proliferate until, of course, they are actually taken away and she is forced to actually confront loss, a loss imposed by the Law. Where, oh where, is the imaginary father?