octuplemama

Music: Distance: Repercussions/Chestplate (2008)

Nadya Suleman has been under a MSM spotlight for over a month now since giving birth to eight children. Suleman already had six children, between the years of 2001 and 2006. Hungry for more hungry mouths, somehow Suleman convinced physician Michael Kamrava to impregnate her with an additional five embryos (three is standard limit for her age). Kamrava is now under investigation by the Medical Board of California and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. Suleman has been the target of death threats a great deal of negative publicity, since she has been using food stamps for many years. Public resentment has largely focused on Suleman's use of the welfare system to support her brood; many feel she is irresponsible for having so many children without the financial means to raise them.

Although Suleman is the unquestionably the poster child for the "Welfare Mama" fantasy, I think most of us can agree that deciding raise fourteen children without adequate resources is irresponsible. And despite the criticism hurled by pundits at the MSM, I also don't have any difficulty with the publicity she has received: Suleman's story raises important issues about parenting in postmodernity, the relationship between the medical-industrial complex and social reproduction, and the ethics of parenting. Her story raises so many interesting issues it's difficult for me to decide what to focus on the most. I'm especially interested in the lack of a second parental figure, and how this may impact her children (I have come around to believe that two parents are always better than one, irrelevant of their gender and sex). Ultimately, however, what gets me the most is motive: why the hell would anyone want to have fourteen children by themselves? What, in other words, is goading this woman toward living in a shoe?

Well, you just know I have to consult daddy Freud first. As most of y'all know, Freud's views on feminine sexuality have been met with much scorn and critique, but let's rehearse them briefly and them discuss how they have been refigured; I promise you they do shed some insight into the Suleman's excessive pregnancy.

In the New Introductory Lectures of Psycho-Analysis first published in 1933, Freud summarizes his theories about female development. Initially Freud didn't have much to say about women at all, however, by the 1920s it was becoming apparent that we could not assume girls come to selfhood in the same way as boys. Freud supposed that castration anxiety in boys led to identification with the father, the "deal" not to have mommy all to himself, and so forth. For girls, however, it all starts when they discover that they do not have penises. I cite Freud at length (since he's a much better writer than I am):

As you hear . . . we ascribe a castration complex to women as well. And for good reasons, though its content cannot be the same with boys. In the latter the castration complex arises after they have learnt from the sigh of the female genitals that the organ which they value so highly need not necessarily accompany the body. At this the boy recalls to mind the threats he brought on himself by the doings with that organ, he begins to give credence to them and falls under the influence and fear of castration, which will be the most powerful motive force in his subsequent development. The castration complex of girls is also started by the sight of the genitals of the other sex. They at once notice the difference and, it must be admitted, its significance too. They feel seriously wronged, often declare that they want to "have something like it too," and fall victim to "envy for the penis," which will leave ineradicable trances on their development . . . . The girl's recognition of the fact of her being without a penis does not by any means imply that she submits to the fact easily. On the contrary, she continues to hold on for a long time to the wish to get something like it herself . . . . The wish to get the longed-for penis eventually in spite of everything may contribute to the motives that drive a mature woman to analysis . . . .

Freud says, in other words, that overcoming penis envy is the major challenge of feminine development. Girls respond in one of three ways: "One leads to sexual inhibition or to neurosis; the second to change of character in the sense of a masculinity complex; the third, finally, to normal femininity." In the first response, failure to overcome penis-envy can lead to neurotic (obsessional) forms of repetition compulsion and substitution. This is where Freud would likely locate Suleman, about which more below. The second response is, of course, various forms of female masculinity (not reducible to lesbianism). And the third response is "normal," heterosexual development which includes a socially sanctioned substitution: the longed-for penis becomes . . . you guessed it . . . a baby.

Of course, Freud's theory of female castration anxiety as "penis envy" has been met with much critique, represented well by Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970) and well-known critiques by Luce Irigaray and others. Particularly offensive to some critics is Freud's argument that, in the infantile unconscious, feces, money, and babies are associatively linked. As I've argued elsewhere, Freud suggests that in childhood the penis functions fundamentally as a "gift," and it takes on this status from the experience of potty training. Basically, the story goes like this: when the child is old enough to control its shit, the parents start training it to eliminate in a potty. From this experience, the child learns that it gets praise for poop or pee-pee. Elimination---or "anal erotism"---thus becomes associated with love for the child; if she produces this stuff, she gets cheers from mommy and daddy. The child also sees daddy and mommy exchanging objects and getting praise from one another (money, jewelry, food, and so on), so, putting two-and-two together, the child comes to understand (at least at an unconscious level) that poop is an object offered in exchange for love.

Now, as Mitchell explains, later developments lead children to attribute other objects with this "exchange" value, principally among them, money and babies. How so? She resorts to an explanation of the "primary process" in the dreamwork:

The language of the primary process is symbolic, it makes use of condensation, displacement, and symbolization and all may occur concurrently, as they do in the instance we are now considering. Children believe that babies are born anally, like faeces: the straining, the release, the production of something new out of oneself is a prototype of birth. The faeces produced for the mother, or whoever cares for the child, are offered as a gift, from here one train of "thought" leads to an equation with money, but another to reconfirmation of the production of a baby which is also always "given," a gift ("he's given her a child," "she's given him a son"). At the same time the faeces, a column that stimulates the membranes of the bowel, is---in psychic terms---a forerunner of the penis---and unfortunately, like the faeces, the penis is also thought to be a part of the body that can be lost, given up, renounced (castration).

Notably, in her defense of Freud, Mitchell is leaning more and more on a metaphorical or associative---that is, formal---reading of Freud on penis envy: this "little thing," the penis, is just a signifier for a "gift," and is roughly equivalent to any gift that can be produced, given, or lost. In short, to little girls and boys, penis is baby is shit. Lacan and others will later solve the problem by simply referring to all this stuff as a phallus, a signifier of value whose meaning is formal, not necessarily specific.

With penis envy as the crucial thing to overcome, then, let me summarize Freud's theory of female sexual development, which moves through these stages (from Laplanche and Pontalis' The Language of Psycho-Analysis):

1. realization that she doesn't have a penis.
2. resentment toward the mom, who won't give her a penis.
3. realization of mother as inferior, cause she ain't got a penis either.
4. giving up on masturbation and the clitoris in favor of vaginal pleasure
5. realizing the infant is a substitute penis

Ok, now: few folks buy Freud's model. What psychoanalysists have subsequently done, however, is lean on the more associative/formal functions of the phallus and have reinterpreted "penis envy" as a errant outcome of childhood. Karen Horney, for example, argued that penis envy "was not inevitable but only occurred when the oedipal situation is not resolved and the daughter flees from libidinal investment in the father, fears competition with the mother, and defensively identifies with the father" (Christine C. Kieffer, "Selfobjects, Oedipal Objects, and Mutual Recognition"). In other words, object envy is a neurotic result of failing to give and receive love to and from a father figure.

Post-Freudian and object-relations folks reject the Oedipal scenario altogether. They tend to focus on primary identification, which simply refers to a time in child development when the genitals don't come into play (e.g., prior to castration anxiety and so forth). For these folks, the phallus represents an object that frees the child from the omnipotence of mama: The father represents a power independent of mother; the phallus is an object that takes on value independent of the mother. This scenario is somewhat Lacanian in the sense that identification with father represents an entry into the social world: dad arrives, and the child thinks, "oh, there's more to my world than mama!" From this scheme, especially the one outlined by Jessica Benjamin, penis envy is actually the name for frustration caused by an absence of the father, in whatever form. To wit: penis envy---or better, "phallus obsession"---is the female consequence of a lack of paternal love: an absent father, an abusive father, a neglectful father, and so forth.

Having trotted all this out, the armchair analysis of Suleman would go something like this: Suleman's desire to have children is a neurosis that represents a failed or frustrated relationship with a father figure. Although Suleman did make the symbolic shift from shit/penis to baby, the move is neurotically hysterical, indeed, a form of repetition compulsion (and, however ironically, goaded by the drive toward death) in which she has over-invested in the "normal" resolution to envy. Because each child is valued as a phallic object (a phallus is anything that seems to move on its own, representing independence from maternal omnipotence), Suleman's infantile motive is gifting: the more children she produces, the more love (recognition) she will receive. For this reason, people have been saying Suleman is "addicted" to having children, despite the fact there is no clinical support for such a claim (the desire to have children is "normal"). In psychoanalytic sense, Suleman is "addicted" because having children has become a compulsion irrelevant of their survival, irrelevant of the so-called "reality principle."

Whatever vocabulary we use to describe Suleman's pathology (classical psychoanalysis; object-relations; etc.), her own words seem to support a psychoanalytic reading. In a painful-to-watch interview with NBC's Anne Curry, Suleman said:

All I wanted was children. I wanted to be a mom. That's all I ever wanted in my life. That was always a dream of mine, to have a large family, a huge family. . . . I just longed for certain connections and attachments with another person that I really lacked, I believe, growing up, . . . feeling of self and identity. . . I didn't feel as though, when I was a child, I had much control of my environment. I felt powerless. And that gave me a sense of predictability. Reflecting back on my childhood, it was pretty dysfunctional.

In an interview in Us magazine, Suleman's mother said "she always blamed me for only having her. She was always upset I didn‘t have more . . . ." Apparently Suleman believes her only-child upbringing had something to do with her abnormal lust for motherhood.

Almost (but not entirely) absent from the media reportage, of course, is any discussion of Suleman's father. Apparently he and her Suleman's mother divorced in 1999. Ed Doud appeared on Oprah to discuss his daughter. Oprah asked him about Suleman's statement that her upbringing was "dysfunctional." His response: "We gave her so much love. No child has so much love. I thought what she meant is because she is the only child. I'm sure that's what she meant. She really wanted a brother or sister." Doud nevertheless said that he found his daughters decision to have eight more children "irresponsible" and that he worried about her mental stability.

Perhaps Suleman did have "so much love." Perhaps. Brain chemistry, however, only goes so far to explain this kind of obsession, this excessive production of children without any realistic sense of their survival needs or welfare as people. These babies are objects for Suleman, overproduced gifts that, as we all know, keep on giving. Suleman is looking for recognition; she's definitely getting it, although we'd be hard-pressed to call it "love."