Vicissitudes in The Mirror[1]
Introduction
Historians of civilization [Freud tells us] appear to be at one in assuming that powerful components are acquired for every kind of cultural achievement by this diversion of sexual instinctual forces from sexual aims and by their direction to new ones-a process which deserves the name of ‘sublimation’.[2] When sublimation has not taken place, however, we can inquire into the variations at work in the process of development of those aims, and of their content.[3]
In his 1915 paper Instincts and their Vicissitudes, Freud details the interchanging complexities driving the psyche. The manifestly shocking content of Radió Teilifís Éireann’s recent production of the popular drama LOVE/HATE drives home the mutability of these old excitations, currently in circulation. So popular, it has received eight nominations for the Irish Film and Television Awards 2014. R.T.E.’s coverage too, of the on-going disturbing conflict in Belfast during, what is referred to as the Orange marching season, has filled our news screens and has been reported in our daily newspapers for many years. Its climax, July 12th a public holiday in Northern Ireland, crowns what Orangeism colloquially refers to as The Glorious Twelfth. This conflict reveals much more to the psychoanalyst than to the journalists and their viewers who seem ill-prepared to acknowledge the veiled, unconscious agents whose content is not without aim.
The constant principle of The Orange Order dominated the State of Northern Ireland. A superficial investigation of its mind-set could, misguidedly, leave the impression that its instinctual mission was simply to create an inert, Nirvana-like state For Queen and Country where, as Freud puts it “to keep constant or remove internal tension due to stimuli.”[4] However, an analysis of the body-politic may uncover stimulating evidence of a deeper, nervous activity, giving pleasure to what some referred to as The Orange State.
It is my hope that this paper can dig out from Freud’s dense text of 1915 enough material, and, by employing its language, unravel the image of what would otherwise continue to appear to be unreflected protests over civic marches by Orangemen, demanding the right to parade.
Charles Melman reminds us that Freud too questioned the social field by way of Civilization and its discontents and Why war, when he writes… ‘excursions which are still valid and which make us astonished all over again at seeing how the relation to the social field is badly handled, badly treated by psychoanalysts. This sends us back then to the singular formulation of Lacan, “the unconscious is the social” ’.[5] In attempting to examine this social dis-ease, we return to Freud, where we find libidinal components at work. The Freudian discovery demands that we listen to, that is - hear the story behind the symptom, rather than placating that enquiry with an appeasement by merely observing manifestations of its ills! Freud’s discoveries of the different components at work in the psyche, unmasks, reveals, the source of love-hate and the question of altérité, that is, otherness and the ego as a social agency.
For heuristic purposes of gaining an introduction to Instincts And Their Vicissitudes, the so-called Troubles of a polarized Northern Ireland, may offer an investigation into sexual instincts. In the contemporary unfolding Irish story, we find pairs of opposites, where the content of love and hate, finds its aims in and through the reversals of sadism/masochism and scopophilia/exhibitionism - mirrored in a paranoiac state.
The Epoch of Northern Ireland
In 1929 when Freud was writing Civilization and its Discontents, the island of Ireland had only recently been split. The Treaty, signed on December 6th 1921 created an Irish Free State for 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties. The remaining six counties became known as Northern Ireland. It is no accident that the six counties chosen, split the province of Ulster.
Before the official plantation of Ulster, Protestant Scots had begun to settle in 1606 through the Ards Peninsula, County Down.
This eastern protestant plantation of Ulster prospered rapidly and became the bridgehead by which, for the rest of the century and beyond, individual Scottish settlers flocked to Northern Ireland…The geographical distributions of Protestant and Catholic in Northern Ireland today still reveal clearly the two separate settlements of Ulster of over 300 years ago.[6]
The name of the Orange Order has taken its roots from around this time, when William of Orange, the Protestant Dutchman seized the thrones of the Catholic King James. Two years later, in 1690 at the Battle of the Boyne, King Billy’s victory over his uncle and father-in-law James II, dashed Jacobite hopes of recovering property that had been confiscated from Irish landowners since the days of Oliver Cromwell (1649-53).
The Orange Order was founded in 1795. The sectarian attacks that accompany Orange marches go right back to its origins. Then, many expelled Catholic families were sheltered by Presbyterian United Irishmen in Belfast and later Antrim and Down, and the mostly Protestant leadership of the United Irishmen sent lawyers to prosecute on behalf of the victims of Orange attacks.
As in the language of perversions, auto-erotism of the scoptic drive takes place in this pair of opposites. Its active aim kept an eye on itself from its earliest stages. The narcissistic mind-set of the emerging Orange body saw fit to satisfy its transforming aim. The words of the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh William Newcome, brought to Ireland as chaplain to the lord-lieutenant, contextualized the backdrop to the establishing Order at that time. Founded amid struggles between landlords and tenants he stated “the worst of this is that it stands to unite Protestant and Papist.”[7] The Institution’s formation was to unify the various sections of the Protestant community. It offered all Protestants a place in its ranks and the promise of promotion and privilege. “The ruthless Protestant gangs called themselves the Peep o’Day Boys because of their tactic of raiding Catholic homes at the break of dawn to catch their quarry by surprise.”[8] The Peep o’Day Boys, would go on to mutate in this pair of opposites. With this reversal we find, marching side-by-side and parading within the Orange Order, the passive aim involved in exhibitionism.
The promise made at the initiation ceremony is noteworthy. Mervyn Jess, a senior broadcast journalist who has reported and written extensively on Orange issues published in in 2007 that “The candidate is brought before the Worshipful Master, officers and lodge brethren…in an initiation ritual, handed down and performed over two centuries.”[9] Part of the ritual includes the reading of the qualifications of an Orangeman which states that:
“…he should strenuously oppose the fatal errors and doctrines of the Church of Rome, and scrupulously avoid countenancing (by his presence or otherwise) any act or ceremony of popish worship; he should, by all lawful means, resist the ascendancy of that Church.”[10]
It is interesting to note that the Unlawful Oath Act of July 1823 “was cast wide and it caught Orangemen as well”.[11] A constitution and rules book published to meet the legal requirements of the Act resulted in the Orange Grand Lodge prohibiting Twelfth demonstrations. Jess writes that this was a risky strategy “By denying private [Orange] lodges the opportunity to parade on 12 July, they could have driven the more militant members into the ranks of extremist and less law-abiding Protestant secret societies.”[12] In 1825 the unlawful Societies Act was passed which included The Orange Order. Although, thirty years after its formation the Orange Institution dissolved itself, protests took place with some lodges burning their flags while many lodges continued to meet. There is also evidence that Orange associations tried to exploit loopholes in the Act by reforming themselves as shooting or rifle clubs, which were still legal.[13]
In 1836, seven years after the Act of Catholic Emancipation, the Westminster government were dependent on the support of Daniel O’Connell. ‘The government decided to move against the Orange Institution and, in February, King William IV declared that he would be “pleased to take such measures as may be seen to be advisable for the effectual discouragement of Orange lodges and generally of all political societies that exclude persons of different religious faith, that use secret signs and symbols and act by means of associated branches”.’[14] Despite assurance to the government that steps would be taken to dissolve the Loyal Orange Institution, it was, just like eleven years earlier, business as usual - especially in the north of Ireland where they refused to countenance dissolution.
For the psychoanalyst dissolution refers to that period in the child’s life where, as the father of psychoanalysis writes “the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge.”[15] In The Psychoses, Lacan writes:
If Freud insisted on the Oedipus complex to the extent of constructing a sociology of totems and taboos, it is obviously because for him the Law is there ab origine. It is therefore out of the question to ask oneself the question of origins-the Law is there precisely from the beginning, it has always been there, and human sexuality must realize itself through it and by means of it. This fundamental law is simply a law of symbolization. This is what the Oedipus complex means.[16]
With the refusal of dissolution, Jonathan Mattison, Orange historian and convenor of the Order’s Education Committee asserts that ‘What would be described now as “Ulster Protestant paranoia” was widespread’.[17] Psychoanalytic examination of Mattison’s analysis will be considered further. It is helpful, none-the-less, at this stage to realize an effect of the mirror. Joël Dor reminds us that:
In re-cognizing himself through the image, he is able to reassemble the scattered, fragmented body into a unified totality, the representation of his own body. The body image is therefore a structuring factor in the formation of the subject’s identity, since it is through this image that he achieves his primal identification.[18]
The disturbances over Orange parades, continuing over many years is not without history. In Orangeism, a new historical appreciation, Dewar, Brown and Long state that the parade had become a point of honour with the Orangemen, showing their determination and strength by marching. The disturbance and killing surrounding Orange marches prompted further legislation with the 1850 Party Processions Act making it illegal to hold meetings, which would ‘“tend to provoke animosity between different classes of Her Majesty’s subjects.”’[19]
Historian and commentator Eamon Phoenix maintains that when Home Rule became the emotive force in Anglo-Irish politics the landed gentry changed tack as Orangeism emerged as the social cement of Unionism. It brought together ‘“the master and the man, the landed classes and the middle classes, the shipyard workers and the agricultural labourers”’.[20] Jess writes that Protestant paranoia was fuelled with William Gladstone’s Liberal Bill and states “A siege mentality was growing within the Protestant community. While Protestants were in the majority in the northern counties, they knew that they were the minority within Ireland.”[21]
In December 1911 Orangemen effectively created new headquarters, not in Dublin, but in the mainly Protestant and loyal northern counties of Ireland. One of the leading office bearers in the Ulster Lodge was Colonel RH Wallace who was instrumental in setting up the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). Wallace established an association between the Orange Order and the UVF.
“Before the formal creation of Northern Ireland, key Unionist leaders had built a “state in waiting”, an administration backed by a body of armed men. The first prime minister of Northern Ireland from 1921-1940, James Craig stated ‘“I have always said, I am an Orangeman first and a politician and Member of Parliament afterwards…all I boast is that we are a Protestant Parliament and Protestant State.”’[22] ‘Craig’s government formed a special constabulary to deal with security, comprised predominantly of Orangemen.’[23]
The day after the Northern Ireland Government took control it issued a public order to all who wished to join the Specials with the extract: “You now have the great test of your loyalty before you…when called upon to fight the agents of Murder, Anarchy, and Terrorism. For it is these three that you are asked to destroy – and to destroy with your utmost vigour.”[24] Its content highlights Freud’s assertion that “sadism, from the outset is directed upon an extraneous object”[25] “Recruitment to those forces came mainly from Orangemen, who were, many of them, members of the U.V.F.”[26] From its infancy in 1921 to direct rule in 1972 when Stormont was prorogued, virtually every Unionist member of the new Northern Ireland parliament was an Orangeman. All the Prime Ministers, and to all intents and purposes, all the cabinet ministers were members of the Order. [27]
The Orange Order’s virulence was particularly noted in its opposition to the 1923 Education Act, proposed in accordance with the Government of Ireland Act (1920), which would have established a non-sectarian education system in which Protestant and Catholic children would have been educated together.
Freud’s text Beyond the Pleasure Principle is helpful here. Understanding the Orange Order, and indeed Northern Ireland, as a homeostatic principle of constancy, where the keeping of instinctual excitation as low as possible occurs automatically, is too simple. The desired status quo in the six counties required relentless drive. In his Three Essays Freud reminds us of this when he says:
By an ‘instinct’ is provisionally to be understood the psychical representative of an endosomatic, continuously flowing source of stimulation, as contrasted with a ‘stimulus’, which is set up by single excitations coming from without. The concept of instinct is thus one of those lying on the frontier between the mental and the physical. The simplest and likeliest assumption as to the nature of instincts would seem to be that in itself an instinct is without quality, and so far as mental life is concerned, is only to be regarded as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work. What distinguishes the instincts from one another and endows them with specific qualities is their relation to their somatic sources and to their aims.[28]
Therefore, with constant instinctual pressure driving the political mind-set, its aim (ziel) found expression in and through its object - the Catholic subjects in Northern Ireland.
“The Stormont parliamentary regime (1920 – 72) became a textbook illustration of Mill and Tocqueville’s prediction that democratic rule was compatible with ‘tyranny of the majority’. Territorial, constitutional, electoral, economic, legal and cultural domination and control became pervasive in what critics were to dub ‘the Orange state’”.[29] Here though, we find a difference with regard to the second pre-genital phase, the sadistic-anal organization. Whereas a sadistic child takes no account of whether or not he inflicts pains, nor indeed is it his intention,[30] in the unfolding story of Northern Ireland, the activity of the agent of sadismis put into operation, as Freud asserts “not only to humiliate and master but also to inflict pain”.[31]
The Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act of 1922 was used to maintain Unionist hegemonic control. The government gave itself the right to: intern people without trial; to arrest people without warrant; to flog people; to issue curfews and to inhibit inquests. “One of its admirers was Dr Hendrick Verwoerd, prime minister of South Africa (1958-1966) who declared that his own powers were puny in comparison.”[32] Verwoerd is often referred to as the architect of Apartheid.
Gerrymandering
While the post-Treaty Free State experienced civil war, gerrymandering[33] promptly took place in the Six Counties. Nationalist held councils were reduced from twenty of the eighty councils to two.
Conn McCluskey, a medical doctor and founding member of the Campaign For Social Justice writes in his book ‘Up Off Their Knees’ published in 1989: ‘There is a modicum of injustices in all societies. Sometimes it is intentional, even inevitable; then again it may be inbuilt, planned and consistently applied. The Northern Ireland of the sixties had all these… Those who suffered the injustices smouldered on, their resentment unchanneled.’[34]
As Freud and Breuer write in the Preliminary Communication:
An injury that has been repaid, even if only in words, is recollected quite differently from one that has had to be accepted. Language recognizes this distinction, too, in its mental and physical consequences; it very characteristically describes an injury that has been suffered in silence as ‘a mortification’ [‘Krankung’, lit. ‘making ill’].[35]
The Campaign for Social Justice, knowing they would never influence the Unionist Government, focussed on speaking to the outside world of the problems. In 1964 a press release was issued in Belfast, beginning:
“The Government of Northern Ireland’s policies of apartheid and discrimination have continued to be implemented at all levels with such zeal.”[36] Ian Paisley, a prominent member of The Independent Loyal Institution whose motto is, “Protestantism not politics, principles not party, and measures not men”[37], had decided to take a hand in the affairs of Northern Ireland. ‘He issued a call for “every Loyalist in Ulster to assemble in Armagh…to take control of the city so as to prevent civil rights demonstrators from marching…describing the civil rights movement as a front for the I.R.A.”’[38]
Dr McCluskey continues:
Would it not have been a wonderful world if the authorities had said, ‘these are sensible people, these are reasonable requests, let us grant them without delay.’ That would have been the end to the civil rights movement and of the killing. Our little province could possibly have moved into a joyous future. As things turned out, most of the demands were eventually, grudgingly conceded, but in a welter of blood and disorder.[39]
1969 The Euphemistic ‘Troubles’
Addressing a Labour Party conference in England in the 1970’s McCluskey stated:
When the B-Specials and the RUC turned their machine guns on the Catholic people of Belfast in 1969 the Catholics could muster perhaps ten guns. Now there are dozens and more every day.[40]
At that time when the six counties of Northern Ireland was sliding into war, both governments – led by the Irish, introduced a media ban. In The Function and Field of Speech and Language Lacan asserts: “the function of language is not to inform but to evoke. What I seek in speech is the response of the other.”[41] In the language of Instincts and their Vicissitudes, could it be that the instinct of the ego, in this case the State, in flexing its muscle to silence unpleasure be seen as indifference? Or, is it an expression of passive hatred where a return of the repressed has been evoked? As Freud writes, “The polarity of pleasure-unpleasure is attached to a scale of feelings [which is of] paramount importance in determining our actions”.[42]
Freud continues: “The principal source of our knowledge remains the psycho-analytic investigation of mental disturbances.”[43] … “These [transference neuroses] showed that at the root of all such affections there is to be found a conflict between the claims of sexuality and those of the ego.”[44] Once again, Joël Dor’s reference to Lacan exposes an interesting revelation when he quotes: ‘“It is this captivation by the imago of the human form…which…dominates the entire dialectic of the child’s behavior in the presence of his counterparts…The child who strikes another says he has been struck.”’[45]
This antagonism can be analysed! Referring to the self-preservative instincts remaining throughout life, Freud uncovers that those “libidinal components, which in normal functioning easily escape notice, are revealed clearly only by the onset of illness”.[46] Can Northern Ireland’s dis-eased history, be seen here as the ego’s self-preservative instincts, promoted by an Imaginary presentation - a conflict with the Real root, which is manifested in social disturbance? Perhaps it will helpful to examine the analysis of Orangeman Jonathan Mattison’s comments when he identifies widespread paranoia.
Clinical application
The objet a
As Gérard Amiel points out:[47] “We see that even the political structures are linked to the unconscious. All the forces which oppose each other at the level of the unconscious can be seen in the political field. How can it be, he asks, that in a society some part of the population will become an objet a…that is, that a section of the population has to be eliminated? The objet a should be missing. However, if it is present it awakens hatred disgust and rejection. Splitting, which organizes that society makes it impossible to hold respect for the other; to hold respect for difference; to accept altérité, that is, while remaining in the binary paranoiac dimension of the mirror. There is no nuance in paranoia it is either yes or no, black or white, and dare I say it Catholic or Protestant – Orange or Green? In a society where someone becomes the objet a of somebody else, where a part of society becomes the objet a within that society, we are dealing with a paranoiac society – the definition of civil war.
When brother is prepared to kill brother, neighbour is prepared to kill neighbour for ideological reasons, we are dealing with intolerance. Rather than taking the signifier as a signifier, but believing that there is an absolute truth behind every word then we are mad, but, as Gérard Amiel continues, “We are completely mad, but we are known as normal”.[48]
Paranoia
Charles Melman teaches us that paranoia is above all linked to Euclidean representation of space. The absolute boundary between the inside and outside (the circle) is the basis of paranoia. In asking us to consider why it is that our spontaneous thinking representing space is along the Euclidean model of closed figures, he links it to Lacan and awakens memories in us of the mirror phase. “The child [he reminds us] sees himself in the mirror as a closed form, and sees everything outside that form as devalued, and also as threatening that form”[49]. He reminds us that Freud says the same thing in that the child takes everything that is good into himself, and, rejects what is bad. However, Melman continues: “to think that you are good and everything outside you is bad is to have a paranoid conception of the world. This is the very source of paranoid thinking. So, it seems simple: I push everything that is bad outside, and then afterwards I feel threatened by that.”[50] The mirror merely complicates the position simply outlined.
Lacan addresses a fundamental problem in western metaphysics and the quest for being and for identity. As we know, the ego is a social agency. As Melman asserts:
Lacan shows us that clinically there are complications, because that image with which I
identify myself, that image which is going to become my own and constitute me, is
essentially the image of another. This is to say that my self is constituted by another. It is
another who is in me. This is why as a subject I am always a little bit of a stranger to my
own ego. So the very principle of paranoia, which is the feeling of being intruded upon by
another, is realised by the very physiology of the constitution of the ego. So I, who
appear to be normal, have an ego that is constituted on a paranoid principle.[51]
Therefore, our initial understanding of what is bad being projected out, is intrinsically, constituent of my own ego - the introjection of the image of the other.
Xenophobia
This clinical conclusion of paranoia therefore is that, what is different from me is considered to threaten me. In xenophobia anyone who is not like me for example their colour, race religion, i.e. outside of me is a threat to my ego. More interesting perhaps, is that the person who is like me, is even more intolerable than the one who is different from me - the problems with brothers and sisters Melman reminds us. So too in groups we see splitting with people who are alike. People looking for some little feature or trait of difference in order to put outside what is inside – hence splits in a formerly united movement.
Therefore, a fundamental question arises: has our modern Irish history circled around a foreclosure of altérité? Nowadays, television camera crews relay less frequent images of brutality born out of the Orange parading season’s contentious marches. Initially, the police force – the Royal Ulster Constabulary (R.U.C.) and its reformed Police Service of Northern Ireland (P.S.N.I.) were responsible for restrictions placed on Orange parades. Following the intervention of Symbolic law, the Orange Order grew to loathe the Parades Commission, established in 1997 and legislated for under the Public Processions Act (Northern Ireland 1998). The Parades Commission became the decision maker with regard to the contentious routes Orangemen would be legally permitted to parade. In 2006 the British Government intervened announcing a review of parades legislation.
Today, we can ask some questions: will the resultant intervention of the Patten Commission of 1998, the Parades Commission and the beleaguered Haas Talks (2013) continue to work toward weaving the dialectic of Symbolic Law? Is it possible that Orangeism can move from a position of feeling under attack by legal restrictions? As Freud teaches, the dissolution of the Oedipus complex is brought about with “the experience of painful disappointments”.[52] An Aufhebung[53]where the signifier of the phallus will intervene upon the old familiar demand to walk The Queen’s Highway, symbolizing a new desire, opening a road to recovery?
Nationally, the Order would, at one time, have claimed 100,000 members. Currently the figure is believed to be less than 50,000 with some putting it around 30,000.[54] Eamon Phoenix writes:
“As an historian looking on, I think Orangeism is in terminal decline...There are Orangemen who want to visit schools of all denominations to explain the origin of the Order and acknowledge that it has certain commonality with other brotherhoods in Ireland. Nobody contests the fact that Orangeism has played a very important role in the history of Ireland.”[55]
Here, we are reminded of Lacan where he teaches that:
“the signifier, with its own action and insistence, intervenes in all of the human being’s interests – however profound, primitive, elementary we suppose them to be…It’s impossible to study how this phenomenon called language, which is the most fundamental of interhuman relations, functions unless one draws this distinction between signifier and the signified from the outset.[56]
To conclude therefore, ‘The twelfth’ is a hopeful signifier for psychoanalysis too! Remembering Lacan’s remarks in addressing the confusion within the psychoanalytic movement he states “this confusion increases when each analyst presumes to consider himself the one chosen to discover in our experience the conditions of a completed objectification, and the enthusiasm which greets these theoretical attempts seems to grow more fervent the more dereistic they prove to be”.[57] Perhaps then, we might celebrate an original, primordial signifier of ‘The Twelfth’, following a route taken by Lacan himself, when on that glorious 12thJuly 1980; he founded the Institute for the Freudian Field.
_________________________
Instincts and their Vicissitudes
[2] S. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, S.E. VII (1905), p. 178.
[3] S. Freud, Instincts and their Vicissitudes, S.E. XIV (1915c), p. 126.
[4] S. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, S.E. XVIII (1920g), pp. 55-6.
[5] C. Melman, Returning to Schreber, Translated by Cormac Gallagher, pp. 79-80.
[6] R. Kee, Ireland, A History, (Abacus, 2000), p. 24.
[7] D. Lindsey, The Defenders, 200 Years of Resonance. Ed Mary Cullen, p. 18.
[8] M. Jess, The Orange Order, (O’Brien Press Ltd., Dublin 2007), p. 14.
[9] M. Jess, op. cit., pp. 11-12.
[10] Ibid., p. 12.
[11] Ibid., p. 29.
[12] Ibid., p. 29.
[13] Ibid., p. 30.
[14] Ibid., p. 32.
[15] S. Freud, Totem and Taboo. S.E. XIII (1912-13), p. 156.
[16] J. Lacan, The Psychoses Book III. (Routledge London 1993), p. 83.
[17] M. Jess, op. cit., p. 34.
[18] Joël Dor, Introduction to the Reading of Lacan, (Jason Aronson Inc., London 1997), p. 96.
[19] M. Jess, op. cit., p. 34.
[20] Ibid., p. 38.
[21] Ibid., p. 42.
[22] F. Ó Dochartaigh, Ulster’s White Negroes, (Edinburgh, A.K. Press, 1994), p. 122.
[23] K. Haddick-Flynn, Orangeism – The Making of a Tradition, (Dublin, Wolfhound Press, 1999), p. 333.
[24] A. Hezlet, The ‘B’ Specials, (London, Tom Stacey Ltd., 1972), p. 21.
[25] S. Freud, Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, op. cit., p. 130.
[26] L. De Paor, Divided Ulster,(Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1977), p. 98.
[27] M. Jess, op. cit., p. 48.
[28] S. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. S.E. VII (1905d), p. 168.
[29] O’Leary & McGarry, The politics of Antagonism: Understanding Northern Ireland, (London, Athlone Press
1996), p. 110.
[30] S. Freud, Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, op. cit., p. 128.
[31] Ibid., op. cit., p .128.
[32] Haddick-Flynn, op. cit., p. 333.
[33] The practice of gerrymandering manipulates election districts unfairly so as to secure disproportionate
representation. The etymology of the word gerrymander stems from the U.S. 1812. The governor of
Massachusetts [Gerry Elbridge] is said to have constructed a map of the U.S.A. in which the shape of one
district suggested to an artist the addition of head, wings, and claws; he exclaimed: “That will do for a
Salamander!”, to which another retorted ‘Gerrymander!’ Dictionary of English Etymology, (Oxford University
Press, 1966), Edited by C.T. Oinions.
[34] C. McCluskey, Up Off Their Knees, (Galway, McCluskey, & Associates, 1989), p. 46.
[35] J. Breuer, & S. Freud, Studies on Hysteria, S.E. II (1895d [1893-95]), p. 8.
[36] C. McCluskey, op. cit., p. 17.
[37] M. Jess, op. cit., p. 242.
[38] C. McCluskey, op. cit., p. 113.
[39] Ibid., p. 105.
[40] Ibid., p. 29.
[41] J. Lacan, Function and Field of Speech and Language in Écrits. A Selection, (Routledge, London, 1989), p. 86.
[42] S. Freud, Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, op. cit., p. 134.
[43] Ibid., p. 125.
[44] Ibid., p. 124.
[45] Joël Dor, op. cit., p. 96.
[46] S. Freud, Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, op. cit., p. 126.
[47] I am grateful to Gérard Amiel, who has generously agreed to be Plus One to our cartel for this year, for his
Comments made at our study day in Dublin on October 5th 2013. Our cartel is comprised of the following
members: Ruth Breen; Nellie Curtin; Ros McCarthy; Malachi McCoy; Helen Sheehan.
[48] Gérard Amiel. op. cit.
[49] C. Melman, Paranoia, in The Letter: Irish Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis, (No. 1, Summer 1994), p. 137.
[50] Ibid.
[51] Ibid.
[52] S. Freud, The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex, S.E. XIX (1924d), p. 173.
[53] The phallus is the signifier of this Aufhebung itself, which it inaugurates (initiates) by its disappearance.
J. Lacan, Écrits, A Selection, (Routledge London 1989), p. 288.
Aufhebung, i.e. the conservation of something destroyed at a different level – the only commandment is
henceforth “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” J. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Book VII
(Routledge, London, 1999), p. 193.
[54] M. Jess, op. cit., p. 272.
[55] Ibid., p. 273.
[56] J. Lacan, The Psychoses, Book III, (WW Norton & Company, Inc., 1993), p. 197.
[57] J. Lacan, The Function and Field of Speech and Language. op. cit., p. 78.