The Symbolic Order of the Mother by Luisa Muraro Timothy S. Murphy

Author:Luisa Muraro,Timothy S. Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2017-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Notes

Chapter 4, page 51: I am aware of the problem of calling “male” a culture to which women, including me in my small way, have also contributed more or less actively. I call it male on the basis of the criterion according to which the prevailing authority exercises its mediation, an act fundamental to every culture. A culture in which authority is by preference identified with being man is a male culture. It is a question of a symbolic criterion (authority is symbolic, otherwise it would not exist as such). The culture in which I am expressing myself at present is female. Men, like Plato or my father or my teacher of metaphysics, are also part of this female culture whose mediating authority is, then, female.

Chapter 4, page 56: The literature on hysteria is vast, and what I have read of it is comparatively little, though in itself it is quite a lot. I will just point out a few titles: Ilza Veith, Hysteria: The History of a Disease (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); J. Michelet, La Sorcière: The Witch of the Middle Ages, trans. L. J. Trotter (London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 1863), especially for the wellknown event of the Ursulines of Loudon (255–76); see also “La stoffa del sogno e il nostro divenire etico [Dream Fabric and Our Becoming Ethical],” Centro documentazione donna di Firenze (Florence: Quaderno di lavoro, 1989), n. 4. Freud wrote extensively about hysteria. I quote a long passage from his “Female Sexuality” (1931): “Everything in the sphere of this first attachment to the mother seemed to me difficult to grasp in analysis—so grey with age and shadowy and almost impossible to revivify—that it was as if it had succumbed to an especially inexorable repression. But perhaps I gained this impression because the women who were in analysis with me were able to cling to the very attachment to the father in which they had taken refuge from the early phase that was in question. It does indeed appear that women analysts … have been able to perceive these facts more easily and more clearly because they were helped in dealing with those under their treatment by the transference to a suitable mother-substitute. Nor have I succeeded in seeing my way through any case completely, and I shall therefore confine myself to reporting the most general findings and shall give only a few examples of the new ideas which I have arrived at. Among these is a suspicion that this phase of attachment to the mother is especially intimately related to the aetiology of hysteria, which is not surprising when we reflect that both the phase and the neurosis are characteristically feminine, and further, that in this dependence on the mother we have the germ of later paranoia in women” (Standard Edition, vol. 21: 226–27).

Chapter 4, page 57: The anecdote of a pupil of mine, who appealed to the authority of her mother to support her cosmological theory, raises the problem of the

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