Verleugnung’s movements in the analysis of a child

de MUSOLINO Maria Rosa Borgatello


The games with the language of an eight-year-old child show the groove of true saying through which the Real passes, it supple the absence of sexual relation. During the analytical work with "lalangue" –his language- among the others languages, that what’s belied, disproved, disclaimed, or disowned appears, that which has been left out of the general symbolization.

After a year and a half of analytical work he manages to overcome his fears. But he is surprised by the "perception" of castration, using Lady Di’s death as a metaphor of it; he translates it into symptoms: anguished terrors, haircuts and stammering.

For the first time, he gives account of it belieing objective reality and he makes his first semantical failure, in his prolific and careful speech. He says with a lot of anguish: "I need a geography for my leg". This primordial statement, admits in the Symbolic something which symbolizes the phallus on a part of his body within a code of his own. It is something like "I don't deceive myself" (l), knotted between the subject and the signifiers' treasure.

He elaborates through his babbling or through an impudent language, a mixture of creative deformation and obscenity, his actings as well as the aggressions against his own body. At this moment he can’t give them a significant meaning as he did with his fears, because his memories don’t come. In fact, he cannot remember because this will be an analysis’s construction around that irruption of the Real, whose truth he is about to invent.

So, seeking another meaning for his anguish, he passes from word retention (coprolalia) to be an alienated voice in the Other, that is to say, to play or to speak during several sessions only with un-significant guttural sounds. When I interrupt his enjoyment by symbolizing the transference, which appears at this moment fallen and insignificant, he reacts with his body. He throws himself on the divan, and he shouts "Pinino!". Then, he throws himself on the floor, he imitates a dog and sucks his leg. When I repeat "Pinino", he answers "Pinino sucks his dick".

He apparently raises his dog's name to a fetichistic condition, but in the Real of an "I don't believe you when you deceive me", when you make me "you", in this fleeting form of the incredible the term emerges, as an apparent triumph over castration, but it orders him there, organizing the traces that the Other has left in him.

That’s why, this is going to be the name which he modulates willingly in inflections and disjunctions, that others can’t perceive (2), especially in everything related to his –pierna-leg’s erotization included in the vocal emission of the first syllable of "Pinino". He venerates, at the same time, his dog metonymically turned into a fetish by the name, he imitates it and he selects it as a companion for erotic games, letting it rub its genitals against his leg, in order to continue masturbation abhorring the menace of castration.

In the following sessions, while he’s speaking of his fears and terrors, he disproves and disowns them. Suddenly, transformed by the effects of his saying, he unfastens himself from the Other's demand, and from his desire he establishes his own Symbolic trace. He says "No, Pinino, no". Something springs reaching the Real (3), beyond the word representation.

He listens to himself in surprise, and tells a dream of anguish. Trying to associate, he babbles: "...Pi..n..ino (in Spanish). S...mall...est (in English). I am Mom's Pinino...(in Spanish: "Yo soy Pinino de mi mamá") (...) ...Mom's small pin (in Spanish: "el small-pin -in English- de mamá")". He makes that something, an unrecognized statement, "unbekannt": radically foreign but familiar, something like "they say", slip behind an "I don't want to know anything about it".

I hear in three languages an "I refuse to recognize" which rejects the truth, while certitude is breaking through by denial. He discredits that which is stated as a representation and due to that, this credit is directly inscribed in the language as out of image, of meaning, of rememoration.

In the instant previous to disproval something appears, that which was forgotten and repressed. Everything that returns, that has been lost and out of memory, is the maternal language, as the mother’s phallus, as phallus significance. I mean Italian, the language spoken by the mother which translates the one spoken by the father and the mother's mother during that daughter's upbringing. All that is erected into a symbol, it’s the interval among the three languages itself which must be read in several languages in order to hear the true saying. Just because of this, the misleading equivalence between Piccolino in Italian and Pinino in Spanish, between the meaning of the word pin in English and the suffix ino in Italian, is the significant equivalence out of significance, which refers to that which is very, very small (the smallest) in the mixture of languages.

The in-significant insists on the sound "pi" of pierna – of leg- and on the real leg offered as an anatomical substitute during masturbation. The phoneme pi is taken in the conjunction of the specular image and the object which causes desire: his mother’s leg observed while she was wearing a dressing-gown, during the massages on his "becchino", when he suffered phimosis. This Italian word is a term used familiarly to name the penis as a small beak. This image is the sign, the reference, the point of enjoyment, the trace assumed by repression.

The phonematic insistence allowed to find there the trace of that b which sounds p when pronounced. His mother knew the injuring meaning of that sound, which was fixed by her drive and modulated by her, without knowing it, to the child. He remembers her rights over his body. She was in charge because he is her "piccolino". He, at the same time, was in charge of covering the significant difference, that black place of enjoyment.

By naming himself "Pinino", he gives that which she has not, to deceive that wish which cannot be satisfied. It is a signifier of the subject, unique, because this term has no other sense except being translated into his own language. The signifier emerges as an arbiter of the ordeal, of the enjoyment feast, but as if it didn ‘t belong to him. It returns from the outside in what "they say". Of course, if it had not been there, nothing would fasten it to his subjective existence.

This singular Verleugnung reveals the drive’s representative representation, which leaves out of game the significance as significance of the phallus and questions the Symbolic knot of Father’s Name conditioned by the mother’s desire. At the same time, the production of a term in a personal language makes it the knot of a Real "formation" (4), to profit of pure significant difference, his own way of saying the absence of sexual relation.

But, which has been the glare that produced in the shadows the singular signifier? It was the impact of a "becchino piccolino", his mother's smallest beak in the identification to maternal clitoris, that place of the fault which he believed that doesn’t lack, but lacks. The subject is feminized by remaining in the shadow of the letter transmitted from an enyoyment beyond the phallus. He places it before, as if it were, that is to say, he founds his being out of the law but he puts the letter to work in the language (5). "Pinino" is equivalent to "Mom's small-pin", "el small-pin de mamá" in Spanish, the small-pin named in English, another shared language.

This is the way the conflict works, in the symptom’s enigma produced in analysis. This being left without words, which he uses in grimaces and tics, brings him back a year after his parents had decided to interrupt his analysis because he had overcome his fears.

 

 

 

María Rosa Borgatello de Musolino

14-9-00

 

 

Bibliografía:

  1. Sigmund Freud: Esquema del psicoanálisis, Cap. VIII. Tomo XXIII – Amorrortu editores
  2. Abriss der Psychoanalyse, pág. 132. Tomo XVII. G. Werke –Fischer Verlag

  3. Sigmund Freud: Fetichismo. Tomo XXI – Amorrortu editores
  4. Jacques Lacan: Les non dupes errent, clase 12-2-74. Inédito
  5. Sigmund Freud: Lo inconsciente, Cap.III. Tomo XIV – Amorrortu editores

Das Unbewusste, pág. 275. Tomo X. G.Werke –Fischer Verlag

(5) Jacques Lacan: D’un discours que ne serait pas du semblant, clase 17-3-71 y 10-3-71