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THE DEAD SON: from a "folie à deux" to the paranoia LEZCANO Alicia Rita "...During all my life I lived more the death than the life..." Salvador Dalí
Author: ALICIA RITA LEZCANO. Translated: (from Spanish to English) Silvia Beatriz Bolotin. This work has the intention to point out some facts to think about a possible incidence in the familiary framework of the psychosis. A genealogical and chronological reading allows to make an hypothesis that in the cases of folie à deux appears the death of a son and the maternal impossibility of symbolizing this loss. In a collaboration with Pierre Mignault and Henri Claude, Jacques Lacan published, in the Annales Médicals(1931), a work that anticipated his interest for the psychosis. The authors lokate their presentation like cases of delirum of two, délire à deux; their hypothesis was called as "simultaeous madness", in opposition to the classic doctrine of "mental contagion" or "communicated (communiqué) madness" (1). There wasn’t in this debate where the interest of this investigation resides; but in pointing out as a mark shown as a favourable point: the loss of a son and the difficulties of being other alive children’s mother. Both cases of délire à deux refer to a mother and a daughter. In the first one, there are the mother and the daughter of the case Rob. The first one presents a "paranoiac" delirium; while the daughter an "atypical interpretative psychosis". Besides this daughter, a natural daughter, was not recognized, and the mother had had of the same father two more children, to those that entrusted in the asylum of orphans , and she had two dead twin when they were born. This loss is coincident with the begining of the illness. She listens voices from the air that tells her "that she has killed his son" (2). So, the daughter is considered dangerous for her strange practices, and afterwards her brother’s death. Both women lived isolated, sustaining their delirium. In the second case of the Gol, the mother seems to have been the first one in being delirious and quickly the daugther has followed in her interpretations. She was an unique daughter and, as in the previous case, a natural daughter. In the social reality of these women, the masculine figure is absent; nevertheless they deploied conceptions about the fecundity and the procreation. The daughter, Blanche, organizes all her delirium in relation to that key that is the maternity. She says that a creator had been "violated" her, still twelf times in a day and other times she stayed as a "virgin" (3). On the other hand, she wonders:"¿What is a mother?" (4) "A lady that has been cleaned her and to the one who the Governorship has installed a child that comes from her own body". I think that between the question and the answer there is no place for any father; and to be a mother, it would be necessary to remain virgin. I imagine that a natural daughter has a fault (manque) father’s side filiation. So, mother and daugther remain in a kind of jail, in a social isolation. There is not a relating on the outside of that other one maternal, freezing the place of a "pure love". One year later, Lacan, in his thesis(1932), emphasizes the importance of the social isolating in the "psychological couple" frequently constituted by a mother and a daughter, or a couple of two sisters. He also mentions the delirious psychosis of the mother of Aimée (5). We know the true name of the case Aimée from Lacan. She was Marguerite, who had the same name that her grandmother, maternal and paternal. A sister also precedes to Aimée: the sister was called Marquerite and was born to the 8th month of her parents mariage and she has died "accidentally" (6) at five years old. To the seventh month, the son from the couple was born dead and his name was Baptiste Pantaine and a year afterwards Aimée was born, here it was the second Marguerite The madness of Aimée is unchained by the first pregnancy, and the delirium takes body with the dead in the son’s birth. A second pregnancy carried her a depressive state with anxiety. Analogoues interpretations that threat her son. Lacan writes:"..The roles of states puerperales are as apparent manifestations clinically and it seems to have been the detonator. To the pregnancies that followed the two initials increases of the delirium"(7). Aimée with her nigthmares and her delirium, in her writings, tries to veil that lethal place. This place doesn’t has a square given by the symbolic, so it reappears one time and another. Their psychosis is adressed to the public, making know them "the nonchalances of the frivolous mothers" (8). Jean Allouch’s researches goes directly towards that impossibility of being the substitute of the dead one, whom Marguerite takes the name. And following the procedure of this matter of places over a famous figure. I’m going to consider Salvador Dalí. This painter, writer, sculptor and film-director has looked for in his characters to interweave his own filiation. He tries to write the marks of his history by means of his brush-strokes, in the letters of his writing or in the lines and forms of the sculptural pieces. Salvador Dalí was born in Figueras, in May 11, 1904, to the nineth month of his brother’s death also called Salvador; and this is one of the facts that he comments: "Desesperate, my father and my mother didn’t find consolation more than in my arrival to the world. I resembled my brother like like two drops of water. Therefore, I was without any doubt viable" (9). Then, to the eyes of his parents, this second Salvador was the substitute of a dead. He is gestated among the bereavement and his brothers’s image, whose portrait wass on the wall of his parents’ bedroom, next to the Crucified Christ of Velázquez. A single altar to adore to the dead Salvador, the brother, and The Saviour, Jesus Christ. His conception takes place in this same altar, in this no-place. Dali tells us: "I draw to stop to be". He was born with a name that paradoxically it was not personal. To ten years old, he carries out his first self-portrait and he titles it: "The sick child". A new nomination that it comes to denounce his origin. All his art and his life itself, had had the mission of building another filiation. The parents gave him the last name Dalí, that means "wish" in catalan, and the name of Salvador was loaded of sense for these parents. However, he deviated the sense with the certenty of being the Saviour but of the deadly threatened painting because of the abstract art (10). He says: "....I only want to be Salvador Dalí and any thing else; but as I come closer to that aim, it moves away from me: Salvador Dalí" (11). The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud began to be published in spanish about 1922. Dalí read them volume to volume as them appeared and he was not only interested by the texts about arts, like Gradiva, Leonardo da Vinci, Moses; but also by the Interpretation of Dreams. After that reading,Salvador Dalí writes: "It seems to me, that I found one of the capital discoveries of my life and it took possession of me a true autointerpretation bad habit, not only of the dreams, but of all that happened to me, for more casual than it seems at first sight" (12). "The Metamorphosis of Narcissus" was painted in July,1936. The folowing year, during a visit he makes to Freud, Dalí showed him this painting and a poem written by himself and he sayed: "Those are the first poem and the first picture gotten entirely according to the intire application of the paranoiac method-critical....Leit- motiv of my thought, of my aesthtics and life: "death and resurrection" (13). Dalí evokes for us his "anticipate and premature double". His creation folows the drama trajectory of being a "living-dead" and escaping from the tragic destiny.This picture represents the search of its own "source" and it concludes with the significative words: "New Narcissus" . "Gala, my narcissus" (14), the name of his lover, and Galo, his grandfather’s name, both nomination come to produce an effectiveness in the nomination, when he signs his pictures like: Galadalí. Here there is a condensation, a saving double that annuls the origin of being only a substitute. Dalí discovers with Gala the freudian key of love, that he has just been born which only the death interrupted. He tells us: "She would be my Gradiva (the one that advances), my Victory Goddess, my wife. And she cured me thanks to the unbroken and the unfathomable power of her love" (15). Gala is his lover, friend, muse, model and main character of his pictures until in the most unsuspected places. It would be for on all the things new own name. In the magazine Minotaure, Dalí publishes a work (1933) with the thesis value sating from Jean- Francois Millet’s picture: "The Angelus". Like Freud does, Salvador Dalí grants a story to this play of art, whose reproduction saw him from very child in the corridor of his school. He writes a book: "The Tragic Myth of the Angelus of Millet", developing the exemplarly "critical paranoiac method". A mixture of reality, memories and fiction lead him to an intention that becomes his thesis: "that great mythical topic of the son’s death". Dalí wonders himself ¿Which the startling pain of these peasants is? A dead son that doesn’t appear explicitly in the picture. As answer, he had made a third character that would represents obsessivaly in his pictures to arise. Numerous versions of the Angelus, trasformed it into an architectural construction; he had reproduced the character Angleus beside Gala, and there he saw her among the rocs of Catalonia and it would be the background of his brother’s portrait. Dali clarifies us that in the case of the Angelus, his "delirious productivity is not visual; it is simply psychic" (16). Although his pencil or paint-brush follows the contour in the forms; in his drawing, stamps, seals, stone-tablets, he transmits us the argument of his drama. That revelation was confirmed for him, once he finished his thesis, in this great mythical topic of the son’s death. In the laboratories of The Louvre Museum, it is examined The Angelus of Millet for the first time by means of study X-ray. The plate verifies the presence of a dark stain of painting covering a small part of the paralellebiped which is in the same place that Salvador Dalí pointed out. Then he takes knowledge that Millet has painted, among the twopeasants pously picked up. There was a coffin that contained his dead son, to the right, near the mother’s feet. According to a certain correspondence, a friend of Millet, resideing in Paris, he had put it fully informed of the rejection for too melodramatics topics. That fact convinced Millet to cover the dead son with a layer of painting that it simulated a peace of land. This would explain the anguish of those two solitary figures. It was an explanation that Dalí no longer needs because all his paranoiac interpretation corresponded to the necessity of basing each event, each corporal sensation, through a personal system of significances. All this creative and imaginative activity took him to the exhibitionism permanently showing his intents of veiling with knowledge that lethal place. By this way, he has decided to covert in a public man with extravagancy and extrem courage. He celebrates the event of his birth being expressed in third person, like frecuently he made it to refer to himself. "¡That sound all the bells! .The famous of the world is born without any trauma!... ¡That the curved peasant on the field straightens his back curved as the olive twisted by the tramontana!"(17) Salvador Dalí had become a "marck registered", in all type of objects, stamps and jewels. This audacious man singed numerous sheets of paper and pictures in white, that facilitated his illegitimate multiplication; but his interest resided in the trascendency. The artist didn’t have enough his own mirror; but rather he nedeed others looks of himself. His pictures, the newspapers, the magazines, the television his admirers would be enough. For a Christmas, special day of Salvador’s birth, Dalí traveled the streets of New York with a bell shaking it, whenever he had the impression that people didn’nt dedicate him the enough attention; exclaming this words: "It was unbearable to think that it could be recognized" (18). Faithful to himself until the last day, boarded in the Quirón Clinic of Barcelona city, he followed the reports about his health, they were diffussed by the catalan broadcasting. He wanted to hear to speak of himself and to know if everything went well or if he wo
Bibliography Allouch, Jean. . Marguerite, Lacan Called her Aimée, Edition Epele,1995, Mexico. Dalí, Salvador. Confessions Inconfesables, Newspapper of a Genius, Tisquets, 1998, Barcelona The Tragic Myth of "The Angelus of Millet", Tusquets, 1998, Barcelona.
Visits Theater, Museum Figeuras, 1998. Litoral 23/24, Artist’s Exercise, Edelp, 1997, Córdoba. Litoral 17, The function of the Bereavement, Edelp, 1994, Córdoba. Litoral 15, To Know about Madness, Edelp, 1993, Córdoba.. Palma, Sabatino . Points about Moonstruck, Homons Sapiens, 1998, Rosario. Pommier, Gérard. Louis, The Rien, Ediciones Amorrortu, 1999, Buenos Aires. Karothy, Rolando, H. Dali and Lacan. Notes of The Freudian School of Buenos Aires. Vegh Isidoro. The Psychosis Teach Us, Sem. Escuela Freudiana de Buenos Aires, 1992. Wermer, Johannes. The Art and his Creators, History 16, Valeriano PAGE
INDEX (1)pag, 483, Lacan, Claude et Mignaut, Madness Simultanées, Medical Annals- Psychologiques, session du 21 Mai 1931 (2) pag, 484, Idem 1. (3-4) pag, 488, Idem 1. (5) pag, 209, Lacan, Jacques. De la Psychose Paranoïaque dans ses Rapports avec la Personnalité. Edition du Seuil, 1975, Paris. Of The Paranoiac Psychosis and their Relationship with the Personality. (6) pag, 167, Idem 5. (7) pag, 190, Idem 5 (8) pag, 151, Idem 5. (9) pag,3-4, Dalí, Salvador, Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, 1984. (10) Dalí, Salvador. Newspaper of a Genius, Tusquets,1998 , Spain. (11) Video. Exhibition (12) pag, 44 , Dalí Monumental Bs. As. Psychoanlysis.
(14) Idem 13. (15) pag, 181, 189, 191, Dalí, Salvador. Secret Life. (16) page 7-8, Descharnes-Néret. Dalí, Chap. "A Dandy face to a Glace". (17) Idem 17. |