"LIFE! It's a game and I
know all the rules. Whether
I win or lose, I don't give a damn. Let's
say I find life amusing." Listening
to this patient I was struck by his dry, serious tone of voice, his
stiff carriage, and the expression on his face, tight with anxiety,
and showing no trace of the amusement that life supposedly brought
him. Why such a denial of life's importance, and
indeed of his own? There was
something distinctly defiant about his statements but to whom were
they directed, and why? Looking back on this first meeting with Professor
K., I can now answer that question in part. His idea that life was a game which he knew
how to play, even if he did not get much out of it, was a desperate
attempt to give some meaning to his life. We
were to discover subsequently that he felt it had none, that the necessary
sign posts were missing, and that he often wished he could put an end
to his miserable game. But there
was no way out of his compulsive existence. In
a sense he was saying I have to live my life as though it were a futile
game otherwise I shall not be allowed to go on living.
Towards the end of this
first interview he replied,
You ask what would happen if I should take myself
seriously. Let's suppose I
really finished this book I've pretended to work on for years—well,
I feel I would be taking a senseless risk. It
sounds crazy, but if the book were a success that would be the end
of everything.
We were to discover that
this modus vivendi touched every aspect of his life—his friendships,
his work, his beliefs, his sexuality. He
did nothing "really, " and was ironic about those who did,
including analysts. The illusion
that nothing he did was serious or quite real allowed him in fact to
begin his analysis. In his first session, after a few desultory
remarks upon the oddness of the situation, he stopped abruptly:
I say, am I playing it well, this psychoanalytical
game?
Behind the playful camouflage
K. was able to reveal glimpses of another reality.
My life is a continual degradation. My intellectual work suffers. Everything I do is accomplished under pressure
at the last possible minute. In
front of my public I have the constant impression that I'm cheating,
fooling them. … I live in
dread of being unmasked one day and condemned forever. By
the way, perhaps I should tell you about some of my little sexual
obsessions—that
is, if it interests you.
In the sessions that followed,
this theme was employed like a tantalizing game as K. let fall here
and there a veiled hint relating to his sex life, stopping from time
to time to ask if I had "understood." His
sexual practice, in fact, consisted in beating his girlfriend on the
buttocks with a whip, in a highly detailed and ritualistic scene.
There you are. Now
I've shown you my sexual degradation, something which is beyond my
own understanding. Oh but don't
imagine that I want to do away with it. These
are my favorite games.
Instead
of being one who must steal to have and thus doesn’t have, K psychologically
engineers his triumphs so that they disintegrate into a depressive
feeling that he was only playing, or fooling the Other. Initially,
the symptoms that were most distressing for K were related to work,
where professional successes repeatedly disintegrated:
Yet in attempting to render
intelligible his anxiety regarding his work problems he succeeded in
revealing that they too were closely connected with his sexual inhibitions. Talking of his difficulty in taking his work
seriously he used imagery evocative of disquieting sexual fantasies:
I seem incapable of penetrating, of really getting
inside my work. It's as though
I dare not go right to the end. I
never reach the bottom. Even
to get started I have to plunge in with my eyes closed. Nevertheless
I get there somehow or other, at least with the bare essentials, but
it's a terrible strain. I have
a stack of little tricks to help me. First of all I put myself into a position where
I can't back out. I have to
go through with it then, because that's what's expected. … It's the fact that others are always watching
which obliges me to produce. In
front of a public I always perform well!
K.'s "stack of little
tricks" for overcoming his work inhibitions found their counterpart
in the whips and ritual clothing of his
theatrical fetishist scenes, but "the others who were always watching" were
less easy to identify. These
anonymous others were often referred to as though they were a single
individual. "I constantly
have my eye on the Other, " K. would say. This "Other" became
an ever-present and important personage in K.'s analytic discourse. Thanks
to his watchful presence K.'s painfully accomplished professional
tasks became brilliant "performances" which brought him
some renown and a feeling of having triumphed over terrible odds. But
his triumphs were also accompanied by the nagging feeling of having
fooled "the Other." Although
he described his public success as "an orgastic moment, " the
more so since he took nothing seriously as "well-intentioned folk" did,
his tenuous feeling of superiority invariably gave way to depression
and the feeling that nothing he did was quite real…
But what was his secret? My
patient was far from being able to pin it down except to say that
he played "the game" and was fully aware of what he was
doing. He
did not fool himself like "the others." Nevertheless
it was never clear what the game in question really was. Claparède's
definition of play as "a free pursuit of fictitious goals" would
have met K.'s approval and indeed seemed to characterize his philosophy
of life. He was constrained to present all his life
goals as fictitious and it seemed doubtful that he could ever permit
himself to act as though they were real. His
playing-at-living carried an element of conjurer's magic which implied
the someone who was always watching. This "someone, " in
contradistinction to himself, had to believe, had to be fooled, as
the child is fooled by the adult. In
this fashion K. projected upon others his own confusion with the
result that he, the "adult" played while "the others, " mystified
and serious, watched him.
As
the analysis proceeds, the diffuse and confused experiences – reality-as-game,
having to fool the watching Others, the depressive tilt into meaninglessness
and suicidal thinking – begin to come together in his relationship
with McDougall:
The anonymous onlooker
rapidly worked his way into the transference situation and became installed
there as a powerful source of resistance.
You, you watch me all the time, and seated where
I can't see you. Who are you
anyway? Who am I really talking to? … If this goes on I shall be obliged to take
you seriously. The idea horrifies
me. … I hope you understand,
I no longer find this very amusing!
I said, "What will
happen if your psychoanalysis no longer amuses you, is no longer
a game?"
Words like abyss, chasm, and void come to my mind. I
no longer see anything. I'm frightened.
K., who never admitted
to anxiety or fright, caught himself up quickly and added, "But
don't worry, I can stand any amount of fear."
Could we say you turn fear itself into a game?
K. said, "Have I ever done anything else but
that? All my procrastination,
my balancing tricks to put off everything to the last possible moment,
till I can no longer draw back. … I'm
like a man playing with death."
McDougall’s
question allows K to sample the anxiety associated with his unconscious
beliefs covered by his “playful” discounting of reality. He encounters a Void that represents the dispersal
of experience, a vacuum created by intense and sustained defensive
operations warding off conscious experience of the components of severe
conflict. And in this Void K feels there is death.
What was K struggling with? His presentation of his childhood left McDougall
believing that he was the only child of a lonely mother; for two years
she was unsure whether his father was dead or alive, or whether he
had siblings. When he did finally
bring him up, K presented his father as marginal, overshadowed by mother’s
father:
In my pastel colored trousers, long after the
normal age, I was still her little Prince Charming. We were as one against the world.
"There was no one
else in this world?" I
asked.
K. said, "Well, yes,
the rest; in a way we formed a couple against my father I suppose. … She always used to tell me I was a real little
man. … She was very ambitious
for me. Her dearest desire was
that I should one day resemble her own father. He
had been a writer and she held him in boundless admiration. Tall, strong—quite the opposite of my own father. … You say my father is totally absent whenever
I talk of my childhood. But
it's true, he simply didn't count. Sure,
he was always there, but like a continual absence. I have no clear picture of my grandfather either,
except through the eyes of my mother. There
was one story about him that I loved. She would tell it over and over for me. One day grandfather chased her with a whip
in his hand, and she fled into the toilet at the bottom of the garden. I see myself as a little boy sitting in grandfather's
garden, imagining the scene. I
used to spend hours like that.
I was to learn later that
K., at the age of nine, daydreaming in his grandfather's garden had
already constructed, down to the tiniest details, the erotic fantasies
which, thirty years later, were still the cornerstone of his sexual
edifice.
Drawing
on his mother’s own fascination with the story, K eventually composed
a sadomasochistic ritual with his lovers in which he takes on the role
of the mother’s father. The
fantasies of K and his mother intertwine, excluding K’s father, who
was away at war and who, in K’s telling at least, failed in comparison
to mother’s father. Yet the father is always in the background:
Hidden behind his partner's
complicity, contained in the varied beating fantasies, or concealed
in his masturbation rituals in front of the mirror, there was always
the fantasy of the unknown Other, or Others, who watched.
This spectator, whoever he is, is the culminating
point of my excitement—and also of my anxiety. I
am terrified of his gaze.
In the session following
this remark, K. brought one of his rare dreams.
I was in the home of my childhood, and you were with
me in the bed. You said 'Those
spots on the sheets are all my fault. Someone
might see them.' Then you added
in a solemn voice 'We're anxious, both of us.' It was exciting and terrifying at the same
time, waiting for the other person to come and catch us.
In his spontaneous associations to the dream, K.
said the bedroom recalled his mother's room in which, in the past,
she had often shared confidences with him in respect to disputes and
disagreements she had with his father. Among
the different possible interpretations of the dream it seemed to reveal
an appeal to the Oedipal father, and the mother having been replaced
by the analyst as the object of sexual desire. The
mother's guilt is also underlined. The
whole scene is anxiety-arousing in that the father might castrate the
incestuous son, but at the same time exciting because the son has triumphed
over him.
As
the analysis continues, the Void gradually becomes populated with people
and emotions. In tandem, the
Big Other becomes a father representation, binding the counterbalancing
fear of being discovered with the mother and a more covert appeal to
the father to bring the scene to an end.
But
why to an end? K was at first
puzzled by the feelings of hatred for his mother, evident in the beating
fantasy, and yet cloaked behind the notion that she really wanted to
be beaten by her father.
K. slowly came to discover,
as though for the first time, feelings of intense anger towards his
mother.
Always talking about her
wonderful father … the man I was supposed to emulate. Actually it was she who wanted to be exactly
like him. She told me she had
always wanted to be a boy. Well
I was supposed to be that boy—not for myself but for her. My
grandfather's death must have affected us both, and yet I can hardly
remember anything around that period of my life. Let's
see, I know I must have been six when it happened. I remember that when my grandfather died my
little brother was just learning to walk.
After a short silence he
continued,
"Really I don't understand this hatred I feel
for my mother. After all she
only wanted the very best for me. If
she wanted to keep me all to herself it was only because she loved
me so much. The fact that she prevented any possibility
of a real relationship between me and my father is not sufficient
to explain the hatred I feel."
I repeated, "When
my grandfather died my little brother was just learning to walk."
What do you mean?
"You tell me your
mother adored you, and wanted you all to herself, " I said.
Sure! And
I said it isn't a good enough reason to explain all this hatred!
"Perhaps it is not
the sole or even the true reason for your hatred, " I said. "It could be that you resented your mother
because she desired other people besides yourself. When her adored father died (and he must certainly
have been a rival for her love) her baby, who was just learning to
walk, was already beginning to take his place. And
this little brother, how does he fit into the idea that your parents
had no sexual relationship as far as you were aware? By the way, this is the first time you ever
mentioned the existence of a little brother."
"Oh, " said K.
lamely, "I guess I never mentioned it. I'm
the oldest of four."
"So she was pretty
unfaithful to you one way and another?" I
said.
The fatal childhood dates—six years, nine years—which
marked the setting up of K.'s sexual system also marked the birth
of two of the rival brothers, but by a powerful act of disavowal
(for
he was well aware of their existence) these cataclysmic events in
the life of the little mother-fixated boy had been rendered totally
meaningless
and thus his illusion was protected. The
whip, fictitious phallus, grandfather's idealized penis, became the
chosen object of maternal desire, the sole object able to excite his
own.
As
the analysis proceeded, K came to see his sexual theater as resting
on a precariously maintained illusion. Instead
of being his mother’s Little Prince, he was only a stand-in for her
father, and could not prevent her from having more sons who threatened
him with replacement. The
significance-draining, “it’s
all a game” stance that overlay the Void of anxiety in turn covered
a warded-off, depressive experience of being “just a boy” or “just
another son.” The effort to maintain a magical, counter-depressive jouissance sucked
the meaning out of all around it
and left K further encased in an ongoing bout with significant levels
of paranoia and anxiety. This
was organized around the fantasied gaze of the Other who, as with
Kris’ plagiarizer,
ultimately held a fantasied and foresworn greater phallic power
that K, in his reified position of the usurper Prince, could never
hope to have for himself. The ecstatic, transcendent element of jouissance that Zizek seeks to elevate
appears as an ephemeral, passing instance in a run of experience
that leaves the analysand troubled and cut off from his fellows, not because he is a stigmatized “pervert,” but because of the alienating
conflicts that the perverse practice contains and secures from exposure,
exposure either in the form of near-psychotic terror or in a form
that might allow development beyond his deadlock.