A CHRONICLE OF SHAME - CHAPTER 9 - BEING IMPREGNATED BY HIS FATHER
It was AS, an ex-partner who later became one of my best friends, who gave me a book by François Peraldi to mark the fifteenth anniversary of our relationship. The book had a considerable impact, a liberating effect, on the very essence of things, on the conclusion of this never-ending story that had spanned my life. I had often spoken to him about Peraldi. He knew how important he had been in my life. Just before coming to join me at home, he had gone into the bookshop Le Parchemin. He later told me that he had immediately seen La mort, Séminaire 1985-1988 (Montreal, Liber, 2010, 430 p. Coll. “Voix psychanalytiques”) on a shelf. “Incredible that I found that! This is exactly what I need to give to Richard! ” He had the book gift-wrapped on the spot and arrived at my house absolutely delighted. ‘Go on, unwrap it! ’ It was March 23, 2011. I was very surprised, even shocked that he would give me such a gift. I wanted this book, so much so that I wanted to read Peraldi, to hear his voice again, and to hope, as many dreams had suggested to me, that I would find a revelation, the essential thing that I finally needed to know to free myself from what had been tyrannizing me for so long - since I was in a queue at a bank in Mexico, when the little liar, the secretive one, the two-faced man that I was had started to panic badly that he would be caught, accused of theft and forgery, that he would be revealed to himself and to everyone as guilty of an unspeakable crime, and that he would go mad. I had often dreamed that Peraldi had left me a note explaining the crux of the matter, a small piece of paper hidden in one of the books in his personal library. I had no idea that, when I read La mort, Séminaire 1985-1988, I would come across a few pages that would have a redeeming power, and that finally, as Peraldi had predicted, “all that would be left to me one day would be the memory of what had terrified me, now without any particular affect.”
So I read, eyes wide open, scrutinizing every page, every line. I read that “psychoanalysis is an act of thought. We have argued that this act is based on a forgetting” of the singularity of one's own history. (p.63) I read “that psychoanalysis essentially has to do not with illnesses, but with the suffering of Man, that is to say essentially with the tragic dimension of his existence”. (p.129) I read some disturbing lines about this “fundamental thesis so violently contested (...) that childhood fantasies, whether they be death wishes or sexual seduction, have as much effect in the unconscious, if not more, than real traumas of the same kind”. (p.169) I had in fact strongly debated and strongly contested this thesis during my own analysis. Above all, I read that the child, at the mirror stage, “desires to be the mother's desire” (p.196), but in the uniqueness of my story, the child that I was, at the mirror stage, rather desired to be the father's desire, even more so, and tragically, because my father's desires were to prove unbearable, and radically forbidden, as soon as words to express them could be stammered, and mental representations could arise from them. This expression, desire of desire, changed everything and clarified everything in one night, and I remember thinking to myself: “But that's Peraldi's own words, spoken in 1988, just a few months before I started my own psychoanalysis. How could he have forgotten this concept? Why didn't he explain it to me?” It was while rereading my notes in preparation for this story that I realized that he had told me repeatedly, in other words than those in the book, that the very young child that I had been had essentially, fundamentally, wanted to embody the desire of his father, with whom he first identified, very early in his life. It was this identification that gave rise to all the temptations, repressed of course, which became totally unconscious, and all the very real anxieties that I felt afterwards, throughout my life. During the very last psychoanalysis session, Peraldi repeated to me, perhaps as an essential legacy: “You suffer from your identification with your father. Until this is resolved, there will be blockages and divisions.”
I wanted to be my father's desire, “a little boy, so small”, who pleased him, who excited him, his object, something that came from him. “I am the giver of life,” he said to me one day, which seemed to establish rights of appropriation and possession. His boy had a desirable little body, and that little body had something to show. How could he resist? There was pleasure, fusion with the little body. I was, as a tiny baby, my father's desire, and to put it another way, I was pregnant with my father, carrying the son, his son, a little boy, as a model to come, the son he wanted, whom he created by projecting his own fantasies and through gestures he sketched out, yet ones fraught with consequences. There was excitement, there was feverishness. — Language games about my baby penis, a hand quickly slipped under my blanket, a blowjob barely started that was interrupted, a nighttime intrusion into my room, absolutely terrifying, and coming from me, when I was a small child, a very clear desire to sleep with him, to replace my mother in bed, to become his spouse entirely willing to let himself be done. By identifying with my father, I first identified with my father's desire. And then came the horror, the rupture. At the age of 5, in Val Saint-Michel, fantasizing about having sex with my father, and reminding myself that it was forbidden even to think about it, I tried to abort myself, still vicious despite everything, and I remember very clearly formulating it in those words, just as they were. I had just realized that I carried my father's desire within me, that I had to give substance to my father's desire. When this desire had arisen out of nowhere, I had been in a state of shock, and I feared committing the unspeakable crime, the very crime that my father feared so much for himself, so extreme, he thought, would the punishment be, if he were to fulfill his desire. So I aborted him as much as I could, I hated him, I wished him dead, but I remained my father's runt, for a long time the only means of survival and of making any desire impossible, so much did I have to stifle his desires, my father's desires that had penetrated me so deeply, to the point of alienation, to the point of madness.
At the very beginning of the analysis, Peraldi had spoken of a fantasy that healed everything and which, perhaps, was my father's: “to have a very young son with whom all sexuality is realized, without the need for the rest of the world. ” There is no doubt that my father's desire came true during my early childhood. It was through sexual contact, however minimal, that my father impregnated me with his own desires. At the age I was, somewhere between six months and two years, maybe three, I saw my father wagging his tongue on my penis, as if I were watching him do it in a mirror or in a movie, dissociated but aware that it was my body. I learned about my body through my father's sexuality. I didn't have the words to express it, but the little boy that I was still recognized his father, he saw him, and his father knew it, and feared that his son would say it or show it, through spontaneous, thoughtless mimicry. The mirror became terribly disturbing. Then there came an age when the little boy lost the roundness of childhood, lost all interest, “we don't know why, really,” Peraldi had told me, “somewhere when the mother began to be disgusted by the child's feces.” So my father also gave up, and imagined that any tenderness was potential homosexuality, which he had to violently reject.
From then on, I denied everything, completely. From a very early age, when I had already reached the age of reason, I denied that I could be like my father, I denied that I could have any affinity with him, I denied that I could have any character trait in common with him, and I even refused to bear his name when, like all teenagers, I had to make a name for myself. If I could have, I would have taken my mother's name. So I did not become my father's adult son. I did not become a real person, well-rounded and detached, free of desire and enjoying life, concrete and tangible. I did not become a man. I became an indeterminate being, a drive, a hologram, desire given birth to by my father. I became my father's excited and guilty desire, determined to remain so all my life. But as I tried to abort myself, in the end I was only my father's despicable and terribly shameful runt.
I naturally hoped that my brother would take over from my father and in turn impregnate me, the magnificent older brother, the one I had waited for so long, so that he would rescue me from my father. When I was around 9 or 10, and even more so when I reached adolescence and he was now a grown man, a brilliant adult, about to get married, I no longer interested him at all, and it was by pretending to ignore him that I listened to him, as he continued to fill me with his fantasies and desires. And so I have always remembered a conversation, in fact a banal one, between my brother and my father, which showed how long I had remained open to what they both wanted, and what they forbade themselves.
There was a credit card advert on the TV, in which the actor said that you only need one, the right one, and that you have to use it intelligently. I was 13, my brother 19, my father 48.
- It’s easy, said my brother, we just have to imitate a signature and buy what we want with a stolen credit card.
- No, it's impossible. A signature is highly personal and no one can imitate it perfectly. The seller will always see through the fraud, my father answered.
I was there, in the same room as them, in front of the TV. There were only three of us. I thought: “oh no, not that too”, now I had to want to steal, have to steal, be closely watched and take up the challenge of stealing. It hit me without a filter, and I thought, not even innocently, that I too had to identify with a desire to steal if I wanted to have value, more precisely “some credit”, in fact to be a man just like my brother was. That evening, I never thought about my mother, who had attempted to steal and had later told me that she was a kleptomaniac. I was a prisoner of my mother's secrets, but these secrets did not reinvent me. It belonged to her, and except for the forgetfulness she taught me, the silence she imposed on me, I did not identify with her unconscious fantasies, I dreamed too much of my father, then of my brother, the absolute value, the only one that really mattered, my brother whom I never stopped loving, hoping and waiting for, my brother who had raped and penetrated me, before whom I remained defenceless. He would be capable of imitating, he would be capable of stealing, but me? I assumed that I needed this perversion, that the audacity of the thief was a rite of passage, a gateway to manhood, a major characteristic of the man, the male, the heterosexual, that it was absolutely necessary for me to acquire it. It completely took over. It was going to stay with me for a long time. It was the most powerful identification with my brother that I had ever made, the only one that was going to last.
I had once said to Peraldi that I had “a great deal of difficulty in giving myself credit, other than in a narcissistic way. In fact, I was terribly afraid of having credit. To have any kind of value. It was like the fear of miscegenation, so present in my dreams: it was the fear of recognizing my father or my brother in myself.
I have kept important fragments of my two or three years in my head. I was disturbed, then terrorized by what my learning at the mirror stage was like, and I still have trouble looking at myself now. Several friends have told me how surprised they were to catch, for a brief moment, the hateful look I give myself when I see my reflection in a mirror. That was exactly what was called signature phobia, the block I encountered when countersigning a check or a credit card slip, and which made me anxious to the point of being unbearable: I regarded the second signature as a reflection of the first, as if the second signature had to be the perfect mirror image of the first, impossible to see without fear and hatred, impossible to achieve. But even when executed perfectly, the anxiety remained, because I imagined myself showing something scandalous, immensely perverse, violently forbidden, my brother's desire to steal (and to be daring), but above all my father's desire, which permeated every cell of my body, his desire for a sexual relationship with a very young boy, that something I had wanted to abort in order to free myself from it at all costs. Having had difficulty in signing my name, in seeing myself in a signature, in recognizing myself in a signature, in showing it, it is not surprising that I developed a terrible trance at having to double my signature, to make a perfect copy of it, as only a mirror can do. It is also no surprise that for so long it was impossible for me to see myself in the gaze of another scrutinizing my signature, or in the photograph to be taken, or in the very fact of simply naming a person, of awakening them, of making them aware of my sexual intentions towards them and of provoking their murderous rage. I had dreamed, in the days of psychoanalysis, that a woman - my mother? - “encouraged me to look at myself in the mirror to find, to remember, to understand, to finally understand. ” Few dreams have spoken to me with such truth.
That night in March 2011, when I finally learned the exact words to express the very heart of my story, I didn't sleep all night, but I wrote a lot, and I had the well-founded impression that I was finally putting an end to this personal story that I had set out to write a long time ago, to finally conclude it.
My father's life trajectory began to seriously decline around the age of fifty. I was still 13 or 14 when mental illness began to affect him, and his whole life took a poignant turn. He was the only one in his work team who did not get a promotion - nor the salary that would have followed. He began to shut himself away, evening after evening, alone in the living room in the dark. He spoke less and less, became less skilled, made considerable errors of judgment. He sometimes had outbursts of excessive rage, could no longer bear any frustration. It was at that time that my mother had asked us to call him the boss, without him ever taking it seriously. He was clearly suicidal, and I began to be afraid of him, afraid of his death wish, afraid that he would kill me in the car when his distress became obvious and I was traveling alone with him in the summer between Île d'Orléans and Québec City. The car was my father's thing. It meant everything to him. It was the ultimate embodiment of his manhood. So I made the opposite choice to his, of course, and I refused to share the immense pleasure that my father had with his car, obviously to avoid any physical and sexual proximity to him, but above all, to resist his death wish, which risked being passed on, that too. Useless resistance, I started to be afraid of killing myself in a car, or of killing someone else. I quickly attributed the intention to kill to all men, with whom I identified myself despite everything, just as I had never stopped identifying myself with my father. He inhabited me, I was terrified by what he forced me to feel, to do. As an adolescent, being my father's son translated into the fear of being sent on a mission by my father, of hearing him say to me “go in my place”, an order that my father would have forced me to obey when he had his fits of rage and was looking for an ally against anyone he perceived as an aggressor, especially against his precious car. I lived with this as a permanent fear. I was very wrong when I thought that running away from the family home would free me from this terrible legacy. I have been scarred for life by his desires, his fantasies, his own shame, his jealousy, his rage, his secret life, his relationships with others. The amnesia about real events from my early childhood has, I am sure, reinforced the active power of what was then captured by the unconscious. I was indeed my father's son.
There is a deep cry inside me, which could be heard as: “No! It's not me!” I had already shouted something similar to my mother when I was around 5 or 6 years old, when I thought that a lady, the mother of my best friend, had called our house to denounce my perversity, the very real desire I had had to have sexual relations with her son in the bathroom at his house, rather than playing trucks. I would like to get something off my mind, the almost physical rootedness of the embarrassment and shame of my father's sexuality that I have inherited. All my life I have had the powerful fantasy of wanting to start all over again, without him. Considering things as they were, as they have always been, my father and my brother took away my right to be a man among men, to desire it, and to integrate among them in a normal way - I mean, free, free to be myself and to let my body develop without undergoing madly inhibiting constraints. That is precisely what I have been trying to heal from.
A small child who survives incestuous desire, which he or she experienced far too early in life, is doomed, for the rest of his or her days, never to clearly understand desire again, neither his or her own, nor, above all, that of others, which he or she always presumes to be unspeakable. A child who has survived incest is doomed never to enter into someone else's desire in a healthy way, without feeling the approach as extremely violent and threatening. This is, I think, the most difficult, most oppressive and most morbid aftereffect to live with. Before I stopped and looked into it, I had nothing to say about this worst of all fears, nameless, a fear of a small child who has few words, who does not know how to express himself, who knows he is totally dependent, but who has understood, perfectly, the inconceivable punishment that would befall him and destroy him if he spoke, or if he staged what had happened. For the rest of their lives, the child, the boy, the young man, the man will ask themselves, with terror, what the true desire of all the people they meet is, as soon as the unpredictable is conducive to exchanges, even indifferent, even banal. For the rest of their lives, children and adults alike will panic at the idea that others may realize that they are, always and in their entirety, a desire that can be shocking, even if they have the healthy clarity of seeing themselves as they are, sometimes ugly, old, bald, or ungainly. Above all, for the rest of their lives, they will never stop worrying about what other people want, always misunderstood, always perceived as dangerous, and therefore never knowing how to react. They will be described as “strange”, “weird”, “antisocial” and unattractive. And people will hope, as in the bad dream I had repeatedly when I was a child, that they will “marry” themselves, isolate themselves and disappear from view. It's no longer locking up the mad; but it's at least a good riddance. I am unable to look at myself in my signature, I hate myself when I see myself in the mirror. It is as if the Other, the two babies from the famous dream, two babies that are one, were me, buried and repressed, but still me. I have a violent fear that the baby will speak, in fact show what happened. I feel like both the criminal who abused those babies and the babies themselves. It's enough to drive you mad.
In 2011, but even more so when writing my story, I realized how dual I am, like everyone else in fact, I am dual to what I am and to what I carry in my unconscious baggage. I am twofold, firstly of a fearful, anxious self, with an overwhelming superego, constantly excited, with an always feverish sexuality, but only able to live it fully in solitary pleasure and in the imagination; and then there is the unconscious, which I know better now, because I have pierced its protective layer, like a mirror I had passed through, like the surface of a lake I had so easily penetrated, to see clearly, in depth. This unconscious is polysexualized, fragmented, perverse, very informed about the thing, and carries an unspeakable guilt, because it is infantile, a guilt that feeds all my anxieties, all my phobias. The unconscious is now partially uncovered; at least a significant fragment, the one that made my destiny a tragic adventure. So I have been able to tell my story and that of my father, my brother and my mother based on what has permeated me and what has been repressed. I am dual, I will never cease to be so, but there may be - surely - a slow but irreversible work of reconciliation and fusion that will take place in the latter part of my life. It has already begun, and very well.
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