What I learned in psychoanalysis

I have always been fascinated by language -- how we use it, how we read and understand it, and how we acquire it in the first place. It is this abiding interest in language that draws me to psychoanalysis. It is why I entered into psychoanalysis myself. But what did I learn there?

First: Transference. That was my ultimate goal -- I had to be part of it, had to experience it fully and completely before I could really understand it and apply it to my own work.

Second: motherhood, the maternal, my relationship to my own mother. These things I had to grasp in a way I never could before...

These are the most important things I learned in psychoanalysis, and I intend to use them fully in this book.

There are several things about motherhood, about mothers, that I need to acknowledge before I write any more: 1. we should trust mothers -- they have a wisdom we should be learning from and believing in; 2. we need to recognize what mothers contribute to civilization as the first teachers, and best ones, especially when it comes to language acquisition; and 3. we ought to celebrate the wonder that is the mother -- an individual who both separates herself from her children but also loves them and teaches them to communicate with the wider world. Feminists don't think or talk about this person much, and we keep her down in wider discourse (for example, in the popular representation of mother as housekeeper/"homemaker") -- if only feminists would embrace and praise her for the miraculous things she does, with no prejudice: sons and daughters both receive these gifts from the mother. Without them, where would we be? (comment 1)

When I learned about psychoanalysis, then went through it myself, I learned about jouissance, how it affects the I.

The problem with jouissance, with simple enjoyment without desire, is that for the object of jouissance, there exists no understanding of why or how it(I) can please the Other. Unlike with desire, where I understand what attracts the Other to me, jouissance is a mystery and profoundly disturbing. This fear, this sort of primal disturbance, brings on abjection. The Other, with the unknowing help of the self, (I am thinking that this is the creation of the "alter ego") creates a topology of catastrophe (comment 2) that leads to the existence of the abject.