Freud's Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer by Lana Lin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Freud's Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer by Lana Lin Madelon Sprengnether (bio) Freud's Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer by Lana Lin. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017, 224 pages. Freud's Jaw, which adapts Melanie Klein's theory of early childhood development to the experience of cancer, offers a new and compelling way to view cancer's impact on survivors. Psychoanalytic readers will be familiar with Klein's formulation of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, which she posits as necessary stages in the infant's creation of an inner world. What they may be surprised to discover is how useful Klein's theory is in thinking about the challenges of later life, including those of illness and loss. Lin grasps the larger implications of Klein's theory and extends it into a profound meditation on mourning. Klein assumed that infants perceive the world initially in terms of "good" and "bad" objects, the mother's breast representing both, based on whether it is perceived as satisfying or frustrating. Unable to tolerate their destructive feelings towards the "bad" breast, infants split this awareness off into the fantasy of an external persecuting force. In other words: "I do not hate my mother's breast; it hates me." At a later stage of development, the infant becomes aware of its capacity for greed, envy, destructiveness, and rage. This leads to the so-called "depressive" position, in which the infant feels guilt and regret about these impulses, along with a desire to make amends. Klein understood the capacity to tolerate inner conflict and ambivalence (hence the achievement of the depressive position) as essential to human development. Once highly controversial, Klein's ideas have gained increasing acceptance over time, due in part, I would say, to a growing awareness of the power of hatred and rage on the global stage. Much of humanity now seems immersed in a paranoid-schizoid type of mentality, rather than one of ambivalence, tolerance, or recognition of the need for reparation. In this [End Page 649] sense, Klein intuited the implications of Freud's formulation of the "death instinct." Freud's emphasis on the life-giving pleasure principle in his early writings gave way in later life to a more sober realization of the forces within us that lead to death and dissolution. We know much about the losses of Freud's later years but little about how he may have felt about them. His best beloved daughter Sophie died of influenza in 1920, and his favorite grandson Heinele in 1923, the same year that Freud was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw. This sixteen-year ordeal involved numerous surgical interventions and the use of an unwieldy prosthesis, which caused difficulties in speaking and eating. Ill and in constant pain, he consented in 1938 to leave Vienna for London, where he died on September 23, 1939, less than a month after Hitler's invasion of Poland. One cannot help but wonder how Freud withstood the succession of losses of his final years. Lin's first chapter focuses on Freud's experience of cancer of the jaw, the devastations it wreaked on him, and the adjustments he made to it as a means of repairing its assault on his life and sense of personal integrity. Central to her argument is Klein's understanding that major loss can reanimate the conflicts we experience in the very first months and years of our existence. In "Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States" (1940/1986), Klein wrote movingly about the impact of grief and the work of mourning in later life. The pain experienced in the slow process of testing reality in the work of mourning thus seems to be partly due to the necessity, not only to renew the links to the external world and thus continuously to re-experience the loss, but at the same time and by means of this to rebuild with anguish the inner world, which is felt to be in danger of deteriorating and collapsing. Just as the young child passing through the depressive position is struggling, in his...