Zen and the ART of Making Babies: Commentary on Simon's “Spoken Through Desire”

Abstract

When the cultural belief is that one can (should) have a baby in one particular way, any other option registers as loss and mourning. This discussion focuses on the subversive potential of assisted reproductive technology (ART). Because ART (“noncoital reproduction”) destabilizes the sanctity of the oedipal family, it is bound to evoke hostility, which in the case of Nora may masquerade as melancholia. As a technology ART established new realities and thus rebranded certain fantasies and desires from perverse to possible. Psychoanalysis needs to follow these changes and not become bastioned by loyalty to oedipal ideologies of reproduction. With short clinical vignettes this discussion attempts to make room for the excitement and renewal ART may impregnate the psychoanalytic field with.

Notes

¹Freud (1924) introduced the concept of the Oedipus complex to denote the biologically and phylogenetically based sexual attraction of the child to the parent of the opposite sex, with concomitant jealousy and hostility to the other parent. Supposedly, “… as the result of many thousands of years of evolution, it appears to have become a hereditary possession of our world” (Boehm, 1931, pp. 450–451). In joining society, the child has to give up early attachments and is commanded to accept a feminine or masculine identity according to the norm of sexual difference and the threat of castration.

²I am thinking of a well-to-do (financially) friend who is a war-veteran amputee. He was recently invited to receive three new hyperdesigned and hyperexpensive prosthetic legs that will allow him to walk, run, and cycle faster. Large teams of doctors and techs have been tailoring such extensions for a lucky few. People who know him or heard of his story have nothing but admiration. One would have to stretch hard to hear a parallel class protest about his being coerced to spend so much on new technology.

³Only in the 1600s did scientists figure out that the woman's orgasm was not necessary for conception (Bergner, 2013).

⁴Just naming the participants is an interesting process—for example, MaMa, Mommy, and Birth-mom.

⁵The United States is a unique country with a mixed legal landscape concerning surrogacy, resulting in an entirely unregulated surrogacy industry; most relevant activities take place in a few extremely permissive states. Internationally, laws vary widely. Israeli legislation has changed rapidly in the past 2 decades, starting from surrogacy being illegal, to being legal for straight couples, and more recently to gay couples—but only if done on an “altruistic” basis—no fees involved. See Svitnev (2011) for a review of international law.

⁶The hostile dread of anything different from the traditional family is deep. Golombok of the Centre for Family Research in Cambridge published a longitudinal outcome study on the welfare of surrogacy children, basically concluding that they were “doing extremely well” (Golombok et al., in press). A comparison group of those conceived through reproductive donation (sperm/egg) showed particularly low levels of emotional or behavioral problems. A reporter covering the publication for a popular audience skewed the findings so badly that Professor Golombok was moved to distribute an open letter to the reporter, protesting the biased reporting.

⁷When Tracy writes “reproductive cells migrating are among bodies” (this issue, p. 290) I hear the whisper of anxiety about transgressive migration across legal (oedipal) boundaries.

⁸Nora's ART baby may be recruited to replace and substitute her oedipal baby, reenacting her impossible role as substitute to her mother's stillborn. Thus, returning her to her sense of falseness, I wonder whether interpreting out of this paradigm, deconstructing the oedipal interpellation by imagining other kinds of wished-for babies, may have served to nachtraglichkeit undo Nora's debt to her mother.