Riding Instincts, Even to Die

ABSTRACT

This paper develops the concept of riding instincts, even to die through a queer reading of Winnicott’s “Primary Maternal Preoccupation.” Primary preoccupation narrates the ongoing establishment of what Winnicott calls “instinctual life.” Turning to queer social history and a clinical case, a relational-structural similarity between pederasty and primary preoccupation is proposed, and the concept of pederastic enactments is used to capture the fraughtness of this similarity. A patient’s deadened instinctual life is explored in relation to his family history and queer identity, and the difficulty of riding instincts, even to die in the treatment is connected to the neoliberalization of desire.

Notes

¹ Winnicott uses “instinct” even though he is often referring to the drive, or the psychical counterpart to the biological instinct. At the risk of confusion, I use instinct and drive interchangeably, since I feel this is in keeping with Winnicott’s thinking. See Goldman (1993) on Winnicott’s relationship to Freud’s drive/instinct theories.

² While Winnicott uses the term “mother,” I sometimes substitute the more gender-neutral term “caregiver,” albeit not without some awareness that this substitution might obscure the sometimes problematic gender dimorphism of his work.

³ Perhaps this brings Winnicott closer to Lacanian ethics, Bataille’s sovereignty, the exigent desire of Simone Weil, or the new humanism of Fanon (especially as formulated by Marriott), to name a few. All these thinkers, each in his or her own way, champion a responsiveness to the unknowable over and above the consolation of the known.

⁴ I use hierarchy rather than asymmetry to distinguish riding instincts, even to die from Benjamin’s (2018) pioneering dialectics of mutuality and asymmetry, and their transcendence in mutual recognition or “the Third as form” (p. 76). Benjamin is addressing developmental stages that follow primary preoccupation, but riding instincts, even to die is also not limited to early life; bringing libido into existence persists as a struggle for many of us. Unlike Benjamin’s intersubjectivism, riding instincts, even to die posits nothing beyond itself; so, for example, it cannot be read as the temporary overcoming of complementarity in mutual recognition. Rather, the ends of care in primary preoccupation are contingent and “radically reinventive,” to borrow Marriott’s (2018) terms. In his exegesis on decolonial violence in Fanon, Marriott writes of reinvention as a nondialectical “language yet to be written” (p. 228), or a language without the consolation of any telos, including that of reinvention itself. I want us to imagine early postnatal care in a similar vein: that is, without the consolation of any prewritten developmental trajectory. It seems this approach is in keeping with the feverish state of Winnicott’s primary preoccupation, since the latter is feverish because it is awash in uncertainty, not about the phenomenal or biological child’s life as much as the infans or child to come.

⁵ Baraitser turns to Levinas to argue for a maternal alterity that infinitely exceeds Benjamin’s concepts of recognition, responsiveness, and reciprocity. Baraitser’s position is close to mine in its espousal of alterity, although her implicit splitting of maternal care from alterity seems based on the notion that maternal care is only thinkable in empirical terms (between a literal mother and child) and that the meeting of need is an invariably “good” thing.

⁶ Jeremy Biles (2016) invokes this same line in his discussion of Bataillean “counter-operation,” or “the infinite undoing of the work of instrumental reason” (p. 4). See Direk (2004) and Brintnall (2015) for similarly compelling readings of Bataillean sacrifice.

⁷ For Bataille, this excessive movement is continuous with the sacred. Bataille is also careful to qualify the sacred as contingent or “heterogeneous,” which is to say it has right- and left-hand paths.

⁸ “Impossible and yet there it is” (p. 206), writes Bataille (1993) in reference to “the miracle,” and this impossible captures the enigma of instinctual life whenever one tries to fathom its indisputable yet phenomenally absent presence in quotidian moments of vitality.

⁹ Pedophiles could be considered pederasts, but not all pederasts are necessarily pedophiles, since pedophilia refers to an attraction to prepubescent children exclusively. Often conflated with pedophilia, pederasty became an object of disdain in queer circles beginning in the 1970s, with the figure of the pederast being increasingly projected onto non-Western, “uncivilized” peoples (Amin, 2017).

¹⁰ I do not mean to suggest that everyone is consciously disturbed by the eroticism of attachments with children, but that such disturbance is, in part, what defines attachment itself, at least to the extent that disturbance marks the presence of incest taboos, which themselves give form to attachment.

¹¹ As much flack as psychoanalysis sometimes gets for being queer phobic, it has done a much better job than queer theory at imagining psychical processes that might be associated with nonnormative sexuality. Understandably, queer theory’s resistance to such speculation is traceable to Foucault’s biopolitics, but as Gayle Rubin’s sexual hierarchy implies, such types are nevertheless still lived—socially and psychically—many of them in the “outer circle,” which includes fetishists, transvestites, and pederasts, to name a few.

¹² The pederastic enactment can be both destructive and enlivening, or perverse in both “generative” and “destructive” ways. In other words, enlivenment and perversion are not mutually exclusive. See Saketopoulou (2014) for an account of what I would call generative perversion.

¹³ Overkill is a forensic term for disfiguring or dismembering a dead (typically murdered) body after death. Stanley cites various cases of overkilled queer and trans bodies.

¹⁴ One example might be members of the Christian right who do not hate queers but pray for them, queerness being negligible in light of God’s unconditional love.

¹⁵ “If the mother provides a good enough adaptation to need,” writes Winnicott (1956), “the infant’s own line of life is disturbed very little by reactions to impingement. (Naturally, it is the reactions to impingement that count, not the impingements themselves)” (my emphasis, p. 303).

¹⁶ This might startle readers of Winnicott who think of his developmental model in moral terms, as if good enough development produces morally righteous subjects. But Winnicott’s developmental model is not a positive one. It is negative in the sense that the caregiver does not invest in the production of a particular child-subject, but gets out of the child’s way so that an innate developmental tendency (or life drive) can do its work. Who the child will become is uncertain. Winnicott writes of a democratic tendency that emerges from good enough development, but “the term democratic need not have a fixed meaning.” Winnicott defines democracy as “society well-adjusted to its healthy individual members,” but “psychiatric health [itself] is … a term without fixed meaning” (Winnicott, 1986, pp. 240–241). Evidently (and central to my argument), in Winnicott’s thinking there is a great deal of contingency that is easy to overlook.

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Notes on contributors

Daniel G. Butler

Daniel G. Butler, LMFT, is a San Francisco-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist and a doctoral student in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He publishes and presents on an array of topics, including queerness and instinctual life in Winnicott (forthcoming in Studies in Gender and Sexuality) and apophatic aesthetics in extreme heavy metal (forthcoming in Théologiques). His paper “Resignation Syndrome and the Psychopolitics of Petrification” is the 2019 winner of APsaA‘s Peter Loewenberg Essay Prize in Psychoanalysis and Culture.