Beyond Sexuality, Beyond Perversion: The Annihilated Last Scream

ABSTRACT

Starting with an ancient, dark story from the Babylonian Talmud, the paper proposes that beyond severe sexual perversion lies—buried, silenced, annihilated—an infant’s last scream. This is explored in the theoretical-clinical psychoanalytic writing on the last scream, early breakdown, madness, and catastrophe and illustrated through a detailed account of an analysis with a severely fetishistic-masochistic patient. In this long and difficult analysis, the cessation of perverse practices led to an extreme collapse into breakdown, profound devastation, emptiness, psychic death, and suicidal despair. Working within this collapse in analysis enabled the deep reason for the patient’s breakdown in early life to unfold. And most important, it engendered the crucial possibility of reliving the patient’s unbearable breakdown, deadness, and last scream—this time patient-with-analyst t(w)ogether—and experientially coming through it differently. Yet it still remains without an ending of love.

View correction statement:

Erratum

Notes

¹ The Talmud (Hebrew תַּלְמוּד talmūd ”instruction, learning,” from a root LMD ”teach, study”) is a central text of Rabbinic Judaism. The term “Talmud” primarily refers to the collection of postbiblical writings named specifically the Babylonian Talmud (Talmud Bavli), although there is also an earlier collection known as the Jerusalem Talmud (Talmud Yerushalmi).

² For simplicity’s sake, throughout this paper I use “analyst” to refer both to analyst and therapist.

³ It was “a transformational moment in Bion’s life and thinking … on the very nature of psychoanalysis itself” (Grotstein, 2013, p. xi). This radical change was accompanied by his moving from London to Los Angeles in 1967 for the last 12 years of his life.

⁴ I am referring to severe, actually acted sexual perversion, which does not fall within the debate over whether it is a perversion or a “variance” (Stoller, 1974) or whether “perversion is us” (Dimen, 2001; Stein, 2003), nor to the psychoanalytic expansion of the term over the last decades to transference perversion or character perversion.

⁵ Israeli astronaut, killed when the space shuttle Columbia was destroyed upon reentering the earth’s atmosphere in 2003.

⁶ It felt to me very similar to the impenetrable “catastrophic loneliness” of the severely traumatized patients and the ineluctable separation between analyst and patient that Grand (2000) powerfully described: “The trauma survivor remains solitary in the moment of h[is] own extinction. No one knew h[im] in the moment when he died without dying; no one knows h[im] now, in h[is] lived memory of annihilation. This place where he cannot be known is one of catastrophic loneliness… Death has possessed h[im] in its impenetrable solitude” (p. 4).

⁷ I add an intense description by Eigen (2010) of annihilation, which is closely related to the agonizing experience expressed here: “Annihilation is not a static state. It goes on and on and on. It’s electrifying. I don’t have the words for it. It’s like being in an electric chair with the current continuously on, or being suffocated but you never die. You keep getting more and more suffocated. … I felt that this is partly what babies must feel, in their own way. … Screaming and screaming and then the scream fades away” (pp. 26–27). For me, it is also closely related to the Talmudic image of the screaming little lion cub that was being suffocated and annihilated.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ofra Eshel

Ofra Eshel, Psy.D., is a faculty member and training and supervising analyst at the Israel Psychoanalytic Society and a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association; Vice-President of the International Winnicott Association; cofounder, former coordinator, and faculty member of the Program of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for Advanced Psychotherapists at the Israel Psychoanalytic Society and of the Israel Winnicott Center; and founder and head of the postgraduate track “Independent Psychoanalysis: Radical Breakthroughs” (2016) at the advanced studies of the Program of Psychotherapy, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University. She is book review editor of Sihot-Dialogue, Israel Journal of Psychotherapy. Her papers were published in psychoanalytic journals and presented at national and international conferences. She received the Leonard J. Comess Fund grant at the New Center for Psychoanalysis (Los Angeles, 2011), the David Hammond grant at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis (Boston, 2016), was a visiting scholar at the Psychoanalytic Institute of North California (San Francisco, 2013), and was awarded the 2013 Frances Tustin Memorial Prize. She was featured in 2012 in Globes (Israel’s financial newspaper and magazine) as 16th of the 50 most influential women in Israel. She is in private practice in Tel Aviv, Israel.