BOOK REVIEWS 307

self-absorbed and at times mean-spirited. Put into the situations these characters
find themselves in, it’s easy to fantasize about revenge. Yet, what one finds repeat-
edly in this novel, is a profound empathy and deep concern for the suffering and
pain of Homo sapiens and a lament for a treasure that, while gradually fading,
offers great hope for humanizing the world. This is the human condition—a terribly
flawed species that easily slips into aggression and lust, which is treated by this
author with compassion and understanding. The conclusion of the novel has a sly
twist that clearly shows Chessick is no Pollyanna.
Read this book for fun, but be careful—you may learn a lot more than you
expect!

J. Colby Martin, Ph.D.

Naperville, Illinois, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

REFERENCES

Chessick, R. (1989). The technique & practice of listening in intensive psychotherapy.

Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Chessick, R. (1992). What constitutes the patient in psychotherapy: Alternative
approaches to understanding. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.

DOI:10.1057/ajp.2012.16

New Studies of Old Villains: A Radical Reconsideration of the Oedipus Complex,

by Paul Verhaeghe (with foreword by Juliet Mitchell), Other Press, New York, 2009,
137pp.

Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid: Elements for a Psychoanalytic Epistemology,

by Dany Nobus and Malcolm Quinn, Routledge, New York, 2005, 258pp.

Au Nom du Grandpère: A Polemic

A sagacity quick in picking up analogies and an imagination audacious in the use it makes
of them are combined with a capability for enlisting emotions and passions in order to
obtain interest for its object—an object that is always veiled in mystery. These emotions
are easily mistaken for the efforts of powerful and profound thoughts or at least of deep-
ly significant allusions and they arouse higher expectations than good judgment would
find justified. Synonyms are passed off as explanations, allegories are offered as truths.
—Immanuel Kant (from O. Sternbach, 1983, p. 403)

I had two grandfathers, Abraham and Isaac and a grandmother named Kate; I’ll call
them Les Trois. I have no serious doubt that I, in some sense, channel their voices.
308 BOOK REVIEWS

I learned to speak au nom du grandpère et nom du grandmère. Les Trois were from
a different world and when I came to have intimations of the development of my
own voice, their differences appeared to grow more stark. I accept it as a given in
the unfolding of generations that there will be differences. One grandfather was a
worker; the other was a religious leader with a following and scholar, and my grand-
mother interpreted dreams from a Jewish dream-book called The Interpretation of
Dreams. Freud (1900, p. 4) reported that Almoli’s little dream-book (Pisron Chalomos,1
in the original) from which grandmère worked was mid-19th century; it was actually
early 15th century.
Signifier and Signified. Grandparent and Grandchild. Père et fils. As I, myself,
introduce new nomenclature in this process of reflecting on my reading of two
volumes written in the Lacanian tradition (a tradition as foreign to me as the
Hungarian and Polish spoken to me by Les Trois), I may not know where to place
my notion of le nom du grandpère of which I wish to speak, whether into the Real,
the Symbolic or the Imaginary (RSI)—to borrow three of many Lacanian terms that
I fail to understand. I mention them (RSI) in spite of my cloudiness relating to what
they signify, as Nobus and Quinn (p. 1) might say, to question the given that
“knowledge is good and shared knowledge is even better” and to follow Verhaeghe
(p. 98) in challenging any residual belief that “a correct answer is guaranteed by
another without a lack.” I sense, after reading Lacan et fils, that it is my prerogative
to develop the signification of le nom du grandpère as I proceed without shared
knowledge and with well-developed lacks. This polemic may go beyond Bion’s
notion of without memory or desire into a land where lack and “knowing nothing
and staying stupid” have new meaning.
I shall try to capture the signification of le nom du grandpère. Akin to the function
of Lacan’s le nom du père (as best as I can comprehend: the articulation by the
fused-to-the-child Mother of the boundaried and lawful state symbolized by the Father
that allows a first triangulation out of symbiosis with mother), le nom du grandpère
may most closely signify the quasi-magical appearance of tits on a bull, not, mind
you, the tits themselves, but a reminder of a connection that ontogenetically became
connected to a function of the bull that has not gone out of being but has never,
perhaps, been.2
Or maybe the RSI is akin to the staging of maturationally specific developmental
currents. In the life, for instance, of King Solomon (or did he have ghost court-writers?),
Desire was to flourish and confound youth in one Real and lusty Song of Songs
after another, while a Symbolic Wisdom was to dominate the middle years with its
one-liner Proverbs, and an Imagined Acceptance was to rule in the mind of the Old
Congregant (Kohelles, as he called himself) who came to the conclusion that only
attachment to God and lover, in the end, mattered much. Well maybe? In any case,
the unfolding of generations continues: Lovers become Philosophers while birthing
new Lovers while grandpère et grandmère come to recognize that attachment trumps
all—certainly theory. An individual’s roles change, as time proceeds.
Could it be that le grandpère et la grandmère arrive in such a space as was
filled by that writer of Ecclesiastes (Kohelles, in Hebrew—the Congregant) and
might it be that their arrival fills that space with le nom du grandpère. For Lacan,
at least, there was a playfulness in words: nom du père and non du père—bringing
 BOOK REVIEWS 309

to mind both name (nom—name) and prohibition (non—not). Grandpère may

not prohibit but he no longer needs to approve. Nobus and Quinn emphasize
in Chapter 3 (titled: “The punning of reason: meaning, nonsense and the limits
of psychoanalytic language”) that “ ‘serious’ psychoanalysts and scholars may
be ‘seriously’ irritated by the ‘non-seriousness’ of Lacan’s linguistic tricks”
(p. 74)—or by theirs, might I add. Still, the serious reader may have questions,
for example, …

• What is le nom du grandpère?

• Is there room left for the grandfatherly or the grandmotherly3 in our discourse?
and
• Is there difference between the function of père and grandpère?
Such serious questions! Freud, in fact, does not mention the Œdipus Complex
(Verhaeghe’s avowed theme) till his early 40’s and doesn’t call it by name until he
is in his mid-50’s and of grandpère age, himself. Still, he fails to mention the role
of the grandparent who plays no significant part in Freud’s four major case histories,
either. Could the existence of such as me have escaped Freud’s attention and could
he have been blind to fact that Big Daddy appears with prominence in the English
and the French and the German grandfather/grandpère/Grossvater?
Vive la différence et la prominence! In any case, somehow I became a grandfa-
ther with a tribe of little-folk where once there were but students. I’ve noted, as
well, certain apparent differences in my function from my previous roles qua grand-
child, child and parent. Let me give an example.
The processing of language in the Old One has assuredly slowed from what it
once was—no longer equivalent to the executive functioning of his or her now
multigenerational offspring. With this slowing of processing, I have spent, now,
more than a year reading and rereading Paul Vehaeghe’s “radical reconsideration
of the Œdipus”4 (its subtitle) and Nobus and Quinn’s “thorough and illuminating
evaluation of the status of knowledge and truth in psychoanalysis” (from the back
cover). The word is, indeed, out: these are important works that both expand and
clarify our understanding of Freud and the Lacanian views of the underpinnings
and dynamic forces of the Œdipal, in one volume, and knowledge and truth, in
the other.
Still, I have not yet successfully processed even the following words and phrases
that would appear necessary (maybe sufficient, too) for understanding these writings,
words that often arrive together in subordinate clauses of complex sentences
and are spoken as if they carried an obvious meaning: nom du père; The Real;
Jouissance (Freddie Mercury5 did repeatedly use “pain is so close to pleasure” in
his lyrics … that hasn’t yet helped me sort things out!); the Sinthome; the differen-
tial element; the (purpose of) Borromean knot;6 the S1; the master signifier, and
many other words/phrases that require a specialized dictionary more complete than
my new and revised Oxford English Dictionary.
In contrast, grandparents tend to cite the dead; it’s easier to deal with the
vagaries of verbal pragmatics with those who have stopped speaking. Even Lacan
no longer talks back! Elvin Semrad (in Rako and Mazer, 1980, p. 188), for instance,
310 BOOK REVIEWS

and in his typically simple, if pithy, language and, in a style consistent with his
apparent interest in the Reader-Other’s need for understanding of that language,7
noted that “To provide education for this field isn’t easy, especially when you’re
dealing with a group of men who already know more than they can use.” Perhaps,
Semrad, like Kant (cited at the opening of this polemic), was referring to a common
difficulty, namely, that in attempting to answer questions about gaps in our under-
standing, to expand our Bewusste of Das Unbewusste, there is a propensity among
some contemporary thinkers to replace partial answers with difficult to understand
questions, novel nomenclature and torturous theory—terms, models and ideas
that are out of reach of the typical grandpère. So, I see. Contained in le nom du
grandpère is his GPS position—out of range, so to speak.
The cover of Verhaeghe’s volume pictures a notepad upon which is penned, in
apparent longhand, the lone message:

dear dad,
I am Really
Really Really
Really sorry
Love, Œdipus.

Dear Drs. Nobus, Quinn and Verhaeghe: I’m not Laius, that first victim of
“road-rage,”8 and cannot, therefore, respond for him to Œdipus and his belated
apology (above) for killing him and purloining his wife. However, I do wish to
snipe a bit in your direction and in the direction of all the complex thinkers who,
as Kant noted, “veil their thinking in allegories offered as truths” (Sternbach, 1983,
p. 403).9 I admit that I have few clues as to the explicanda of your arguments, of
what, after many readings, you’re trying and, for many, succeeding in saying
about the Œdipus complex, in one volume, or about your ideas about the value
of skepticism or whether your reading adds an iota to the writings of the Pyrrhonian
Greek Skeptics and their view of the sanguinity of skepticism in promoting ataraxia
( … quietude), in the other volume. As I’ve already bared my teeth, I owe
you the right to know something about who is writing polemically to you. Ah! The
who behind le nom du grandpère!
I am a practicing analyst (near 40 years), like the three of you; long-time director
(now retired) of a psychoanalytic training facility, like some of you, and an
ex-student of Topology and university lecturer (you’ve all taught, as well) of Mathe-
matics (for more than 40 years). Topology, indeed, is an area that Lacan and you
utilize to “clarify” by analogy your models. We have that interest in Topology and
much else in common.
Still and with all these similarities, I do not understand the language of the
psychoanalytic writing in your works and, as an ex-topologist, I feel puzzled that
my heart was not in the least lightened by the references to topological constructs10
in your works. I do understand when your thinking (Verhaeghe) overlaps with
the separation–individuation thinkers (Mahler et al., 1975) or those, such as the
relationists and attachment theorists, who describe softer underbellies to the Œdipals
and related stages, or when your thinking (Quinn and Nobus) intersects Sextus
Empiricus’ skepticism—but I don’t need Lacanian language for any of that. In addition,
 BOOK REVIEWS 311

in dozens of readings of your (Verhaeghe’s) very last paragraphs (titled: “Creatio ex

nihilo: The sinthome,” pp. 98–100), I not infrequently had the sense that—while I
couldn’t understand le sinthome—I was in agreement that Œdipal resolution
had something to do with eschewing, rather than forever repeating, a belief that
a correct answer is guaranteed by an Other, or as you say an “Other without
a lack.”11 And, as to Nobus and Quinn, I embrace skepticism with a full and open
(if arrhythmic with age) heart. But I can’t know if I do agree with much of what
was said due to my inability to understand your language. Perhaps, I am telling
myself that I am looking for univocal expression but unconsciously wanting your
expression to be without “lack” or nods to “the truth, the whole truth and nothing
but the truth.” I cannot exclude these possibilities.
If I can focus particularly, for a moment, on your volume, Dr. Verhaeghe in
carrying this self-disclosing disclaimer just a bit further. I agree with your sense that
the early Œdipal child must be protected from Mother’s desires and not only from
the desire for Mother (p. 48) and that, as many psychoanalysts have stressed (e.g.,
Abelin, 1971, 1975, 1980), understanding the manner by which the child uses the
Father to triangulate out of an apparently inescapable symbiosis must be central to
untangling the many strands of Œdipal development. This is no surprise to me as
I take it as a given about unconscious syntax that if “A Desires B” is in the uncon-
scious, so, always, is “B Desires A.” This failure of system unconscious to separate
subject from object of a drive (or predicate, in grammar) is basic to our theory of
primary process functioning. But I do feel that you fall short when you reason
that:
The moment that it becomes clear that the mother has another interest beyond the
child, that is, that her coming and going is also determined by her desire for the father, the
infant’s sense of being engulfed by the mother’s desire abates … (p. 49).

Related to this matter, I have argued, elsewhere (Covitz, 1997)—borrowing some

language from Freud’s Das Unbewusste12 (1915)—that, in this instance and others,
multiple Vorstellungen13 (internal templates or visual scenarios or endopsychic
object relationships14) are birthed and may be poised against one another, thus
yielding conflict or even a crisis. The first such Vorstellung recognizes pleasure and
safety in maternal symbiosis; the presence of the mother brings pleasurable affect
to consciousness. The second, a familiar if discordant accompaniment to the first
during the rapprochement subphase of Mahler’s separation individuation model
and, perhaps, in the Œdipals as well, has the child experiencing the presence of
the mother as a threat to a nascent and cherished sense of Self and identity. And
a third such internal schema has the young Lothario perceiving relationships
outside of the Self that seem to or do exclude himself or herself as an affront to
his or her healthful narcissism. Each, I should add, arises in a natural unfolding
of drives that grow out of evolutionarily prescribed instincts. Need I say that those
earlier children who never developed a symbiotic attachment wandered off from
Mother eons ago and met their fate with Lions, Tigers and the other accidents
that befall the unprepared. Second, those who never develop a sense of identity
likely met catastrophe when mother, herself, was finally prepared to liberate them
from her protective sphere and they had to fend for themselves. And finally, Freud
312 BOOK REVIEWS

has acquainted us with the procreative need to seek a dominance, and specifically
a shared one, in relationships—the travail of moving from dyadic to triadic and
sanguine social functioning. The child needs eventually to cease recoiling from
the recognition that others have relationships and relinquish the hope for unilater-
ally dyadic relationships; even thus, the child must and does begin life with
the wish that all others relate to him or her, and him or her, alone. The salient
question remains: how are these three Vorstellungen made compatible in the func-
tioning Psyche?
Thus, all three such Vorstellungen arguably have their roots firmly planted in
endopsychic drives and failure in any of them runs the risk of the youngster
receiving the Darwin Award,15 of being blocked from contributing to the gene
pool. And, as you note: “For Lacan, the Œdipal period is nothing less than the
transition from nature to culture;” I agree. I have reasoned (Covitz, 1990 p. 48)
that Œdipal resolution is coextensive with the capacity for recognizing the subjec-
tivity of others and, thereby, for developing the skills necessary for entering poli-
ties of mutual concern and interest.
All this is to say that I don’t think we are necessarily on such different pages,
but—and this I wish to stress—I do not know whether that’s the case; frankly, I cannot
discern from your writings whether we agree or not due either to my deafness or to
your lack of clarity and idiosyncratic nomenclature. And, herein, I arrive at one of
my troubles with these works. If, indeed, the capacity to see another as a subject in
its own right is a part of sanguine development, when we are communicating with
that subject is there value in doing so in a manner that the other can understand—even
if that other is a slow-processing grandpère? I do believe so.
This brings me back to nom du grandpère and the previously mentioned unfolding
of generations. As the shadows grow long in this grandpère’s play in the final quarter
of life’s games and as I walk, as the would-be King Œdipus noted in response to
the Sphinx, on three legs, as my ability to process slows and my uncertainty
continues whether my processing functions are shot or others’ articulations are
faulty, I (united in spirit, I suspect, with some other older—and maybe some
younger—psychoanalysts) close with my own note:
Dear Drs. Nobus, Quinn and Verhaeghe,
I Really Really
Really Really
Really don’t
Understand what
You (and most other
Lacanians) are saying.
And I fascinate:
Does that matter?
Warm regard, Dr. Covitz (Grandpère)

NOTES

1. Almoli’s work is available in a Jungian-mediated translation: Visions of the Night: A study

of Jewish dream interpretation, J. Covitz, 1990.
 BOOK REVIEWS 313

2. I have an urge to apologize. I do!

3. In some sense, gender in les grandparents may be thought to be muted.
4. Verhaeghe’s volume begins with a glowing introduction by Juliet Mitchell (“immensely
accessible,” she calls Verhaeghe’s work—p. vii) and five equally radiant reflections on
this volume by psychoanalytic luminaries from at least four different countries.
5. Freddie Mercury was the lead singer and lyricist of the rock group Queen.
6. In a previous review, I cited a memory of a lunch during a conference on the application
of another form of Mathematics to Psychoanalysis. I was walking with an Editor of Scientific
American, and Gail Young, ex-President of the American Math Society and a Topologist,
himself. The Editor opined: the AM presenters didn’t seem to know a lot about Science.
I chimed in that they didn’t seem to know much about clinical analysis, either. The ever-
gentlemanly Kentucky Colonel of Mathematics, then about 90, finished it off with “and
they don’t know a fucking thing about Mathematics.”
7. I just love it when an author wants me to understand their message and shows that wish
openly!
8. I first heard “road rage” used in reference to Œdipus and Laius in conversation with Elio
Frattarolli.
9. Even if those “truths” are introduced with a disclaimer disavowing a belief in lackless
knowledge.
10. For those readers who might think that I hold a grudge against my previous field of
study, I can only point out that I have continued teaching university Mathematics
since the mid-late 60’s and one of my papers in that field is still frequently cited. And
I would add that when Galatzer-Levy published a paper in JAPA (1978) on another part
of Topology, Rene Thom’s Catastrophe Theory, I was thrilled with its evocative modeling
properties.
11. Not that I fully understand this matter of “lack,” but I do hear echoes of the familiar when
Verhaeghe notes (p. 50) “The Name-of-the-Father is no longer the guarantee of the Other,
that is, of the Symbolic order, and vice versa …. On the contrary there is no Other of
the Other …. Now what the Name-of-the-Father guarantees is the lack in the Other or
the Symbolic castration of the subject.” Sacre bleu!
12. The German text of The Unconscious (1915) was butchered by Strachey as I (1997) and
many more capable translators have demonstrated.
13. I am using Freud’s presentation of the topographic model of system unconcius (1915).
There, Freud suggests that the Unconscious is constituted by visual scenarios of subjects,
drive/actions and objects, much like a well-constructed and diagrammed sentence.
He went on to reason (section on Unconscious Emotions) that affects are precipitated
when these Vorstellungen rise toward consciousness. Kernberg proposed a similar model
in suggesting object-drive-affect units (1975) as the constituents of the Psyche.
14. Strachey translates the rich and visually textured Vorstellung with the English “idea.”
15. The Darwin Awards are given out informally throughout the internet (initiated by Wendy
Northcutt, an American biologist) to those who have, through their own lack, if I may
use a Lacanian term in another sense, removed themselves from the gene pool by making
it impossible for them to procreate, by, for instance, premature death (e.g., trying to
educate a bar full of rival motorcycle gangs in their individual complete Œdipals wishes
to bed both their mothers and their fathers).

Howard H. Covitz Ph.D.,

A.B.P.P., NCPsyA
e-mail: [email protected]
314 BOOK REVIEWS

REFERENCES

Abelin, E. (1971). The role of the father in the separation–individuation process. In

J.B. McDevitt & C. Settlage (Eds.), Separation–individuation (pp. 229–252).
New York: International Universities Press.
Abelin, E. (1975). Some further observations and comments on the earliest role of
the father. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 56(3), 293–302.
Abelin, E. (1980). Triangulation: The role of the father and the origins of core gender
identity during the rapprochement subphase. In R. Lax, S. Bach & J. Burland
(Eds.), Rapprochement (pp. 151–169). New York: Jason Aronson.
Covitz, J. (1990). Visions of the night: A study of Jewish dream interpretation. Boston,
MA: Shambhala Publications.
Covitz, H. (1997). Oedipal paradigms in collision: A centennial emendation of
a piece of Freudian canon (1897–1997). New York: Peter Lang.
Freud, S. (1900). The interpretation of dreams. Standard Edition (Vol. 4–5, pp. 1–626).
London: Hogarth.
Freud, S. (1915). Das Unbewusste [The Unconscious]. In Gessamelte Werke. Vol. X.
(18 vols.) Frankfurt Am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, Originally in Int. Zeitblatt fur
Psychoanalyze, 3(4), 189–203 and (5), 257–269.
Galatzer-Levy, R.M. (1978). Qualitative change from quantitative change: Mathe-
matical catastrophe theory in relation to psychoanalysis. Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association, 26(4), 921–935.
ibn Almoli, S. (1515). Pisron Chalomos (also, appeared as M’fasher Chelmin in
Cracow), [pub. Unknown], Salonika, http://www.scribd.com/doc/11893132/
Almoli-Solomon-Sefer-Pitron-Chalomot[Almoli’s work is also available in a
Jungian-mediated translation: Visions of the Night: A study of Jewish dream
interpretation, J. Covitz, 1990].
Mahler, M., Pine, F. & Bergman, A. (1975). The psychological birth of the human
infant. New York: Basic Books.
Rako, S. & Mazer, H. (Eds.) (1980). Semrad: The heart of a therapist. Indiana:
iUniverse Press, republished in 2003.
Sternbach, O. (1983). Critical comments on object relations theory. Psychoanalytic
Review, 70(3), 403–421.

DOI:10.1057/ajp.2012.18
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