Conclusion

This chapter revisits some of the resonant themes of Freud’s Jaw by threading together anecdotes drawn from the author’s own experience, from Freud’s, Lorde’s, and Sedgwick’s lives, as well as autopathographies by Edward Said and Christina Crosby. The chapter contends that loss and gain are imbricated, not unlike destruction and creation, and disidentification and identification. It concludes that the collaborative project of survival may be a means of provisional reparation by which incomplete individuals can face the future.

Reparative Objects in the Freudian Archives

This chapter returns to the Freudian narrative of loss, specifically to sites of his memorialization in the two Freud Museums. Forced into exile after living in Vienna for seventy-eight years, Freud escaped to London where most of his material objects followed him. The chapter examines the reconstruction of Freud’s Viennese study and consulting room at what is now the Freud Museum in Hampstead, London, where Freud died in the presence of his massive collection of antiquities. Whereas the Freud Museum, London, now houses all the “good” Freudian artifacts, objects that could be said to function reparatively, the museum that occupies Freud’s former residence in Vienna compensates for his expulsion and the evacuation of his prized possessions through a fetishizing and melancholic reliance upon photographs taken by Edmund Engelman prior to the objects’ displacement. The chapter interprets the Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna, as a space of irremediable loss where Freud’s missing objects—his couch, books, and antiquities—take on the character of fantasied partial objects enlisted to perform the work of mourning.

Object-Love in the Later Writings of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

This chapter focuses on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s little-known breast cancer advice column, “Off My Chest,” which she wrote from 1998 to 2003 for MAMM, a women’s cancer magazine, and A Dialogue on Love, a memoir of her therapy that records her struggle with her cancer diagnosis and metastasis. The chapter argues that Sedgwick’s journalistic and experimental writing circulates a public discourse of love that mediates her relationship to her own mortality. Sedgwick sets herself up as an object for collective identification. By disseminating pieces of herself in published works she strives to serve as an instrument for “good pedagogy” to counter the “bad pedagogy” of the cancer establishment. Influenced by Melanie Klein’s concept of reparation, which she regards as another word for love, she offers a Buddhist inflected teaching that recognizes life as an ongoing collaborative project sustained through the anonymous and impersonal love of readers she has never met, but who survive her death.

Keen for the First Object

This chapter interprets Audre Lorde’s experience of cancer and racial injury through psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s theories of sadistic aggression, mourning, and psychic reparation. Drawing on Klein’s theories of the maternal breast as the first part-object, the original lost object that initiates a cycle of destruction and reparation, the chapter considers the psychic consequences of losing the breast through the traumatic processes of weaning and invasive carcinoma. For Lorde, illness, racism, sexism, and homophobia are conjoined as objectifying forces. The chapter inquires into how psychoanalytic object relations theory contends with objectification—becoming the object of a fatal disease, racial hatred, or sexist assault. Indicating how destruction can play a part in reparation, Lorde described her own mastectomy as breaking off a piece of herself to make her whole. She rejects the breast prosthesis on the grounds that it enforces objectifying gender norms. Lorde’s critique of the “prosthetic pretense” is applied to contemporary breast cancer culture. The chapter proposes that one of the unconscious motivations behind the social pressure to reconstruct the breast stems from a fetishism of the first object.

Prosthetic Objects

This chapter examines Freud’s ambivalent attachment to his prosthetic jaw, a result of his addiction to smoking. It argues that illness highlights the technological predicament in which humans as “prosthetic gods” are bound up. Exposing the contradiction between the promise of technology and its potential to fail, the prosthesis paradoxically represents both injury and reparation. The chapter provides a close reading of Freud’s medical case alongside his theories and relevant personal narrative. The uncanny repetitions of Freud’s prosthetic adjustment rhyme with the compulsive structure embedded in his theory of the death drives. The term “not-death” is proposed to describe the persistent entanglement of the life and death drives. Simultaneously creative and destructive, Freud’s inorganic and organic prosthetic dependencies mediate the ongoing contest that cancer perpetuates between life and death.

Introduction

The Introduction lays out the key terms, organization, and methodology of the book. It details how Freud’s Jaw relies on psychoanalytic object relations theory—in particular theories on part-objects, attachment and dependency (anaclisis), mourning, melancholia, and fetishism. These psychoanalytic concepts are mobilized to probe the psychic life and death of human and nonhuman objects and to throw light upon how illness initiates processes of objectification. Each chapter focuses on a different type of object, which bears a relation to the psychoanalytic lost object: the prosthetic object, the “first object” (the breast), love objects, and reparative objects. Through its examination of autopathographies, including the author’s own autopathographic observations, the book fleshes out a “subjectivity of survival.” For Sigmund Freud survival entailed maintenance and adjustment of his oral prostheses; for Audre Lorde it was bound up with a politics of self-preservation; for Eve Sedgwick it was explicitly a reparative project. The chapter explains how cancer carries psychoanalytic meaning, confirming that death has always occupied the core of psychoanalysis as a tragic discourse.