Page 65 - Nada temas, dice ella

of individual prehistory’ (not to be confused with the father of the collec- tive prehistory of the ‘primal horde’): he possesses the qualities of ‘both parents’ and identification with him
is direkte und unmittelbare (direct and immediate). For the psychoanalyst this is but a variant of the ‘Oedipal father’. On the other hand, in its ignorance
of the Oedipus complex, the Christian faith only retains a de-eroticized Love of and for the Father, as the foundation for the possibility of Speaking, which only exists if and only if the words spoken are words of love. We can go back to the Song of Songs as Teresa and other mystics did, to find the source of this co-presence word/love.
Nevertheless, this extreme ideal- ization is only maintained in its pure state and with an injunction to re- pression, by the Church’s exoteric message. On the contrary, in her pos- ition of internal exclusion, the mystic constantly re-sexualizes idealization. Freud sheds light on this logic of alternation in the economy of drives (Instincts and their Vicissitudes): when the processes and excitation go over certain quantitative limits, they are eroticized or de-eroticized. Mystics, especially Teresa, not only experience this reversal, but some, and our saint more than others, are actually able to name it. From hereon, the alternation between idealization-desexualization- resexualization and vice-versa trans- forms love for the Ideal Father into the
non-stop frenzy of drives, a passion for the Father which turns out to be a sado- masochistic father-version/père-version. Drastic fasting, penance, flagellation
– often using bouquets of nettle on open wounds, convulsions even to the point of epileptic comas which take advantage of vulnerable neuronal and hormonal states: I’ve only named a few of the sadomasochistic extravagances that mark these on-going ‘exiles of the self’ in Him (to borrow one of Teresa’s expressions) or this transference to- ward the Other (to use my terms). More than the ‘beaten child’, and beyond him or her, it is the ‘beaten Father’ that Christianity venerates in the Christ- like Passion with which the believer identifies. And, in an extreme man- ner, it similarly venerates the mystic in prayer. It is a gratifying way, if such a thing is possible, to support suffer- ing humanity as well as the passive femininity in both sexes, and even sadomasochistic violence. Dostoevski’s remark ‘It’s too idealistic and because of this, cruel (Humiliated and Offended) could sum up the mystical father- version/père-version and Teresa’s own experience.
However, this incitement to suffer- ing is appeased in Christianity by oral gratification: the Eucharist reconciles the believer with the beaten Father and, furthermore, it even attributes quali- ties of the good mother to the body of this Man of pain: ‘I’ become myself by swallowing the Other. In the Middle
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