Page 70 - Nada temas, dice ella

a metaphor but a metamorphosis. Last- ly, I will comment on her identification with the Divine she finds at the heart of her Interior Castle, in the seventh chamber. Thus I shall get to the heart of Teresa’s paradox of a God that can only be found in the depths ... of the writer’s soul.
A. Teresa began her ‘search’ by a ‘sus- pension of powers’ (as at the time, understanding, memory and volition were called) to attain what must
be referred to as a state of regression wherethe thinking individual loses the contours of her identity, and be- low the threshold of the conscience, becomes what could be called a ‘psyche-soma’.2 In this state, which
for the psychoanalyst goes back to the archaic states of osmosis between
the newborn, even the embryo, and
its mother, the relation to self and other are fleetingly maintained by an elaborate infra-linguistic sensibility whose intensity is in direct proportion to the loss of the faculty for abstract judgment. Another kind of ‘thought’ results from this, a non-thought, an underwater dive which the term ‘mind’ does not convey as well as ‘sensorial representation’ or the ‘psyche-soma’: as if the reasoning mind went from being in the world to an ‘imaginary elab- oration’ inhabiting the entire body,
to touching-feeling the outside and the inside, both its own physiological func- tions and the outside world, without
the protection of ‘intellectual work’ or the help of a judging conscience. D. W. Winnicott was surprised that we locate the ‘mind’ in the brain while certain regressive states of his patients attested, he believed, to the fact that all the senses and organs participate in both self-perception and the perception of the world: that the psyche is body (soma) and the body is psyche.
How does one speak of the psyche- soma’s self-perception in emotive states as in the case of Teresa, Jesus’s wife, or that of an intense transference with borderline personalities?
The Teresian style is continuously anchored in images, themselves meant to transmit visions which do not call on sight (or at least not sight alone), but inhabit the body-and-mind en- tirely, the psyche-soma. Firstly and essentially, such visions can only lend themselves to touch, taste and hear-
ing before transiting through sight.
Let us say, therefore, that a sensitive imaginary,3 rather than ‘imagery’, ‘imagination’ or ‘images’ in the scopic sense of the word – convokes words in Teresa’s writings so that they become the equivalent of what Teresa felt. In turn, they put into play what is felt by her addressees: the confessors who de- manded and encouraged theses texts, her sisters who glorified her and read- ers present and to come.
Metaphors, comparisons, or metamorphoses? How did Teresa
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