WEEPING *
*
Translated by Concetta
Violante
Weeping is
the new-born man’s first expressive modality. At birth
the first breathing in leads to the expansion of the pulmonary
alveoli and the sound emission, wailing, is considered a signal
of viability. All this is assimilated to weeping.
Actually from that moment and for several weeks the baby will
be making use of that sequence of repeated breathings in-prolonged
expirations, combined with sharp sounds and hyperlachrymation,
as the elective expression of its needs and, in a short time,
of its wishes too.
When verbal language is widely acquired, well on in years too
and until the end of his days, man will always have, at hand,
that first non-verbal expression, which was already a sketched
form of packets of emotions not easily translatable into words.
In the course of life, that is to say, man will be repeating
the sequence of acts which marked the moment of his birth.
The so-called tears of joy, a rare event, everything considered,
are combined with feelings of suffered ambivalence, if we see
well.
Weeping can also be a fairly effective manipulating tool as
it is a regressive expressive modality.
At clinic we are often witnesses of copious tears or absence
of tears, which is worse, in the presence of a psychic experience
of terrifying grief. We can say that the absence of weeping
in important existential or pathologic situations implies a
severe prognostic judgement. An example can be the serious endogenous
depression, sorrow without tears, thought without affection,
which can start to clear up with the appearance of weeping.
During weeping the secretion of the lachrymal glands grows.
These, at rest, produce modest quantities of liquid, which has
the function of keeping the trophism of the conjunctiva and
the cornea, and removing foreign bodies, powders and toxic insults
(bacteria, virus, irritating liquids etc.).
Tears see to the washing of the eye then.
But during weeping lachrymation becomes copious and the function
of tears becomes paradoxical: after a prolonged weeping the
eye is reddened and the eyelids are swollen; the washing has
gone over one’s intentions. We could say that the physiological
function of weeping assumes a psychic task aiming at the elimination
of a pre-existent tension caused by reasons which are known
or ignored by the person who weeps as well.
We say that weeping tries to “clean the soul” by eliminating
an excess of tension psychobiologically. In this sense it has
a borderline function between soma and psyche: it is a somatic
defence which is used by the psyche as well.
In summary three situations could come true.
A) Some dust really falls into the eye which needs cleaning:
lachrymation is a specific action.
B) A casual meeting recalls, by association, somebody loved
or lost by the subject: weeping breaks out. Or the subject uses
a somatic defence to lower the tension caused by the memory
of the loss, to remove some conscious psychic dust.
C) The subject himsef realizes that he has moments’ weeping
without being able to identify specific motivations, or the
necessity of relaxation by weeping derives from pre-conscious
or unconscious reasons; we can describe two variables of this
third situation:
1) weeping occurs in situations considered to be unimportant
from a rational point of view;
2) weeping occurs at any moment of the day without specific
stimulations, independent and without the possibility of being
stopped. Or it comes directly from the unconscious and emerges
as an obsessive thought which goes beyond the barriers of the
secondary process and breaks out with all the force of the primary
process, without the possibility of being stopped. To keep the
terms used, it means that some psychic dust is repressed and
the only signal of its presence is just weeping: that repression
will be extremely unpleasant, loaded with tension and pain:
a traumatic repression then.
SOME EXAMPLES OF WEEPING DERIVED
FROM CLINICAL EXPERIENCE
RESISTANCE WEEPING
Resistance weeping
prevents the patient from approaching free associations, occupies
a large part of a sitting and literally stifles his/her voice.
An example will be the case of a young woman probably subjected
to incestuous acts until the end of her infancy, so much that
she was able to refer to such material indirectly during the
first meetings already.
In
this case of serious inhibition and tendency to obsessive defence,
with psychosexual identity troubles, to keep one’s control
is a symptom but also an extreme defence against an impulsiveness
felt as uncontainable and dangerous; weeping was a shame, actually
the only expression of her behaviour that escaped from her control.
When she less wanted to weep, when the wish to attack overwhelmed
her, she burst into tears and although she admitted that her
reasons were not sufficient to justify such a showy reaction,
she could not control the copious emission of tears. During
the first sittings she controlled her sobs with a great muscular
effort and forced breathings in, but her tears could not be
refrained and flowed silently from her eyes, flooding the pillow.
A coerced weeping, caused by the coming out of tension.
If she had managed to let the vice of her control go, she would
have been relieved of it and, in fact, that only yielding was
a
balm already.
ANALYSIS END OR SYMPTOM LOSS WEEPING
During the last
sittings of her personal analysis a young woman notices that
she spends her days weeping. Copious tears flow also without
sobs: she does not feel sad, in front of her there are several
prospects she is interested in, she is adequately gratified
by a sentimental relation and the monotony of work does not
trouble her any longer, on the contrary she manages to find
agreeable adaptations in it.But she thinks of her sister, who
is elder, is well and has achieved a fair social adaptation,
and weeps: she thinks that the symbiotic relation she had before
is definitively dissolved; she examines and acknowledges the
coercion into choices of sacrifice and hyperresponsibleness
such a tie imposed unconsciously on her; she is aware of the
lethal conducts she resorted to as the only way out of the yoke……
but she weeps!! The emancipation from a relation which, although
neurotic, has accompanied her for all her life, leaves her in
a condition of distressing bewilderment and she uses the last
sittings to elaborate this loss.
After remembering an infantile nightmare reported at the beginning
of work, Atlas who dropped the earth, she remarks: “I have
thrown the planet away, what shall I do now?”
Weeping at the end of the analysis soothes the comparison with
the sure and irreversible loneliness produced by the loss of
the symptomatic packet which, in spite of making us suffer for
all that part of preceding life, has also allowed us to survive:
to have demolished and lost it is also a grief that must be
metabolized.
ANGUISH WITHOUT WEEPING
n analysand who had
gone through several autodestructive phases among which anorexia
and heroin addiction, had to struggle against another lethal
polarity: the psychic twin’s phantom. The elaboration of
this point of the analysis, which was, in terms of overdeterminations,
the most recent activation of fusion fixation, was characterized
by severe anguish and expressed itself in a trnsference by producing
oneiric material with a homosexual content as the expression
of the desire for the symbiotic unity reconstruction. His anguish
was severe and characterized his clinical picture referable,
at that point of work, to a depressive form in which catastrophic
thoughts were expressed by images of bleeding open wounds or
of fear of a violent self-injuring act. Separation from fixation
is painful: fixation is a defence, to abandon it makes one bleed.
Fusion fixation does not know weeping, an activity which involves
the presence of air ( of post-birth, then), but it knows the
bleeding which characterizes labour, the slow breaking off of
the chorial villi and, probably, pregnancy final phase during
which the placenta is undergoing an involution and cooperates
with this phenomenon in the induction of labour itself. Undergoing
an involution means that it is not well sprinkled and this causes
hemorrhagic lacunae which will then become necrotic.
To have lived the psychic experience again in the presence of
the analyst allowed, in the end, the access to weeping which
emerged copiously, released from specific contents: we could
define it an endogenous weeping which produced the lowering
of anguish, the identification with healthier images and, in
the end, a fair well-being.
ENDEMIC WEEPING
Even today in the
cultures which descend from the Greeks ( southern Italy, the
southern Balkan peninsula and the islands in the South-East
of the Mediterranean), a funeral ritual is attended by “The
Mourning”, a chorus of women who spontaneously join in
the sad event and mourn officially, repeating lamenting phrases
which do not fail to mention the dead person. The so-called
“Greek mourning” is a trace of many overdeterminations:
of the classical Greek tragedy chorus, who had the function
of expressing the feelings stirred up by the ups and downs of
the drama; of an earlier chorus, who attended heroic personages’
funeral rites, singing their deeds; finally, of the Dionysia
chorus which Maenads intoned during the bacchanal culminating
in the sacrifice of a goat ( a totemic animal representing Dionysus
himself).
Millenniums ago the “Greek mourning” instituted a
kind of regulation of grief expressions tending to formulate
relatives’ unseemly and spontaneous grief in an orderly
way and protect a funeral rite, as Ismail Kadarè 1
maintains. On this subject, for example, see widows’ suicides
on their husbands’ pyres in India.
In other words the Greek mourning seems to make the super-ego
stronger to a cathartic-salvific purpose when facing potentially
destructive tensions.
This reflection upon the normalizing function of weeping through
its introduction into the cathartic rites of funeral ceremonies
leads us back to its function, defined above, tending to eliminate
an excess of tension and sensations of grief: then, weeping
as grief regulator in mourning and in every other homeostatic
variation as well.
© Gioia Marzi
NOTES:
1
“Eschyle ou le grand perdant” ( Fayard 1955, pages
28-31)
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