Weeping: a phylogenetic
hypothesis *
*
Translated by Concetta
Violante
In my
first work on this subject, published on this column, I
wrote on weeping as man’s very precocious expressive modality.
I considered its physiological function of the “washing”
of the cornea through the increase in the lachrymal liquid production
and its psychophysiological function of a somatic defence that
takes on a psychic task aiming at the lowering or elimination
of a tension the subject feels as grief-sorrow.
Such considerations seem to be corroborated by the neurophysiological
studies carried out at Saint Paul-Ramsey Medical Centre at Minnesota
University. Voluntary weeping people’s tears have been
gathered, not without difficulties, in a sort of “weeping
laboratory”: in order to have one litre of sample, in fact,
66,000 tears are needed. The study of the molecular structure
of tears, carried out by using a high-pressure fluid gas chromatography,
has revealed the presence of prolactin, ACTH, lysozyme and enkephalin.
According to Dr. William H. Frey, the prolactin could explain
why women weep much more than men. Besides, the enkephalin,
an endogenous opioid and powerful anaesthetic liberated by the
hypophysis in the presence of an acute pain, could explain why
“weeping reduces sadness and anger by 40%”.
It is interesting to notice that these substances are present
only in the tears of people who weep because of authentic emotions,
while neither hormones nor enzymes nor peptides are found in
tears caused by irritants.
Moreover a large number of studies deal with the analogies between
two apparently contrasting forms of human behaviour:
laughing and weeping, both characterized by the enkephalin activation.
The relief one feels when laughing or weeping is then a function
of the same neuropeptide.
Then the data of molecular biology confirm the statement that
weeping tries to clean the soul by eliminating an excess of
tension psychobiologically and, in this sense, has a borderline
function between soma and psyche.
Now let me pass on to another point of my first article: weeping
can occur in situations considered to be unimportant from a
rational point of view; or weeping occurs at any moment without
specific stimulations, independent and unrestrainable. It comes,
i. e., 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 one, unrestrainable.
In this case it is the only signal of what is repressed, a repression
loaded with tension and pain, a traumatic repression then.
But in some cases it is possible to identify, besides repression,
components that differ from ontogenetic material though without
setting it aside.It is in such clinical considerations that
Freud’s following statements are found:
“Affections may be the reproduction of ancient events of
vital importance, perhaps preindividual”, comparable with
“innate, typical, universal, hysterical attacks”.
Later, in Moses and monotheism, he will speak of a non-cultural
transmission of psychic experiences that represent a people’s
essence.
In the hypothesis of a phylogenetic weeping I am using two clinical
examples.
Example 1
A young analysand
is facing a series of dramatic losses which have hit his family
and fall within the more general tendency to keep things secret.
From banal facts to true tragedies, the tendency to secret characterizes
the group and becomes stronger from the maternal branch to the
paternal one increasing a guilty feeling in many members.
Some images of the Holocaust and the horror of concentration
and death camps arouse his intense emotion which obliges him
to explain, while weeping, to his bewildered friends present
that he feels guilty of all those people’s death.
The subject has known that, in the second world war, a progenitor
of his maternal line had happened to be involved in the disbandment
of the army after the armistice signed on September 8; fallen
into Germans’ hands and deported to camps in Germany, he
had survived only because he had sided with persecutors.
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Rome 1929
- Venezia Square - Victory celebrations |
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The old man’s
possible remorse is comparable with the analysand’s thought
of existing thanks to other people’s death and no reasoning
prevents the expression of his pain, which is still tied in
with his ontogenesis conflicts, but which can evidently be led
back to events that did not belong to him directly.
The ontogenetic material deals with an associative series with
an oral-sadistic fixation, where the young man asks himself
questions about the load of conscience and his feeling guilty
of everything.
Once again weeping flows for hours, unrestrainable, together
with a rich associative production which deals with the theme
of the primary ontogenetic guilt. In the article entitled “Spermatozoo”,
published in “Scienza e Psicoanalisi” in March, 2002,
referring to the moment of conception, Prof. N. Peluffo says:
“In this context it is, probably, just the 299,999,999
spermatozoon brothers’ death which forms the first trace
of one’s existence as a survivor, causing consequent guilty
feelings”.
This material effectively summarizes the presence, intertwining
and strengthening of contents concerning the phylogenetic material
with the ontogenetic ones, carriers of the emotionally most
glaring impact (weeping during a setting). In this case the
access to the depth of the ontogenetic material is possible
thanks to the link with the phylogenetic hint and the opening
to abreaction by weeping.
Example 2
The subject is watching
the TV news one morning when he learns, by chance, an historical
new dealing with the battle of Verdun, fought by the Germans
and the French from February to December, 1916 and cost over
700,000 men.
700,000 dead people without taking into account civilians: whole
villages destroyed, razed to the ground by 21,000,000 grenades
of every calibre emptied in the area of Verdun. The exact number
of the victims is not known actually and some authors even speak
of 1,000,000 victims.
The report is supplied with rare film images of explosions and
foot soldiers who wriggle in mud and barbed wire among dead
people and under the bombs dropped from those first primitive
aircraft. A commentator gives details on the formations, on
the reinforcement troops, who were sent off to the slaughter
in slow columns exposed to bombardments, and on the hell that
ended thanks to the exhaustion of the forces without victors
nor vanquished and made the field of Verdun literally caked
with the soldiers’ flesh.
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1917: On
Passo Rolle paths in the memory of Carlo Giannuzzi, seriously
wounded.
Original painting as a nice concession of Ugo Giannuzzi. |
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The thought of the
end of the battle, the thought that perhaps every family mourned
for the loss of at least one victim causes, in the subject,
a quick rise of weeping, which starts flowing imperceptibly.
He realizes that he is weeping and a spark of reason makes him
notice the illogicality of the phenomenon, but he lets himself
weep with patient resignation.
That subject has done a close personal and didactic analysis
and knows very well that his weeping is caused by a phylogenetic
trauma closely reconstructed during a genealogical work.
To be clearer I add that the access to the phylogenetic material
has been allowed by the ontogenetic analysis of the working-through
of the loss of a second relative (grandfather).
The subject notices weeping still emerge although he has freed
himself from the unconscious and compulsive necessities that
aimed at the reconstruction of his pretraumatic condition and
determined several choices of his.
Proceeding with associations he is able to draw that the components
of the present recall (the neuter stimulus of the TV broadcast)
determine only that short weeping, which ends when he thinks
about the illogicality of the phenomenon and starts the autoanalytic
work. He also notices that the first tears emerged when he considered
that perhaps every family had a dead person to mourn for because
of that war, as if the identification in that grief had allowed
or still needed to weep over it.
Of course the identification is possible because of the real
presence of that trauma in the subject’s phylogenesis,
but weeping would be too specific a reaction to the trauma represented
by the loss of a person never met and about whom one has few
historic data; it is, however, an adequately specific reaction
to the “FIRST WORLD WAR TRAUMA”, which is still acting
out.
It can be considered an Endemic Trauma with a phylogenetic
reinforcement.
Referring again to my preceding work on the same subject I remind
that I defined “endemic weeping” the Mourning Women’s
weeping, a kind of institute of regulation of grief expressions
with respect to individual mournings widely shared, but not
bound to catastrophic events that strike thousands of family
stocks.
An example of endemic weeping is the “Planctus Mariae”,
an expression of mothers’ mourning, which, still today,
is ritually repeated, at Peschici during Good Friday’s
procession, by women who perform a dirge, a spoken and recited
lament.
It is a cathartic ritual, which I define non-specific as it
can be led back to the Endemic Trauma of the “Loss of the
Son”.1
In the example of the “First World War” Trauma I maintain
that the endemic importance of the catastrophe of the war is
reinforced by leaving a mark in the phylogenesis of many family
stocks (“every family mourned for a dead person”)
and expresses itself on an individual level as in the example
reported.
That subject’s weeping, then, a non-specific reaction to
an endemic trauma that insists in the individual’s phylogenesis,
can be considered a PHYLOGENETIC WEEPING.
Phylogenetic weeping is continuously bolstered by the necessity
of working through a phylogenetic trauma (or polytraumatism).
How important can be the detection of weeping in psychoanalitic
work?
Let’s not undervalue the relief brought about by the awareness
of the transindividuality of grief (collective rituals, as the
mentioned Planctus Mariae, are a proof of this) and the knowledge
of molecular biology supports the salvific function of weeping:
the production of endogenous opioids, as we have seen, has the
function of giving forgetfulness.
Then weeping is a real treatment.
In psychoanalysis it is a patrimony of knowledge: to catch the
signal of a deeper nucleus of its can be the starting point
of an adventure of extraordinary interest, the adventure of
genealogical research.
I think that endemic traumas can have an evil importance to
following generations almost more than to directly concerned
ones (apart from the subjects who die of them). I mean that
one can have good powers of recovery after catastrophic events:
if we have a look at history, we shall notice how quicker and
more fruitful reconstruction and recovery processes are after
wars or natural catastrophes. “You need a nice trauma,
a nice devastation to put things back in their places”,
says a patient of mine during a deep working-through.
But the trace of those events has the potentiality for acting
unconsciously (because of repetition compulsion) in following
generations. I could suppose that the absolute non-awareness
of the phenomenon puts the individual in a particularly undefended
position. He is acted out by a stimulus he cannot place in space-time
and that has the possibility of taking a particularly bewildering
polymorphism.
And after so much time, so much work, one can still need to
weep over it a little (or rather let oneself weep) to wash what
can be washed since we have this simple and archaic defence,
which our ancestors, with an ingenious intuition, utilized socially
by instituting the Chorus of the Mourning Women.
© Gioia Marzi
Notes:
1
An unluckily very frequent trauma until a few decades ago when
infant mortality was so high that black clothes were not considered
in babies’ mourning rituals in some southern regions..
Bibliography:
- Eibl-Eibesfeldt: “I fondamenti
dell’etologia”, Adelphi, Milano. 1976
- Freud S.: “Inibizione, sintomo, angoscia” 1925,
in Opere, vol. 10, Boringhieri, Torino.
- Freud S.: “L’uomo Mosè e la religione monoteistica:
tre saggi”, 1937-38, in - Opere, vol. 11 Boringhieri, Torino.
- Frey W. H.: “Crying: The Mystery of Tears”, Minnesota:
Winston Press, 1985.
- Luzzatto S.: “La battaglia di Verdun”, La Stampa,
31 luglio 2002.
- Marzi G.: “Weeping”.
Panza N.: “Il
dolore post operatorio”.
Peluffo N.: “Spermatozoo”.
Rauzino T. M.: “Il
pianto della Madonna”.
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