Murdered Father, Dead Father and Other Work by Rosine Perelberg (review)
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“Tommy, go and clear up your toys now,” Jake barked at his three-year-old son. Seemingly unmoved by his father’s order, Tommy shifted closer to his mother and asked, “Mummy, when is Daddy going to die?” Encapsulated in such a simple if dramatic encounter are the complex derivatives of Freud’s Oedipus complex. As outlined by Rosine Perelberg in her work over the last decades, these complexities cover “the murder of the father, identification and super ego, the setting up of the ego ideal, castration complex, desexualization and sublimation” (2016, p. 126). In one of her three books of selected papers, Murdered Father, Dead Father (2016), she counters what she sees as a drift away from a recognition of the primacy of the Oedipus complex. It is a compelling endeavor, placing little Tommy’s psychic construction of the world center stage.
Perelberg’s prolific psychoanalytic writing is characterized by an invitation to absorb complexity but also to associate freely. In her clinical practice demonstrated throughout her work by clinical accounts, she describes how there is no place for the omnipotent analyst, but rather the analyst inaugurates a process (Perelberg, 2016, p. 76). Clinical work is characterized by such things as the open interpretation, the special form of listening, and a scrupulous and compassionate attention to the patient’s lived experience. My contribution to a wider knowledge of Perelberg’s work is offered in the context of “inaugurating a process.” Perelberg provides a rigorously argued psychoanalytic theory, never too far away from the consulting room.
Throughout her work, Perelberg (2020) interrogates the centrality of what she calls the myth of origins, how can one be made of two:
This is a theme that permeates Freud’s work, as he emphasises mankind’s concerns with its origins and interprets [End Page 793] the riddle of the Sphinx as being about where babies come from . . . The foundation of time in myths is, in so many cultures, related to intercourse between the couple.
(pp. 168–169)
In her account of her own origins, her 50-year journey from young anthropologist in Brazil, steeped in a rich cultural tradition, to internationally known training analyst and recent president of the British Psychoanalytic Society, she writes:
It is striking to see how many of these ideas awaited for so many years until they acquired their full significance for me as a psychoanalyst as a real example of après coup that indicates how the seeds planted in the past acquire full meaning in the future retrospectively.
(Perelberg, 2009, p. 249)
Furthermore, thinking of her own origins, we can read her scholarship as a homage to Freud, but I think there is something also of a homage to André Green, a titan who straddled the British and French psychoanalytic traditions. Perelberg’s work has been crucial in introducing an Anglophone audience to his work. She respectfully acknowledges other British colleagues who have contributed to this richness. In particular, Green rendered Lacan’s recovery of the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit/the après coup,1 comprehensible to contemporary psychoanalysts.
In my reading of her work, I trace three—how could it be another number in the writings of an author who elaborates so much of the oedipal dimension of our work?—essential themes of her work. First, she engages with the temporal dimension of psychoanalysis, initially explored by her in a paper based on her infant observation as a candidate (Perelberg, 2008, p. 181). Perelberg (2008) argues that Freud describes not an overdetermined linear temporal progression but many faceted movements to and fro, forward and backward: “There are at least seven dimensions—development, regression, fixation, repetition compulsion, the return of the repressed, the time-lessness [End Page 794] of the unconscious and après coup—like a heptagon in movement” (p. 32). Crucially this conceptualization of the bi-directionality of the nature of Freudian time does much to counter what has been misunderstood in Freud’s work as over determinism: this “rules out linear determinism and thus emphasizes the relevance of the...
