In this month's column I would like to comment on the film I Killed My Mother ( Jai tué ma mere). When the film was released in 2009, I was interested in watching it, but I don't remember why I ended up not going to see it. I recently bumped into him again, now on the trendy streaming service of the moment. It is about the relationship between a teenager and his mother, in an oscillation of love and hate, tenderness and rudeness, courtesies and slights, requests for love and declarations of war.
Hubert, the protagonist, at 16 years old, finds himself grappling with something that could pass for a cry for independence, but every time he tries to move away from his mother he ends up getting closer, as if he were walking in circles . And this is much more common in real life than you might imagine!
Taking advantage of the film to bring up how psychoanalysis thinks about the constitution of a human being, I begin by dispelling an erroneous idea: that psychoanalysis deals with people with the old story of the myth of Oedipus: kill dad and marry mom. Nothing more misleading. A closer reading of Freud, explained by Lacan, shows us how much we are founded by the Other, even with a capital letter, because the Other is a function and one of the ways to define it is as "the field of language". It is the people who perform the maternal function – there is usually a main figure, but it is never unique and nor is it necessarily the biological mother – who act as support from the Other for the newborn, giving it its first language baths, naming the child and naming his gestures, attitudes, desires, etc. Language is different from voice, since deaf people have a constitution like any other people, as they are also in language. In other words, we are constitutionally founded in and by the Other. That is why it is no surprise that much of the work Freudian needs to address the personal history not only of the analysand, but also of their family members and their culture.
It turns out that becoming autonomous, or better yet: having the fantasy that you are autonomous, is necessary to some extent. Remaining in the hands of this other (who supported the Other) eternally is neither desirable nor pleasurable. It is to illustrate the operation of this split, painful but necessary, that I want to use the film, since adolescence can be an important time for this partial split with the other. And we need to be logical here: there can only be a split if there is first a certain fusion or indistinction. And there can only be a split with what is there, with what exists. This is why those who perform the role of reference caregivers are so commonly accused of all kinds of things by some teenagers: to say that I am me, I need to oppose myself to the other! It is a difficult task for caregivers to bear being these others!
It turns out that none of this is conscious: no one consciously knows they are going through this, nor will taking a psychoanalysis class solve things. The forms of this split can be countless and as subtle as possible!
However, those who played the role of supporting the Other for the child also operated as identification models. It's hard not to laugh at moments in the film where accusations are made that the other person (father, mother, etc.) is doing something that is exactly what Hubert is putting into action at the same moment! The other is me. No, I'm not the other one. After all, who am I? How I am? I want the other one to give it to me! But no, I want to achieve it myself! It is no coincidence that these questions that seem so silly and from youthful diaries that you feel ashamed later are so common among so many people.
This split with the other is obviously never complete and total. Something is demanded from whoever is occupying this position of Other, the faults, the deficiencies, the problems are located in them. And the Subject is, in this way, hidden, muffled, with enormous difficulty in speaking for himself and in desiring. And then, symptomatically, relationships become powder kegs!
In current times of discussion about what family is and what determines someone's sexual orientation, thinking about how we become adults can be very useful. Identification and opposition, alienation in the Other and saying about oneself: non-conscious, non-moldable processes, but capable of being elaborated and understood with each personal analysis and also through the construction of a metapsychological theory that allows these processes to be worked on.
+ Strategies and reflections to combat homophobia – even internalized homophobia
I hope I have made it clear why Dorian families do not give any guarantee of what will become of their children. Nor are the infamous "disstructured families" (an execrable term) decisive. Constituting oneself as a human being means entering a world of possibilities and positioning oneself in front of them, making conscious and unconscious choices and above all: having no guarantees or pre-determinations.
It is no surprise that the situation occurs in the car between Hubert and her boyfriend near the end of the film: it's a situation very similar to the one he lived with his mother at the beginning, demanding her attention and repelling her at the same time, although the positions apparently changed in the scene with the boyfriend. But then it becomes clear: she has something of Hubert there, which is his, and which is repeated in his relationships with others even though it appears to be someone else's, his mother in this case. What is this that repeats itself? Well, that's no longer possible to know, he's just a movie character and not a real person. But any similarity with the reality of many of us is not a mere coincidence.
Leandro Salebian is a psychologist (CRP 06/99001) graduated from the USP Psychology Institute. He has worked in the area of mental health in an Adult CAPS and is now dedicated exclusively to working in a private practice. He continues his training by studying Psychoanalytic authors and has a critical and attentive look at issues of gender and sexual diversity. Also visit their website (www.leanrosalebian.com.br )
