How came I thus?: Adam and Eve in the mirror of the other

College Literature, Spring 2000 by Martin, Roberta C

Milton's Paradise Lost explores origins of many kinds at multiple levels of human experience, including the origin of human psychological development. It is not surprising, then, that modern critics with an interest in psychoanalytic theory have turned their attention to the striking narcissism displayed by several of the poem's characters narcissism clearly evident in the behavior of Adam and Eve. I wish to demonstrate how the language of psychoanalysis, used in the service of more traditional methods of Linguistic and stylistic analysis, can bring new interpretations to classic works and encourage students to examine traditional texts in a variety of ways. One of the salutary effects of a psychoanalytic approach is that it encourages students put off by Milton's unrelenting phallocentrism to reexamine the subtlety with which the poet, perhaps unconsciously, embued his greatest poem with complex psychological ambiguities.

Claudia Champagne, in an analogous psychoanalytic exercise, argues that Adam's fatal acquiescence to Eve's desires, while clearly serving his own narcissistic needs,"originates, not in any sense of vanity or self importance, but . . . in his primordial consciousness of a lack in his being. . . . Adam needs Eve because she fills this void, making him feel complete" (1991, 48-49).1 Champagne, moreover, reaches the optimistic conclusion that in the events that follow Adam's capitulation, he learns humility from Eve's admission of guilt and is redeemed by her example: "Her humility leads Adam back to the Other . Adam confesses his guilt and . . . once more submits himself to the authority of the omnipotent God"(57). This conclusion, of course, makes excellent use of psychoanalytic tools, but it produces rather traditional results. I suggest we push our psychoanalytic interrogation further in a way that spares no participant in this great drama from critical examination, not even the Father.

While I agree that Adam's uxorious difficulties are rooted in a sense of incompleteness, I think that his narcissism originates not in his own psychological configuration alone, but in the overwhelming-and repressive-narcissism of the "omnipotent God" himself: If this contention is valid, then Adam and Eve are part of a much larger web of"family dysfunction" in the poem, and the complex weave of narcissistic elements suggests more pessimistic conclusions about the prospects of Edenic autonomy and the kind of redemption involved.

The present reading departs from more usual psychoanalytic treatments of Paradise Lost by employing the developmental concepts of object relations psychology within a broadly Lacanian framework. Its purpose is to investigate the results of what ego psychologists might call "blurred ego boundaries" between God-the-Father and the Son. Such boundary confusion arises from two circumstances. First, the exact relationship between Father and Son in Paradise Lost is ambiguous-that is, it is not clear in what way the two are "united" in the Godhead and yet "separate" as "persons" in the trinity Second, the Father-Son dyad is purely phallic-that is, it admits no female, or "gynetic," element to play a part in divine creative activities.

The result of these two factors is a repression of the radically monist Father's "maternal" dimension into a register of experience that Lacan calls the Imaginary.2 Thus, not only does the indeterminate relation between phallic divine agencies set the stage for a range of narcissistic disturbances in the poem's other characters, but the repressed, maternal, creative dimension within the Godhead becomes encoded as an Imaginary "subtext."This "subtext," or submerged chain of signification, becomes the domain of what I call the "absent (M)other." Moreover, the maternal principle, denied primary text expression (the Lacanian Symbolic) as a creative element, operates through the Imaginary to distort the Symbolic activity of the primary text. Before we consider this argument, however, let us review the Lacanian categories that structure this discussion.

Lacan argues that the different levels of the human psyche and therefore human experience are structured like a language-that is, in chains of signs (signifiers) and the ideas, images, or effects toward which those signs point (signifieds). The basic linguistic principles that govern this psychic "language," its signifying chains, are the same as those we see in poetry-the principles of metaphor and metonymy Lacan also developed categories that he called the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real. These categories, or "registers," are in essence the different levels of experience composed of signifying chains that both constitute the person and are themselves the environments within which all our experiences are constituted. These levels or registers of experience in their metaphorical and metonymic dimensions establish what we might consider a text and subtext of psychic experience.3 The Symbolic register is inaugurated by the "phallic" Law of the Father.This "law"-the principle of difference and separation-is established by what Lacan calls the phallus or "phallic signifier." This signifier cannot be identified in any direct way with the male sexual organ. Rather, in the Real and in the unconscious the phallus is a "pure effect," a functional principle that separates the psyche of the child from that of the mother. During this separation, the phallic signifier mandates language, making language possible through the substitution of symbol for absent thing (the mother), and ushers the child into the Symbolic order.4 This level, which Lacan privileges, includes spoken and written language and conscious reasoning. It also constitutes our systems of thought and culture.The Imaginary register is the illusory, subjective, and narcissistic response of the individual to separationmost basically, the original separation from the mother. This register is most apparent in dreams, fantasies, and unconscious thoughts; it constitutes our illusory view of ourselves as a unified consciousness, and it is motivated by "Desire"-a desire for wholeness, completeness, and unity with an Other.