Freud's Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer

About the Book

What does it mean to live with life-threatening illness? How does one respond to loss? Freud's Jaw and Other Lost Objects attempts to answer these questions and, as such, illuminates the vulnerabilities of the human body and how human beings suffer harm. In particular, it examines how cancer disrupts feelings of bodily integrity and agency.
Employing psychoanalytic theory and literary analysis, Lana Lin tracks three exemplary figures, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, poet Audre Lorde, and literary and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Freud's sixteen-year ordeal with a prosthetic jaw, the result of oral cancer, demonstrates the powers and failures of prosthetic objects in warding off physical and psychic fragmentation. Lorde's life writing reveals how losing a breast to cancer is experienced as yet another attack directed toward her racially and sexually vilified body. Sedgwick's memoir and breast cancer advice column negotiate her morbidity by disseminating a public discourse of love and pedagogy. Lin concludes with an analysis of reparative efforts at the rival Freud Museums in London and Vienna. The disassembled Freudian archive, like the subjectivities-in-dissolution upon which the book focuses, shows how the labor of integration is tethered to persistent discontinuities.
Freud's Jaw asks what are the psychic effects of surviving in proximity to one's mortality, and it suggests that violences stemming from social, cultural, and biological environments condition the burden of such injury. Drawing on psychoanalyst Melanie Klein's concept of "reparation," wherein constructive forces are harnessed to repair damage to internal psychic objects, Lin proposes that the prospect of imminent destruction paradoxically incites creativity. The afflicted are obliged to devise means to reinstate, at least temporarily, their destabilized physical and psychic unity through creative, reparative projects of love and writing.

Table of Contents:
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS LIST OF FIGURES INTRODUCTION Psychoanalysis and the Cancerous Object Psychoanalysis and Death Key Psychoanalytic Concepts Psychic Life of Objects Methodologies: Psychoanalysis and Pathography Overview of Chapters I PROSTHETIC OBJECTS: ON SIGMUND FREUD'S AMBIVALENT ATTACHMENTS The Prosthetic Contest Between Human and Nonhuman The Prosthetic Condition as Technological Predicament The Prosthetic as Psychic Object A Narcoanalysis of Freud's Illness Cancer as Not-Death His Living Prostheses II KEEN FOR THE FIRST OBJECT: A KLEINIAN READING OF AUDRE LORDE'S LIFE WRITING The Breast as Psychic Object The Breast as Political Object Objectification and Object Relations Orality: Creation and Destruction, Parts and Wholes The Breast as Fetish Object Mourning the Lost Object III OBJECT-LOVE IN THE LATER WRITINGS OF EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK A Public Discourse of Love Love as Comic Instruction Sedgwick's Forms of Love Object-Use, Object-Love Bad Pedagogy/Good Pedagogy "Let Another Finish the Poem ..." IV REPARATIVE OBJECTS IN THE FREUDIAN ARCHIVES The Museum as Creative Construction Remedy and Re-animation at the Freud Museum, London The Life and Death of Objects Melancholia and Reparation at the Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna Fetishism of the Lost Object CONCLUSION: LAST OBJECTS BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

About the Author :
Lana Lin is Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School, New York.

Review :
"Lana Lin's Freud's Jaw and Other Lost Objects is at once searingly beautiful, analytically searching and technically clarifying. The case is cancer, the main object is the breast, and through Freud, Lorde, and Sedgwick Lin elaborates a 'subjectivity of survival.' She tells a story of how these authors died in their own fashion, processing the invasiveness and strange freedom of becoming an object in illness. She also sees their modes of identification, and her own, as a kind of reparative teaching in the middle of crisis. Lin's work with her authors, plus Melanie Klein, W.R. Bion, and D. W. Winnicott, makes this book important for any scholar of affect and embodiment. But general readers of illness memoir will also find a richness of description that will allow them to feel held in the volatile, rich, and searching space illness can become." -- -Lauren Berlant George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor at The University of Chicago