1976).

Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 12:496-506

The Theory of Transitional Phenomena and Cultural Symbols

Suzanne Hanchett, Ph.D. and Leslie Casale
IN THIS PAPER WE WANT to explore some ways in which cultural and social anthropology relates to the subject of transitional phenomena. Whereas others have considered an extension of Winnicott's theory away from its original focus on early childhood experience into patterns observable in adolescents or adults, we wish to extend outward from the spontaneous and private experience of the individual into the realm of culturallyformed patterns of symbolic activity, especially those relating to transitions and changes in culturallydefined identity. In a review of the literature on infancy experiences in various cultural settings, we have found the following: There is very little direct observational material on the use of transitional objects in cultures other than our own. This may be due to the fact that at the time when the classic studies in psychological anthropology were done, the conceptual frameworks employed by anthropologists did not include the concept of transitional objects and phenomena. Winnicott himself noted in several places that there has been a long-standing theoretical gap in psychoanalytic literature relating to this concept. That is, this way of looking at the developing person reaching out in experience to the "not-me environment" is relatively recent in psychoanalytic theory. Secondly, we wish to point out that the experience of a developing infant is undoubtedly quite different in cultures which have extended-family residential units, than in our own system of the isolated nuclear family. In the extended family situation of most cultures, the infant is rarely, if ever, left alone. Almost all of the material surveyed indicates that there is almost continual stimulation of the infant by a wide range of relatives, in addition to the mother, especially elder siblings. The following quote from Kluckhohn's (1947) study of Navaho child behavior is representative of the treatment of infants in the majority of studies providing this type of information:

The youngest child is definitely kingpin of the household. After he can walk he tends to get progressively less of his mother's undivided attention, it is true. His mother will tell an older child to amuse him, and toddlers are bounced, carried around on the hip, and entertained in every conceivable way by elder siblings, especially sisters (p. 60).
Kluckhohn follows this with a detailed, three-hour observation of the activities of a sixteen-month old child and his interaction with four older children. This childis not alone at any time during this period. This material raises the possibility that there may be little or no use of transitional "objects" by children in most non-European cultures. But this does not mean that there are no "transitional phenomena." Focusing on actions as well as objects would open up a wide range of possibilities in studies of the development of the experiencing ego in cultures where we do not find numerous toys for the entertainment of infants. For example, the bodies of their many caretakers (hair, noses, eyes, clothing, etc.) provide a major source of amusement for babies in non-Western cultures. We feel that in the nonerotic experiences with others, many "transitional phenomena" are probably occurring, although they have not been labeled as such by observers. Shifting to the major theme of this paper, we now wish to discuss transitional phenomena from a cultural perspective. First we will discuss the cultural componentof individual play experience. And secondly we will consider rites of passage as culturally prescribed, institutionalized transitional phenomena.

I. The Cultural Component of Play Experience

Insofar as symbol manipulation is necessary for existence in social life, the individuation process is partly a process of developing the ability to exchange with others in symbolic codes. As Winnicott (1966) states, " When we witness an infant's employment of a transitional object we are witnessing the child's first use of a symbol " (p. 369). The developing child will put its symbolic skills to use in play, first with the mother figure, and then in sharing relationships beyond themotherchild unit.

In Winnicott's (1953) model the meanings of the original symbolic not-me objects will "have become diffused over the whole cultural field" (p. 91) as the healthychild leaves the objects behind. That is, the capacities developed so early are seen as the basis of an individual's experiences in "the whole intermediate territory between 'inner psychic reality' and 'the external world as perceived by two persons in common' " This concept of culture is satisfactory to both anthropology and psychology. Of course cultural systems have logic of their own, and it is incumbent upon participants to accomodate to this logic to some extent.1 Winnicott (1966) is in agreement with principles of anthropology when he describes social life as a creative interaction between cultural forms and individual interpretations of them:

In any cultural field it is not possible to be original except on a basis of tradition. Conversely, no-one in the line of cultural contributors repeats except as a deliberate quotation, and the unforgivable sin in the cultural field is plagiarism. The interplay between originality and the acceptance of tradition as the basis for inventiveness seems to me to be just one more example, and a very exciting one, of the interplay between separateness and union (p. 370).2

The possibility of separating the individual from culture is still being debated in anthropological theory (Murphy, 1971).
1 2

The relationship between individual experience and cultural traditions was discussed at length by the early anthropologist Franz Boas in his works on primitive art and elsewhere.

Culture, then, is a basic environmental fact with which each individual must come to terms. But one must make it one's own and constantly recreate it in the process which we call social life. The observations which have been made on play activities of children over two years of age are interesting in this light. Although all children endow their toys with special personal value, there may be some difference between the experiences of children of European descent and those of many other cultures. European (Western) children often use toys which are given to them by others, while non-Western children most often manufacture their own toys.3 The focus provided by Winnicott's approach suggests that in addition to serving as anticipatory socialization for adult roles (an oft-mentioned function), the play of non-Western children with toys of their own making encourages them to become creators of their own experience in the world of cultural symbols. Similarly the transitional objects and phenomena being presented by this panel all have significant components of cultural meaning, since they are used by persons beyond infancy. Their personal significance in facilitating "transitions" of several types is closely integrated with the system of concepts, metaphors, and images from which they are taken. The nature of this synthesis is of course a matter of personal imagination, but we must acknowledge the presence of both levels of meaning in the processes we are considering. Volkan's (1972) work on the "linking objects" of pathological mourners includes references to such items as a watch, a ring, or a dress, all objects with strong meanings at both the personal and cultural levels. The work of Lvi-Strauss (1963), and others in anthropology has enhanced our understanding of ways in which meaning can be encoded in culturally prescribedsymbolic actions (rituals, myths, dramas, and ordinary events as well). But we do not often have access to the private areas in which individuals make these meanings their own. The clarity and the richness of the cultural symbols are, however, often understood by individuals and obviously used by them. Collaboration with psychoanalysts could be mutually enlightening if we could share the depth of our conceptions of each of the two levels of meaning, the personal and the cultural, in considering the universally human desire to "use" objects in Winnicott's (1969) sense of the term.

Documentation of these activities by children is available for the Hopi and Navaho Indians, and for the Chaga of East Africa (Dennis, 1940) ; (Kluckhohn, 1947) ; (and Raum, 1940).
3

II Rites of Passage
2

The themes of separateness, union, and transition are found in cultural systems just as they are in personal ones. It is for this reason that we wish to introduce some purely cultural material, that of rites of passage, into the discussion at this point. Although we are dealing with public ceremony, and not with private ritual, many anthropologists have observed that the two are clearly related, both in origin and function. As the anthropologist Edmund Leach (1967) has said, although "We have no grounds for assuming that the actors in public rituals are in a psychological condition which corresponds to the symbolism of their performance a puzzle (still) exists. All public symbolizations start, at some point, as private symbols " (p. 102). Benedict has suggested that the symbolic messages of rites of passage often serve to reorient individuals, and to remotivate them, as they move through social role-transitions. The rite of passage is a public ceremony in which an individual is brought through a status transformation. The literature on rites of passage is extensive, and begins mainly with the basic work of the Belgian anthropologist, Arnold Van Gennep, published in 1908. Van Gennep (1960) points out that a child to be named, a person going through a puberty ceremony, a religious initiate, a bride, a groom, and a dead person, all have much in common, and are brought through a sequence of three phases: isolationtransition ("liminality, " the phase often most emphasized)and reintegration into society in the new role, in a ritual structure which is almost universal. Rites of passage underscore the considerable influence which culture plays in defining us as public actors, limiting and compelling our experiences in the world according to the guidelines which are set largely by our public identities. The "magical" actions (or objects) of which they are composed are assumed by those of one culture to produce appropriate changes in identity of any individual who goes through rites of passage. They have the capacity to change a person from a wild creature to a member of ordered humansociety; to change one from a sexually ambiguous creature to a full male adult (in New Guinea); to change one from a single person to a husband or wife; and even to change one from a corpse into a settled ghost or an ancestor. The two examples we will discuss from Hindu India are (1) the transition of a young Brahman man at religious initiation out of his mother's world; and (2) the transition from being an auspicious married woman to being an isolated and unlucky widow. There is an interesting parallel between the personal and cultural processes of transition. As anthropologists have observed in many cultures, it is very common for an individual to be considered "dangerous" while in the second, "liminal" phase of a rite of passage. We usually explain this in that such a person has no clearly defined identity at that time. That is, having separated off from an old identity, and not yet having adopted a new one, the person without status is often feared, avoided, or considered "holy" or sacred in the sense of being charged with a magical power that could be dangerous if the ritual were for some reason left uncompleted. Thus, in one movie of Satyajit Ray's, a prepared bride must be married to a casual wedding guest when the groom is discovered to be physically unfit. The cultural assumption of danger in transition is parallel to the personal fears or anxieties that an individual feels when separating out from the security of a loving unit, and reaching out into unfamiliar experiences as a newly conscious self in the world. Involved in a public ceremony, the rite of passage, the individual is moved through actions, and objects are manipulated for his or her use in understanding the transition and affirming the new identity. In a Hindu community of Karnataka, South India, 4 one of us (S. H.) has observed the following ceremony as part of the religious initiation of a 13-year-old boy of the Smartha Brahman caste: After a series of preliminaries, during which the boy's head is shaved and the blessings of various gods and important relatives are invoked, the boy is seated next to his mother. A plate of food is placed in front of them, and they jointly partake of a meal off the same plate. This is the last time they will ever eat together off the same plate: such behavior would be disapproved after this event. After eating the meal, the boy moves to sit between his father and a priest. The three males are covered with a white cloth, and the boy is introduced to some magical formulas which are secret.

The field research on which this report is based was conducted jointly with Dr. Stanley Regelson in 1966 and 1967 in Hassan District, Mysore State (now renamed Karnataka). The languages of the communities described are Kannada and (for some) Tamil, both of the Dravidian language family. The persons described here live in peasant communities, although they are of elite groups, generally educated and well-travelled.
4

A message to the boy, his mother, and society in general is being stated in the very form of this ceremony. The boy is (in a social-identity sense) separating from his mother and uniting with his father and the male priest in a new identity. A second example from India will demonstrate the point further. It has to do with the transition of a woman from being married to a living husband into the status of widowhood. Both the married woman and the widow are highly significant and well-marked statuses in Hindu Indian culture, especially among Brahmans. They are both ornamented in specific ways which are dictated by custom; and there is extensive folklore surrounding the two statuses and the various magical powers presumably natural to either married women or widows. In many ways they are polar opposites in the cultural system of India, the married woman being the epitome of beauty, virtue, and good luck (whatever her personal conduct actually is), required for most "auspicious" ceremonies, i.e., those having to do with birth, puberty, or marriage. The powers of the married woman in popular belief extend to her being able to maintain the very life of her husband by her dedication to protective deities, her worship of him, and her sexual discipline (Thurston, 1909; Hart, 1973; and Luschinsky, 1962). Her ornamentation consists in a brightly colored sari with a good decorative border, her long, well-oiled hair adorned with flowers, her marital pendant (called atali), the glass bangles on her wrist, and the bright red spot on her forehead or in the front of her hair-part. (In various parts of India, there are many other items of decoration special for the married woman.) Her daily ornamentation affirms her value to those around her, and women frequently exchange miniaturized ornaments as gestures of mutual good wishes. It is not uncommon that one will give a gift to a married woman, or offer her a meal, in order to gain her blessing for the welfare of a husband or child, and such actions may extend to vows practiced over a period of years. The widow, on the other hand, is considered to be as malevolent and unlucky as the married woman is good. In Karnataka it is considered to bode ill for a proposed journey to see a Brahman widow as one starts out. Harper (1969) reports a belief that a Brahman widow must poison someone every year for the good of her own soul. A widow is not invited to baby-naming ceremonies, weddings, or any other auspicious ceremonies, although there are jobs for her to do in funerals. If a Brahman, she wears a plain sari (red in Karnataka), no glass bangles, no red spot, no tali pendant, no flower, and her head hair may be shaved off.5 These are not casual restrictions. The majority of the rural Hindu population is observant of these restrictions. And the life of a widow, especially a Brahman widow, is a continuous experience of isolation and personal discipline. Two images from South Indiaone fictional and one ethnographicwill demonstrate the role of ornaments in identifying women's status and will show the type of life which a Brahman widow is expected to live. The first is an excerpt from the short story, "Krishnamurthy's Wife" by Masti Venkatesa Iyengar (1943). The womanbeing observed is a widow, but she is not sure that her husband is dead. Her ambiguous state is expressed in her confused (and confusing) use of the ornaments of a married woman:

What lustre in those eyes! She is still very young. Yet, in the light of these eyes and in the firmness of those lips you see the marks of a grown-up woman. She had not the auspicious mark on her forehead. I wonder why. Yet her cheek looked like still knowing the use of saffron [another item of ornamentation, aprivilege of the married woman of this region]. It is possible she had just got up from bed and came out without having put on the mark on the forehead (p. 96).
(Two days later, the observer now knowing of her widowhood)

The plain sari and head-shaving is no longer performed in Karnataka. One rarely sees women under the age of sixty or sixty-five with these particular identifying marks. But until the 1920s or so there was pressure on Brahman widows to "disfigure" themselves in this way. (The rite of passage is, however, still performed at the transition to widowhood.) For a vivid personal description of one widow's life, see Felton (1966).
5

 She stood at her door and looked at me, I wondered whether she was perfectly sane. Was it possible that in a body that looked so well the mind had gone astray? I took my bicycle and walked out. The young woman walked briskly in my direction. I noticed what seemed a mark of kumkum [vermillion] on her forehead. "What is the matter?" I said to myself and got on to my bicycle and rode quickly off. It could not be that she was wearing the auspicious mark on her face? (p. 105)
The following is a description of a typical day in the life of a Brahman widow interviewed by S. Regelson in 1967. Dr. Regelson's notes on the interview read as follows:

She was married at ten years old. During marriage she took food from all her own caste mates (Smartha Brahmans). But now she won't even eat from her daughter-in-law. If she takes a bath, makes herself pure, does not touch even her own children "Then I'll take food" She actually would take coffee from her daughter-in-law if she got sick, but only if the daughter-in-law were ritually pure herself. She won't even let her daughter-in-law in the kitchen. She does not take food at night. Her daughterin-law cooks for herself at night. In the morning the daughter-in-law purifies the kitchen and washes the vessels. But the widow washes everything herself again with tamarind (considered to be "purifying").
The following report from the notes of Dr. Regelson provides ethnographic illustration of the discipline and restraint expected of the Brahman woman as a widow. This is especially important in matters of food ingestion and personal "purity." As other researchers have pointed out (Luschinsky, 1962) the conduct of a widow is believed to directly affect the soul of her deceased husband. The report presents the following description of the day of a widow:

She was married at ten years of age. During marriage she accepted food from all of her own castemates (the Smartha Brahmans). But now she won't even eat from the hands of her own daughter-in-law. In order to eat a meal, she takes a bath and makes herself pure, not even touching her own children. "Then I'll take food." She won't let her daughter-in-law into the kitchen at this time. She does not take food at night. Her daughter-in-law cooks for herself at night. In the morning the daughter-in-law purifies the kitchen (with cow dung) and washes the vessels. But the widow washes everything herself again with tamarind (a "purifying" substance). She actually would take coffee from her daughter-in-law if she were certainly "pure, " but only under those conditions. From other caste-mates she will receive snacks but will not eat them; if she knows for certain that they are "pure, " she might drink milk from their homes.
It is tempting to see the life of both of these figures, the married woman and the widow, as being almost saint-like in the demands and expectations imposed on them by the culture. If not saints, they are at least expected to lead disciplined lives which often do involve ascetic practices such as fasting. The reasons which best explain this are largely social ones, and time does not permit discussing them here.6 The transition from being a married woman to being a widow is a rite of passage. The transition is remarkable in its symbolism. To summarize a rather complexsequence of actions, the wife of a deceased man is decorated to an extreme degree with many flowers in her hair, a new sari, lots of glass bangles, a large red mark on her forehead, and so on. In one case (of the Oil-Presser caste) she was seated down with her husband (the corpse). The two had been garlanded as a bride and groom are and she received farewell gestures of the community together with him. She then was guided through a series of actions symbolizing her attachment to her dead husband and her deference to him. (In this case the two had been virtually at war for years before his death.) And the procession moved to the grave-site. At the grave the flowers were taken from her hair [one bystander explained, "One piece of flower must not remain in her hair"]. And another widow broke the glass bangles from each of her wrists over the head of the grave, and also removed the colored powder from her face. No married woman with a living husband is supposed to see this ritual.

Another case reported to Dr. Hanchett, that of a Brahman widowhood ritual, has similar aspects of excessive decoration followed by removal of ornaments (bangles, tali pendant, and so on), and the additional feature of receiving a new sari of the type appropriate to widows. Like the Brahman boy's religious initiation, the widowhood ceremonies express the old status, the transition, and the new status. For this discussion, however, it is important to point out that the expression of all aspects of these transitions is in symbolic objects and actions of cultural value. These same objects or actions are associated with many meanings

In addition to the sources already cited, the magical and ritual role of women in Hindu (and Sinhalese) culture is discussed by Yalman (1963), and by Hanchett in one article (1974) and a forthcoming monograph on Hindu ritual symbolism. in Hindu culture, and seem to be quite powerful in their own right. We wish to
6

suggest that they are "used" in facilitating identity transformations in much the same way that Winnicott's transitional objects and phenomena are used.

III
Winnicott (1968) makes the distinction between "play" and "game, " as the distinction of spontaneous, personal experiencing from organized, external formulas ofsymbolic action. Although all of cultural symbolism would probably be called "games" in this sense, we feel that there is enough of the spark of human creative ingenuity in these rites of passage for them to possibly qualify as "play." Indeed most cultural symbolic activity seems to grow from the human capacity to play. If a concert which we hear over and over again is relevant to the "third area" between the self and the world, then maybe a rite of passage is also.

REFERENCES
Dennis, W. 1940 The Hopi Child New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Felton, M. 1966 A Child Widow's Story New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc. Hanchett, S. 1974 Two women's ceremonies: Gaur and Prti Unpublished manuscript. Harper, E. B. 1969 Fear and the status of women Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 25 81-95. Hart, G. L. III 1973 Woman and the sacred in ancient Tamiland Journal of Asian Studies 32 233-250. Iyengar, M. V. 1943 Short Stories Bangalore. Vol. I. Kluckhohn, C. 1947 Some aspects of Navaho infancy and early childhood Psychoanalysis & the Social Sciences 1:37-86 Leach, E. R. 1967 Magical hair In: Myth and Cosmos Ed. J. Middleton. Garden City, New York: The Natural History Press, pp. 77-108 (Reprinted from The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1958 88 147-167). Lvi-Strauss, C. 1963 Structural Anthropology New York: Basic Books. Luschinsky, M. S. 1962 The life of women in a village of north India Columbia University, New York, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Murphy, R. F. 1971 The Dialectics of Social Life: Alarms and Excursions in Anthropological Theory New York: Basic Books. Raum, O. F. 1940 Chaga Childhood London: Oxford University Press. Thurston, E. 1909 Castes and Tribes of Southern India Government Press, Madras, India, 7 Vols. (See especiallyVol. IA and B, "Brahman, " pp. 356-364 .) Van Gennep, A. 1960 The Rites of Passage (translated by M. B. Vizedom & G. L. Caffee.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Volkan, V. D. 1972 The linking objects of pathological mourners Archives of General Psychiatry 27 215-221. Whiting, B. B. 1963 Six Cultures; Studies of Child Rearing New York: Wiley. Winnicott, D. W. 1953 Transitional objects and transitional phenomena; a study of the first not-me possession The Int. J. Psychoanal. 34:89-97 [] Winnicott, D. W. 1958 The capacity to be alone The Int. J. Psychoanal. 39:416-420 [] Winnicott, D. W. 1966 The location of cultural experience The Int. J. Psychoanal. 48:368-372 [] Winnicott, D. W. 1968 Playing: Its theoretical status in the clinical situation The Int. J. Psychoanal. 49:591-599 [] Winnicott, D. W. 1969 The use of an object The Int. J. Psychoanal. 50:711-716 [] Yalman, N. 1963 On the purity of women in the castes of Ceylon and Malabar The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 93 part I 25-58
1976). Psychoanalytic Review, 63:301-315

Woman Versus Womanliness in India: An Essay in Social and Political Psychology*

Ashis Nandy

I.
At the level of values, human progress can be seen as an expanding awareness of the subtler and more institutionalized forms of inequity and the suffering born of it. Person-to-person aggression and personal sadism have been punished since almost the dawn of civilization. For its survival, every society had to do that. But, as Bertrand Russell was fond of pointing out, social ethics always lags behind private ethics, so slavery, racism, colonial exploitation, and genocide were not only permitted, but often encouraged. Of course, some controls were maintained. The sacred texts everywhere defined social rights and social wrongs and prescribed limits to group violence, but the observance of such limits was not informed with an understanding of the less obvious forms of ill treatment of man by man and of the social institutions and psychological defenses which supported them. Civilization grew for many centuries before men such as Owen, Marx, and Kropotkin formulated ambitious explanations of intraspecies aggression in terms of social groupings till then seen as naturally different. Today the idea of a continuum between the exploiters and the exploited, between the aggressors and their victims, is commonplace. It was not so only a century ago.

I am grateful to M. P. Sinha, R. L. Owens, and D. L. Sheth for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. This essay is part of a forthcoming volume entitled Women in India(Ed. B. R. Nanda). The essay was first delivered as a lecture at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, India. Erik Erikson has called attention to the manner in which men legitimized these differences with reference to the latent construct of pseudo-species.10

There were still other, and subtler, forms of inequity. It was Sigmund Freud who pointed out the inequities associated with biological strata like age and sex. Though Friedrich Engels had noted earlier the vulnerability of women in general and Western women in particular, in some ways he had merely extended the formalmodel of class analysis to the condition of woman.7 Freud, being more cynical, had less faith in human nature and even less willingness to grant that economicinstitutions were the only means of oppression human intelligence and nature could devise. He traced the root of inequity to a more fundamental stratificatory system designed to derive its strength from man's evolutionary experience, namely, psychobiological growth. As a pioneer he understandably directed attention to the biological stratum which was most vulnerable at the time, namely, children. For the first time in human history he systematically analyzed how over the centuries man has exploited children, using them to express sadistic and narcissistic impulses. He also showed how man has built enormous defenses to deny to himself his cruelty and exploitation. There were times when infanticide and the torture of children were widespread in the world. Yet some of the most sensitive and humane thinkers of the age never protested. In fact, torturers of children included men such as Milton and Beethoven. Child labor was acceptable till about fifty years ago in reputedly the most civilized parts of the world. The sexual abuse of children was common. Some of the greatest Greek philosophers enthusiastically supported the homosexual use of children. One even gave elaborate instructions on how to perform well in this sphere, though he was kind enough to advise that one should not stimulate the genitals of a child when indulging in buggery because that might lead to premature sexual growth in the child and might be bad for his morals.6 Now it would be rash to conclude that the man was a vicious hypocrite. He was no more a hypocrite than the defenders of the democracy of Greek city states which rested on the slavery of the masses. They just did not have a large enough span of moral awareness. Human morality had not acquired that much depth at that time. Gregory Zilboorg's deservedly famous paper suggests something very similar for the manwoman relationship.30, 4 Here, too, oppression results from attempts to deny one's deepest anxieties, which are projected to an exploitative relationship institutionalized over centuries. The most socially valued attributes of the male, Zilboorg argues, are a result of natural selection imposed upon him by the female's original power to instinctively sense which mate was biologically fitter. This primal dominance arouses in man insecurity, jealousy, and hostility toward woman. He has a phylogenetic awareness that his primordial role is highly specialized as no more than a temporary and ephemeral

appendage to life, as a parasitic fertilizer.* Till now he has had no civilizational awareness that he has been trying to work through this basic hostility by limiting the full possibilities ofwoman by sheer oppression. It is an indicator of how far man has succeeded in these efforts that in many societies the evolutionary and biological primacy of woman has given way to an institutionally entrenched jealousy of man on her part. It is this complex psychosocial phenomenon which Freud so appropriately called penis envy. I do not think, as many defenders of woman do, that Freud was wrong in his analysis. There is enough data from some of the major Western societies to support him. He merely missed the historical tragedy that was involved in this reversal of roles. All this is by way of a long disgression. The point is this: The present awareness of the constricted role of woman in Indian society and in public affairs is part of an ongoing process of civilizational change and must be so analyzed. This demands that we identify the structure of defenses, individual as well as cultural, which has given meaning to the role of woman in Indian society and which has been challenged in recent times by new waves of social consciousness. Only then can we hope to isolate and control the long-term processes of social and psychological changes in this sphere. I shall give an example. Everybody knows that the survival rate of boys in India is much higher than that of girls. But only scattered individuals and groups feel passionately about it, in spite of the fact that the number of vulnerable young girls in India is larger than that of the landless laborers. Even fewer persons are sensitive to the fact that this indirect female infanticide or, to use Johan Galtung's term, structural violence toward woman is mainly a function of maternal neglect, a weird expression of woman's hostility toward womanhood and also, symbolically, toward her own self. This classic instance of the psychological defense of turning against self by identifying with the aggressive male draws attention to the way in which some social institutions have made woman herself a participant in her self-repudiation and intra-aggression. The oppressive reality for woman, one might suggest, is now only partially outside her. A part of that reality has been introjected through a long historical process of social learning. And the learning has been thorough. It has been said that man's cruelty toward man is exceeded only by man's cruelty toward woman. But even man's cruelty toward woman is no match for the cruelty of woman toward woman.* To ignore this aspect of womanhood in India is merely to strike a moralistic posture congruent with the strident tones of the female liberators of women in the West; it abridges Indian awareness of some of the latent justifications of oppression in this society. Such a statement itself challenges vested interests and arouses theanxiety of many, so I shall begin at the very beginning, with a consideration of the linkage between the Indian's traditional world image and his means of livelihood.

Ontogenetically, too, it is the female sex which is primal, not the male.25 A sensitive interpretation of Freud's view of womanhood and its humanist implications can be found in Erikson.9 For an early psychological analysis of woman's identification with the aggressive male and her hostility toward womanhood see Menninger.18 It may seem a little too obvious to be important, but in a society like ours, a major obstacle to the equal treatment of woman by man in job situations is the pressure exerted by the insecure female relatives of both male and female job-holders.

II.
An agricultural society has its own distinctive symbiotic relationship with nature. Since the time of neolithic agriculture, this distinctiveness has lain in the central role of woman in society and culture. It was she who was primarily involved in gentling and nurturing and breeding; it was her capacity for tenderness and love which gave the earliest agricultural settlements of man their touch of security, receptivity, enclosure, nurture; and it was she who made fully possible the growth of civilization.20 A number of studies have found that such a society tends to emphasize the feminine principle in nature, to see nature as a mother who is irascible and unpredictable, propitiable only through a wide variety of rites and rituals.* Particularly in societies where nature continues to be the dominant partner in the man-nature dyad, important themes in folklore and religious texts are often the fecundity and bounty of nature as well as her frequent denial of sustenance to men who have poor means of controlling the fickle motherand are totally dependent upon her for survival. This is indeed true of India. Though the Brahmanic tradition attempted to limit the dominance of woman in society, the pre-Aryan dominance of woman was retained in many areas of life, particularly in the symbolic system. This undeniably is a matrifocal culture in which femininity is inextricably linked with prakriti, or nature,

and prakriti with leela, or activity. Similarly, the concept of adya shakti, primal or original power, is entirely feminine inIndia. It is the male principle in the godhead, purusha, that is reliable but relatively passive, weak, distant, and secondary. That is why the deities that preside over those critical sectors of life which one cannot control such as the success of crops and the occurrence of famines (food), protection against cholera and smallpox (personal survival), and childbirth and child health (perpetuation of race) are all motherly figures. All the more cruel rituals, which are mentioned as indicators of Indian medievalism, have centered on the goddesses: sati, or the enforced ritual suicide of women after the death of their husbands, child sacrifices at Sagar Sangam; infanticide to ensure the longevity of dams, bunds, and buildings; and human sacrifices of various forms. The thugs, or men who robbed after quasi-ritual murder of unwary travelers, considered themselves devotees of Kali. For that matter, most of the marginal groups, such as thieves and decoits, have sought meaning as social beings by being devotees of one black goddess or another, that is, at another level, by identifying and identifying with an aggressive, treacherous, annihilatingmother. In other words, the ultimate authority in the Indian mind has always been feminine. It is this authority that the traditional Indian male propitiates or makes peace with through symbolic or real aggression against his own self and by identifying with what he sees as thepassive, weak, masculine principle in the cosmos.

Barbara Smoker, making the point that the Judeo-Christian God was the original male chauvinistic pig, has tried to show how the position of woman in the original peasant cultureof the West changed in response to a divine sex change. Gradually the fertility goddesses gave way to a patriarchal God who was perceived as the creator of man after his ownimage.27 The Aryan attempt to contain the importance of woman was more successful in the Brahmanic and Brahmanized sectors than in the rest of society, where women retained much of their traditional freedom and prerogatives.31

III.
There is a congruence between this structure of authority and the traditional family and socialization systems. Studies of child rearing done in the more orthodox sectors of Indian society have repeatedly shown that in the critical years of life the mother is the only true and close authority to which the child is exposed. In his relationships with others, the Indian child has a wide spectrum of predefined roles and role-specific behavior. There is distance and fragmentation of self in these interpersonal relationships. It is only with respect to his mother that he is his whole self and recognizable as an individual.12, 23 Associated with this in the son is a deep feeling of ambivalence toward a controlling yet discontinuous mother. He often sees her as a treacherous betrayer, mainly because of her intermittent presence and nurture which are in turn due to the exigencies of her familial role, social obligations, mores, and taboos.* The Indian's fantasylife is to a great extent organized around this image of an angry, incorporative, fickle mother, against whom his anger is directed and from whom, through a process ofprojection, counteraggression is feared.5, 28, 29 His model of male identification, too, is the father who is more a mother's son than a woman's husband, and therefore is swayed by the same fantasies and fears. For the Indian mother, on the other hand, the son is the major medium of self-expression. It is her motherhood that the traditional family values and respects; her wifehood and daughterhood are devalued and debased. The woman's self-respect in the traditional system is. protected not through her father or husband, but through her son. It is also through the son and for that matter on the son that she traditionally exercises her authority.* Here, thus, is a case of psycho-ecological balance. What the nature and economy emphasize, the family and the cultural system underscore. No wonder all major social reforms and attempts at social change after the beginning of British rule have centered on woman and femininity. It is by protesting against or defying the traditional concepts of woman and womanhood that all Indian modernizers have made their point. On the other hand, all forms of conservatism and protests against modern Western encroachments on the Indian society have taken shelter in and exploited the symbol of motherhood.

An important element in her familial and social roles is the fact that she is expected to be the main socializing agent for her children, responsible for meting out both rewards and punishments. This fosters the child's ambivalnce toward her. In many societies, the responsibility for administering punishment is mainly the father's.

Here he is on the whole an outsider to the reward-punishment system for the children. There is also the possibility that the Indian wife resents the husband's social superiority and dominance and, unable to express it, displaces her unconscious destructive impulses toward him to her son.26, 13

IV.
Thus the mother-son relationship is the basic nexus and the ultimate paradigm of human social relationships in India. To an extent this is true of all cultures, but only in a few cultures have the loneliness and self-abnegation of woman as a social being found such elaborate justification in her symbolic status as a mother. Since motherhood is a compensatory mechanism, the society can manipulate and control a woman by forcing her to take on her motherly identity whenever cornered and a man by forcing him to take on the son's role whenever in crisis. The culture tends to shape critical public relations to fit or exploit that symbolic paradigm. Yet simultancously the Indian society inculcates in women a certain self-doubt and in men a certain ambivalence toward womanhood. This ambivalence is very different from the ambivalence which the Western man feels toward woman or the universal fear which Zilboorg, Bettelheim, and Salzman diagnose. In this society, except for small sectors in which martial values predominate, the man's fear is not that he will lapse into womanliness and thus lose his masculinity or potency. In fact, potency here is not generally something men strive for, protect, or protest in the external world. The masculine fear here is that a man may run afoul of the cosmic feminine principle, that woman will betray, aggress, pollute, or at least fail to protect.

As is well known, the Indian family underemphasizes the wife's role and overemphasizes the mother's to blur the outlines of the nuclear family and de-emphasize it as the basic unit of family life. Though a huge majority of Indians stay in nuclear households, the values associated with the extended family system are a major influence on intrafamily relationships.

There are two major corollaries of such an uncertainty about the cosmic feminine principle. The first of these can be stated in the form of a dialectic but is perhaps a matter of the various planes at which the Indian man lives his psychological life. At one plane, he is continually afraid that he may become too independent of the maternal principle of authority, too defiant as a son of the power of cosmic motherhood, and too close to open anger toward his mother. On the other, he is constantly anxious that he will be incorporated by an all-encompassing, powerful mother, lose his autonomy and individuality altogether, and be reduced to the safe but ineffective role of the father. Secondly, bisexuality in India has always been considered an indicator of saintliness and yogic accomplishments. Perhaps it is considered an indicator of having successfully coped with or transcended one's deepest conflicts about femininity and masculinity. Perhaps it has something to do with the traditional concept ofardhanarishwara, or bisexual god, associated with the deity that combines godly grandeur with yogic asceticism, namely Shiva. However it be, one who is closer to godliness is expected to show a little less concern with the worldly division between the sexes and a little more ability to transcend the barriers imposed by one's ownsexual identity. He is expected to subscribe to values which are unbound by the society's prevalent sexual identities.21,* In India, unlike in many Western societies, the softer forms of creativity and the more intuitive and introspective styles of intellectual and social functioning are not strongly identified with femininity. Nor ismasculinity that closely linked to forceful, potency-driven, hard, and hardheaded modes of intrusive behavior. Sexrolespecific qualities here are differently distributed. In fact, the concept of potency in Indian high culture has always had a private, introversive quality about it. The Brahman's concept of ritual and intellectual potency has nothing in common with the manifest extroversive concept of potency in the modern West. Brahmanic potency is derivable, as it was in medieval Europe's monastic orders, from

One would expect this idealization of bisexuality to lead to understanding and tolerance of the other sex.14 One wonders why this has not happened in India's high culture. Perhaps what the culture values is not so much bisexuality as transsexuality. It is in India's low cultures that bisexuality as a value has had its fullest impact.
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displaced sexual potency through abstinence and denial of one's sexual self.

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This has another aspect. In the twilight zones in which creative minds dwell, there is always a certain emphasis on the ability to turn inward and live in one's own inner world; the ability to accept intuition, tenderness, and caritas as values; a certain sensitivity to one's natural environment and to the latent communications among men; and the capacity to use media of self-expression which mobilize feelings, imagery, and fantasies. In the West this has invariably meant becoming more feminine. That is why psychological studies of creative men in the West frequently show that one of the best predictors of creativity in men is the extent of their psychological femininity. In the Western context Berdyaev has argued that the figure of Christ is androgynous and that all creators must be so if they are to conceive and bear greatly and whole.3, 1, 16 Understandably too, there are elements of pathos and loneliness associated with such a search for bisexuality in societies where, even at the level of symbols, males dominate.* My own studies of creative men in India roughly corroborate this finding, but with one important caveat. The Indian, apparently, is not more creative only when he is more feminine or, to put it less obtusely, when he can better accept his feminine self. His creativity also consists in his being able to identify the cosmic feminine principle with his own internal concept of authority and then in defying this authority and simultaneously making large-scale symbolic reparations for this defiance. This is a major ingredient of the relationship between womanliness and creativity in India. The isomorphism between one's inner controls and the society's concept ofauthority sharpens one's sensitivity to the basic symbolic system of the culture and makes one more rooted in the culture's style of self-expression. On the other hand, this defiance of one's final and most intimate authority gives an edge to one's defiance of the shared concept of authority outside. And you do not have to be a psychologist to recognize that this defiance is one of the cornerstones of creative effort. There is another aspect of this linkage between creativity and womanliness in India. Public defiance rationalizes one's more guiltprovoking

On the tragedy which accompanies the search for bisexuality in the West, see the fascinating study of Kubie.15
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private defiance. If this public defiance of authority is linked to the cause of woman, either as an exercise in reform geared to her good or as a purely intellectual exercise in understanding her problems, the structure of rationalization becomes stronger and more usable. It binds the moral anxiety triggered by defiance of one's internalauthority and, at another level, atones for that defiance. This atonement through working for the cause of woman or, in its intellectualized version, through understanding woman and femininity has been perhaps the single most important theme in the history of social creativity in India. Many years ago someone pointed out to me how formidable and powerful the women are in the Mahabharata, the epic which perhaps summarizes the Indian ethos better than any work of social science, and how the story revolves round them. It struck me then as an original viewpoint, and over the years I have been convinced that it is correct in more senses than one. When one looks at the styles of creative self-expression during the last two hundred years, a period characterized by a fast tempo of social change and the breakdown of many aspects of the older life style, one cannot but marvel at the crucial role that woman as a symbol and womanliness as an aspect of Indian identity have played. This dynamic is clearer in some parts of the country than in others, because some communities, such as Bengal, have a greater capacity than others to superbly dramatize the psychological problems of the society at large.* Perhaps Bengal's tribal base, unsure Brahmanization, deep symbiotic links between means of livelihood and cultural products, and strong feudal traditions have something to do with this.22 At least from Rammohun Roy through Ishwar Chandra Vidyasgar in the area of social reform, from Bankim Chandra Chatterji through Sarat Chandra Chatterji to Satyajit Ray in literature and arts, from Vivekananda to Aurobindo in religion, womanhood as a symbol and womanliness as a subject of study have been the centerpieces of creative consciousness in different sectors of Bengali life. Whether in Bengal or the country as a whole, certain closely

How far this helps the society to work through these problems by providing tentative solutions and nonsolutions is, however, a different issue.

11

Kakar provides interesting comparative data on seven Indian subcultures which show Bengal to be exceptional in its concern with the destructive and threatening aspects of the motherand its unconcern with the Oedipal conflicts between the father and the son.
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related modes of symbolic adaptation have dominated India's distinctive style of entry into the modern world. What came as if in a flux in the British period was an entire authority system which involved the invalidation at many levels of the traditional equation between femininity and power, the old concept of propitiation through rituals and magic, and the primal mythical personification of nature as an inviolate cosmic mother. Some, like Rammohun Roy and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, tried to redraw the traditional definition of womanly identity, trying to introduce into it new elements drawn from reinterpreted traditions and to endogenize certain Western themes. Their own deeper ambivalence toward woman found in these efforts a personal adaptive device. I have shown elsewhere how much this was true of Roy, and some of the new biographies of Vidyasagar do not leave us in much doubt on this score either.11, 19 Some with mass appeal like Sarat Chandra Chatterji and Govardhanram Tripathi among writers, and Vidyasagar and Gandhi among reformers, tried to legitimize woman's wifely role in particular and public role in general by stressing in them aspects of her motherliness.* Some others like Ramkrishna Paramhansa and Aurobindo found in motherhood the supreme concept of a new godhead, rooted in tradition on the one hand and capable of balancing the overemphasis on masculinity in the Semitic religions on the other. In fact, their appeal to many Westerners was this concept of a godhead that could be counterpoised against the patriarchal orientations dominating the Western view of man and nature. Still others like Bankim Chandra Chatterji and Vivekananda linked this traditional image of sacred motherhood to the modern concept of motherland, hoping thereby to give a new sanctity to the concept of nation in an essentially apolitical society. Even Gandhi tried to give a new dignity to women by making a new equation between womanliness and political potency, denying in the process the Western association between maleness and control over public affairs and statecraft, rejecting the martial tradition inIndia, which, like martial traditions in

In fact, this redefinition through the new norms of sex-role-specific behavior was tried also by Rammohun Roy in Brahmoism, the new religious ideology he evolved, and by Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar in his style of reform and the rationalizations he offered for them. Nirupama Pota's ongoing study of the four most creative writers of twentiethcentury Hindi literature (Jay Shankar Prasad, Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, Sumitra Nandan Pant, and Mahadevi Verma) suggest something roughly similar.
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most other societies, debased womanhood, and abrogating the colonial identity which equated femininity with passivity, weakness, dependence, subjugation, andabsence of masculinity.8, 24 His conservatism as well as his modernity, his success as well as his failure, rested on this equation.

V.
In sum, the redefinition of womanhood in present-day India has required a redefinition of the concept of man and of public functioning. In this ongoing process, the emancipation of woman and her equality with man have been important but not the main issues. They may today lead to vicious debates in small groups of already privileged modern women, but the majority in the hinterlands have never considered these themes relevant for social analysis and intervention. Naturally. To make the issues of emancipation of woman and equality of sexes primary, one needs a culture in which conjugality is central to male-female relationships. One seeks emancipation from and equality with one's husband and peers, not with one's son. If the conjugal relationship itself remains relatively peripheral, the issues of emancipation and equality must remain so too.* Thus in conclusion I must confront the basic yet commonplace paradox of every social interpretation of the Indian woman: Why do some women in India reach the pinnacles of public power and recognition while women in general have kept out of large areas of public life? According to some, the ascendancy of certain women is proof that Indian culture does not intrinsically discriminate against women. According to others, these women are exceptions that prove nothing. To psychologists, who, as you know, are used to thinking in strange ways, there is always a continuity between the commonplace and the exceptional. I have already said that, in India, competition, aggression, power,

12

activism, and intrusiveness are not so clearly associated with masculinity. In fact, in mythology and folklore, from which norms often come for traditionally undefined social

The theme of equality between sexes has been less dead, because it also relates to equality between the son and the daughter. From Rammohun Roy to Jawaharlal Nehru, a number of reformers have made it an important plank in their ideologies of social change. In the forthcoming Women in India Veena Das seems to argue that men in India are also kept out of large areas of life. If women do not have access to men's life, men also do not have access to women's life.
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situations, many of these qualities are as frequently associated with women. The fantasy of a castrating, phallic woman is also always round the corner in the Indian's inner world. That is why in some areas of life, disjunctive with the traditional life style and not having clearly defined or well-developed norms, women do not start with as much handicap as they do in many other societies. Obvious examples of such areas are politics and public affairs and some scientific and religious activities.* Here public success does not seem to detract from private womanliness. In other words, in such instances the Indian woman can more easily integrate within her feminineidentity the participation in what by Western standards are manly activities but in India are either not defined in terms of sex roles or are tinged with transsexual or bisexual connotations. In these areas, Indian women do not have to fight the same battle that their Western sisters have to fight, though some of them do pretend to give battle to existing norms here too. That, of course, is shadow boxing. I am not concerned here with those for whom the search for freedom and dignity as women has become a search for a new neurotic stability which they hope will defend them as successfully against self-awareness as the now crumbling defenses once did. For the more sensitive woman, the challenge is nothing less than redefinition of herself. The first task that faces her is to devise means of de-emphasizing some aspects of her role in her family andsociety and emphasizing others, so that she may widen her identity without breaking totally from its cultural definition or becoming disjunctive with its psychobiological distinctiveness. In the West that may mean defying the limits of conjugality and giving a new dignity to the maternal role of woman; in India it may involve transcending the partial identity imposed by motherhood and winning a new respect for conjugality. Partial identities always extract a price from those who live with them, either as victims or as beneficiaries. Indian women have paid terribly for

I must remind those who may be surprised by my inclusion of some aspects of religious activity in this list that traditional Hinduism is not an organized religion. Some highly organized Hindu sects which have sprung up during the last 150 years are thus clearly discontinuous with the older life style. In such sects women often play important roles. I must reluctantly draw attention to the fact that in India the truly creative women in these areas have rarely been feminists, ardent or otherwise. There the battle has been fought by men who have presumed that the plight of women in other areas of life extend to these too.
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Indian insensitivity, but they have also extracted a heavy toll from a society which has not yet learned to live with all aspects of womanhood. In that respect theirs is not what Rollo May would call a case of authentic innocence but that of pseudoinnocence.17 This innocence leads one to participate in a structurally violent system because of the unawareness of one's power to intervene in the real world and because of the indirect psychosocial benefits of being a victim. But then, ultimately this is no different from ancient wisdom. Victims and beneficiaries of a system, even common sense admits, are rarely ever exclusive groups. Modern psychology only strengthens one's belief that no marauder can hope to be a marauder without being a prey and no prey can be a prey without being a marauder.

References
1 Barron, F. Creative Person and Creative Process. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969, p. 105. 2 Barron, F. The Psychology of Creativity. New Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 2. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965, p. 40.

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3 Berdyaev, N. The Meaning of the Creative Act. Transl. D. A. Laurie. New York: Harper & Row, 1954. Quoted in Barron.1 4 Bettelheim, B. Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male. New York: Collier, 1962. 5 Carstairs, G. M. The Twice Born. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1957. 6 De Mause, L. The Evolution of Childhood. New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974. 7 Engels, F. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. New York: International Universities Press, 1942. 8 Erikson, E. H. Gandhi's Truth. New York: Norton, 1969. 9 Erikson, E. H. Inner and Outer Space.: Reflections on Womanhood. Daedalus, Vol. 93, 1964, pp. 582-606. 10 Erikson, E. H. Race and the Wider Identity. Identity: Youth and Crisis. New York: Norton, 1968, pp. 295-320. 11 Ghosh, B. Vidyasagar o Bangali Samaj. Calcutta: Bengal Publishers, 1958, Vols. 1-3. 12 Gore, M. S. Urbanization and Family Change. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1968, Chapter 1. 13 Kakar, S. Aggression in Indian Society: An Analysis of Folk Tales. Indian Journal of Psychology, Vol. 49, 1974, pp. 119-126, esp. 125-126. 14 Kestenberg, J. S. Vicissitudes of Female Sexuality. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., Vol. 4, 1956, pp. 453-476. [] 15 Kubie, L. The Drive to Become Both Sexes. Psychoanal. Q., Vol. 43, 1974, pp. 349-426. [] 16 Mackinnon, D. W. The Personality Correlates of Creativity: A Study of American Architects. In P. E. Vernon (Ed.), Creativity. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1970, pp. 289-311, esp. 305-306. 17 May, R. Power and Innocence. New York: Norton, 1972.
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18 Menninger, K. Love Against Hate. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942, Chapter 4. 19 Mitra, I. Karuna Sagar Vidyasagar. Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1969. 20 Mumford, L. The City in History. London: Secker and Warburg, 1961, Chapter 1. 21 Nandy, A. Alternative Sciences. New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill, 1976. 22 Nandy, A. Sati, or a Nineteenth Century Tale of Women, Violence, and Protest. In V. C. Joshi (Ed.), Rammohun Roy and the Process of Modernization in India. New Delhi: Vikos, 1975, pp. 168-194. 23 Narayan, D. Growing Up in India. Family Process, Vol. 3, 1964, pp. 148-152. 24 Rudolph, L., and S. Rudolph. The Modernity of Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966, Part 2. 25 Salzman, L. Feminine Psychology Revisited. Am. J. Psychoanal., Vol. 31, 1971, pp. 123-133. [] 26 Slater, P. E. The Glory of Hera. Boston: Beacon, 1968. 27 Smoker, B. Women and the Patriarchal God. The Secularist, Vol. 33, 1975, pp. 67-68. 28 Spratt, P. Hindu Culture and Personality. Bombay: Manaklalas, 1966. 29 Whiting, B. (Ed.). Mothers in Six Cultures. New York: Wiley, 1966. 30 Zilboorg, G. Masculine and Feminine: Some Biological and Cultural Aspects. Psychiatry, Vol. 7, 1944, pp. 257-296. 31 Zimmer, H. Philosophies of India. New York: Meridian, 1956.
- 315 (1972). Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 8:179-184

Traditional Indian Textures and Contexts

Barbara Stoler Miller, Ph.D.
AESTHETIC SENSIBILITY seems to me the ideal means for approaching the complex emotional situation portrayed in Satyajit Ray 's "Devi" (pronounced Debi in Bengali), especially since the film is a work of art in which a variety of elements are interwoven by aesthetic means. In Indian terms, in order to understand any work of art the audience has to be one of sensitive connoisseurs, educated tasters of experience. As an Indologist, I shall discuss Indian cultural aspects of the film that seem essential background for an "educated taster" who would enter the world of the film and respond to its contents (stated and suggested).1

The non-Indian attempting to enter that world should understand that "Devi" is not a "popular" film aimed at a mass Indian audience; its audience, even in India, is limited.
1

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Three areas seem most relevant to understanding the psychological developments of the characters in "Devi": (1) Indian aesthetics, as it applies to the film itself and to the forms of worship that are central to its visual imagery and symbolism; (2) religious institutions, which form the basis of traditional culture, embody communal fantasies, and govern the lives of the film's characters, especially

14

the Shakta cult of Bengal and the Brahmo Samaj movement as it developed in nineteenth century Bengal and injected elements antithetical to the dominant medieval traditions of the Indian village at that time; and (3) social institutions of caste and the joint family which define patterns of behavior in the Indian society of the film.

Indian Aesthetics
Mood or sentiment is at the heart of Indian aesthetics. The Sanskrit word for this, rasa literally the taste or flavor of somethingis best translated as "mood, " the rasa of a poem or dramatic scene being the essential pervading mood or flavor of an emotional situation. Indian philosophers and poets recognize that the basicmaterial of mood is human emotion, which is to say that they recognize that psychological complexity underlies aesthetic experience. They divide human emotion into nine categories: laughter, grief, energy, fear, loathing, wonder, sexual passion, and peace. There are strict rules about how these may be mixed in classical Indian drama. Satyajit Ray employs all of the classical emotions in "Devi, " often most effectively by exploiting the power of unclassical justapositions. In the tradition of Indian artists, Ray works in the film to distill essential qualities from the natural confusion of spontaneous emotion, and to pattern these into rich, but ordered, textures. He expresses emotion amidst a multiplicity of sensuous qualities and luxurious environments. This is not a sparse film; the filmmaker does not cyrstallize or unravel emotion for his audience. Instead, he compresses the profusion of its qualities into a thick, emotionladen atmosphere so highly controlled that the sensitive audience is compelled to share in the experience of his characters. But the uninitiated may be too overwhelemd by the sensory and emotional lushness to appreciate the film. Insight into the problem is offered by Erik Erikson's account, in his introduction
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to Gandhi's Truth(1969), of observations of Indian children, made through play study. The method he used in India, fully described in Childhood and Society, consists of confronting individual children with an empty table (the "stage") and a series of toys (the "cast") and asking them to build a "scene." American children he had observed in similar play tended to select a few toys and to concentrate their efforts on building a scene of increasingly clear configuration. Indian children, in contrast, attempt to use all the toys at their disposal, creating a play universe filled to the periphery with blocks, people, and animals but with little differentiation between outdoors and indoors, jungle and city, or, indeed, one scene from another. If one finally asks what (and indeed where) is the "exciting scene, " one finds it embedded where nobody would have discerned it as an individual event and certainly not as a central one. Once it is located, however, a Gestalt emerges and suggests some relation to the child's history and backgroundas do scenes at home (Erikson, 1969, p. 40). Ray is masterful in effecting the magic of erotic emotion on a variety of levels in "Devi, " always in settings made more sensual by the textures of light and darkness, stillness and motion, silence and sound. Dark eyes, shining silks, fireworks, candlelight, moonlight, oil lamps, songs, and chanting all seduce the audience into the atmosphere of the film. The emotion-laden atmosphere that they create is in the film itself essential to the Shakta ritual which the old man practices. It creates a setting for his sexual fantasies, sublimated into his dream of the Goddess's incarnation in the form of his beautiful daughter-in-law, Doya (whose name means "compassion"). The intoxicating effect of the ritual is akin to intense aesthetic experience. The psychological fusion of his ritual worship with sensual experience is made concrete when the old man has Doya rub his feet, and goes to bed to have his revelatory dream.

Indian Religious Institutions

Within Hinduism there is enormous variety of doctrine and ritual. The religious focus of the film is on the Shakta rituals and images. Shaktas are worshippers of the great female-power, Shakti, also called Devi and Kali. Their doctrine and practice
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emphasizes power (Woodruffe, 1929). They consider the world to be pervaded by power in the dual aspects of Shiva and ShaktiShiva being the unchanging, masculine aspect of divinity and Shakti the changing female aspect. The Shakti aspect, as manifested in the universe, is near to the worshipper. He can see her, touch her, for she is the Great Mother; he can lie in the lap of her vast body just as the sick boy in the film lies in the lap of Devi. For the Shakta worshipper, divinity is spoken of as Mother because it conceives, bears, give birth to, and nourishes the universe and all beings. In Western terms we might

15

refer to this as "infantilism, " stressing the attempt to recapture the blissful state of the helpless child through the act of prostration before the Mother. Shaktism stresses the importance of emotion in religious experience, and the feelings of a child toward its mother are considered fundamental to Devi worship. The mood or aesthetic environment (rasa) created by the ritualization of emotion is important in understanding how a profane act of "regression" is transformed into a sacred act appropriate for the adult worshipper. Both Shakta and Tantric rituals often include elements normally forbidden to orthodox Hindus outside ritual. What is, in orthodox Hinduism, considered to be unlawful (adharma), is in these cults sanctified by ritualization. All of the main male characters in the film participate in the profanation of orthodox religion: the oldfather by his antinomian practices, the older son by getting drunk on the holy wine of his father's ritual, the younger son by his modern reformist ideas. The acquisition of power is inherent in the Shakta ritual, which evokes occult magical power through elaborate means. This, again, is something apart from the norms (dharma) which govern non-ritual religious life even for the old man; it is only in ritual that external checks on desires are removed. The ritual, which has its roots in the ancient Vedic sacrificial ritual, has supernatural power which can insure results never to be hoped for from any conceivable natural means; and the efficacy of the ritual depends on successful invocation of the god or goddess (or dual divinity) to whom it is directed. The Goddess (Devi), is Power (Shakti); to have a vision of her is to be powerful. The statement of Morris Carstairs (1958) on the tension that exists for the high-caste
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Hindu between cultural ideals of self-control over spontaneous impulse and the realities of sensual passion is relevant to the attitudes towards woman that are central to Shakta worship and to the film as a whole. Sexuality remains throughout something detrimental, dangerous and seductiveeven to Shaktas who embrace it as the source of power. Like Time (Kala), with whom she may be considered a partner in destruction, Kali, the dark side of The Goddess, ravages the life of man in the fatal revolution of days and seasons. Tormenting him for his vain craving for immortality and his shrunken potency, she traps him in his own fantasies. The old man in the film is Time's victim; his sensual attraction to his daughterin-law threatens to make mockery of him. When he invokes The Goddess and dreams the dream, the girl's haunting beauty is transformed into an acceptable object of adoration. The poison is transformed into a potable ambrosia, which makes him strong and youthful; he temporarily conquers Time by ritually embracing its mistress. His adoration is satisfied in the concrete sensuality of the ritual. By drawing the beautiful object of his lust into the emotional atmosphere of theritual, he is able to accommodate the antithetical demands of religion and eroticism. A common notion in Hinduismthat creation and destruction constitute an ongoing cyclical process is central to the Shakta cult and to the film. Devi, as Kali or Shakti, is both destructive and creative energy. Sacrifice is necessary for creation, or creative change, and The Goddess always demands her sacrifice. Ray uses the theme of sacrifice and gives it greater dimension by projecting it into the socio-historical sphere. He suggests that the sacrifice of the old man's grandson, the girl's innocence, and the old family are all necessary before the new order can begin. On this level, the triumph may finally be the son's, despite his personal tragedy, since the fanaticism and perversion of the old man make him incapable of keeping his tenuous paternal power. In conflict with the Shakta ritualism of the old man is his son's involvement with the Brahmo Samaj, a major cultural reform movement of the nineteenth century, which was centered in Bengal. The Brahmo Samaj concentrated on the reform of Indian religionnot the religion of the old scriptures and lofty philosophies, but on the aspect of religion that is epitomized in the
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old man's cult worship. It objected to the ritualized complex of highly emotional beliefs and valuations that gave the sanction of sacredness and immutability to inherited institutional arrangements, modes of living, and attitudesreligion as the overwhelming force for social inertia and the great barrier to change. Although the Brahmo Samaj, founded in Bengal in 1828 by Rammohan Roy, was open to all castes and creeds, it was joined mainly by upper-caste, educated, reform-minded urban Hindus. Its attraction for the uneducated masses, or the privileged landowners of the village, was slight. The struggle between the old village landowner and his educated son is therefore a conflict in ideological and generational, as well as personal terms.

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Indian Social Institutions

Indian society is best described in terms of two interacting systems, those of caste and class, which are distinguished in Indian terminology by the terms jati (birthgroup, genus) and varna (class, rank). The caste system, the operative social structure of the Indian village, is characterized by group exclusiveness, endogamy within the caste marriage circle extending over a group of villages, and hereditary occupation. Castes within any village or region are ranked in terms of ritual status and personal attributes, such as wealth. Castes in a village interact in terms of obligatory exchange of goods and services. The class system is an ideal social structure, in which caste groups were theoretically ranked into four broadly occupational divisions by ancient Brahman lawgivers. The wealthy landowning family in the film belongs to the Brahman class and to the highest caste in the village, ranked by virtue of birth and wealth. The family's position in the village is such that other castes owe it a variety of services in return for patronage, in the form of distribution of food at festival times, clothes, and care. Though The Goddess, Devi, could conceivably be incarnate in any woman, the villagers are more ready to honor her in the form of the bride of the powerful Brahman's son. Doya's apotheosis is not far from her actual social position. In the Indian joint family, even after marriage, sons live in their father's household, with their wives and children. There is little real privacy, no acknowledged independence, and dramatically separate spheres for men and women. In this rich
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Brahman family, the absence of the old man's wife is significant. The young bride is left in his father's house when her husband goes off to study and to develop his radical ideas in Calcutta. Without the authority of a mother-in-law, Doya is at the mercy of her father-in-law. Her sister-in-law, jealous of Doya and bitter, is absorbed in her own sexual antagonism toward her ineffectual husband. In this atmosphere of lush decadent surroundings, languorousness, intoxicating rituals, and erotic tensions, both the father and Doya are predisposed toseduction; he embraces his fantasy and she slowly loses herself in her role. No one is powerful enough to successfully challenge themuntil Death intervenes.

REFERENCES
Carstairs, Morris G. The Twice Born (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1958 )156157 Erikson, Erik H. Ghandi's Truth (New York: Norton, 1969) 40 Woodruffe, Sir John Shakti and Shakta (London: Luzach, 1929)

( 2004 ). Journal of Psychoanalysis , 50 : 461-468

Merging of different temporalities

Andrea Sabbadini
The coexistence in our daily lives to reflect the different temporalities two different logical systems of the primary process, which operates in the Unconscious, and secondary operation that characterizes the conscious and preconscious. It is this coexistence that allows us to enter and exit from different states of consciousness, in and out of rational thought and fantasy, dreams and waking life, without feeling too disturbed (unless you are psychotic) from these changes. It is also a necessary, albeit insufficient, for the expression of creativity, like all the artists that "get lost" in their work are well aware. A specific example of this contrast of temporalities can be encountered in the consulting room, the time limits provided by the establishment of an analytical report, with the day fixed for the sessions and the strict adherence to conventional fifty minutes, and allow the emergency ' exploration of that ' timeless world that dominates our unconscious (Sabbadini, 1989) . In this regard, the vagueness of the total duration of psychoanalysis, in contrast to the fixed duration of every session, it seems to be an essential characteristic that distinguishes it from other forms of therapy even more than, for example, his frequency or the intense use of the couch - even conditions that I consider important. What Freud (1900) had to say about the analysis of a single dream ("there was really never certain of having understood the way down a dream") applies to the analysis as a whole: as we push in depth,

17

you can go even deeper. In this sense, then, psychoanalysis is endless and can only be interrupted, you must consider
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"Interminable terminable within a psychoanalytic treatment" (Berenstein, 1987) . For psychoanalysis, therefore, we mean here not only what happens during the meetings between psychoanalyst and patient in the course of years, but the process established by these first regular meetings in the presence of each other, then in the mind of the analysand through the internalization of 'analyst and the analytic process. By definition, a bit brutal, a bulimic patient: "the analysis can go on ad nauseam . " Helen, an analytic patient of mine, is a cellist. He has thirty-two. It is desperate since he was four. At thirteen, his family was "a sinking ship," he says. "Sixteen is sunk." The diagnosis if it alone and it is a shocking precision: "I am a borderline case," he says, "and I'm on the wrong side of the limit." He has a fringe that covers his forehead and wearing a heavy black sweater and blue jeans. Helen brings to her neck hung a clock that looks like the onion Olympic time trial judges and makes the sound of an alarm from the kitchen. "I was behind," says everyone, time to cool, freeze, stop around her to allow it to reach the world around her and left her behind. "I feel like I live on the wrong train," he says on another occasion, "that I forgot the past and ignore future stations. Indeed, waiting under the canopy of an anonymous provincial station quickly that perhaps will never arrive. In the meantime, Helen reads a newspaper, buy a sandwich, drink a beer or coffee, without any hope or belief.Perhaps, he thinks, is already too late. In short, he would like the calendars of the universe would stop to allow it to recover the lost opportunities in the years of his illness. His inner world is at odds with the external boundaries are blurred. It is only through an act of magic that Helen powerful illusion of power if not stop the inexorable flow of life towards death, at least their sense of desperate isolation. The moment time stands petrified, is perhaps the mother with her to satisfy his desires for an eternity. Then the clock reflect the motion that seems to always be a race - and the good mother becomes absence, frustration of his needs, want to depend punishment. "Yet every time she manages to have some success," I say in one of those rare occasions when I yield to the need for a moment to reassure you or
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perhaps myself. "Even the broken clock," he replies bitter Helen, "twice per day indicating the correct time." The time psychoanalytic time being and becoming. It is the domain of motion unstoppable from the past memories of this experience, here and now and back, between progress and regression, the original territory of Timelessness of a ubiquitous autistic child without borders, where the desire and his gratification meets magic. analysis offers the possibility of both: the relative rigidity of the contract time, which marks the course, and the establishment of a space not unlike that of the unconscious, which in time can fluctuate with a similar freedom of movement; regardless, that is, from (chrono) logic that governs the outside world dominated by the reality principle, where desire and its satisfaction, unfortunately, never coincide. "We have to cut here, today," I say at the end of one session. "I have already finished two minutes," she says. Helen never responds to my "Hello" when I go to pick her up in the waiting room or to my "Goodbye" at the end of the sessions. For her, to respond to my greetings would be to recognize the existence of a time gap between one seat and the other and a gap between her and me, but, in fact, the existence of a genuine relationship between us. "I live in hell," he once said, "I come here, then she says it's time to stop, and then for me it's still hell." Between here and hell - between time and timelessness - there is no space between them for her. His analysis is, in his experience, a track with no gaps that can not tolerate interruptions in performance or composition, without coming to a premature end. Interruptions "real" therapy actually exist - the transitional space between the waiting room and the analysis, between the door and the bed and again the door - as the interval between feedings in the experience of the infant, subject a magical process of negation: all'atemporalit boundaries are not granted. The babies, but perhaps even adults in some circumstances such as for example the regressive state of falling, the world they live in a time mode "ubiquitous" in which distinctions between past, present and future (and between internal and external worlds) do not is still undefined. Beyond the immediate needs that must be gratified in a mode dominated by the omnipotent narcissistic pleasure principle and will not tolerate delays, there are to His Majesty the Baby memories to be recalled, or expectations to be met (Sabbadini, 1988) .
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A good enough mother, in harmony with the body and the mind of your child, keep him warm, to sing a lullaby, it will cover, and feed when hungry. The frustrations, however, are inevitable as

18

necessary. The children soon learn that when their needs are not met in the present, must settle for the memory of past rewards. The process by which the child learns to tolerate the absence of the object that satisfies, fantasizing presence, is the prototype of thought, creativity, and - what is important for us in this context - the first differentiation of time. the original will gradually be omnipresent, but not entirely, replaced by more sophisticated dimensions of past, present and future, with the establishment of the reality principle, dominate our everyday conscious life. Cinema and time have a deep, though not always easy. The historical reconstructions of past or future travel in science fiction films are common subjects. All the films tell stories that unfold over time even though they may take liberties with the use of technical means to mount as slowing down or speeding up the movement (which alter the length of time) and flashback or flash forward (which alter the succession ), and, unless it is conducted in "real" time, the film manipulates time by condensing the stories that take place in a period of days, months or years in a few weeks of shooting, then reduced to a final cut a hundred minutes of viewing. When you exit the room, it was therefore a little older (and, if the movie is good, a little wiser) than it had before entering. In short, the camera and projector are time machines. If the weather and the cinema are so closely intertwined, it is because they have an ambiguous relationship with the movement . The conventional perception "film" of time as a movement - as if the turn of the clock coincide in time rather than give a mere representation - is based on our confusing time with space (Bergson, 1889) .As for the film, the tension between each frame optical and presentation of dynamic sequences of frames in succession at the root of the illusion of cinematic movement. Despite these connections, it is unusual to come across films that clearly intend to explore the meaning of time. Yet, in 2002 fifteen directors from around the world are engaged in a project like this with as many short films
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ten minutes each. (1) Bernardo Bertolucci, whose contribution to this ambitious intellectual work is entitled "Histoire d'eaux", has previously brought to the screen the subject of time, especially in "The Spider's Stratagem" (1970), "Last Tango in Paris" (1972) and "Little Buddha" (1993). (2) In "Histoire d'eaux Bertolucci (who also wrote the story, derived from an Indian dish) leads us more directly through a magical journey, a brief yet eternal: an entire life full of events takes only the ' a matin d'espace , like a rose, to unfold. Perhaps in homage to the early days of film history, "Histoire d'eaux" is shot (by Fabio Cianchetti) in monochrome black and white and is nearly silent. Italian immigrant traffickers, who treat their cargo of cattle in the same way, shout a few words. A girl (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) curses his scooter that is hard to leave and then invites the young Indian (Amit Arroz) who repaired the vehicle to take her back home, where he offered him a bun, a drink, a shower and very more. The girl, now married, named for the first time her husband by name, Narada, saying that they broke the waters. An old Hindu (Tarun Bedi) sitting under a tree called Narada "brother", he asks for a sip of water and plays the flute. another girl, perhaps younger sister of the protagonist, grows over the ten minutes of the film from childhood to adolescence without saying a word, mysterious mirror, or alter ego , the wife of Narada, is an intriguing presence dependent sister or perhaps his potential rival. As we watch the young immigrant to pass through various stages of the course of life, the old Indian is still waiting for the water and hardly makes
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Under the heading includes Ten Minutes Older (Older than ten minutes), the entire collection, completed in 2002, is divided into two films: "The Trumpet" ("The Horn") (ki Kaurismaki, Victor Erice , Werner Herzog, Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders, Spike Lee, Chen Kaige), "The Cello" ("The Cello") (Bernardo Bertolucci, Mike Figgis, Jiri Menzel, Istvan Szabo, Claire Denis, Volker Schlndorff, Michael Radford, Jean- Luc Godard). (2) In "The Spider's Stratagem," Athos Magnani return to the country where thirty years before his father, considered an anti-fascist hero, was killed. the identification of Athos with his father, with whom he also shares his first name and a mistress, turns his career in an ominous trip back in time. In "Last Tango in Paris" the protagonist, Paul, is related to his young friend Jeanne as if his wife had died long ago, when in fact we discover that you have just committed suicide a day or two before. This creates confusion in the audience, destabilizing their sense of placement in time. Even "Little Buddha" has disturbing connotations time, because on one hand the film presents a continuity between the historical figure of the Buddha and his latest reincarnation, while the other puts us in front of a discontinuity between the material values of American society where you find the new blade and the fluidity that characterizes the Buddhist philosophy.
(1)

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account of the passage of time around him. In place of these two parallel stories - one that we are told, the other can only imagine - each following its own temporality, "Histoire d'eaux" reminds us of the fable of Sleeping Beauty , Princess, for which the Clocks stopped for a hundred years, for a spell while

19

lying asleep in his bunk, and outdoor life flowing normally. We could also do think the recent American obsession for hibernation, as an alternative to the final outcome of our bodies - earth, ashes and dust an organization called "Society for the extension of life promotes the offer (for about 120 thousand dollars) to freeze our bodies and keep them in special laboratories below zero. There will be revived, as a Frankenstein-powerful, when - in ten, fifty or two hundred years - there will be a cure for the disease which led to the death. The universal fantasy of immortality and dies hard can it be disinterred from our unconscious. Sci-fi nonsense, of course, and plenty of bad stories and even worse on this film are already on the road to prove it.
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I can say that "Histoire d'eaux" is so many light years away from ' idea of hibernation as it is also the French pornographic novel, best-selling novel of the Fifties, phonetically resonated from its title. Bertolucci's film concerns the internal rhythms of our existence. Moves around the conflict, more than the conflict between the time the heart beats and the clock, between the primary biological needs and emotions on the one hand, and the rituals and social conventions of the other, among a universe of inner music and noise of city streets, between the time the circular of the cultures of rural and Eastern philosophies, and the linear of our idea of progress often delirious, between the timeless nature of the olive trees and water buffalo that chew the cud in peace, and the ambitions of a culture of consumerism and waste.the latter is represented by a sharp break in the film: the happy family of Narada in his new car, suddenly standing on a bridge in front of a shapeless carcass of metal, looking resigned to the extreme precariousness of everything. A train passing in the background of a quiet forest scene perhaps the classic quote "Apu Trilogy" (3)of Satyajit Ray - is the beautiful final shot of the film. When she calls Narada to return to his bar, we hear a song on the radio in the background of Mina, "A Year of Love", that most of us Italians of my generation will recognize immediately. His words seem to be significant for the film, because they reflect the same contrast of temporality I was talking about, "and you'll see in a moment what it's like a year of love . " Like the man who sees, in the last seconds before drowning, before one's eyes to its existence, almost like a movie, the protagonist of the song by Mina try, enclosed in a single moment of insight , that in "real life "It took a year to happen. Having chosen to present the old (which we imagine to be wise if we do not have any feedback) thirsty, an official who gives that to drink and sat next to a buffalo dairy, Bertolucci provides viewers enough visual associations with the primordial state of an infant who wants to be fed. At the same time, Narada, forgetful of the promise to fulfill his mission "mother", is distracted by the concerns of everyday life that occur under the guise of an attractive woman whose language he does not include a moped breakdown of bids of various kinds: food, sex, a wedding, married life, fatherhood, work, a Fiat Panda car radio with the short existence.
------------(3)

"Pather Panchali" (1955), "The Unvanquished" (1956) and "The World of Apu" (1959).
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As long as the voice of the flute, primitive and powerful as a magnet, makes itself felt again. This time, Narada can no longer ignore the music. Or, perhaps, when you throw the foot of the old man who called him brother, she realizes that the two have merged together to become indistinguishable.

Bibliography
Berenstein I. (1987). Analysis terminable and interminable, fifty years on. Int J. Psycho-Anal. , 68, 21-35 [] Bergson HL (1889). Essay on the immediate data of consciousness. Turin, Basic Books, 1964 S. Freud (1900). The interpretation of dreams. OSF, 3 A. Sabbadini (1988). Time and Identity: Some psychoanalytic account. In Paola Reale (ed.), Time and Identity, Milan, Franco Angeli, 116-127 A. Sabbadini (1989). The Edge of Timelessness: the temporal dimension of the psychoanalytic space. Psychotherapy and Human Science , 23, 19-32
- 468 2007). Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 27:419-424

On the Merging of Temporalities in Bernardo Bertolucci's Histoire d'Eaux (2002)

Andrea Sabbadini
Cinema and time have complex structural connections, but only a few movies have focused specifically on them. A remarkable exception is a series of shorts by 15 major film directors, collected under the

20

title Ten Minutes Older (2002). I shall refer here to one of such films, Bernardo Bertolucci's Histoire d'Eaux. Narada, an Indian immigrant, has a chance encounter with an Italian woman, and we watch their lives unfold over the years. But at the end of the film, Narada goes back to the old man who has been waiting for a drink of water since the time preceding Narada's first meeting with the woman, as if only a few hours had gone by, instead of a lifetime. This narrative, taken from an ancient Eastern parable, offers the opportunity to comment on the merging of different temporalities in human experience, with specific reference to psychoanalytic interpretations of our relationship to time. In This Article, I Will Refer to Bernardo Bertolucci's Short Histoire d'Eaux as a brilliant representation of contrasting and merging
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temporalities, in the context of the complex structural connections of cinema and time, as well as of psychoanalytic interpretations of the temporal dimension of human experiences. Cinema and time enjoy an intimate, if not always comfortable, relationship. Period reconstructions from the historical past or journeys into a science-fictional future are staple subjects for moviemakers. All films tell stories that unfold in time, although they can also take liberties with it through the use of such technical editorial devices as slow or fast motion (which alter time duration) and flashbacks or flashforwards (which alter time succession); and, unless they take place in real time, films manipulate it by concentrating narratives unfolding over a period of days, months, or years into a few weeks of shooting, later distilled into a final cut of some 100 minutes of viewing. When you come out of the theatre, then, you are a little older (and, if the film is good, also a little wiser) than you were when you entered it. In brief, movie cameras and projectors are time machines. If time and cinema are so tightly intertwined, it is because they share an ambiguous relationship to movement. Our conventional cinematographic perception of time as movingas if the turning of a clock's hands coincided with it, rather than just representing it for our convenienceis based on our confusion of time with space (Bergson, 1889/1960). As to movies, it is the optical tension between each single still frame and the presentation of sequences of them in dynamic succession that is at the roots of the cinematic illusion of movement. Despite such connections, however, it is unusual to come across films explicitly intended to explore the meaning of time. Yet, in 2002, 15 filmmakers from all over the world engaged in such a project through as many 10-minute-long original shorts.1 Bernardo Bertolucci's contribution to this intellectually ambitious work is entitled Histoire d'Eaux. Bertolucci had played with temporal themes in several of his films, most notably in The Spider's Stratagem (1970), Last Tango in Paris (1972), and Little Buddha(1993). In The Spider's Stratagem, Athos Magnani goes back to the small town where, 30 years earlier, his father, allegedly an antifascist hero, was killed. Athos'sidentification with his father, with whom he also shares his first name and a lover, turns this into an uncanny journey

Under the general title Ten Minutes Older, the whole collection is divided in two films: The Trumpet (Aki Kaurismki, Victor rice, Werner Herzog, Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders, Spike Lee, Chen Kaige), and The Cello (Bernardo Bertolucci, Mike Figgis, Jir Menzel, Istvn Szabo, Claire Denis, Volker Schlndorff, Michael Radford, Jean-Luc Godard).
1

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back in time. In Last Tango in Paris, the protagonist, Paul, relates to his young girlfriend Jeanne as if his wife had died a long time before; in fact, we discover that she had just committed suicide one or two days earlier. This creates confusion in the viewers, destabilizing their sense of location in time. Little Buddha has, again, disturbing temporal connotations, for on the one hand the film presents a continuity between the historical figure of the Buddha and his latest reincarnation; on theother hand, it faces us with a discontinuity between the material values of the American society, where the new lama is being found, and the impermanence that characterizes Buddhist philosophy.

21

In 1964, Bertolucci had Gina, the protagonist of his Before the Revolution, tell her friends that very same story, derived from an Indian parable, which, 40 years later, he would film as Histoire d'Eaux. It is almost as if he had to wait a long time before keeping the implicit promise he had made in that early work of eventually giving us a visual representation to that beautifully simple tale. What is intriguing is that the long-postponed fulfilment of a wish is, indeed, what the story itself is about. Perhaps as an homage to earlier days of cinema history, Histoire d'Eaux is shot (by Fabio Cianchetti) in monochrome black-and-white, and is mostly silent. The soundtrack consists simply of a few angry words shouted by Italian immigrant traffickers, who treat their wares as if they were cattle; by an old Hindu (Tarun Bedi) sitting under a tree addressing young Narada (Amit Arroz) as brother, asking him for some water, and playing the flute; by a girl (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) cursing her moped that fails to get back on the road, and then inviting Narada (who has fixed it) back home, where she offers him a piece of cake, a drink, and much more; and a song can be heard from a radio in the background. The girl, now a bride, calls out for the first time her husband's name to tell him that her waters have broken. In the course of the 10 minutes of the film, another girl, perhaps the protagonist's younger sister, grows from childhood to adolescence without uttering a word. While we watch the young immigrant going through many stages of the life cycle, the old man is still waiting for his water and hardly notices that time has moved on all around him. In the parallel unfolding of these two storiesthe one that we are told and the other that we can only imagine each following its own temporality,Histoire d'Eaux reminds us of the fairy-tale of Sleeping Beauty, the Princess for whom clocks stop for a 100 years as she lies asleep under a spell inside her castle, while life goes on as normal outside of it. It can also make us think of the latest chilling obsession
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with cryonics. As an alternative to the final destination of our bodies earth, ashes, and dustan organization that calls itself The Life Extension Society promotes the offer (for about $120k) to get your corpse frozen and kept in special refrigerated laboratories. There it will be reanimated, Frankenstein-like, when a treatment becomes available for the condition that had caused its death in the first place. The universal and die-hard fantasy of immortality can, thus, be unburied from ourunconscious. Histoire d'Eaux is as many light-years away from cryonics as it is from the best-selling French pornographic novel from the 1950s phonetically echoed by its title. Instead, Bertolucci's film takes us through a magical journey, both brief and eternal, and makes us reflect on the suggestion that a whole life full of events may only take, like a rose, l'space d'un matin to unfold. Histoire d'Eaux is about the internal rhythms of our existence. It is about the contrast, more than the conflict, between the time of heartbeats and that of the wristwatch; between primary biological and emotional needs on the one hand, and social rituals and conventions on the other; between a universe of inner music and the stultifyingly repetitive sounds of videogames; between the circular time of rural cultures and Eastern philosophies, and the linear one of our self-deluded idea of progress; between the nature of ageless olive trees and peacefully ruminating water-buffalos, and the ambitions of a culture of consumerism and waste. This last one is represented through an abrupt cut in the film: Narada's happy family in their brand new car are, all of a sudden, standing on a bridge in front of a shapeless piece of metal junk, looking resigned to the ultimate impermanence of everything. A train passing by in the background of a tranquil woodland scenea quotation perhaps from Satyajit Ray's classic Apu Trilogy 2is the beautiful last shot of the film. The coexistence in our everyday lives of the two different temporalities that Histoire d'Eaux puts into relief reflects two different systems of logic: the primary process operating in our unconscious and the secondary process characterizing conscious and preconscious functioning. This is what allows us to move in and out of different states of consciousness, in and out of fantasy and rational thinking, of dream and waking life, without feeling too disturbed (unless one is psychotic) by these oscillations. It is also a necessary, although not sufficient, condition for the expression of creativity as all artists getting lost in their work well know. A specific instance of this contrast of temporalities can be encountered in the psychoanalytic consulting

Pather Panchali (1955), The Unvanquished (1956), and The World of Apu (1959).
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22

room. The time boundaries provided by the structure of analytic intercourse, with set days for sessions and the rigorous adherence to the conventional 50-minute hour, is what allows for a different temporality, the timelessness dominating our unconscious world, to emerge and be explored (Sabbadini, 1989a). Infants, and sometimes also adults in the regressed state of being in love, experience the world in an omnipresent temporal modality, where distinctions between past, present, and future (and between internal and external worlds) are not yet established. Beyond the immediate needs to be gratified, in a narcissistically omnipotent way dominated by the pleasure principle and without delay, there are for His Majesty the Baby no memories to be recalled, nor expectations to be fulfilled (Sabbadini, 1989b). A good enough mother, attuned to her child's body and mind, will keep him warm, sing him a lullaby, hug him, and feed him when he is hungry. Frustrations, however, are as inevitable as they are necessary. Babies soon learn that they must content themselves, when their needs are not met in the present, with the memories of past experiences of gratification. This process of learning to tolerate the absence of the satisfying object by fantasizing its presence is the prototype of thinking, ofcreativity, andwhat is important to us in this contextof a first differentiation of time. The original omnipresent will be gradually, although never entirely, replaced by the more sophisticated past, present, and future dimensions which, with the instauration of the reality principle, will come to dominate our conscious everyday lives. To return now to Histoire d'Eaux, when the girl invites Narada back to her bar, we hear, from a radio, a song that most Italians of my generation will recognize asUn anno d'amore, sung by Mina, the iconic voice of the 1960s. Its lyrics seem to be relevant to the film, for they reflect that same contrast of temporalities I was talking about: e capirai in un solo momento cosa vuol dire un anno d'amore [ and in a single moment you'll understand the meaning of a whole year of loving]. Like the man who can watch, in the last moment before he drowns, his own existence replayed in front of his eyes, almost as if it were a film, the protagonist of Mina's diegetic song will experience, encapsulated in a single insightful moment, what in real life has taken a whole year to develop. Bertolucci has chosen to present the old man, whom we also imagine to be wise although we have no evidence for it, as thirsty, dependent on someone else to provide him with a drink, and sitting near a milk-producing buf-falothus giving the viewers sufficient visual associations to the prototypical state of an infant in need of the breast. At the same time,
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Narada, oblivious of his promise to fulfill his maternal mission, lets himself be distracted by everyday life preoccupations, in the form of an attractive woman whoselanguage he does not understand, her broken-down motorcycle, the offers of a shower and sex and a wedding party and married life and fatherhood and work and a short-lived Fiat Panda and so on until the voice of the flute, primitive and powerful like a magnet, makes itself heard again. This time, Narada will no longer be able to ignore its music. Or, perhaps, as he throws himself at the feet of the old man who had called him brother, he realizes that the two of them have merged together to become indistinguishable.

Notes
A version of this article was published in Italian under the title Fusione di temporalit diverse in Rivista di Psicoanalisi, L(2):461-468, 2004.

References
Bergson, H. L. (1960), Essai sur le donnes immediates de la conscience [Time and free will: An essay on the immediate data of consciousness] (F. L. Pogson, Trans.). New York: Harper and Brothers. (Original work published 1889) Sabbadini, A. (1989a), Boundaries of timelessness. Some thoughts about the temporal dimension of the psychoanalytic space. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 70: 305-313. [] Sabbadini, A. (1989b), How the infant develops a sense of time. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 5: 475-484.
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