An Example of Dehumanization as a Shield Against Our Helpless Openness to the Other

How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.

Not long ago Arunachalam Kumar (2011), head of the Department of Anatomy at Kasturba Medical College in Mangalore, ¹ published a short account of a moment of being “down and depressed.” The incident that prompted his low mood occurred as part of his work as professor of anatomy during the annual university examinations for first-year medical students. He begins by placing us in context. Twenty-six young people appear for each day’s exercise, which involves histology spot identification stations, discussions on dissected specimens, and surface anatomy. The day can be long and tiresome, he writes: “standing for no less than five hours, examining student after student, without showing frustration at stupid gaffes, anger at gross errors or impatience with juvenile behaviour. Plus the tension of hosting two senior visiting examiners from other universities, who can at times be very demanding. . . . But these were not the things that upset my composure. . . . What suddenly unnerved me was that, during the surface anatomy exercise, one of four cadavers on the cold steel dissection table was that of a young female.”

Kumar explains that the preparation of cadavers for use in medical colleges is strict: “The Anatomy Act ² requires that all individual identifiers be erased. . . . each is stripped bare, shaved clean, eyebrows are removed and scalp hair is tonsured. Rings, bangles, anything that might give a clue as to who he or she was are eliminated. The cadavers become just odd-looking objects, ceasing at times to even look human. This systematic eradication of human identity makes the young medic feel less emotional when dissecting and gives the dissected dead a little more dignity.” Kumar’s description of the treatment of bodies reveals two implicit interlocking aims: anonymization and depersonalization. Both converge to dehumanize, to weaken the sense that one is working with the remains of a fellow human being, one who would have had feelings and thoughts similar to our own and who could have sat up and talked to us. The desired effect is a self-conscious fiction and is achieved only in part: there is no explicit wish to deny the former humanity of these remains, only the wish to “pretend” that it is so in order to achieve pedagogical goals.

It is customary during the annual examinations for the professor to assign the task to students of finding a certain artery in the foot. In this instance, after a five-minute wait (the time usually given for surface marking), Kumar walked over to have a look at the foot of the cadaver the candidate had marked. The “tiny, neat foot” showed the linear chalk mark the candidate had drawn. It was at this moment that the professor saw something that “jolted” him: the dead woman’s toenails, all five of them painted red. “Meticulously varnished, each nail was a resplendent scarlet. I could make out it was quite recent, for the colour still gleamed.” This observation was “terribly disconcerting.” In a trice, the anonymous cadaver was transformed into the body of a coquettish young woman, setting off a profusion of painful queries in the teacher’s mind:

How could this youngster, who had painted her toenails with such care and precision in her hospital bed, be dead and dispensed with so rapidly?

How could she be unclaimed and homeless . . . ? . . . How could one who valued how she looked and presented herself, even when on a sick bed, be so suddenly unwanted? Had she no kith, kin or claimant? How had she come to be discarded like a destitute person, a burden, a loadstone?

. . . . How can a family vanish, deserting a sick girl at death’s door? Was she that lost to society that she deserved to be abandoned; an unclaimed and unwanted nobody in an eerily forbiddingly sterile dissection hall?

The signifier of the red nails—rehumanizing the “odd-looking object”—in its message of sexuality and flirtation, of youthful optimism and adult neglect, had unleashed a burst of unexpected and unwelcome signification, with all its emotional charge. The educational task had become “contaminated,” as had the observer himself. Kumar’s article ends on a note of self-loathing in which he looks forward to “the day I retire from this sickening anatomist’s job I do to earn my keep.” We cannot know why the professor experienced this transference onto the dead young woman or why it drove him to denigrate his function as teacher and physician. There is no doubt, however, as to the traumatic effect of his spontaneous “interpretations.” For some reason, Kumar has used the word “loadstone” as though it means “a stone that is a load,” thus a “weight.” However, a “lodestone” (misspelled “loadstone” so often that dictionaries, being descriptive, now enter it as a variant) is a naturally magnetized piece of the mineral magnetite. Ancient peoples first discovered the property of magnetism in this mineral. Pieces of lodestone, suspended so they could turn, were the first magnetic compasses, and their importance to early navigation is indicated by the name lodestone, which in Middle English means “course stone” or “leading stone.” Used figuratively, “lodestone” means “something that attracts.” There is thus unconscious truth in the word’s misuse: it was the red nail polish that “magnetized” the professor. It also “re-coursed” his relationship to the cadaver and to his task; it reoriented/disoriented him in a drastic change in identificatory “direction.”

Probably every human society and even some proto-human groups have practiced ritual taboos concerning the dead. The evolutionary theorist might argue that these taboos protect the living from a real danger of accidental contamination from them (the foul odors of decay, further spread of disease, the attraction of vermin and predators, etc.). However, there are certainly other, non-self-preservative factors at work beyond the obvious conscious issues of attachment or religious conviction. Freud (1912–1913) analyzed the dark projective side of these taboos: “We have already learned that certain taboos arise out of fear of temptation. The fact that a dead man is helpless is bound to act as an encouragement to the survivor to give free rein to his hostile passions, and that temptation must be countered by a prohibition” (p. 61).

Freud was addressing fear of the dead among survivors who are close relatives or otherwise emotionally bonded people for whom the dead individual was a “cherished being” (p. 60). “The taboo upon the dead arises . . . from the contrast between conscious pain and unconscious satisfaction over the death that has occurred” (p. 61). What arrested my attention in reading Kumar’s anguished account was the traumatic impact of viewing the corpse of a complete stranger on a seasoned professional when the normal defense of depersonalization of the body had collapsed. It was not unconscious hostility to this person that was breaking through, but her inert feminine human form—startlingly rehumanized and repersonalized when the red nails were noticed—that had the capacity to evoke representations of hostility, sexuality, and related guilt.

In his review of the anthropological literature, Freud (1912–1913) noticed “the way in which the degree of prohibition varies according to the taboo power of the person upon whom the taboo is imposed” (p. 52). Thus, the isolation period required of anyone who touches a dead chief is longer than that expected of someone who has touched the remains of a lesser mortal. At one level, we could say that covering the body, or any other anonymizing ritual, greatly lowers the “force” of the taboo of touching the dead. The traditional death shroud or the contemporary body bag made of drab, solid-colored material encloses and conceals the corpse. ³ The deceased person’s eyes, face, sex, and clothing are all removed from view. In fact, this temporary and partial screening of the “human” signals coming from the body also enables, as we well know, surgeons to not only touch the living but to transgress the sanctity and integrity of their bodies. Hence the injunction to physicians against operating on a close relative or friend. A senior surgical resident told me recently that he had been on call when a friend came to the emergency room with a case of appendicitis. In the operating theater he noticed that he was working “too carefully,” that his technique was being waylaid by too much care. Even dissimulated under hospital operating room drapery, a familiar body can still trouble the surgeon’s mind and hands by “calling out” with intimate “messages.”

Perhaps the practice of covering human remains as soon as possible calls for explanation beyond the Freudian motive of survivor ambivalence, since this practice does not lessen the demonic character attributed in so many cultures to the dead spirit. Yet it does lessen our exposure to their human form. Beyond any familiarity with the deceased, we all know that the human form of itself creates an emotional tie. And its very prostration before us can have a highly stimulating impact. Is not the shroud, like the strict protocol of the preparation of the medical school cadaver, an attempt to stop the body from reminding us of its humanness and thus preventing it from “speaking” to us? There is no doubt that we remain at an unconscious level helplessly passive with respect to the excitation that even the lifeless human form—be it stranger or friend—can stimulate.

The human form of the dead can place them at risk in our presence. Their vulnerability and their passivity are absolute. We could do anything to them: cut their heads off and stick them on a stake, scalp them, undress them, sodomize them, parade them in front of Troy’s walls, let them rot in a public square. The asymmetry of our relationship with the dead is unnerving, more extreme even than that existing between adult and child. As Freud noted, they have no access to movement or aggression; they are completely without resistance. Who will defend them against us? Could the taboo of touching and looking at the dead be not only a projection of unconscious hostility toward a particular dead person but also an unconscious perception on our part of the potential danger that arises for them in our troubled reactions to any inert human form? The shroud, the veil, in blocking out the individuality of the corpse, in occluding most of its humanity, might act as a brake against this potential in us, might have the effect of “calming” the unconscious agitation of the survivor in front of the helplessness of these prostrate ⁴ bodies? Burial, cremation, dragging the cadaver to the top of a hill for the vultures, abandoning it in the deepest forest at night for the insects and the jackals: so many methods serving various purposes, hygienic and otherwise. In light of these reflections, might these rituals not be seen as also distancing the defenseless dead from our reach and our control, even as we expose them to “danger” elsewhere?

In thinking this way, I am expressing the influence of Jean Laplanche’s theory (1990) of the foundational priority of the other in the human psyche. The infant is in a position of helpless “openness” to the “enigmatic messages” of the unconscious sexuality mobilized in the adult by the caretaking function. The adult has no control, indeed no inkling, of this unconscious transmission. Our unconscious passivity with respect to the “messages” coming from others is lifelong. Though the deceased are henceforth “absent,” their enigmatic messages, says Laplanche, may only become louder. Thus, bodies big and little (especially prostrate and naked ones, but not exclusively) can evoke powerful urges that unconsciously direct our behavior toward them.

The helplessness and radical dependency of the human infant as foundational conditions in the future development of the psyche have received fairly careful attention in the psychoanalytic literature. The complementary exposure of the adult to this helplessness has perhaps received less explicit treatment. Yet the impact of the helpless infant body on the adult can be disquieting. The unconscious masochistic identification of the adult with the infant’s openness can certainly be triggered. But additionally this same vulnerable tangle of skin and limbs can be a powerful incitation to startling and disturbing sadistic impulses. ⁵ Just as the lover falls under the “spell” of an attraction he neither commands nor understands, so can the living be unconsciously moved, deeply and ambivalently, by aspects of the prostrate human form.

Logically speaking, of course, a cadaver is not “helpless” and is thus incapable of “vulnerability.” From the perspective of the outsider, there would seem to be confusion between concrete and metaphorical, between subject and object. Unconsciously speaking, however, we are on a completely different plane: a cadaver, though objectively dead, is never “inanimate,” infused as it is by conscious and unconscious fantasy on the part of survivors. ⁶ Neither our horror at our own anticipated disintegration nor our compassion makes sense without acknowledging our helpless response to the enigmatic messages, our identifications and guilt. More primary than original sin is this helpless openness to the suffering of others, and to death as its ultimate testimony. We will have occasion to meditate further upon this helpless openness, but first we might ask: What is it that is opened on these occasions? As Laplanche and Ferenczi often repeated, it is the polymorphous, continuously present child-within-the-adult who is stirred up in exposure to the physical child/body without. The confusion of tongues (Ferenczi 1949) is that the child believes himself to be addressing an adult, while the response he receives, the one that is confusing, is from the libidinally fixated child-within-the-adult, the “intrinsically perverse” adult (Laplanche 1999, p. 212) because his messages are “compromised” by his own unconscious.

The taboo against touching the dead works both ways: protecting us from them and them from us. It can hold in check the impulse to desecrate the body, to penetrate its mysteries, to defy our phobia of death. As extreme avatar of the baby’s passivity and vulnerability, the human cadaver has, for the survivor, a similar capacity for drawing forth eruptive unconscious infantile sexuality in its polymorphous, fragmenting, part-object-driven multiplicity.

In “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” Thomas Gray ⁷ evokes the double function of the gravestone that both hides the cadaver—“from insult to protect”—and marks its place:

Yet ev’n these bones from insult to protect

Some frail memorial still erected nigh,

With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked,

Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

While the reflection we have undertaken so far in the wake of Kumar’s story has led us to some consciously and unconsciously aggressive, even sadistic responses to human remains, in general what is at least equally salient are the identifications/translations occurring in the passive tense, as a torment to the living. This realization calls to mind Freud’s assertion that masochism is primary in human development and sadism secondary. Laplanche would add passivity first, activity second. But why? It is pertinent to recall in this regard that in his dense analysis of identification in The Ego and the Id, Freud (1923) discusses the enrichment of the ego by the “transformation of [sexual] object-libido into narcissistic libido” (p. 30), a “Ptolemaic” model (Laplanche 1999 ⁸ ) of a self-appropriating alteration of the ego in which the ego recenters itself. But suddenly Freud speaks of the “origin of the ego ideal,” for behind it he claims “lies hidden” a qualitatively different identification, an “individual’s first and most important identification” (1923, p. 31). Thus Freud introduces the idea of a primary identification: “This is apparently not in the first instance the consequence or outcome of an object-cathexis; it is a direct and immediate identification and takes place earlier than any object-cathexis.” To begin with, Freud avers that this first and most important identification is “with the [individual’s] father in his own personal prehistory” (p. 31). In a footnote, however, he remarks that reference to the “father” is a simplification: “Perhaps it would be safer to say ‘with the parents’; for before a child has arrived at definite knowledge of the difference between the sexes, the lack of a penis, it does not distinguish in value between its father and its mother.”

A time before any object-cathexis would have to be very early indeed. It is a supposition practically indefensible given the child analytic work and observation accomplished since Freud penned these words; we know now how early the infant is “oriented” toward, and invested in, the other. But what we need to retain is Freud’s impression of a foundational identification in “earliest childhood,” a time before appreciation of sexual differences, before separation of self and other, and before the acquisition of language that would permit a self-historicization.

By claiming that it is not in the first instance the consequence or outcome of an object-cathexis, this first identification and first narcissistic ideal might be taken to imply a “Copernican” movement, going first from outside in, that is, an anticipatory jump on the part of a not-yet-there ego, a jump that creates an incipient subject in primary identification with the adult caretaker, before the baby has the cognitive capacity and experience to make distinctions between self and other, part and whole. “Copernican” is Laplanche’s shorthand for a movement in which the subject or ego is penetrated by the other, where the ego is not in control. The infant’s aspiration toward and attraction by the other in Freud’s primary identification would appear to be both gravitational pull and inhalation. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud (1921) had written that “identification is known to psycho-analysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person” (p. 105). Could this “emotional tie with another person” before any distinction in “value” be understood as a tie to the human form, and through it to the human community? Primary identification would thus be the earliest of all connections in an open-ended, undifferentiated, absorption of humanness.

This last idea is Nathalie Zaltzman’s brilliant apprehension (1998), that is, to see primary identification as a primary and primal unconscious feeling of “belonging to the human species.” It is a question of a “cultural given that precedes the individual,” an “initial narcissistic capital unconsciously received by each, even before birth, the assurance that a “pact exists between him and the rest of humanity” certifying a “minimum of existence for [all] others.” I will quote Zaltzman (1995) at some length, as her work is not yet available in English, so that we may follow her reading of Freud and her new perspective on his phylogenetic speculations:

Starting retroactively from the figure of Moses [Freud 1939], all the Freudian works consecrated to the phylogenetic dimension of the unconscious designate the existence of a pact that binds the narcissistic integrity of each person to the impersonal narcissistic evolution of the ensemble. In bringing forth a new paternal figure compared to the procreative father of the horde, and beyond the latter’s murder, Moses inaugurates a new alliance among men. More precisely, I would say that this final work, issue of all the ones preceding it, reveals a new relationship possible for man through the constitution of a shared reference, accomplished by the human ensemble. . . . From Moses on, all the anthropological works of Freud come to show how each individual destiny is dependent in its own libidinal stakes on those of the group to which it belongs. And these works show how the place assigned to the individual as an organic element of the ensemble renders his destiny inseparable from the collective destiny. Part of Freud’s oeuvre defines the subject as a single entity, individual and self-sufficient. The other part situates this singular identity as radically tributary to a general and common reality existing before each individual: “The individual does actually carry on a twofold existence: one to serve his own purposes and the other as a link in a chain, which he serves against his will, or at least involuntarily” [p. 99; quotation from Freud 1914, p. 77; all translations of Zaltzman mine].

Understanding primary identification as identification with the human species, radiated as it were into the individual from the surrounding human community, had a deep impact on Zaltzman’s reaction to the concentration camp literature. Three years later, in 1998, she was again reading this unconscious primordial identification as an emergent-from-the-ensemble inheritance—now, however, not from the beginning of life but retroactively, when that life is threatened by the depths of human malignancy witnessed in the Nazi and Soviet concentration camps. She wonders what becomes of the ego in a reality supported by a totalitarian mass culture that openly pursues the goal of destroying the spirit, the body, and the human bond. How can the individual, absent exterior or interior flight, maintain the narcissistic integrity and mental cohesion necessary to stay alive when animals in similar circumstances die? She concludes that the concentration camp literature

testifies to the existence of an unconscious reference to an indestructible inclusion of the individual in the future of humanity. . . . something in man resists, [he] does not lose his head, does not disconnect from his inscription in human reality. . . . this literature confirms the timelessness and impermeability of his inscription in the face of all that contradicts it, and thus reveals its irreducible organizing presence and function: man does not cease to be man, whatever happens to him, and does not cease to exist with respect to the whole human community. . . . Oblivious to contradiction and to time: the key characteristics of the unconscious thing [Zaltzman 1998, pp. 20–21].

The truth of the matter is that this “unconscious reference” is not indestructible. The conviction of belonging to the human race, of being meaningful to it, is a fragile cultural acquisition that can indeed be lost or at least deeply, perhaps irretrievably, damaged. Always and everywhere, the individual has unconsciously entered into a “narcissistic contract” (Aulagnier 1975, pp. 109–113) defining him as “human” according to the precepts of a particular tribe or ethnic group or nation. I do not know how often in the history of our species the temporary and/or partial notion of a common “humanity” has existed that would encompass human beings in all their infinite variety. It would seem that the concept of a “human race”—without distinctions of appearance or behavior—as a widely shared view is a recent historical acquisition. Evidence both historical and contemporary abounds to demonstrate that the mantle of “humanity” has been (and often continues to be) reserved for one’s extended family, tribe, ethnic group, or nation. As Freud pointed out, the killing of an enemy, considered to be nonhuman, was not and is not necessarily a source of internal conflict. A single striking example will drive home this point. An ethnographer working with indigenous peoples who until the early 1960s practiced two distinct forms of cannibalism writes that they “see approximately as much similarity between funerary cannibalism and warfare cannibalism as we see between burying our dead and burying our garbage” (Conklin 2007, p. 1257).

Gerson (2009) believes that for “survivors of genocide, the ‘Dead Mother’ concept can usefully be extended to include survivors’ experiences of the world at large as unresponsive to their suffering and unconcerned about their fate” (p. 1347; see also Laub and Auerhahn 1989). Gerson’s notion of “mankind as ‘dead mother’” (p. 1347), as well as his emphasis on the “active witnessing presence of an other” for the “most basic necessity [of] psychic aliveness in the aftermath of atrocity” (p. 1353), points to our dependency on others for the maintenance of a primary identification as human. There is here a paradox of which Zaltzman was well aware. A few pages after the last long quotation, she writes: “Primary narcissism is not a self-referred or a self-referential register of identification” (1998, p. 29). The belief of belonging to the human species has first to come to us from the other, and we continue to need the other to confirm it. In the face of crushing denial, when so many voices conspire to deny our inscription in the human race, is not the individual—in order to survive—rather like the paranoiac who needs at least one approving voice as kindling for this fragile inner flame? (see Aulagnier 1975, pp. 177–219). And even that does not seem to have been enough for certain survivors. Perhaps because of this fragility of the individual under terrible duress, Zaltzman is convinced that a narcissistic injury of this nature “to each of us in the relationships we can or can no longer maintain with others cannot be healed individually” (p. 28; emphasis added). What has been taken away by the collectivity must in some way be restored by the collectivity.

In a talk given in 1988, Saul Bellow spoke of a strange reaction he had noticed, in himself and others, to viewing post–World War II newsreels of the Nazi concentration camps. One woman had remarked, “I don’t think the Jews can ever get over the disgrace of this.” Bellow writes of his own response to these newsreels:

In one of them, American bulldozers pushed naked corpses toward a mass grave ditch. Limbs fell away and heads dropped from disintegrating bodies. My reaction to this was similar to that of Mrs. Abel—a deeply troubling sense of disgrace or human demotion, as if by such afflictions the Jews had lost the respect of the rest of humankind, as if they might now be regarded as hopeless victims, incapable of honorable self-defense, and, arising from this, probably the common instinctive revulsion or loathing of the extremities of suffering—a sense of personal contamination and aversion. The world would see these dead with a pity that placed them at the margin of humanity [emphasis added].

Thus can death itself become a disgrace in the eyes of the living. The pathetic helplessness of these victims embarrasses and discomforts. The disgrace of the camp dead is an extreme version of a much more general and common reaction of the feeling of personal contamination that springs from our identification, unwanted perhaps but implacable. ⁹ What is perhaps most shocking and humiliating about the bulldozer shoving bodies one upon another is the mechanical treatment of these bodies as if they were mere things, inanimate waste matter. The bulldozer at the same time exemplifies the deeply paradoxical need to distance ourselves, to avoid directly “touching” these afflicted remains and their capacity to afflict us with their suffering. We have already seen that such reactions confirm that the human body is never, for living observers, completely “dead.” To treat a human body as a thoroughly inanimate object is in fact viewed as a sign of the deepest pathology and lack of “respect.” We must shroud the body from its continuing “aliveness” in our minds. We must “shield” ourselves from its “aliveness” in order to dispose of it rationally, not mourning it so much as protecting ourselves from its enigmatic pull, its capacity to continue to “communicate” and “relate” to us.

After the earthquake and tsunami in Japan two years ago, the front pages of our newspapers were filled with pictures of rescue workers, white-helmeted, white-masked, and white-gloved, bowing in short prayer over shrouded figures recovered from the wreckage. The North American press was impressed by the “respect” shown their dead by the Japanese, which we can now additionally appreciate as a cultural protocol limiting the unconscious, uncontrollable, and intensely intimate “relationship” that even the body of a complete stranger can evoke.

For Laplanche, it is the unconscious “motion” of the effort of translation of implanted enigmatic messages, obscurely intuited as directed to the subject, that gives rise to an unconscious drive. This motion is both “effect” and “affect” and explains why, in the actual seduction / seduction fantasy controversy, he accords priority to the former. He argues for upholding the reality of seduction, because in what he calls the universal anthropological situation human sexuality, sexuality mediated by fantasy, is not innate but—in the form of implanted unconscious messages—first comes to us from the other. He views the unconscious as the untranslatable, undigestible, trace of the other’s unconscious sexu-ality. It is to Freud that we owe the idea that the excitation linked to drive is necessarily experienced in a masochistic way, as the painful assault of an internal foreign body, in relation to which the ego is passive and permanently in danger of being invaded. In Laplanche’s addendum (1999), before being experienced with respect to the internal danger, this primary unconscious masochism is first related to the stimulations of an external other:

the self-preservative function serves to call in the intervention of the other, which, moreover, though it is generally attracted by the physiological sites of exchange (especially the mouth, anus and urogenital membranes), is far from limiting itself to these, and can cause ‘shocks’ in any part of the organism, in particular on any part of the bodily surface, to set up all kinds of currents of exchange. . . . For the necessarily traumatic intervention of the other must entail—most often in a minor way but sometimes in a major one—the effraction or breaking in characteristic of pain. That the ‘drive’ is to the ego what pain is to the body, that the source-object of the drive is ‘stuck’ in the envelope of the ego like a splinter in the skin—this is the model which one should constantly keep in mind [p. 209].

Thus for Laplanche the different forms of “masochist perversion” are “merely an exacerbation and a fixation of a major dimension of human sexuality, ab origine” (p. 210). “For it is the breaking in of an ‘excess of message’, emanating from the other, which functions like pain, originating first from the outside, then coming from that internal other which is repressed fantasy” (p. 211). The premise of primary masochism in the human infant and adult helps situate the aspect of the survivor’s “helpless openness” (to the helpless openness of the corpse and baby) mentioned earlier. In addition to the spectrum of sadistic responses, usually considered socially unacceptable, one cannot neglect the constraining sense of “responsibility” that is ferried along in reactions to the prostrate human form. Understanding primary identification as a species-specific human trait means examining the implications of its persecutory passivity. Autobiographical accounts of medical training (e.g., Groopman 2012) are replete with the anguish inflicted on healers when helpless in the face of others’ suffering. Is not the suffering of another experienced as a persecution, something one might have to defend oneself from by developing a thick skin? And is not this “persecution” an avatar of the “accusative” ¹⁰ grammatical case of our earliest relationships so trenchantly described by Laplanche? The word empathy means “feeling into,” the “power of projecting one’s personality into, and so fully understanding the object of contemplation.” Hence, empathy could be seen as the ego “righting itself” in a Ptolemaic illusion of self-control after an original “injection” of human identification from the other and its ineluctable effect or “shock” of “accusation” or “solicitation.”

Pertinent in this regard is a body of research (see, e.g., de Haan et al. 2002; Pascalis et al. 1995) ¹¹ documenting the infant’s fascination with, perhaps fundamental “biological need” for, responsive interplay with a human face and body, and, in the older baby, for the unifying eureka of an encounter with the mirror image brought to our attention in different ways by Lacan and Winnicott. One can see this daily in any public park: the spontaneous attraction of the infant for the human face, and of very young children for each other, regardless of skin color or clothing style. That this relationship can be imbued with ambivalence does not alter the clearly powerful magnetism of an other of similar human form, the ultimate load/lodestone. This fundamental identification expresses a deep biological, psychological, and social need for the human other as a confirmation, a reflection, and an embodiment of self. As Zaltzman (1998) puts it, “The narcissism of the individual, his ego ideal’s view of the ego, his reasons for living, his possibility of self-love repose upon his connection to the human ensemble” (p. 66). Yet for some time before this pull toward the other, at least one adult was already present, someone who sought confirmation from the infant—someone who conveyed in words and in gestures a nonenigmatic and very personal message: “Speak to / look at me: I know you are there!” In and alongside the flood of enigmatic messages the adult inevitably transmits, he or she also unconsciously requests confirmation from the infant or child. The adult’s request for “recognition” always precedes, at least at first, that of the child. In looking to the other for confirmation, the infant/child is just handing forward the same earnest request that if it could be thought about, if it could be formulated (which of course it cannot be), would sound something like: “I need you to respond to me so that I may know you and believe in a fundamental part of myself.” I do not mean to imply that the adult’s invitation qua need for recognition is “conscious”; but it is a “given” tacitly informing their interaction; perhaps it would more accurately be described as a need “called forth” by the child’s human form. And though it is obvious and implicit, many parents might feel uncomfortable becoming aware of and/or acknowledging their search for recognition in the infant’s gaze. What I am proposing is that primary identification as part of the human race springs originally from the other, is a desire “sprung out” from the other, both the personal other of early caretakers and, as Zaltzman has emphasized, the larger human community. It is perhaps useful to consider two primary intersubjective Copernican motions: one of unconscious messages triggered in the adult and addressed to the child in the caretaking process, the other an unconscious wish in the adult to be “recognized” by the child, to become a respondent (in the sense of answering), the latter also itself a “deposit” in the child’s psyche of a connection to humanity. An element of circularity inevitably becomes part of our attempt to conceptualize these deep intersubjective “implantations” (another Laplanchian notion), because the Copernican, other-centred motion is double-sided; that is, it exists equally in both adult and child. The Freudian child’s first “direct and immediate identification” does, contrary to what Freud asserted, occur in a situation of “object-cathexis,” the object-cathexis of its parents. But that object-cathexis is in part an unconscious response to the baby’s human form and (projected/imagined/beckoning) humanity. Who is “projecting” and who is “soliciting” fast becomes a blur.

We know that the absence of this nonenigmatic and highly personal message in the physical care of institutionalized orphans leads to marasmus and failure to thrive (Spitz 1951). When it has been present, even death does not have the power to immediately squelch its “summoning” to and from the other. In his elegy, Gray evokes the continued “calling” of the dead:

On some fond breast the parting soul relies,

Some pious drops the closing eye requires;

Ev’n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,

Ev’n in our ashes live their wonted fires.

The crying of this “voice of Nature,” as we have seen, prompts many responses, almost always tinged with guilt, a guilt regarding the still fragile and still open self-recognition of humanness swallowed from the other: gift, loan, theft, betrayal?

Our Dr. Kumar opted impulsively for a repressive solution to this enigmatic call. That evening before he left his department, he writes, “I got the cadaver with painted toes removed from the dissection hall’s steel table and returned it back into its formalin tank, where I hope it will lie sunken and unseen” (2011; emphasis added). Like the shroud, the tank serves to cloak signals from human remains. Dehumanization in the service of humanity is a deliberate temporary deafness to the messages coming from the other human form so that the corporeal integrity of a fellow human being may be transgressed without guilt for “its own good” or “for the good of the many.” This deafness remains, however, easily and dolorously reversible, as it proved for Kumar. Will his repressive solution allow him to forget the oppressive thoughts that rushed to mind in at the sight of the red toenails: the call, the appeal, the seduction and accusations of the young woman’s corpse? We need to shroud the body, burn it, bury it, hide it so as to escape the enigmatic pull of its troubling lifeless fragility. The shroud, by preventing us in some measure from receiving messages, frees us in part from having to respond to these messages, as Kumar was forced to do. The shroud, like the anonymous, stripped cadaver, is an attempt to spare us the psychic work, inevitably painful, surely conflict-laden, of “answering.”

There are many accounts, written and oral, historical and contemporary, by laypersons, medical students, soldiers, and public safety officers of the traumatic effect of encountering a human corpse when unprepared (e.g., Groopman 2012; Conklin 2007). It was of great interest to me, therefore, to learn recently of the protocol for the treatment of donor human bodies developed at McGill University Medical School. Students are far better prepared nowadays: they receive an introductory lecture and begin work on their cadaver only on a discrete area, while the rest of the remains stay covered; throughout the course, the face is hidden from view by a protective gauze. Moreover, and perhaps most important, they are given written “guidelines for reflectors” and counseled to start a journal of self-observation. At the end of the academic year, in a public ceremony attended by these first-year students, their families, the families of the body donors, university officials, and faculty, there is a commemorative service during which selected student “reflectors” share thoughts and poems about their experience in the anatomy lab. The body’s uniqueness and a fantasied dialogue with its “spirit” are constant themes in these narratives. An elegant McGill Body Donor monument, where the cremated ashes of donor bodies are finally interred, stands in one of the oldest cemeteries in Montreal. Thus, rather than play down the corpse’s humanity, the students’ transgression of these bodies is mitigated by encouragement to put into words fantasies about that humanity and its relationship to themselves.

Though the body of the young woman with the red toenails has been removed from view and is out of reach, preserved as she is in a holding tank, she has not disappeared, either from this earth or the mind of the good Dr. Kumar. The ordeal of elaborating the wretched associations that seized hold of him that day upon the sight of her toenails still begs to be tackled. As Gantheret (2008) has noted, “We are condemned to navigate in a world of signs, and to be ourselves signs” (p. 34; translation mine).

Freud’s theory of mourning as a gradual, piecemeal severing of bonds to lost loved ones (1917) might be suggested as a parallel to what I am discussing. But that would be erroneous. Mourning involves coping with the absence of a specific other, known and precathected. This knowledge may have been face-to-face or have evolved from a distance (as with an intense individual or collective cathexis of a political or religious public figure). What is at issue here is something else: the continuing enigmatic draw of any lifeless human form due to a primary and ongoing identification that creates an impossible-to-resist “leading astray” of ourselves, to use Laplanche’s language, in commiseration and “dialogue” with the presentation of that fragile human form. Though the emphasis here has been on the “fragility” of the lifeless human form, my conclusions have a more general import. Allusions have been made to the impact of other incarnations of that fragility inside and outside the consulting room. What of the impact on the analyst of the patient’s “prostrate” form, for instance, or the bridge these reflections might offer to a psychoanalytic examination of ethics? I am intrigued by the compelling parallels between the “calls” from the other that I have noted and Emmanuel Lévinas’s view (1985) of “responsibility as the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity. For I describe subjectivity in ethical terms” (p. 95).

Regrettably, these implications, as well as a scholarly and thorough view of the richness and variety of responses to the dead, individually, culturally and historically, are beyond my competence. My focus here has been limited to a single, perhaps idiosyncratic (though I hope fertile) associative track of conscious and unconscious fantasy. For the human subject, the lifeless (or otherwise vulnerable) other is never completely “dead.” “It” retains the capacity to return as a “he” or a “she” in intermittent conversation with the living, a conversation postponed perhaps and attenuated temporarily by the burial shroud or its equivalent, but with the ability to return and continue, sometimes for centuries. Our humanity is a ceaselessly eruptive/disruptive openness to the other, a compulsion originating in our earliest intercourse with the living, and even death can have no dominion over it.