Ambivalence is a fundamental trait of the cathexes of depressives. What is the case in the dead mother complex? When I described above the affective and representative decathexis of which hatred is the consequence, this description was incomplete. What one must understand, in the structure that I have expounded, is that the inability to love only derives from ambivalence, and hence from an overload of hatred, in the measure that what comes first is love frozan by the decathexis. The object is in hibernation, as it were, conserved by the cold. This operation comes about unknown to the subject, in the following way. Decathexis is withdrawal of cathexis which takes place (pre)consciously. Repressed hatred is the result of instinctual defusion（去融合）, all unbinding and thus weakening the erotic-libidinal cathexis, which, as a consequence, frees the destructive cathexes. By withdrawing his cathexes, the subject believes he has brought them back within his ego, for want of being able to displace them onto another object, a substitute object, but he ignores that he has left behind, has alienated, his love for the object, which has fallen into the oubliettes of primary repression. Consciously, he believes his reserve of love to be intact, available for another love when the occasion arises. He declares himself ready to become attached to another object, if he appears to be friendly and he feels loved by him. He thinks the primary object no longer counts for him. In truth, he will encounter the inability to love, not only because of ambivalence, but because his love is still mortgaged to the dead mother. The subject is rich but he can give nothing in spite of his generosity, for he does not reap enjoyment from it.
In the course of the transference, the defensive sexualization which took place up to now, always involving intense pregenital satisfactions and remarkable sexual performance, comes to a sudden halt, and the analysand finds his sexual life diminishing or fading away almost to nothing. According to him, it is a matter neither of inhibition nor of the loss of sexual appetite: it is simply that no one is desirable, or, if perchance someone is, it is he or she who is not attracted in return. A profuse, dispersed, multiple, fleeting sexual life no longer brings any satisfaction.
Arrested in their capacity to love, subjects who are under the empire of the dead mother can only aspire to autonomy. Sharing remains forbid- den to them. Thus, solitude, which was a situation creating anxiety and to be avoided, changes sign. From negative it becomes positive. Having previously been shunned, it is now sought after. The subject nestles into it. He becomes his own mother, but remains prisoner to her economy of survival. He thinks he has got rid of his dead mother. In fact, she only leaves him in peace in the measure that she herself is left in peace. As long as there is no candidate to the succession, she can well let her child survive, certain to be the only one to possess this inaccessible love.
This cold core burns like ice, and numbs like it as well, but as long as it is felt to be cold, love remains unavailable. These are barely metaphors. These analysands complain of being cold even in the heat. They are cold
below the surface of the skin, in their bones; they feel chilled by a funereal shiver, wrapped in their shroud. Everything happens as though the core of love frozen by the dead mother does not prevent the ulterior evolution towards the Oedipus complex, in the same way that the fixation will be ultimately overcome in the life of the individual. These subjects may outwardly have a more or less satisfactory professional life; they marry and have children. For a while all seems well. But soon the repetition of conflicts contributes to turning the two essential sectors oflife, love and work, into failure: professional life, even when profoundly absorbing, becomes disappointing, and marital relations lead to profound disturbances in love, sexuality and affective communication. It is in any case this last which is most lacking. As for sexuality, it depends on the later or earlier appearance of the dead mother complex. It may be relatively preserved but only up to a certain point. Love, finally, is never completely satisfied. Thus, at one extreme, it is completely impossible, or, at best, it is somewhat mutilated or inhibited. There must not be too much: too much love, too much pleasure, too much enjoyment, whereas on the contrary the parental function is hyper-invested（高度投注）. However, this function is more often than not infiltrated by narcissism: children are loved on condition that they fulfill the narcissistic objectives which the parents have not succeeded in accomplishing themselves.
Thus, if the Oedipus complex is reached and even bypassed, the dead mother complex will give it a particularly dramatic aspect. Fixation to the mother will prevent the girl from ever being able to cathect the imago of the father, without the fear of losing the mother's love; or else if love for the father is deeply repressed, without her being able to avoid transfer- ring onto the father's imago a large part of the characteristics that have been projected onto the mother. Not the dead mother, but her opposite, the phallic mother whose structure I have attempted to describe (Green, 1968).The boy projects a similar imago onto the mother, while the father is the object of a homosexuality which is not very structuring but makes him into an inaccessible being and, as in the familiar descriptions, insignificant or tired, depressed and overwhelmed by this phallic mother. In all cases there is a regression to anality. In anality the subject not only regresses from the Oedipus complex backwards, in every sense of the term, but also protects himself by the anal buttress against the tendency towards oral regression to which one is always thrown back by the dead mother, because the dead mother complex and the metaphoric loss of the breast reverberate each other. One also always finds the use of reality as a defence, as though the subject feels the need to cling to the presence of what is perceived as real and untouched by any projection, because he is far from sure of the distinction between fantasy and reality, which he does his utmost to keep apart. Fantasy must be only fantasy, which means that one witnesses, at the limit, the negation of psychical reality. When reality and fantasy are telescoped together, intense anxiety appears. Subjective and objective are confused, which gives the subject the impression of a threat of psychosis. Order must be main- tained at any price, by a structuring anal reference which allows splitting to continue to function, and above all keeps the subject away from what he has learned of his unconscious. This is to say that psychoanalysis allows him to understand others better than to see clearly within himself. Whence the inevitable disappointment with the results of the analysis, though it is strongly cathected, albeit more often narcissistically.
The dead mother refuses to die a second death. Very often, the analyst says to himself: 'This time it's done, the old woman is really dead, he (or she) will finally be able to live and I shall be able to breathe a little.' Then a small traumatism appears in the transference or in life which gives the maternal imago renewed vitality, if I may put it this way. It is because she is a thousand-headed hydra whom one believes one has beheaded with each blow; whereas in fact only one of its heads has been struck off, Where then is the beast's neck?
A habitual preconception expects one to delve to the deepest level: to the primordial breast. This is a mistake: that is not where the fundamental fantasy lies. For, in the same way that it is the relation with the second object in the Oedipus situation that retroactively reveals the complex which affects the primary object, the mother, likewise, it is not by attacking the oral relation face on that one can extirpate the core of the complex. The solution is to be found in the prototype of the Oedipus complex, in the symbolic matrix which allows for its construction. Then the dead mother complex delivers its secret: it is the fantasy of the primal scene.
Contemporary psychoanalysis has understood, many indications attest to it -belatedly, it is true- that if the Oedipus complex remains the indispensable structural reference, the determining conditions for it are not to be sought in its oral, anal or phallic forerunners, seen from the angle of realistic references -for orality, anality or phallicisity depend on partly real object relations -nor either in a generalized fantasizing of their structure, 'A la Klein', but in the isomorphic fantasy of the Oedipus complex: that of the primal scene. I emphasize this fantasy of the primal scene to stress the difference here from the Freudian position as it is expounded in the 'Wolf Man' (Freud, 1918b), where in the controversy with Jung, Freud searches for proof of its reality. Now, what counts in the primal scene is not that one has witnessed it but precisely the contrary, namely that it has taken place in the absence of the subject.
In the case with which we are concerned, the fantasy of the primal scene is of capital importance. For it is on the occasion of an encounter between a conjuncture and a structure, which brings two objects into play, that the subject will be confronted with memory traces in relation to the dead mother. These memory traces have been forcibly repressed by de-cathexis. They remain, so to speak, in abeyance within the subject, who has only kept a very incomplete memory of the period relative to the complex. Sometimes a screen memory, of an anodyne nature, is all that is left of it. The fantasy of the primal scene will not only recathect these vestiges, but will confer to them, through a new cathexis, new effects which constitute a real conflagration, that sets fire to the structure which gives the complex of the dead mother retrospective significance.
Every resurgence of this fantasy constitutes projective actualization, the projection aiming to assuage the narcissistic wound. By actualized projection I designate a process through which the projection not only rids the subject of his inner tensions by projecting them onto the object, but constitutes a revivifying and not a reminiscence, an actual traumatic and dramatic repetition. What happens to the fantasy of the primal scene in the case that concerns us? On one hand the subject takes account of the insuperable distance that separates him from the mother. This distance makes him realize his impotent rage at being unable to establish contact with the object, in the strictest sense of the term. On the other hand the subject feels himself incapable of awakening this dead mother, of animating her, or rendering life to her. But, on this occasion, instead of his rival being the object who had captivated the dead mother in her experience of bereavement, on the contrary, he becomes the third party who shows himself apt, against all expectation, to return her to life and to give her the pleasure of orgasm.
This is where the revolting aspect of the situation lies, which reactivates the loss of narcissistic omnipotence and awakens the feeling of an incommensurable libidinal infirmity. Of course, in reaction to this situation there will be a series of consequences which may come singly or in groups:
I. The persecution by this fantasy and hatred for the two objects which form a couple to the detriment of the subject.
2. The classic interpretation of the primal scene as a sadistic scene, but where the essential feature is that the mother either has no orgasm and suffers, or else has orgasm in spite of herself, forced to it by the father's violence.
3. A variation of the last situation; when the mother experiences orgasm, she becomes cruel, hypocritical, playing it up, a sort of lewd monster, that makes her the Sphinx of the Oedipus myth, rather than Oedipus' mother.
4. The alternating identification with the two imagos: with the dead mother, whether she remains in her unaltered state or gives herself up to a sado-masochistic type of erotic excitation; with the father, the dead mother's aggressor (necrophilic fantasy), or he who repairs her, through sexual union. More often, depending on the moment, the subject passes from the one to the other of these identifications.
5. Erotic and aggressive delibidinalization of the primal scene to the advantage of intense intellectual activity, which restores narcissism in the face of this confusing situation, where the quest for meaning (which was lost anew) results in the formation of a sexual theory and stimulates an extensive 'intellectual' activity, which re-establishes the wounded narcissistic omnipotence by sacrificing libidinal satisfaction. Another solution: artistic creation, which is the support for a fantasy of auto- satisfaction.
6. The negation, 'en bloc', of the whole fantasy. Ignorance of every- thing pertaining to sexual relations is highly cathected, making the emptiness of the dead mother and the obliteration of the primal scene coincide for the subject. The fantasy of the primal scene becomes the central axis of the subject's life which overshadows the dead mother complex. This is developed in two directions: forwards and backwards.
Forwards, there is the anticipation of the Oedipus complex, which will then be experienced according to the schema of defences against the anxiety of the primal scene. The three anti-erotic factors, namely hatred, homosexuality and narcissism, will conjugate their effects so that the Oedipus complex is adversely structured.
Backwards, the relation to the breast is the object of a radical reinterpretation. This becomes significant retrospectively. The blank mourning for the dead mother reflects back to the breast which, superficially, is laden with destructive projections. In fact it is less a question of a bad breast, which is ungiving, than a breast which, even when it does give, is an absent breast (and not lost), absorbed with nostalgia for a relation that is grieved for; a breast which can neither be full nor filling. The consequence of this is that the recathexis of the happy relation to the breast that existed prior to the occurrence of the dead mother complex, is this time affected with the fleeting signal of a catastrophic threat, and, if I dare say so, it is a false breast, carried within a false self, nourishing a false baby. This happiness was only a decoy. 'I have never been loved' becomes a new outcry which the subject will cling to and which he strives to confirm in his subsequent love-life. It is evident that one is faced with a situation of mourning which is impossible, and that the metaphoric loss of the breast cannot be worked through for this reason. It is necessary to add a precision concerning oral cannibalistic fantasies. Contrary to what happens in melancholia, here there is no regression to this phase. What one witnesses above all is an identification with the dead mother on the level of the oral relation and with the defences which arise from it, the subject's fearing to the utmost either the ultimate loss of the object or the invasion of emptiness.
The analysis of the transference by means of these three positions will lead to the rediscovery of the early happiness that existed prior to the appearance of the dead mother complex. This takes a great deal of time, and one has to work it over more than once before marking a victory, namely before blank mourning and its resonance with castration anxiety allow one to reach a transferential repetition of a happy relationship with a mother who is alive at last and desirous of the father. This result supposes one has passed through the analysis of the narcissistic wound, which consumed the child in the mother's bereavement.
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