Louis Wolfson calls himself "the student of schizophrenic language," "the mentally ill student," "the student of demented idioms"... The initial sentence is in English, but the final one is a simulacrum of a sentence that borrows from various languages

 

Louis Wolfson, Le Schizo et les langues.

Connaissance de l'inconscient. (Introduction by

Gilles Deleuze). Paris, 1970

The schizophrenic language student, the mentally ill student, the demented language student, that's what the author of this book calls himself. For him it can only be a matter of grasping from the outside, in an anonymous form, and of reporting exactly what he is doing. It is not the least originality of this book to be a protocol of activities and not, as is generally the case in the testimonies of "mentally ill people", the presentation of a delusion. is delivered in what triggers a series of encounters: with the "fluidic" father on a public bench, with French-speaking masons in the courtyard, with a prostitute, with the Libraries and the refrigerators. We hope that the reader does not protect himself of this extraordinary book - by its humor and its tragedy and by the logic it implements - by hastening to classify it under the rubric of "psychopathological documents". Instead, let him remember these words of Michel Foucault: “Psychology will never be able to tell the truth about madness since it is madness which holds the truth of psychology.” [by Google translate]

Louis, Wolfson, Ma mère, musicienne, est morte

de maladie maligne. Paris, 1984

Here is a text where everything, absolutely everything is exceptional. The author first of all: American schizophrenic, writing in French and adored in France, since a book published by Gallimard in 1970, by personalities as different as Queneau, Deleuze, Foucault, Le Clézio, Auster and Pierre Alferi. The subject then: the chronicle of a maternal death announced from the title; the story, as astonishing as it is moving, of an outsider who must simultaneously face the death of his mother and the end of half a century of guardianship. Language finally: of such inventiveness and strength that Le Clézio did not hesitate to compare Wolfson to Sade or Lautréamont...
My mother, musician... is in fact the narration of the last sixteen months of life that the author shared, from October 1975 to May 1977, with his mother suffering from cancer. Included is an account of his wanderings in New York in the 1970s, and in particular his visits to suburban racetracks where, passionate about gambling, he ventured into complex horse racing bets. [by Google translate]

Louis Wolfson (born 1931 in New York)[1] is an American author who writes in French. Treated for schizophrenia since childhood, he cannot bear hearing or reading his native language and has invented a method of immediately translating every English sentence into a foreign phrase with the same sound and meaning.

Diagnosed with schizophrenia at an early age, Louis Wolfson was placed in psychiatric institutes during his adolescence, where he underwent severe treatments, notably electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). This period left him with distrust and hatred for people, as well as a radical detestation of his native language which he refused to use. He learned foreign languages (notably French, German, Hebrew and Russian), and became used to spontaneously translating (through a sophisticated technique) whatever was said to him in English into a Sabir of these languages.

In 1963, Wolfson submitted a manuscript to the French publishers Gallimard in which he set out, in French, the principles of his linguistic system, and how he employed it in his daily life. Le Schizo et les langues (Schizophrenia and Languages) was published in 1970 in the collection "Connaissance de l'Inconscient" that had just been launched by writer and psychoanalyst Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. It generated great critical interest, due in parts to its introduction by Gilles Deleuze. Seven years later, Wolfson's mother died of complications from an ovarian tumour. The author, now liberated from her guardianship, left New York and moved to Montreal in 1984.

There, Wolfson wrote an account of the last months of their divided lives, marked by his mother's agony and his obsessive practice of betting on horses. The text — Ma mère, musicienne, est morte... (My Mother, a Musician, Has Died) — uses the same humor and staggering language of Le Schizo et les langues, but is also charged with the drama of the illness. It was published in 1984 by Éditions Navarin. The text has become scarce. He wrote a new version during 2011. It was published by éditions Attila in 2014.

Since November 1994, he has lived in Puerto Rico where he became a millionaire on 9 April 2003 after winning the lottery. - Wikipedia

Louis Wolfson's second book, the highly alliterative Ma mère, musicienne, est morte de maladie maligne à minuit, mardi à mercredi, au milieu du mois de mai mille977 au mouroir Memorial à Manhattan, which concerns his mother's death from ovarian cancer, has just been re-published in France after its first publication in 1984, and was re-edited by the author in 2010 with a very slightly different title.

Wolfson was born in New York in 1931 and has written two books, both in French, which is not his maternal language: a schizophrenic, after horrific youthful spells in psychiatric hospitals which included EST (ECT in British English), he came to detest English to such an extent that his existential survival depended on avoiding the language at all costs. Teaching himself Hebrew, German and Russian, but particularly French, he tried all possible means to shut out English words, notably those of his domineering mother, and for years strove to create an internal language that automatically bypassed received English words to create alternative foreign forms. 'Where', to give a straightforward example, is changed to the German 'woher', but other transformations involve highly elaborate linguistic convolutions via similar meanings and phonemes held in common, etc, sometimes through a series of different languages.

French publisher Gallimard published his first book, Le Schizo et les langues ('The Schizophhrenic and Languages') in 1970, with a Foreword by Gilles Deleuze. Raymond Queneau found it exceptional, and J.-B. Pontalis and Paul Auster have also shown great interest in Wolfson's work.

Ma mère, musicienne represents a kind of posthumous reconciliation of Wolfson with his mother, closely detailing his dying mother's state of health in her final year. There are some conflicting reports about the dates of events in Wolfson's life, although it seems certain that he later went to live in Montréal, and then Puerto Rico, where he won a lottery that made him a millionaire when he was in his seventies, although several years later he lost his money and unsuccessfully tried to file a suit against those responsible for his investment advice.

Inevitably, Rimbaud's expression 'Je est un autre' ('I is another') from 'Le Bateau ivre' has been referenced, and Le Nouvel Obs suggests that Wolfson's book makes Camus's L'Étranger (which of course also starts after a mother's death and for me is more accurately translated as 'The Stranger' or 'The Foreigner') look, well, of a far more superficial order.

https://tonyshaw3.blogspot.com/2012/05/louis-wolfson-and-schizophrenic.html

AN ESCAPE FROM LANGUAGE INTO LANGUAGE: THE INTERNAL EXILE OF LOUIS WOLFSON by ANTOINE RIDEAU 

Louis Wolfson, author of the book Le schizo et les langues, calls himself "the student of schizophrenic language," "the mentally ill student," "the student of demented idioms," or, in his reformed writing, "le jeune ome sqizofrene." This schizophrenic impersonal form has several meanings, and for its author does not simply indicate the emptiness of his own body. It concerns a combat in which the hero can apprehend himself only through a kind of anonymity analogous to that of the "young soldier." It also concerns a scientific undertaking in which the student has no identity except as a phonetic or molecular combination. Finally, for the author, it is less a matter of narrating what he is feeling and thinking than of saying in exact terms what he is doing. One of the great originalities of this book is that it sets forth a protocol of experimentation or activity. Wolfson's second book, Ma mere musicienne est morte, will be presented as a double book precisely because it is interspersed with the protocols of his cancerous mother's illness.

The author is American but the books are written in French, for reasons that will soon become obvious. For what the student spends his time doing is translating, and he does so in accordance with certain rules. His procedure is as follows: given a word from the maternal language, he looks for a foreign word with a similar meaning that has common sounds or phonemes (preferably in French, German, Russian, or Hebrew, the four principal languages studied by the author). For example, Where? will be translated as Wo? Hier? ou? ici?, or better yet, as Woher. Tree will produce Tere, which phonetically becomes Dere and leads to the Russian Derevo. Thus, an ordinary maternal sentence will be analyzed in terms of its phonetic elements and movements so that it can be converted into a sentence, in one or more foreign languages, which is similar to it in sound and meaning. The operation must be done as quickly as possible, given the urgency of the situation; but it also requires a significant amount of time, given the resistances offered by each word, the inexact meanings that emerge at every stage of the conversion, and above all the necessity of drawing up phonetic rules for each case that are applicable to other transformations (the adventures of believe, for example, will take up forty pages). It is as if there are two circuits of transformation that coexist and interpenetrate each other, the first taking up as little time as possible, the second covering as much linguistic space as possible.

Such is the general procedure: the phrase Don't trip over the wire becomes Tu'nicht treb uber eth he Zwirn. The initial sentence is in English, but the final one is a simulacrum of a sentence that borrows from various languages: German, French, Hebrew-a "tour de babil." It not only makes use of rules of transformation (from d to t, from p to b, from v to b), but also rules of inversion (since the English wire is not sufficiently invested by the German Zwirn, the Russian prolovka will be invoked, which turns wir into riv, or rather rov).

Now in order to overcome resistances and difficulties of this kind, the general procedure has to be perfected in two different directions. On the one hand, it moves toward an amplified procedure, grounded in "the idea of genius to associate words more freely." The conversion of an English word, for example, early, can now be sought in French words and phrases that are associated with "tot" and include the consonants R or L (suR-Le-champ, de bonne heuRe, matinaLement, diLigemment, devoRer L'espace); or tired will be converted at the same time into the French faTigue, exTenue, CouRbaTure, RenDu, the German maTT, KapuTT, eRschopfT, eRmudeT, and so on. On the other hand, it moves toward an evolved procedure. In this case, it is no longer a matter of analyzing or even abstracting certain phonetic elements from an English word, but of forming the word in several independent modes. Thus, among the terms frequently encountered on food labels, we not only find vegetable oil, which does not pose many problems, but also vegetable shortening, which remains irreducible to the ordinary method: what causes the difficulty is SH, R, T, and N. It will therefore be necessary to render the word monstrous and grotesque, to make it echo three times, to triple its initial sound (shshshortening) in order to block the first SH with N (the Hebrew chemenn), the second SH with an equivalent ofT (the German Schmalz), and the third SH with R (the Russian jir).

Psychosis is inseparable from a variable linguistic procedure. The procedure is the very process of the psychosis. The entire procedure of the student of languages presents striking analogies with the famous "procedure," itself schizophrenic, of the poet Raymond Roussel. Roussel worked within his maternal language, French; he too converted an initial sentence into another sentence with similar sounds and phonemes, but one with a completely different meaning (les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard and les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pi/lard). A first direction gave the amplified procedure, in which words associated in the first series took on another, related meaning in the second (queue de billard and robe atraine du pi/lard). A second direction led to the evolved procedure, in which the original sentence was converted into autonomous components (i'ai du bon tabac =jade tube onde aubade). Another famous case was that of Jean-Pierre Brisset. His procedure fixed the meaning of a phonetic or syllabic element by comparing the words, from one or more languages, that shared this element; the operation was then amplified and evolved in order to provide the evolution of the meaning itself, in accordance with various syllabic compositions (hence the prisoners were first of all drenched in dirty water, dans l'eau sale, they were dans Ia sale eau pris, thus becoming salauds pris, who were then sold in Ia salle aux prix). In each of these three cases, a kind of foreign language is extracted from the maternal language, on the condition that the sounds or phonemes always remain similar. In Roussel, however, it is the referent of the words that is put in question, and the meaning does not remain the same; moreover, the other language is merely homonymous and remains French, though it acts like a foreign language. In Brisset, who puts the signification of propositions in question, other languages are called upon, but only in order to demonstrate the unity of their meanings as much as the identity of their sounds (diavolo and dieu-aieul, or di-a vau I'au). As for Wolfson, whose problem is the translation of languages, the various languages are combined together in a disordered manner in order to conserve the same meanings and the same sounds, but only by systematically destroying the maternal language of English from which they were extracted. By slightly modifying the meaning of these categories, one could say that Roussel constructs a language homonymous with French, Brisset, a synonymous language, and Wolfson, a language paronymous with English. According to one of Wolfson's intuitions, this is perhaps the secret aim of linguistics-to kill the maternal language. The grammarians of the eighteenth century still believed in a mother tongue; the linguists of the nineteenth century voiced certain doubts, and changed the rules of both maternity and filiation, sometimes invoking languages that were little more than sisters. Perhaps an infernal trio was needed to push this initiative to its limit. In Roussel, French is no longer a maternal language, because in its words and letters it conceals various exoticisms that give rise to "impressions of Africa" (in keeping with France's colonial mission); in Brisset, there is no longer a mother tongue, all languages are sisters, and Latin is not a language (in keeping with a democratic vocation); and in Wolfson, American English does not even have British English as its mother, but becomes an exotic mixture or a "potpourri of various idioms" (in keeping with the American dream of bringing together immigrants from around the world).

Wolfson's book, however, is not a literary work, and does not claim to be a poem. What turns Roussel's procedure into a work of art is the fact that the interval between the original sentence and its conversion is filled with marvelously proliferating stories, which make the starting point recede until it is entirely hidden. For example, the event woven by the hydraulic metier aaubes takes up the metier qui force a se lever de grand matin. These are grandiose visions-pure events that play within language, and surpass the conditions of their apparition and the circumstances of their actualization, just as a piece of music exceeds the circumstances of its performance and the execution given to it. The same holds true for Brisset: to extract the unknown face of the event or, as he says, the other face of language. Moreover, it is the intervals between one linguistic combination and the next that generate the great events that fill these intervals, like the birth of a neck, the appearance of teeth, the formation of sex organs. But there is nothing similar in Wolfson: between the word to be converted and the words of the conversion, and in the conversions themselves, there is nothing but a void, an interval that is lived as pathogenic or pathological. When he translates the article the into the two Hebrew terms eth and he, he comments: the maternal word is "split in two by the equally split brain" of the student of languages. The transformations never reach the grandiose level of an event, but remain mired in their accidental circumstances and empirical actualizations. The procedure thus remains a protocol. The linguistic procedure operates in a void, and never links up with a vital process capable of producing a vision. This is why the transformation of believe takes up so many pages, marked by the comings and goings of those who pronounce the word, and by the intervals between the different actualized combinations (Pieve-peave, likegleichen, leave-Verlaub ...). Voids subsist and spread everywhere, so that the only event that arises, turning its black face toward us, is the end of the world or the atomic explosion of the planet, which the student fears will be delayed by arms reductions. In Wolfson, the procedure is itself its own event, and has no other expression than the conditional, the past conditional, which is needed to establish a hypothetical place between an external circumstance and an improvised actualization: "The alienated linguistic student would take an E from the English tree and would have mentally inserted it between the T and the R, had he not realized that when a vowel is placed after a T sound, the T becomes D .... During this time, the mother of the alienated student followed him around, and occasionally came to his side and uttered something completely useless. " Wolfson's style, his propositional schema, thus links the schizophrenic impersonal with a verb in the conditional, which expresses the infinite expectation of an event capable of filling up the intervals or, on the contrary, of hollowing them out in an immense void that swallows up everything. The demented student of languages would do or would have done ...

Wolfson's book, moreover, is not a scientific work, despite the truly scientific intention of the phonetic transformations it brings about. This is because a scientific method implies the determination or even the formation of formally legitimate totalities. Now it is obvious that the totality of the referent of the student of language is illegitimate; not only because it is constituted by the indefinite set of everything that is not English, a veritable "tour de babil," as Wolfson says, but because the set is not defined by any syntactic rule that would make it correspond to the meanings or sounds, and would order the transformations of the set in terms of a starting point that has a syntax and is defined as English. Thus, the schizophrenic lacks a "symbolism" in two different ways: on the one hand, by the subsistence of pathogenic inter vals that nothing can fill; and on the other hand, by the emergence of a false totality that nothing can define. This is why he lives his own thought ironically as a double simulacrum of a poetic-artistic system and a logical-scientific method. It is this power of the simulacrum or irony that makes Wolfson's book such an extraordinary book, illuminated with that peculiar joy and sunlight characteristic of simulations, in which we feel this very particular resistance germinating in the heart of the illness. As the student says, "How nice it was to study languages, even in his crazy, if not imbecilic, manner." For "it is not rare that things go that way in life: at least a little ironically." (..) - Gilles Deleuze

American author Louis Wolfson is not just any writer, that is, he has not identified his job as writing and sharing his work with the publishing world. He probably thinks of – I say probably because it is not himself who says this, I have inferred it – writing as a therapeutic tool, as a way of communicating and existing and he has accordingly published two books. In his first book The Schizophrenic and Languages, the author talks about his war against his native language English and his struggle that goes so far to creating a new language. In this delirious process, the mother presents itself as an unsymbolized “weirdo”. Wolfson sends his handwritten notes of this book he has written in French to Gallimard publishing house in Paris in 1963. The book is published in Paris in 1970 and creates a lot of reactions, especially in psychoanalysis circles. Meanwhile, we should remind that the famous psychoanalyst J.B.Pontalis also has a chair in the Galimard publishing board. Seven years after the publishing of the book, Wolfson’s mother dies of cancer. Wolfson writes his second book based on a diary his mother has kept about her illness and the treatment process. In his book My Mother, the Musician, Died of a Malignant Disease at Midnight Connecting Tuesday to Wednesday, in the middle of May of 1977, in the Memorial Hospice in Manhattan. Wolfson transforms his mother’s mechanical notes to a historical narrative and from then on becomes present in this narrative alongside his mother. The mother has symbolized and has been able to claim a place, a record in Wolfson’s personal history. Now, I will analyze these two books with respect to the concepts of symbolization and becoming a subject in order to tell you about this transformation that Wolfson has made possible through writing.

In his book The Schizophrenic and Languages, Wolfson talks about his psychotic experience as a “student who studies foreign languages” or “a demented student”, through a third person perspective, in an impersonal narrative. This narrative does not have a subject. In fact, Wolfson refers to his mother as “the mother of the schizophrenic”. As a reader we cannot get a hold of Wolfson’s feelings, emotions and thoughts since the author talks only about his actions using an operational narration. We can say this language is like a scientific document since it contains serious linguistic “inventions” and observations. At the same time, the book is akin to an autobiography, although in the third person, since we witness moment by moment the psychic workings and doings of a schizophrenic. We also cannot be indifferent to the power of humor in the absurdity of the inventions; in that sense it can be called a humorous novel. There are also observations from linguistics that we can call philosophical or deep psychoanalytical. In that sense, it can be called a psychological novel. The fact that the author writes in French which he speaks with his step-father who is of Canadian descent instead of his mother tongue English also creates a feeling of absurdity in the reader, especially in those who are native French speakers, since his use of language is sometimes foreign to French as well. As a result, this book can be classified neither in terms of genre or content.

Wolfson is a student in his 20s, living in New York with his mother and studying foreign languages. He has been diagnosed as a schizophrenic and has received psychiatric treatment, including electroshock. The book does not mention any psychotherapy or psychoanalytic treatment. Wolfson has been maintaining his life with a kind of handicap pension he receives from the government and has been living a completely dependent life on his mother and her second husband. Despite living with them under the same roof, he almost never leaves his room, living a life conditioned to constantly learning foreign languages. He goes outside only if need be and does not have any relationship outside of the house. He meets up with his father every month for an hour or two. It is only towards the end of the book that we witness Wolfson’s fairly humorous encounter with a prostitute. Aside from that, throughout the book we witness our protagonist studying with books, tapes and dictionaries and translating from English to other languages. We learn that Wolfson, who we will get to know better in his second book, has had a problematic childhood and that he was a hyperactive and maladjusted child. His mother divorced from his father when Wolfson was little, but no further information is provided in either of the two books about this break up. Wolfson mentions his father as if he is an unimportant detail and tells that he meets him once a month and is bored during their time together. Wolfson, hinting at his father’s limited financial means, talks about how little the money he so laboriously takes from his father every month is. An important detail is that the father speaks French and that they speak to each other in French.

Wolfson hated English which is his mother tongue. He was covering his ears whenever he heard his mother speak in English or putting his radio to his ear, listening to music or radio programs in a foreign language. In the case that he mistakenly heard an English word, he would immediately translate that word into a similar sounding word with a close enough meaning in another language. For example, when his mother would say “Where are my glasses?” in a hurry and in a loud voice around the house, Wolfson would take the word “where” and would immediately translate it into “woher” (from where) which is the phonetically closest word in German and then relax. It is seriously a torture for him for the word “where” to get stuck in his mind. Or in another example, he would translate the English word “tree” to the French “terre” (earth, glebe) and the Russian “derevo”. The aim was both to skip from English to another language and also to find a word in that language that is phonetically similar (by keeping the consonants) and has a close meaning. That is, the translation should not only one of meaning but should also be similar phonetically. This of course, was very tiring, complex and at the same time frantic work. What’s more, it had to be very quick! That is why Wolfson had dedicated a very important part of his time to foreign languages and was constantly memorizing new words in different languages (French, German, Russian and Hebrew).

Wolfson’s goal was to kill his mother tongue and to create a new language in which he could think to himself and create meaning. His mother’s words were like an arrow, using his expression, “piercing his eardrums and making the little bones inside vibrate”. Wolfson describes his mother’s “injection” of her words to him as a serious assault and claims that the mother experiences “victory” over her schizophrenic son that is her “only wealth”. In order to withstand this assault and survive – this is a serious life and death war – Wolfson uses a “method”. This method is to parse and crumble every word in English, his mother tongue. Parsed words become meaningless, and actually for Wolfson any English word that is pronounced is meaningless, dangerous and is like a poisonous arrow. The language has not symbolized, it is as if its meaning dimension has been excluded and eradicated. Wolfson first parses English words and then keeps the consonant letters of these parsed words. He then uses them to form words in a new language and in a sense revives them. It can be said that keeping the consonants of parsed words and then trying to revive them in a new language is what Wolfson does. Language for him is a new world, a new body of meaning, a new system and maybe a new home, or a container. As a matter of fact, Wolfson can only feel safe in this newly founded language and does not give up on his search for meaning, although this search is absurd and complex for those of us that internalize without questioning much the language we are born into. Wolfson is not born into a new language just like every mortal being is; he builds a new language that he places himself in. In this crazy project, naturally, parents, ancestors and the primal scene cease to exist. Wolfson’s project of parsing his mother tongue in order to create a new language is essentially a frantic project of recreating the world. I suggest we do not take this craze as only a delirium but see it as the effort of a subject trying to make himself happen, to write his history with his own means. We should not forget that Freud has interpreted delirium as an attempt to heal. Although the language Wolfson has created in order to survive as a subject and perhaps reborn is delirious, it carries hope for the subject. This hope stems from the transfer of the consonant letters broken off of the mother’s spoken words into a foreign language, French, that is the father’s mother tongue. The existence of a foreign language is Wolfson’s salvation. The mother’s estranging, terrifying, dumbfounding and “foreign” voice will be silenced, but the consonant letters in this voice will become vocal in a foreign language, will be heard, internalized and finally embraced. The foreign language will serve an encapsulating function and will provide shelter for these consonant letters. At the same time, the elements in the mother that are perceived as foreign will only become tame thanks to the alpha function that ensures thought, the self-reflexive function[1]of that language, and will become familiar and ultimately be embraced by Wolfson in a foreign language.

Thanks to this weird method that familiarizes the foreign, Wolfson will have the chance to be born again with the father’s language that softens and humanizes the mother’s voice. In the fantastic primal scene in which Wolfson brings together his mother’s and father’s languages and embraces the history, law and rules of linguistics, it would not be far-fetched to say that ultimately, Wolfson embraces his own history with its laws and rules. In other words, Wolfson eventually creates his mother and father by bringing them together using language in the context of the history, mechanics, rules and laws of linguistics in order to become the subject of his personal history. Although ultimately he has created a new language and therefore a new world on his own, his origins have survived despite being injured by schizoparanoid attacks.

But throughout this process, that is, in this mad process in which the subject fights to become existent, can one talk about the symbolization of the mother in this primal scene in which the mother-father coupling is reconstructed? I am talking about the mother being symbolized as a separate, whole object. What does this mean? What does symbolization or being symbolized mean? This is quite a vast topic and the work of psychoanalysts such as Freud, Klein, Ferenczi, Green, Roussillon and Piera Aulagnier include a comprehensive analysis of this concept. We can suggest that Freud in a sense speaks of symbolization when he talks about the baby’s hallucination of the breast once he faces its absence. But we can allege that the primary condition for our psyche to represent processes such as emotions, feelings and thought and to make them visible and tangible is symbolization. To think is to think upon something, that is, it has an object. We can assume that we kill a priori objects when we think, just like Hegel says, although in a different frame “words kill things”. In other words, we need to put a distance between objects and ourselves in order to be able to think. When we are engaged with objects, we cannot have a space to think about them, that is, a transitional space. Just like the baby has to face the lack of the breast in order to hallucinate about the breast, there needs to be a lack of the object for thought to form. Symbolization starts with the lack of object. In other words, mourning sits at the foundation of symbolization.

M.Klein’s article from 1930 is educational about this topic. According to Klein, in the first months in which infantile sadism reaches its peak, the baby and later on the child casts his emotions and feelings like deep anger, hatred and jealousy towards his first object onto objects around him like a ball of fire. If this outside object is say round, this round object becomes a breast and is treated as if it is a breast. The round object and the breast become equivalent. Some children, just like is the case with M. Klein’s Dick, become so nested in some objects that they do not play with those objects. This is because objects are evaluated to be equivalent to things they represent. For example, if a child who thinks that the ball he wants to kick is the breast itself and not a representation of it, then he cannot kick the ball since he is experiencing and feeling as if he is kicking the breast. What’s more, this child may not be able to speak later on due to this inhibition, that is, he cannot replace the object with some symbolical sounds or phonemes. We see this hardship in autistic or deep psychotic children. We learn that Wolfson too has had difficulty in speaking in his childhood and difficulty reading later on in school.[2]

Klein places the identification concept that he has taken over from Frenczi as the foreground in the symbolization process. The baby identifies the pieces in his body with objects in the outside world; the first sense-making process is done through his body. But Klein postulates another thing in addition to what Frenczi has said: the child, because he wants to destroy and harm these organs at the same time, later on starts fearing the objects that represent them and thinks that the same thing will happen to him through retaliation. This fear and anxiety bring him to identifying his organs with other objects. Because these objects will transform into feared objects when the time comes, the child will always set up new equations. This forms the basis of the child’s search for new objects and the symbolism itself. Another way to put it, according to Klein on the basis of changing objects lies anxiety rather than seeking pleasure. In a sense, when we go from a symbol to another – which is the process with all activities concerning sense-making, especially with scientific research – it is as if a continuous fear and anxiety is following us. One can argue that the basis of the deep anxiety during creative processes is the violence in the root of this sense-making, that is, in symbolization.

Babies and later on children resort to tangible objects first in order to shape and interpret their inner happenings. It would probably not be wrong to say that the writing process is subject to the same processes. Words, the sounds they harbor and the written form of these sounds correspond to and suck in all of these psychic experiences; the person who writes establishes a relationship from within his psyche with these letters, words and sentences, just like the child’s first relationships with objects. Writing, in this sense, is not just using language as a tool. This is proved to us by inhibitions and emotions that some writers experience. For example, Freud tells Fliess that he has written The Interpretation of Dreams “as if he were completely in a dream”.

Now, going back to our protagonist Wolfson, and bearing in mind his deep schizoparanoid anxiety about his mother, can we talk about the symbolization of the mother? Of course not, since for the mother to symbolize, the mother has to be annihilated first in order for the mother to exist in the representational level. This is possible if it is accepted that the mother lives as a separate object and independent of the subject. This is the fundamental condition of being able to separate from the mother. Yet, Wolfson’s whole life is set on warding off the mother. In Wolfson’s phantasy, the mother is a monster that is to be wary of, like a challenging rival that is conditioned to win. For Wolfson whose paranoid anxiety is centered upon the mother and her voice and language, an escape from this terrifying world is possible only through creating a new language and a new world in which he can make himself existent. Hence, as a result of this attempt which we can call a rebirth, his mother can transform into a less dangerous being and his anxiety is soothed to an extent, even though not completely. As Freud asserts, delirium presents here as an attempt to heal in the new language that is built through translation. One can talk about the process of writing and preparing for print the second book in which the mother is symbolized and she has obtained a more realistic dimension following this attempt. This process is closely related to depressive position and contains findings regarding the symbolization of the author’s mourning and the mother eventually being internalized as a good object.

Firstly I should speak about the way this second book is presented. The front and back covers of this book are black; there is the unabridged name of the book in white letters: My Mother, the Musician, Died of a Malignant Disease at Midnight Connecting Tuesday to Wednesday, in the middle of May of 1977, in the Memorial Hospice in Manhattan. The book’s long title may have caught your attention. This title is an example of Wolfson’s desire to reflect reality word for word. The mother passes away at quarter past midnight. Wolfson is at his mother’s bedside; the nurse notifies him of the death and calls the doctor in charge. A few minutes later the doctor comes and prepares the death certificate. Wolfson does not pay any attention to this certificate at first. But a year later he somehow gets a hold of the certificate once again and reads on it that the doctor has last seen his mother alive at 00:15. Wolfson thinks this is nonsensical and of course gets angry, just like he does with everything that is outside of his own system of thought and his reasoning. He is angry because this sentence in the certificate does not fully reflect reality. It had taken the doctor a few minutes to come, but according to the certificate the doctor was on the patient’s side until her dying breath. To fix this “mistake” Wolfson appeals to official authorities. But of course he does not receive a reply! Wolfson makes a title out of this, in order for the mistake to be corrected and recorded. This desire to establish the truth also shows us a dimension of the relationship Wolfson has with writing. It is as if Wolfson is saying, whatever that can be talked about should also be written; writing should in a sense be a perfect reflection of the world. We can see here that the act of writing has been idealized and that it has been owned up as not only a therapeutic tool but also, as I assume is the case in all writers, an act of sublimation by Wolfson. We can claim that after the attempt to create a new world through translation, now with the experience of writing, experiences have been symbolized in written words and the style of writing. And again, we can claim that a transitionnal space is now possible for Wolfson through writing. If translation has provided a new container, a new home, it can be said that writing is the potential space in which he can freely use and play with words and sentences. In this potential space, we meet an interesting writer instead of a case that has been classified with a diagnosis of schizophrenia; just like Beckett and all writers in the new novel wave who resorts to many different uses of language.

I now turn back to the book after this short digression about the act of writing. In the book which is presented in the color of mourning, there are seven chapters and each chapter starts with a black page. Another feature of the book is that it has photographs of Wolfson’s mother, Rose Minarsky. The book is almost a historical document, witnessing the life and death of the mother. That is, in other words, Wolfson says that there was such a woman, she was born on some date, she lived a life as such and died as such. There is a representation of the mother, a presentation of her and therefore symbolization. At the same time, this historical witnessing contains an emotion, compassion. For example, at the end of the first chapter, there is an old, black and white photo of the mother in which she has posed holding her elementary school diploma in one hand and a bouquet of flowers in the other. Wolfson has made a note under this photograph, stressing that her mother has not continued her education after elementary school. At the end of the second chapter is a portrait of her teenage mother: “The most beautiful portrait of my mother” Wolfson has written under it. The expression “my mother” is noteworthy since at the beginning of the book he refers to her as Rose or just with the letter R. In the first book, he had referred to her as “the mother of the schizophrenic”. At the end of the third chapter is a photo of Wolfson with his mother; Wolfson should probably be around 2-3 years old. It is as if this photo from 1934 has some stillness and sadness. The way the mother and son have leaned on each other undoubtedly brings to mind the absence of the father, even though the birth father is alive. Another thing that stands out is that the mother and son have posed to the camera at the same level. Could their existence on the same plane reflect Wolfson’s feeling of being trapped in his mother’s world? At the end of the fourth chapter, we see Wolfson in college in a class photograph. He has a mischievous look on his face. At the end of the fifth chapter, there is a photo of Wolfson as a senior in the 1951-1952 educational year wearing a graduation cap. There is a note under the photograph indicating that he could not graduate from college. He is smiling in the photo but it is as if his eyes are sad. The photograph at the end of the sixth chapter belongs to 1984 and is thus from his 50s. There isn’t a photograph at the end of the seventh chapter, there is a black page. In any case, we can claim that the actual mourning starts only after that moment.

The point that stands out the most in this panorama of photographs is that in his work that is about his mother’s death, Wolfson presents himself from his childhood to his middle ages in addition to his mother’s life, that is, that he shows the continuity of generations as well as the differences. In this presentation that is worldlier and more realistic, Wolfson presents his existence in a plain manner. The mother is a beautiful and talented mother, far from being a monster. Wolfson introduces her as “my musician mother”. In this second book, we feel the mother in a different way. While in the first book her scary and even terrifying characteristics were presented in almost a fantastic dimension, in this book the mother is both a real and affectionate mother. She is both compassionate and careful about her son’s pathology. She respects his obsession about English and we see that she talks to him in Yiddish in the second book. Wolfson is also as diligent with her as he had never been. He says towards the end of the book, that is when the mother has gotten weaker and has a few days left: “My mother was talking to me in Yiddish as much as she could; her effort to succumb to my exorbitant ways despite her pitiful state moved me.” Moving from this expression of emotion that is so rare in the two books, we can say that the mourning process is at work and that the mother can now be perceived as a whole, unique and other object. The mother is also careful and respectful about all of her son’s needs; she shortly and distantly reminds him about his daily affairs from clothing to eating. Wolfson visits her more often when she is in her death bed at the hospital and when she catches him looking at his watch, she tells him compassionately that it is late and he should go home and come back the next day. Again at the hospital, she tells her husband Sam that she loves him very much and asks him implicitly to look after Louis after she dies.

The plot of the book is as follows: The mother has a notebook in which she notes down every task that her illness (ovarian cancer) requires, such as doctor’s appointments, test results, expenses made, taxi fares etc. For example, one might read: 21 June 1976, Flushing Hospital, Hematology service. Based on these notes, Wolfson starts writing 5 years after the mother’s death. His writing follows his mother’s chronological notes and he analyzes cancer to its finest details. For example, Wolfson follows research about this topic from scientific journals, and even consults a famous oncologist from Germany. He attributes his mother’s cancer to her having spent too much time in front of the television and her diet, and thinks that it has psychological origins. He carries out research on these, goes to libraries and makes effort to prove his opinion right. Perhaps Wolfson is struggling to fix the mother’s reproductive organs that he thinks he has mutilated?

The book has two main themes. The first is the hospital notes and the other is Wolfson’s passion for horse races and bids. It is not just victory and gaining a narcissistic repair thanks to money that sits at the basis of this passion. There is also hope that the destructive phantasies become real. But one can think of this destructiveness as his anticipation that this world, in which he thinks many things are wrong, will come to an end and with this end that the gates of a new world will open up to him. In the beginning of the book, Wolfson says “One day if I win a big lottery, I may speak up from the front page of a monthly magazine and advise everyone to commit suicide.” According to Wolfson, this world is not worthy of living in and Wolfson’s hope is that a nuclear war which he anxiously anticipates every day watching the news erupts. Wolfson calls such a war a redemptive Apocalypse. Wolfson says, in another part of the book: “The Greek have said: The greatest happiness that a person can experience is to not be born at all. We have taken what was given us.” To not have been born, to stay in the mother’s womb, to live a life there and to communicate in a pre-language manner with the mother, that is, to correspond with the mother in a pre-English language. Bearing in mind Wolfson’s and in general schizophrenics’ clumsy and awkward ways in this world, such a hypothesis cannot be rejected. The end of this world is Wolfson’s hope for a new world. The idea of an ending, or death, is foreign to Wolfson as can be gathered from this.

But the mother’s illness and death brings a new dimension to this apocalyptic world. What is mentioned here is not that the mother will really die or that she dies eventually, but that this death is objectivized through writing. Writing has at last carried the mother to a representational level and has realized her actual death during the writing process of these two books. Just like the correction of the time of death and registration to the reality dimension, these two books are historical documents witnessing the existence and later the death of the mother. But as a work of literature, as a narrative, writing is a way of resisting death. The mother will now be fixed in a work of literature and her existence will resist time. And maybe with this way, both mourning and coping with absence – which lies at the base of symbolization – will be possible. The object will now have a place both outside and inside, and with internalization the inner and outer spaces will be separated, and an inner world in which there is emotion, thought and meaning will emerge. What Wilson expresses at the end of his second book is not just anger but also compassion and understanding. And this is a sign that depressive position is no longer too far from Wolfson.

I have approached Louis Wolfson’s work from the perspective of it being a witness to the violence of the symbolization processes and a painful experience of becoming a subject. This work in which literature meets the clinic not only joins two different disciplines but also enables new meetings of language and theories of psychoanalysis. For example, Wolfson’s observations at the end of his first book about the emotional motivation of people involved with linguistics opens up new horizons for us spiritual health professionals. Wolfson stresses that these people do not treat their native languages as a very natural thing. According to the author, these people have “a repressed, unconscious desire to see their native languages as an exotic mixture full of idioms”. I think this is also true for psychoanalysts and joining psychoanalysis with linguistics is there right from the beginning in Freud’s work. Lacan, later on, has placed language and meaning at the basis of his practice with his preamble “the unconscious is organized like a language”. This work can be called Lacan and Klein meets post-Kleinists like Bion. Wolfson shows, thinks and makes us think about the theoretical dimension of the relationship our psychism has with language. But what makes him think of this is ultimately him getting to know about his emotions through writing and thus joining meaning and emotion. Ultimately Wolfson speaks of “desire” and points to the emotional dimension that language has.

Whereas meaning has been placed at the seat of honor in Lacanist psychoanalysis, the emotional dimension had been developed by Klein and the post-Kleinists. This work has been carried out by looking out for these two cornerstones of our psychism. I thank you for listening to me while saluting Louis Wolfson, who has enabled us to discover these archaic pieces of psychic life by communicating with us and generously exhibiting his intimacy and subjectivity. - Bella Habip

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