The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 1984/4. [antikvár]

A PATIENT WHO HAD TROUBLE WITH GEOGRAPHY BY LEONARD SHENGOLD, M.D. Aspects of geography are important in relation to the establishment of body ego, since they inevitably supply from the external world the early symbols that represent in the mind the basic elements of infantile experience in regard to body parts, functions, and relationships with primal objects. The accretional intertwining of all subsequent psychic conflicts can therefore be expressed in symbolic geographic terms. These conflicts center on the developmentally evolving meanings of the mother's body as epitomized in the riddle of the Sphinx. Illustration of the concepts includes a brief clinical report and selected literary and mythological examples. "Geography is destiny," Napoleon is reputed to have said. Freud's transformation of this is familiar. Here is his earliest statement of it: The excremental is all too intimately and inseparably bound up with the sexual; the position of the genitals-inter urinas et faeces-remains the decisive and unchangeable factor. One might say here, varying a well-known saying of the great Napoleon: 'Anatomy is destiny' (1912, p. 189). Freud "here" locates the genitals. The full Latin quotation-we are born between urine and feces (my emphasis)-not only connects sexuality with the excremental but alludes to the mother, her body, and her priváté parts. Freud varied a saying of one of his altér egos, the conqueror Napoleon ("I am nothing but by temperament a conquistador," Freud wrote to Fiiess in 1900 [Jones, 1953, p. 348]), substituting anatomy for geography (thing