The son figure in Marina Tsvetaeva's writings in the light of Heinz Kohut's self-psychology.(Critical Essay)

Publication: West Virginia University Philological Papers

Publication Date: 22-SEP-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 West Virginia University, Department of Foreign Languages

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) is considered one of the major Russian poets of the twentieth century. The scholarship on Tsvetaeva usually investigates her works in close conjunction with her tragic life. (1) While Russian scholars concentrate on the hard conditions of the poet's life both at home and abroad, they tend to miss the problems of Tsvetaeva's psyche. On the contrary, Western Slavists pay much attention to her dysfunctional family life. Some Slavic scholars attempt to analyze Tsvetaeva's oeuvre by applying archetypal mythical plots to it, such as the Orpheusmyth (2) or the myth about Demeter and Persephone. (3) Tsvetaeva's ways of shattering traditional gender roles have called forth the writings on her creativity of the feminist scholars. Sometimes Tsvetaeva is seen as a "powerful signifying woman who cannot enter, except through language, the other." (5) Svetlana Boym reconsiders Tsvetaeva's making of the self through examining both the literal and figurative death of the poet. (6)

Slavists note that Tsvetaeva repeatedly engages in mythologization of her relations with others. However, the generalized pattern, according to which Tsvetaeva's literary persona interacts with the male counterpart, remains underexamined. My analysis focuses on the narcissistic relations between Tsvetaeva's poetic persona and her beloved. I maintain that Tsvetaeva's persona employs the maternal as an important vehicle of her self-realization. In portraying her male addressees, the Tsvetaevan narrator attempts to fit them into the mold of the Son figure. She alternates between idealizing and mirroring transference processes, utilizing the Son figure representations to soothe her wounded narcissistic self.

The ideas of self-psychology, developed by the Austrian-American psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut (1913-1981), provide the theoretical ground for my analysis. The major concept of Kohut's theory is the notion of the selfobject. Selfobjects are idealized others who serve as repositories for lost infantile grandiosity. The narcissistic person experiences the other as a missing part of the self, that is, a selfobject. Kohut explains:

The intensity of the search for and of the dependency on these objects [people] is due to the fact that they are striven for as a substitute for the missing segments of the psychic structure. They are not objects (in the psychological sense of the term) since they are not loved or admired for their atiributes, and the actual features of their personalities, and their actions, are only dimly recognized. (7)

So, selfobjects are functions originally performed by others, which are internalized to form and maintain a structured, cohesive self. The Son figure is an important selfobject for Tsvetaeva's narrator. Tsvetaeva's narcissistic narrator is involved in a compulsive search for self-confirming responses from others in an attempt to counteract her innate sense of worthlessness. She feels worthwhile only if she is attached to someone she can idealize as an embodiment of the human perfection she permanently lacks. She demands complete dominance over selfobject others. Tsvetaeva often interprets the fact of having a son as the justification of a woman's physical and spiritual existence and even as the creative output of a female poet. In what follows, I will examine how Tsvetaeva employs the maternal...

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