The Letter, Issue 69, 2020, pages 57-64
Nocturnal Whispers:
What could be concealed within Freud’s Primal Scene?
Donna Redmond
While acknowledging that the inevitable encounter with language is the traumatic encounter par excellence that structures subjectivity, this paper explores a fantasy that Freud remarked on many times, namely the fantasy of the primal scene. In focusing on this moment, be it real or imagined, Freud, in his scrutiny of infantile sexuality, draws our attention to the materiality of body and the centrality of the drives and explores their implications with regard to subjectivity.
Keywords: infantile sexuality: primal scene: fantasy: Freud: Pascal Quignard
The poet Galway Kinnell’s playful yet rueful meditation on the discomfiture that children can cause by interrupting an intimate moment between adults, is presented in his poem ‘After Making Love We Hear Footsteps’.[1]
Allow me to begin by quoting a selection of lines from it….
let there be that heavy breathing,
or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house
and he will wrench himself awake
and make for it on the run - as now we lie together, after making love…
and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,
his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child…
this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making
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