The experience of frustration is what we know after helplessness and before satisfaction. We have made a riddle of our feelings of frustration, of our fury, our hatred. It was barred from Kane’s conscious thought; even as he lay dying it was a sledge Kane called for, not his mother. The riddle Orson Welles sets out for journalist Jerry Thompson to unravel is that of Kane’s unconscious – how did Kane stop the knowledge of the frustration of his incestuous desire from becoming conscious? Loss, rage, longing. Incestuous, unbearable feelings. It’s turned into a riddle because we can never go there, turn back, must never get what we want, and yet we never stop wanting it.
‘In the 20s everything had the oedipal complex at its core, yet I knew the troubles started earlier’, (Winnicott, 1962: 172). Winnicott was talking about frustration’s complex relationship with satisfaction. The way our incestuous desire becomes an enigma or an ‘unthought known’ is what sets us up: it’s how w e have dealt with that frustration that defines it’s clandestine influence. Winnicott believed it was a good enough mother that sets the child up: ‘The good-enough mothers…starts off with an almost complete adaptation to her infant’s needs, and as time proceeds she adapts less and less completely, gradually, according to the infant’s growing ability to tolerate the results of frustration‘, (Winnicott, 1972: 95). Winnicott’s good enough mother spoons out doses of frustration according to what she feels her child can bear In this way she oversees an environment in which the infant might invent, create, can become, because it’s an environment where the doses of frustration can be borne; the known does not need to be thought about. Winnicott’s attention to the capacity to be alone is essentially connected to this.
This good enough person upon whom the child can depend manages the child’s feelings of frustration in such a way that the child can adapt his expectations of omnipotence. Wilfred Bion had a more dramatic take; to avoid frustration, to fail to adapt, might be the start of a potentially catastrophic journey that; ‘involves the assumption of omniscience as a substitute for learning from experience and of thoughts and thinking’, (Bion, 1961: 112). These are the omnipotent expectations of satisfaction that are set up in the chain of reactions Freud speaks of in The Origins of Psychoanalysis. Expectations embedded long before Freud’s grandson played fort da—a paradigm moment in Freud’s thinking on frustration and satisfaction – and the emergence of any principle of reality. This may be why Winnicott was so sure that
…there is no possibility whatsoever for the infant to proceed from the pleasure principle to the reality principle…unless there is a good enough mother (Winnicott, 1972: 28).
Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Bion, Lacan; there’s some convergance. Unless Freud’s small lover can turn away from his longing there is a more ominous potentiality. Each make connections between the negotiation of frustration and considerations on sanity.
‘The fundamental thing, and the criterion for all later capacity for adapting to reality is the degree in which they are able to tolerate the deprivations that result from the oedipal situation’, (Klein, 1926: 128). Fifty years earlier Freud was theorizing that if disturbing, (frustrating) ideas couldn’t have emotional charge displaced, (ie repressed), they might be totally abolished, as if cast out of the psyche; ‘the ego rejects the incompatible idea together with its affect, and behaves as if the idea had never occurred to the ego at all. But the moment this has been successfully done the subject is in psychosis’ (Freud, 1924: 149).