Demeter-Persephone Complex, Entangled Aerials of the Psyche, and Sylvia Plath

The sexual content of Sarah's actual accounts, related to the enigma of her own passage into womanhood and the desire to share the secrets of a sexual desire manifested by some older woman figure (a teacher) are ignored; the meaning for her (as daughter) of maternal preg- nancy is reduced simply to stubbornly signifying maternal abandonment. 1-6 Christopher Bollas insists that Jonathan's mother had been "traumatizing" (.Shadow of the Object 188) during babyhood while he himself enters an analyst-analysand "hallucination-à-deux" (Shadow of the Object 181)-a countertransference psychosis to which his own interpretations might have contributed (184). Repeated momentary hate flashes risk fixation upon the real mother figure through a symbolic articulation of her being a toxic " cause," which in turn might "attack" her offspring's own self from the inside, immediately or in the future, whether or not the subject becomes a parent and enters the symbolic category under attack ("adult," "mother"). No mother gave me birth-that's why in everything but marriage I support the man with all my heart, a true child of my father Zeus. [...]that woman's death I won't consider more significant (verse 940) An Athena born from no-mother is a phallic phantasy; matricide is a phal- lic solution to symbiosis. A matrixial collaboration between the generations and a caring attention to the borderlinking aerials to the (m)Other are particularly important in a context of a failure of the paternal figure (for which mothers, in our society and culture, are often blamed too.) Demeter-Persephone variations (complexities) bring into awareness the woman-mother desirability as subject, the infant's non-narcissistic fascinance by the m/Other (Ettinger, "Fascinance"), the investments of primary love, symbolic recognition of the womb time-space, recognition of the (m) Other not as a mirror image of the self (recognizing and loving the Other as other, not self), loss of desirability, the becoming a crone, youth and old age, trans-generational transmission, and aspects of inspiration and initiation in/by the feminine.