Psychosomatics And Fanny Kaplan

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Psychosomatics and Fanny Kaplan

Psychoanalysis once began with Freud observing and listening to hysterics. In general, hysteria is a chronic neurotic disease with a breakdown in certain bodily functions and mental functioning. When emotional states and bodily symptoms are both playing and telling a story, very deep, often well, very reliably hidden from consciousness.

Psychosomatics - the area where hysteria is "queen of the fields". When doctors shrug their shoulders: well, it should work, sometimes there are no special organic lesions, but an organ or system does not work, or it works unpredictably, inexplicably.

When I reread the works of modern French psychoanalysts on psychosomatics and hysterical bodily symptoms, I went over the persons who would become an illustration. Fanny Kaplan. So many rays of the psychosomatic model converged here that you only have time to tell. And about crises of love relationships in the first place. How it works inside the psyche and why.

Love and hysteria

When Fanny Kaplan was in hard labor before the revolution, her case was marked "hysterical blindness." Which then became full, then the vision returned to the level when it was possible to see the outlines of objects and even examine something with a magnifying glass. Hard labor was for life, and even in Akatui - for the most dangerous criminals, a lost place. There were no prospects for treatment. But Fanny was examined by doctors every now and then. Firstly, because on such inmates and their interesting cases, you can exercise your medical skills. Secondly, because Fanny was a very attractive person even in the conditions there and in her condition. One doctor even got her transferred from Akatui to Chita, where the infirmary is better. And the convict was only 16 years old. Small, 156 cm, with luxurious hair that she did not cut like other nihilists and revolutionaries, a bright Jewish brunette with a half smile.

Half-child, half-woman. And this is a very important point for understanding the essence of this "branch" of psychosomatics. "Hysteria manifests itself through the emptiness of identification," writes Vicente Palomera in The Ethics of Hysteria.

And Lacan, describing the Stage of the Mirror, noted the absence in the present deep history of the hysterical identification with the Woman. She seems to be constantly doubting whether it is true or not. Some part of her is not sure of this and persistently, on the one hand, demonstratively assures others of this: look how much feminine there is in me, and this, and this, and pay attention to this. On the other hand, this part longs for a reflection of its image from others: confirm that I am a Woman, your responses will reassure and reassure me. And here comes another important part of the topic. Why hysterics often become like their beloved. They can mimic his environment, sincerely share his beliefs, hobbies, lifestyle, when "yours" becomes "mine." As a woman puts on a boyfriend's shirt, a hysterical woman pulls on the identity of a man, outwardly remaining within the framework of female sexuality, but inside there is some significant part of her, like Him. According to Freud, she has a lack of narcissistic identification. The other is the bank where, from his narcissism and his more stable identity, she will take permanent credit to “patch up” the stability of her system. In the guise of the object (the paradigm of his life and identity), the hysterics of any gender hides from the present. Who I really am, what I am is a topic that the hysteric knows and does not know, and seeks, and runs from it.

So Fanny Kaplan once followed her beloved Viktor Garsky, became like him. And even the fact that she took everything upon herself during interrogations was also part of the "his is mine" series.

This love of hers once abruptly turned her life around, and even ended it. According to one version, according to Garsky's note, she went to the plant where the attempt was made on Lenin's life. They met when she was 15. With 14 she worked as a seamstress. Real name - Dora Roitblat, a girl from a poor Jewish family with 8 children. Her father, an elementary school teacher, did not let her into this school himself and studied with her at home. From Volyn region, she went to work in Kiev, where in an atelier she met a sewing machine master Vitya Garsky, who was two years older. She is 15, he is 17. And the guy was very muddy, involved in various dark affairs. The first nickname is Mika. Dora and Mika. Bonnie and Clyde.

At first he robbed sewing workshops, for which he was known in Odessa as Sasha Beloshveinik, then shops. Having become an anarchist, he replenished the party treasury with robberies. Then this desperate couple ended up in a terrorist organization.

In 1906, an attempt was being made on the life of the governor. Mika was making a bomb, a courier came to their hotel for it. Dora was then with a passport in the name of Feig Kaplan (Fanny she will later be in hard labor, Fanny is translated from the Hebrew "Violet"). Dora carried the bomb out of the room, and there was an explosion. The courier died, she was concussed, Mika disappeared. With that concussion, in fact, the eyes did not suffer much from the fragments, rather the body. She was sentenced to death, she did not betray Mika. Then, due to being underage, the execution was changed to life-long hard labor. And further important dates. She was diagnosed with hysterical blindness only in 1908. It was at the time when Mika was arrested for robbing a bank in Odessa. From the prisoner's telegraphs, of course, she could not have been unaware of this. And at first, during interrogation, he suddenly said that then he did everything in the hotel, and she was just his woman, she just took out the bomb. The case was reopened, Feige-Fanny had a chance to see the white light. But then the case was closed again. And there were rumors that he backed out of his words.

Of course, for her, all this was a huge tragedy. Due to suicidal conversations and complete blindness, she was closed for two years in the infirmary. And here it is worth noting important points from the point of view of psychoanalysis.

Psychosomatics

Body and soul are communicating vessels, one but different, different, but one. We are talking about psychosomatics when the psychic register of experience cannot cope, it is blocked. Mental suffering is so significant that it is reduced by moving to the body. Physical pain takes the place of mental pain. At the same time, the erotic body disappears - a suffering body arises. The eyes are undoubtedly an erogenous zone associated with scopic attraction. To see is a great pleasure, to have eyes is to have the right to pleasure.

When psychic pain is transferred to the organ, its new meaning is invested. The organ begins to beep not as a zone with a pleasure function, but as a zone with a "horn" function, informing.

As noted in French psychoanalysis, the ethics of hysteria is the ethics of need. This is a story of deprivation. Libido deprivation, deprivation of connection with the object, deprivation through contact with the object in oneself. And pain is often the trick of the psychic through the physical. You are not with me, but you are with me, you are pain. And just as outer life was once organized around an object, life begins to "spin" around illness, pain, suffering. And this both destroys and consolidates, as it becomes a new organizing meaning, the essence of contact with oneself, with others and with the object, the history of the preservation of the object.

In general, Fanny's blindness came and went. The blind convict was looked after by her friend, a Socialist-Revolutionary woman, niece of the owner of the Dukat tobacco factory, Maria Spiridonova. She took the anarchist under her patronage and in the field of her party.

Everything changed after the revolution, when Fanny saw the light of day in every sense. She was released. The mention of Kaplan and the image in the general photo were in the Iskra newspaper No. 17 of 1917 under the heading Heroes of the Revolution.

She was released and began to see better. If she wanted to see Mika after 11 years of hard labor, she would have found him. But she didn't. Party comrades sent her to the sanatorium "House of Convicts" in Yevpatoria. And here - a new round of its history. New life brought new love.

Crimea

Although there is an opinion that the relationship between Kaplan and Lenin's brother Dmitry is just a legend, there are other sources that confirm this. For example, Semyon Reznik, a former editor of the ZhZL series of biographies, wrote about this in America in 1991. Viktor Baranchenko, an employee of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU, and Crimean historian Vyacheslav Zarubin also wrote about the "House of Convicts".

Dmitry Ulyanov had two weaknesses - wine and women. Despite the fact that he was a very talented doctor. In Crimea, at one time, he fearlessly fought cholera.

By the time Kaplan arrived in Crimea, Dmitry Ilyich had just married a second time. He took his wife away from his landlord. (By the way, before working as a medical doctor in Evpatoria, he served in Domodedovo, where a nurse gave birth to him. By the way, this boy was later found, his mother died of cholera, and Krupskaya raised him as a family. supreme dynasty , he was guarded, but watched that there were no steps along the party line).

So the new wife of Dmitry Ulyanov was far away, but the Crimea, with its trends of that time, disposed to novels. As local historians write, in Evpatoria after the revolution it was libidinous as never before. Society "Down with Shame" organized nudist beaches and "Athenian evenings" (orgies for educated people), where Dmitry Ulyanov was often seen. "Young, the blood boils, the body is brave." And not just one, but 28-year-old Fanny Kaplan. Because of blindness, she then moved around the city either with him or with those accompanying him. Companions noted that her eyesight at the resort had improved.

And here it is not only the healing effect of the place, the rest and positive emotions that is important. In somatization, the patient's ability to return from the eroticization of pain to the register of the enjoying erotic body is very important. Then grieving for the narcissistic loss of both the original and the secondary object ends (I will not talk about the initial loss of the primary object that laid the matrix). As eros and thanatos unite again, destruction, disorganization of the body stops. Libido is directed not to a fantasy object within itself, when illness is both a representation of a mental history and a link with the object, but to another, real one, and the hysteric receives a new identification through new relationships.

Dmitry Ulyanov sent Fanny to the Mecca of the visually impaired - Kharkov. There is still a Hirschman Eye Clinic there. Professor Hirschman performed an operation on Fanny, and his vision did not fall until he became blind, although it did not fully recover.

After the operation, the relationship between the doctor and the patient went wrong. Fanny left for Moscow. We will not talk about the history of the attempt on Lenin's life now, the official part of it is well known.

About Miku. She met Garsky by chance on the street, they spent the night at the hotel, after which he left.

There is evidence of his career in the party line. He was the commissar of the food detachment in his small homeland in Tiraspol. He was considered "Sverlov's man". He appointed Garsky as Commissioner of the Central Office of Military Communications - a mission to know everything about everything with the right to be everywhere. The repressions bypassed him, Garsky lived until 1956. Persistent libidinal object.

And the Kaplan case of an attempt on Lenin's life was reopened by the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation in the early 90s. It was conducted by the investigator-criminologist Vladimir Soloviev, the same one who investigated the murder of the royal family. Photo of Kaplan from his archive is very different, which is given by search engines upon request. The love story of Kaplan and Garsky with a mention of the Crimean events was filmed. In 2016, the Ukrainian film "My grandmother Fanny Kaplan" became the best at the London festival.