Repeating and Remembering

[This article contains spoilers]

Pain is oftentimes too difficult to face head-on, and this is particularly true of a certain kind of pain we call ‘trauma’. Freud early on said that what we cannot remember, we are fated to repeat. Namely, what happens when we face an event so difficult that it extends beyond our capacity to make meaning from it; i.e., to make it speak.

Traumatic injuries, from natural disasters to abuse to the death of a parent at a young age, are just those memories that Freud evokes: ones that we cannot remember exactly, so we have to repeat it (in action). This is the crux of psychoanalytic treatment in some sense — how can one speak about that which one cannot speak? This classic Wittgensteinian moment of our psychic lives is opened up beautifully in Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron (2023).

Just Like Mom

To put it simply: loss is trauma, and vice versa. This is not to valorize loss or to minimize trauma. Loss in the psychoanalytic sense means something more than simply losing your wallet or keys. It evokes a deeper sense of a basic existential lack that we all carry with us; something deep inside of us which reverberates through our whole being with the message: “You are incomplete.” While different psychoanalysts and philosophers will try to articulate this differently — probably based on their own particular relation to loss — all would agree that the unexpected and violent death of one’s mother at a young age would be safely put into this category of loss. And particularly, of a traumatic event (one that isn’t just basic to the human condition, but a peculiar experience of a small minority of people).

While the majority of Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron does not need to be summarized, it needs to be briefly set up to explore this question loss and repetition.

Mahito, in The Boy and the Heron, experiences just a tragedy. His mother is killed in a hospital during an air raid over Tokyo during WWII. Him and his father move to the countryside some years later, where his father’s new wife is awaiting their arrival. Natsuko, this new mother-figure, is pregnant with Mahito’s soon-to-be brother.

When he arrives at the new village in the countryside, Mahito does not fit in. He gets into a fight with the boys at school, and is forced to stay at home while his father tries to “get vengeance” on the child menace who inflicted pain onto Mahito. Meanwhile, Mahito, clearly unhappy and vaguely dissociated, meanders about the grounds of his new massive home, builds a bow and arrow, and wonders about the apparently magical tower and gray heron that lurks nearby.

One of Mahito’s earliest lines in the film comes near the beginning, when he first meets Natsuko off the train with his father. It is him narrating, saying, “She looked just like mom.” This should clue us into what might be happening in Mahito’s unconscious: this isn’t mom, but she is similar. We then have to ask, why is she similar?

For Mahito, the obvious answer is: because this is new-mom, similar to old-mom in function and authority.

On Storks

There are two lines in Freud and Lacan that have troubled me in their meaning for some time now, but I can’t help but feeling that they’re related. First, Freud’s following statements in the Three Essays:

About the same time as the sexual life of the child reaches its first rich development, from the age of three to five, there appear the beginnings of that activity which are ascribed to the impulse for knowledge and investigation … for we have learned from psychoanalysis that the inquisitiveness of children is directed to sexual problems unusually early and in an unexpectedly intensive manner; indeed, curiosity may perhaps first be awakened by sexual problems. (Basic Writings (A. A. Brill Trans.), pp. 562–63)

Second, Lacan’s remark in the “Instance of the Letter”:

…little Hans, left in the lurch at the age of five by the failings of his symbolic entourage, and faced with the suddenly actualized enigma to him of his sex and his existence develops — under the direction of Freud and his father, who is Freud’s disciple — all the possible permutations of a limited number of signifiers in the form of a myth, around the signifying crystal of his phobia. (Ecrits, p. 432).

It appears to me that, when read together, we come to the following observation: the existence of the body, and of its feelings and origins, is a thing of wonder to the child. And it is this wander that is narrowed, sublimated into curiosity and knowledge. Put more succinctly: desire and knowledge are closely correlated.

And since desire is rooted in the body, knowledge is directed from and to there as well. And in the context of Mahito, it is the curiosity of his own existence that drives much of his infatuation with Natsuko. She not only represents Mahita’s mother in her relation to her father, her (unknown to him) sibling-hood to his mother, and her role as mother — but also because of her pregnancy. She, too, gives birth. And giving birth is a thing of amazement to young children, who always betray their curiosity withy questions. Even now, adults joke now and then by saying, “When a man and woman love each other very much…” This joke can be read as a ripple effect of this infantile infatuation of the body and its origins, particularly of one’s own.

In The Boy and the Heron, we see many references to childbirth. Most prominently, the scene with the Wararas: pre-human spirits who fly up during certain nights to be born as people. There is something enigmatic about this universe, Miyazaki is telling us, that concerns Mahito’s “actualized enigma” of his “sex and his existence.”

So Mahito’s search for Natsuko can be a repetition of two things: (a) of the (loss of) his mother; (b) of his failure to establish the grounds of his existence in his own world, which is emphasized by his and his fathers’ move from Tokyo and his inability to ‘fit in’ in the rural community.

Repetition and Creativity

But repetition is never, or hardly ever, merely repetition of the same. In fact, something changes with each moment. Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” is a great example of this: in a single song Reich manages to draw the listener into monotonous repetition of a single phrase played by 18 musicians; but each time the phrase repeats, it sounds like one minor difference is made, until the phrasing sounds almost entirely different in content, but similar in form.

Repetition of traumatic events works the same way, albeit less glamorously (and less consciously). As Mari Ruti claims:

Nor is any instance of recovery entirely identical to previous (or future) recoveries. In the adult, this variation obviously takes more sophisticated forms, but the principle holds, so that even when we repeat, we never repeat in precisely the same way; no matter how symptomatic our repetitions, we never live out our pain in exactly the same manner, but continuously invent new ways to sting ourselves. This is because repetition, like the sublimatory impulse it serves, is extraordinarily plastic: It finds infinite ways to approach its object so that when one route is obstructed, others take its place. (The Singularity of Being, p. 137)

The creative impulse, i.e., sublimation, “demands variety so ardently that even when it reiterates the old, it produces something new” (p. 138). In modernist literature, like Faulkner, this is accomplished by using the same line, typically mundane in nature, multiple times throughout the book or even on the same page. Something happens to the third, fourth, or fifth time we read the line: it begins to mean something different. How can this happen? Why does repetition create new things? Let us pose this to Miyazaki.

Mahito frequently encounters blockages to his quest for his Natsuka, for his lost mother, the ultimate sublime object. In classic Miyazakian fashion, the story gets more and more absurd the deeper we get into it. He does not yield anything to us about the world in which the characters are thrown, and he doubles down as the story unfolds. We could say that the obstacles get increasingly creative the closer we get to Natsuka. Not only is it geographico-dimensional distance, it’s also the existence of an ocean. And not only an ocean, but a political organization of parakeets built upon the symbolic monarchy of a king-figure whose people feel oppressed by their god… and so on.

We could read this as Mahito’s constant and unconscious deployment of delay in reaching his goal: to rescue his mother. This can be translated as: an attempt to re-live with the intent of mastering and overcoming the traumatic event of the loss of his mother. Since he was not able to save her then (despite his effort), he will try to do so now, although in a different way. It isn’t exactly clear why he feels motivated to help the servants search for Natsuka in the first place when she goes missing. There is no particularly moving connection between the two, yet he launches himself into the woods to rescue her. She represents a second chance. Note the repetition of the symbol of fire when he finds Natsuko’s birthing chamber, the same element which killed his actual mother.

But the story is not only about being frustrated, or else this would be the story about symptoms, not sublimation. In undergoing such trials to save Natsuko, Mahito invents a world along the way. And this is how we stamp our own singularity onto the world. Mahito teaches us a very useful lesson: we are all marked by loss, and there is, to an extent, no complete covering up of this loss. The best we can do is recreate a world each time we try to achieve the unachievable.

Don’t Forget

As Mahito, Natsuko, and the Heron-Man return to their world, the Heron-Man instructs Mahito that he should probably forget everything. Is this not Freud’s injunction that we began with?

What we don’t remember must be worked through in repetition.

Photo creds: https://reason.com/2023/12/08/hayao-miyazakis-the-boy-and-the-heron-is-a-dream-like-swan-song-for-a-great-animated-filmmaker/