8%
PARTISAN REVIEW
be forced to consider woman as a castrated being, this then evok–
ing such terror as to determine his future impotence. This discovery
that women and especially his mother, were castrated beings, made
when under the care of the ailing Frances, must have been retrojected
on the past and his real lost mother; that mother who, ever after,
ruled his inner life. And the Black Cat is hated less, indeed, for
avoiding its master, than for the "frightful appearance" of the mutila–
tion it bears.
This, then, is the real reason why the cat must die. But why
must it hang, rather than be put to death in some other manner?
The answer is in retribution for the crime the mother committed. In
the manner in which the cat is punished, the mother may read the
nature of her offense.
Another imaginative work, one of the most famous ever con–
ceived, shows the mother similarly hanged. This is the key myth and
story of CEdipus, borrowed by Freud to describe a universal complex
in man. While CEdipus, in the myth, as the son-husband, puts out his
eyes in punishment for his incest, Jocasta, the mother-wife, chooses
to die by hanging.
Though, however, from the early days of psychoanalysis, there
was no difficulty in interpreting CEdipus's self-imposed punishment as
symbolizing castration, it was less clear to the psychoanalyst why
Jocasta should choose this form of death.
This is no idle question. The kind of death people choose,
whether as suicide for themselves, or in fiction for their heroes is
never, in fact, decided by chance, but always rigidly determined
by psychic factors. Let us now see whether
The Black Cat
may not
finally help us to solve the problem posited by Jocasta's hanging.
That of the hung cat we have already answered in analyzing
Loss of Breath.
There, the impotent hero, castrated of his symbolic
breath, in effect, has his penis symbolically restored when he is
hanged. Hanging, as we saw, is equated in the unconscious with the
rephallization
of the victim, both because hanging is thought to
determine ejaculation
in extremis
and because the suspended body, as
hanging
object, is equated with the penis. Thus, the hanged man,
in toto,
comes to represent a most important member, present in men
but not in women.
