Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila

SYLVIA LECLERCQ, fast, reading and underlining. Clearly, this publicity for an amorous imagination that converts suffering into a gemstone and crystallizes masochism into self-overcoming, without letting itself be affected by the exaltation it rests upon, has nothing in common with the Freudian scalpel. Because the interpretation of transference/countertransference proceeds by means of subtraction, whereas Teresa amplifies in order to magnify; only thus can she render secure the inner being of the loved lover. Freud operates per via di levare, he writes, like a sculptor using the chisel of free association to chip away the patient’s defenses and uncover the infantile impasses of the capacity for loving and thinking. In aid of this dismantling he is armed with the discovery of the unconscious, based on the Oedipus: killing of the Father and identification with his ideality and power, incestuous desire for the Mother, the accidents of which exhort from our psychic bisexuality the emergence of speaking-thinking-loving beings.

Teresa, for her part, proceeds like the painter of a baroque cupola: applying layer upon layer, per via di porre, adding twist upon high-wire twist to her tale — inviting her sisters and readers to dreams and hallucinations of amorous success, a success warranted by the grace of the Trinity and the indisputable devotion of Mary and Joseph, the parental couple.¹³ Pointing out all the while what a fiction it was, a necessary game of infinite communication; but since the experience creates a saving neo-reality, it is the Truth. What’s more, this amorous intoxication does not display as a liberty taken with the transcendence underwritten by the paternal function and mellowed by the Marian cult, not at all! It merely, if I can put it that way, advances, with extravagant ease, through the fundaments of Christian ethics.

(Silence. Head in hands.)

SYLVIA LECLERCQ, enunciating slowly, underlining. To sum up, if Teresa’s lucidity unwraps the stages and components of amorous passion…she does not aim to be delivered from it, as promised by the adventure of analysis; on the contrary, she wants to enjoy it the more, and so demonstrate the ineluctable logic of the biblical and evangelical premise. While Freud questions and dismantles the patient’s defenses in order to leave the subject free to reconstruct his amorous and rational bonds, Teresa, on the contrary — in her infinite traversal of the Oedipus complex — never suspects that God is a question. For the Beloved is a strange Archimedes’ lever that sends one precisely inside oneself, where the Other dwells. It enables one to let go of the bristling array of defenses and fears, and thus to discover, along with the enigmas of love, well-being itself, the good and supreme Being. She would agree with Leibniz that “since we are beings, being is innate in us”;¹⁴ she went on to prove it by erecting the inner dwelling places of a being that only is if he or she is in love. While beating the Lord at chess, it doesn’t occur to Teresa for one second that the game could be possible without His august and loving Fatherhood; after all, the player’s desire reaches its acme in the avowal that she longs to have a child from Him, to become the Mother of God, Sovereign in her own right. Divine. (Long silence.) Reading her, listening to her, it seems the Other in me is not infernal, like the unconscious. It is forcibly uncertain, or prey to the devil. But it is definitively lovable if I can find it in me to listen to it, articulate it, and write it, as a lover/loved.

And yet, after this long trek in Teresa’s company, I maintain (measured, poised, confident voice, occasionally emphatic) that Freud, while embarking on a completely different course, could not be ignorant of the advantages of the interior dwelling places discovered by La Madre. What “substance” was the dauntless Viennese sculptor chiseling into, if not that enigmatic transference/countertransference that he never really theorized, leaving that task to the female psychoanalysts who were the first disciples of Melanie Klein? Alert to the double Judeo-Christian alliance concealed at the heart of the Spanish sixteenth century,¹⁵ Teresa amplified in her own way the diabolical resistances we each oppose to the flourishing of our amorous representations, themselves founded on a no less amplified need to believe, which succeeds to the oceanic dependence on the maternal container and the primal identification with the Father of personal prehistory.¹⁶