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

As a writer she shines a light on these fundamental logics, while not averse to pinpointing the abuse or distortion of them by those polar opposites to the Lord (to the ideal of the Self) constituted by the twin tyrants of the sex drive and the moralizing superego. But the holy woman would never question the Other’s love and her love for the Other: how could she conceive of a viable way of being if not in love with the ideal Father?

(Sylvia falls silent. We hear Dr. Leclercq’s muffled voice tackling the complex notation of “Exaltavit humiles.”)

SYLVIA LECLERCQ. In my view — but keep this to yourself (here her voice becomes intimate, hushed, singular) — our dear, great Sigmund was not far from thinking, though he stopped short of formulating it, the same as what Teresa celebrated in all her writings. What did he lay onto the couch, if it wasn’t love? Love, again, is what’s transferred in the attention we pay to our patients’ words, drives, and affects. Freud’s philosophy was explicitly based on the Enlightenment, his interpretative method was without doubt Kabbalistically and Talmudically Jewish, but his unconscious was baroque. (Sidelong glance at the diamond.) Baroque — as in inconstant, mobile, playful, reinvented on the go — is the word for the amorous principle upon which he founded psychoanalysis, and over which he lingered in his scrutiny of the history of myths, religions, arts and letters; the principle Teresa crosses back and forth, with cheerful faith, never underestimating the demons of excitation unto death. Teresa reigns as the high priestess of the continent of idealization that inaugurates the transference that precedes the cure, into which the psychoanalyst will hack with the blows of his chisel, ice ax, hammer, or pen.…

(She closes her notebook, rises from the chair, walks toward the door — then turns back and sits down again, picking up the pen in a mood of contented, tranquil solitude.)

Can I convince you that by remitting the truth of the amorous bond, and by extension of the transferential bond, to an unconscious that is equally in love and yet infantile, no analytical interpretation can expel this “delusion” of love from the field of that (interminable) analysis? Not only does the constant of the loving bond persist under the guise of some “future of delusion,” notably religious delusion, which Freud regards as regrettable yet insurmountable; the permanence of the Teresian problematic of love manifests itself even at the termination of the cure, which, for all its dissipation of illusions, merely leads to the creation of…new and no less amorous bonds. These new transferences, better apprised of the impasses of the subject’s former traumas and hatefatuations, embark all over again — at best more soberly, but never desisting — upon the quest for jouissance in the intimacy, forever to be reconquered, of an interior castle forever to be rebuilt, by the latest self with its latest set of narratives.

SYLVIA LECLERCQ, in a calm voice, eyes drawn to the divan. In order to remain psychically alive, or alive tout court, I can’t do other than try to re-inhabit my inner dwelling places — with someone new this time — while realizing, courtesy of my analysis, that it will once more be in vain, or almost. But as the baroque poet said, “Everything is mutable in this world. We must snatch love as we can.”¹⁷ (Broad smile.)

Teresa, already a potential saint when on her deathbed, has not quite reached this point. Her brand of baroque differs from that of artists who solemnly assert, in the face of the One, the power of a nonessential, theatrical, “performing” humanity. The baroque illusion — triumph of the as-if, celebration of the inconstancy of objective reality (the very stage sets are to be cast into the flames, like Don Juan) — assumes an extravagant superiority nonetheless, negating every value and form of otherness. The baroque artist lays no claim to inner authenticity; he is praised for shape-shifting alone, for his dexterity with whirling masquerades and the opulent play of simulacra. (Amused glance at the divan.)

None of this with Teresa; La Madre was never content to approach delusion as an illusion. Being a mystic, she was afraid the crumbling of fantasy would reduce her to the condition of a worm in the nonspace of Hell; so she distilled the imaginary into the joy of love and a life founded on love, like an alembic distills spirits. (Exhales, looks at Teresa’s diamond.)