ABSTRACT
Melodrama and psychoanalysis are both concerned with the dramatisation of affects in search of form. Indeed, if we are to think of Freudian sexuality as this passionate drive in search of forms that are initially derived from another, then we can also see how sexuality begins as both melodramatic passions and nonpersonal objects or types, which over time become inscribed as a personal identity we call the ego. The next two chapters explore, in their analysis of melodrama and psychoanalysis, how passions and sexuality move between a personal ego and non-personal other. Significantly though, this rhythm is captured through an early maternal form and aesthetic, rather than the naming of language or the paternal signifier. Pre-Oedipal experience is not simply an imaginary entity that is then broken up through a language of the unconscious and notions of the signifier. For me, there is an imaginative as well as a fantasmatic aspect to the imaginary; one which corresponds with our perceptual senses and reality through a lived mimesis with the mother. In this mimesis sameness is returned albeit differently, in relation to her aesthetic and cultural response—her gestural form. It is the mimetic return of maternal gestures that occurs initially through the non-personal (and virtual) form of the mother which both elaborates the child’s passions and builds what I have called a painterly home or being for the ego. And yet it is the melodrama of passions in search of old and familiar forms that stages the dramas of our personal and historical pasts. Therefore to really get somewhere new, we have to go back further, beyond the pleasures of the ego and the personal self, to encounter an older relation to a virtual form of being, which is unconsciously perceived and received in association with the early mother. It is this older relation to a virtual non-personal world where we access the unconscious not simply as a private entity but as an historical force. 1
