|
KMID : 0385320000110020255
|
|
Journal of Korean Psychoanalytic Society
2000 Volume.11 No. 2 p.255 ~ p.271
|
|
|
Chang-Sup Sohn and Castration Trauma : A Psychoanalytic Approach on His Early Works (II)
|
|
Cho Doo-Young
Cho Maeng-Je
Lyoo In-Kyoon
Kang Ung-Gu
|
|
|
Abstract
|
|
|
|
The magician of the middle-age type is a lonely figure with no family and no sex life, and is alone among objects which he believes he can change, create, or destroy at will. Servadio once described the true magicians type on the unconscious level as a self-castrated, narcissistically regressed and self-centered infant, who by accepting castration has exchanged the true possession of a penis (=potency) towards a delusional unlimited mastery over the pre-oedipal objects (=omnipotence). Therefore, Servadio said, the magic wand is not just a penis-symbol, but is an actual, delusional substitute for the magicians lost penis. As the magicians wand is like that, so is the writers pen. The magician and the writer both can create or destroy the world at will. Extending Servadios notion of the magician onto the writer, we can speculate that some relationship exist between the writers motivations and the castration-complex on the unconscious level. A good example of it is a Korean writer in mid-twentieth century, Chang-Sup Sohn. According to his autobiographical novel, a Comic Creature of the God : a Self-Portrait, Sohn was the only-child and lost the father during infancy. He lived in a district of prostitution, and was the idol-boy among the young prostitutes. He suffered from enuresis through out of childhood, adolescence and early adulthood, and from public punishments for it in his elementary school-years. He slept with his mother in same bed up until the age of thirteen, and the mother abused him sexually. As a preadolescent boy, he witnessed twice his mother engaging sexual activities with a stranger, and these episodes made him to commit an unsuccessful suicidal trial by hanging. His mother soon after eloped with the man, leaving him in the hand of the relatives. These repeated trauma and castration trauma in his life history therefore suggest us that he suffered from the castration-complex on unconscious level for the first half of the life at least. Looking at Sohn works carefully, we could find a castrated male hero in a gloomy atmosphere, along with a few other castrated characters in many of his early works of over-twenty short stories. For example, in his Written in Blood, a story in which a sadistic, violent, young amputee cut in force a finger of his introverted, docile friends to have the latter write a letter in blood to volunteer for the army, the mechanism of identification with the aggressor pronounces. In the Persecuted, a story in which a middle-aged man caught in a fraud-marriage loses his life after all of his properties taken away one by one, there is repeated recurrences of castration trauma, and the turning against the self of the aggression. In the Unresolved Chapter, a young college student of a poor family, frequently beaten by the incompetent father for the refusal to go to the United States for further study, withdraws into an autistic world and shows bizarre behavior such as sleeping in the empty bed of a neighboring prostitute. This heros behavior exhibits a picture of regression. A Summary of Human Zoo, full of scenes of homosexual acts among male inhabitants in a prison cell ending to a hanging-murder, shows masochistic submission and bisexuality. The Wild Plain is a story of an adolescent boy, living in the wild plain of Manchuria with the mother who remarried a friend of her deceased husband with whom she had committed adultery before her husbands death. The boy pretends asleep while a bunch of mounted bandits plot together at night and strike the heads of his mother and stepfather with clubs to death. This story shows the revenge in fantasy. Finally the Boy is a story of a pre-adolescent boy, living with the stepmother who runs a house of prostitution, and stepsiblings, in physical abuse and sexual over-stimulation. The boy misuses his artistic talents by drawing porno-pictures on the blackboard in the class to deride the warm-hearted woman teacher, and fails in control of his rage by stabbing the vagina of a girl-classmate with a wood-stick. In this story there is full of sexualization and sadomasochism. Thus, Sohn exhibited, in his early works, a certain series of unconscious psychological procedures, which are, namely, an identification with the aggressor, repeated recurrence of castration trauma, turning against the self of the aggression, regression, masochistic submission, bisexuality, acting-out in the form of revenge fantasy, isolation of the affect, sexualization and sadomasochism. All of which are the defense mechanisms against the castration anxiety. Conclusion : The castration-complex most likely acted as the main motivating force among many others in Chang-Sup Sohns early works.
|
|
|
KEYWORD
|
|
|
Art, Literature, Chang-sup sohn, Castration, Psychoanalysis
|
|
|
FullTexts / Linksout information
|
|
|
|
|
|
Listed journal information
|
|
  
|
|