By Emily Bilman
Like a serpent the tram slithered around the city surreptitiously. Amid the passengers, I held on to a railing in the middle of the tram with one hand
and faced the river Rhône. Geneva is built on an ancient glacier valley crossed by the Rhône flowing through lake Léman, a city where space is constantly re-planned.
I had just sent out my dissertation to East Anglia University for the viva. In my thesis, I compared poets to children-at-play. I argued that both
poets and children sublimated their narcissistic traumas into games and poems. Thirteen year-old Felix had been analysed by Melanie Klein for his
inhibitions in playing and learning during his early schooling. When his father had returned from fighting in WWI, he started beating the boy for
his cowardice so that he would start playing again. The boy became indifferent to learning.
Klein argued that the boy’s dislike of learning was due to his interest in games. In play therapy, Felix had phantasized about a football game played by naked girls with whom he interacted. Klein interpreted this as a repressed reference to the primal scene whose sounds had excited him.
He had been an unconscious perceiver and an anxious critic of the parental union.
Felix’s therapy involved face-to-face conversations with Klein, playing and painting. Klein would, then analyse the symbols behind the games and
paintings and trace them back to his childhood traumas. Through therapy, Felix developed his talent for music. As an adult, he became a successful composer. According to Klein, he had finally assumed the sublimated paternal role.
The tram was packed to the brim with passengers like sturgeon eggs in a tin can. Suddenly, a slim little girl, probably a four-year-old, standing right
next to me, looked up at me with her big brown eyes and grabbed my hand. Her other hand was held by her father who looked at both of us
with amazement. She smiled at me in anticipation. Her father said: “S’il te plait, ne dérange pas la dame, Émilie.” She, then, let go of my hand but kept looking at me intensely. I felt she trusted me.
I imagined the city as a body with a will of its own, functioning through its interconnected organs whose rhythms provided its working force and
assured its social coherence. The city’s sounds made up its speech whose rhythms allowed people to celebrate and communicate. I imagined when
hard times set in, the libidinal force, merged initially with the people’s life-force, would have been sublimated into the workforce. And the
foundations of our civilized society were established.
I thought of the little girl who had the same name as myself as one of my imaginary children to whom I wanted to offer Lego blocks to build bridges, pools, airports in the cities of her imagination. After Klein, I thought that
the inhibition of our excess life-force, leading to successful repressions and sublimations is one of the foundations of our civilisation symbolized
by the city. A city where the river is diked and can not flow backwards.