The Piano Teacher - A Case Study in Perversion and Sadomasochism

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PEP Web - The Piano Teacher: A Case Study in Perversion and Sadomasochism
Christian, C. (2009). The Piano Teacher: A Case Study in Perversion and Sadomasochism. Psychoanal. Rev., 96:769-784.
(2009). Psy choanaly tic Rev iew, 96:769-784
The Piano Teacher: A Case Study in Perversion and

Sadomasochism
Christopher Christian, Ph.D., FIPA
The Piano Teacher (Jelinek, 1988) is an intensely evocative, semi-autobiographical novel (Weedon, 1997)1 by
Nobel Prize laureate and Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek that provides an unusual glimpse at the artistic rendition of a
woman with a severe sadomasochistic character disorder. The novel tells the story of the enmeshed relationship
between Erika Kohut, a piano teacher with sadomasochistic perversions, and her overcontrolling mother, with whom
Erika lives. The novel's incidental contribution to psychoanalysis lies in the fact that, as Grossman (1986), Novick and
Novick (1987), and others have observed, women with severe masochistic perversions, like the piano teacher, very
rarely come to analysis, and when they do they are among the most difficult cases to treat. The Piano Teacher serves
as a challenging substitute for a real case study to a condition that remains, as it did half a century ago, one of the
most complicated subjects in psychoanalytic theory and one of the most difficult problems in our therapeutic work
(Berliner, 1940, p. 322).
In this paper, I propose a way of understanding the type of female perversions illustrated in The Piano Teacher.
My main thesis is that in certain cases where a father, by virtue of his absence or his character, has not facilitated the
daughter's differentiation and separation from an all-engulfing mother, the child attempts to differentiate from the
mother by becoming the father, assuming the father's role vis--vis the mother, and embracing the realm of the paternal
symbolic order. Unable to use the father as an anchor that allows her to extricate herself from her mother, the daughter
constructs a symbolic phallic realm that becomes an exaggerated version of the father, and of what it means to be
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male. She develops a caricature of masculinity and incorporates into her simulacrum violence, cruelty, penetration,
oppression, voyeurism, sadism, perversion, and a state of confusion in relation to the female gender and female
genitalia. Embodying the father gratifies symbiotic wishes for merger with the mother, whereby the daughter attempts
to gain access into the mother's body as a male substitute, while it simultaneously serves as a drastic attempt at
separation from the archaic mother through an identification with the paternal realm that staves off further regression
and psychosis. I suggest that these dynamics are thrown into sharp relief by The Piano Teacher and may be
fundamental in some types of female perversions.
Other authors (Cooper, 2004; Teitelbaum, 2005; Wrye, 2005; Wyatt, 2005) have examined The Piano Teacher,
as well as Michael Haneke's faithful film rendition of the novel, to emphasize and illustrate different aspects of
perversions and masochism. Both novel and film have become, according to Rudnytsky (2005), a locus classicus for
psychoanalytic criticism (p. 391).
Cooper (2004) saw in the novel evidence for the ways in which perversions aim to erase passivity and the
experience of being at the mercy of a cruel and controlling mother. All perversions, he believes, contain core fantasies
related to avoiding and denying such passivity. The dehumanizing hatred that Stoller (1974) has described as
ubiquitous in perversions are, according to Cooper, the means by which the person protects against the vulnerability
of loving, against the possibility of human unpredictability, and against the sense of powerlessness and passivity in
comparison to other[s] (p. 168). Male perversions deny the woman's existence or the man's need for her. In the novel
Cooper understands the fantasies that Erika, the piano teacher, has of being rendered helpless and passive as
ultimately expressing her need to be in control and paradoxically representing a triumph over passivity. Klemmer,
Erika's would-be lover in the novel, manifests intense anxiety and rage over the control that Erika asserts over him in
her demands of how she should be subjugated. According to Cooper (2004), fears of ultimate passivity are aroused
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by the evidence of the woman as independent, with a capacity to make demands and to have her own feelings (p.
175).
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Wyatt (2005), taking a Lacanian perspective on the novel, argued that Erika lives in a world of maternal
jouissance in which her mother observes no law and knows no limits to her rights to possess her daughter's body.
Jouissance is, as a rule, contained by the social and symbolic order. Wyatt contends that Erika's self-mutilation are
attempts to escape jouisssance and rid herself of the internalized motherattempts that by virtue of employing means
anchored in jouissance are destined to fail and result in an endless repetition.
In an informative essay about Michael Haneke's cinematic interpretation of Jelinek's novel, Teitelbaum (2005) also
draws on Lacan and makes the point that perversions are attempts to reach the father, who represents the
differentiated sanity of the symbolic order (p. 154). In the novel, Erika has lost her father, and this loss has abdicated
her to a fate of fused maternal madness.
Wrye (2005) takes a relational approach to understanding Haneke's film. She focuses on what she sees as a series
of dialectical tensions between creativity and destructiveness, longing and deadness, innocence and sexual
perversion, psychotic fragmentation and sadomasochistic control (Wrye, 2005, p. 1206). She describes the motherdaughter bond as bondage and notes that one of the truly shocking aspects of the film is the lack of any signs of
attunement, warmth, and love between the mother and daughter. Erika is depicted as a narcissistic extension of her
mother. It is only through her perversions that Erika manages to subvert her mother's absolute control. In the end,
Erika's only escape from complete psychotic disintegration is to symbolically kill the mother by killing herself.2
These works, among others, speak to a growing theoretical and clinical emphasis on the role that thwarted needs
for separation and individuation play in perversions, and point to a movement away from understanding perversions
as solely or even mainly defensive maneuvers against the male castration complex. Perversions, by and large, have
been understood as male phenomena. With the increasing recognition of female perversions (Kaplan, 1991; Person,
2005; Richards, 1989) the castration complex, with its concrete focus on anxiety about the loss of the penis as a key
determinant in perversions, has met a number of
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theoretical and conceptual challenges and given way to a broader understanding about castration anxiety in both men
and women (Kulish, 2002).
In The Piano Teacher, Jellinek (2001) portrays Erika Kohut, a woman in her mid-thirties who has never married and
lives with her widowed mother in a two-bedroom apartment, where they share the same bed. Erika gives piano lessons
at the Vienna Conservatory in order to draw extra income intended for the purchase of a new apartment where mother
and daughter plan to live. Erika's relationship with her mother is marked by extreme ambivalence, oscillating between
intense violence, hatred, and destructiveness on the one hand, and, on the other, an obsessive attachment that is
similar in important respects to that between two lovers.
The Piano Teacher is a study in contradictions between appearances and reality. In dark contrast to the idealized
image that Mother has fabricated of her delicate meadow flower, the timid, frail, and aesthetic artist, there is Erika's
inner life and perverse secret fantasies. No one would suspect the music teacher of being the criminal in the tightly
packed train who is taking secret pleasure in surreptitiously kicking women's shins or pinching their legs, causing them
to bruise. Erika punctures the monotony of her life with behaviors that appear unfathomable for someone of her ilk. She
frequents dingy pornography shops where she sits in a booth and pays to gaze at women, mesmerized by their
genitals, straining to look as far inside of the female orifice as she can, as the woman exposes herself to the male
customers. Erika thinks: Men must often feel that the woman must be hiding something crucial to that chaos of her
organs. It is those concealments that induce Erika to look at ever newer, ever deeper, ever more prohibited things. She
is always on the lookout for a new and incredible insight (p. 108).
At home she partakes in what Jelinek refers to as a hobby of cutting her skin and genitals, magnifying the
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aperture that is the doorway into her body (p. 86). Erika is as mystified by her genitals as she is by that of the women
at the peep shows. Never has her bodyeven in her standard pose, legs apart in front of the shaving mirror
revealed its silent secrets, even to its owner! (p. 108).
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At other times, Erika takes the trolley to the Praterstern and heads through the Prater meadows to what she
describes as the homeland of peepers (p. 141), where she spies on couples having sex. She brings with her a pair of
binoculars that she inherited from her father, who used them for bird watching.
Any applied analysis of The Piano Teacher defies facile interpretation or quick conclusions. Jelinek unflinchingly
traces the story of her protagonist, a woman with a complex regressive masochistic pathology marked by primitive selfdestructiveness that includes self-mutilation. The first half of the novel is used to portray Erika's inner life, while in the
second half we witness her rapid deterioration, sparked by the sexual advances of one of her male students, Klemmer.
As Erika's beating-fantasies push toward a behavioral enactment with the student and her inhibitions against acting
out such fantasies are weakened, the delicate balance of compromise formations that have allowed her to function so
far begin to unravel.
The narrative of the novel flows with a dreamlike quality from one voice to another, from spoken word to thought,
with no delineation between these forms. This rhetorical device illustrates the porous boundaries between mother and
daughter, inside and outside, reality and fantasy. In fact, the obliteration of boundaries pervades many of Erika's
fantasies.
The Obliteration of Differences

Several authors (Bach & Schwartz, 1972; Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1978; McDougall, 1980) have drawn attention
to the significance of the obliteration of differences in cases of perversion and sadomasochism. It is a prevalent
phenomenon, for example, in the writings of Marquis de Sade (1968, 1996), where the differences between the sexes
and generational differences are eliminated. Men and women are equally used as objects of sexual indulgence. There
are no familial boundaries, no generational boundaries, and bodily orifices are interchangeable. The obliteration of
reality, of genital sexuality, is the means by which the perverse subject fantasizes a return to the undifferentiated and
fused matrix of mother-child union, and concurrently defends against
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castration fears and other forms of harm that are associated with oedipal conflicts.
Chasseguet-Smirgel, in a series of publications (1978, 1984, 1998), posits that perversions are the means by which
a subject strives to bridge a gap between his ego and his ego-ideal, and mend a sense of inferiority when he compares
his genitals with that of his father.
Similarly, McDougall (1980) believes that the child's experience of inadequacy is a blow to his narcissistic sense
of omnipotence, when the little boy with his little penis compares himself to his father and recognizes that he cannot
satisfy Mother like Father does. The potential for this disillusionment being traumatic is magnified in cases when a
narcissistic mother's behavior alternates between being overly seductive to rejecting. Coen (1985) states that the
child is both encouraged in his illusion that mother desires only him and is rejected doubly, in that he does not receive
adequate warm mothering and that mother does not desire him sexually, but his father (p. 22).
In both sexes, the fear of engulfment by the powerful preoedipal mother alternates, according to ChasseguetSmirgel (1984), with a wish to return to inside the mother's womb. A central problem with these subjects who are
unable to renounce absolute possession of the motherto cope with separation, loss, and mourningis also their
inability to accept the primal scene, which implies the existence of three: mother, father, and child (p. 118). At this
juncture, the father is essential because he stands in the way of primal fusion (p. 118). Stoller's (1985) ethnographic
research led him to similar conclusions: A father serves as a shield to protect the child against impulses mother may
have to prolong the mother-infant symbiosis (p. 44).
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The ideas of Chasseguet-Smirgel (1978, 1984, 1998), McDougall (1980), and Coen (1985) find ready
representation in The Piano Teacher, where Jelinek depicts a number of sexual and generational transgressions of
boundaries: most saliently, Erika's avowed incestuous wishes for her mother, her sexual relationship with a much
younger male, and the development of sexual perversions typically seen in men. To the extent that Erika denies
differences between the sexes, and differences in ages and
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between generations, she preserves the symbiotic tie to the pre-oedipal realm of the narcissistic mother.
The Concretization of Differences

There is another, equally important dynamic at work in The Piano Teacher that operates in the opposite direction
of securing Erika's place in this preoedipal universe with Mother, a dynamic marked by attempts to escape and
differentiate from the symbiotic mother. While typically the daughter can use positive identifications with her father to
aid in the process of separation from the mother, Erika has no such help. In the novel, Jelinek depicts Erika's father as a
man who has abdicated his role as the one meant to stand in the way of a primal fusion between mother and child.
Possibly owing to his own anxiety about being engulfed by the preoedipal mother represented in his wife, he offers up
the child as the sacrificial lamb and seizes on the opportunity created by Erika's birth to exit the family. In the absence
of a father, Erika must construct an archetype of a father and embody him. A split in the ego is created, containing
wishes for merger with the preoedipal mother alongside drastic attempts at differentiation. In this sense, Erika's
perverse behaviors can be understood as the means for progressing into the oedipal phase, rather than being solely
the product of regression or fixation to an undifferentiated state of maternal symbiosis. One might consider if female
perversions in general express at their core the need to delineate differences between the daughter and the symbiotic
mother, rather than the need to obliterate differences, as Chasseguet-Smirgel (1978), McDougall (1980), and others
have convincingly demonstrated is the case in male perversions.
By becoming the father, Erika at once replaces him in her mother's bed and gains access to her mother's body,
while establishing herself as a separate person from mother and averting psychic decompensation. The perverse
solution, the means by which Erika resists the regressive pull toward symbiosis and identifies with the absent father
who has become reified in a number of perverse sexual acts, is made evident throughout the novel. From the very
beginning of her story, Jelinek shows a relationship between mother and daughter that has all the makings of a
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traditional marriage in which Erika is depicted as the man of the house, the breadwinner, who succeeds the missing
husband in her mother's life. Erika tells us that they are together until death do us apart. Mother, at times, acts the
role of the dependent and nervous housewife, who stays awake to accuse and confront Erika upon her return home
from her nightly excursions. During these outings, Erika has spent the money that she ought to be saving for their new
apartment, frequenting pornography shops and paying to gaze at women who display themselves for male patrons.
Erika is intent on deciphering the male perspective. At the peep show, she strains to look as far as she can into the
woman's innards, imagining what men must think and feel, and the confusion and awe that they must experience at the
sight of the woman's genital orifice.3 She herself experiences her own genitals as a foreign and mysterious object,
carving them with what she labels the paternal razor, the phallus that cuts to reveal inner secrets. The subjective
experience described by Jelinek of Erika's acts of genital mutilation is focused on that of being the one who cuts, the
one who holds the phallus, rather than on experiencing being cut. The blade smiles like a bridegroom at a bride (p.
43). Erika says that she's enlarging the doorway to her body. We see a type of splitting and dissociation, whereby
Erika is depicted as identifying with the male at the entryway, while experiencing her own genitals and her body as
foreign and belonging to an other (mainly the mother).
At other times Erika is a Peeping Tom in the woods with her father's binoculars in hand, spying on couples
having sex and urinating at the height of sexual excitement. Urination causes sexual pleasure not only by virtue of the
physical stimulation that urination produces in her, but by the fantasy that the stream of urine is the equivalent of male
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ejaculate. Erika's voyeurism, by which she inserts herself in the couple's sex act and is amused by how the twosome is
turned into a threesome, represents an identification with the role of the father (if not the father himself), who comes
between the mother-child dyad and turns it into a triad. The use of her father's binoculars in the act of peeping gives
further evidence of her attempts at identification with him. As Wrye (2005) points out, even her outfittrench
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coat with kidskin glovesevokes the image of the proverbial male pervert.
Sabbadini (2000), in a review of Michael Powell's film Peeping Tom, explores the scopophilic drive and stresses
how voyeurism is related to primitive primal scene phantasies (p. 809). A variation of the scopophlic drive is
connected to the auditory sphere and related to primal scene fantasies of listening to the parents during intercourse.
Through music, Erika has sublimated auditory voyeurism, so that now pleasure is derived from applying her fingers to
piano keys and hearing music. Her taste in classical music separates her from the masses, which she sees as being at
the mercy of their base instincts. Yet, notwithstanding the extent to which auditory voyeurism has been sublimated
into a penchant for classical music, we see clear traces of it in Erika's fantasies that stress the importance of subjecting
her mother to the sounds of Erika's sadomasochistic acts with Klemmer. The fantasy represents turning passive into
active, whereby the mother is now forced to listen to the sounds of sex (or Erika's childhood interpretation of what sex
sounds like between two adults) coming from the other room. The mother, thus, is simultaneously excluded and
included in the sexual act. Peto (1975) points out how the element of danger, conspicuous in the perverse act itself, is
rooted in the very young child's exposure to the primal scene (p. 185) and harkens back to the experience of danger
associated with the illicit witnessing of the sexual act between parents. This danger is re-created by the voyeur, where
the possibility of being discovered is a crucial aspect of the sexual excitement derived from peeping.
As an adult, Erika has gone from being the one excluded from her mother's bed to sharing the bed with her mother.
After revealing her sadomasochistic fantasies to Klemmer, who is repulsed, Erika goes to bed in a perturbed frame of
mind. In a quasi-delirious state, she declares her love for her mother and attempts to mount her, kissing her
passionately while her mother resists, pleading that Erika stop. With hectic thrusts of the head, mother's mouth tries
to avoid Erika's puckered mouth. Erika has lost all control (p. 233). Erika gnaws and sucks on this big body as if she
wanted to crawl back in and hide inside it (p. 233). The scene is a pantomime of male-female sex in
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which there are no signs of tenderness, just mad sexual urge and brute force. Erika attempts to regain access to her
mother's body, but now in the way she imagines father might have.
Erika's efforts to embody the father represent a type of concretization that signals a failure at symbolization and a
lack of the attainment of a stable psychic representation of the paternal object. The perceptual concreteness with
which the perverse subject needs to represent the absent father is meant to secure a mental representation of him that
has hitherto remained elusive or is at risk for being lost again. It amounts to anchoring in reality by way of overt action
that which needs to remain fixed, lest it be susceptible to reversal and undoing.
In a series of writings, Bass (1997, 2000) has described concretization as a defense against differentiation. A
patient's view, for example, that a percept can only be and mean one thing and that the analyst must view it exactly the
same way, is a defense against the experience of differences, which create an intolerable tension in some patients.
Concreteness in these patients is the means by which difference is disavowed. There is an ongoing attempt to
eliminate the distinction between perception and memory, perception and fantasy, and to eliminate the possibility of
meaning itself (Bass, 1997, p. 663). Bass (1997) stresses that the male fetishist disavows and repudiates realitythat
is, the reality that the woman does not have a penisand, thus, denies the possibility of castration. By affirming that
the woman does not lack a penis, the male fetishist construes the sexes in terms of phallic monismone sex and its
absence and magically erases the differences between the sexes (Bass, 1997, p. 658).
Yet, in female perversions, we have a different menacing reality that the subject needs to disavow, which is the
similarity between her and the all-engulfing, preoedipal mothera similarity that threatens the female with a psychotic
disintegration of boundaries and the loss of a sense of herself as a separate being.
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Klemmer, the young male student, represents an opportunity for Erika to extricate herself from mother. Erika's fears
of mother dying have created the urgency for Erika to find a substitute in him. The old woman keeps getting older and
older. What will happen when she falls apart and becomes a dismal creature in need of care herself, when she has to
obey Erika?
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(p. 104). Her mother has always possessed Erika's will, and now Erika hands it like a runner's staff, to Klemmer (p.
207). She has a fantasy of enacting with Klemmer the conventional roles of husband and wife, which are depicted by
Jelinek as that of master and slave. Erika embraces the phallic order of the law by drawing up a contract, a sort of legal
document that grants specific powers regarding what the torturer can and cannot do. She will remain tied down in her
room until he returns from his outings, much like mother is tied down to the home while Erika is away. As Deleuze
(1971; Bogue, 1989) has observed, there is an underlying humor in the exaggerated dedication to the letter of the law
represented in the masochistic contract that simultaneously idealizes and mocks the law that the contract ostensibly
seeks to enforce.
Here, it helps to situate Jelinek's writing in the broader context of the corpus of her work. In novels like The Piano
Teacher (1988) and Lust (1989), she exposes and subverts societal conventions and the power relations between the
sexes. By reversing modes of relating that have become fixed, she delineates these social norms more clearly in the
contrasts that she creates. Thus, the woman, rather than being an object of the male's gaze, is turned into a Peeping
Tom; she is at once the voice of authority and the subjugated slave, the sensitive connoisseur of art and consumer of
pornography; she defies passivity by submitting to subjugation.
In Erika's fantasies of masochistic bondage she projects onto Klemmer the attributes of the punishing phallic
mother, yet she is not re-creating a replica of her own relationship with her mother. Instead, she fantasizes living out
with Klemmer her father's masochistic relationship with the mother, in which Erika identifies with the father and
Klemmer is pressed to act the part of mother (thus his experience of emasculation). The sexual masochistic act gratifies
a wish to perpetuate a relationship with her mother, relating to her mother as Father once did, while delineating herself
as a separate entity.
In the restorative capacity of Erika's perversion, the concretization through action and the dramatization of
embellished male attributes and roles are prerequisites if the perverse act is to succeed in demarcating the boundaries
between mother and
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daughter, me and not me. Obscene exaggeration in the simulacrum is the means by which Erika, who is threatened
with a regressive pull toward merger, attempts to draw out those features that distinguish her from the background of
the all-engulfing, narcissistic mother. Boesky (1982), in discussing the communicative function of action and
enactment, makes the point that not every behavioural communication is regressive (p. 50). In fact, certain
behavioural communications stave off regression, particularly so in cases where the line between psychic fantasy
and reality are marked tenuously. In these cases, action becomes the way of affirming in observable terms a concrete
reality that is separate from, and noncontaminated by, regressive fantasies.
Glasser (1986) proposed an argument along similar lines, stating that male perversions were disorders of
identification with the mother. According to Glasser, the perverse subject has developed a core complex marked by
wishes for merger with the archaic mother that come with severe anxiety and fear of being engulfed. He reacts to this
fear with aggression meant to stave off annihilation associated with his wishes for merger. It is this aggression that
accounts for the difficulties that the perverse subject has in developing a healthy identification with the mother. In
place of identification, what we find is simulation as a substitute. As Glasser (1986) notes, The process of making an
identification is not available to the pervert because, governed by the core complex anxieties as he is, he would
experience incorporation of the object representation into his self-representation not as enriching or enhancing, but as
something invasive and possessivein short, annihilatory (p. 12).
Through simulation, the perverse subject maintains a connection with the mother and yet fends off the danger of
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annihilation that would accompany a more profound type of change that comes from true identification. A conceptual
difficulty in Glasser's explanation lies in his idea that the perverse subject seeks to delineate a separate self from the
mother and yet strives to simulate her. Glasser attempts to address this apparent contradiction, stating that simulation
is in essence a compromise between identification proper, which is experienced as intrusion
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and threatens the self with annihilation, and complete withdrawal.

In The Piano Teacher we see evidence for a different solution to the same fears and needs that Glasser describes.
The important difference is that in place of simulation and imitation of the mother, the perverse female subject seeks to
identify with the fatheran identification that allows the subject to maintain ties to the mother while safeguarding a
sense of a self that is separate from her.
The question then becomes, what disposes Erika to this particular set of compromise formations as opposed to
more adaptive ones, such as the development of a homosexual object choice4 one, for instance, that could contain
unconscious identifications with the father and simultaneously preserve Erika's relationship with the mother as
represented by another woman? How do we account for the fact that Erika operates on the borderline range of
functioning, that is, on the brink of psychosis, rather than at a neurotic level? The novel as a case study confines the
information that would allow one to reach clear conclusions in this regard. The nature and severity of Erika's pathology
represents at its core a profound failure in her capacity for symbolizationessentially, the ability to represent one
thing for another. It is this same failure of symbolizationa crucial feature of psychosisthat does not allow her to
represent the father or mother symbolically but rather demands that these objects be represented through a series of
concretizations. Julliett Mitchell (1974) points out that, psychosis, in a sense, is about the problematic interaction
between mother and child that, in the absence of the symbolic father, such mother-child relationships signify (p. 291).
Owing to the mother's inability or unwillingness to recognize Erika's right to have a mind of her own, we witness
throughout the novel harrowing raids into Erika's physical and psychic space. From the novel's opening scene, we
witness the violence of Mother ransacking the contents of Erika's purse, a representation of Erika's psyche and private
thoughts. Like a room protected by a door with no lock, Erika's psychic space is as vulnerable to her mother's
intrusions as is her physical space. Erika tells us that she has learned the hard way that a child has no secrets from
her mother (p. 5). Jelinek has the
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reader experience Erika's boundaryless world by blurring the distinction between Erika's thoughts, her spoken words,
and actions. As a result, the reader is often confused as to whether an event actually happened or was merely the
product of someone's thoughts.
The mother's inability to see and treat the child as a separate and unique person with distinct ideas and beliefs
hampers the child's capacity to differentiate herself from others (Modell, 1963) and, in extreme cases, to differentiate
fantasy from reality. Herein, I believe, are the roots of Erika's perversions and psychotic solutions. Given the traumatic
and chronic impingements on her sense of self and subjectivity by a mother who recognizes no limits to her rights to
her daughter's mind, concretizations become the only means by which Erika can delineate the boundaries between
fantasy and reality, between herself and her motherboundaries that she requires if she is to avert further regression
and psychosis.
A number of authors have explored The Piano Teacher and related Jelinek's rich artistic rendition of Erika's severe
psycho-pathology to clinical theories and observations about masochism and perversions. In this paper I have
described how Erika's perversions represent an exaggerated version of the father, his role, and the paternal order,
meant to rescue her from a state of regressed fusion with the all-powerful preoedipal mother. It is well worth
considering the extent to which the dynamics that I propose underlie Erika's perversions in Jelinek's novel elucidate
other cases of female perversions.
Notes
1
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1 In a biography of Jelinek, Boiter (1998) notes that Jelinek, like Erika Kohut, attended Vienna Conservatory of M usic,
trying to meet her mother's high expectations while coping with her psychologically ill father. The Piano Teacher was modified for
the screen by M ichael Haneke, who also directed the movie of the same name in 2001. In this paper, all references to The Piano
Teacher are solely based on the book.
2 Although Wrye (2005) concludes that the film culminates with Erika committing suicide, it is not clear if Erika indeed dies
from the self-inflicted stabbing. In fact, the movie ends with Erika walking out of the conservatory, leaving one to wonder if she
exsanguinates to death or survives.
3
A series of descriptions of Erika's searching curiosity about the female cavity,
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including her own, evokes Robert Bak's (1968) ideas on how the perverse subject defends against castration anxieties by
asserting that the woman has a penis but that it is simply hidden from view. Jelinek says that Erika feels solid wood in the place
where the carpenter made a hole in a genuine female (p. 51).
4 This is not to suggest that a homosexual object choice is a psychopathological compromise formation, but that object choice,
like most other thoughts, behaviors, or conscious fantasies, involves compromise formations that are influenced by a variety of
unconscious fantasies and identifications.
References
Bach, S., & Schwartz, L. (1972). Narcissistic trauma, decompensation, reconstitute delusional self. J. Amer. Psychoanal.
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Article Citation
Christian, C. (2009). The Piano Teacher: A Case Study in Perversion and Sadomasochism. Psychoanal. Rev., 96:769784
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(2009). Psy choanaly tic Rev iew, 96:769-784

The Piano Teacher: A Case Study in Perversion and

The Obliteration of Differences

The Concretization of Differences

and threatens the self with annihilation, and complete withdrawal.

A series of descriptions of Erika's searching curiosity about the female cavity,

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