The Power of Names: Uncovering the Mystery of What We are Called, by

Mavis Himes, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 2016, 223pp.

A name “is like an elongated shadow attached at our heels,” Himes

writes (127). How does one’s name guide the course of one’s life? The
author’s father and siblings legally altered the family name making
Heimovitch into Himes and questions surrounding the motivation for this
change led to the personal journey of writing this book. The monograph is
divided into two parts: the first “Called into Existence,” followed by
“Burden or Blessing,” both passionately probing the ground between self
and moniker. The fact that a name is first given by others external to the
subject and is, secondly, internalized has profound implications, claims
Himes, a psychoanalyst in Toronto, making nomenclature both a gift and a
curse.
The author details how our name, both first and last, defines us in
relationship to those who have given it and to patriarchal structures of
kinship. How does precedence of the paternal surname over the maternal
impact a female’s sense of authority and voice? Surnames often announce
ethnic affiliations, revealing cultural roots and geographic origins. One
crucial aspect of being Jewish, states Himes, is being linked to a sequence of
historical events spanning over five thousand years and ties to an ancient
community of Mesopatamian desert wanderers— nomads who only had the
law (nomas in Latin) and the name (nomen), the two being inetricably
intertwined. With few possessions and a primary concern for survival, the
word and law of the Torah became paramount, its inscribed values and
moral codes. At the same time, Himes suggests one’s ancestry and
intergenerational past can be “a prison from which we wish to escape” (169).
The book has expansive historical reach, examining naming practices
in relation to the contemporary mononyms of pop culture icons such as
Cher, Sting, and Christo and extending to the writings of Plato and early
totemic rituals surrounding the murder of the primal father. She cites the
Roman proverb nomen est omen: the name is destiny, a common belief in
the ancient Western world. Yet with adventurous spirit, she proceeds to
consider a broad range of name changes, both involuntary and voluntary,
including those foisted on communities by the State as with law #174
instituted by Hitler during Kristallnacht (1938), which forced Jews to adopt
a name recognizably “Jewish”: men were assigned “Israel” and women
“Sarah.” Immigrants have chosen to change family names to avoid
discrimination, assimilate to a host culture and enhance business
opportunities. Letters are dropped, the original name truncated, reshaped.
Some name modifications symbolically extract one from associations with a
miserable marriage or traumatic family history, Himes remarks, citing the
words of one of her patients: “I live within the confines of my screwed up
family matrix, and my name is simply a relic, all that is left of a washed-out
historical fact” (3).
Himes recounts a dream in the prologue where she shakes hands with
Jacques Lacan and the ensuing pages convey an uneasy alliance with his
theories, the law of the Father and the unrelenting demands of the Symbolic.
Himes maintains that many Lacanian analysts “vehemently oppose” any sort
of name change, arguing it leads to the instability of one’s identity and
onerous psychological problems (157). Yet the author writes of Erik
Homburger, who elaborated “identity” as one of the eight stages of
psychosocial development and reinvented himself in adulthood as “Erik
Erikson” when he gained United States’ citizenship. She describes how
Freud, too, as well as many of the early Eastern European analysts, changed
his name to gain distance from his racial idemtity. I, myself, recall the
French dramatist and director, Antonin Artaud, a major figure of 20th
century theater who adopted numerous pseudonyms to dissociate himself
from what he perceived as parasitic familial relations. In his late poems, he
went so far as to repudiate his ancestry altogether and proclam himself as his
own progenitor. These instances of name change open up new possibilies of
subjective agency within language. A central theme emerges: the creative
remaking of identity through the use of a symbolic name change
The book’s overriding tension is the pull between obedience and
iconoclasm, the struggle between the desire of the individual and the Law of
the Father. How do we negotiate between self-determinism and family
patriotism, or what Himes calls our “deference to dead elders” (84). How do
we honor our heritage without being shackled by it? How to we maintain
the capacity for freewheeling thought? Along with the application of
Lacan’s ideas throughout the book, I wanted an attendant critique of them.
For instance, American academic Judith Butler criticizes Lacanian theory for
the implacable nature of the Symbolic which requires an obedience to
paternal law that proves impossible to fulfill and dooms the subject to
"failure" - a sexual identity ridden with guilt, confusion and conflict. She
points to the structure of religious tragedy in Lacanian theory, describing it
as a "slave morality" that "guarantees the failure of the tasks it commands"
(Butler, 1990). (Lacan underwent a rigorous religious education at the
distinguished Jesuit Collège Stanislas before proceeding to a classical
French psychiatric education at the Faculté de médecine de Paris in 1919.)
Butler suggests Lacanian structures of sexual identity are motivated by a
theological impulse, whose purposes, like those of the Old Testament God,
are "obedience and suffering to enforce the 'subject's' sense of limitation
'before the law.'" Put differently, Lacan subordinates the question “What is
being?” to the foremost question “How is being signified through the
paternal economy?” Nonetheless a vital aspect of who we are falls between
words and exceeds our lingistic vocabulary.
Himes describes her travels across her cherished Sinai desert in search
of her ancestral origins. At the same time she avows the importance of
creating one’s own “signature,” of authorizing one’s own narrative unbound
from the markings of ancestry and domination of the paternal metaphor. The
author acknowledges that we do not receive language --even proper names --
ready-made, but that they are a product of ongoing human activity. There is
the name we are given and then there is what we make of it. To paraphrase
Goethe, we must take what we acquire from our fathers and make it our
own.
This thoughtful and poetic book is not only about names and
language, but contemplates a larger picture regarding freedom of thought
and the universal human desire to make life significant despite its brevity
and apparent absurdity. Fundamental to the human condition, writes Søren
Kierkegaard, is the distinction between recollection and repetition,
recollection being what is inside us that we inherit from the past, a looking
backward -- as opposed to the higher form of repetition, which delineates
our capacity to look forward. Lyrical, searching, Himes grapples with how
we are bound by the string of letters we carry from childhood and how,
looking forward, we take them up and continually reinterpret their meaning.

Molly S. Castelloe, Ph.D.

The National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis
Msc214@nyu.edu

REFERENCE

Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

New York: Routledge.