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Taking up Flax's points one notes that difficulties in screening, sorting or modifying experience also happen in verbal behaviour.  It is not a set of activities that is mastered once and for all.  Recognition of this would challenge Flax's topography of the ego.

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Indeed, elsewhere in the same text she assumes similarities between verbal and preverbal stages.  There is a slippage in Flax's text from "infancy", "infantile drama" to "child" and "child within" (247).  Infantile and childhood memories, the child elements of the ego, are deemed repressed and difficult to access.  They are inside.  They are cathected to internalized objects.  Intrinsic to this stress on internalization is an equation of repression with a "keeping in" rather than a "keeping from".  What does this entail for the place of reason?

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The characterization of the infant as prerational explains the difficulties in processing experience.  However the equation between reason and language contradicts the innateness of reason posited earlier in Flax's text.  As she points out, object relations theory is itself a questioning of Freud's instinct theory (n4) and the place of reason within his theory.  Object relations theory according to Flax sees reason

as an innate potential capacity rather than a faculty painfully acquired through the internalization of the authority of the father and as defense against frustration and threats from the external world.  (249)

If reasoning capacity is innate, how can the infant's engagement with experience be prerational?  The potential capacity can be activated before the acquisition of verbal skills.  Indeed it must be for those skills to be acquired.

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The preservation of an inner prerational core depends finally upon the marginalization of intense experiences.  Flax claims religious and hallucinogenic experiences occur rarely.  It seems, for her, erotic activity registers no intensity.  If however one considers that experience is constructed and in a constant state of construction then its handling poses problems not only for the infant who is a being in a state of verbal impotency but also for adept language users.  Intense difficulty in sorting, modifying or screening ­­ tasks that construct experience ­­ are also the lot of reading subjects.  From Flax one does reach for intriguing metaphors.  As a child before the text, the reader is demanding, querying.  As an infant before the text?  The parental analogy reaches a limit.  Objects bob in a force field of drives.  Zones.

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These metaphors play with the distinction between the speaking child and the extra-linguistic infant and do introduce the drives of Freudian theory.  Of course, the mother is not a text.  However the comparison has heuristic value.  The reading subject's relation to a text is best not patterned on a one-to-one dyad.  Memories of other texts hover and the reading subject is traversed by competing desires.  Field faces field.

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Likewise the developing human's relation to sources of nurture or the human's consciousness of those sources need not, on empirical or conceptual grounds, be theorized as dyadic.  Since an ideology of the couple is basic to object relations theory, it is forced to assume separation in terms of break-up.  Thus the developmental stage of recognizing objects as independent of the self, the stage when the infant recognizes that temporally discrete percepts may constitute apprehension of the same object, the stage at which the mother emerges as a distinct object, produces anxiety.  Only anxiety.  There is no possibility for cognitive joy.

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The game of losing and finding the object of desire is in object relations theory a stage that breaks up the blissful dyad.  Divorce is traumatic.  But equally so for both parties?  Posited in the theories drawn upon by Flax and her intellectual heirs is the essential unity of infant self.  That unity confirms the status of identification as a key category in gender role formation and authorizes interiorization of the infantile drama.  The preeminence of identification and interiorization is a consequence of the reification of the couple.  The reliance on dyads becomes even more perplexing when explanations move from individual to collective development.

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In Flight to Objectivity, Susan Bordo extrapolates from the ontogenic story of individual human development offered by object relations theory to phylogenic explanation of changes in historical consciousness.  The psychocultural history outlined by Bordo rests upon two coordinations.  As in object relations theory, a relation to one's body is embroiled in a relation to one's mother.  It is also through this nexus that one's relation to the world passes.

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For Bordo the gendering of nature is considered in universal rather than historical terms.  She accepts a mapping of the physical world unto the figure of the mother.  This allows a second coordination between the rise of the scientific method and denial of separation anxiety.  Since a cognitive style is coordinated with a developmental theory, Bordo can characterize the rise of modern science as a turning away from the maternal body towards the paternal mind:

The change may also be described in terms of separation from the maternal ­­ the immanent realm of earth, nature, the authority of the body ­­ and a compensatory turning toward the paternal for legitimation through external regulation, transcendent values, and the authority of law. [original emphasis] (Bordo 58)

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The mind-body opposition is left intact.  Moreover, when Bordo's stress on the gendering of the opposition is amalgamated with the psychological defense mechanisms against separation anxiety, she opts for a narrative which terminates in the exemplary dream of knowledge "imagined as an explicit revenge fantasy, an attempt to wrest back control from nature" (Bordo 75).  The concentration on power struggles is vivid but not accurate.  Bordo chooses to focus on a single defense mechanism.  She explicitly recognizes that psychoanalytic theory has described three responses to separation from the mother (Bordo 106).  They are denial, longing and mourning.

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It is possible to maintain the reading of ontogenic separation anxiety onto a phylogenic frame, without privileging the response of denial.  For example, Jacquelyn N. Zita, in a review of Bordo's book, refers to work by Genevieve Lloyd and proposes a different conjecture:

The ontological separation of mind from body could thus be seen as a way of making physical differences between the sexes less significant and asserting the equality of the sexes in rationality and will. (Zita 647)

With this interpretation of dualism, Zita does not demonize Descartes.  She considers biographical elements, his epistolary exchanges with women, the early death of his mother, and his decision to write in the vernacular (few women read Latin).  Descartes is figured as a creature of longing.  Bordo nowhere tackles the ambiguities in the Cartesian corpus.  She mentions Lloyd only once, in passing.  The mention is subsumed in a list of other names (Bordo 4).  To move beyond a dyad, she would have to account for the role of sisters and other siblings, as well as mothers in the development of individual and collective consciousness.

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