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.Once this has taken place the kava is served, that is, theexperience can be reincorporated in a form that is soothing and tranquillizing.But theMelanie Klein today 230transformation is not always successful, for strong green kava sometimes makes peoplewant to vomit.In other words, the method of preparing the kava can be seen as an effortto convert envy and jealousy into remorse and affection, to change poisonous feelingsinto feelings of tranquillity and harmony.But other myths and legends make it clear thatenvy and jealousy can never be overcome entirely and permanently, just as they cannever be eradicated from everyday life.The feelings appropriate to cannibalism are hereto stay.Envy, greed, and jealousy are always with us, but so are admiration and remorse.Conflict is inevitable.The kava ceremony states the particular Tongan variant of thisgeneral human dilemma and tries to communicate the idea that the forces of love can bemade stronger than the forces of hate, at least temporarily.Once again, people do notthink all this out consciously.They feel there is something good about the ceremony,something healing, but no one phrases it in terms of reparation to a damaged object andthe reincorporation of the whole experience.As with the kava myth, there are many other possible interpretations of the  Aho eitumyth.One version of the myth, for example, goes into considerable detail about the waythe brothers threw  Aho eitu s head into a bush, which caused the bush to becomepoisonous.Perhaps this is a way of talking about castration, with the customary theme ofpower residing in the cut-off head/phallus.There is a great deal of ambiguity in the mythabout who is killing whom.Obviously the half-brothers kill  Aho eitu, but he is thefather s favourite so they are attacking the father as well.The father himself sends Aho eitu to his death, as I have indicated above.And what of the mother far away inTonga?  Aho eitu is her only son, so she is being attacked and perhaps destroyed.But itis she who tells  Aho eitu how to get to heaven in the first place.And what of the linkwith the kava myth itself in which a daughter is destroyed? Is it a daughter only or also amother in disguise?I do not think one can select any particular interpretation as the  right one.None ofthem can be  proved or  disproved , at least not by the methods appropriate to theconsulting room, nor by any other method that I could think of at the time.In theconsulting room, where the two partners to the relationship are supposed to bediscovering psychic truth, however painful and improbable, one can make interpretationsabout unconscious cannibalism or unconscious desires to castrate a brother, and judgefrom the patient s reactions whether the interpretations are close to home or wide of themark.One always has the transference situation, of which one has direct experience, as ayardstick against which the manifest content of the patient s material can be compared.InTonga I was often aware of transference, especially of the more obvious aspects of it: theattitude that I was a foreigner with whom a cultural  front had to be kept up; attempts to use me in one way or another to gain some social end; the feeling that I was asympathetic outsider with whom emotional burdens could be shared.But I never felt itappropriate to interpret the transference.I was prepared to raise such issues as thelikelihood of hostility between ruler and subjects, particularly with a very secure andmuch-loved monarch, but I was not prepared to try out interpretations of cannibalism orcastration with anyone, so unprepared, in fact, that I could hardly think of suchinterpretations intellectually until I had left the field.The social situation I was in did notsanction such endeavours.Psychoanalysis and ceremony 231From among the many possible interpretations, I have emphasized the theme ofcannibalism and reparation, of the destruction and restoration of a brother/son, because itseemed to me the most obvious, the most consistent with the events and the statusdifferentials of the ceremony, and the most in accord with constellations of envy andrivalry in other aspects of Tongan social life [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]