Bellmer’s most disturbed partner was Unica Zurn who was born in Berlin in 1916 and died by suicide in Paris in 1970 after an almost seventeen-year relationship with Bellmer. Zurn’s father had been a cavalry officer stationed in Africa and Unica’s mother was his third wife. Unica idealized her dashing, often absent father while suffering abuse from her mother. As she puts it in her autobiographical fiction, The Man of Jasmine: Impressions from a Mental Illness: “Filled this morning with an inexplicable loneliness, she enters her mother’s room in order to get into her bed and return, if possible, to whence she came so as to see nothing more. The mountain of tepid flesh which encloses this woman’s impure spirit rolls over on to the horrified child, and she flees for ever from the mother, the woman, the spider! She is deeply grieved.”16 The revolting spectacle suggests a failure of mothering so severe as to explain Zurn’s later craving for miraculous signs (including spectral male presences) to save her from the awfulness of reality. Achieving notice as a writer of free-association fiction, favoured by Surrealists, Zurn’s prose today reads more as dissociative, peopled by pathological “alters”, rather than substantial characters and driven by helpless fantasies of loss, the effects of abuse. Zurn and Bellmer lived impoverished in Paris in a sort of uneasy creative tension, what now might be called “co-dependence”, a sort of stand-off of two people unable to fathom each other’s suffering.
Again, Bellmer could not bring himself to portray Zurn for herself, but had to fuse with her as in Double Cephalopod—Self-Portrait with Unica Zurn (1955). Here Zurn, sprouting a breast, gives the placental surround of a reposing Bellmer; her smaller head overtops his, and both look out forbiddingly as if to say: “this is our locked together state, however strange it may seem”. Therese Lichtenstein sees the picture as revealing “his desire to actually be her, as he looks out of her body from his position inside”.17 But if Zurn invited a
fantasy of safe containment, she also invited perverse abuse as his feared “other”. Bellmer’s infamous photographs of a headless, bound nude female body are also of Zurn. In this series of 1958, tightly binding cord grotesquely distorts her body into an object as repellant as she herself had said her mother’s body was when she sought comfort. It is as if Bellmer is saying “there’s no comfort here, and I will punish the rejecting lover-mother”. With the bondage series, Bellmer’s wish for control over the mother-lover was complete—but it did not end his pain and fear.
By 1959, Bellmer’s aged mother Maria in Berlin was in failing health, and Bellmer traveled to see her just prior to her death. It is likely that anxiety over inability to prevent her passing prompted the bondage fantasy, which makes explicit the intent of doll manipulations. In fact, Bellmer’s entire re-engineering of the female form can be seen as an attempt to control the mother—to restrict her freedom while at the same time cherish her as caregiver. Bellmer was fused with his mother, even toying with the idea that he might himself be female, but finally he was a heterosexual male, albeit one unable to accept independent females, having to incorporate them to forestall abandonment. To feel safe from threat of submissive control or abandonment by the mother-lover, Bellmer counter-controlled females. His reinventing them as distorted mannequins was self-protective “triumph over trauma”, as stoller puts it. The dolls, and their erotic sequels, are dehumanized and inert objects, while Bellmer’s living sexual partners were subject to relentless demands for safe attachment that he, alone, could manipulate. As has been shown, Bellmer’s women were more or less compliant underlings, made vulnerable by the psychological damage they brought with them. Except for Nora Mitrani, they seemed scarcely to recognize the manipulative love-hate system into which they had been drawn.
Neither did Bellmer recognize it in his autobiographical reconstructions, Memories of the Doll Theme (1934) and The Father (1936), which are our main guides showing Bellmer’s urge to understand his psychology of self-defense, yet also his limits of insight. The striking feature, especially of “The Father” is its lack of any mention of Bellmer’s mother, who was the primary victim of a tyrant husband and father. (Bellmer’s retrospective attack on his father has misled biographers to think that he alone was the pathological parent, which may not be so.) Emphasis is on victimization of himself and his brother, not of their mother who was the continuing caregiver during her husband’s long military absence during World War I. That the brothers were anxiously attached to their mother has not been considered, with Bellmer’s complaint against his father successfully throwing biographers off the track into fruitless Oedipal speculations. As we will see, it was not so much an Oedipus Complex that developed as a Laius Complex, with the father Hans wanting revenge on his son for emotional monopoly of his wife, Marie Bell-mer.
The artist Hans Bellmer (who was given his father’s first name) could not fully see his mother because, by identification, he was his mother. (Yet he did see to make at least one striking portrait of her, but none of his father. (Webb, illustration 212 (1954).) Well might his army officer father have been apprehensive about his son’s close alliance with his wife, which was undoubtedly taken as unmanly. Bellmer’s intensity of feeling for his mother appears many years later from his reaction to her death in Berlin, where she had lived in difficult circumstances. Maria Bellmer was an old woman, yet her son confessed: “The desperate fact is that on 22 December 1959 my mother whom I loved so dearly passed away in my arms. I have lost all the courage that is necessary to continue living”. This was not melodrama as five years later, Bellmer was still grieving for his mother so severely that he requested a psychiatric examination: “My depression began Christmas 1959 (death of my mother in Berlin)”.l8 Why the excessive reaction unless because, life-long, Bellmer had remained anxiously attached to his mother? Since nothing is known of Bellmer’s actual pre-oedipal attachment experience with his mother, it cannot be said that the sadistic string binding of Zurn’s breasts in 1958 is a direct reminiscence of nursing failure. Other orally aggressive imagery is identified by Taylor, so it is quite possible that separation anxiety over breast feeding was the lingering issue.19 If so, he would ever after look hungrily for the breast, but even this may not be the main issue. The intensity of need for sadistic control still needs accounting for—Bellmer reportedly remarking, for instance, that had he not made the dolls he might have been a child murderer. Such a retaliatory fantasy arises less from feared separation from mother than from anxious fusion with her.