Scand. Psychoanal. Rev (2002) 25, nr. 2 Copyright © 2002 -THESCANDINAVIAN PSYCHOANALYTIC REVIEW ISSN 0106-2301
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok – The inner crypt* Maria Yassa This article is an introduction to the central ideas of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. The author locates their work in the history of psychoanalytic thought. Abraham and Torok’s thinking on trauma, symbol versus anasemia, introjection versus incorporation, endocryptic identification as well as woman’s penis envy are described as theoretical axes around the focal point constituted by the authors´ specific concept of introjection; seen as the human mode of appropriation of the external world which is crucial to the expansion of the ego through symbolization.
The work of the two psychoanalytic theorists Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok is relatively unknown in Scandinavia. Both received their training at Societé Psychanalytique de Paris, within which they came to work as clinicians and writers. Both were born in Hungary, but were forced into exile – Abraham in 1938, due to numerus clausus (the prohibition for jews against partaking of higher education), Torok in 1947, in connection to World War II. In the shadow of the Holocaust, the personal histories of both were touched by tragic personal loss. Abraham’s academic background was in philosophy; he also worked as a translator, among other things of Hungarian poetry. Maria Torok’s originally trained as a child psychotherapist. In Paris they became a couple, in love and work. Abraham´s and Torok´s theoretically most productive period fell in the sixties *
and seventies, during which they wrote most of the articles in the anthology L’Ecorce et le Noyau (The Shell and the Kernel, english translation by Nicolas Rand), published in 1987. Many of these articles bear the imprint of thought in opposition, they are sometimes polemical regarding those Freudian, Kleinian and Lacanian orthodoxies which in this period dominated French psychoanalysis. Implicit in all their work is a trait of resistance to all doctrinaire tendencies in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis; they explicitly sought a radicalization of psychoanalytic thinking, removed from the authoritarian trading of knowledge of psychoanalytic schools. The aforementioned book, and the study of Freud’s analysis of the Wolf man (1976) present a number of Abraham and Torok’s central ideas. These, however, in no way form a theoretically closed system, nor do they aim at an exhaustive map of
Translated by the author.
1
the psychic landscape. Rather, these ideas constitute a number of intersecting theoretical axes. I will in the following attempt to decribe some of them. TRAUMA AND INNER WORLD Regarding the fact that the lives of Abraham and Torok were touched by the Holocaust – which is present without being mentioned in their texts – it is not surprising that the phenomenon of trauma and its repercussions in the human psyche came to occupy a central place in their production. Fabio Landa, co-worker and colleague of Abraham and Torok, points out that post-holocaust psychoanalysis was called upon for an answer, a theoretical adaptation to a human reality more horrifying than any nightmare (Landa, 2001). Abraham and Torok’s theoretical foundations are to be found in Freud and his disciple, analysand and friend Sandor Ferenczi. For a considerable period in the history of psychoanalytic thinking, Ferenczi was regarded as a controversial figure, not least regarding the controversy with Freud as to the relative importance of real trauma in the aetiology of the neuroses and psychoses. Abandoning the idea of actual sexual intrusion – the theory of seduction – Freud was increasingly drawn to seek the origins of neurotic suffering in the analysand’s inner world of conflicting sexual and aggressive wishes and fantasies. Ferenczi, on the other hand, maintained that any thorough psychoanalytic treatment sooner or later reveals a real trauma. The controversy thus came to stand between fantasized versus real intrusion as cause of the neuroses (Dupont, 2001). Freud came to revise his thinking in connection with his articles on the war neuroses, the compulsion to repeat and the death instinct. Ferenczi´s contribution, however, remained controversial and was in many respects neglected. Abraham and Torok consequently took on a translation of the wri-
tings of Sandor Ferenczi into French. Their concepts constitute a rigorous application and personal approach to the conceptual system of Ferenczi. Perhaps the concept of trauma came to be considered controversial due to confusion in earlier attempts to define the traumatic through the properties of the intrusive element: - Could the traumatic be ascertained by the strength or duration of the intrusion? - Was it to be defined by sexual or by aggressive invasion? – Abraham and Torok’s answer is that the traumatic potential is defined as to its effects in the subject. The traumatic, they claim, is found in every experience that is impossible to psychically metabolize, i.e. to know, think, verbalize, symbolize and thereby transform into a bearable aspect of the subject’s experiential world. Such undigestible experiences create wounds in the psychic web, thereby destroying the individual’s sense of coherence and continuity. Being undigested and indigestible, impossible to integrate into the fabric of psychic life, these experiential fragments are split off and maintained intact in isolated psychic regions, parts of the self which consequently become equally split off. These ensue as a response to the psychic work that the trauma has imposed. As dissociated from the experienced self, existing completely outside the subject’s range of knowledge and mentalization, secret albeit not unconscious, they bear the impression of psychic no-man’s-land or blind-zones, around which large segments of the symbolic field of the individual comes to gravitate. The subjective experience is restricted to the sense of harbouring a foreign entity, a ”something” that gives rise to inexplicable feelings and sometimes to psychic and somatic symptoms. Being radically foreign to the ego, the authors name this conception psychic phantom (Abraham, 1974-75, 1975).
2
The phantom can be transgenerationally transmitted, and it is with the help of this concept that the authors understand the family secret and its powerful effects: in the first generation, the secret is something that must never be revealed, unspeakable because of the pain and shame it would evoke. In the next generation it becomes unmentionable, since the bearer intuits its existence but is ignorant as to its content. For the third generation it finally becomes unthinkable, a something that exists albeit in no way mentally accessible. According to the authors, the path of the secret between the generations is no simple matter of inheritance of secret mental contents; rather, they claim that the existence of the phantom in a parent creates a psychically mute zone, unexpectedly inaccessible and incomprehensible to the small child, who, failing to understand the sudden psychic absence of the parent, attempts to metabolize and is thereby compelled to incorporate this mute aspect of the parent, at the price of creating a mute psychic zone in the child. These isolated parts of the psyche are termed enclaves. They are filled with fantasies of the reason(s) for the parent’s absence as well as of reparation of the parent’s damaged part. It is hence the splitting of the ego, the creation of enclaves, that is transmitted, and not the contents of the secret per se. Despite the possibility of the secret being benign and harmless as to its contents, the splitting of the ego into foreign parts can be devastating (Tisseron, 2001). The radical alienness in Abraham and Torok´s concept of the psychic phantom resembles Laplanche’s (1978) thinking on the enigmatic message of the parent’s unconscious received, without being metabolized, by the child. In Laplanche’s thinking, the external otherness of this message is the very origin of the internal other, i.e. the child’s unconscious. This transmission is necessarily traumatic because alien, but simultaneously constitutive of the psychic apparatus and therefore inevitable and
developmental, whereas Abraham and Torok see it, conversely, as conducive to defensive splits in the ego, thus stressing the pathological/pathogenic character of the process. In short, it could be said that Abraham and Torok´s concept of trauma refers forward, to its consequences in the individual psyche, they posit that the traumatic is all that which counteracts the formation of symbols, and hence of thought. SYMBOL AND ANASEMIA The symbol as cornerstone of all thought is another central concept in Abraham and Torok´s production. Abraham has devoted many of his writings to it, often from a philosophical point of view. He approaches the subject in the theoretically highly condensed text of 1968 ”The kernel and the shell” (english translation, 1994), which has given name to the couple’s anthology. The article was written as a critical discussion of Laplanche and Pontalis’ Vocabulaire de la Psychanalyse (1968). The figure of thought of the hidden kernel and protective shell can be found at several levels in the articles of Abraham. First, he uses it to depict the structure of the human psyche: the innermost kernel of the psyche; the unconscious drives, the somatic layer of being, is according to Abraham, radically inaccessible, foreign, unknown and unreflexive, and therefore in itself lacking meaning. The shell that protects this kernel carries its characteristics and acts as its spokesman by way of such symbols we create so as to give form and meaning to such enigmatic messages that emanate from the unconscious. We get to know ourselves, to contain our wishes and impulses through that translation which the shell, or ego, effects. For Abraham, the symbol is and remains the object of psychoanalysis, as opposed to the unconscious, which is and remains inaccessible. Eve3
ry attempt to explore the unconscious therefore constitutes a contradiction in terms. It is possible that this point is polemical in regard to orthodox Kleinianism, according to which the unconscious is seen as a finite number of phantasized relations between internal objects. Abraham argues that the symbol, as testimony of the analysand’s unconscious, can only be understood within that dynamic relational field that arises between the analysand’s transference and the analyst’s countertransference. Here is created the space, in response to the words of the analysand, of a resonance of complementary images within the analyst, making the symbol intelligible within that unique couple of analyst and analysand. Abraham firmly disputes any formalization of symbols into systems, or closure of signification. The symbols that make up a particular individual’s subjective field are unique and therefore impossible to generalize; he describes them as condensed hieroglyphics containing aspects of subjective history. Therefore symbols are regarded as the constructive entities of psychic life. Secondly, Abraham sees the kernelshell dialectic as inherent to the structure of psychoanalytic theory as a system of thought: the metapsychological level of discourse; its different terms, all denote for the individual covert and unknown phenomena. Metapsychological concepts such as Pleasure, Unpleasure, Discharge, the Unconscious, the Somatic, etc. are all subjectively unknowable. Abraham denotes them as antisemantic, since they constitute a point of absolute zero of subjective meaning, but simultaneously, through the tension created by the distance to the subjective layers of the psyche, or the shell, they create the very precondition of reflexive discourse. Therefore the concepts of metapsychology are seen as designified, and Abraham characterizes them as anasemic. The concept of anasemia is a neologism of Abraham’s (c.f. polysemia), approximately meaning suspended significa-
tion, incomplete symbol (Swedenmark, 2001). It simultaneously denotes the function of metapsychology as the protective shell or ego of psychoanalysis. Most importantly, it captures the inherent paradox of psychoanalytic theory; that is, the attempt, with the help of language, to comprehend the unknown/unknowable source of language in the subject. Meaning arises first on the subsequent level of discourse. This is made up of subjectively accessible symbolic transformations of nucleic messages. The symbol, in Abraham’s definition, is constructed in the same way as the symptom, i.e. as a compromise formation of shell and kernel. For Abraham the clinical theory of psychoanalysis is symbolic/symptomatic. To this level of discourse belong such concepts as the oedipus complex, penis envy, castration anxiety, etc., all being symbolic/symptomatic in their structure and thus comprising manifest and latent levels. Thus psychoanalysis, as a system of thought, is seen as comprising two and only two conceptual levels: symbols, or approximations of our inner movements and unconscous aspects, and anasemias, concepts that point to, denote, but never capture the essence of the innermost, unknown/unknowable kernel. From this position Abraham takes on a radical reformulation of a number of Freudian theses. The oedipus complex, for example, is described as the female or male child’s symbolic myth, not only of desire and prohibition, of the father’s entry into the mother-child dyad, which is the myth’s manifest level; he also conceives the myth’s latent level in that which it does not say; via negation -not kill the father, not love the father incestuously, i.e. not cathect the father – the oedipus myth can be seen as a means of confirming separation from the early mother through negation. The myth thus conceals this latent aspect, that is the prohibition against remaining in the early, exclusive, mother-child dyad. Like4
wise, the Freudian hypothesis of the inherent masculinity/phallicity of sexuality is reinterpreted in terms of the individual dynamics of kernel and shell; as the implicitly penetrating, phallic character of the kernel’s messages to the shell, in the male and female subject. DEPRESSION, OBJECT AND SYMBOL Some of Abraham and Torok’s most important clinical writings refer to the problematics of depression. The fact that the central axis of depression is constituted by the subject’s relationship to a lost object has been described, with different theoretical foci, by several authors. In ”Mourning and melancholia” (1917), Freud described how the melancholic’s self-reproaches, self-hatred and self-contempt all veil battles of love and hate with a lost object which has been withdrawn from consciousness but is retained through identification, a relational mode which, because of its inherent ambivalence, inevitably includes sadism and hate. Karl Abraham (1911, 1924) deepened this understanding through detailed descriptions of those drive-aspects that characterize the relationship to the lost object in melancholia and mania. He understood the link between the cannibalistic colouring of identification and the for depression/mania specific symptoms as representing cycles of incorporation/oral devouring followed by destruction/anal expulsion of the loved/hated object. These processes occur in ”normal” mourning as well, but as an intermediary stage, until the subject has introjected the cathexes to that which has been lost. The obvious futility of these cycles in the case of the melancholic could therefore be said to manifest the concreteness of the relation to the object: devouring is followed by expulsion, nothing is gained, and nothing lost.
Klein (1935, 1940) expanded Abraham’s thinking on the importance of orality and incorporation in grief as well as depression. She traced the common roots of both in the development of the small child. For the baby, writes Klein, the difference between loving the object and cannibilastically destroying it is minute. This gives rise to anxious phantasies of having destroyed it, as well as phantasies of retaliation from a damaged object. These phantasies, in turn, pave the way to and characterize the depressive position, which has been thouroughly studied by Klein and her followers. Where Freud was first to understand the subjective contents of depression, it could be said that the line of thought starting with Abraham and developed by Klein localize the focus of depression, or the inability to mourn, i.e. to introject that which has been lost as well as the reality of the loss, in the subject’s ambivalence toward the lost object, generally, and specifically to the oral-sadistic, incorporative aspects of the subject’s drives. Depression is hereby localized to the arena of internalization. Torok (1971-74, 1978) objects that the drive-centered optics of this tradition tends toward an interpretation of depressive imagery – which gravitates around digestion – in an overly concrete fashion. Thus, the image of teeth, for instance, need not necessarily refer to the wish to devour, nor need the image of the corpse automatically designate the anally expelled object. The oral and anal colouring of depressive imagery should be understood not as a direct derivative of the drives, but metaphorically; as a way of alerting the analyst’s attention to the existence of a conservation within the ego, that indigestible aspects of the relation to the lost object have been swallowed whole without being symbolized, and therefore have not gained access to the experienced self.
5
Abraham and Torok’s writings on depression, their emphasis on its subjective contents, therefore constitute a link beween Freud’s 1917 description – in which he mentions, but does not dwell upon the instinctual grammar of depression – and later thinking, which could be said to focus on its topography or contents. André Green’s description of the dead mother-complex (1983), as well as Kristeva’s writings on the symbolic depletion of depression (1989), are examples of such thinking which seeks to capture content-related aspects of negative, blank mourning, of absence, lack and non-symbolization, all reminiscent of Abraham & Torok’s concept of the phantom. The link, in my view, is specifically to be found in their contrasting concepts of introjection versus incorporation. INTROJECTION, INCORPORATION AND ENDOCRYPTIC IDENTIFICATION The coming into existence of an individual and unique subject entails taking the world in, allowing it to make its for each human being particular marks; it is the transformation of these marks into owned parts of a unique inner world. Through this developmental process, a human being comes to own her/himself, her/his experiences and inner world. That the world is made up of objects is all the more obvious in the case of the small child. For the child, the primary objects, in particular the mother, are crucial to survival, and are experienced as parts of the child’s self. This is an accepted truth; psychoanalysis has studied how this surrounding world’s characteristics; availability, presence or absence, but perhaps most importantly, how the loss of vital objects leaves its mark on the inner world of the child, and conversely, how the child’s inner world of fantasies colours the experience of the object world.
The writings of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok specifically concern themselves with the nature of the link between a subject’s inner and outer worlds, that is, the particular way in which a person transforms the surrounding world into a unique experiential world. The nature of this link, an individual’s manner of taking in the world, can either enrich or in a devastating way deplete subjectivity; in the last case leading to inevitable estrangement from desire, and depression. Introjection is the designation Abraham and Torok give one of these mediating links (Abraham & Torok, 1972). Their concept originates in the work of Sandor Ferenczi. They use it quite distinctively and exclusively, so as to clearly distinguish it from other modes of appropriation, such as incorporation and identification. They claim that the workings of introjection within the individual are quite different, and lead to diametrically opposite developmental consequences. They pay particular attention to the crucial difference beween introjection and incorporation; they show how in the handing down of concepts in the history of psychoanalytic theory there has been a tendency to treat these concepts as if they were synonymous, or serial, that is denoting different degrees of the same phenomenon. This, according to the authors, is erroneous, and leads to a blurring of the theoretical rigour of the concept of introjection as it was first intended by Ferenczi. Introjection, according to Abraham and Torok, denotes that gradual and life-long process through which the small child, later the adult, comes to own its drives, feelings, desires; i.e. its particular subjectivity. To love, hate, enjoy, suffer, feel satisfaction or frustration are all manifestations of the child’s cathexes of the maternal object, that is, of the transformation of the child’s autoeroticism into object love, in metapsychological terms. The child’s wishes originally bear the object’s name: 6
mother is love, hate, pleasure, pain, satisfaction and frustration. The child’s dependency of the object is therefore absolute, and the function of the object is to assist the child in the naming of desire, in all its different aspects. The drives are then superposed with fantasies, images and memories. This means that the caretaker returns to the child its emotions and wishes, which with the object’s mediation have been legitimized by the verbal code of the outer world, thereby gaining the right of residence in the child, as the child’s love, pleasure, etc. The object thus becomes a connecting link to the child’s feeling of vitality and sense of unique subjectivity. Because desire is life-long and varying, the need for introjection is also life-long. As adults we feel the need of closeness to others, of cultural experiences and of dreaming, all of which are pleasurable to the extent that they help us recognize, name and thus legitimize various manifestations of our inner lives. With the help of introjection, the mother’s absence becomes bearable: it is not part of the child, of its desire, that is missing, but its object. Hereby the child acquires the mental capacity to contain mother’s absence as well as her return: absence and presence become thinkable, and therefore bearable perceptions, whereas it is unthinkable to lose oneself. The ultimate outpost of absence which is the loss of the object through its deceitfulness, incapacity or actual death inevitably entail mourning, but not necessarily the melancholic’s conviction of having lost vital parts of the self. The work of mourning leads to a point where the subject can reclaim her/his cathexes of the loved and lost object. It is thereby possible to think: ”It is he/she who is dead. Not I. I am alive”. A work of introjection has taken place, and the subject is able to return with hope and love to people in the outer world, and cathect it. What happens, then, in such cases where the object is lost before it has helped the
child, or the adult, to a rudimentary appropriation of its drives? Before desire has been named and claimed? –Those particular depressive states that follow have been thouroughly studied by Abraham and Torok (Torok, 1968; Abraham & Torok, 1972,1975), who have given them a central place in their joint production. Their point is that, irrespective of the way in which the loss takes place, it is in these cases inevitably traumatic (c.f. the authors´ conception of trauma, p. xx), it creates a gash in the subject’s psychic fabric, since the lost object is precisely the object which should have helped the subject to constitute itself, and to bear the object’s absence. The trauma, according to the authors, is not constituted by the loss as such, however painful it might be, but by the loss of the very person who is cathected with the subject’s maturing drives, and therefore has the function of mediator to its inner world. This mediation may have been deficient or lacking; the child has nevertheless maintained the hope to receive it one day. Definitive loss through death therefore marks the extinction of this hope, and irrevocably confirms the impossibility of regaining various aspects of the maturing drives from the object. Faced with the extinction of this hope, Abraham and Torok describe that the subject resorts to a last-ditch solution: the fantasy of incorporation. Being precisely a fantasy, incorporation functions according to the pleasure principle and the magic of hallucinatory wish-fulfillment, removed from the reality of the loss. In contrast to introjection, which takes place in the presence of the object, in the service of reality and the expansion of the ego, incorporation occurs in the object’s absence, and is in every sense compensatory to deficient introjection. Faced with the trauma of loss; a wound the healing of which would entail a gradual and painful work of introjection – or mourning – the fantasy of incorporation 7
supplies the subject with an immediate solution, a shortcut the content of which is that the subject literally and concretely devours, swallows the object or parts of it. The subject’s wish is to thereby retrieve its own desire through magical union with the object. This wish is secret and felt to be shameful, because the prohibition inherent in the loss is neither heeded nor openly defied, it is evaded. Abraham and Torok describe how analysands, after many years of analytic work and with considerable shame, are able to describe how, when faced with the reality of loss, instead of experiencing grief, felt overwhelmed by powerful libidinal wishes, sexual excitement resulting in orgasm. The authors understand this as a manifestation of the magic and orgastic fantasy of union with the lost object, the intoxication of omnipotently reclaiming the drives through incorporation, or devouring of the dead object. This fantasy is also present in cases where the loss is less complicated, and the subject has been able to effect a partial introjection, but then as a temporary solution before the actual work of mourning sets in. In the early life of the child, the process of introjection and the fantasy of concrete devouring are superimposed: eating serves as a concrete depiction of the child’s hungry appropriation of desire. Gradually process (introjection) and magic fantasy (incorporation) separate. This takes place when the mouth, previously filled with the maternal breast, remains empty, hungry, and desire is temporarily frustrated. The mouth can then be filled with words that speak of hunger, longing, fullness and reunion, words for presence and absence: with the help of thinking and of words, the mother’s presence becomes possible to evoke, despite her actual absence. The maternal breast is thus replaced by maternal words. Abraham and Torok
therefore describe the process of introjection as ”the work of empty mouths”, thereby stressing the symbolic nature of introjection, as opposed to the concreteness of incorporation. Accordingly, things that concretely fill the mouth (food, alcohol, etc.) can later be used to fill a mouth whose real lack is for words meaningful to the process of introjection. Thus the fantasy of devouring the dead object serves as a compensation for the emptiness of the mouth imposed by the loss. Since this swallowing has taken place according to a concrete fantasy far removed from associative links to the rest of psychic life, it can neither be repressed to the unconscious where it could be elaborated and integrated with other unconscious material through dreaming, slips, parapraxes etc., nor is it accepted by the rationality of the conscious ego. By way of solution, the dead object is enclosed in an isolated part of the ego, a kind of secret tomb or inner crypt. The object is not mourned, its image is not repressed – it is enclosed in a part of the ego that is sealed by the repression of the shameful pleasure of the moment of loss. This inner crypt can be likened to the previously mentioned enclave, albeit further sealed by the conserving repression of shameful desire. Here, the object lives its secret life, and the subject becomes the guardian of the secret shared with it. Life goes on, seemingly as if nothing had happened, and no loss had taken place. It is as if the subject stated: ”Since the dead object has taken my desire, love and sexuality into the grave, I am obliged, in order to survive, to take the grave into me”. In the article ”The illness of mourning and the fantasy of the exquisite corpse” (1994), Maria Torok quotes a male analysand, a widower since several years: ”My wife took my potency to the grave. She holds my penis there, as though it were in her hand” (p. 116). Where mourning, i.e. the work of introjection, leads to independence from the 8
object, incorporation works in the opposite direction: in this case, dependency on the dead object is crippling, since the dead object disposes of and commands the subject’s drives. This identification is termed endocryptic, given the secrecy of the bond. The clinical picture given by the authors is that of classic melancholia: inhibition, lack of objectal love, depression, self-reproach, self-contempt. They adhere to Freud’s 1917 formulation that these manifestations are parts of an ongoing dialogue with the lost object. Freud claimed that the subject bears the features of the object as a mask, that the self-reproaches should be heard as reproaches and devaluations of the dead object, for its betrayals in life and in dying. The object accordingly casts its shadow over the ego. Abraham and Torok proceed a step further and claim that the dead object has borrowed the subject’s identity: such is the tangibility and secrecy of the subject’s fantasy of the object’s survival within its self. The melancholic, in his discourse, acts as spokesman to the lost object: the depression, pain, emptiness and guilt are all understood as the melancholic subject’s fantasy of the object’s pain of having lost the subject, the guilt as the object’s guilt over having abandoned its beloved object, the subject. The voice and presence of the object are thus conjured in melancholic symptomatology, which becomes the enactment of an ongoing love story, the image of the object’s endless suffering reassuring the subject of being dearly loved and longed for, notwithstanding the real loss. Suicide then becomes a guarantee for the unchanged continuation of this fantasized love story. The dissolution of endocryptic identification can only take place through the tracking of the source of the analysand’s symptoms, words, expressions and enactments. Who is speaking? Whose symptom? Whose pain? Whose physical suffering? Often, these are part of the fantasy of
the object’s ongoing endocryptic life, the object that has been swallowed whole. In one of their articles on this subject, Abraham and Torok describe psychoanalytic work with a little boy, whose two years older sister had died. She had made certain sexual advances to the boy, before dying at the age of eight. At a cerain point in the analytic work the boy, suddenly and inexplicably, began to steal ladies’ underwear. This was as incomprehensible to the boy as to his analyst, until the day when the boy, in a slip of the tongue, instead of giving his own age, which was his conscious intention, gave the age his sister would have been, had she lived: fourteen years. This led to an understanding of the boy´s inner situation: since his sister concretely lived within him, it was perfectly reasonable that she, reaching puberty, would require ladies’ underclothing. The sister’s sexual advances, the secret these had created between brother and sister, had halted introjection and consequently mourning for this boy, who obviously had incorporated his sister within himself, swallowed her (Abraham & Torok, 1972, p. 266-267, author’s translation). PENIS ENVY AS INCORPORATIVE SUBTERFUGE A less dramatic expression of incorporation as last resource in the face of deficient introjection is described in Maria Torok’s 1964 article ”The meaning of ´penis envy´ in women” (english translation 1994). Here, she proceeds from the observation that the analyses of women often include episodes of hopeless dissatisfaction 9
over the experienced imperfection of the proper sex, its supposed restriction of possibilities and capacity for pleasure. These compaints are accompanied by bitterness, spite, resentment, feelings of emptiness, powerlessness and depression. These feelings occur in both sexes, but remarkably, it is only the woman who sees them as direct consequences of her sex. It is as if the woman said: ”My feelings of weakness, passivity, stupidity and dependence, in short, all my shortcomings, are due to my being a woman (implicitly, to lacking a penis)”. Why, asks Torok, this monumental self-devaluation in woman? Why woman? And why sex? – In her article, Torok embarks on a radical reinterpretation of the concept of penis envy.
a genuinely psychoanalytic understanding of the problem. She questions the supposed inevitability of woman’s contempt/envy regarding her own sex. Confronting the Freudian hypothesis of infantile sexuality’s inherently phallic/masculine character with (among others) Melanie Klein’s and Karen Horney’s observations of the little girl’s early awareness of vaginal sensations, Torok claims that these should lead the little girl to an early preconception of her own sex. Therefore the little girl’s later discovery of the difference between the sexes should, if anything, reawaken this early conception of femininity, thereby bringing the yet diffuse, if present, perception of the possesion of feminine sexuality to the fore.
The clinical phenomenon exists, as it did in the time of Freud. The classical Freudian interpretation starts with the little girl’s discovery of the difference between the sexes. The girl’s perception and knowledge of the boy’s penis is linked to the hypothesis that the child’s sexuality – girl or boy – is phallic, masculine. The girl’s discovery that she, in contrast to the boy, lacks a penis, would consequently rouse her envy with regard to the boy, as well as her disappointment and hatred towards the mother, who has given her a defect, castrated body. As a consequence of this disillusion with the mother, she turns to the father, who becomes her loveobject. This would herald her oedipal development. In his work with female analysands, and in accordance with the previous line of thought, Freud seemed to resign in the face of the seeming unyieldingness of women’s belief in their own sex’s biological inferiority. He therefore came to regard penis envy as primary, a specifically feminine expression of universal human envy in the face of that which is inaccessible.
Torok locates the key to understanding woman’s penis envy in the inherent character and emotional colouring of envy. As opposed to desire, a state of being possible to live with and in, envy is by nature hopeless, insatiable; objects of envy can always be found, they are always seen as existing outside the subject, and are perceived as missing things. Envy is therefore necessarily a smoke-screen covering the real problem, the actual inner obstacle, which is the difficulty of appropriating specifically feminine sexual desire in the face of inner prohibitions. Therefore complaints of being a woman, over the alleged deficiencies of femininity, in short of the lack of a penis, can go on endlessly, and that which is lacking can always be perceived as a thing or appendage of the woman’s self, notwithstanding if this thing is a penis, child, fortune or beauty. What is efficiently camouflaged is that which is really lacking; namely the woman’s free disposal of desire, the capacity for and right to satisfaction – in other words, the introjection of femininity. The problem of being-in-the-body is covered by the subterfuge of ownership of a bodily part, in this case a penis.
Conversely, Torok claims that resignation in the face of biologistic and sociological approaches constitute evasions from
10
This penis is, in the woman’s representation, violently idealized as to the advantages it is thought to entail: uninhibited freedom, absence of anxiety, insecurity and narcissistic vulnerability, access to wealth and sexual pleasure without guilt. Torok quotes two women: ”I don’t know why I have this feeling”, says Agnes, ”when it has nothing to do with reality, but it’s always been like that for me. It’s as if men were the only ones made to be fulfilled, to have opinions, to develop themselves, to advance. And everything seems so easy to them… they’re a force nothing at all opposes… they can do anything they want. And I simply stagnate, hesitate; I feel as if there’s a wall in front of me… I’ve always had the feeling that I was not quite completed. Something like a statue waiting for its sculptor to make up its mind finally to shape its arms” (p. 45). Yvonne recalls always having thought, when she was a little girl: ”…that boys succeed in everything…, they are instantly fluent in several languages… They could take all the candles in a church and no one would stop them. If ever they encounter an obstacle, they just naturally jump over it” (p. 45). Envy, the representation of the penis as idealized thing, combined with the powerful hate and resentment toward the mother, indicate that what is in question is an anal conflict regarding the mother, rather than a phallic-genital one. Envy, which is dominated by acquisitiveness, the perception of inner riches in terms of things rather than as states of mind, is known to be a characteristic of anality. For the small child, regardless of sex, the anal phase entails training, with the caretaker’s – who is often the mother –
help, to attain sphincter-control, the intentional emptying and holding back of faeces. The anal phase entails the fantasy that the mother, through her control of the child’s sphincter, commands all that is inside its body, that this is in fact the mother’s property, to utilize at her will. For the little girl this includes sexuality, which at an early stage is felt to be part of the inside of the body (in contrast to the boy, who localizes sexual feelings to the penis, on the outside of the body). The girl’s sexuality will therefore also be felt to be the mother’s possesion. The problem arises when the girl wishes to reclaim as her own desire, sensuality and awakening sexual feelings, i.e. her gradual maturation: her feeling, correspondingly, is of aggressively disposessing the mother of her property, of depriving and robbing her of inner riches. Since the little girl also loves her mother and is dependent on her love, this is perceived as infinitely dangerous. When the girl later, in oedipal love, turns to the father, thus in addition gaining a rival in the mother, the obstacles are felt to be insurmountable. Better then to resent the mother for not having given her a penis, than to express her real hatred, that which is the result of forfeiting desire and sensuality for the mother’s sake. Hence penis envy, life-long because unfulfillable, is simultaneously a pledge of fidelity to the mother, a reassurance that the girl/woman will never feel pleasure and therefore never separate from her. Torok imagines that the little girl’s discourse to the maternal imago could be described as follows: - It is the penis-thing that I have been deprived of and lack, not parts of myself. - This search is deemed to fail, which I know. But on this failure I can blame that I must give up pleasure. Actually, it is you who command and forbid my pleasure, since you own the inside of my body. It is you who have emptied it. - I insist on the infinite value of the penis-thing, so that you may understand the 11
depth of my sacrifice: it is my sensuality that I have given up. - For this reason, I hate you and wish to take revenge, eye for eye, by emptying and disposessing you. But this I cannot, since I also love and need you. - So, I will make the lack of penis my problem. In this way I can remain faithful to you for the rest of my life: I cannot, with my defect body, reasonably expect to feel pleasure. I can keep secret my longing for a penis that complements me, because it would entail my leaving you. Obviously, masturbation is forbidden, since I then would risk coming into contact with myself as a female subject, with my desire, which according to my anal fantasy means depriving you of something infinitely valuable.
tion at several different levels of the experience of subjectivity, and with the help of their specific concept of introjection – seen as the key to every aspect of psychic life. The concept of introjection, due to the distinctiveness the author’s ascribe to it, is seemingly unambiguous. At closer inquiry, it can be seen to constitute a synthesis of Freudian concepts from different points in the evolution of his thought; it thus comprises the early Freud/Breuer concepts of catharsis and abreaction, as well as the later concepts of working-through and above all, mourning. Due to the inclusiveness of the concept and the life-long duration the authors ascribe to the work of introjection, it is also reminiscent of the Kleinian concept of the depressive position.
The analysis of woman’s penis envy, claims Torok, is often fruitless because interpreted literally, concretely, and not as a symtomatic compromise-formation that can be further deconstructed into conflictual representations. To the extent that psychoanalysis, in a concession to biologism, regards penis envy an irreducible, primary entity, it contents to woman’s confusion of penis-as-thing with desire-asstate of mind. To the sociological objection that we, as a fact, live in a patriarchy, making penis envy inevitable, Torok points out that social institutions arise as a solution to problems originating in the interaction of individuals. Where woman, in her meeting with man, brings with her this archaic maternal image, the social inequality between the sexes can only be conserved.
The work of Abraham and Torok, however, also comprises a radical approach to metapsychology. Abraham’s distinct cleaving of psychanalytic concepts into symbols and anasemias point out the essential futility of approaching the unconscious as if it were open to inquiry. That which conversely is available and comprehensible are the symbolic transformations of the unconscious and of the drives. He claims that the mechanistic deduction of human subjectivity to the drives as ultimate explanation risks attributing the status of truth to the drives, thereby leading psychanoanalytic theorizing into the impasse of biologism. These thoughts are illuminating with regard to such attacks which have lately been leveled at psychoanalysis, focusing on the alleged datedness and lack of scientific rigour of metapsychology, not least of the concept of drives. These attacks can be seen as an expression of the ever-looming confusion between these by Abraham described categories; (subjectively knowable) symbol and (antisemantic) anasemia. The criticism against psychanalysis in part rests on the misconception of treating the concepts of metapsychology as subjectively knowable.
FINAL WORDS The central idea running through the body of Abraham and Torok´s work is that of the prerequisites for the emergence of subjectivity. The question of how a unique individual comes into being is only superficially simple. They approach this ques-
12
Through the entirety of their work Abraham and Torok pledge their fidelity to the Freudian canon. At closer inspection, one wonders whether this does not apply more to the spirit than to the letter of Freud. In the final analysis, the authors effect a radical decentering of psychoanalytic theory, due to the central importance they attribute to introjection as the crucial and absolute motor of psychic life. Sexuality becomes secondary albeit important, it is regarded as one of many aspects of human existence that need to be subjected to the work of introjection. From this follows a reinterpretation of large segments of clinical theory. Thus, Maria Torok’s deconstruction of the concept of penis envy entails the insertion of a metaphorical level of discourse. Likewise, in the authors thought on the mute drama of depression, oral and anal fantasies are seen as metaphorical. With regard to depression, their radicality can be seen in the descriptions of the violent intrusion of a lifeless object at the expense of a devastating loss of subjectivity. Their descriptions of the subjective content as opposed to the instinctual grammar of depression can be said to start where Freud’s work ends, cutting through the conceptual confusion which has coloured the field of internalization, i.e. the central question of the emergence of human subjectivity through appropriation of the outer world.
Abraham, N. (1968). L’ecorce et le noyau. In L’Ecorce et le Noyau. Paris: Flammarion, 1987. --- (1974-1975). Notes du séminaire sur l’unité duelle et le fantôme. In L’Ecorce et le Noyau. Paris: Flammarion, 1987. --- (1975). Notules sur le fantôme. In L’Ecorce et le Noyau. Paris: Flammarion, 1987. --- (1994). The Shell and the Kernel (translation of l´Ecorce et le Noyau). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. --- (1999). Le Verbier de l’Homme aux Loups. Paris: Flammarion. Abraham, N. & Torok, M. (1972). Deuil ou mélancolie, Introjecter – incorporer. In L’Ecorce et le Noyau. Paris: Flammarion, 1987. --- (1975). ”L’Objet perdu – moi”. In L’Ecorce et le Noyau. Paris: Flammarion, 1987. Dupont, J. (2001). Repères sur la question du trauma, Freud, Balint, Abraham et Torok. In Rouchy, J.-C. (Ed.): La Psychanalyse avec Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok. Tolouse: Erès. Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and Melancholia. S.E., XIV.
REFERENCES Abraham, K. (1911). Notes on the psychoanalytical investigation and treatment of manic-depressive insanity and allied conditions. In Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis. London: Maresfield Library, 1988. --(1924). A short study of the development of the libido, viewed in the light of mental disorder. In Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis. London: Maresfield Library, 1988.
Green, A. (1983). The dead mother. In On Private Madness. London: Hogarth, 1986. Klein, M. (1935). Ett bidrag till studiet av de manodepressiva tillståndens psykogenes. In Igra, L. & Sjögren, L. (Eds.): Kärlek, skuld och gottgörelse. Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1988. --- (1940). Sorg och dess samband med manodepressiva tillstånd. In Igra, L. & Sjögren, L. (Eds.): Kärlek, skuld och gott-
13
görelse. Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1988. Kristeva, J. (1989). Black Sun. Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Landa, F. (2001). Une psychanalyse non indifférente. In Rouchy, J.-C. (Ed.): L a Psychanalyse avec Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok. Tolouse: Erès, 2001. Laplanche, J. (1997). The theory of seduction and the problem of the other. Int. J. Psychoanal., 78: 653-666. Laplanche, J. & Pontalis, J.-B. (1968). Vocabulaire de la Psychoanalyse. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Torok, M. (1964). La signification de l’”envie du pénis” chez la femme. In l’Ecorce et le Noyau. Paris: Flammarion, 1987. --- (1968). Maladie du deuil et fantasme du cadavre exquis. In l’Ecorce et le Noyau. Paris: Flammarion, 1987. --- (1971-74; 1978): Deuil impossible, honte et secret. In Rand, N. (Ed.): Maria Torok: Une Vie avec la Psychanalyse. Paris: Aubier, 2002. --- (1994). The meaning of ”penis envy” in woman. In The Shell and the Kernel. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Swedenmark, J. (2001). Personal communication.
--- (1994). The illness of mourning and the fantasy of the exquisite corpse. In T h e Shell and the Kernel. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Tisseron, S. (2001). Les secrets de famille, la honte, leurs images et leurs objets. In Rouchy, J.-C. (Ed.): La Psychanalyse avec Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok. Tolouse: Erès.
Maria Yassa Upplandsgatan 42 113 28 Stockholm Sweden E-mail:
[email protected]
14
