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Originally published in 1992.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691604701 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #127 |
| Pages: | 222 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.90(w) x 7.00(h) x 0.60(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Family Secrets
And the Psychoanalysis of Narrative
By Esther Rashkin
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1992 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06951-7
CHAPTER 1
For a New Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism
THE WORKS OF ABRAHAM AND TOROK
For the last twenty-five years the link between literature and psychoanalysis has been the subject of an energetic and at times impassioned debate that no well-informed literary scholar has been able to ignore. Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan are the two major figures whose works have articulated the terms of this debate: the problematic relationship between psychic structures and textual structures, between the language of the mind and the language of the poetic work. With the publication in France in 1976 of Le verbier de Vhomme aux loups, the first volume of the collected writings of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, two new voices joined this debate. Having taken degrees from the Sorbonne in philosophy and clinical psychology, respectively, Abraham and Torok became psychoanalysts in the mid-1950s and began publishing articles on metapsychology, the phenomenology of poetics, and the theory of translation in a variety of French journals. Not until their reopening of Freud's celebrated analysis of the Wolf Man, however, did their work catch the attention of the larger French psychoanalytic, philosophical, and literary communities. The recent publication in translation of the The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonymy and of several essays from the second volume of their writings, L'écorce et Ie noyau (The Shell and the Kernel), has brought Abraham and Torok to the attention of increasing numbers of Englishspeaking scholars and clinicians.
Abraham and Torok did not conceive their theories as a response to others but as an internally coherent system of thought that grew out of their clinical experience and philosophical reflections. The purpose of this chapter is to consider their conceptual system within the history of ideas. It aims specifically to examine the potential significance, for the study of literature, of the analysts' theories of the dual unity, the phantom, secrets, cryptonymy, and symbol. To this end, I will begin by situating Abraham and Torek's work within the context of Freudian and Lacanian theory. My intent here is not to provide exhaustive summaries of Freud's and Lacan's writings. Nor is it to do a "Freud-on-Freud" or "Lacan-on-Lacan" reading that would show how one of their texts diverges rhetorically from itself or "self-deconstructs." I propose rather a comparative analysis of those developmental and psycholinguistic aspects of Freud's and Lacan's work that have relevance for Abraham and Torok's project, by virtue of either their convergence with it or their divergence from it. This will lead to a preliminary exposition of the implications, for the study of narrative, of extending into the literary-analytic realm certain concepts articulated by Abraham and Torok. The chapter will conclude with a brief precis of the cogent similarities and differences between their project and mine.
FREUD, LACAN, ABRAHAM AND TOROK: VIEWS OF PSYCHIC DEVELOPMENT
The Oedipal Scenario
The centrality of the Oedipus complex to Freud's concept of human development cannot be overstated and bears recalling for the sake of the analysis that follows. Freud considered this complex to be universal and ineluctably traumatic for all individuals. According to this phylogenetic view, a child matures into an adult as the result of conflictual encounters between instinctual drives and the necessities and prohibitions of external reality. In the course of this maturation, the child passes through a series of overlapping stages of psychosexual organization. In the oral stage, the nurturing relationship with the mother takes on a libidinal or erotogenic dimension as pleasure is associated with the mouth and sucking the breast. Upon the child's entering the anal stage, the orally oriented drives are repressed and redirected to activities of defecation and retention. The ensuing phallic stage sees a further repression and libidinal shift to the (male) genitals and an emerging perception of the two sexes as differentiated by virtue of the presence or absence of the penis. This discovery of sexual difference coincides with the onset of the Oedipus complex and the actualizing of a fear Freud deemed to be universal: the threat of castration by the rival father as punishment for the (male) child's instinctual and incestuous desire for the mother. The successful outcome of the Oedipus complex is contingent upon the repression of this desire for the mother. This enables the child to disengage libidinally from the mother and to identify with the father, who is no longer perceived as a rival but as a model of the man the child will someday become. The vinconscious as a repository of repressed wishes is organized at this moment in terms of this identification with the parent of the same sex and the prohibition against incest. The superego, the agency of conscience and moral and cultural law and authority, also takes shape at this time.
The Imaginary and the Symbolic
Lacan's conception of the Oedipus complex differs from Freud's most notably for its emphasis on language and on the subject's position in society as a function of language. Informed primarily by the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, G.F.W. Hegel's dialectics of the subject, and the phenomenological writings of Martin Heidegger, Lacan views the preOedipal stages as part of one structuring system called the Imaginary. The Imaginary is a prelinguistic state in which the child exists in an equivalent or "metaphoric" relationship with the mother, misapprehending in her image a reflection of its own (illusory) plenitude and self-identity. Organising this realm of fiction is the "Desire of the Mother," a formulation signifying the child's desire to be united with the mother in a satisfying, fusional rapport, and the desire to be the object the mother lacks and desires above all else: the phallus.
The child's recognition of the father as a symbol of the law prohibiting incest shatters this dyadic mirror structure by inserting a third element into the equation. The Name-of-the-Father (le-Nom-du-père), meaning both the father as a "name" (nom) or figure of language and as the "No" (non is homophonous with nom) or agency of interdiction threatening castration, comes between the child and its desire (to be the phallus) of the mother. The child represses this desire, as well as the threat now associated with it embodied in the name and the "no" of the father, and thereby enters language, the realm of the Symbolic. Where before (illusory) meaning and fullness appeared there is only lack, a world of "empty" language in which signification is an effect of the difference between signifiers. Henceforth the child's desire of the mother will be mediated by a potentially infinite chain of signifiers—linked to each other by what Lacan calls metonymy—all functioning as substitutes or metaphors of the absent and irretrievable phallus. The phallus or "privileged signifier" has been pushed below the bar of repression. This bar, which in Saussure's algorithm signaled a correspondence between signifier and signified, represents for Lacan the insurmountable barrier between the chain of intertwined signifiers above it and the fixed, identifiable meanings or signifieds below it. The child, as a subject in language and as subject to language, is itself split by this bar, marked by the irreducible lack at the core of its existence and by its radical otherness to itself. It can never know or grasp what is below the bar—the unconscious and signification—except as missed understanding, missed signification, and the fictions of the conscious.7
The Dual Unity
Abraham and Torek's view of psychic maturation and of the signification of the Oedipus complex differs markedly from both Freud's and Lacan's. In general terms, Abraham and Torok reject the accepted universality of the stratification of childhood development, be it sexual or linguistic, as the organizing principle for the practice and theory of psychoanalysis and as an explanation of psychic conflicts. They also do not accept as axiomatic that a particular event is traumatic for all individuals or that a given moral system can legitimately serve as the a priori determinant of what does or does not cause trauma. This means the analysts reject the Freudian concept of the Oedipus complex (and its Lacanian correlative of the Imaginary/Symbolic) as an inevitable drama, central to all psychic development, born of the ineluctable conflict between the desire for incest and the societal prohibition against it.
Abraham and Torek propose instead that human existence be understood in terms of a process of "individuation." They contend that psychic development is potentially nonlinear, and that in certain cases it is constituted by specific influences outside the individual's immediate or lived experience. In this view, a patient's symptoms can be attributed to something other than a fixation at a particular stage of development producing, for example, an unresolved Oedipus complex or an inability to pass from the "Imaginary" into the "Symbolic." Within this wider optic they also conceive of the mechanisms of symptom-formation as potentially more varied and complex than Freudian processes such as condensation and displacement and their Lacanian equivalents of metaphor and metonymy, generally associated with the "return of the repressed."
At the core of this new perspective is the concept of the "dual unity." Informed in part by Sandor Ferenczi's theory of "bio-analysis" and by Imre Hermann's notion of "filial instinct," Abraham and Torok conceive of the individual as literally an "in-dividual," as an un-divided entity gradually defined by a constant process of differentiation or "division" from a more primary union: the mother. The crucial moment in this process is the child's discovery of the power of the word. Prior to this the child exists in an undifferentiated state within the mother's world. The mother is everything for the child: "amnion, warmth, nourishment, mainstay, body, cry, desire, rage, joy, fear, yes, no, you, me, object and project." With no conscious or unconscious of its own other than the mother's, the child perceives the mother's words, gestures, and physical attributes without distinguishing between the mother's conscious and unconscious intent or charge. The discovery of the word occurs when the child detaches the mother's words—what Abraham and Torok call the "pieces-of-the-mother" (bouts-de-mère)—from her person and uses them to designate "objective events," that is, "events unbound by the mother's unconscious."
Abraham and Torok point to the fort/da game recounted in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle as a model of this process. When the child makes a word—"o-o-o-o" (fort = gone, over there)—coincide with the event of the mother's absence, it detaches that word from the mother and her unconscious. The almost magical coincidence of word and thing marks the moment at which the child realizes the repression of the mother's unconscious as the Core or Kernel of its own. This repression signals in turn a split in the psychic topology of the child, which gradually transforms itself into an internal duality between Unconscious and Ego, Kernel and Shell.
These events constitute the beginning of the child's emergence as an individual, as separate from the mother. The child is by no means rid of the maternal unconscious, however. As the verbal pieces-of-the-mother are disengaged from the mother's person, the unconscious charge or affect bound to the word is transmitted into the child's speech. The maternal unconscious becomes part of the child's language. Communicated without ever having been spoken, it resides as a silent presence within the newly formed unconscious of the child. As the child matures, it will add its own repressions—produced by its own lived experiences—to this central core. Its Ego will simultaneously expand to accommodate new introjections. The child will still carry with it, however, part of the mother, a reminder of the prior union from which it issued.
The child, in Abraham and Torok's terminology, is thus always in a "symbolic" relationship with the mother. It exists by virtue of the negation of a previous unity, by implicitly repeating, "not the mother, not the absent member of a prior union whose trace I bear." For Abraham and Torok, being is only possible in this symbolic mode. (The concepts of "symbol" and "symbolic operation" will be elaborated more fully later in the chapter.) We are all, to use their invented locution, mutilés de mère or "mother-amputees" (rhymes with the common French expression mutilés de guerre: "war-amputees" or "war-invalids"). We are all veterans of a process of cutting ourselves off from the mother-child union that precedes our emergence as individuals. And we all carry within us the vestige of the lost appendage from which we have been severed.
A crucial distinction between Abraham and Torok's view of human development and that of Freud and Lacan may be drawn at this point. The process just outlined of the individual's detachment from the mother is not determined by any specific instincts or prohibitions. It follows no preprogrammed sequence of drives and repressions, as one finds organizing Freud's oral, anal, phallic, and Oedipal stages. Nor does it hinge on one privileged desire and repression—that of the phallus—as for Lacan. According to Abraham and Torok, there are no general principles of being. Everyone creates being for her- or himself. Every child's emergence as an individual is distinctive, constituted by repressions of uniquely charged pieces-of-the-mother, each bearing affects specifically related to the singular circumstances and psychic traumas of the mother's life. Moreover, since every mother is also the child of another mother, she must herself be understood as always already carrying the contents of another's unconscious. This is why Abraham refers to the dual unity as the "genealogical concept par excellence." We are all the psychic products of our infinitely regressive family histories. We all recapitulate, in our individual, ontogenetic work of being, the phylogeny of our ancestors' sagas, all the while expanding these sagas with the stuff of our own lives.
OEDIPAL MYTH
The Lie of Incest
The status of the Oedipus complex and its role in psychic maturation can be understood in view of the noninstinctual, ontogenetic organization of the dual unity. Simply stated, Abraham and Torok believe that if such a complex does in fact exist, it is to be construed as a strategic lie offered by the child to the mother. This radical idea issues from their definition of myth, outlined in the essay, "The Shell and the Kernel":
[M]yths are efficient ways of speaking by means of which some situation or other comes about and is maintained. We know how: by carrying out, by means of their manifest content, the repression of their latent content. The myth then points up a gap in [our] communication with the Unconscious. If it offers understanding, it does so much less by what it says than by what it does not say, by its blanks, its intonations, its disguises. An instrument of repression, the myth serves also as a vehicle for the symbolic return of the repressed. Any study of myths, whether ethnological or psychoanalytical, should take this aspect into account. (26)
Myths are vehicles of repression, "collective imaginary objectifications" (25) of various metapsychological relationships between, for example, the Unconscious and the Conscious, the Ego and external objects, and the Child and the Mother. What must be read in myths is the silence or lacuna in their story, the gap in their speech that points to hidden and unspoken contents.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Family Secrets by Esther Rashkin. Copyright © 1992 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsNote on Documentation
Introduction: Character Analysis, Unspeakable Secrets, and the Formation of Narrative
Ch. 1 For a New Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: The Works of Abraham and Torok
Ch. 2 The Ghost of a Secret: Psychoanalytic Allegory in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Sharer
Ch. 3 The Interred Sign: L'intersigne by Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
Ch. 4 Legacies of Gold: Honore de Balzac's Facino Cane
Ch. 5 In the Mind's I: The Jolly Corner of Henry James
Ch. 6 A Meeting of the Minds: Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher
Conclusion
Notes
Index