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Review: The Testament of the Other: Abraham and Torok's Failed Expiation of Ghosts
Author(s): Christopher Lane

Review by: Christopher Lane
Source: Diacritics, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Winter, 1997), pp. 3-29
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566259
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THE TESTAMENT OF
THE OTHER
ABRAHAM AND TOROK'S
FAILED EXPIATION OF GHOSTS
CHRISTOPHER LANE
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. THE SHELL AND THE KERNEL. Vol. 1. Ed.,
trans., and intro. Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.
Nicholas Rand and Maria Torok. QUESTIONS A FREUD: DU DEVENIR DE LA
PSYCHANALYSE. Paris: Belles Lettres-Archimbaud, 1995.
- . "QUESTIONS TO FREUDIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS: DREAM INTERPRE-
TATION, REALITY, FANTASY." Trans. Rand. Critical Inquiry 19.3 (1993): 567-
94. ["QFP"]
Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the
inextinguishable and immortal elements of life, which, having once been, can
never die, though they blend and change and change again for ever.
-H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon's Mines
What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of
others.
-Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel
1. Prologue
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok may be best known for advancing a theory of
transgenerational haunting. According to this theory, repressed secrets are passed from
one generation to the next if they are "encrypted" as unprocessed and traumatic
information. Before Abraham's death in 1975, he and Torok saw their analytic role as
reparative: Encouraging their analysands to mourn repressed secrets, they hoped to
transform their analysands' perspectives on family history.
Abraham and Torok quickly became known for expanding Freud's emphasis on the
subject's conflicting desires and identifications. From 1968 on, when Abraham published
"L'6corce et le noyau" ("The Shell and the Kernel") as an extended review of Laplanche
and Pontalis's The Language of Psychoanalysis, he and Torok published their claims in
cheerful defiance of Freudian orthodoxy, acquiring a reputation in France-and, later, in
England and the United States-for shattering such "doctrinaire" elements of psycho-
For their advice and commentary on an earlier draft, I thank Jonathan Culler, Jason Friedman, and
Timothy Murray. I also thank Judith Feher Gurewich and David Marriottfor inviting me to present
shorter versions of this paper at Harvard University and the University of London.
diacritics / winter 1997 diacritics 27.4: 3-29 3
analysis as the Oedipus complex and death drive, penis envy, and the primal scene, as well
as for criticizing Lacan's alleged stranglehold on psychoanalysis in France and much of
Europe.' After publishing L'dcorce et le noyau (1987), a collection of their essays (many
coauthored), and a radically new interpretation of Freud's patient "the Wolf Man,"
Cryptonymie: Le verbier de l'homme aux loups (1976; trans. The Wolf Man's Magic
Word: A Cryptonomy), Abraham and Torok were championed in Europe and the United
States by theorists delighted to see a "poststructuralist" critique of Freudian and Lacanian
psychoanalysis. Ironically, Abraham and Torok's work received almost comparable
support from analytical philosophers eager to denounce Freud's "unscientific" precepts.
Now that the first volume of Abraham and Torok's essays has appeared in translation,
non-Francophone readers have an opportunity to assess what Abraham and Torok
contributed to psychoanalysis and to revisit the debates they staged with Freud and Lacan
in the 1970s and-posthumously for Abraham-in the '80s. Reviewing this collection is
not a simple task, however, because its conceptual interests are so diverse and because
Torok's coauthored work with Abraham differs radically from the essays and book she
published recently with Nicholas Rand, editor and translator of The Shell and the Kernel.
Rand's interventions confirm Torok's latest arguments but they also, occasionally,
misleadingly frame the older work in terms of the new. Readers may therefore see Rand's
editorial notes and introduction as guides to how he and Torok now view Torok's
collaboration with Abraham. We can only speculate whether Abraham would have
interpreted the collaboration the same way.2
How does Abraham and Torok's account of psychic "encryptment" differ from
Freud's model of repression? Assessing their revision of Freud's metapsychological
project, Abraham and Torok declare, "It would be presumptuous indeed to allege that we
have reached our goal. Yet it would be false modesty to deny our suspicion that we are
finally entering an open road" [140].3 Echoing Freud's conviction that in dreams he had
discovered "the royal road to the unconscious," Abraham and Torok encourage a
comparative reading of their psychoanalytic "road" and Freud's. The following essay
undertakes this reading, but it also speculates on what Freud's and Lacan's emphasis on
1. To grasp the complex, turbulent exchanges between Abraham and Lacan, one must read
Roudinesco 's Jacques Lacan & Co., esp. 597-601. According to Roudinesco, Abraham's Husserlian
project of phenomenological psychology took a "path [that] was unique in the French history of
psychoanalysis. It was 'alien' in all senses of the word to French phenomenology. That was why
Abraham ... cultivated an ignorance of Lacan's work, and when he discovered the master's
discourse at Sainte-Anne, he was repelled by the hypnotic nature ofLacan 's relation to his students.
In brief, he did not regard Lacan's re-elaborations as central to psychoanalysis" [598; my emphasis].
This difficulty about conceptual debts and acknowledgment obviously was compounded by
Abraham's "bizarre" treatment by the SocidtU Psychanalytique de Paris (where he had previously
undergone training), when his application, in 1975, to become an adhering member was rejected
[597-98, 601]. The situation worsened after Lacan's "astonished" and "aggressed" response to
the publication success of Abraham and Torok's Cryptonymie: Le verbier de l'homme aux loups
(1976) [600]. In a commentary published in Ornicar? [14 (1978): 8-9], Lacan registered his
"surprise" and irritation that Derrida "supplied this lexicon witha fervent and enthusiastic preface
['Fors']" [Lacan, qtd. in Roudinesco 600].
2. In correspondence with me, which I reproduce with his permission, Rand distinguished
Abraham and Torok's clinical differences with Freud from his own intellectual arguments with
Freud: "It is perhaps I, more than Abraham and Torok themselves, who stress their differences with
Freud. In an earlier version of the introduction, I had included a sentence which designated them
as 'unfreudian Freudians.' The double edge there is significant." For elaboration of Rand's
argument, see "Family " as well as his collaborations with Torok: "The Secret ofPsychoanalysis, "
"A propos de travaux, " "Questions r ... M. Torok et N. Rand," and Questions Ba Freud.
3. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent references are to The Shell and the Kernel,
vol. 1.
psychic difficulty adds to Abraham and Torok's theory of transgenerational haunting.
Since Abraham and Torok ask, "Who among us is not battling with specters that implore
Heaven and demand of us their due, while we are beholden to them for our own salvation?"
[139-40], I shall claim-following Kamuf [42]--that Abraham and Torok dramatize not
only the "specter" of Freud's legacy but a pressing, political question about our ability to
rid ourselves of the past.
2. The Terms of a Cure
The Shell and the Kernel does not simply wrestle with the reign of "French Freud";
Abraham and Torok's diverse essays present a model of consciousness, language, and
symptom formation radically different from most continental and poststructuralist
accounts of subjectivity. Abraham differs slightly from Torok in his claims about
psychoanalysis's capacity to resolve psychic conflicts, but both analysts ultimately
present psychoanalysis as a curative profession, in which the analysand is able-with the
analyst's prompting-to "retrieve" blocked dimensions of consciousness [16-17]. Con-
cluding their 1975 essay "The Lost Object--Me," Abraham and Torok write, "We ...
hope that ... the treasures which lie buried in crypts will become the delight of their owner
and can be made to work for the benefit of us all" [156].
Abraham and Torok do not dispute the fact of psychic trauma, but they differ in their
approach to treatment from Freud, who ultimately considered psychoanalysis "intermi-
nable," due in part to his realization, as Tim Dean put it recently, that "there is something
fundamentally incurable in being human" [116]. While arguing that psychoanalysis can
alleviate a patient's suffering, Freud was careful to state that psychoanalysis cannot
resolve basic ontological difficulties facing all humans. When discussing the effect of
psychoanalysis on analysands, for instance, he spoke of "transforming [their] hysterical
misery into common unhappiness" [Studies 305]. His rationale for encouraging this
substitution was simply that "with a mental life that has been restored to health," his
analysands would "be better armed against that unhappiness" [305].
By contrast, Abraham and Torok consider psychoanalysis more influential in aiding
an individual' s well-being.4 Rand' s assessment of this position in his introduction to The
Shell and the Kernel seems to me quite accurate: "Abraham and Torok view the
unintelligibility they encounter in their patients as psychically motivated disturbances of
meaning, as instances of psychic aphasia. ... Searching for the means to retrieve
signification, Abraham and Torok uncover psychic mechanisms whose aim seems to be
to disarray, even to annul the expressive power of language" [17]. While Abraham and
Torok suggest that psychoanalysis enhances a dimension of control preexisting the
specific difficulties leading subjects to treatment [140, 156], Freud and Lacan refute these
claims, arguing instead that the subject is never ultimately "in control" of itself and that
the ego can foster internal unity only by eviscerating the unconscious.
In advancing these claims, Lacanian psychoanalysis highlights concerns about the
adequacy of desire, which the patient's enunciated demand alternately conveys and
obscures. Lacan also insisted, counterintuitively, that distinguishing between desire and
demand is a fundamental principle of treatment:
For a long time now psychoanalysts have given up answering when questioned
in this way, for they have ceased to question themselves about their patients'
4. In Rand and Torok's latest work, as we'll see, an intolerancefor psychoanalytic discussion
of castration could almost be considered their primary motivation. See Questions ' Freud, esp.
279-80.
diacritics / winter 1997 5
desires: they reduce these desires to their demands, which makes the task of
converting them into their own that much easier. Isn't that the reasonable
way?-it is certainly the one they have adopted.
But sometimes desire is not to be conjured away, but appears .. at the
centre of the stage, all too visibly, on the festive board.... ["Direction" 262]
When put this way, the search for a "cure" fosters a panacea that may be more distressing
than the symptom, given its ensuing promise of resolving psychic conflicts. Pushing for
this "resolution" may also encourage the analyst to read patients' fantasies literally and
coercively-insofar as they reproduce the analyst's. Lacan was contemptuous about such
therapy, seeing its wish to reinstate the ego as complicit in the analysand's denial of
unconscious conflicts, and thus as entirely counter to the principles of psychoanalysis:
"What nobility of soul we display when we reveal that we ourselves are made of the same
clay as those we mould! Now that's a naughty thing to say. But it's hardly enough for those
at whom it is aimed, when people now go about proclaiming, under the banner of
psychoanalysis, that they are striving for 'an emotional re-education of the patient"'
["Direction" 226].5
Radically downplaying Freud's and Lacan's claims about intrapsychic conflict,
Abraham and Torok credit the ego with a basic capacity for coherence while representing
sexuality (and the drives) as entirely amenable to consciousness. As we'll see, this
emphasis on egoic coherence takes Abraham and Torok beyond the purview of psycho-
analysis and into the realm of psychology. At such moments, Abraham's theoretical
differences with Torok (and implicitly with Rand) articulate what I shall call a fault line
running throughout The Shell and the Kernel.
This fault line appears whenever Abraham and Torok discuss their patients' testimo-
nies and fantasies. Since speech inadequately represents the sexual dimension of fantasy,
the analysand' s testimony, while one of the most compelling forms for expressing psychic
distress, is also a profoundly unreliable indicator of what is wrong. To obviate this
problem, Freud stressed the importance of interpreting parapraxes-slips of the tongue
and bungled actions-betraying the subject in the act of speech and action. At such
moments, he claimed, one "hears" egoic resistance and unconscious desire, the analyst's
difficult task being to distinguish one from the other ["Analysis" 224-25, 235]. While the
"talking cure" therefore remains a compelling metaphor for psychoanalysis (without
speech, for instance, the subject cannot symbolize trauma), the analyst cannot simply
accept or believe that speech is an unequivocal testament of a patient's well-being.
We can put Freud's thesis a little differently: empiricism is unreliable in psycho-
analysis for the precise reason that treatment is possible. If psychic change is to occur, the
psyche must necessarily be unreliable. The corollary of this argument is not difficult to
discern: if the ego and speech were reliable indicators of psychic distress, one could
administer self-help with encouraging pep talks, leaving psychic resistance and conflict
entirely unexamined. Beyond this relatively obvious point lies a drama about the
"evidence" of distress, the "cause" of what is wrong, and the "principle" of how best to
treat these factors, all of which conflict with the ego's resistance; such resistance protects
the ego from what it finds unbearable and repugnant, but at an immense internal cost:
"Symptoms involve suffering," Freud stressed, "and [this fact] almost invariably domi-
nates a part of the patient's social behaviour" [Three 166]. Since this behavior may be
neither visible nor self-evident, Jacqueline Rose's important claim bears repeating: We
cannot "deduce from the external trappings of normality or conformity in a woman that
all is in fact well" [92]. Were this ambiguity about appearances missing, patients
5. Lacan is quoting the first report of the International Symposium, which met in 1958 at the
invitation of the Socidtd Frangaise de Psychanalyse, published in La psychanalyse 6.
presumably could be persuaded to modify their behavior, based on the rational explana-
tion that it is causing them-and perhaps others-harm.
Maria Torok touches on this problem in "Story of Fear: The Symptoms of Phobia-
the Return of the Repressed or the Return of the Phantom?" (1975), an essay engaging
unconscious fantasy, though her perspective is quite different from Rose's. She asks,
"Why shriek in fear when somebody wants to show you a picture you could just as easily
shut your eyes to?" [180]. Torok's partial dilemma in answering this question emerges
when she elaborates on the psychic paradoxes of "penis envy": "What benefit does the
male derive from subjecting to his mastery the very being through whom he could both
understand and be understood himself?" [71-72]. For Torok, the question is not simply
rhetorical and thus easily dismissed; she usefully frames this question as a need to theorize
aspects of fantasy defeating sexual equality.6 However, we soon reach the terrain on which
psychoanalysis confounds political justice and logical solutions to sexual inequality:
"Our task is to display the advantages resulting, for both men and women, from the
institutional inequality of the sexes, at least as far as this obtains in the area available to
psychoanalytic study, that is, within the affective realm" [70].
This task is commendable, but it yields only those advantages "available" to
consciousness rather than those unable to enter "the affective realm." Losing patience
with psychic resistance and anticipating a conclusive answer, Torok seems unwilling to
allow her question's enigma to raise related concerns about unconscious fantasy-for
instance, about whether pleasure and enjoyment are self-explanatory or entirely consis-
tent with the subject's well-being. She establishes a "conclusive" proposition that closes
down this discussion: "Self-to-self revelation through the opposite sex would be the
realization of our humanity, and this is what eludes nearly all of us" [72]. Torok does not
present this elusiveness as the best lesson psychoanalysis can teach us. By arguing that
it "eludes nearly all of us," she presents this realization as psychoanalysis's daunting aim.
Given this proposition's repeated failure and manifest heterosexism (it insists on
"revelation through the opposite sex"), we can propose that the elements missing here,
which mitigate against humanity's "realization," are the same ones that Rand deprives of
conceptual resonance in his introduction to The Shell and the Kernel-namely, "the
Oedipus complex, the death drive, penis envy, the primal scene" [5]. It is not always clear
that Abraham (and the early Torok) would reject all of these elements, but we can agree
with Rand that what haunts The Shell and the Kernel are those enigmas-which Rand calls
the "enemies of life" [7, 15, 22]-to which Abraham and Torok rarely give conceptual
sanction: the troubling vicissitudes of enjoyment, unconscious fantasy, drives, and sexual
identity that defeat rational explanation and empirical certitude. To give only one
example, which in some measure "answers" both Torok's question about unconscious
pleasure in sexual inequality and the statement "nearly all of us," consider this passage
from her 1959 essay, "Fantasy: An Attempt to Define Its Structure and Operation":
"sexual intercourse accomplishes the union of two narcissistically complete and genitally
complementary beings. No doubt this conviction, which happens to be my own, has a
number of latent meanings as well. I am quite prepared to admit this, with the stipulation
that these meanings will not be branded unconscious fantasies" [33]. Why this stipula-
tion? We can hazard that it allows Torok to distinguish her argument about fantasy's
amenable relation to consciousness from Freud's account of dreams, memory, and fantasy
in The Interpretation ofDreams (1900) and The Psychopathology ofEveryday Life (1907
[1901]). Departing radically from Freud-and, as a consequence, eclipsing his concep-
tual distinction between reverie and wish-fulfillment ["Creative" 146-49]-Torok claims
that "we can speak of fantasy as a waking dream" [34]. From this assertion, it is relatively
easy for her to support fantasy's apparently sociable and utilitarian principles, its
6. For elaboration on this point, see Murray 25-64. esp. 40 and 52-53.
"operational value": "Fantasy is expressive of an attempt at working through a problem
and is combined with a desire for collaboration .. ." [36].
What contributes to this limited understanding of psychic satisfaction in The Shell
and the Kernel-and thus to the collection's fraught relation to Freud and Lacan-is
Torok' s later willingness to reincorporate those aspects of psychic life that Rand excises
in his introduction. While eager to cure "penis envy," Torok's essay on this phenomenon
meditates at length on its psychic significance. And while Rand downplays Abraham and
Torok's interest in the primal scene, Torok's essay emphasizes this phenomenon's
continued psychic relevance: "What do we discover on the way to orgasm? The power to
fantasize our identity with our parents and the power to picture ourselves in all the
positions of the primal Scene, in accordance with the various levels at which it is
apprehended" [50].
Considering Torok' s claims that "sexual intercourse accomplishes the union of two
narcissistically complete and genitally complementary beings" [33], we must question
whether the infant's fantasmatic addition to this scenario not only interrupts the alleged
"union" of these "two ... beings" but jeopardizes the possibility of their being "complete
and ... complementary." By acknowledging the "cut" that sexuality inaugurates for all
"dyads" (not just heterosexual ones), Freud remarked to Wilhelm Fliess in 1899: "I am
accustoming myself to regarding every sexual act as an event between four individuals"-
a figure he later expanded to six [Ego 33nl ]. Lacan also critiqued assumptions of psychic
unity: "In persuading the other that he has that which may complement us, we assure
ourselves of being able to continue to misunderstand precisely what we lack" [Four 133].
Let us place these arguments alongside Torok's essay on "'penis envy,"' which she
describes "as a stopgap invented to camouflage a desire, as an artificially constructed
obstacle thrown in the way of our becoming one with ourselves. .... 'Penis envy' will
disappear by itself the moment the painful state of lack responsible for it has ceased to
exist. ... So vital a lack cannot be natural; it must be the effect of deprivation or
renunciation" [44-45]. Besides the remarkable claims made for psychoanalysis here,
Torok' s assumption about unified identity begs a question about the precise agent creating
the symptom's "construct[ion]" and "disappear[ance]."
3. Therapy vs. Psychoanalysis; or, The Ego and the Id
As the above example illustrates, Abraham and Torok's "advance" on Freud and
"renewal" of psychoanalysis foreclose on the unconscious-and reinstate the ego-
precisely when intrapsychic conflicts are most in need of interpretation. For instance,
Torok writes that "the removal of repression brings with it strength, self-esteem, and
especially confidence in one's power and becoming" [52; original emphasis]. However,
Abraham and Torok's intricate account of egoic crypts does not adequately explain why
the ego wards off those aspects of unconscious drives it cannot introject into conscious-
ness. This problem with introjection occurs not because such drives represent a "family
secret" of shared pain and trauma, but because, by their very nature, these drives can never
be conscious. "There is nothing in the id that could be compared with negation," Freud
insisted. "There is nothing in the id that corresponds to the idea of time" ["Dissection" 74];
"it may be said of the id that it is totally non-moral, of the ego that it strives to be moral"
[Ego 54]. With Freud's stress on the ego and id's impossible relation, given their
"mutually opposing forces" ["Resistances" 218], we can appreciate why he described the
ego not as unified or comfortable with sexuality, but as "the actual seat of anxiety,"
desperate to maintain homeostasis at any price [Ego 57].7 Arguably, this represents the
7. This passage in The Ego and the Id is worth quoting at length: "Threatened by dangersfrom
three directions, [the ego] develops the flight-reflex by withdrawing its own cathexis from the
"kernel" of Abraham and Torok's differences with Freud: While they see the unconscious
as an aberration designed for remediation, for Freud the unconscious is irrevocably
"alien" and antipathetic to conscious thought.8
Considering the psychic value of "introjection" ("intro-jection: casting inside")
[111], a term, as I shall show, of great value and conceptual importance for Abraham and
Torok, the latter writes: "Introjection does not tend toward compensation, but growth. By
broadening and enriching the ego, introjection seeks to introduce into it the unconscious,
nameless, or repressed libido" [113]. Are these adjectives really synonyms? Following
Torok, we must infer that "introjection" overrides both the "preservative" status of
repression, which for Abraham and Torok is responsible for "endocryptic identification"
[142], and the psychic difference between unconscious and conscious systems, whose
"communication" in Freud's work is immeasurably strained.9 Rand is again accurate in
claiming that Abraham and Torok "demote the sexual instinct from its characteristic
Freudian status as the principal causative agent in psychopathology. For them, ...
psychosexuality is the function of a larger whole, the continuous activity of self-creation"
[11].
The conceptual implications of Abraham and Torok's revision appear in Abraham's
formative essay, "The Shell and the Kernel: The Scope and Originality of Freudian
Psychoanalysis" (1967). Yet despite this essay's numerous invocations of Freud's
metapsychology, Abraham gives few citations of Freud's argument and fewer explana-
tions for his conceptual revisions. He asks us simply to believe, for example, that "The
pansexualism of Freud is the anasemic pansexualism of the Kernel" [89]. However, in
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) and, later, in "Two Encyclopaedia
Articles" (1923 [1922]), Freud distanced his work from pansexualism because it substi-
tutes voluntarism for resistance and defense-formation. Noting how critics of psycho-
analysis mistake resistance for the very analytic procedures interpreting it, Freud added:
"It is a mistake to accuse psycho-analysis of 'pan-sexualism' and to allege that it derives
all mental occurrences from sexuality and traces them all back to it. On the contrary,
psycho-analysis has from the very first distinguished the sexual instincts from others
which it has provisionally termed 'ego instincts"' ["Encyclopedia" 251-52; see also
Three 134 and "Resistances" 218].
Disregarding Freud's caveat, Abraham proposes that "there had to be [in Freud's
work] a relation of homology [between] the zones and the sources ... [of] erotogenicity"
[88], such that "it is by virtue of this correspondence between the Envelope and the Kernel
[Abraham's reformulation of the ego and id, respectively] that Freud localized the source
of sexual drives in the somatic zones ... that is, the ones originating in the Kernel" [88].
In his Three Essays, however, and especially in "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," Freud
carefully theorized variations among the drives' "source," "pressure," "object," and
"aim" in order to disband assumptions about their equivalence [Three 135-36, 148;
"Instincts" 122-23]. He theorized the astonishing absence of correspondence among the
menacing perception or from the similarly regarded process in the id, and emitting it as anxiety.
... What it is that the ego fears from the external and from the libidinal danger cannot be specified;
we know that thefear is ofbeing overwhelmed or annihilated, but it cannot be grasped analytically "
LEgo 57; my emphasis]. After Freud's allegory ofpsychical identity [see note 9], we can see why
Reich and Marcuse believed that the liberation of sexuality would precipitate political emancipa-
tion; however, Freud's above qualifier deprives us of this conceptual satisfaction.
8. Freud's references to the "alien" and "foreign" dimensions ofpsychic life recur throughout
his Papers on Metapsychology ("Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," "Repression," "The Uncon-
scious, " "A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams, " and "Mourning and
Melancholia") and in his lecture "Dissection of the Psychical Personality"; see also Derrida,
"Me" 12.
9. I1 refer to "Resistance and Repression, " in which Freud allegorizes intrapsychic conflict as
individuals jostling each other in an entrance hall [2951.
drives' constitutive, partial, and resultant forms, concluding that by representing the
drives' propensity to abreact through various (and not self-evident) "objects" and "aims,"
psychoanalysis in fact differs from biologistic and culturally determinative formulations
of sexual desire and behavior [Three 135-36; "Instincts" 140]. Freud insisted as early as
1895: "All contrivances of a biological nature have limits to their efficiency, beyond
which they fail" [Project 306]. It is reasonable to deduce that psychoanalysis emerged in
response to this failure.
Which Freud is Abraham proffering here? Only in rare and naive moments did Freud
characterize the unconscious, in Abraham and Torok' s words, as "the genuine depository
of what is now nameless" [128]-a Gothic conception of locked space quite incommen-
surate with Freud's formulations in "Repression" (1915) and "The Unconscious" (1915),
in which he discarded the idea of a depository as conceptually at odds with his
understanding of the unconscious. Arguably, this is the radical lesson of Freud's
abandoned Papers on Metapsychology (1915)--abandoned because Freud began to
grasp, and thus to reformulate, the psychic significance of external events.'" For this
reason, Lacan later characterized the unconscious as a scar, bladder, and knot [Four 22,
131], claiming that this structure influences all aspects of psychic life while refuting an
organicist tradition that likens the unconscious to the "fruit" of being:
The Freudian unconscious has nothing to do with the so-called forms of the
unconscious thatpreceded it, not to say accompanied it, and which still surround
it today.... Freud's unconscious is not at all the romantic unconscious of
imaginative creation. ... To all these forms of unconscious, ever more or less
linked to some obscure will regarded as primordial, to something preconscious,
what Freud opposes is the revelation that at the level of the unconscious there
is something at all points homologous with what occurs at the level of the
subject-this thing speaks and functions in a way quite as elaborate as at the
level of the conscious, which thus loses what seemed to be its privilege. l am well
aware of the resistances that this simple remark can still provoke, though it is
evident in everything that Freud wrote. [Four 24]
Considering Lacan's caveat, what do Abraham's substitutions of "Shell" and
"Kernel" for "ego" and "id" borrow from-and add to-Freud's work? [Derrida, "Me"
7]. To what do they also respond in Lacan's? Abraham's metaphor of the Shell connotes
an object with a large open rim withdrawing into convex and inaccessible recesses. While
this object's shape is intriguing, Abraham implies that the Shell's open rim is sufficient
to "hear" and "receive" whatever "mysterious messages" the Kernel emits; unless
repressed elements such as family secrets stand in the way, the drive reaches its
destination in consciousness [86-87; see also Rashkin 43]. This is especially true when
the Envelope substitutes for the Shell in Abraham's account, for an envelope is designed
to enclose its messages--even to "seal" and "entomb" them [18, 16]. However, this
"sealed-off psychic place, a crypt in the ego" [141] does not accord with Abraham's grasp
of the unconscious's "designify[ing]" tendencies [84] to "disclose ... what it encloses"
[80] and his and Torok's careful study of the way drives can displace into subsidiary
"crypts" [107-38]. Noting also the "specific tension that arises between the Envelope and
the Kernel" [95], Abraham implies that we cannot detach the ego's "seal" from its
accompanying "leaks." Our problem derives simply from Abraham's assumption that
these leaks are exceptional-that they indicate only a temporary failure in psychic
functioning: "Just as drives translate organic demands into the language of the Uncon-
10. See Freud, Beyond: "the sexual instincts are . . . peculiarly resistant to external
influences" [40].
10
scious, so it [the psychic Envelope] utilizes the vehicle of affect or fantasy to move into
the realm of the Conscious" [91].
4. "All that is buried is not dead""'
Several years before "L'6corce et le noyau" first appeared in print, Lacan remarked: "It
is not the soul, either mortal or immortal, which has been with us for so long, nor some
shade, some double, some phantom, nor even some supposed psycho-spherical shell, the
locus of the defences and other such simplified notions. It is the subject who is called-
there is only he, therefore, who can be chosen" [Four 47].12 Derrida also touched on
Abraham and Torok's related problem with seals and leaks in "Fors," an essay whose
title's semantic richness refutes entirely the idea of harmonious interiority:'3
Caulked or padded along its inner partition, with cement or concrete on the
other side, the cryptic safe protects from the outside the very secret of its
clandestine inclusion or its internal exclusions. Is this strange space hermeti-
cally sealed? The fact that one must always answer yes and no to this question
that I am deferring here will have already been apparentfrom the topographical
structure of the crypt, on its highest level ofgenerality: The crypt can constitute
its secret only by means of its division, its fracture. "I" can save an inner safe
only by putting it inside "myself," beside(s) myself, outside. [xiv; original
emphases]
Even in the most stringent "encryptment," Derrida contends, a sign can leak its psychic
meaning. To this extent, what does Abraham's Envelope or Shell add to Freud's account
of the ego, which is never an astute listener? Freud conceives of this "sycophantic,
opportunist and lying ... frontier creature" with a "cap of hearing (Hirkappe)" worn
haphazardly "on one side only.... It might be said to wear it awry" [Ego 56, 25; see fig. 1 ].
He reminds us here that while the drive may reach its destination, it cannot be assured of
conscious abreaction; the "leak" underscores a basic cwesura distinguishing conscious and
unconscious systems. Freud did not endorse organicist notions of the unconscious, a point
Lacan underscored by formulating the unconscious as a permanent psychic structure
[Four 22, 24-25]. For Abraham and Torok, however, this Kernel (noyau) precipitates in
their writing a remarkable number of "organic" images [87], whose principal effect
reorients the unconscious from "chaos" and "lack" in Freud and Lacan, respectively, to
assumptions of harmony and plenitude. We have already seen Torok's assumption that
11. Schreiner 97.
12. It appears that Lacan was responding to Abraham and Torok's typology ofthe "phantom"
and "shell" before it appeared in print; this problem of chronology is perhaps explained by the
circulation of texts or ideas several years before they were published. I am following Rand's
editorial note that "'L'dcorce et le noyau' was written in 1967 [and published in Critique in 1968]
as an extended review ofLaplanche and Pontalis's Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse" while Lacan 's
remarks in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis are dated February 5, 1964 [Shell
75].
13. As Barbara Johnson remarks in her translator's note to Derrida 's essay, "the word fors
in French, derived from the Latin foris ('outside, outdoors'), is an archaic preposition meaning
'except for, barring, save.' In addition, fors is the plural of the word for, which, in the French
expression le for int6rieur, designates the inner heart, 'the tribunal of conscience,' subjective
interiority. The word fors thus 'means' both interiority and exteriority, a spatial problematic that
will be developed at great length here in connection with the 'crypt'" [Johnson in Derrida, "Fors"
xi-xiin]. For a Lacanian account of this phenomenon as "extimacy, " see Miller.
diacritics I winter 1997 11
the symptom belies the psyche's propen-
iiiiiiiiii:isity to resolution and self-restitution [44-
..... ......".. .45], but The Shell and the Kernel is
S replete with references to "introjection"
.. Kas "the continual process of self-fashion-
X 5......ing through the fructification of change"
[14]; as a "psychic process that allows
........ human beings to continue to live harmo-
_:...... niously in spite of instability, devasta-
. .tion, war, and upheaval" [14]; and as a
iii situation encouraging the "psyche ...
........................ finally [to] make fruitful use of the natu-
i.i.iiiiiiii.iii. ral gift of sexual pleasure" [10-11]. If
Spsychic life "consists of the pursuit of its
own harmonious progress" [22], how-
Fig. 1. The Ego and the Id (1923), Standard ever, we can also begin to see why this
Edition 19: 24. "harmony" represents intrapsychic an-

tagonism and repression as the "enemies
of life" [22]. At issue here is a mythopoetic depiction of the unconscious, which in The
Shell and the Kernel serves as the Kernel of organic pleasure. In Freud's work, by contrast,
since the unconscious radically destroys the ego's chances of happiness, the ego
conceives of sexuality as its "enemy." In its intolerance of sexual enjoyment, which takes
the psychic organism "beyond the pleasure principle" and toward jouissance, the ego
ultimately is responsible for generating a "war" against the libido's psychic promptings.
Abraham's organic references to "the [birth] ... of the symbol, where the innumer-
able forms of civilization disintegrate, originate, and bloom" [97]-references he later
acknowledges are "all too rhapsodic" [97]-are antipsychoanalytic; they belong to a form
of psychology that, as Joel Fineman observes, "can only understand desire ... as an
impulse or a pulsion toward the good" [82-83]. This organicism is partly responsible for
an astonishing elision in "The Meaning of 'Penis Envy' in Women," in which Torok shifts
from describing "a genuinely psychoanalytic approach" [44] to advocating treatment
through "analytic therapy" [53]. The conceptual-but, above all, ontological---distinc-
tion between "analysis" and "therapy" is best grasped by their respective etymologies:
"Analysis" (Gr. andlusis, formed on analiein) denotes a loosening and radical undoing,
while "therapy" (Gr. therapeutike) is bound irrevocably to the "art of healing" [Hoad 15,
490; see also Shell 250]. Placing this second, cathartic tradition alongside Freud's 1937
account of analysis "terminable and interminable," we must ask whether therapy can
bring the subject to an adequate and satisfactory mourning, for it promotes egoic
consolation over the difficult interpretation of unconscious drives and the painstaking
analysis of psychic dissociations.
This tension between analysis and therapy, which corresponds conceptually to
Abraham and Torok's paradigm shift from the unconscious to the ego, prevails through-
out The Shell and the Kernel, haunting the authors' "rhapsodic" organicism [97] as the
subsidiary meaning of "Kernel" (noyau). Rather than endorsing Abraham and Torok's
"fructification of change" [14], however, this aspect of noyau designates a type of
organicism that resists symbolization by conveying the "stone" of a fruit-the indetermi-
nate center on which its flesh grows. Ultimately, we may be closest to Ziek's formulation
of the "hard kernel of the Real" precisely when Abraham and Torok anticipate "harmony"
between sexuality and identity [Ziiek 47]. Lacking the absolute solace of symbolic and
imaginary identifications, subjectivity, as Ziek reminds us, cannot escape the trauma of
this "hard kernel" [47]. This is perhaps the strongest retort to theorists wanting to
downplay the "tension" between "the Envelope and the Kernel" [Shell 95]. As Lacan
12
argued, "Do we say this in order to explain the difficulty of the desire? No, rather to say
that the desire is constituted by difficulty" ["Direction" 268].
5. Incorporation and Introjection; or, Freud vs. Ferenczi
Do Abraham and Torok therefore advance psychoanalytic formulations and "extend"
Freud into territory he could neither foresee nor fully elaborate? To answer this question,
we must carefully consider Abraham and Torok's conception of "introjection." This term
is central to their project, which follows Karl Abraham's and Ferenczi's distinction
between introjection and incorporation [Ferenczi 36-37]. Abraham and Torok claim that
Freud's schematic differentiation between mourning and melancholia fails to make clear
why a tremendous upsurge in libido may accompany (and sometimes disarm and upset)
patients ritualizing the loss or death of loved ones. After the work of Karl Abraham (who
took Freud's advice in suspending this inquiry) and Ferenczi (who did not), a conceptual
gap opens here regarding the subject's affective difficulty in mourning. Abraham and
Torok's work properly emerges from within the wake of this conceptual difficulty (not,
as Rand contends, as this theory's singular formulation [102]),'4 for they interpret this gap
as a significant split between introjection (pace Ferenczi) and identification (pace Freud).
Between these psychic principles, Abraham and Torok argue, lies an unformulated
problem about the guilt surrounding sexual desire that can rigidify and coalesce as a
psychic "crypt" if the subject is neither aware of-nor willing to accept-the proximity
between sexuality and mourning.
But what if this distinction-so central to Abraham and Torok's work-is not
psychically as rigid as they propose? What if it is in fact untenable? As Derrida observes
in "Fors," "Introjection/incorporation: Everything is played out on the borderline that
divides and opposes the two terms. From one safe, the other; from one inside, the other;
one within the other; and the same outside the other" [xvi]. And he indicates the fragility
of this binary: "Like the conceptual boundary line, the topographical divider separating
introjection from incorporation is rigorous in principle, but in fact does not rule out all
sorts of original compromises" [xvii-xviii; original emphases; see also Derrida "Me" 7].
Following these remarks, we note Derrida's interpretive generosity as he summarizes
Abraham and Torok's hermeneutic precepts:
Certain readers (the quick-witted type) will perhaps be surprised not to find in
the style of The Magic Word any of the prevalent mannerisms of this or that
French discourse today: within the psychoanalytic agora, outside it, or in that
intermediary zone that expands so rapidly. Neither in its most exposed simplic-
ity, its serenity (for example, we know that we are looking for something from
which nothing will turn us away), and its smile (I know the patient smile of the
authors, their indulgent, pitiless, and truly analytic lucidity before all kinds of
dogmatism, banality, theoretical boastfulness, and conformity, the search for
cheap thrills. "Hey, come on, what, or whom, is he afraid of? What does he
want? What is he trying to do to us now?"), nor in the elliptical refinement of
14. "Despite their attribution of the concept's paternity to Ferenczi, Abraham and Torok are
the genuine creators of the concept of introjection in the very broad sense they intend. The
distinction drawn by Abraham and Torok between introjection and incorporation has no precedent
within psychoanalytic thought, either in the depth and scope of the distinction or in its theoretical
consequences and clinical differences" [102]. Rand may be correct to argue that Abraham and
Torok 's conceptual distinction between these terms inaugurated a new shift--and perhaps rift--in
psychoanalytic thought, but his claim about this term's origins eclipses Freud's use of "introjec-
tion " in 1915 and 1920, and of "incorporation " in "Mourning and Melancholia" [1917 (1915)1.
the most daring subtlety does this "style" resemble anything that a French
reader could expect to recognize ofa program he wouldfind reassuring. ["Fors"
xxV]'5
Derrida teasingly reproaches Abraham and Torok for trying to disband resistances and
psychic opacity in order to reach the "kernel" of mystery--"Hey, come on ... What does
he want?"-while noting that this endeavor is not "reassuring" precisely when Abraham
and Torok most want it to be [see Kamuf 32-33]. With his backhanded compliment
Derrida says that Abraham and Torok, when most in search of certainty, merely enact the
ego's ruse of trying not to know. As they argue in "The Topography of Reality: Sketching
a Metapsychology of Secrets" (1971), "The crypt is there with its fine lock, but where is
the key to open it?" [159]. Once this key is found, no other difficulty seems to beset the
meaning an analyst can attribute to psychic drives: "This heavy architecture [of the tomb
or crypt] will gradually be shaken and will disappear in the course of the patient's
prolonged presence on the couch, since it will appear bit by bit that, for lack of a lawsuit,
the walls of denial have become obsolete" [161].
While Abraham and Torok distinguish clearly between introjection's capacity to
give us pleasure, growth, and expansion, and incorporation's constraining and enfeebling
principles, Derrida's insistence on the conceptual fragility of this binary overwhelms their
argument. It is satisfying to distinguish absolutely between introjection and incorpora-
tion-representing each, respectively, as life and death-but the caesura dividing con-
sciousness and the unconscious, a gap that arises in analysis as the jouissance binding the
subject to its symptom, disturbs the distinction. Grappling with life's tautological relation
to death, for instance, Freud adduced: "The emergence of life would thus be the cause of
the continuance of life and also at the same time of the striving towards death; and life itself
would be a conflict and compromise between these two trends" [Ego 40-41].
What are the implications of Freud's point? One is that the ego considers introjection
an "enemy of life," rather than a sign of benign growth and harmony, because it disrupts
the ego's homeostatic aims. Seemingly absurd-because counterintuitive-this point
considers psychic "growth" almost as traumatic for the ego as are the "negative" conflicts
it represses. In The Ego and the Id, for instance, Freud calls the ego a "constitutional
monarch" [55], thus advancing his argument against "His Majesty the Ego" in "On
Narcissism: An Introduction" (1914) [91nl]. The corollary to this emphasis is that
incorporation (that is, the wish to absorb and devour, rather than entomb) is not the ego's
"exceptional" tendency but-as Freud understood-its governing precept, a point on
which he elaborates at some length in his 1895 Project [see 368-69].16 In his lecture on
resistance and repression, too, Freud asked us to consider this nonpathological aspect of
the ego:
How ... do we account for our observation that the patient fights with such
energy against the removal of his symptoms and the setting of his mental
processes on a normal course? We tell ourselves that we have succeeded in
discovering powerful forces here which oppose any alteration of the patient's
condition; they must be the same ones which in the past brought this condition
about. ["Resistance" 293]
15. Yet, on pp. xl and xli, Derrida starts to question this hermeneutic principle, clarifying how
much interpretation in Abraham and Torok's text rests on linguistic and translated associations
that "seem to break down" [xli]. For clarification ofDerrida 's quite generous reading ofAbraham
and Torok-a "generosity" we rarely find in his readings of Freud--see Roudinesco 600.
16. 1 am drawing here on Leo Bersani's invaluable reading of Freud's work in The Freudian
Body, esp. 38-39.
14
Freud questioned simple causality and self-evident answers in this lecture, calling both
"crude and incorrect" [296]. Such principles are inadequate for psychoanalysis, he claims,
because although "repression ... is the precondition for the construction of symptoms
... it is also something to which we know nothing similar" [294; my emphasis].
Freud theorized repression's asymmetrical relation to consciousness only by declin-
ing evidential and "hydraulic" models of repression and symptom formation ["Paths"
362, 367]; he realized that psychoanalysis is not behavioral because repression has no
obvious or logical relation to empirical circumstances. Realizing too that fantasy's
relation to material events is vagarious, Freud did not cast introjection and incorporation
into a rigid binary; psychic fantasy was for him contingent on interpretations of reality
and, at the same time, susceptible to fixations of that interpretation. For comparable
reasons, Derrida addresses the ease by which incorporation in Abraham and Torok' s work
conceptually "bleeds" into introjection, and vice versa, rendering the psyche more
permeable-if no less symptomatic-than Abraham and Torok would have us believe.'7
In approaching Abraham and Torok's often simplistic correlation between introjection
and life and between incorporation and death, we must not only question whether their
theory of preservative repression properly inaugurates encryptment within the ego, but
indicate why they end up reproducing Freud's 1915 account of full and partial repression.
In "The Topography of Reality," Abraham and Torok advance the following distinctions:
To use less metaphorical language we shall call the tomb and its lock preserva-
tive repression, setting it offfrom the constitutive repression that is particularly
apparent in hysteria and generally called dynamic repkession. The essential
difference between the two types ofrepression is that in hysteria, the desire, born
of prohibition, seeks a way out through detours and finds it through symbolic
fulfillment; whereasfor the cryptophore, an alreadyfulfilled desire lies buried-
equally incapable of rising or of disintegrating. Nothing can undo the consum-
mation of the desire or efface its memory. [ 159; original emphases]
Abraham and Torok's divergence from Freud hinges in this passage on the term
"preservative repression," which allegedly inaugurates "endocryptic identification"
[142]. Yet this passage raises more questions than it answers: if "preservative repression"
represents the burying of "an already fulfilled desire," how-strictly speaking--can this
desire be fulfilled, frozen, and later capable of entering consciousness? Indeed, if "nothing
can undo the consummation of the desire or efface its memory," as Abraham and Torok
insist, how can we explain the relative ease by which they repeatedly find the "key" to this
psychic disclosure, thus aiding their patients' psychic growth? At issue here is not a
quibble over minor terms: since Abraham and Torok's work on "endocryptic identifica-
tion" aims entirely to rewrite Freud's 1915 account of repression, we must follow their
argument closely.
Freud considered repression not "preservative" but dynamic. After delineating three
stages of repression-"primal repression," the construction of a "fixation," and the
creation of "after-pressure" (Nachdriingen) ["Repression" 148]-Freud argued that
"repression does not hinder the instinctual representative from continuing to exist in the
17. As I have argued elsewhere, the question that psychoanalysis poses for Derrida-in ways
that he cannot simply dismiss as conceptually incoherent-concerns the role of jouissance and
resistancefor a subjectivity implacably divided against itself To reject this proposition, as Derrida
has acknowledged, is to risk a conceptual foreclosure on "unreason" [ "Let Us" 3-4]; to this we
must also add the ontological ramifications of voluntarism, impossible mastery, and delirium
[Lane, "Philosophy" 98-100, 106-07and "Beyond" 109, 114]. Unfortunately, there is not space
here to assess how these ramifications impact on Derrida's conception of psychic resistance in
R6sistances de la psychanalyse.
unconscious, from organizing itself further, putting out derivatives and establishing
connections. Repression in fact interferes only with the relation of the instinctual
representative to one psychical system, namely, to that of the conscious" ["Repression"
149; my emphasis]. Hence Freudians consider the term "preservative repression"
oxymoronic: what is repressed cannot be preserved unless we conceive of the uncon-
scious in egoic terms.
This topographical and economic dilemma emerges when Torok interprets sexual
conflict in her patients: "In ... these cases," she writes, "repression not only separates, but
also has to preserve carefully, although in the unconscious, the wish the ego can only
represent as an 'exquisite corpse' lying somewhere inside it" [118; original emphasis].
Seven years later, however, Abraham and Torok write that "endocryptic identification"
produces a "sealed-off psychic place, a crypt in the ego" [ 141; my emphasis], an argument
reformulating Freud's topographical claims about repression. Can the unconscious
preserve, though, or the ego encrypt without repression-that is, without engaging the
unconscious? In maintaining that the unconscious preserves the crypt while the ego
represents it, Torok takes us back to Freud' s opening remarks in "Repression" and "The
Dissection of the Psychical Personality," where he argues that the unconscious cannot
repress because it does not understand negation. Recall: "There is nothing in the id that
could be compared with negation. .... There is nothing in the id that corresponds to the
idea of time" ["Dissection" 74]. For this reason, Freud represents repression as stemming
partly from that aspect of the ego called the "preconscious," a term he coined in 1896
[Project 363n2]. If the ego were aware that the preconscious was repressing drives (a
psychic tautology), it could affirm this if challenged by an analyst or therapist. Freud
realized, however, that patients necessarily are ignorant of repression, a fact explaining
both their profound difficulty in retrieving "buried" psychic material and the reason this
material's reintroduction to consciousness generally is so traumatic.
In their effort to move repression "beyond" Freud's paradigm, Abraham and Torok
not only empty the term of all psychic meaning and value, but advance an argument that
is conceptually incoherent. Although such "renewals" of psychoanalysis aid Abraham
and Torok in reconceptualizing sexuality as a "treasure" amenable to consciousness,
representing sexuality as a life force the ego fundamentally enjoys, psychoanalysis
properly began when Freud rejected such notions. For Freud, the libido is an intractable
difficulty for consciousness because it shares an intimate relation with eros and the death
drive. As we've seen, Freud grasped this problem when he encountered patients seeking
reprieve from suffering who nonetheless refused to relinquish the very factors making
them ill ["Resistance" 293]. In The Ego and the Id, too, Freud insisted: "There is no doubt
that there is something in these people that sets itself against their recovery, and its
approach is dreaded as though it were a danger" [49]. The rest of my essay explores the
repercussions of Freud's claim.
6. Splitting the Ego
To demonstrate how Freud and Lacan offer us valuable conceptual alternatives to
Abraham and Torok' s account of"endocryptic identification" [142], we must now revisit
Freud's arguments about "archaic heritage," egoic "splitting," the role of incorporation
in mourning, the centrality of the death drive, and the function of "screen memories." Such
historical and conceptual excavations will illustrate precisely what is at stake in Abraham
and Torok's debate with Freud.
Freud's interest in transgenerational conflicts certainly does not prevail in all of his
work, but nor is this interest absent; it would be wrong to assume that Abraham and Torok
formulated this approach. When addressing neuroses in children, for example, Freud
16
notes: "There are ways more direct than inheritance by which neurotic parents can hand
their disorder on to their children" [Three 224]. Elaborating on this point, Lacan detailed
a form of censorship in 1953 anticipating Abraham and Torok's demand for
transgenerational haunting and transmission, though without rendering this phenomenon
exceptional or pathological:
The unconscious is that chapter of my history that is marked by a blank or
occupied by a falsehood: it is the censored chapter. But the truth can be
rediscovered; usually it has already been written down elsewhere. Namely:
-in monuments: this is my body [. ..]
-in archival documents: these are my childhood memories [.. .]
-in semantic evolution [...]
-in traditions, too, and even in the legends which, in a heroicizedform, bear my
history;
--and, lastly, in the traces that are inevitably preserved by the distortions
necessitated by the linking of the adulterated chapter to the chapters surround-
ing it, and whose meaning will be re-established by my exegesis. ["Function" 50]
For good reason, Lacan wrote "rediscovered" (or, to translate more accurately, "refound"
["la v6rit6 peut 8tre retrouv6e"-"Fonction" 136]), not (as Abraham and Torok suggest)
"recovered." Lacan is alluding to Freud's famous remark in his Three Essays on the
Theory ofSexuality (1905) that "[t]he finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it" [222].
More important, Lacan "refinds" in his list what Freud detailed about "archaic heritage"
in The Interpretation ofDreams [549]; consciousness as a "body-ego" in The Ego and the
Id [27]; and childhood memories in a crucial chapter of The Psychopathology ofEveryday
Life [SE 6: 43-52]. In this last text, Freud discussed the possibility that "screen memories"
re-present aspects of the past that consciousness has displaced and partially distorted, but
without these aspects undergoing repression. Although these memories can be recalled,
they are not simply preserved: their recollection is in fact part of their composition.
These "screen memories"-which Lacan calls "archival documents"-are but one
aspect of Freud's work demonstrating how events and affect can be "interred" in the ego
without abreaction or repression, ideas with obvious prescience for Abraham and Torok.
In "Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence" (1940), Freud outlined too how the ego
may attempt to satisfy mutually exclusive choices. Once accustomed to accepting "a
powerful instinctual demand," the ego, Freud wrote, must "decide either to recognize the
real danger, give way to it and renounce the instinctual satisfaction, or to disavow reality
and make itself believe that there is no reason for fear, so that it may be able to retain the
satisfaction. Thus there is a conflict between the demand by the instinct and the
prohibition by reality" [275]. Yet as Freud noted, a third course may emerge, a
development of tremendous conceptual value in this discussion of "dynamic" and
"preservative" repression:
But infact the child takes neither course, or rather he takes both simultaneously,
which comes to the same thing. He replies to the conflict with two contrary
reactions, both of which are valid and effective. On the one hand, with the help
of certain mechanisms he rejects reality and refuses to accept any prohibition;
on the other hand, in the same breath he recognizes the danger of reality, takes
over the fear of that danger as a pathological symptom and tries subsequently
to divest himself of the fear. It must be confessed that this is a very ingenious
solution of the difficulty. Both ofthe parties to the dispute obtain their share: the
instinct is allowed to retain its satisfaction and proper respect is shown to
reality. But everything has to be paidfor in one way or another, and this success
is achieved at the price ofa rift in the ego which never heals but which increases
as time goes on. [275-76]
By acknowledging the "price of [this] rift," Freud anticipated Abraham and Torok's
emphasis on intra-egoic conflict; he gave us in 1940 a coherent account of self-splitting
that assisted Abraham and Torok's related proposition in the 1960s and '70s. In the above
example, Freud likens egoic splitting to fetishism because splitting serves the partial
acknowledgment of reality without resulting immediately in masculine castration: "[the
boy] created a substitute for the penis which he missed in females-that is to say, a fetish.
In so doing, it is true that he had disavowed reality, but he had saved his own penis" [277].
Since the boy later develops anxiety about his toes being touched, Freud notes wryly that
"in all the to and fro between disavowal and acknowledgement, it was nevertheless
castration that found the clearer expression. . . ." [278; ellipsis in original]. Freud
illustrates here the pressure informing this splitting and the mechanism's susceptibility to
failure, creating a pervasive dimension of anxiety that is remarkably similar to Abraham
and Torok's account of their patients' diverse symptomatology.
Freud notes immediately that "splitting" alters his conception of egoic homeostasis,
a fact Rand and Torok recently ignore when addressing Freud's alleged resistance to
rethinking his metapsychological claims ["QFP" 574]. What is valuable about Freud's
revision, however, is less his or our difficulty in being able to retain splitting and
homeostasis than the chance to catch the ego trying again to downplay the rift between
two incommensurate principles: "The whole process seems so strange to us," Freud
avows, "because we take for granted the synthetic nature of the processes of the ego. But
we are clearly at fault on this. The synthetic function of the ego, though it is of such
extraordinary importance, is subject to particular conditions and is liable to a whole
number of disturbances" ["Splitting" 276; my emphasis].
Strictly speaking, Freud's claim that an ego can simultaneously "split" and aim for
homeostasis is not contradictory. Indeed, in The Ego and the Id Freud began to consider
homeostasis merely the ego's aim or ideal, whose inevitable default leads it toward self-
reproach, anxiety, and guilt [56-58]. Since the ego answers to three different sources,
however, we can appreciate why Lacan would later consider miconnaissance central to
its sustaining illusions ["Mirror" 6]. Summarizing Lacan's move, Rose recognizes that
this conceptual shift represents not an ego which is "'not necessarily coherent,' but an ego
which is 'necessarily not coherent'" [93].
We can adopt these insights when reading "Mourning and Melancholia" (written in
1915, but published in 1917), another of Freud's essays with profound relevance for
Abraham and Torok's project. In this essay, as Torok notes in "The Illness of Mourning
and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse" (1968), Freud acknowledges Karl Abraham,
Otto Rank, and Karl Landauer for considering the volatile and contradictory principles of
psychic mourning. However, Torok is curiously imprecise in attributing Freud's account
to "introjection," a term Ferenczi coined in 1909:18 "[Freud] equates introjection with
identification. Moreover, Freud equates introjection with the recovery of investments
placed either in a lost object (the ego becomes what it cannot leave) or in an inaccessible
ideal object (the ego sets itself the ideal of becoming what it cannot yet be). ... We will
18. Strachey explains: "The term 'introjection' does not occur in this paper, though Freud had
already used it, in a different connection, in the first of these metapsychological papers [i.e.,
'Instincts and Their Vicissitudes'] above. When he returned to the topic of identification, in the
chapter of his Group Psychology referred to in the text, he used the word 'introjection' at several
points, and it reappears, though not very frequently, in his subsequent writings [i.e., Beyond the
Pleasure Principle (1920)]" ["Mourning" 241nl; my emphasis].
18
see that completely different ideas inspired Ferenczi's concept [of introjection]" [ 112; my
emphasis].
While accurately summarizing Freud's overall argument, Torok, with some advan-
tage to herself, misnames Freud's term for this argument: Freud equates the ego's
identifications with "incorporation," not "introjection," arguing that "the ego wants to
incorporate [the] object into itself' ["Mourning" 249]. Torok' s substitution assists her and
Abraham (and, later, Rand) in claiming that their conceptual debts are to Ferenczi, not
Freud [112], and that the two analysts differ radically in their understanding of this
concept. Yet in 1915, Freud had already distinguished-as Ferenczi properly had not-
between "introjection" (in "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes") and "incorporation" (in
"Mourning and Melancholia"). The closest Ferenczi gets to this distinction is in "Introjec-
tion" [48-49], and he acknowledges Freud here (and throughout his article) for aiding all
of his formulations. If we correct Torok's mistake and read Freud's argument as he
presented it-with incorporation proving central to the ego's identifications and introjec-
tion playing an extensive role in both group psychology and Freud's distinction between
the "reality-ego" and "pleasure-ego" ["Instincts" 136], a precursor to his 1940 argument
about egoic splitting, we would diminish many of Freud's alleged differences with
Ferenczi. We would also find in Freud' s argument a notable rapport between melancholia
and the object's mnemonic "interment" in the ego, which might lead us to theorize
"encryptment" in a radically new way-that is, in terms of jouissance, as I show below.
In claiming that "[i]ntrojection does not tend toward compensation, but growth"
[113], Torok argues with Freud, who allegedly made introjection a compensatory aspect
of mourning. Since Freud attributed such compensation to "incorporation," however, his
argument in fact is very close to Abraham and Torok's claims about "encryptment":
We have elsewhere shown that identification is a preliminary stage of object-
choice, that it is the first way--and one that is expressed in an ambivalent
fashion-in which the ego picks out an object. The ego wants to incorporate this
object into itself and, in accordance with the oral or cannibalistic phase of
libidinal development in which it is, it wants to do so by devouring it. ["Mourn-
ing" 249-50]
Freud explains here not only how psychic splitting can occur, given the ego's inability to
incorporate and devour an object, but why retaining the object's image affords the ego
such satisfaction. This clarifies a problem we encountered earlier. In melancholia, he
writes,
the free libido was not displaced on to another object; it was withdrawn into the
ego. There, however, it was not employed in any unspecified way, but served to
establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object. Thus the
shadow of the objectfell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged
by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object. In this way
an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego
and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and
the ego as altered by identification. [249; original emphasis]
Despite Torok's effort to distinguish between Freud and Ferenczi, Freud in 1915-17
clearly gives us a complicated account of "incorporation" that emphasizes both the
resilience of this phenomenon (its centrality for identification) and its unconscious
satisfaction. To illustrate this argument, we must consider one of Torok's examples of
"incorporation"-the "illness" of mourning that strongly resembles, but for her purposes
must also differ from, Freud's account of melancholia.'9 Torok mentions a woman whose
mother's death leads, in the mother's words, to "carnal sensations" [qtd. in Shell 109]. She
avows, "I've never understood how something like that could have happened to me; I've
never forgiven myself ..., but a giddy song coursed through my mind and wouldn't leave
me. It continued during the entire vigil. I tried on the black veil like a bride preparing for
the big day" [109].
The difficulty in using the woman's words to convey "incorporation" as both an
"illness of mourning" and as distinct from Freud's formulation of incorporation-melan-
cholia derives from her consciousness of the drive, though she can neither explain nor
accept its meaning. The example demonstrates that the woman must pretend not to know
the reason for her joy for fear that it would overwhelm her as guilt. Her compromise is
neither repression nor symptom formation; nor does it resemble Abraham and Torok's
idea of "encryptment" in the strict sense of the term. Her compromise is closer to Freud's
account of melancholia and Lacan's formulation of "lajouissance de 1' Autre," the Other's
jouissance [Encore 13], for it relates to a satisfaction that is joyful precisely because it is
denied--or stolen from-another. Such extreme and "inappropriate" joy poses a diffi-
culty for this woman, leading her to believe that it caused her mother's death.
We can use this example to confirm why Freud considered "incorporation" central
to melancholic identification and warding off loss ["Mourning" 249]. He gives us an
account of identification motivated by the ego's denial of alienation, yet contingent on
unconscious fantasies of absorbing and containing different objects. The point for Freud
is that these processes are replete with ambivalence; they are not, as Abraham and Torok
contend, benign and indicative of "growth." In developing this point, Freud illustrates a
crucial development for psychoanalysis-the death drive-which forever altered his
understanding of consciousness and sexuality.
Freud asks us to consider a psychic paradox in melancholia, in which the "ego's self-
love... [appears] so immense" alongside a "vast ... amount of narcissistic libido which
we see liberated in the fear that emerges as a threat to life, that we cannot conceive how
that ego can consent to its own destruction" ["Mourning" 252; my emphasis]. His
discussion binds the "mania" and fleeting triumph of melancholia with the ego's difficulty
in retaining and "absorbing" those imagoes and ideals with which it struggles to identify.
Freud's initial claim emerges succinctly: identification is inseparable from ambivalence;
it is not a simple or painless decision the ego makes for its own good.20 We are thus justified
in claiming that Freud did in fact consider a relation between mourning and increases in
libido. However, melancholia also aided his understanding of the death drive, one of the
primary factors separating his work from ego-based arguments about treatment and
reparation. In 1915, Freud grasped that when encountering blocked grief, "the ego can
consent to its own destruction" ["Mourning" 252], a principle informing his account of
self-directed trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). This realization directly
19. Compare Freud's account of melancholic incorporation with Abraham and Torok's-the
two are not easily distinguished: "Incorporation results from those losses that for some reason
cannot be acknowledged as such" [Shell 130; original emphasis].
20. Freud: "In melancholia, ... countless separate struggles are carried on over the object,
in which hate and love contend with each other; the one seeks to detach the libido from the object,
the other to maintain this position of the libido against the assault. The location of these separate
struggles cannot be assigned to any system but the Ucs., the region of the memory-traces of things
(as contrasted with word-cathexes). ... Just as mourning impels the ego to give up the object by
declaring the object to be dead and offering the ego the inducement of continuing to live, so does
each single struggle of ambivalence loosen the fixation of the libido to the object by disparaging
it, denigrating it and even as it were killing it. It is possible for the process in the Ucs. to come to
an end, either after the fury has spent itself or after the object has been abandoned as valueless. .
.. The ego may enjoy in this the satisfaction of knowing itself as the better of the two, as superior
to the object" ["Mourning" 256-57; original emphases].
20
influences our reading of Abraham and Torok, for in adopting Ferenczi's "benign"
definition of "introjection," they correspondingly excise psychic negativity and misrep-
resent the real etiology of trauma.
In softening Abraham and Torok's psychic antinomy between incorporation and
introjection, we regain a discourse about resistance, repetition, and symptom formation
that distinguishes psychoanalysis from its ego-based counterparts-psychology and
psychiatry. Further, in realigning the effect of repression with the unconscious, and the
symptom with repression's failure, we return with Freud and Lacan to a vital discussion
about the drives' fate after their full or partial dissociation from each repressed signifier.
This argument's value lies in returning us to Freud's and Lacan's accounts of the war
between "mutually opposing" psychic systems ["Resistances" 218]-accounts that grasp
the full and traumatic vicissitudes of unconscious life and jouissance.
7. Memory and Veracity
Turning now to Rand and Torok's 1993 essay, "Questions to Freudian Psychoanalysis:
Dream Interpretation, Reality, Fantasy," I hope not only to show why they revised
Abraham and Torok's earlier work, but to illustrate the critical trajectory of Rand and
Torok's present collaboration. As Rand avows in his introduction to The Shell and the
Kernel, "By now I see myself as a continuer rather than as a student and disseminator of
[Abraham and Torok's] work" [4].
Rand and Torok' s recent essay is a close reading of Freud' s Interpretation ofDreams,
his 1899 paper "Screen Memories" and an important chapter of his Psychopathology of
Everyday Life, "Childhood Memories and Screen Memories" (1907 [1901]). In both these
texts, Freud interprets memories that are not forgotten or repressed but are associatively
linked with insignificant reminders in such a way that the subject "refinds" the memory's
"original" content. As an act of mnemonic revision, this "refinding" differs radically from
Abraham and Torok's account of egoic encryptment. Freud's two essays elaborate on
different arguments, but their shared premise is memory's astonishing unreliability.2
At the end of "Screen Memories," Freud questions "whether we have any memories
at allfrom our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess"
["Screen" 322; original emphases]. In this way, he seems to reject historical veracity,
though in fact he merely concludes that memory can distort past events. Rand and Torok
follow these arguments closely, but when translating Freud' s German phrase "eine Reihe
von Motiven, denen die Absicht historischerTreue fern liegt.. ." ["Ober Deckerinnerungen"
488], Rand modifies James Strachey's translation to represent Freud as claiming that
"'historical truth is the least of our concerns'" [qtd. in "QFP" 586]. The position of the
dative plural denen after Motiven renders this translation quite incorrect: The "object of
historical truth" refers unequivocally to "a series [or number] of motives." Strachey's
translation in Standard Edition makes clear why consciousness is the distorting agent,
denying us access to a pure and perfect history; the original is not recoverable without
alteration. This, then, is how Freud's statement should read: "And a number of motives,
with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them [i.e., childhood
memories], as well as in the selection of the memories themselves" ["Screen" 322; my
emphasis].
Rand's mistranslation suggests why critics of psychoanalysis often hold Freud
21. One can grasp the current stakes of this unreliability by reading Frederick Crews et al.'s
The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute. a book to which this section of my essay implicitly
responds.
responsible for distorting elements of consciousness; in this example, however, the
distortion is the critic's alone. Rand presents "Screen Memories" as the "dramatization
of [an] internal debate [in Freud's work and correspondence ... that] rages between the
authenticity of infantile recollections and the role of sexual fantasies" ["QFP" 586]. As
Strachey notes, however, Freud's presentation of an autobiographical example in this
essay as objective is responsible for "rather undeservedly overshadow[ing] . . . the
intrinsic interest of this paper" ["Screen" 302]. Indeed, the autobiographical element
allows us to read the paper as a self-interview-not as an instance of conceptual
schizophrenia, as Rand and Torok claim-in which Freud poses two different perspec-
tives in a way that renders neither satisfactory. For me, the interest of this essay is that
Freud could advance his argument only by relinquishing the assumption that childhood
memories are conscious; the argument develops incisively once Freud entertains the role
of unconscious influence, substitution, and distortion. Thus by the end of "Screen
Memories," he represents not only memory but consciousness and subjectivity as
organized by anticipation and deferred action-that is, by Nachtriiglichkeit: "A screen
memory may be described as 'retrogressive' or as having 'pushed forward' according as
the one chronological relation or the other holds between the screen and the thing
screened-off.. ." "i.e., according to whether the displacement has been in a backward or
forward direction" ["Screen" 320, 320n].
When introducing The Shell and the Kernel, Rand overlooks this principle of
Nachtraglichkeit or "deferred action"; he argues that "Freudian theories rely on the
concept of latency: beside an emotion expressed, behind a symptom manifested, there
lurks a contrary, repressed emotion" [18]. To highlight the repercussions of Rand's
mistake here, I have underscored Freud's arguments against latency in "Repression"
partly to differentiate his work from Abraham and Torok's repeated use of this concept
in their essays. Given Rand's characterization of Freud, it is easy to see how Abraham and
Torok appear to "enlarge upon or redirect the Freudian definition of personal identity as
beset by unconscious conflicts, desires, and fantasies" [18]. In claiming that they also
"explore the mental landscapes of submerged family secrets ... in which, for example,
actual events are treated as if they had never occurred" [18], Rand eclipses how Freud's
1899 and 1907 essays on memory were designed to interpret precisely this problematic.
More to the point, his and Torok' s essay partly recognizes this complexity in Freud's early
writing but dismisses Freud's conflicted relation to fantasy and the event: "Freud ends the
century vacillating; he continues the tussle between truth and falsehood, between the
genuine recollection and the fantasy of childhood scenes" ["QFP" 587]. It should not
surprise us that this "tussle" manifests itself yet again as a tension between consciousness
and the unconscious. Regarding oneiric states, Rand and Torok therefore argue: "Dreams
are in part incomprehensible to dreamers, hence the need to interpret them, to find their
latent meaning, and to make this available to dreamers, allowing them access to hitherto
unreachable regions of their own psyches, thereby permitting them to control their own
houses" [573].
In light of these claims, we can see why Rand would characterize the "broadest aim"
of The Shell and the Kernel (and indeed his own understanding of the "Renewals of
Psychoanalysis," the title he gives his introduction to this collection) as an attempt "to
restore the lines of communication with those intimate recesses of the mind that have for
one reason or another been denied expression" [4]. The problem remains that Rand and
Torok produce a psychic and interpretive voluntarism when proposing that "idioms need
to be adapted to what patients are trying to express through them" ["QFP" 578]. "If
psychoanalysis has any authority at all," they contend, "in our opinion it derives from the
willingness of psychoanalysis to welcome people into their own personal creations"
["QFP" 577]. For this reason, Rand and Torok represent alienation as a temporary effect
of suffering and loss, not a traumatic cause precipitating a fragile and conflicted identity
22
that uses fantasy to conceal this trauma: "The freedom to fantasize is crucial in the
formation of the self in childhood and remains an integral part of the harmonious
functioning of the adult psyche-that is our conviction" [592-93].
With this emphasis on psychic harmony, Rand and Torok's therapeutic approach
relies on testament and empirical evidence about trauma and distress. As we've seen with
Rose's help, such perspectives consider the unconscious in functionalist ways, advancing
a form of ego psychology that is by definition antipsychoanalytic. Thus Rand introduces
The Shell and the Kernel with the following caveat: "Theories need to be abandoned or
revamped if inconsistent with the actual life experience of patients or the facts of a text"
[1]. Although Freud allowed his clinical experience to modify some of his conceptual
claims, there are crucial differences between Freud's and Rand and Torok's undertakings.
Besides the treachery inherent in determining more than the most rudimentary "facts of
a text"-a treachery accompanying every interpretive act, whether literary or psychic-
the ambiguous and unsettling experience of analysis demonstrates that empiricism is the
least reliable of psychic theories. This is what Freud grasped of the death drive in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle and what Rand and Torok curiously overlook when presenting the
following questions to Freudian psychoanalysis:
Is what patients say about their childhood experiences true or false? Freud's
dilemma, as we see it, consisted in his being unwilling and perhaps unable to
determine the real orfantasized status of his patients' accounts. The result is an
odd dilemma: Freud does not seem to know with certainty what he is working
on as an analyst-truth or lies, traumas or fantasies. The most highly evolved
stage of that question-raised, whether directly or indirectly, with almost
inexorable persistence between 1896 and 1932-is less than satisfying: Freud
responds with a non liquet, there is doubt, it is never quite clear or certain.
["QFP" 579-80]
By presenting Freud's dilemma in this way-as a binary between truth and falsehood on
whose answer his work and reputation ultimately hinges-Rand and Torok miss the
answer to their question: "Freud's dilemma ... consisted in his being unwilling and
perhaps unable to determine the real or fantasized status of his patients' account."
Personal and generic resistances coalesce here, making anything less than certainty
appear to disqualify Freud's inquiry. Freud's "colophon of doubt," however, is exactly
what distinguished psychoanalysis from its psychological counterparts: The discovery of
the unconscious necessarily obstructed all further psychic certainty [Lacan, Four 44].
Thus when analyzing the proposition "Ilam not sure, Idoubt," Lacan remarked: "It is here
that Freud lays all his stress--doubt is the support of his certainty" [Four 35].
Later acknowledging that this problem of fantasy and reality preoccupied Freud-
"In spite of what he had hoped and what he subsequently said, Freud was not at peace with
this problem.. ." ["QFP" 587]-Rand and Torok do not simply accuse him (as Jeffrey
Masson has) of conceptual complacency or of a type of subterfuge amounting to
patriarchal tyranny. Instead, their complaint about Freud's relative unease with his own
argument suggests to them a personal deficiency behind Freud's failure to produce the
answer he announced more confidently in his earlier work:
What astonishes us most is the fact that the considerable theoretical advances
of Freudian thought at the start of the twentieth century should not have
succeeded in neutralizing the question of truth and falsehood in Freud's mind.
The light he shed on infantile sexuality, the role of the stages of instinctual and
libidinal development in the neuroses, the pathogenic importance of repressed
unconscious fantasies, as related in particular to the Oedipus complex--all the
new theories, which in the eyes of nearly everyone defined the quintessence of
psychoanalysis, failed to satisfy Freud. These elaborationsfailed to quiet in him
the turmoil of the choice between truth and falsehood. ["QFP" 587]
Strangely, this passage represents the "kernel" of Rand and Torok's objections to
"classical Freudian psychoanalysis" ["QFP" 587], though the objections do not conclude
with the object at which they are first leveled. The passage begins with an account of what
in Freud's early work is most valuable-both for psychoanalysis and, we might infer, for
Rand and Torok: the "discovery" of infantile sexuality, the idea of repression, and the
Oedipus complex. After all, these elements prevail in modified form throughout The Shell
and the Kernel. But Freud's refusal entirely to disband a binary his own work discredited
is not a personal or even conceptual failing. His refusal instead illustrates the complex,
ambiguous stakes of fantasy, testimony, seduction, and events (real and imagined). Such
factors intensify ensuing questions about truth and falsehood, demanding that we modify
our perspective on psychic reality. We cannot also state convincingly that Freud was at
fault for realizing that these factors do not "neutraliz[e] ... the question of truth and
falsehood"; such claims are beside the point.
Similar complaints recur in Questions a' Freud: Du devenir de la psychanalyse, Rand
and Torok' s recent book. Here Rand and Torok offer an elaborate reading of Freud' s 1906
account of Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva and of the role "transmission" plays in the history
of psychoanalysis. Yet in attempting to resolve complex psychoanalytic concerns,
Questions ai Freud consistently traces psychoanalytic enigmas back to Freud's life and
even childhood [see esp. part 4]. The book is intolerant of speculation and doubt, but its
allegiance to psychobiography founders precisely on the intentional fallacy: attributing
all conceptual incoherences and psychic difficulties to Freud's life obviously proves
impossible. Nonetheless, it seems disingenuous that Rand and Torok would conclude
their book by implying that Freud's project somehow arose and went awry due to his
intolerance for speculation and doubt:
Nous avons questionne Freudparce que lapsychanalyse nousparait "voluer sur
des voies contraires. Nous avons voulu apporter une rdponse ai la question:
Pourquoi dans la pense freudienne l'inspiration d'extraordinaire ouverture se
heurte-t-elle si souvent et comme par fataliti des pratiques de fermeture?
L'ambition d'ouverture, I'espoir de tout comprendre-dans le domaine de la
psych" et au-del4, pour le bien et le bien-etre de l'humanit---ont anime Freud
tout au long de sa vie. ... Maispouvons-nous lui donner notre adhesion entiere
lorsqu'il ferme ce qu'il tentait-en bravant maintes redsistances--d'ouvrir?
[279]
We have questioned Freud because psychoanalysis seems to us to have evolved
along contrary paths. We have aimed to respond to the question: Why in
Freudian thought does the astonishing inspiration of gaps or openings conflict
so often-indeed, almost inevitably-with the habit ofclosing things down? The
aspiration to open things up, the hope of understanding everything-in and
beyond the psychic field and for the good and well-being of all humanity-
motivated Freud his entire life. ... But can we adhere to him entirely when he
closes down precisely what he tried-while defying repeated opposition-to
open? [my trans.]
How does this statement-alternately generous to and critical of Freud--correspond to
Rand and Torok's "astonish[ment]" at Freud's precise dissatisfaction with his early
theories? Surely Rand and Torok's careful enumeration of Freud's conceptual revisions
24
demonstrates both a lack of rigidity in Freud's argument and his willingness to interpret
the repercussions of the unconscious, a factor they strangely overlook above and reframe
in most of their book.
What makes these arguments so curious, finally, is Rand's gratitude that Abraham
and Torok "attempt ... at times to smooth over aspects of Freud's theories" whenever they
seem contradictory or poorly formulated [Shell 76n]; Rand himself, as we've seen,
perceives analysis as helping patients "continue to live harmoniously," such that "fruitful
use [is made] of the natural gift of sexual pleasure" while the "enemies of life" are properly
overcome [14, 10-11, 22]. As I argued earlier, this gesture not only aims to organize
factors Freud insisted were structurally insoluble, but forecloses on the very apparatus
that could begin to analyze the resulting trauma.
Although Rand and Torok object to Freud's dissatisfaction with his early theories of
sexuality, fantasy, and the event, Freud's later work alighted on a concept demonstrating
the inadequacy of an evidential reality/fantasy split-the death drive. Freud apparently
had to smuggle the ensuing conceptual difficulty into his argument, in the form of a
haunting doubt that interrupts his "official" confidence: "Whether we adhere to them or
not, Freud's mature theories clearly lay claim to a level of cohesiveness and universal
validity that would not [sic] longer require a return to the question of truth versus
falsehood. Nobody but Freud requires it" ["QFP" 587].
There are two objections to Freud here, which aren't entirely congruent: his false
claims about psychic consistency and his immediate dissatisfaction with these claims.
The first is again difficult to reconcile with Rand and Torok's citation from Freud's An
Autobiographical Study (1925), which they use to demonstrate his conceptual vacilla-
tions. As Freud avows, "Before going further into the question of infantile sexuality I must
mention an error into which I fell for a while and which might well have had fatal
consequences for the whole of my work" [33-34, qtd. in "QFP" 582]-the error concerns
his willingness to believe his patients' accounts of infantile seduction. The issue that Rand
and Torok highlight, however, is not simply Freud's uncertainty about the truth or
falsehood of infantile seduction, but Freud's ability to endorse his patients' testimony,
since the stakes of analysis (both practical and theoretical) hinge on this psychic and
evidential interpretation. As Freud wrote in 1907, in a statement questioning neither
infantile fantasy nor "actual history" but the speech giving credibility to both: "If the
memories that a person has retained are subjected to an analytic enquiry, it is easy to
establish that there is no guarantee of their accuracy" ["Childhood" 46-47; my empha-
sis].
Once Freud alighted on the vicissitudes of this testimony-given all of its informing
factors of distortion, condensation, projection, partial repression, and Nachtriiglichkeit-
psychoanalysis could not continue simply by accepting or rejecting what patients
announced as fact. Indeed, Rand and Torok ironically demonstrate this in their careful
transcription of Freud's work on infantile fantasy and seduction; the oscillation we see in
Freud's work illustrates neither the invalidity of fantasy and seduction nor the inevitable
need to prioritize one at the other's expense. Freud's oscillation directs a question instead
at the meaning and importance attached to both registers that psychoanalysis can broach
but-for obvious reasons--cannot easily resolve. Given their extensive knowledge and
experience of psychoanalysis as a professor and analyst, respectively, what is surprising
about Rand and Torok's recent work is its willingness to overlook the obvious point that
Freud's central dilemma in the 1900s concerned both the truth and fiction of his patients'
claims.
Since doubt and uncertainty are prerequisites for all psychoanalytic inquiry, Rand
and Torok's second objection-that "nobody but Freud requires ... a definitive
answer"-is wholly disingenuous. Why should this signify Freud's error and not his
integrity? Rand and Torok's argument is also difficult to square with Freud's careful
diacritics I winter 1997 25
admissions of doubt in his later work, and Rand and Torok's earlier argument that Freud
kept working at these issues precisely because they troubled him. Without considering
these obvious counterpoints, Rand and Torok resume their argument about Freud's
dissatisfaction: "From 1897 on, Freud shackled himself with the question of truth versus
falsehood without ever examining its ultimate sense or his own reasons for the interro-
gation" ["QFP" 588; my emphasis]. Rand and Torok's previous argument shows
precisely the reverse: Freud consistently examined his reasons for this interrogation.
Indeed, psychoanalysis and his patients' well-being hinged on the answer to nothing less.
Arguably, this demonstrates that Freud managed to separate his work from his followers'
limited understanding of it.
What Rand and Torok imply about Freud's conceptual doubt they do not rigorously
interpret in his later work (as opposed to his contemporaneous letters), where it prevails
to an remarkable degree, particularly in Three Essays' footnotes and in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle. Rand and Torok attribute this conceptual doubt to Freud's alleged
pride and/or isolation: "For want of a friend perhaps, to whom he could regularly and
immediately communicate his clinical and theoretical second thoughts.. ." ["QFP" 587].
This deduction is rather absurd and many have critiqued its biographical assumptions [see
for instance Davidson]. Claiming that Freud's intolerance of equivocation in his work
compelled this factor to return as an "insidious... haunting" [587] clears some space for
Rand and Torok's theory of revenance, which Freud formulated in "The 'Uncanny"'
(1919), but this proposition in fact ignores the self-acknowledged doubts surfacing
throughout Freud's early and later work (we quoted some of these doubts earlier); it also
turns psychoanalysis into a study of certainty, in which any "doubt" registers as an
immediate conceptual disaster.
To all of Rand and Torok's objections-"Freudian psychoanalysis appears to us
threatened from within"; "we have perceived internal rifts running through Freud's
system of thought"; "we are tempted to say that Freudian psychoanalysis is divided and
self-contradictory"; "Freudian theory fractures in its very core" ["QFP" 568-69]-we
can only respond, of course. And how could it be otherwise? How could any psychoana-
lytic principle not be contradictory when the subject is founded upon this contradiction?
Freud makes this point, using almost the same words, when he avows that his principal
hypothesis in the 1895 Project "suffers under an internal contradiction" [369]; psycho-
analysis, as I earlier remarked, could almost be said to begin with this admission. In Rand
and Torok's work, on the other hand, resolving equivocation recurs with greater urgency:
Rand begins from a premise of "harmonious progress" in analysis [Shell 21-22], when
Freud does not.
It surprises me that Rand and Torok overlook the axiomatic tension between
conscious and unconscious systems in Freud's work. For they note, in a manner that takes
us beyond those who argue (as Frederick Crews does) that Freud patterned the uncon-
scious after his own failures: "The problem reaches well beyond the theoretical contra-
diction.... The psychic realm has its own laws, wholly unknown to other domains"
["QFP" 575, 580]. Yet we obviously don't need to accept that this "beyond" leads to either
biography's unquestionable veracity or the partial errors and falsehoods surfacing in
analytic treatment. In this respect, I agree that "an internal demon of sorts is at work here
... [whose] compass of individual paradoxes... form[s] a network of mutually exclusive
methodological dualities within Freudian thought" [569]. In revisiting Freud's arguments
in The Ego and the Id, "Resistance and Repression," and "Mourning and Melancholia,"
however, my aim has been simply to demonstrate both the inevitability of this "demon"
and the recurrence of paradox in any theory that tries to account for it. Beyond this
relatively banal point, I would add that Freud's conceptual oscillations mirror this psychic
turbulence only insofar as his early work plays out the drama of allegiance between
psychology (an account of the ego) and psychoanalysis (a theory of the unconscious) by
26
rendering a resolution of this drama virtually impossible.
8. Beyond Evidence ... to Doubt and Trauma
In concluding this essay, I propose that Freud formulated in 1899-and, later, in 1901-
a set of questions about memory and the psychic representation of events that would
forever transform our understanding of reality, time, and history. In chapter four of The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life, he argued:
This general principle would assert that when the reproducing function [of
memory] fails or goes astray, the occurrence [of this error] points, far more
frequently than we suspect, to interference by a tendentious factor-that is, by
a purpose which favours one memory while striving to work against another. .
.. This suggests that there are conditions for remembering (in the sense of
conscious reproducing) of a quite special kind, which have evaded recognition
by us up to now. ["Childhood" 45-46; original emphasis]
Central to my reading of Freud is a conviction that the recurrence of questions, doubts,
and revisions in his writing is itself profoundly psychoanalytic; psychoanalysis by
definition cannot produce conditions of certainty. For this reason, I have emphasized how
Abraham's, Torok's, and Rand's pursuit of resolution and harmony detracts from their
psychic investigation. In "Renewals of Psychoanalysis," for instance, Rand remarks on
Abraham and Torok's difficulties with Freud's legacy: "intent on... exploring ever more
avenues of sympathetic understanding ... they struggle, sometimes unwittingly, to shake
off the various theories handed down to them" [Shell 1]. Inadvertently perhaps, Rand's
image represents Freud (and surely Lacan) as an unwanted legacy that Abraham and
Torok also want to "shake off'--even as a "crypt" they cannot introject [Kamuf 42].
Throughout this essay I have argued that Abraham's, Torok's, and Rand's accounts
of subjectivity and sexuality either ignore or repress the very psychic factors that take us
away from "sympathetic understanding." Strongly pronounced in Rand and Torok's
recent work, such attempts are liable to reproduce the forms of coercion and psychic
violence that Lacan denounced in "The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of
Its Power" (1958). Lacan's criticisms, cited earlier, indicate why he emphasizes not
"recovery" but rather what cannot be lost and properly mourned; hence Lacan's baleful
assessment that subjectivity is unable to restore itself or face the pressing turmoil of its
eventual demise.
Instead of leading to quietism and ahistoricism--of which many critics accuse
psychoanalysis-Lacan takes us in the opposite direction, toward an inquiring skepticism
and an irreverence so extensive it can seem intolerably extreme: "Such is the fright that
seizes man when he unveils the face of his power that he turns away from it even in the
very act of laying its features bare. So it has been with psychoanalysis" ["Function" 34].
As Lacan argues, however, we nonetheless continue to demand that witnesses provide us
with testimonials, however sullied the result. The Other still speaks. Can we heed this
speech without also demanding unquestionable veracity?
WORKS CITED
Abraham, Nicolas, and MariaTorok. The WolfMan 's Magic Word: A Cryptonomy. Trans.
Nicholas T. Rand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Trans. of Cryptonymie: Le
verbier de l'homme aux loups. Paris: Aubier Flammarion, 1976.
Bersani, Leo. The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art. New York: Columbia UP,
1986.
Crews, Frederick, et al. The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute. New York: New
York Review, 1995.
Davidson, Arnold. "Assault on Freud." London Review of Books 5-19 July 1984: 9.
Dean, Tim. "The Psychoanalysis of AIDS." October 63 (1993): 83-116.
Derrida, Jacques. "Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok."
1977. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Foreword to Abraham and Torok, WolfMan's Magic
Word xi-xlviii.
-. "Let Us not Forget-Psychoanalysis." Oxford Literary Review 12.1-2 (1990): 3-
7.
S . "Me-Psychoanalysis: An Introduction to the Translation of 'The Shell and the
Kernel' by Nicolas Abraham." Trans. Richard Klein. Diacritics 9.1 (1979): 4-12.
-. Resistances de la psychanalyse. Paris: Galilee, 1996.
Ferenczi, Saindor. "Introjection and Transference." 1909. First Contributions to Psycho-
Analysis. Trans. Ernest Jones. London: Hogarth, 1952. 35-93.
Fineman, Joel. "The Sound of O in Othello: The Real of the Tragedy of Desire." October
45 (1988): 77-96.
Freud, Sigmund. "Analysis Terminable and Interminable." 1937. SE 23: 211-53.
". An Autobiographical Study. 1925 (1924). SE 20: 1-74.
". Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1920. SE 18: 1-64.
(. "Childhood Memories and Screen Memories." The Psychopathology of Everyday
Life. 1907 (1901). SE 6: 43-52.
(. "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming." 1908 (1907). SE 9: 143-53.
(. "The Dissection of the Psychical Personality." 1933. SE 22: 57-80.
". The Ego and the Id. 1923. SE 19: 1-66.
". "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes." 1915. SE 14: 109-40.
-. The Interpretation of Dreams. 1900. SE 5: 339-686.
(. "A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams." 1917 (1915). SE 14:
217-37.
". "Mourning and Melancholia." 1917 (1915). SE 14: 237-60.
(. "On Narcissism: An Introduction." 1914. SE 14: 69-102.
(. "The Paths to the Formation of Symptoms." 1916-17 (1915-17). SE 16: 358-77.
". Project for a Scientific Psychology. 1950 (1895). SE 1: 283-397.
(. "Repression." 1915. SE 14: 141-58.
(. "Resistance and Repression." 1916-17 (1915-17). SE 16: 286-357.
(. "Resistances to Psycho-Analysis." 1925 (1924). SE 19: 213-24.
(. "Screen Memories." 1899. SE 3: 300-22.
". "Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence." 1940. SE 23: 275-78.
". The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud. Ed.
and trans. James Strachey. 24 vols. London: Hogarth, 1953-74. [SE]
". Studies on Hysteria. 1893. SE 2: 1-335.
". Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. 1905. SE 7: 135-72.
". "Two Encyclopaedia Articles." 1923 (1922). SE 18: 235-59.
. "Uber Deckerinnerungen." 1899. Gesammelte Schriften von Sigmund Freud. Vol.
1. Leipzig: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1928. 465-88.
. "The 'Uncanny.'" 1919. SE 17: 217-56.
. "The Unconscious." 1915. SE 14: 159-209.
Haggard, H. Rider. King Solomon's Mines. 1885. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.
Hoad, T. F., ed. The Concise OxfordDictionary ofEnglish Etymology. Oxford: Clarendon,
1986.
Kamuf, Peggy. "Abraham's Wake." Diacritics 9.1 (1979): 32-43.
Lacan, Jacques. "The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power." 1958.
28
Acrits: A Selection 226-80.
-. Ecrits: A Selection. New York: Norton, 1977.
- The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. 1973 (1964). Ed. Jacques-
Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1978.
-. "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis." 1953.
Ecrits: A Selection 30-113. Trans. of "Fonction et champ de la parole et du langue
en psychanalyse." Ecrits I. Paris: Seuil, 1966. 111-208.
. "The Mirror Stage As Formative of the Function of the I As Revealed in
Psychoanalytic Experience." 1949. Ecrits: A Selection 1-7.
-. Le Seminaire, livre XX: Encore. Paris: Seuil, 1975.
(. "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian
Unconscious." 1960. Ecrits: A Selection 292-325.
Lane, Christopher. "Beyond the Social Principle: Psychoanalysis and Radical Democ-
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. "Philosophy of the Unconscious: Vacillating on the Scene of Writing in Freud's
Project." Prose Studies 17.2 (1994): 98-129.
Miller, Jacques-Alain. "Extimit6." Prose Studies 11.3 (1988): 121-31.
Murray, Timothy. Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas.
New York: Routledge, 1993.
Rand, Nicholas. "A propos des travaux de N. Abraham et M. Torok: Entretien de
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- . "Family Romance or Family History? Psychoanalysis and Dramatic Invention in
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de l'inconscient." Propos presentds et recueillis par Patrick Conrath. Journal des
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(1987): 278-86.
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Abraham and Torok." Diacritics 18.3 (1988): 31-52.
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Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso, 1988.

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Review: The Testament of the Other: Abraham and Torok's Failed Expiation of Ghosts

Author(s): Christopher Lane

ABRAHAM AND TOROK'S

FAILED EXPIATION OF GHOSTS

trans., and intro. Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.

Nicholas Rand and Maria Torok. QUESTIONS A FREUD: DU DEVENIR DE LA

PSYCHANALYSE. Paris: Belles Lettres-Archimbaud, 1995.

- . "QUESTIONS TO FREUDIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS: DREAM INTERPRE-

-H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon's Mines

reparative: Encouraging their analysands to mourn repressed secrets, they hoped to

transform their analysands' perspectives on family history.

cheerful defiance of Freudian orthodoxy, acquiring a reputation in France-and, later, in

diacritics / winter 1997 diacritics 27.4: 3-29 3

as for criticizing Lacan's alleged stranglehold on psychoanalysis in France and much of

States by theorists delighted to see a "poststructuralist" critique of Freudian and Lacanian

psychoanalysis. Ironically, Abraham and Torok's work received almost comparable

support from analytical philosophers eager to denounce Freud's "unscientific" precepts.

non-Francophone readers have an opportunity to assess what Abraham and Torok

interpreted the collaboration the same way.2

Freud's model of repression? Assessing their revision of Freud's metapsychological

['Fors']" [Lacan, qtd. in Roudinesco 600].

rid ourselves of the past.

2. The Terms of a Cure

symptom formation radically different from most continental and poststructuralist

psychoanalysis's capacity to resolve psychic conflicts, but both analysts ultimately

present psychoanalysis as a curative profession, in which the analysand is able-with the

analyst's prompting-to "retrieve" blocked dimensions of consciousness [16-17]. Con-

and can be made to work for the benefit of us all" [156].

approach to treatment from Freud, who ultimately considered psychoanalysis "intermi-

psychoanalysis on analysands, for instance, he spoke of "transforming [their] hysterical

analysands would "be better armed against that unhappiness" [305].

By contrast, Abraham and Torok consider psychoanalysis more influential in aiding

an individual' s well-being.4 Rand' s assessment of this position in his introduction to The

unintelligibility they encounter in their patients as psychically motivated disturbances of

Torok suggest that psychoanalysis enhances a dimension of control preexisting the

In advancing these claims, Lacanian psychoanalysis highlights concerns about the

demand is a fundamental principle of treatment:

diacritics / winter 1997 5

way?-it is certainly the one they have adopted.

But sometimes desire is not to be conjured away, but appears .. at the

unconscious conflicts, and thus as entirely counter to the principles of psychoanalysis:

Radically downplaying Freud's and Lacan's claims about intrapsychic conflict,

running throughout The Shell and the Kernel.

distress, is also a profoundly unreliable indicator of what is wrong. To obviate this

problem, Freud stressed the importance of interpreting parapraxes-slips of the tongue

"talking cure" therefore remains a compelling metaphor for psychoanalysis (without

accept or believe that speech is an unequivocal testament of a patient's well-being.

We can put Freud's thesis a little differently: empiricism is unreliable in psycho-

invitation of the Socidtd Frangaise de Psychanalyse, published in La psychanalyse 6.

tion that it is causing them-and perhaps others-harm.

psychoanalysis confounds political justice and logical solutions to sexual inequality:

psychoanalytic study, that is, within the affective realm" [70].

This task is commendable, but it yields only those advantages "available" to

complementary beings. No doubt this conviction, which happens to be my own, has a

[1901]). Departing radically from Freud-and, as a consequence, eclipsing his concep-

tual distinction between reverie and wish-fulfillment ["Creative" 146-49]-Torok claims

diacritics / winter 1997 7

and is combined with a desire for collaboration .. ." [36].

What contributes to this limited understanding of psychic satisfaction in The Shell

narcissistically complete and genitally complementary beings" [33], we must question

describes "as a stopgap invented to camouflage a desire, as an artificially constructed

the symptom's "construct[ion]" and "disappear[ance]."

3. Therapy vs. Psychoanalysis; or, The Ego and the Id