930 Book Reviews

influenced by the trauma unfolding around him. Kogan raises important

questions for psychoanalysis as a field, not the least of which is the role of
the analyst him or herself, with his or her individual past, and consequently
his or her inevitable effect on the outcome of the work, particularly in the
light of shared mourning.
Finally, at the risk of passing over much of what is original and important
in this wide-ranging book, I would like to raise some theoretical questions
based on the notion of ‘deposited representations’ of the atrocities of the
Holocaust, communicated unconsciously from parent to child and reacti-
vated in times of actual external danger. While I have no doubt that this
way of explaining transgenerational transmission specifically of Holocaust
trauma is true, is it not also true of everything that is unconsciously ‘put
into’ children by parents? Is it not possible theoretically to transmit the
entire psychic contents of parents to children as the basis of the uncon-
scious, in a way that is structured by anxieties and internal calamities? Do
the specific ‘black holes’ of Holocaust trauma differ in kind as well as in
degree from other unconscious communications, evacuations, etc.? I also
wonder here about the omission of any mention of Faimberg’s (2005) work
on the telescoping of generations, which also takes up in detail many of the
same dilemmas. While Kogan alludes to the psychoanalytic model of trauma
(and implicitly ‘aprs-coup’) in her Epilogue, I miss a broader integration of
her own work on mourning and the defenses against mourning with current
psychoanalytic theory.
By the same token, if we read this book as a form of enormously creative
personal and professional autobiography, we will be richly rewarded with
the fruits of an extraordinary career as an individual psychoanalyst, and an
extended and significant personal contribution to our field.
Jane V. Kite
17 Hammond Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-1915, USA
E-mail: jvkite@gmail.com

References
Faimberg H (2005). The telescoping of generations. London: Routledge.
Ferro A (2008). Book review essay: A beam of intense darkness by James S. Grotstein. Int J
Psychoanal 89(4):867–84.

Humain/Déshumain: Pierre Fédida, la parole de l’œuvre1

by Pierre Fédida et al.
PUF, Paris, 2007; 250 pp; e12.00

Based on a seminar recorded in 2001 ⁄ 2002 in Paris, Humain ⁄ Dshumain

[Human ⁄ Unhuman] constitutes one of Pierre Fdida’s last elaborations of
his work. First published in 2007, it is reprinted in this volume along with
eight psychoanalytical articles by other authors who take it as their point of
departure, authors whose thoughts have helped refine the following review:

1
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith.

Int J Psychoanal (2009) 90 ª 2009 Institute of Psychoanalysis

 Book Reviews 931

Jacques Andr, La Mort dans l’me [Sick at Heart]; Monique Schneider,

La Disparition fminine [Feminine Disappearance]; Vincent Estellon, cou-
ter, interprter avec Pierre Fdida [Listening and Interpreting with Pierre
Fdida]; Michel Gribinski, Les Scnes indsirables [Undesirable Scenes];
Daniel Widlçcher, Une Esthtique du dissemblable [An Aesthetic of the Dis-
similar]; Corinne Ehrenberg, La Mort entre les jambes [Death between the
Legs]; Dominique Scarfone, Seul ce qui est humain peut nous Þtre tranger
[Only the Human Can be Foreign to Us]; Marieke Wolf-Fdida, Faire
et dfaire [Doing and Undoing].
Human ⁄ Unhuman is a text that does two things at once, for it extends the
main psychoanalytical themes informing Pierre Fdida’s thought (absence;
psychoanalytic treatment as a locus of foreignness; crisis and countertrans-
ference; the resort to regression) while at the same time constituting a turn-
ing-point that upsets our theoretical and practical assumptions and startles
us with the audacity of its metapsychological imaginativeness and its com-
plexity. For Fdida makes the uncanny – a defining and essential aspect of
the psychoanalytical experience, of the practice and theorization of that
experience and of its written record – into a feature of the actual conduct of
analysis. A first notable characteristic of Fdida’s text is the use of terms
that do not appear really to represent Freudian concepts: human ⁄ unhuman;
process of the unhuman; loss of the fellow-human [le semblable]; fellow-
human ⁄ alien other [semblable ⁄ dissemblable]; disappearance ⁄ appearance –
terminology that reflects the author’s wish to give an anthropological cast
to his psychoanalytical research, with the notion of disappearance occupying
the ‘central’ position much as the general theory of seduction is placed by
Jean Laplanche at the centre of the ‘fundamental anthropological situa-
tion’.2 Fdida’s subtitle – Forgetting, Erasure of Traces, Subjective Elimina-
tion, Disappearance – is also telling in that it signals a very up-to-date
investigative concern on the part of Fdida, whose theory goes even further
than Freudian exploration ‘beyond the pleasure principle’; it thus parallels
current work on psychic trauma, leaving a door open onto the unknown
while continually retaining a firm hold on clinical experience with the psy-
chopathology of notoriously difficult kinds of cases such as narcissistic
pathologies, autistic enclaves within neuroses, serious depressions – areas, in
short, where the subject experiences painful feelings of identity loss. A last
important consideration is the actual construction of Fdida’s text which is
complex and rich, receptive to literary, philosophical and psychoanalytical
references and shaped at once by the derivation of concepts, which are
invariably placed under tension, and by the paradigm of disappearance, a
psychic experience that Fdida locates at the core of melancholia and of the
psychoanalytical experience. ‘‘Melancholia has a central place in psycho-
analysis’’, he writes (p. 15). Jacques Andr expands very effectively on this
theme of Fdida’s work by emphasizing its paradoxical tensions and its
exploitation, for the purposes of analysis, of an anthropological situation
based on the human ⁄ unhuman process. ‘‘Rather than a work of mourning’’,
Andr reminds us, citing Fdida, ‘‘psychoanalysis is a work of melancholia’’
2
See A partir de la situation anthropologique fondamentale (Laplanche, 2007, p. 95).

ª 2009 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2009) 90

932 Book Reviews

(p. 128). Indeed Fdida alerts us from the outset that we must think beyond
loss, beyond mourning and separation, beyond our familiar theoretical ideas
which tend to create an ideology of the object.

Disappearance as paradigm
The psychic experience of disappearance is what Fdida wants us to con-
sider, for he deems it pivotal to the analytic experience and calls it ‘‘the sub-
jective experience par excellence for each one of us’’ (p. 52). He describes
disappearance as foundational to the experience of the unhuman in that it
implies the abolition of traces: ‘‘There are no more archives, no memory, no
history, no past’’ (p. 24), for the identity of the self and the identity of the
other have been lost; the relationship with the fellow-human or counterpart
has been lost in a way that goes ‘‘beyond the tragic, beyond suffering,
beyond fear, even beyond death’’. This terrifying experience surpasses
Freud’s observation that the impossibility of counting the vast numbers of
dead in the First World War led to an alteration of language and thought in
face of a vision of bodies that had lost any sign of humanity (Freud, 1915).
The literature of the concentration camps gives us some access to this pro-
cess of extermination of the human, and in this sense Auschwitz might be
said to have an anthropological dimension. Fdida stresses that it is up to
the analyst to understand, and to find the words and images adequate to an
experience that remains unimaginable and unthinkable to the patient, in
order to restore that patient’s own humanity and maintain that recognition
of the fellow-human which defines what is human. ‘‘It is the analyst’s role
to imagine the trauma,’’ he writes, ‘‘otherwise we are lost, for not to imag-
ine it is to ignore the fact that it has taken place, and all that is left for the
analyst are constructions’’ (pp. 22, 24). Here Fdida builds on his conversa-
tions with Georges Didi-Huberman – as also on the work of D.W. Winnicott
(1989) for whom the goal is to create a psychic space for an event which for
the patient has never occurred and especially on Freud’s text ‘‘Constructions
in analysis’’ (Freud, 1937). Fdida adds that the analyst summons the power
to imagine and to make constructions by virtue of a process analogous to
the dream-work, which is the paradigm of psychoanalytical listening and
interpretation when dealing not only with psychotic anxiety but also with
certain experiences of the very depressed as well as others, such as fright in
dreams. Fdida offers an example of how he handled a dream of this kind:
a patient who had had an unhappy fatherless childhood alone with her
mother dreamt of her mother walking out into the sea until she was lost to
view. ‘‘You have terra firma behind you,’’ the analyst told the patient, where-
upon she hit upon the idea of climbing up a sand-hill to a vantage point
where she would see her mother swimming back to shore. ‘‘Few words are
needed to establish a verbal location where the scene can change,’’ Fdida
remarks (p. 40). Basing herself on Fdida’s last talk, in which he emphasized
the close similarity between the figure of the piet and that of Medea,
‘‘whose suffering unravels the body’’, Monique Schneider suggests that dis-
appearance be thought of as the disappearance of the space of the feminine,
an internal psychic space paradigmatic for the psychic work which Freud

Int J Psychoanal (2009) 90 ª 2009 Institute of Psychoanalysis

 Book Reviews 933

calls ‘Aufnahme’ [reception, inclusion]; she offers a clinical example of this

in the shape of what she calls the dream of the ‘‘extra bedroom’’ (p. 148).

The loss of the fellow-human

Fdida continues by asking how in the context of the transference the ana-
lyst can bring his attention to bear on the experience of the unhuman. The
analyst, he tells us, must get beyond an empathetic kind of listening con-
fined to the register of understanding and of the intersubjective relation-
ship. ‘‘The problem is not to understand but to hear .... ‘Empathy’ works on
the basis of intersubjective inferences and depends on a defence mechanism’’
(p. 64). Even though human interaction relies on resemblance to the fellow-
human, the analyst’s task is continually to detach the question of the other
from that of the fellow-human and to manage to conceive of dissimilarity
within resemblance to the fellow-human. To remain within the realm of the
uncanny by considering the psychopathology that confronts us with respect
to the alien dimension of the fellow-human (as, for example, when Freud on
a train journey failed to recognize his own reflection in a mirror3). For
Dominique Scarfone, to deny particular others the status of fellow-humans
(to deny their humanity) has the paradoxical effect of declaring them ‘‘all
alike’’ and so losing sight of ‘‘the dialectical relationship in accordance with
which we are at once the same and different, and like the other precisely
because we are other ... and the face, to which Fdida comes back several
times, is well suited to remind us of this way in which the unlike resides
within the like’’ (pp. 220, 221). Fdida argues that intersubjectivity tends to
dismiss transference in favour of countertransference and encourages one to
interpret what comes from the other in terms of one’s own subjectivity.
Transference for Fdida is a ‘wild process’ (Freud called it ‘our cross to
bear’), never simple repetition and certainly not familial, or maternal or
paternal or fraternal in character. Daniel Widlçcher parts company with
Fdida on intersubjectivity and proposes to reconceptualize it in terms of a
‘‘co-thinking’’ said to characterize an associative process between patient
and analyst (p. 186). Fdida goes on meanwhile, referring to Ferenczi, to
say that: ‘‘Our interpretations are lacking in animistic and analogical imagi-
nation .... One must be mad oneself in order to listen to someone and offer
an interpretation’’ (p. 65). The issue is whether analysts let their ideas be
altered by the patient’s symptom in the sense intended by Lacan when he
observed that the symptom involves the entirety of the patient’s lived experi-
ence. Do they master the patient’s dialect as Freud did the Rat Man’s and
translate it into ordinary language? Can they allow themselves to regress like
Freud in connection with the dream of Irma’s injection, and do they retain
the dream as the guiding model for all interpretation (Freud, 1900)?

The identifications of the analyst at work

As to the nature of the identifications of the analyst at work, since these
cannot be conceptualized on the basis of empathy or on the basis of an
3
See Freud, 1919, p. 248n.

ª 2009 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2009) 90

934 Book Reviews

objectifying account couched in behavioural terms, Fdida urges us to revi-

sit Lacan’s seminar on identification.4 In Fdida’s view, identification in the
analyst during the work of analysis is a matter of presence, which if it is not
to interfere with the regressive process of the transference must be thought
of in terms of Dasein (in Ludwig Binswanger’s philosophical sense) and of
survival (in the sense of Aby Warburg’s Nachleben). The psychoanalyst’s
personal presence is of necessity self-effacing, but it fosters a kind of archaic
transference memory that conjures up unrecognizable figures reminiscent of
the ancestral beings known as imagines to be seen in Roman atria or of the
blurred images of dreams. For Fdida such identification also implies the
recognition of a style, a cyclical return of the same thing, a repetitive pattern
brought into play by transferential memory that is comparable to the cycli-
cal movements said by Nietzsche and Joyce to reflect complex temporalities
in music or writing. Thus the analyst cannot but be continually split in the
attempt to listen and interpret, and off-centre relative to any totalizing
notion of the ego. Fdida thinks it necessary in this context to return to
Freud’s paper of 1938 on the splitting [Spaltung] of the ego (Freud, 1940
[1938]), where the ego is seen as exiled from its own identity. For Freud, he
reminds us, it is vital to eschew any synthesis of the human which represses
those facets of it that are unhuman, destructive or in thrall to the death
instinct, and this requires a commitment from the analyst on practical,
linguistic and theoretical levels. ‘‘We are perforce two or in two’’, Fdida
adds; there is no identification without disidentification, without a splitting
of the ego, a cutting-in-two of the subject, as in the experience of actors, in
which the individual must wrestle with a separation from him or herself (the
first hero being he who killed his father and then told of it). Echoing and
basing himself on Freud (1942[1905]), Michel Gribinski stresses that ‘‘the
analytical setting is not complete unless the players are all effectively
psychopathic and the scene itself has a demoniac dimension, unless the
‘undesirable’ comes to occupy the place of desire’’ (pp. 172, 173). ‘‘We listen
with anxiety and understand in death’’, proclaims Fdida, and Corinne
Ehrenberg confirms this as Fdida’s approach in her semi-fictionalized
account of a supervised analysis with him of a female patient who had suf-
fered sexual abuse as a child (p. 213). The psychoanalytic situation indeed
calls for the continual creation of an imbalance and for the exclusion of all
mechanisms of identification, if it is not to become alienated in imaginary
scenarios. It presupposes that the transference with its negative hallucinatory
power be taken into account, and its ideal form would be two people aware
that no one is present. (Lacan likened the place of the dead to that of the
analyst, and Maurice Blanchot spoke of the negative as a method.)

The sexual
If the analytic situation cannot be built on intersubjectivity, if it explodes
the ego’s identifications, the reason in Fdida’s eyes is that it is ‘worked on’
by ‘sexual’, a sexuality that can be neither represented nor narrated

4
See Lacan, 1961–62.

Int J Psychoanal (2009) 90 ª 2009 Institute of Psychoanalysis

 Book Reviews 935

(‘there is no sexual relationship’, says Lacan), having a greater affinity with

the formless in Georges Bataille’s sense than with a primal scene that is
over-choreographed and hence causes what Blanchot calls ‘the racket of sex’
[le fracas sexuel] to be drowned out by talk instead of intruding into the
continuum of language. For Marieke Wolf-Fdida, Fdida views the form-
less or its action in a dialectical way that approaches things by way of their
opposites: ‘‘The formless is liable to reveal the outline of the form itself just
as the unhuman, by virtue of the revolt it inspires, signals what the human
should be’’ (p. 244). Fdida points out further that the strength of a method
which does not start out from an idea of the sexual is that it directs our
attention to sounds, to bodily sounds, whose nature is no longer clear to us,
and obliges us to proceed by way of these signifiers. Vincent Estellon notes
that ‘couter’ [listen] and ‘ausculter’ [auscultate] have the same Latin root
and observes that the analyst should be prepared to regress in his or her lis-
tening, auscultating the body of words and giving words time to wander into
alien territory so that interpretation may then take shape within the space
thus opened up (p. 153). When Fdida calls the analyst’s ear a ‘belly’ where
(and here he borrows from the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty) the
‘word made flesh’ may be heard, he rejoins the Melanie Klein who listens –
more with her guts than her ears – to the phantasies conveyed by the pho-
nemes of the speech of children or adults. He is also close to Laplanche,5
although according to Fdida Laplanche’s account, based as it is on the
general theory of seduction and on the enigmatic message which remains
traumatic unless it can be assimilated, is too tame. It is worth noting, how-
ever, that Laplanche invokes sexuality in its full demoniacal power to
‘unbind’; for this he uses the French neologism ‘sexual’ (as distinct from
‘sexuel’), contrasting it with the binding tendency of Eros. Fdida for his
part seems to make no distinction between the sexual and Eros unless we
take it that he understands Eros, after the fashion of Bataille, as a tendency
to affirm life even in death. Fdida’s views also have affinities with Ferenczi’s
notion of the child’s exposure to an enigmatic sexuality, with Michel
Foucault and his history of sexuality, with Sade, with Bataille as I just
noted, and with Lacan; but first and foremost Fdida returns to Freud,
notably apropos of the dream of Irma’s injection. According to Lacan, this
dream is foundational for psychoanalysis, containing as it does the moment
when Freud examines the flesh of Irma’s throat, which is to say the form-
lessness of the sexual that defies all representation. The fact is, says Fdida,
that this dream demolishes any intersubjectivity and any ego identification
for the analyst. The transference is shown to be a sexual scene that disrupts
place and breaks all links, a loss of sexual identity, and a ‘chaos of absence’.
In order to understand the sexual dimension of what the patient is telling
the analyst, Fdida goes on, the analyst must listen from a position of
regression as understood by Freud in connection with his Irma dream.
Speech thus becomes the opposite of a tool of communication, becomes a
kind of sounding board or mirror and psychoanalysis gets us to work from
that angle, from ‘the other side of the face’ (even, adds Fdida, when the
5
See Le genre, le sexe, le sexual (Laplanche, 2007, pp. 153–93).

ª 2009 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2009) 90

936 Book Reviews

treatment is conducted ‘face to face’). What form of writing, then, would be

appropriate to psychoanalysis, asks Fdida in conclusion, if not one that
restores the aforementioned flesh of words as a vision of the invisibility of
the sexual?

In conclusion
Fdida’s starting-point is the experience of the unhuman, which he deems
crucial to the analytic treatment in that disappearance is central to it, giving
us access to melancholia, well beyond loss and mourning, where the link to
the object is still viable; he then brings us gradually and paradoxically to
conceive of that experience within the scene of the transference and in rela-
tionship to the uncanny, which for Fdida is inseparable from any proximity
to the unconscious. The sexual indeed operates in the transference with all
its power to unbind and all its traumatic violence, erasing the traces that
facilitate access to the past and to its historicization and representation. The
transference so conceived is a ‘wild’ process whereby the relationship to the
fellow-human is dismantled and the analyst’s identifications demolished.
Only by means of a work of regression analogous to the dream-work can
the analyst understand and put into words and images what heretofore has
been unable to find a venue in the patient’s psyche where it can be staged.
Perhaps we should ask, nonetheless, whether the ‘racket’ of the sexual with
which Fdida confronts us is not simply too fascinating – whether it might
not prevent us from thinking about the sexual in other ways, in terms of
transformation by way of transference-love or seduction by the other.
Brigitte Eoche-Duval
3 rue Dobrée, 44100 Nantes, France
E-mail: brig.eocheduval@wanadoo.fr

References
Freud S (1900). The interpretation of dreams. SE 4–5.
Freud S (1915). Thoughts for the times on love and death. SE 14, 274–300.
Freud S (1919). The uncanny. SE 17, 219–52.
Freud S (1937). Constructions in analysis. SE 23.
Freud S (1940[1938]). Splitting of the ego in the process of defence. SE 23.
Freud S (1942[1905]). Psychopathic characters on the stage. SE 7, 305–10.
Lacan J (1961–62). Identification. In: Seminaire IX, unpublished.
Laplanche J (2007). Sexual: la sexualité élargie au sens freudien. Paris: PUF.
Winnicott DW (1989). Fear of breakdown. In: Psycho-analytic explorations, 205–76. London: Karnac.

How Infants Know Minds

by Vasudevi Reddy
Harvard University Press, London, UK, 2008; 273 pp; £25.95

How Infants Know Minds by Vasudevi Reddy is a well-written exploration of

infant development that will be of value both to researchers and clinicians.
The book includes an excellent review of much of the infant development
literature, illustrating the key points with real life examples. The book is
divided into 11 chapters, with substantial endnotes and (what is particularly
helpful) a summary ⁄ conclusion at the end of each chapter.

Int J Psychoanal (2009) 90 ª 2009 Institute of Psychoanalysis