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The Testament of The Other Abraham and Torok's Failed Expiation of Ghosts
The Testament of The Other Abraham and Torok's Failed Expiation of Ghosts
Reviewed Work(s): The Shell and the Kernel. Vol. 1 by Nicolas Abraham, Maria Torok
and Nicholas T. Rand:
Questions à Freud: Du devenir de la psychanalyse
by Nicholas Rand and Maria Torok: Questions to Freudian Psychoanalysis: Dream
Interpretation, Reality, Fantasy by Nicholas Rand and Maria Torok
Review by: Christopher Lane
Source: Diacritics , Winter, 1997, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Winter, 1997), pp. 3-29
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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extend access to Diacritics
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.
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.
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.
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.
6. For elaboration on this point, see Murray 25-64. esp. 40 and 52-53.
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
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.
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]
10. See Freud, Beyond: "the sexual instincts are . . . peculiarly resistant to external
influences" [40].
10
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
.. 5......ing
X Kas "the continual
through process
the fructification of self-fashion-
of change"
[14]; as a "psychic process that allows
........ human beings to continue to live harmo-
_:......
. .tion,niously inupheaval"
war, and spite of instability,
[14]; and as adevasta-
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 t
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
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. Th
distinction drawn by Abraham and Torok between introjection and incorporation has no preceden
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 an
Torok 's conceptual distinction between these terms inaugurated a new shift--and perhaps rift--i
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
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
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.
16
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
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
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
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
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.
22
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
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:
24
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
26
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]
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28