A Poetics of Psychoanalysis: "The Lost Object: Me"Author(s): Nicolas Abraham, Maria Torok, Nicholas RandSource: SubStance, Vol. 13, No. 2, Issue 43 (1984), pp. 3-18Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3684812Accessed: 17/04/2010 08:25

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A Poetics of Psychoanalysis: "The Lost Object-Me"

NICOLAS ABRAHAM and MARIA TOROK

Translator's Note: This article is excerpted from Nicolas Abraham's Lecorce et le noyau (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1978), with the permission of Maria Torok. It is being published simultaneously in Psychoanalytic Inquiry (forthcoming 1984). The Hungarian-born French philosopher's and psychoanalyst's works are being systematically introduced to the

English-speaking scholarly community. Diacritics has devoted half of a special issue (Spring 1979); the University of Minnesota Press has recently commissioned the translation of Abraham's and Torok's Cryptonymie: Le Verbier de l'Homme aux loups (Paris: Aubier- Flammarion, 1976); and the Georgia Review has published the English translation of

Jacques Derrida's prefatory essay, "Fors," to Cryptonymie (Spring 1977). The original title of the essay, "L'objet perdu-moi," has been supplemented here

by "A Poetics of Psychoanalysis" to underscore its contribution to both psychoanalysis and literary theory. The essay offers a privileged entry into Abraham's works in that it puts forward a theory of fiction in the place of the psychoanalytic subject. The type of fiction outlined here is not based on the workings of the unconscious or the illusion of an imaginary self, it is the result of a loss. In setting up the fiction of being another, the subject creates himself as a dialogue or, more precisely, as a system of analogical references to a fictitious other. The status of the subject becomes poetic in that the dialogic struc- ture can only be recognized through linguistic acts. The essay thus implies a dia-logic theory of reading- a subject or a text may be read through to another text which is its own fictitious (and concealed) system of reference.

The Haunted Analyst . . .

That soul who, here on earth did not push forth its part Divine, has not, even down in Hell, repose.

-Holderlin, To the Fates

Thus speaks the poet. Yes. The "part Divine," the work born of the encounter with oneself only, comes into being if one pushes one's self forth, only if one is acknowledged. Acknowledged by oneself to oneself before the whole world. Sometimes the "whole world" is represented by the occupant of the analyst's chair. Before him this "part Divine" is created or, gradually, unveiled. If only

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the analyst would understand it, admit it, rejoice in it! As one would rejoice in poetry. But how many the ways of reaching there. And how many the traps along the way. Does the analyst have an ear for all "poems" and for all "poets"? Surely not. But those whose message he failed to hear, those whose deficient, mutilated text he listened to time after time - the riddles with no key-those who left him without yielding up to him the distinctive oeuvre of their lives, these come back forever as phantoms of their unaccomplished destiny, haunting ghosts of the analyst's own deficiency.

Who among us is not at odds with specters that demand their due from heaven while being the debtors of our own salvation? Just think of Freud and his Wolfman. From 1910 well into Freud's extreme old age, the case of this enigmatic Russian - bewitched by some secret -never stopped haunting him, drawing from him theory upon theory because he could not deliver the key words to the poem.

It is the same for us when it comes to the enigma of this great poetics, a poetics not of a single individual, but of an entire and vast family, dubbed rightly or wrongly with the common name manic-depressive. It has been a long while since we joined forces to establish its semantics and formulate its

prosody. Let us bring to you, after a long and groping search inspired by many haunting enigmas, a few examples and outlines drawn from our practice. It would be presumptuous - and how! - to pretend that we have reached our goal. At the same time, it would be false modesty to deny our suspicion that we are finally entering an open road.

. . .and the Crypt on the Couch

Obviously the figure of the phantom does not come to us accidentally as a name for the torment of the analyst. 1 This same figure points to the occasion of torment for the patient as well- a memory he buried without legal burial place, the memory of an idyll experienced with a prestigious object that for some reason has become unspeakable, a memory thus entombed in a fast and secure place, awaiting its resurrection. Between the idyllic moment and its forgetting (we have called the latter "preservative repression"),2 there was the metapsycho- logical traumatism of a loss, or, better yet, the "loss" by dint of this traumatism. It is this segment of painfully lived Reality, whose unutterable nature dodges all work of mourning, which has stamped a covert shift on the entire psyche. The shift itself is covert, since both the fact that the idyll has taken place and its subsequent loss will have to be disguised and denied. Such a situation leads to the setting up within the ego of a closed-off place, a crypt, as the consequences of a self-governing mechanism, a kind of anti-introjection, comparable to the formation of a cocoon around the chrysalis, which we have called inclusion.3

Living in a Crypt

Indeed, the "shadow of the object" keeps on straying about the crypt end-

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lessly until it is finally reincarnated in the very person of the subject. We will see that this kind of identification, far from displaying itself, has as its calling to remain utterly concealed. We thought it expressive to complete Freud's meta-

psychological formula, showing "the Ego under the guise of the object" by its opposite, which reflects a first clinical appearance to be taken into account- the "object, "in turn, carries the ego as its mask. The ego or some other facade. For, necessarily, we are talking about an imaginary and covert identification, a cryptofantasy which, given its unutterable nature, cannot show itself in the light of day. The identification concerns not so much an object which no longer exists, but essentially the "mourning" that this "object" allegedly carries out as a result of losing the subject; the subject, consequently, now appears to be pain- fully missed by the "object." It is obvious that an identifying empathy of this kind could not say its name, let alone its aim. Accordingly, it hides behind a mask, even in the so-called "periodic states." This mechanism consists of exchanging one's own identity for a phantasmic identification with the "life"- beyond the grave-of an object lost as a result of some metapsychological traumatism. Awaiting something better, we have named this very specific mechanism endocryptic identification.

A phantasy of identifying empathy! What does it mean? First the phantasy. We hold that it is never a simple translation of the psychic process; on the con- trary, it is the illusory and painstakingly reiterated proof that no process what- ever has or should take place. Only in this one sense can phantasy refer to a metapsychological state of affairs. With this much set in place, we can glimpse the status of the identification now known as endocryptic. To state that it is the work of sheer phantasy means that its content is governed by a concern for maintaining the illusion of the topographical status quo as it had been prior to the transformation. As for the inclusion, it is not phantasy. It points to a painful reality, forever denied, the "gaping wound" of the topography. It is there- fore essential to set down the following. The melancholic's complaints trans- late a phantasy - the imaginary sufferings of the endocryptic object - a phan- tasy that only serves to mask the real suffering, this one unavowed, caused by a wound that the subject does not know how to heal.

This, in short, is our argument. It is obvious that the poetics born of the crypt brings to life as many poems as individual cryptophores. A great number of creations of a definitely nonmelancholic appearance also turn out to come from the same school of thought. "Melancholy," in fact, seems to occupy a rather small area of the possible uses authorized by the notion of intrapsychic crypt as well as endocryptic identification. In point of fact, these notions had been familiar to us before they were found appropriate to circumscribe the manic- depressive. For years we have been talking about "preservative repression," "unutterable libidinal experiences," and "covert identification." Now that the nature of melancholic identification is finally stated clearly, quite a few other modes of being, just as enigmatic, are becoming crystallized around the same notions. We are going to mention - in addition to the manic-depressive - two other modes, commonly called "fetishism" and "neurosis of failure." It seems to us that these inventions of the mind also rest on some "gaping wound," opened

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long ago within the ego and disguised by a phantasmic and secret construction in the spot and place of the very thing from which, through the loss, the ego was cut off. To disguise the wound is, in all cases, the destination of this type of construction - to disguise the wound because it is unspeakable, for to state it in words would be fatal to the entire topography. Individual cases only differ in the manner of the wound and the particular form of arrangement invented in order to reveal nothing about it.

The Wolfman's Secret

Recently we thought it necessary to violate with impious hands the (hypo- thetical) "sepulcher" the Wolfman supposedly carries within him in order to uncover-behind the utterable memory of a seduction by the sister-the memory of another seduction to which the sister herself must have been subjected by the father. To be sure, the Wolfman was only vicariously a melancholic. His crypt did not contain his own illegitimate object (as would be the case with a true melancholic), but someone else's object-his older sister. His wound does not seem to be-as Freud was inclined to think-the loss of his own object, the sister, but the fact that he was neither able to participate in the scene (which, according to us, had been narrated by the sister and renewed with him), nor tell anyone about it and thereby legitimize it. The dis- appointment at not having been the one seduced by the father would connect him with the hysteric who is never quite seduced enough; the impossibility of exposing this fact without bringing down the whole world has apparently forced him to transform his vindictive tendencies into an intrapsychic secret. Otherwise he would lose his other wish as well - supplanting his sister in the scene. The solution he found to this square circle, as we established it, was- let's admit it-most ingenious.4 He managed to make, from the ideas related to the account so marvelously illustrated by the sister, a crypt within the ego. With the same care and intent, he preserved in the crypt the words of the account, words which proved truly magical since they were good both for making statements and for producing pleasure. Thus preserved, the words were readily available. To use them, all he had to do was apply them innocently in a different sense and construct - thanks to astute homonyms - quite another scene, not recalling in the least the encrypted one. This other scene, although altogether different, was no less effective in producing pleasure. One of these words seems to have been the Russian verb teret, first used to mean "to rub"

(the penis is understood) and then applied, for the benefit of the cause, in the altered sense of "to polish," "to shine." Thus, in the new scene translated from the old one, the woman rubbing the penis becomes one polishing the floor. A fetish image taken from a fetish word whose meaning has been forgotten: shine-gleam-glisten.

The Man of Milk and his Fetish

All of us must have had a Wolfman on the couch or other similar cases.

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Let us draw briefly on one from our practice. A middle-aged man. A lengthy analysis with a colleague: improvement. Feelings of inadequacy, not always founded. Persistent fear of impotence, rarely justified. Married, the father of a large family. Consistent and effective in his professional life, but has diffi-

culty playing his role in public, asserting himself in accordance with the demands of his position. What is "wrong" is "in the head" and sometimes "in the body."

In listening to him, one wonders how sturdy common sense can coexist with cranky phantasies devoid of any apparent link traceable to some tension within the topography. It is the same with his sometimes phantastical feelings which are out of place, and which never fail to surprise him, though he has been accustomed to them since childhood. A few themes recur over the years in the flood of enigmas he pours out while on the couch. It takes some time to understand that he speaks and lives someone else's words and affects. Whose? It will be established later, those of his encrypted father. It is now possible to

grasp the theme of the cemetery, apparently visible to the analyst through the window, but not within view of the patient. With good reason, for he himself lives in this tomb. A lethargic beauty is waiting in a glass coffin, is still waiting to be awakened by a magical kiss. Why is he dead, if indeed he is dead? Because he is a monster. "Here comes the monster," they say when he comes forward with a wish. But what kind of wish? Who will find out? A strange mytho-maniac theme. Once in South America he was a front-wheel drive champion [traction avant, literally, front-pull drive].5 He doesn't understand it. Is he mad to be so convinced of the truth of his account? "Am I mad?" and then, "a goat herd, goatherds, milking [traite], goat's milk." (Front-pull: drawing milk, goat's milk [lait de chevre]; leche, the word for milk in South America, thinks the analyst.)

This confirms a hypothesis formulated several months earlier: the physical and mental demise of the father and the older sister's psychosis have some- thing to do with each other. This relationship is in pulling the udder [pis]. "Punch, the puppet," he says, "I could never stand him. He moves and jumps about. I especially hate the pasty paint smeared all over his head and that white stuff dripping down" (leche . . .). These must have been the words the sister used in telling him about her "scandalous encounter" with the father's penis. This had presumably taken place on a South American farm during a family trip. A recurring dream. Game of billiards, one billiard ball hits another, the second one a third on the rebound. Yes, that's it precisely. He is hit on the rebound. But when he wants to play with himself, one name is enough: Letitia [lait, milk], to fall in love with and marry a woman on whom he will often perform cun- nilingus (leche [lecher, lick]). The magic word leche (i.e., sperm), the outcome of the "front-pull" on the penis, thus leads to a sexual practice which is the opposite of its original model. Cunnilingus corresponds to a dreamlike staging of the magical word leche.

The analyst only learns about this toward the end when he learns about another key, the one which explains how endocryptic identification with the father becomes manifest. First, the analyst had to undergo lengthy and insidious testing. (Would he be able to hear everything? Would he feel sympathy for the father who considers himself a monster? Could he listen without spurning

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him, without condemning him to death, and so not repeat what the father had done to himself?) The patient finally reveals that the father had gone nearly blind for refusing medical care and that, to end it all, he had slashed his wrists. Many things clear up: the patient's recurring experience of losing his sight in

large areas of his visual field-not due to scotoma or negative hallucination, as one would think, but as a result of his identification with his father's blind- ness - precisely while coming to the analyst's office . . . . An example of empa- thetic identification with the phantasmic remorse of the "guilty" father. This also causes his truly unjustified panic at having scratched his wrists while doing odd jobs. The effect of the same empathy was that he experienced (unaccount- ably for himself and, for a long time, for the analyst) "affects" that were not his own. Now we understand that they were the father's affects, his rumina- tions, his remorse, his phantasies, his desires - all imagined and surmised. The

patient's long walks invariably led him to the same spot. Once there, an internal dialogue, always the same, emerged in him: "Is there somebody here?"-"No, there's nobody. . . . We're alone." At a clearing, he has the impression of being a character in a fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty.

One day, anxious before entering the door to the analyst's office, he has a sudden impression that there is someone inside. The meaning of the phantasy he is acting out: father (the patient) is going to see his daughter (the analyst). A recollection: the sister gone mad shows her clenched fist while her other hand moves up and down. The father cannot stand to see it. Beside himself, he shakes her. Shortly afterwards, she is institutionalized. "What did your father feel then?" asks the analyst. Then, for the first time after a very long period of analysis, the patient bursts out in tears. "My father must have been so awfully miser- able," he says in his own name this time. Officially he has revealed nothing, but he understands that his drama is known. The father cannot stand his daughter's gesture, whose tragic and ironic meaning he alone is supposed to understand: she replayed the secret scene, clenching the father's penis in her hand while he caresses her. It is also clear why he thinks his mother is so "cold." Yes, the father (whom he believes himself to be) deserves a wife who behaves like an "ice statue" toward him. Another dream for confirmation. "A gang of shady characters [toute unefaune]. There was going to be a brawl. I was stifling, I was stifling." Father is a goat [faun], but the scandal has to be stifled. If the scandal is stifled inside, shut up in a crypt, only the word of the desire returns with an altered meaning - the word thing-the only survivor of a topographic catastrophe. A silent witness to the unspeakable Leche(r), lick-yes-and all can live.

Fetish: The Symbol of Non-symbol

Many points of this type of analysis seem instructive compared to certain received ideas. If a fetish is to be understood as a penis attributed to the mother who is devoid or deprived of it, then the meaning of this deprivation becomes more precise: it is linked to the parallelfate of the son and the mother, both being ex-

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cludedfrom the libidinal and illegitimate scene. The "fetish" and its counterpart, "the

penis of the mother," are invented, among other things, to compensate for the mother's lack of pleasure and the son's loss of his ideal, while the topography is maintained as it is without the son's having to give up his own pleasure. In fact, if it were necessary to accept "castration" (i.e., the lack of sexual pleasure due to an exclusion beyond repair), it would unleash a lethal aggressiveness and, as a consequence, push the young subject (now inseparable from the wronged mother) into betraying the illegitimate scene, annihilating it along with its participants. By the same token, what has secretly become one's own libidinal ideal, one's own raison de vivre, would also be annihilated. How can we find a way out of this impasse? By creating for one's "hysteria" (which varies according to age) an internal or narcissistic public, so to speak; by creating a self-to-self "hysteria." All that survives of the relationship to others will be the

dynamic repression, not of the desire to have pleasure, but of the desire to

speak out. Apart from this relational residue, everything can work in seclu- sion; there need be no witnesses for the fetish to be effective, except precisely to test its opaqueness. The analyst who "will never understand" has no other apparent vocation than to bring to the fore the constant temptation to speak out while permitting to verify, day in day out, that the crypt has remained unscathed.

Let us return to the split in the ego that in 1938 Freud finally surmised in order to provide an explanation for cases like the Wolfman's. In our view, these belated yet new findings need only one final complement. The split shows

up in a "double tendency" which, in these cases, feeds the patient's words during analysis. There is, on the one hand, a conformist tendency which lacks ade-

quate affective charge and, on the other hand, an enigmatic tendency which translates, in a cryptic manner, the identification with one of the participants in the scene. This second tendency is -as we saw in our patient's case - entirely parallel to and independent of the first, and is usually expressed in incompre- hensible terms or in the description of "feelings" that are experienced as incon- gruous. If this were the case of a phantasmic empathy with someone who is bereaved by the loss of the subject (i.e., his beloved), we would speak of melan- cholia. But, in this case, the subject was simply a witness and excluded from the idyll. Not having either to give up or to use what had become his libidinal ideal, he has created a symbol-the alloseme of the wish word made into a thing and acted out, in short, the fetish word, strictly speaking. What creates the

symbol here is not, as in a neurosis, related to prohibition, but the intrinsic

impossibility of having recourse to it. The impossibility itself bears no name and, therefore, becomes one with

the very word of the impossible wish -this is the structure of the symbol leche. As for cunnilingus, the fetishistic act, it is not symbolic in this case, but works instead as a veritable symbol-cover. The magic word (i.e., the true symbol), the authentic and full creation of the subject, remains concealed by the fetish. The triple complement of such a hidden symbol (the desire to participate in the illegitimate scene, the desire of aggressive intrusion, and the desire to speak out) does not appear, therefore, as the latent counterpart of some manifest dis-

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course, since this discourse is itself concealed behind acts, dreams, and symptoms that disguise the symbol emerging from a different world which cannot be sym- bolized. The analyst's work does not consist in condoning this concealment, but in bringing to light the wish word, in recognizing it precisely as a symbol, i.e., as an exceptional work [of art] and therefore all the more precious: the

very symbol of non-symbol-of what cannot be symbolized. Freud's splitting of the ego thus gains in precision. The enigmatic trend

issues from the crypt or the inclusion in the same way as the magic word itself. As for the conformist trend, it results from the wish to conceal the symbol; it is a product of the crypt and includes, however paradoxical this may seem, the description and the development of the fetishistic act as well as other every- day trivialities.

Coming back to the Wolfman, we had no idea until late that he had also been attracted, through some semantic contagion, not only by the squatting position of the floor scrubber, but by the sight of a "shining nose." For con-

firmation, it will suffice to read carefully Freud's essay On Fetishism (1927). It is easy to guess that in this "sheen of the nose" the Wolfman alludes to the word teret ("rub," "shine")-the very symbol of his interred desire. The ailments of this same nose - pimples, holes, blackheads - symbolize the desire to break into the scene, while the choice of the nose as their place (the nose betrays lies) tells of the desire to speak out. This is a good example of the covert and three- fold purpose of the fetish work, which had been fated to remain obscure. Only after it has been deciphered, understood, and appreciated can it render to its creator his own "part divine" - hiding under enigmas, yet demanding the light of day.

Some Model Crypts

Both the Wolfman and the Man of "Milk" created their crypts not because

they knew of an illegitimate sexual scene, but in order to overcome a double

impossibility: to make the scene into an admissible ideal or to reveal it and, thereby, destroy the libidinal ideal. This contradiction is not characteristic of neuroses. The impossibility of telling curbs neurosis, as it were. Relinquish- ing, at least apparently, supplants the betrayal of both the libidinal ideal and

any wishes for revenge. Preservative repression safeguards public opinion, while the fetish, a most ingenious conceit, reduces the danger of a "cosmic cataclysm" to a harmless oddity capable of reviving desire.

There is another form of crypt, the crypt of the blameless and guiltless object [of love] which, after the idyll, left the subject for good reason, so to speak, or in spite of himself. This object has been totally good, absolutely perfect, and no one should suspect it as his secret love. The loss of such an object- always innocent of desertion-produces, instead of an impossible mourning, an

endocryptic identification free of any aggressiveness, at least as far as the

partners themselves are concerned, if not the outside world. This is the crypt psychiatry calls "melancholic."

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Altogether different is the fate of those who personally benefited from an unutterable favor. Not being able to put their loss into words, or to communi- cate it to others and resign themselves through grief, they chose to deny every- thing-the loss as well as the love. Deny everything, shut up everything in themselves, both pleasure and suffering.

The concrete variety of such cases is infinite. There are some who, at the time of the loss, suffered a disappointment in their object, in their sincerity or value. Their crypt is under double lock while, due to a tragic split, they desperately try to destroy what is dearest to them. These people are deprived of even the hope of ever being acknowledged.

It is also possible, in some cases, that a trend of covert aggressiveness, directed against the object, remains in the deserted partner in addition to his endocryptic identification. This creates a useful arrangement on the couch, as the presence of the patient's own aggressivity directed at the object-first manifested in a "failure syndrome"-favors the opening of the crypt.

"Victor" and "Gilles," or How to Keep?

"I'll bash your head against the wall, that'll cure you from loving me." This sentence, never uttered but put into action, was an ending. It was preceded by another that did not have to be said either: "I'll bash your head against the wall if you tell anyone what we did together." No more was needed to cut off speech. To say everything once and for all, there was only one recurring theme left: contrition-failure, failure - contrition. "No, I should not have!" "I can't control myself!" Words laboriously illustrated by deeds.

Victor is also middle aged. "I am neurotically unsuccessful," he says right away. "Yet, I am like any other man, married, children, executive position. Yes, power, giving orders! . . . that's what I'd like most. But I can't bring myself to do it. Something always makes me side with my subordinates. I am always on the verge of fighting with my superiors. It ends in dismissal." He is aware of it and contrite, but the analyst is perplexed. Acts and words recur before his eyes, and he obviously understands nothing.

From the start, the fight with repression is missing, the neurotic compromise that signals the existence of an "I." Above all, the transfer onto the analyst is lacking. For want of it, what is said seems empty of any present content. Time- less words directed at no one. The present--if it exists, and we are justified in doubting that it does - is the indefinitely reiterated account of day-to-day failures and the regret over having sunk so low. No accusations, no projec- tion; everything is taken on almost too conscientiously. Boredom sets in, stag- nation. . ..

If the analyst thinks for a minute that he should feel affected, that he is going to be involved in some repeated experience, in some affective recollec- tion, he is greatly mistaken. Whatever he does know, he did not learn from associations, but by drawing his own conclusions. At this rate, he would have been better off becoming a detective. For how on earth could a "boat ride" at

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age eleven, with his elder brother of seventeen, have caused an almost fatal illness the following day? Complaints about his wife who, according to what he says, is jealous, shrewish, possessive, frustrating. Another question, if she is this way, how could he have stood her for so long? Yet, he seems to desire her intensely on occasion, his potency never letting him down. "When I see her in the bathroom in certain positions, I cannot hold back. Why doesn't she tolerate the least bit of interest on my part for anyone else, man or woman? She is jealous even of the reading I do. Does she expect me to succeed profes- sionally? No sooner do I achieve something than she despises it. - -She wants me to be hers, totally and only hers. - - During intercourse she accepts readily all positions, except the one I would want most."

Does Victor like suffering? humiliation? Nothing in the analytic relation-

ship leads one to believe this. Does he perhaps say all of this after an oedipal fashion to pacify his father? If this were indeed the case, the analyst would have no reason to fret. And then there is the brother: "He was so mean and so stupid. When he got engaged, he gave me such a thrashing, I had to stay in bed for three days-which, by the way, kept me from taking part in the festivities."

The detective then surfaces. Was the patient possibly in love with his brother to the point of provoking him, out of frustration, at the time he was being unfaithful? The analyst, however, has not the faintest idea about anything. ... Then, one fine day comes the account of one of the numerous car accidents he is used to having, an accident which almost cost the life of a young friend who was with him. "I only had a concussion, but after the coma I could no

longer find my young friend. Dazed and confused, I sleepwalked from house to house in the village where I had been taken in, asking: 'Where is the little one? Where is little Viki?' " Finally! The detective is let go. The analyst reas- sumes his function. With hindsight he finally hears, behind the dreary everyday of failures and regrets, the sounds of the love Victor attributes within himself to his brother Gilles. And he himself is this older brother, even in the coma. That's clear. Strange paradox of action. The elder one searching for the younger one. In real life was it not the reverse? Gilles, the elder, had jilted Viki, first to act macho, then to marry a woman. Gilles, once his guardian angel in school, his pride in front of everyone, this handsome guy, virile and muscular; Gilles, delight of their mother, who could be tough with their father; Gilles the pure, the ultimate, with a temper worthy ofJupiter. Yes, Victor was this ideal brother in secret; he was this brother while driving with his young friend; he continued to be him even in the coma and the subsequent daze as he desperately searched for his young friend after he had awakened. According to his phantasy, the little one lives on in the big one whom Victor has become-as remorse, as a lack.

But why the accident? This lack of attention on a deserted road? . . . There lies the question mark of Victor's whole life: He is Gilles, sure enough, that much we now know, but he is him in order to upset him all the time, to defeat him all the time: that's what "Gilles," his lover, deserves for having rejected him.

Our understanding opens up at long last. What appears now and later is "Gilles in love and contrite, remorseful at not being able to stop loving and then

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at being unfaithful." Meanwhile, Victor deserts himself by taking up residence in this Xanthippe-like woman, his nagging and quarrelsome wife. She will say to "Gilles" the big brother all that "Victor" the little one has on his mind. As far as "Gilles" is concerned, "Gilles" his lover, Victor recoups him as well by becoming "Gilles" for "Victor." . . . Yet, it is a shaky solution. He contemplates divorce. But how could he go through with it if, with his wife's departure, he would also have to give up Victor whom she embodies? Day by day, he and she will thus jointly defeat "Gilles" and his ego ideal-the recognized cause of their traumatic separation. Does he expect to get ahead in business? We are

going to thwart him. He wants to look at women? He's going to have a hard time. Blocked in all acts of life, "Gilles" remains, "Gilles" will not leave. His

wings clipped, he will not fly from the hiding place Victor has set up for him. One day the analyst announces: "Victor does not want Gilles to make it, to go out with women; he straps him down, he wants to keep him for himself." This moment marks a turning point. Recollections, then contours of a transfer.

Why did it take years to unmask "Gilles" hidden under Victor's guise? For the simple reason that there is no cryptic identification which does not emanate from a crypt, an inclusion, or from an unspeakable scene. This scene had taken

place, we learn bit by bit, during a boat ride. Once more, this ride recalls the

image of an impassable wall: "I'll bash your head against the wall if you say a word," says the analyst. It is not yet Victor who recounts the scene but "Gilles," with reserve, embellishments, and omissions. In the boat, between his legs, leaning back on his penis, is little Victor. The day after his account there is no longer a serious illness, as there was after the event, but a dream. "A chicken he is disemboweling while pulling on the esophagus and windpipe [trachee-artere]. But the chicken won't relinquish life [n'arrive pas a mourir]. It becomes his little daughter. He wants desperately to take her life [lui donner la mort] so she no longer suffers. No use." Yes, Gilles can "wind up" (ejaculate, windpipe) [cracher par terre, spit on the ground; trachee-artere, windpipe], but little Victor has to swallow (esophagus) his orgasm. His own penis is really only a "little girl" whose "life" (love) [la mort, I'amour] cannot yet be had. This was the situation when Victor's orgasm was taken abroad by Gilles - right up to his return which imme-

diately preceded his marriage. Only at age sixteen and a half, after he had received his brother's thrashing, did the aggressiveness of despair finally set off the process of puberty. Being unable to dislodge "Gilles" (whom he has

become) from his two-fold and incompatible position of being both his lover and his ego ideal, Victor spends his life attacking him by attacking himself, by thwarting him - in his own endeavors prescribed by their shared ego ideal. In the same way, the ostensible belligerence he directed against his wife for not wanting to perform coitus a tergo is in fact "Gilles's" belligerence. As for Victor, in his heart of hearts, he can only gloat over it. "It serves him right, that betrayer, who used to love me so much and then left me." "Gilles" fantasizes about wild

orgies, . . . but alas, they don't work out. "Fortunately," hoots little Victor up his sleeve.

We now understand that, were it not for the aggressiveness directed at the older brother, Victor would remain crestfallen in his identification with a phan-

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Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok

tasmic object, supposedly in mourning for him. If it has not turned out this

way, Victor has a special situation to thank. For, in his case, another conflic- tual element is present on top of his phantasmic identification with his elder brother. This element works in the way a neurosis would. It is the fact that his own and the brother's ego ideal coincide in Victor. It was precisely this ideal inherent in Gilles that had once separated them, and which explains why every attempt to realize this shared ideal brings with it a large measure of aggres- sivity directed against the ideal. Hence the illusion, but only the illusion, of a masochistic or self-destructive neurosis. Hence also the relative ease of a

pseudoanalytic dialogue. Indeed, there is obviously a conflict, but it is not where it first appears to be.

The Afflicted Dead

The following case is quite different. No conflict can be seen between the

cryptophoric subject and the object of the crypt. The two of them are accom-

plices in secretly hating the outsiders who had long ago separated them. Together they shall live and die.

She had, at the time of her suicide attempt, just given birth. A wonder that she could be saved. A few years spent in a sanatorium, then a lengthy and unwieldy analysis. Themes of self-deprecation, worthlessness, void, internal rotting, refusal to get medical care; all of this alternating with periods of bravado, contempt, feelings of superiority filling the universe. A psychiatrist might describe her in this way. As for the analyst, he too, being unable to under- stand, is reduced to as much. Listening to her, he fixes on an enigma: when the little girl is still too young to go to school, her "irresponsible father" deserts the family for some obscure reason and is gone forever. Is he still alive? This

question is to this day without an answer. The analysis begins in an atmosphere of elation. Here she finds again the

"warmth of the fire" that had fed her bygone dreams. "Someone is happy and full of hope." If only the analyst had heard it this way from the start! He would have been spared having to grope for several years, not fruitlessly to be sure, but also not without running the risk of some serious errors. "Someone is happy." Is it really the young woman or some other person? The father, perhaps. ... This is how we would formulate the question today. Short of this, the analyst is disoriented. He looks for the transfer, or at least for the role he is meant to play. To no avail. He does not yet suspect that it is possible to disguise under one's own traits a phantasy person endowed with entirely fictitious greatness and torments. Is it surprising that afterward the analyst's words bounce off like peanuts thrown against the wall without making any difference? The dreams are monotonous: cuts, dislocations, scattered limbs. Are they ideas of castra- tion which torment her? Or is she cut off from her father? Or castrated by her mother? Or full of hatred against some people or the analyst? Still . . . nothing budges. Whose are these scattered limbs? Is it she herself who has to recover a lost object, an object that could be projected onto the analyst, an

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Poetics of Psychoanalysis

object that the oedipal mother, for instance, might have taken away from her? . . . Very much the stuff of fairy tales with no other effect, all in all, than the benefit of a stable and secure relation. But whose are these scattered limbs? The turning point comes, thanks to other cases, as soon as the hypothesis of

mourning arises-a cryptic mourning, however, phantasized as the incessant affliction of another. Retroactively, it is easier to clarify the meaning of her repetitious and alternating attitudes of depression and activity. How could she have transferred her feelings of a little girl looking for her father when she lived entirely on the concealed phantasy of herself being the father weeping over her, who suffers because he is bereft of her, and who, forever disconsolate, accuses himself of the worst of crimes since he had to be subjected to the punishment of losing her. Or of being the father, equipped with every guile, who flies, in "manic" moments, to his beloved darling, taking on giant proportions and being absolutely confident that nothing will stop him. In these exalted moments, she runs from dealer to dealer trying to add a precious doll to her collection: her father thirsting after her is looking for her, is going to find her. Once she finds the "little specimen," her eagerness to acquire it knows no limits and pushes her into nearly criminal acts. Such must be the force of love.

In sum, she was the "father," but without its showing in her demeanor, which had remained most feminine, or in her professional pursuits. Still, if the analyst had known about the mechanism of endocryptic identification, he would have understood it pretty early on. When quite small, she would daydream: "Some- one was charged with child murder, and finally I realized that the defendant was myself." Was it not the lost father who, in the little girl's phantasies, endured the mother's accusations? The analyst's office is said to be funereal, to wit, a place of sojourn for the beloved girl, long since dead for the father's desire. One day, she walks past an "escalator" with her child (the father had been seen for the last time near one). A sudden impression that the child is "devoured" by the machine. "I felt my arms fall crushed." This is what it was like for him (the father) to lose his little lover. Yes, all these speeches could have guided the analyst, had he not been sacrificing to such prejudices as that of the "I."

In endocryptic identification, the "I" is understood as the phantasied ego of the lost object. On the couch, even more than in life, he stages the words, gestures, and feelings-in short, the entire imaginary lot-of the lover who mourns for his "dead" object. As the patient repeats her experience of the escalator for the nth time (where her arms fell crushed), the analyst finally states that all the "fallen arms" and all the "scattered limbs" of her dreams, her phantasies, represent the dejected suffering of her father: his arms are as if cut off, not having his little girl to carry.

From then on, the incorporated father becomes "decorporated," so to speak, onto the analyst. Witness this dream: "A quack doctor cuts off one arm when he loses his daughter." "As a sign of mourning," says the analyst, the "quack."

It is the end of endocryptic identification. As proof: a drawing she sketches hastily on the back of an album, a relic of her father's. The drawing is entitled "Aida." Here, the characters of the drama find their places. Aida is the imprisoned daughter dying of starvation. A living corpse, she awaits her former

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16 Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok

lover to come and deliver her. This reworking of identities does take place, to be sure, in the crypt, but the edifice is swaying. Soon enough it will give way to a true recollection: "It's shameful, it's disgusting," shouts the neighbor in unison with the mother. "These women are tearing her father away from the child." No need to fill in the dots between the shame inflicted on the father and his subsequent disappearance. Henceforth the crypt is unlocked, the fight for the father goes on openly. From this moment on, the infantile conflict re-

appears as it was before the loss, before the entombment.

Unlocking the Crypt: Before and After

We have sketched three very different cases of inclusion. In all three, we are disoriented by the unnoticed action of a covert identification that leads

apparently to unintelligible words and behavior - apparently unintelligible for

analytic listening. Only when the analyst has shown his receptiveness to this mode of being can the inclusion slowly give way to real mourning, whose name is introjection. In this lengthy process, three successive movements can be dis-

tinguished. The first one coincides with the onset of the relationship. Without parting

with his endocryptic identification, the subject secretly projects, onto the analyst, the child partner of the crypt. Secretly, it is important to underscore; in the mani- fest relationship none of it must show. The partners' faithfulness to each other is surmised only in the regularity of the sessions and a certain degree of ani- mation. The first segment is followed by a very long period of seeming stagna- tion, but it is, in fact, used surreptitiously to study the listening capabilities of the analyst, i.e., his prejudices (and not his desire, as would be the case in objectal neuroses). During this whole phase, the regular return to the couch has, by the way, the same libidinal significance for the patient as the regu- larity of his physiological functions: breathing, bowel movements, menstrua- tion; symbolic recurrences of the interred experience. The illness affecting these functions (asthma, colitis, painful periods or their cessation, involution, etc.), should it become eloquent, speaks only to the subject and not to others (as, for

example, would be the case in conversion hysteria). The illness tells the subject: "The return is there, but it is an illness." This return is the mirror image of what happens on the couch-when coming to the sessions and speaking are conceived of as suffering, as torture. Thanks to this translation into words, the self-to-self affliction can register a respite from the onset of the analysis.

The second movement takes place when the secret projection of the child onto the analyst gives way to the equally secretive "decorporation" of the cryptic object. The impulse for this change may be quite contingent. But, above all, it will be the work of interpretation laying open, at the right time, the endo-

cryptic identification. The false "I" will be reconverted into a third person, while the patient is given to understand that it is possible to evoke the prodigal love of his object without subjecting him to shame or losing him morally -all the more so since the transgression itself implies an authentic and privileged

Poetics of Psychoanalysis

encounter with the depths of the object's psyche that the patient, henceforth, will attempt to fathom.

The great danger during this second phase is that, upon opening the crypt, the object is implicitly or explicitly condemned by the analyst; whereas what is required is the capacity to mourn, namely, the capacity to acquire for one- self the libidinal resources owned by the object. To say, in this context, "You want to seduce me," or "You're making a seducer out of me," or "It's time to forget all that," does not sound like a trivial comment, but like an irreversible sen- tence, capable of upsetting everything. If, on the contrary, instead of shaming the object, the narcissistic value of the entombed experience (for both partners) is recognized -with the crypt unlocked, its treasure laid into the open and recog- nized as the unalienable property of the subject - the third and last movement will come into being, thanks to a new elan, with the task of undertaking the final fight with the oedipal party -the last hurdle on the way to fructifying the treasure.

At the close of this all too rapid overview of some effects of inclusion, and of endocryptic identification in particular, let us express the hope that these notions will lighten the arduous task of listening to certain patients. There is also hope that, for them, we have increased the chances of being heard and, finally, the hope that the treasures which lie buried in crypts can become the delight of their owner and work to the benefit of us all.

Translated by Nicholas Rand

University of Wisconsin-Madison

NOTES

1. This image of the "phantom"-meant at first to point out a rift (inflicted upon the listening analyst by some secret of the patient which could not be revealed) that creates a formation in the unconscious of the listener-lent itself to a variety of theoretical elaborations. The analyst, ready- ing himself to be keyed to the dictates of the couch, is surely, in some respects, comparable to a child maturing on the psychic nourishment received from his parents. Should the child have

parents "with secrets," parents whose speech is not exactly complementary to their unstated repres- sions, he will receive from them a gap in the unconscious, an unknown, unrecognized knowledge- a nescience- subjected to a form of "repression" before the fact.

The buried speech of the parent becomes (a) dead (gap), without a burial place, in the child. This unknown phantom comes back from the unconscious to haunt and leads to phobias, mad-

ness, and obsessions. Its effect can persist through several generations and determine the fate of an entire family line.

Could this be the "mysterious" primary repression hypothesized by Freud? It is too early to

provide an answer. All the same, the clinical impact of the phantom theory is becoming ever more

precise. In this text (delivered as a lecture in March 1973), the image of the phantom simply rep- resents a specific malaise of the analyst; it has since been transposed into a metapsychological notion, a matter for new research and renewed analytic listening. It has been further expanded upon in a seminar on Dual Unity and one of its consequences: the metapsychological phantom (see "Notes du seminaire sur l'Unite Duelle et le Fant6me," in L'ecorce et le noyau [Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1978], pp. 393-425). Further applications can be found in the following articles: Nicolas Abraham, "Notules sur le Fant6me," and Maria Torok, "Histoire de peur," in L'corce, pp. 426-433 and 434-446. [ Trans-

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18 Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok

lator's note: See also Abraham's interpretation of Shakespeare's Hamlet with his addition of a sixth act: Le Fantome d'Hamlet ou le VIe acte," L'corce, pp. 447-474.]

2. See "La Topique realitaire," in L'ecorce, p. 255. 3. See our article "Introjecter-Incorporer: Deuil ou Melancolie," in Lecorce, pp. 259-276. [In

English, see "Introjection - Incorporation: Mourning or Melancholia," in Psychoanalysis in France, ed. S. Lebovici and D. Widlocher (New York: International Universities Press, 1980), pp. 3-16.]

4. See N. Abraham and M. Torok, Cryptonymie: Le Verbier de l'Homme aux loups (Paris: Aubier- Flammarion, 1976), pt. II, pp. 135-160 (forthcoming in English in 1985 from the University of Minnesota Press). This chapter is a contribution to the psychoanalysis of dreams and phobia. It elaborates upon the secret content of the Wolfman's "crypt" and the manner in which it returns in his famous nightmare. The chapter was originally a lecture given in Paris on 15 January 1974 to commemorate the centenary of S. Ferenczi's birth.

5. Information in brackets supplied by translator.