Primitive Agony and Symbolization

Rene Roussillon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781855758568
• eBook ISBN: 9780429917523
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

The fundamental outlook of this book is clinical. It attempts to establish a unitary model of the processes at work in different forms of narcissistic pathology, and to offer a model that is both an alternative to, and complementary to, Freud's model of what are usually considered to be neurotic problems. The aim is to extract a sequence of mental processes that could be seen as typical of narcissistic disturbances of the sense of identity, with their several forms and clinical variations. The book describes how these are structured, together with their intrapsychic and intersubjective functions, based on the hypothesis of a defensive pattern that is set up to counter the effect of a split-off primary trauma and the threat that hangs over the mind and subjectivity.

Part I
Agony

Chapter One
Drives and intersubjectivity

I, personally, find most regrettable the fact that the concept of intersubjectivity tends to be taken over by certain schools of thought that try to turn it into their own emblem. By subscribing only to restrictive definitions of the concept, they are an obstacle to the metapsychological and psychoanalytic exploration of it.

In my view, the concept of the Subject (Freud’s Ich, in French “je”—”I”), as understood in terms of the subjectivation process—what I would call subjective appropriation (based on Freud’s famous aphorism Wo es war, soll Ich werden [“Where id was, there ego shall be”], 1933a, p. 80)—now fully deserves to be included in our psychoanalytic vocabulary and used in a manner that avoids any risk of its being considered as simply metaphysical. The concept of intersubjectivity is also a useful one, as long as it refers to our psychoanalytic conception of the Subject, one that indicates the existence of an unconscious dimension of intersubjectivity that takes into account the drive-related and sexual dimensions. That is where current notions of intersubjectivity seem to me to be in difficulty: they tend to ignore or find impossible to integrate unconscious processes (unconscious, not simply “non-conscious”) and the sexual dimension that is part of these. In such a case, the concept of instinctual drive, and with it the whole complex nature of the mind’s dynamics, might well be pushed aside.

My use of the word “intersubjective” refers to the idea of the encounter between a subject, nourished by instinctual drives and unconscious mental life, and an object that is also an “other-subject”, similarly nourished by drive-related impulses, part of which are unconscious. Such a definition seems to me to be essential in that it emphasizes the role of the object and of the object’s response to the subject’s drive-related urges in influencing what becomes of them in the mind. The question of the object’s response leads to the idea that the object is an other-subject and is present as such.

I, therefore, adopt the perspective that Green has called the “drive/object system”, in which the object is also an “other-subject”; this agrees also with those who, although they may describe it differently, place the idea of subjective appropriation at the heart of mental processes. That position does bear some relationship to the one adopted by those French psychoanalysts who, in the early days, spoke of intersubjectivity (Lacan and Lagache), although in many respects it differs from theirs. It is, however, completely different from that of Stern, for whom intersubjectivity is a specific dimension that has nothing to do with the drives, and even further removed from the “intersubjectivist” school of thought of the East Coast of the USA. It does, however, correspond to Trevarthen’s idea that the drives do have a part to play in the analysis of an intersubjective encounter. The reader will appreciate that I am, for the moment, simply outlining my own approach.

The idea of interplay—which is also an “inter-I” play—is an attempt at highlighting what, in my view, Winnicott implies when he says that psychoanalysis takes place in a locus in which two play areas overlap: that of the analysand and that of the analyst. Another way of looking at this would be to start with a clinical “fact” that no clinician would call into question: human beings know themselves, construct themselves, and recognize themselves in and through encounters with others with whom they become acknowledged as such. This is one of the essential ingredients of the Oedipal situation, which is fundamentally intersubjective—a kind of interplay—even though passion may also play a part in it. We can now add to Freud’s own fundamental contribution the fact that current investigations into the earliest moments of mental life give full support to Winnicott’s hypothesis of the mother functioning as the primary “mirror” of her baby’s internal states; these explorations show also that this mirror function is a crucial factor which enables the infant to get in touch with his or her own affects and representations. Similarly, the importance of the form taken by the object’s symbolizing function is now widely acknowledged: there can be no thinkable “I”, no subjective appropriation, unless there is an “inter-I” and an interplay between two subjects.

The path from self to self (from the id to the subject-ego) is not a direct one; it goes through the object as an other-subject—the object in so far as it is another subject—and the reflection of the self in the other person on which it depends for its very construction. Henceforth, the object’s mediation is seen as a necessary element in primary narcissism, which entails the kind of primary identification that immediately brings the “shadow” of the object into the construction of the subject and into the process of subjective appropriation that lies at the heart of it.

Over and beyond the references to early childhood, clinical views on the impasse reflected in the narcissistic and self-identity distress experienced by adults highlight the collusion that exists between narcissistic defences and certain solipsistic aspects of that theory; they encourage us to acknowledge the fact that a metapsychological approach to intersubjectivity and interplay must be adopted. There is an “enacted penetration” of narcissistic defences into the theory of narcissism itself; the best antidote to this is to make sure that we acknowledge the role and function of the object considered as an other-subject in the very structure of the life of the drives.

My intention here is not to attempt to build up any such meta-psychology, or even to outline its general shape. More modestly, I would argue that an initial approach—an attempt at clearing the metapsychological way for dealing with the issues involved, focusing inter alia on the part played by the drive-related and sexual dimensions—is not only possible, but also somewhat urgent. Therefore, I focus these introductory remarks on that point.

None the less, we ought probably to expect that, conversely, taking into account the intersubjectivity of the interplay will also have a retroactive effect on our conceptions of the sexual dimension and unconscious mental life. For example (simply to outline a possibility, without entering into a discussion of the complex nature of what it might involve), references to the unconscious and to those negativization processes that are part and parcel of it have, over the past few years, undergone some modification and have become more complex now that concepts such as “denegative pacts” (Kaës), “community of denial” (Fain) and “shared splitting, joint foreclosure, denegatory pact” (Roussillon) are being taken into consideration; these are different ways of taking into account the impact of the shadow of the object (or other-subject) on mental structures-that is, of including the intersubjective dimension. The negativization processes by which a given mental content is excluded from becoming conscious and from the work of subjective appropriation that is implied in this are no longer looked upon as involving simply the intimacy of the depths of mental life; they can (and perhaps must) also take into consideration the conditions surrounding the encounter with the object as other-subject and the manner in which the drive-related impulses brought by both participants to that encounter are received and dealt with by each of them. We can no longer think about the drives and what becomes of them without taking into account the way in which they are received, taken on board, or rejected by the object towards which they are directed; we can no longer think of drives as simply requiring to be discharged—the subjective message that they carry and convey must also be taken into consideration. This leads me to take a brief look at how Freud saw these issues.

The significance of the drives as messengers

Traditionally, psychoanalysis has focused on the importance of the economic aspect of the drives in Freud’s thinking, together with the need for discharge that this implies. It is true that Freud very early on did emphasize the trauma represented by the lack of any possibility of drive discharge. That conception lies at the heart of the blocking of affect discovered initially in hysteria and, more generally, in the transference neuroses. Trauma is, thus, the consequence of drive overload.

As early as 1895–1896, all the same, Freud added another element to that initial idea of trauma when he highlighted a particular traumatic pattern that he saw as characteristic of the “actual” neuroses. In these, discharge does take place, but not at the correct time nor in the correct place, not in the object’s presence, not in the object; it has not been received by the object. In his “Project for a scientific psychology”, Freud (1950 [1895]) emphasizes the threat to mental structuring caused by a signal that discharge is taking place in the absence of the object—the pleasure of discharge that has no corresponding “satisfaction”, since the latter requires the participation of the object. The model that he had in mind at that point was that of the feeding situation and the infant’s primary relationship to the breast. This is very close to Winnicott’s idea that the breast must be “found-created”. In his papers on neurasthenia and the actual neuroses, Freud describes the traumatic conditions brought about when sexuality without the object or without involving the object takes place. The various potentially traumatic—or at least disruptive—patterns that Freud describes all have to do with the fact that discharge of sexual pleasure takes place without the object’s involvement; it is not “received” by the object—for example, onanism, coitus interruptus, withdrawal.

We cannot, of course, take Freud’s observations simply at face value, but he does all the same outline a model that, if we abstract it from sexual behaviour as such, seems to me to retain much of its clinical relevance. It has often been emphasized that, in psychoanalytic thinking, the object of the drives is not to be confused with the actual external object. This is indeed an important distinction, as long as we remember that in Freud’s thinking—and the practice of psychoanalysis bears this out—there is an ongoing to-and-fro movement, a pulsation as it were, between the object of the drives and the actual external object. In auto-eroticism, they are indeed different, but love and desire for the object mean that at that point they overlap. “The object has been put in the place of the ego ideal”, writes Freud (1921c, p. 113) in his description of group psychology and of some forms of love-choice; this is just as much an “internal” object as an internal object “transferred” to an other-subject chosen as the object of the drive. As he points out in that paper, the psychology of the individual is from the outset a “social” psychology; it becomes “individual” only after a process of secondary conquest as a result of internalization based on primary intersubjectivity.

In 1920, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud is even more explicit. He describes the path followed by the drives as separating into a movement that continues in the direction of the object—and it is quite obvious that he means the external object—and one that turns back towards the internal representation of the object and towards the ego. This obviously raises the question of the correspondence or attunement between internal and external objects. The antinomy between drives that are in search of the object and those that are in search of pleasure seems to me to be a particular clinical manifestation of the outcome of a given drive, bearing witness to its failure to encounter the object, not a fundamental contradiction in that encounter itself. Drives are both in search of pleasure and in search of the object; the pleasure that they seek is one that is related to the object, that is, in the object and in the object relation. Looking upon drives in this way seems to me to see them as having an integral part to play in every intersubjective relationship, in the “inter-I”, since they take as their aim an object qua other-subject.

Paul Denis (1992) has emphasized the fact that, in addition to the need for satisfaction, there is another component of the drives that aims at dominance; this opens up a more complex view of what is at stake in the life of the drives. In my view, these various components and characteristic features of the drives are worth exploring in some detail; this will enable us to separate out their function as messengers. Over and beyond the strictly sexual aspect that Freud underlined in his work at the end of the nineteenth century, I would argue that the conscious and unconscious life of the drives cannot be fully understood unless we acknowledge their role in communication as a whole between human beings and the intersubjective dialogues which that implies; these may be conscious or unconscious, repressed or involving more radical forms of negativity such as splitting, denial, or foreclosure.

Freud always maintained that one of the essential vectors of the drives was the ability to be represented—which, indeed, is how they make themselves known. The psychic representative of a drive, affect representative, word- and thing-presentations—these all bestow on the ways in which the drives are manifested the idea of a message, one that is presented and re-presented. This aspect of the drives is usually dealt with in regard to its intrapsychic component: drives “demand” some form of mental representation. That is the case not only of the subject’s relationship with him- or herself, but also with respect to the encounter and dialogue with the other-subject. How could we conceive of the work of psychoanalysis and of transference interplay without the idea that the drives also are directed towards the object of the transference as an other-subject? The entire practice of psychoanalysis presupposes this “messenger” aspect of the instinctual drives: they are in search of acknowledgement by the object. Lacan was probably the first to emphasize that fundamental dimension of desire in human beings, but, in my view, it runs all through Freud’s writings, even though he did not himself draw specific attention to it.

Any metapsychological approach to intersubjectivity has to take into account the messenger aspect of the drives; in this way, I would argue, we can move beyond the theoretical impasse that we would come up against were we to see interchange and intersubjective communication as having nothing to do with the drives, or if we were to think of the drives as having nothing particularly to do with the object towards which the drive-related impulse is directed.

I would, therefore, argue that it is quite legitimate to say that the three types of drive representation that we find in the classic texts—those that I have mentioned above—give rise, at least potentially, to three types of “message” addressed to the object as other-subject. Word-presentations and the verbal apparatus that underlies them obviously aim at subjective and intersubjective expression; they play a major role in every interplay, as every clinician would agree. In addition, the messenger aspect of the affects, which Darwin highlighted early in his work, is now also much clearer and acknowledged even by French-speaking psychoanalysts. Thing-presentations, now that the concept of projective identification has been mapped out to a considerable extent, also can be seen as messengers of the drives in that they adopt a particular posture; subjective, their value as representative agents within the intersubjective encounter lies at the heart of current conceptions of the transference (Agieren) and of the use of the countertransference in the work of analysis. Extending the analyst’s attention to encompass non-verbal material, including the kind of impact that speech can have on the object as an other-subject, implies the existence of some idea of an “enacted message”, of the drive-related message as an action addressed to the object. Going from such enacted messages to play is undoubtedly one of the fundamental issues at stake in the work of an analysis.

This perspective makes it possible to envisage extending the various treatment parameters based on psychoanalysis to cover a whole set of clinical situations in which action, behaviour, and interaction are very much to the fore. When action and behaviour are brought into a clinical sphere of the analysing situation type (their objective effect is often that of acting upon the clinician), then, over and beyond their impact as interaction, they can be seen as a kind of enacted message in search of symbolic shape and meaning. They can, thus, be looked upon as something other than merely meaningless ways of mental avoidance or discharge; they are a kind of potential message, bearing witness to something awaiting acknowledgement and verbal expression.

That is also one of the essential virtues of referring to an “inter-I”, since this implies that there is no predetermined meaning attached to the message independently of the object’s response. Its meaning is constructed partly as a function of how the object receives it; through the object’s response, the latent potentialities of the initial message can be made more explicit. The message then becomes a proposal awaiting some answer. Action, behaviour, and interaction are no longer treated as completely meaningless and proscribed as useless for the psychic work of subjectivation; they are no longer excluded from clinical attention and condemned to the de-subjectifying threat of cognitive behaviour therapy; they can begin to claim their rightful place within the clinical encounter. In that encounter, behaviour gives rise to interactive effects, and if these are acknowledged and thought about by an other-subject, they can begin to take on an intersubjective quality before being able to express their intrasubjective potential.

Two clinical illustrations

A brief clinical illustration will make it easier to grasp the importance of the object in the organization of the drives.

Echo was a woman patient of mine whose clinical anorexia nervosa gradually diminished as the analysis proceeded. Her social life, however, was still extremely limited in scope. She was economizing, convinced that she could slow down the passing of time or even bring it to a complete halt. She limited her social contacts to what was strictly necessary. She herself toned down whatever faint drive-related impulses she did have and repressed her affects. In her sessions, she was often immobile and silent. It was only very sparingly that she talked of some aspects of her inner thoughts and feelings. I had the impression that she was treating the work of the analysis as she did food in her anorectic states, but that impression of mine was not particularly useful on a practical level. I had the idea that she evoked in me an experience, and, therefore, was communicating to me what she herself had gone through. This was useful only in so far as it helped me to tolerate the specific features of the transference without retaliating too much. It was in another aspect of the transference that we had to find the wherewithal to revive her drive-related processes.

As the work of the analysis progressed, the following intersubjective pattern began to emerge in the transference. Echo gradually began to express in words what was going on inside her when she came to her sessions. When she arrived at...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• PSYCHOANALYTIC IDEAS AND APPLICATIONS SERIES
• INTRODUCTION Primary trauma, splitting, and non-symbolic primary binding
• PART I: AGONY
• CHAPTER ONE Drives and intersubjectivity
• CHAPTER TWO The capacity to be alone in the presence of the analyst
• CHAPTER THREE Interpretation, play, and style
• CHAPTER FOUR Play and potential
• CHAPTER FIVE Communicating primitive experiences
• CHAPTER SIX The primitive “inter-I” and primary “doubled” homosexuality
• CHAPTER SEVEN Destructiveness and complex forms of the “survival” of the object
• PART II: SYMBOLIZATIONS
• CHAPTER EIGHT The symbolizing function of the object
• CHAPTER NINE Associativity and non-verbal language
• CHAPTER TEN Research and exploration in psychoanalysis
• REFERENCES
• INDEX