Abraham y Torok - The Inner Crypt
Abraham y Torok - The Inner Crypt
Abraham y Torok - The Inner Crypt
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Copyright 2002
-THESCANDINAVIAN
PSYCHOANALYTIC
REVIEW
ISSN 0106-2301
Klein (1935, 1940) expanded Abrahams thinking on the importance of orality and incorporation in grief as well as
depression. She traced the common roots
of both in the development of the small
child. For the baby, writes Klein, the difference between loving the object and cannibilastically destroying it is minute. This
gives rise to anxious phantasies of having
destroyed it, as well as phantasies of retaliation from a damaged object. These phantasies, in turn, pave the way to and characterize the depressive position, which has
been thouroughly studied by Klein and her
followers.
Where Freud was first to understand
the subjective contents of depression, it
could be said that the line of thought starting with Abraham and developed by Klein
localize the focus of depression, or the
inability to mourn, i.e. to introject that
which has been lost as well as the reality of
the loss, in the subjects ambivalence toward the lost object, generally, and specifically to the oral-sadistic, incorporative
aspects of the subjects drives. Depression
is hereby localized to the arena of internalization. Torok (1971-74, 1978) objects
that the drive-centered optics of this tradition tends toward an interpretation of depressive imagery which gravitates
around digestion in an overly concrete
fashion. Thus, the image of teeth, for instance, need not necessarily refer to the
wish to devour, nor need the image of the
corpse automatically designate the anally
expelled object. The oral and anal colouring of depressive imagery should be understood not as a direct derivative of the
drives, but metaphorically; as a way of
alerting the analysts attention to the existence of a conservation within the ego, that
indigestible aspects of the relation to the
lost object have been swallowed whole
without being symbolized, and therefore
have not gained access to the experienced
self.
mother is love, hate, pleasure, pain, satisfaction and frustration. The childs dependency of the object is therefore absolute,
and the function of the object is to assist
the child in the naming of desire, in all its
different aspects. The drives are then superposed with fantasies, images and memories. This means that the caretaker returns to the child its emotions and wishes,
which with the objects mediation have
been legitimized by the verbal code of the
outer world, thereby gaining the right of
residence in the child, as the childs love,
pleasure, etc. The object thus becomes a
connecting link to the childs feeling of
vitality and sense of unique subjectivity.
Because desire is life-long and varying, the
need for introjection is also life-long. As
adults we feel the need of closeness to
others, of cultural experiences and of dreaming, all of which are pleasurable to the
extent that they help us recognize, name
and thus legitimize various manifestations
of our inner lives. With the help of introjection, the mothers absence becomes
bearable: it is not part of the child, of its
desire, that is missing, but its object. Hereby the child acquires the mental capacity to
contain mothers absence as well as her
return: absence and presence become thinkable, and therefore bearable perceptions,
whereas it is unthinkable to lose oneself.
The ultimate outpost of absence which
is the loss of the object through its deceitfulness, incapacity or actual death inevitably entail mourning, but not necessarily
the melancholics conviction of having lost
vital parts of the self. The work of mourning leads to a point where the subject can
reclaim her/his cathexes of the loved and
lost object. It is thereby possible to think:
It is he/she who is dead. Not I. I am alive. A work of introjection has taken place, and the subject is able to return with
hope and love to people in the outer world,
and cathect it.
What happens, then, in such cases where the object is lost before it has helped the
child, or the adult, to a rudimentary appropriation of its drives? Before desire has
been named and claimed? Those particular depressive states that follow have been
thouroughly studied by Abraham and Torok (Torok, 1968; Abraham & Torok,
1972,1975), who have given them a central
place in their joint production. Their point
is that, irrespective of the way in which the
loss takes place, it is in these cases inevitably traumatic (c.f. the authors conception of trauma, p. xx), it creates a gash in
the subjects psychic fabric, since the lost
object is precisely the object which should
have helped the subject to constitute itself,
and to bear the objects absence. The trauma, according to the authors, is not constituted by the loss as such, however painful
it might be, but by the loss of the very person who is cathected with the subjects
maturing drives, and therefore has the
function of mediator to its inner world.
This mediation may have been deficient or
lacking; the child has nevertheless maintained the hope to receive it one day. Definitive loss through death therefore marks
the extinction of this hope, and irrevocably
confirms the impossibility of regaining
various aspects of the maturing drives from
the object.
Faced with the extinction of this hope,
Abraham and Torok describe that the subject resorts to a last-ditch solution: the
fantasy of incorporation. Being precisely a
fantasy, incorporation functions according
to the pleasure principle and the magic of
hallucinatory wish-fulfillment, removed
from the reality of the loss. In contrast to
introjection, which takes place in the presence of the object, in the service of reality
and the expansion of the ego, incorporation
occurs in the objects absence, and is in
every sense compensatory to deficient introjection.
Faced with the trauma of loss; a wound
the healing of which would entail a gradual
and painful work of introjection or
mourning the fantasy of incorporation
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therefore describe the process of introjection as the work of empty mouths, thereby stressing the symbolic nature of introjection, as opposed to the concreteness of
incorporation. Accordingly, things that
concretely fill the mouth (food, alcohol,
etc.) can later be used to fill a mouth whose real lack is for words meaningful to the
process of introjection.
Thus the fantasy of devouring the dead
object serves as a compensation for the
emptiness of the mouth imposed by the
loss. Since this swallowing has taken place
according to a concrete fantasy far removed from associative links to the rest of
psychic life, it can neither be repressed to
the unconscious where it could be elaborated and integrated with other unconscious material through dreaming, slips, parapraxes etc., nor is it accepted by the rationality of the conscious ego. By way of
solution, the dead object is enclosed in an
isolated part of the ego, a kind of secret
tomb or inner crypt. The object is not
mourned, its image is not repressed it is
enclosed in a part of the ego that is sealed
by the repression of the shameful pleasure
of the moment of loss. This inner crypt can
be likened to the previously mentioned
enclave, albeit further sealed by the conserving repression of shameful desire.
Here, the object lives its secret life, and the
subject becomes the guardian of the secret
shared with it. Life goes on, seemingly as
if nothing had happened, and no loss had
taken place. It is as if the subject stated:
Since the dead object has taken my desire,
love and sexuality into the grave, I am obliged, in order to survive, to take the grave
into me. In the article The illness of
mourning and the fantasy of the exquisite
corpse (1994), Maria Torok quotes a male
analysand, a widower since several years:
My wife took my potency to the
grave. She holds my penis there, as
though it were in her hand (p.
116).
Where mourning, i.e. the work of introjection, leads to independence from the
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Conversely, Torok claims that resignation in the face of biologistic and sociological approaches constitute evasions from
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This penis is, in the womans representation, violently idealized as to the advantages it is thought to entail: uninhibited
freedom, absence of anxiety, insecurity
and narcissistic vulnerability, access to
wealth and sexual pleasure without guilt.
Torok quotes two women:
I dont know why I have this feeling, says Agnes, when it has
nothing to do with reality, but its
always been like that for me. Its
as if men were the only ones
made to be fulfilled, to have opinions, to develop themselves, to
advance. And everything seems
so easy to them theyre a force
nothing at all opposes they can
do anything they want. And I
simply stagnate, hesitate; I feel as
if theres a wall in front of me
Ive always had the feeling that I
was not quite completed. Something like a statue waiting for
its sculptor to make up its mind
finally to shape its arms (p. 45).
Yvonne recalls always having thought,
when she was a little girl:
that boys succeed in everything, they are instantly fluent in several languages They
could take all the candles in a
church and no one would stop
them. If ever they encounter an
obstacle, they just naturally jump
over it (p. 45).
Envy, the representation of the penis as
idealized thing, combined with the powerful hate and resentment toward the mother,
indicate that what is in question is an anal
conflict regarding the mother, rather than a
phallic-genital one. Envy, which is dominated by acquisitiveness, the perception of
inner riches in terms of things rather than
as states of mind, is known to be a characteristic of anality.
For the small child, regardless of sex,
the anal phase entails training, with the
caretakers who is often the mother
help, to attain sphincter-control, the intentional emptying and holding back of faeces. The anal phase entails the fantasy that
the mother, through her control of the
childs sphincter, commands all that is
inside its body, that this is in fact the
mothers property, to utilize at her will.
For the little girl this includes sexuality,
which at an early stage is felt to be part of
the inside of the body (in contrast to the
boy, who localizes sexual feelings to the
penis, on the outside of the body). The
girls sexuality will therefore also be felt to
be the mothers possesion. The problem
arises when the girl wishes to reclaim as
her own desire, sensuality and awakening
sexual feelings, i.e. her gradual maturation:
her feeling, correspondingly, is of aggressively disposessing the mother of her property, of depriving and robbing her of inner riches. Since the little girl also loves
her mother and is dependent on her love,
this is perceived as infinitely dangerous.
When the girl later, in oedipal love, turns
to the father, thus in addition gaining a
rival in the mother, the obstacles are felt to
be insurmountable. Better then to resent
the mother for not having given her a penis, than to express her real hatred, that
which is the result of forfeiting desire and
sensuality for the mothers sake. Hence
penis envy, life-long because unfulfillable,
is simultaneously a pledge of fidelity to the
mother, a reassurance that the girl/woman
will never feel pleasure and therefore never
separate from her.
Torok imagines that the little girls discourse to the maternal imago could be
described as follows:
- It is the penis-thing that I have been
deprived of and lack, not parts of myself.
- This search is deemed to fail, which I
know. But on this failure I can blame that I
must give up pleasure. Actually, it is you
who command and forbid my pleasure,
since you own the inside of my body. It is
you who have emptied it.
- I insist on the infinite value of the penis-thing, so that you may understand the
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tion at several different levels of the experience of subjectivity, and with the help of
their specific concept of introjection seen
as the key to every aspect of psychic life.
The concept of introjection, due to the
distinctiveness the authors ascribe to it, is
seemingly unambiguous. At closer inquiry,
it can be seen to constitute a synthesis of
Freudian concepts from different points in
the evolution of his thought; it thus comprises the early Freud/Breuer concepts of
catharsis and abreaction, as well as the
later concepts of working-through and
above all, mourning. Due to the inclusiveness of the concept and the life-long duration the authors ascribe to the work of introjection, it is also reminiscent of the
Kleinian concept of the depressive position.
The work of Abraham and Torok, however, also comprises a radical approach
to metapsychology. Abrahams distinct
cleaving of psychanalytic concepts into
symbols and anasemias point out the essential futility of approaching the unconscious as if it were open to inquiry. That
which conversely is available and comprehensible are the symbolic transformations
of the unconscious and of the drives. He
claims that the mechanistic deduction of
human subjectivity to the drives as ultimate explanation risks attributing the status of truth to the drives, thereby leading
psychanoanalytic theorizing into the impasse of biologism. These thoughts are
illuminating with regard to such attacks
which have lately been leveled at psychoanalysis, focusing on the alleged datedness
and lack of scientific rigour of metapsychology, not least of the concept of drives.
These attacks can be seen as an expression
of the ever-looming confusion between
these by Abraham described categories;
(subjectively knowable) symbol and (antisemantic) anasemia. The criticism against
psychanalysis in part rests on the misconception of treating the concepts of metapsychology as subjectively knowable.
FINAL WORDS
The central idea running through the
body of Abraham and Toroks work is that
of the prerequisites for the emergence of
subjectivity. The question of how a unique
individual comes into being is only superficially simple. They approach this ques-
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Through the entirety of their work Abraham and Torok pledge their fidelity to
the Freudian canon. At closer inspection,
one wonders whether this does not apply
more to the spirit than to the letter of
Freud. In the final analysis, the authors
effect a radical decentering of psychoanalytic theory, due to the central importance
they attribute to introjection as the crucial
and absolute motor of psychic life. Sexuality becomes secondary albeit important, it
is regarded as one of many aspects of human existence that need to be subjected to
the work of introjection. From this follows
a reinterpretation of large segments of clinical theory. Thus, Maria Toroks deconstruction of the concept of penis envy entails the insertion of a metaphorical level
of discourse. Likewise, in the authors thought on the mute drama of depression, oral
and anal fantasies are seen as metaphorical. With regard to depression, their radicality can be seen in the descriptions of the
violent intrusion of a lifeless object at the
expense of a devastating loss of subjectivity. Their descriptions of the subjective
content as opposed to the instinctual
grammar of depression can be said to start
where Freuds work ends, cutting through
the conceptual confusion which has coloured the field of internalization, i.e. the central question of the emergence of human
subjectivity through appropriation of the
outer world.
REFERENCES
Abraham, K. (1911). Notes on the psychoanalytical investigation and treatment of
manic-depressive insanity and allied conditions. In Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis. London: Maresfield Library, 1988.
--(1924). A short study of the
development of the libido, viewed in the
light of mental disorder. In Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis. London: Maresfield Library, 1988.
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Maria Yassa
Upplandsgatan 42
113 28 Stockholm
Sweden
E-mail: [email protected]
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