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The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, Volume 1 by Nicolas Abraham
This volume is a superb introduction to the richness and originality of Abraham and Torok's approach to psychoanalysis and their psychoanalytic approach to literature. Abraham and Torok advocate a form of psychoanalysis that insists on the particularity of any individual's life story, the specificity of texts, and the singularity of historical situations. In what is both a critique and an extension of Freud, they develop interpretive strategies with powerful implications for clinicians, literary theorists, feminists, philosophers, and all others interested in the uses and limits of psychoanalysis.Central to their approach is a general theory of psychic concealment, a poetics of hiding. Whether in a clinical setting or a literary text, they search out the unspeakable secret as a symptom of devastating trauma revealed only in linguistic or behavioral encodings. Their view of trauma provides the linchpin for new psychic and linguistic structures such as the "transgenerational phantom," an undisclosed family secret handed down to an unwitting descendant, and the intra-psychic secret or "crypt," which entombs an unspeakable but consummated desire. Throughout, Abraham and Torok seek to restore communication with those intimate recesses of the mind which are, for one reason or another, denied expression.Classics of French theory and practice, the essays in volume one include four previously uncollected works by Maria Torok. Nicholas Rand supplies a substantial introductory essay and commentary throughout. Abraham and Torok's theories of fractured meaning and their search for coherence in the face of discontinuity and disruption have the potential to reshape not only psychoanalysis but all disciplines concerned with issues of textual, oral, or visual interpretation.
Hardcover
First published September 1, 1994
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 6, 2010
There is something gothic about Abraham and Torok's take on psychoanalysis: crypts and all. But then, there's something very gothic about psychoanalysis in general.
January 31, 2014
A positively 'gothic' take on psychoanalytic method; probably best as a handbook for reading psychoanalytically. And feminist, too (bonus!). Recommended.
March 25, 2020
Abraham (especially Abraham, that mythical progenitor of progenetive myths or poems) and Torok's collected essays espouse an ideosyncratic take on psychoanalysis as both a theory and a practice. This take takes its value from two elements, slightly distorted, which have from its beginning been essential to psychoanalysis - words (read "poetry") and listening (read "reading").
Words, as Abraham is wont to repeat, following his phenomenological past, are not symbolic of something else, some other thing, but are rather symbols of themselves, as symbols (collective assemblages for forming meanings, bringing forth affects). "To be" is reduced to "to signify." Thus words do not merely convey a tale, a past, and even conceal or cover it over - they are the very material of this past, this revelatory concealment, this récit. This is telling in all of Abraham and Torok's readings, their interpretations. If one thought that some of Freud's interpretations of what he read and heard were wild, if not tenuous, then one might find themselves struggling to grasp the thread which weaves together Abraham and Torok's linguistically rooted analyses. Especially when these depart so drastically from Freud's orthodox readings. But there is a logic here - a cryptology which is at once a cryptonomy and a cryptography, a writing and naming of that which was hidden, of the secret. And these are all but other names, allosemes, perhaps, for analysis as poetry.
Abraham and Torok, far less than Freud (and, perhaps, the former far less even than the latter in the analytic pairing), desire for their readings to be taken as fact. This, of course, is not to say that they aren't true. But the truth here is of an other sort - alethic, rather than veridical. And this, perhaps, is bound up with the fundamental poetics of their analytic theory and practice. For the truth they aim for is not the adequation to the events of the past (the problem of the crypt and the encoding of foreign or distanced desires renders such adequation without mesure of verifiability, just as it renders the analysand's words devoid of referent), but rather the coming to language, the bringing forth, of the words and desires which were encrypted, and which were heretofore unspeakable and enigmatic, haunting the unconscious of the analysand. Thus do our analysts weave, from the threads of the analysand's words (their "clues"), a text, a poem, the truth of which speaks, for the first time, in words, the desire which was encrypted in the ego, and left to spread its deadening, miasmic effects. The poem, inscribed together by the analysts and the analysand (in a sharing of words), allows for an exhumation and an expectoration which none could have expected in advance - the surprise of the poem's coming together, speaking itself, the truth that was concealed in its words now re-written, re-read, so as to reveal. Desires, once thought dead, and thus not thought, never known, are freed by the speech which bound them in secret - not through interdiction refusing their speech, but through the cryptic speaking of these words so as to not say the truth, to speak without being heard. But the poem, through the inter-diction, speaking between the analysts and the analysand, is able to let the words speak as they never had before. The secret dissipates, as the symbol says itself, and refers no more to some castration, some complex, etc.
Psychoanalysis as poetry - a novel thought. Not the science that Freud struggled so hard to make it, but rather as an art. The art, then, of introjection - the creation of the self; the very emergent creativity of psychic life itself.
Words, as Abraham is wont to repeat, following his phenomenological past, are not symbolic of something else, some other thing, but are rather symbols of themselves, as symbols (collective assemblages for forming meanings, bringing forth affects). "To be" is reduced to "to signify." Thus words do not merely convey a tale, a past, and even conceal or cover it over - they are the very material of this past, this revelatory concealment, this récit. This is telling in all of Abraham and Torok's readings, their interpretations. If one thought that some of Freud's interpretations of what he read and heard were wild, if not tenuous, then one might find themselves struggling to grasp the thread which weaves together Abraham and Torok's linguistically rooted analyses. Especially when these depart so drastically from Freud's orthodox readings. But there is a logic here - a cryptology which is at once a cryptonomy and a cryptography, a writing and naming of that which was hidden, of the secret. And these are all but other names, allosemes, perhaps, for analysis as poetry.
Abraham and Torok, far less than Freud (and, perhaps, the former far less even than the latter in the analytic pairing), desire for their readings to be taken as fact. This, of course, is not to say that they aren't true. But the truth here is of an other sort - alethic, rather than veridical. And this, perhaps, is bound up with the fundamental poetics of their analytic theory and practice. For the truth they aim for is not the adequation to the events of the past (the problem of the crypt and the encoding of foreign or distanced desires renders such adequation without mesure of verifiability, just as it renders the analysand's words devoid of referent), but rather the coming to language, the bringing forth, of the words and desires which were encrypted, and which were heretofore unspeakable and enigmatic, haunting the unconscious of the analysand. Thus do our analysts weave, from the threads of the analysand's words (their "clues"), a text, a poem, the truth of which speaks, for the first time, in words, the desire which was encrypted in the ego, and left to spread its deadening, miasmic effects. The poem, inscribed together by the analysts and the analysand (in a sharing of words), allows for an exhumation and an expectoration which none could have expected in advance - the surprise of the poem's coming together, speaking itself, the truth that was concealed in its words now re-written, re-read, so as to reveal. Desires, once thought dead, and thus not thought, never known, are freed by the speech which bound them in secret - not through interdiction refusing their speech, but through the cryptic speaking of these words so as to not say the truth, to speak without being heard. But the poem, through the inter-diction, speaking between the analysts and the analysand, is able to let the words speak as they never had before. The secret dissipates, as the symbol says itself, and refers no more to some castration, some complex, etc.
Psychoanalysis as poetry - a novel thought. Not the science that Freud struggled so hard to make it, but rather as an art. The art, then, of introjection - the creation of the self; the very emergent creativity of psychic life itself.
August 24, 2020
Here some inspiring essays by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok are collected. I particularly enjoyed those on the theory of the phantom (as opposed to hauntological specters), the crypt (what happens when it is transferred to the social realm—could there be such a thing as ”a social crypt” or ”a crypt in the social imaginary”?), and the two succint mechanisms of introjection and incorporation.
February 3, 2014
A sixth act to Hamlet!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews