Birth of a body, origin of a history

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1. Translated by Andrew Weller. Translated from the French: Aulagnier, Piera, ‘Naissance d'un corps, origine d'une histoire’ in Corps et histoire, Les Belles Lettres, 1986. pp. 99–141

Notes

1. Translated by Andrew Weller. Translated from the French: Aulagnier, Piera, ‘Naissance d'un corps, origine d'une histoire’ in Corps et histoire, Les Belles Lettres, 1986. pp. 99–141

2. Of course, the impact of the cultural discourse is just as active in the organization of our relational and ethical world, and it is this same discourse that supplies us with the criteria that alone can decide on the truth or falsehood of our judgements.

3. In the French text ‘com‐possible’.

4. Translator's note: infans (‘not speaking’, before the acquisition of language). Throughout this article I have translated infans as infant and enfant as child.

5. During childhood, and afterwards, but more sporadically if the child has ‘inherited’ a body which has succeeded in overcoming the ‘infantile illnesses’ of the psyche.

6. Giving a predominant place to the mother, as the majority of analysts do, does not imply forgetting the place occupied by the father. From the beginning of life, the father also exerts a modifying action on the ambient psychic milieu of the newborn. But in almost all cases, one person – most often the mother – has a privileged feeding role, whether she offers a breast or a bottle, and consequently brings – through desire or duty – a vital satisfaction for the infant. This person who has the power to respond to the needs of the infant and, in so doing, to be the source of the first experiences of pleasure and of suffering, occupies this role of modifier of the somato‐psychic reality through which the presence of an inhabited world is announced in advance. That is why the mother is also the one through whom the first ‘sign’ of the presence (or absence) of a father will make a breach in the infant's psyche: her choice of these ‘signs’ will depend on her relationship to this father. Subsequently, but no doubt very soon, the child will be able to reject them and forge his own signs and in so doing establish a relationship with the father in accord or disaccord with the one that preceded it. It remains true that in the register of time, there is effectively a primacy of the relationship to the mother, just as the experience of pregnancy induces in the mother a form of cathexis for this being that she is carrying within herself which is not of the same quality as the father's cathexis while he is waiting for the child. This is a ‘natural’ privilege the mark of which the man will always bear, whether positive or negative.

7. The present essay draws on and extends the metapsychological hypotheses defended in my book (Aulagnier, 1975) concerning the concept of primal process that it introduced. Consideration of the ‘moment’ when the succession of encounters between the psyche and the world occurs is a factor that seems to me to be increasingly important.

8. Consideration of the ‘moment’ when the succession of encounters between the psyche and the world occurs is a factor that seems to me to be increasingly important.

9. Such somato‐psychic experiences of pleasure will facilitate the future representation of a unified body. Conversely, the psyche, as soon as it has the means, will try to oppose this ‘irradiating’ power of suffering with the risk of only having at its disposal a fragmented representation of the somatic space.

10. This ‘anticipated mother’ may be compared with what Bion defines as pre‐concept: in both cases, a relational mould waits and precedes that which will be one of its supports. But the resemblance does not go any further than this: Bion's hypothesis appeals to a vision which is reminiscent of the Kantian concept of intuition. Mine, which is more ‘materialistic’ presupposes the presence of this ‘element of reality’ furnished by a somatic experience.

11. To speak of an erogenous zone is, ipso facto, to pass over from the register of the body to the psychic register: in psychoanalytic terminology the terms pleasure and suffering, regardless of their source and the activity that has produced them, only have meaning when applied to a psychic experience.

12. It is important to have a clear understanding of the expression fantasy of fusion: the desire realized in this fantasy is the fusion between two psychic spaces, two bodies, two pleasures. What is denied concerns the power of refusing this state of fusion. But that supposes that their separation has been perceived and that it has been abolished and substituted by a relation of fusion, of reunification between two parts which would exclude the slightest difference or which would prove to be complementary. We could attach to this fantasy the mathematical formula: 1 + 1 = 1; the result is false but the sign + between two terms is preserved.

13. A total disappearance of this sign is not compatible with the preservation of some sort of psychic life, once the dawn of our existence has been left behind.

14. Paper read at a Colloquium on Psychoanalytic Approaches to Autism in Monaco, June 1984.

15. See particularly Chapter 2, pp. 126ff.

16. A belief that is sometimes quite erroneous, but in which the parent continues to have confidence.

17. It is evident that the impossibility of taking any pleasure in suckling, washing, and touching her baby will affect the movements necessary for doing any of these things, but I do not think that we can content ourselves with this ‘mechanistic’ or ‘realistic’ explanation. I think that the mother's experience of a psychic pleasure, with its eroticized components, is necessary if the infant is to be able to fully feel his own experiences of pleasure. The mother may have the same gestual behaviour, the same dexterity, but my feeling is that if she does not experience pleasure herself, if there is no circulation via the body of a shared experience of pleasure, the infant's psyche will not receive the ‘aliment’ of pleasure that it needs in a form that can be assimilated or metabolized. There will be some pleasure − for it is a vital energy without which the psychical apparatus cannot function − but its quality, its properties, will find expression in anomalies and especially in the resistance that this form of energy opposes to the relational functions of the apparatus.

18. We shall see that in one case the consequences of the maternal depression on the infant are, on the contrary, directly linked to the encounter.