TRANSLATING THE PSYCHOANALYSIS OF ORIGINS

Abstract

Nicolas Abraham’s “Introducing Thalassa” contributed to the revival of Sàndor Ferenczi’s ideas in France from the 1960s and initiated a transformation in his own psychoanalytic thinking as the thalassal argument was brought into a new context. This article argues that Abraham’s work provides a pathway to not only remember, but also revitalise Ferenczi’s notion of trauma and its inscription in biological processes from events that have happened is species pre-history as well as personal history. Abraham rethinks this “biological unconscious” through a unique conception of the symbol that is inherently unstable and always responding anew to trauma it also continually reformulates. This allows us to understand the body in different terms, away from a series of biological processes to which psyche can be reduced, towards a notion of the somatic that is eloquent and unpredictable and must be translated by the psyche and any apprehending discourse. This transformation made the body relevant once more in a French context that was suspicious of its blanket positing as the cause of psychical processes. Situating the origins of subjectivity in the somatic ever-displaces causal processes in the body so that we can never quite grasp these and must search for them across different, although related, levels of meaning. The search for origins is essential but never satisfactory hence my use of translation as a frame for understanding Abraham’s work; a process that is always unfinished and invites further response.

Keywords:

• Nicolas Abraham
• Sàndor Ferenczi
• Thalassa
• the symbol
• translation
• the body
• origins

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 As Carlo Bonomi notes, Dupont translated Thalassa from the Hungarian-language version that her father had published and not from the original German text that Ferenczi had written.

2 Under the Habsburg monarchy, the Austrian Empire had subjected Hungary since 1526, and from 1867 to 1919 endured an uneasy coalition. Hungarian men comprised nearly half of the men drafted by Austro-Hungary in the First World War. They fought almost exclusively for Austrian and German interests.

3 It is worth noting in this interweaving of invested languages that Abraham came from a family of orthodox Jews, trained in the Talmudic tradition and would have probably considered Hebrew (which he spoke fluently) as his first language. Ferenczi and Dupont were similarly from assimilated middle-class Jewish families, where a strong Hungarian identity was downplayed in favour of emphasising linguistic and cultural pluralism, that included Hebrew roots.

4 This is acknowledged when his work was posthumously collected and edited by his partner and collaborator Maria Torok under the title L’Écorce et le noyau. She places “Présentation de Thalassa” at the beginning of this work, despite it being chronologically out of order in an otherwise chronological text.

5 Take, for example, Ferenczi’s return to the question of trauma as a real phenomenon at the heart of psychopathology that challenged Freud’s turn away from this and his increasing reliance on Oedipal explanations and the structure of fantasy. Freud was also infuriated by the perceived wildness of Ferenczi’s experiments in active technique which included his condemnation of the notorious Küsstechnik (kissing technique).

6 As detailed in Ernest Jones 188–90.

7 Daniel Lagache and Jacques Lacan cite him in texts from the 1950s, although the latter is critical of his notion of introjection. See Judith Dupont 106.

8 Dupont is even more central than Abraham in the translation of Ferenczi’s work as she was Michael Balint’s niece and entrusted with Ferenczi’s legacy after her uncle’s death.

9 See Dupont for a full elaboration.

10 See Roudinesco 598–602.

11 In his 1979 text “Me-Psychoanalysis,” Derrida describes a “break” in Abraham’s thinking on the symbol that begins with his 1968 work “The Shell and the Kernel.” It is this essay and his 1974–75 “Seminar on the Dual Unity and the Phantom” that I refer to here.

12 André Green poetically describes this process as the “chains of Eros” in his book of the same title.

13 It is telling that the Lacanian indifference to biology still bears its mark problematically on the French mental health system, with detrimental effects for the treatment of autism in particular. Sophie Robert explores this in the 2011 documentary Le Mur.

14 In L’Introduction, Dupont notes how Thalassa was so successful that it was even sold in railway kiosks, although Bonomi qualifies that “because of its subtitle ‘Psychanalyse des origines de la vie sexuelle,’ […] it was [often] confused with a pornographic book” (130).

15 It is impossible to overlook the parallels between this theory of translation and how Abraham and Torok conceive of the psyche appropriating the world. Here, the foreignness of the external world and inner processes must somehow be included in a comprehending (and domesticating) psyche through the corollary operations of incorporation (inclusion at the level of hallucinatory fantasy and the body) and introjection (metaphorical assimilation through symbolic means). Abraham and Torok develop large aspects of their conceptual schema in response to considering the extent to which that which is included in the psyche is domesticated or remains foreign. See their texts “Mourning or Melancholia” and “The Illness of Mourning.”

16 Both Abraham and Ferenczi refer to the exemplary psychoanalytic condition of hysteria in their speculations to demonstrate the limitations of the psyche’s governance of the body and account for the variety of “mysterious leap[s] from the psychic into the organic” (“Introducing Thalassa” 139). In the many hysterical reactions, the everyday routines of life are frequently interrupted as the body inflicts unruly sensations, unsolicited affects and uncontrolled actions and reactions onto the unwary psyche. The extremes of hysteria only magnify processes that are commonplace in this complex exchange.

17 His 1964 Seminar XI is largely recognised as Lacan’s turn towards considering the real.

18 This section of the SPP was already loosely formed in the 1950s through the figures of Pierre Marty, Michel Fain, Michel de M’Uzan and Christian David but was vitalised after the publication of Thalassa, when their collected 1963 text L’Investigation psychosomatique, founded “psychosomatics as a strictly psychoanalytic discipline” (Aisenstein and Rappoport de Aisemberg xvii).

19 Where psychoanalytic terms are capitalised in French, there is no consistent denotation in the English language. Nicholas Rand, the translator of “The Shell and the Kernel” had a torrid time trying to keep on top of Abraham’s sometimes inconsistent use of capitals in the original French. For purpose of clarity, I have elected to italicise terms that have a specific psychoanalytic (i.e., anasemic) meaning and left them non-italicised when the word is meant more generally.

20 Although Abraham privileges the Somato-Psychic relation as exemplary of the Shell–Kernel figure that dictates his work from 1968, he still recognises it as one example of many related relationships. In “The Shell and the Kernel” he examines both the relation of Laplanche and Pontalis’ dictionary of psychoanalytic terms, The Language of Psychoanalysis to Freud’s intuition of the unconscious, and the relation of consciousness to the unconscious in these terms.

21 The question of translation shadows much of Derrida’s work from these early essays. He makes the link between translation and the questioning of origins explicit in his 1985 essay “Des Tour de Babel,” inspiring an important critical turn in translation studies that, for many academics and translators, still defines the field.

22 For a fuller explanation, see Abraham’s “Seminar on the Dual Unity and the Phantom” and my commentary on this, “The Haunted Delimitation of Subjectivity in the Work of Nicolas Abraham.”