Dr Tom Goodwin

Nicolas Abraham (1919-75) rethinks the symbol as the very fabric of being. The author examines how this notion challenges the limitations of Husserl’s phenomenology and its reliance on a transcendental ego that can apprehend hyletic data in its purity. For Abraham, the symbol is worldly and resonates with its emergence from intersubjective foundations to constitute subjectivity impurely as a Dyad. It is born from trauma, a cut that differentiates Ego from Other but also generates anxiety (and Time) to keep its operation unfinished. This projection into the future implicates intention (agency) that builds upon origins that are opaque and immemorial. Abraham denotes this origin as the Arche, conceiving of it as a primary symbolism that renders the traumatic cut but without temporal or structural guarantee. It is a beginning that is beyond the phenomenal, requiring exploration through a radical transphenomenological perspective derived from psychoanalysis. Here, trauma is both the debilitation of the symbol and (potentially) the impetus for its transformation, (re)iterating structures of subjectivity that have greater complexity and degrees of freedom. This is, of course, as circumstances allow. Abraham’s construction of symbolic subjectivity is stratified as the symbol negotiates levels of existence from basic Ego-integration to sophisticated social organizations, none of which can individually capture its operation. The journey to a fulfilling existence is riddled with obstructions that could be physiological, relational, cultural or otherwise. The author highlights this multivalence as a complexity that must be carefully navigated - especially when there is suffering - by attending to the symbol and its resonances where creative transformations cannot be mapped in advance.

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.

Nicolas Abraham & translated by Tom Goodwin (2020) INTRODUCING THALASSA

Abraham and Torok’s clinical concept of the phantom can be rethought in extended terms to account for the challenges inherent in giving birth to oneself. The author re-examines the question of the ghost in terms of the individual’s separation from the mother–child unity. This is a traumatic process that vacillates between the threat of loss and the intrusion of the mother, now constituted as an object. We manage this experience through the symbol, with the process of introjection differentiating the child and substituting the mother with psychical representatives. Incorporation is the refusal of the symbol, creating cryptic mechanisms that destroy meaning and produce resilient pathologies. Where Abraham and Torok oppose and separate these processes, the author follows Derrida in questioning the purity of this distinction. Something cryptic necessarily intervenes in our accession to the symbol as we negotiate the enigmas and inconsistencies of the mother–child union. Our foundations are haunted by gaps that we must continually negotiate in the birth and maintenance of subjectivity. Phantoms are transmitted as we constitute an internal frame, formulate repression, and use maternal words to articulate our separation. We are subject to and subjects of transmission, incompletely individuated, as we endlessly repeat through the symbol and into the future, a dynamic of clinging to and separating from the mother.

“Seminar on the Dual Unity and the Phantom” translates into English Nicolas Abraham’s notes from a presentation series delivered at the Société psychanalytique de Paris in 1974-5. These were collected as a single essay and published in French by his partner Maria Torok following Abraham’s untimely death in 1975. The Seminar introduces the dual unity as a clinical concept to account for patient symptomatology where traumatic structures resist intervention and are seemingly impossible to locate. Abraham describes these pathologies in terms of a phantom; the transmission down generations of gaps and silences in comprehension that disrupt emerging subjectivity at its foundation. Abraham demonstrates through a number of clinical and fictional cases how phantoms are transferred unwittingly into an individual psyche and uses this to pose questions about the boundaries of selfhood that extend beyond his pathological examples. As a broader metapsychological concept, the dual unity explains the mechanisms of self-formation in general terms as the always incomplete separation of an individual from the maternal context. Abraham conceives of selfhood as a symbolic response to and overcoming of the traumas that characterize human existence, which begin with the loss(es) of the mother. He describes the birth of the subject, therefore, as the accession to symbolic life through words split off from the maternal context and used to designate objects in the outside world. The words, however, still retain traces of that first relationship in the connection they draw to the drama of separation and the maternal unconscious that haunts this scission as the protector and a danger to individuation. The duality of the mother-child relationship is transformed through the objective use of words into a relation between the shared meaning of language (understood at the level of ego) and a “whole stratification of maternal imagos” that constitute the individual unconscious and whose traces inhabit those same words. This constant connection to the mother means we are always separate-unseparated beings; dual unities open to the continual threat of haunting.

reud’s analysis of the Wolf Man was notoriously problematic, with this most famous patient resisting psychoanalytic interpretation and requiring attention from its practitioners for the duration of his long life. The case study, published in 1918, draws into its orbit the narratives of a neurotic personality and a dying class of Russian aristocracy, along with key theoretical assertions and political posturing (regarding the dissention of former colleagues) on the part of Freud. What the author locates in Freud’s text and the Wolf Man’s later memoirs and interviews is an exclusionary attitude, in both theory and personal reflections, to the very dramatic forces of world history that were to have a considerable impact on the lives of analyst and analysand. Using the related concepts of incorporation and the crypt developed in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s text The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, the author reconstructs this exclusion as both generative and disruptive of the Wolf Man’s engagement with, dependence on and resistance to psychoanalysis. Identifying a compromising and silenced dynamic regarding the Russian Revolution traced into the Wolf Man’s fragmented and uncertain identity, the author uses evidence of an irreconcilable subject position to inform a more cryptic understanding of the often bizarre attitudes, behaviour and language demonstrated by Freud’s patient. More than providing an answer to the Wolf Man’s pathology, this suggests instead a re-imagining of the case as an elusive, enigmatic and poetic work of symbolic mediation to which a similarly open and multiple interpretation is the only appropriate interpretative response.

Reflecting on the numerous abuses it has been embroiled in since its inception and the inherent conservativism of certain of its clinical practices, this chapter questions whether it is right to include psychoanalysis in a collection on critical social psychology. Returning to Freud’s original insight on the notion of the unconscious and its intrinsic connection to the sexual body, the author unpacks and highlights a fundamentally radical project in psychoanalysis, where conflict and uncertainty generate a theoretical frame and clinical practice that is ever restless and necessarily responsive to new patients and socio-political contexts. Alongside reactionary strands in thinking and associated institutions, therefore, Freud’s particular “discovery” and development of key psychoanalytic concepts means that their resistance to fixed meaning and the possibility of full articulation offers fertile grounds for critical social and psychological inquiry. Exploring continental strands of psychoanalysis in the works of Jean Laplanche, André Green and others, this chapter poses questions for the construction of reflective and emancipatory clinical practice and ends with a consideration of radical psychoanalytic ideas in social psychological research.