2-21-11 Freud, Mourning and Melancholia; Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel

Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”

Summary: Melancholia is a pathological form of mourning, where the loss of the object causes a narcissistic identification with that object and self-hatred.

 

Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel

Summary: Abraham and Torok believe that the subject’s difficulties originate in the parent’s prohibition of masturbation leading to the failure to introject, which manifests itself in haunting, fantasies, and phobias, the secret to which can be unlocked through speech and expression.

“Only when its initial and precise meaning is restored will the concept of “introjection” reveal its effectiveness in clarifying the clinical facts noted above, as regards both their genesis and evolution” (111).

Torok begins this section by emphasizing the importance of defining a word that “has undergone so many variations in meaning that is mere mention is enough to arouse in me the suspicion of confused ideas, not to say verbiage” (110).  This single word is so incredibly important to the practice and performance of psychoanalysis that restoring its original meaning is the only possible way to clarify the raw data of psychoanalysis.  Rand makes this clear in his introduction to this section, saying that “Abraham and Torok found that patients suffering from a secret identification with a departed love-object invented particular forms of obfuscation in their speech.  The patients obscured beyond recognition the linguistic elements that might reveal their secret’s existence and contents to themselves and to the world” (105).  Obfuscation is a word that appears frequently throughout this text, and it is the thing that psychoanalysis, presumably, aims to remove from speech.  But I want to return to the word that I started out with at the beginning of this post: introjection.

Torok begins with “only,” which makes it seem like there are no other options than the one that she sets forth here.  Rather than close off other avenues to restoration, though, the word “only” emphasizes the process, because it is paired with “when.”  The temporal nature of the word “when” indicates that restoration will take time.  Torok could have presumably used the construction “only if,” which would make this restoration more absolute, more either/or.  Thus, in this sentence, there is a performance of the process of restoration and its movement over time, and presumably, language.

This process, at least in this sentence, is one of etymology.  Torok returns to Ferenczi, who coined the term then picked up by Freud.  It would be interesting and productive to do an etymology of the term through The Shell and the Kernel, but I don’t have the space for that here, so I’ll go to the OED: “A term used by S. Ferenczi … to denote the forming of a subjective image of an object and the transfer to it of emotional energy previously given to the object itself.”  That’s the definition, and the first usage noted is: ”One might give to this process, in contrast to projection, the name of Introjection.”  Incidentally, the first usage calls introjection a process.  When Torok says that we need to return to the initial meaning, it’s more clear that she is talking about the beginning of the term “introjection”.  Since she’s talking about a temporal process, the temporal word “initial” works well here.  It’s less clear, though, what she means by “precise.”  Precise is more spatial than temporal, and so there are a few connections I need to make to the rest of Abraham and Torok’s work to take away some of the obfuscation.  Just before this sentence, Torok mentions that interjection “gives shape” to Ferenczi’s discoveries about psychoanalysis.  Additionally, the process that I’m talking about has everything to do with speech, as Torok and Abraham emphasize over and over again in this book.  Indeed, the meaning of precise is “characterized by definiteness or exactness of expression,” “of the voice or tone of voice: distinct, clear,” “overly formal, fastidious”.  These definitions point to space (formal) and speech (expression, voice).  Presumably, the process of introjection needs to be precise before it can even become that process. 

But I want to challenge and push the limits of “precise” here.  The process I just went through above was not precise, exact, or even overly formal.  In fact, I couldn’t just define introjection in order to get at its initial and precise meaning even in this sentence.  I had to point to context, to what came before this sentence, to things outside this sentence, and I had to make connections to other, seemingly unrelated terms in the rest of the book.  Indeed, the process of introjection is much like oscillation.  The verb structure is where I think oscillation comes out most clearly in the above sentence; much like the reading I did last week, the passive structure makes it hard to locate a subject.  The meaning of introjection is being restored, but then introjection can reveal itself.  What’s more, it’s interesting here that I am talking about the process of introjection, but I’m not really talking about introjection itself—I’m not really discussing its definition or what it means to psychoanalysis in the most “precise” way possible, yet I’m still talking about introjection by explaining how introjection looks like this sentence.  I focused my discussion around introjection, but it seems like I did anything but—I’m no closer to its initial and precise meaning than I was at the beginning of this post.