Trans(litter)ating Abraham and Torok: A Pictorial Topography

In Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia”, he delineates the two by defining the latter’s relationship with mania, which he’s able to clarify through an analysis of the object relations among the unconscious, the ego, and the love-object which has been lost.

Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s The Shell and the Kernel, Volume 1, edited and translated by Nicholas T. Rand, incorporates parts of the full body of the two authors’ work interspliced with Rand’s introductions, histories, and analyses in order to present one possible evolution of their thoughts concerning the structures, methodologies, and clinical practice of psychoanalysis after and often in conflict with Freud as well as their theory of transgenerational trauma.

“Incorporation is the refusal to reclaim as our own the part of ourselves that we placed in what we lost; incorporation is the refusal to acknowledge the full import of the loss, a loss that, if recognized as such, would effectively transform us.” (127)

The word “import” in this passage crystallizes the metaphor of exchange that is at work throughout Abraham and Torok’s writings, particularly when they directly address the nucleoperipheral concentricity of the Shell and Kernel schema (which they draw out in language on page 90 and which I’ve drawn out for you in diagram above).

The Oxford English Dictionary gives two senses of the word “import”: importance and importation. In the first sense, “importance” further implies “significance”, “signification”, and “amount” (of worth, for instance) as well as the word’s opposite, “insignificance”. In the second sense, “importation” further implies “introduction”, “bringing in”, as well as its opposite, “exportation”. In one word (and perhaps even in one syllable, as I’ll address later), “import” establishes a metaphor of signification and exchange (the signification of exchange, the exchange of signification, both implied here). I think a shipping metaphor will work well to unpack this sentence and the larger essay. (Perhaps I anasemically take my cue from the standard exchange medium of incorporations: were they to need a significant amount of important objects exchanged, they’d definitely ship.) In this shipping metaphor, those objects which amount to or are significant enough for exchange must be transported to a rendezvous point, a passage along which an appropriate vessel can carry them through the shipping channel. The two poles of the shipping channel, the here and the there, are not the same but are similar enough that a vessel, properly shaped and sized, can accommodate both ports. Were a vessel or an object on the vessel be of the wrong amount (stacked too high, extended too wide, too heavy, etc), the shipment could make the entire journey without sign of trouble only to get stuck dragging the bottom of a shallow harbor or wedged testing the boundaries of a narrow canal.

In Abraham and Torok’s depiction of the related processes of introjection and incorporation, the exchangeable objects are desires, demands, drives, urges, memory traces, fantasies, perceptions, affects—languages developed for specific use in certain “places” within the psychic Envelope of the self. In the “Kernel” (90) or “primary organic” (91) center, drives and urges, in order to be legible to the unconscious, must be translated not only into another language but also though a specific site of introjection (a concept itself imported from Ferenczi). To travel from the Kernel through the Periphery, through the Envelope, and into the Unconscious, the messages must be translated through what Abraham and Torok call “emissaries” or “mediators”—memory traces—which assist in “frontier” crossing and in the “constant activity, repeating endlessly the alternation of its duplex discourse” (92). Translated from drives to desires, and through an introjection site which allows for such translation to occur, the messages, unobstructed, would move through a site of introjection on their way to another Envelope, another Periphery, another layer of the concentric self. The whole route can also be reversed so that the exchange is an ongoing system of importation and exportation through which the self maintains construction.

If obstructed at any point along these corridors of translation and exchange, the objects can get stuck outside of translation, so to speak. Introjection fails to navigate them properly to their destination, and the mark of that failure is what Abraham and Torok call “incorporation”.

Incorporation is the refusal to reclaim as our own the part of ourselves that we placed in what we lost; incorporation is the refusal to acknowledge the full import of the loss, a loss that, if recognized as such, would effectively transform us. In fine, incorporation is the refusal to introject loss. The fantasy of incorporation reveals a gap within the psyche; it points to something that is missing just where introjections should have occurred. (127)

“The part of ourselves that we placed in what we lost” is the object to be transported this particular sentence. That the self has “the part” points to the concept of a divisible self, each of its parts transportable, translatable, and transposable. The self it describes is a fragmented self capable of willful partitioning and displacement. The self here, fitted into the metaphor, could be seen as the entirety of the shipping network, each of its vessels and objects a part of it and under its control; so long as the introjective mechanism works, the parts are the whole; but when even one object is lost or one vessel misdirected, a gap is left open or the whole system has to adjust for the loss.

In the sentence, it’s not the words “import” or “part” which gets repeated; it’s “loss” and “refusal”. Actually, the word “loss” is repeated twice only after the first iteration of the word, “lost”. That is to say, the “loss” shows up again and again as present only once it has already been “lost” in the past. Although the sentence highlights temporality and spans of time when it moves through the past and presence of loss as well as through the implied duration of the two refusals—to reclaim and to acknowledge—the text is careful to point out twice that “Incorporation is the refusal . . . incorporation is the refusal”. Incorporation, then, is all about control and mastery, about getting to decide what comes in and what goes out, but it’s a mere fantasy of control. The fantasy of incorporation is that nothing has to be lost when the loss is re-fused, that no translation must take place, no introjection. The fantasy is that the refusal has left no refuse. That all has been incorporated. Were we to recognize the loss “as such”, we could export the refuse of the fantasy, transforming it and ourselves. I refused to draw incorporation into the pictorial below because the fantasy of the incorporated loss is secret: “Reconstituted from the memories of words, scenes, and affects, the objectal correlative of the loss is buried alive in the crypt as a full-fledged person, complete with its own topography” (130). The incorporated loss is, in our shipping metaphor, in Davy Jones’ locker, lodged in the ocean floor, refused.

And now, a tentative translation analysis. The OED has this etymological information on the noun form of the word “import”: “< import, v.” It’s not surprising that the noun refers to the verb, as the word “import” carries with it an active and mobile connotation. The verb form of the word has a more interesting and perhaps telling etymology:

Forms: Also ME inp-, 15 emport(e, ymporte, 15–16 importe.

Etymology: <> importā-re to carry or bring in, < im- (im- prefix¹) + portāre to carry. Also, in part, <> emporter, Old French en porter, Latin*inde portāre to carry away.

Etymologically, the word “import” carries with it a sense of personal responsibility and ambiguity as to whether it’s coming or going. The note about the im- prefix details exchanges that took place in Latin, French, and English between im- and its close relative em-; it’s still okay in French and in English to use either of the prefixes in some instances. A la lettre, the word “import” becomes further embedded and more anasemically bound to Abraham and Torok’s discourse. The action of importation is the action of anasemic words as they are borrowed – letter for letter – from another discourse into Abraham and Torok’s or any discourse to mean another thing, as all imported (that is, introjected and/or incorporated) objects will take on new meanings with each new discourse which envelops (Envelops) them.