The Shell and the Kernel

by Abraham, Nicolas; Torok, Maria; Rand, Nicholas T.

• ISBN13: 9780226000886
• ISBN10: 0226000885
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-09-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

This volume is a superb introduction to the richness and originality of Abraham and Torok's approach to psychoanalysis and their psychoanalytic approach to literature. Abraham and Torok advocate a form of psychoanalysis that insists on the particularity of any individual's life story, the specificity of texts, and the singularity of historical situations. In what is both a critique and an extension of Freud, they develop interpretive strategies with powerful implications for clinicians, literary theorists, feminists, philosophers, and all others interested in the uses and limits of psychoanalysis. Central to their approach is a general theory of psychic concealment, a poetics of hiding. Whether in a clinical setting or a literary text, they search out the unspeakable secret as a symptom of devastating trauma revealed only in linguistic or behavioral encodings. Their view of trauma provides the linchpin for new psychic and linguistic structures such as the "transgenerational phantom," an undisclosed family secret handed down to an unwitting descendant, and the intra-psychic secret or "crypt," which entombs an unspeakable but consummated desire. Throughout, Abraham and Torok seek to restore communication with those intimate recesses of the mind which are, for one reason or another, denied expression. Classics of French theory and practice, the essays in volume one include four previously uncollected works by Maria Torok. Nicholas Rand supplies a substantial introductory essay and commentary throughout. Abraham and Torok's theories of fractured meaning and their search for coherence in the face of discontinuity and disruption have the potential to reshape not only psychoanalysis but all disciplines concerned with issues of textual, oral, or visual interpretation.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Note on the Translation	xi
Introduction: Renewals of Psychoanalysis	1	(22)
Nicholas T. Rand
I INSTRUMENTS OF THERAPY
Editor's Note	23	(4)
Fantasy: An Attempt to Define Its Structure and Operation	27	(14)
Maria Torok
II FEMININITY IN PSYCHOANALYSIS
Editor's Note	37	(4)
The Meaning of ``Penis Envy'' in Women	41	(38)
Maria Torok
III TOWARD A CONCEPTUAL RENEWAL OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
Editor's Note	75	(4)
The Shell and the Kernel: The Scope and Originality of Freudian Psychoanalysis	79	(28)
Nicolas Abraham
IV NEW PERSPECTIVES IN METAPSYCHOLOGY: CRYPTIC MOURNING AND SECRET LOVE
Editor's Note	99	(8)
The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse	107	(18)
Maria Torok
Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation	125	(14)
Nicolas Abraham
Maria Torok
``The Lost Object---Me'': Notes on Endocryptic Identification	139	(18)
Nicolas Abraham
Maria Torok
The Topography of Reality: Sketching a Metapsychology of Secrets	157	(5)
Nicolas Abraham
Maria Torok
Self-to-Self Affliction: Notes of a Conversation on ``Psychosomatics''	162	(9)
Nicolas Abraham
Maria Torok
V SECRETS AND POSTERITY: THE THEORY OF THE TRANSGENERATIONAL PHANTOM
Editor's Note	165	(6)
Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud's Metapsychology	171	(6)
Nicolas Abraham
Story of Fear: The Symptoms of Phobia-the Return of the Repressed or the Return of the Phantom?	177	(10)
Maria Torok
The Phantom of Hamlet or The Sixth Act, preceded by The Intermission of ``Truth''	187	(24)
Nicolas Abraham
VI PSYCHOANALYSIS OF THEORETICAL DISCOURSE
Editor's Note	207	(4)
Psychoanalysis Lithographica	211	(15)
Nicolas Abraham
Unpublished by Freud to Fliess: Restoring an Oscillation	226	(8)
Maria Torok
A Remembrance of Things Deleted: Between Sigmund Freud and Emmy von N.	234	(19)
Maria Torok
VII PSYCHOANALYTIC COMMUNION
Editor's Note	249	(4)
Theoretra: An Alternative to Theory	253	(4)
Maria Torok
Selected Bibliography	257	(2)
Index	259