Scand. Psychoanal. Rev (2002) 25, nr.

2
Copyright 2002
-THESCANDINAVIAN
PSYCHOANALYTIC
REVIEW
ISSN 0106-2301

Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok The inner crypt*

Maria Yassa
This article is an introduction to the central ideas of Nicolas Abraham and
Maria Torok. The author locates their work in the history of psychoanalytic
thought. Abraham and Toroks thinking on trauma, symbol versus anasemia,
introjection versus incorporation, endocryptic identification as well as womans penis envy are described as theoretical axes around the focal point
constituted by the authors specific concept of introjection; seen as the human
mode of appropriation of the external world which is crucial to the expansion
of the ego through symbolization.

The work of the two psychoanalytic

theorists Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok is relatively unknown in Scandinavia.
Both received their training at Societ Psychanalytique de Paris, within which they
came to work as clinicians and writers.
Both were born in Hungary, but were forced into exile Abraham in 1938, due to
numerus clausus (the prohibition for jews
against partaking of higher education),
Torok in 1947, in connection to World
War II. In the shadow of the Holocaust, the
personal histories of both were touched by
tragic personal loss. Abrahams academic
background was in philosophy; he also
worked as a translator, among other things
of Hungarian poetry. Maria Toroks originally trained as a child psychotherapist. In
Paris they became a couple, in love and
work.
Abrahams and Toroks theoretically
most productive period fell in the sixties
*

and seventies, during which they wrote

most of the articles in the anthology
LEcorce et le Noyau (The Shell and the
Kernel, english translation by Nicolas
Rand), published in 1987. Many of these
articles bear the imprint of thought in opposition, they are sometimes polemical
regarding those Freudian, Kleinian and
Lacanian orthodoxies which in this period
dominated French psychoanalysis. Implicit
in all their work is a trait of resistance to
all doctrinaire tendencies in the theory and
practice of psychoanalysis; they explicitly
sought a radicalization of psychoanalytic
thinking, removed from the authoritarian
trading of knowledge of psychoanalytic
schools.
The aforementioned book, and the study of Freuds analysis of the Wolf man
(1976) present a number of Abraham and
Toroks central ideas. These, however, in
no way form a theoretically closed system,
nor do they aim at an exhaustive map of

Translated by the author.

the psychic landscape. Rather, these ideas

constitute a number of intersecting theoretical axes. I will in the following attempt to
decribe some of them.
TRAUMA AND INNER WORLD
Regarding the fact that the lives of Abraham and Torok were touched by the
Holocaust which is present without being
mentioned in their texts it is not surprising that the phenomenon of trauma and
its repercussions in the human psyche
came to occupy a central place in their
production. Fabio Landa, co-worker and
colleague of Abraham and Torok, points
out that post-holocaust psychoanalysis was
called upon for an answer, a theoretical
adaptation to a human reality more horrifying than any nightmare (Landa, 2001).
Abraham and Toroks theoretical foundations are to be found in Freud and his
disciple, analysand and friend Sandor Ferenczi. For a considerable period in the
history of psychoanalytic thinking, Ferenczi was regarded as a controversial figure,
not least regarding the controversy with
Freud as to the relative importance of real
trauma in the aetiology of the neuroses and
psychoses. Abandoning the idea of actual
sexual intrusion the theory of seduction
Freud was increasingly drawn to seek the
origins of neurotic suffering in the analysands inner world of conflicting sexual and
aggressive wishes and fantasies. Ferenczi,
on the other hand, maintained that any
thorough psychoanalytic treatment sooner
or later reveals a real trauma. The controversy thus came to stand between fantasized versus real intrusion as cause of the
neuroses (Dupont, 2001). Freud came to
revise his thinking in connection with his
articles on the war neuroses, the compulsion to repeat and the death instinct. Ferenczis contribution, however, remained
controversial and was in many respects
neglected. Abraham and Torok consequently took on a translation of the wri-

tings of Sandor Ferenczi into French. Their

concepts constitute a rigorous application
and personal approach to the conceptual
system of Ferenczi.
Perhaps the concept of trauma came to
be considered controversial due to confusion in earlier attempts to define the traumatic through the properties of the intrusive element: - Could the traumatic be
ascertained by the strength or duration of
the intrusion? - Was it to be defined by
sexual or by aggressive invasion? Abraham and Toroks answer is that the traumatic potential is defined as to its effects in
the subject. The traumatic, they claim, is
found in every experience that is impossible to psychically metabolize, i.e. to
know, think, verbalize, symbolize and thereby transform into a bearable aspect of the
subjects experiential world. Such undigestible experiences create wounds in the
psychic web, thereby destroying the individuals sense of coherence and continuity.
Being undigested and indigestible, impossible to integrate into the fabric of psychic life, these experiential fragments are
split off and maintained intact in isolated
psychic regions, parts of the self which
consequently become equally split off.
These ensue as a response to the psychic
work that the trauma has imposed. As dissociated from the experienced self, existing
completely outside the subjects range of
knowledge and mentalization, secret albeit
not unconscious, they bear the impression
of psychic no-mans-land or blind-zones,
around which large segments of the symbolic field of the individual comes to gravitate. The subjective experience is restricted to the sense of harbouring a foreign entity, a something that gives rise to
inexplicable feelings and sometimes to
psychic and somatic symptoms. Being
radically foreign to the ego, the authors
name this conception psychic phantom
(Abraham, 1974-75, 1975).

The phantom can be transgenerationally transmitted, and it is with the help of

this concept that the authors understand the
family secret and its powerful effects: in
the first generation, the secret is something
that must never be revealed, unspeakable
because of the pain and shame it would
evoke. In the next generation it becomes
unmentionable, since the bearer intuits its
existence but is ignorant as to its content.
For the third generation it finally becomes
unthinkable, a something that exists albeit
in no way mentally accessible. According
to the authors, the path of the secret between the generations is no simple matter of
inheritance of secret mental contents;
rather, they claim that the existence of the
phantom in a parent creates a psychically
mute zone, unexpectedly inaccessible and
incomprehensible to the small child, who,
failing to understand the sudden psychic
absence of the parent, attempts to metabolize and is thereby compelled to incorporate this mute aspect of the parent, at the
price of creating a mute psychic zone in
the child. These isolated parts of the psyche are termed enclaves. They are filled
with fantasies of the reason(s) for the parents absence as well as of reparation of
the parents damaged part. It is hence the
splitting of the ego, the creation of enclaves, that is transmitted, and not the contents of the secret per se. Despite the possibility of the secret being benign and
harmless as to its contents, the splitting of
the ego into foreign parts can be devastating (Tisseron, 2001).
The radical alienness in Abraham and
Toroks concept of the psychic phantom
resembles Laplanches (1978) thinking on
the enigmatic message of the parents unconscious received, without being metabolized, by the child. In Laplanches thinking, the external otherness of this message is the very origin of the internal other,
i.e. the childs unconscious. This transmission is necessarily traumatic because alien,
but simultaneously constitutive of the psychic apparatus and therefore inevitable and

developmental, whereas Abraham and

Torok see it, conversely, as conducive to
defensive splits in the ego, thus stressing
the pathological/pathogenic character of
the process.
In short, it could be said that Abraham
and Toroks concept of trauma refers forward, to its consequences in the individual
psyche, they posit that the traumatic is all
that which counteracts the formation of
symbols, and hence of thought.
SYMBOL AND ANASEMIA
The symbol as cornerstone of all thought is another central concept in Abraham
and Toroks production. Abraham has devoted many of his writings to it, often from
a philosophical point of view. He approaches the subject in the theoretically highly
condensed text of 1968 The kernel and
the shell (english translation, 1994),
which has given name to the couples
anthology. The article was written as a
critical discussion of Laplanche and Pontalis Vocabulaire de la Psychanalyse
(1968). The figure of thought of the hidden
kernel and protective shell can be found at
several levels in the articles of Abraham.
First, he uses it to depict the structure
of the human psyche: the innermost kernel
of the psyche; the unconscious drives, the
somatic layer of being, is according to Abraham, radically inaccessible, foreign,
unknown and unreflexive, and therefore in
itself lacking meaning. The shell that protects this kernel carries its characteristics
and acts as its spokesman by way of such
symbols we create so as to give form and
meaning to such enigmatic messages that
emanate from the unconscious. We get to
know ourselves, to contain our wishes and
impulses through that translation which the
shell, or ego, effects. For Abraham, the
symbol is and remains the object of psychoanalysis, as opposed to the unconscious, which is and remains inaccessible. Eve3

ry attempt to explore the unconscious therefore constitutes a contradiction in terms.

It is possible that this point is polemical in
regard to orthodox Kleinianism, according
to which the unconscious is seen as a finite
number of phantasized relations between
internal objects. Abraham argues that the
symbol, as testimony of the analysands
unconscious, can only be understood
within that dynamic relational field that
arises between the analysands transference and the analysts countertransference.
Here is created the space, in response to
the words of the analysand, of a resonance
of complementary images within the analyst, making the symbol intelligible within
that unique couple of analyst and analysand. Abraham firmly disputes any formalization of symbols into systems, or closure
of signification. The symbols that make up
a particular individuals subjective field
are unique and therefore impossible to
generalize; he describes them as condensed
hieroglyphics containing aspects of subjective history. Therefore symbols are regarded as the constructive entities of psychic life.
Secondly, Abraham sees the kernelshell dialectic as inherent to the structure
of psychoanalytic theory as a system of
thought: the metapsychological level of
discourse; its different terms, all denote for
the individual covert and unknown phenomena. Metapsychological concepts such
as Pleasure, Unpleasure, Discharge, the
Unconscious, the Somatic, etc. are all
subjectively unknowable. Abraham denotes them as antisemantic, since they constitute a point of absolute zero of subjective
meaning, but simultaneously, through the
tension created by the distance to the subjective layers of the psyche, or the shell,
they create the very precondition of reflexive discourse. Therefore the concepts
of metapsychology are seen as designified,
and Abraham characterizes them as anasemic. The concept of anasemia is a neologism of Abrahams (c.f. polysemia), approximately meaning suspended significa-

tion, incomplete symbol (Swedenmark,

2001). It simultaneously denotes the function of metapsychology as the protective
shell or ego of psychoanalysis. Most importantly, it captures the inherent paradox
of psychoanalytic theory; that is, the attempt, with the help of language, to comprehend the unknown/unknowable source
of language in the subject.
Meaning arises first on the subsequent
level of discourse. This is made up of subjectively accessible symbolic transformations of nucleic messages. The symbol, in
Abrahams definition, is constructed in the
same way as the symptom, i.e. as a compromise formation of shell and kernel. For
Abraham the clinical theory of psychoanalysis is symbolic/symptomatic. To this
level of discourse belong such concepts as
the oedipus complex, penis envy, castration anxiety, etc., all being symbolic/symptomatic in their structure and thus
comprising manifest and latent levels.
Thus psychoanalysis, as a system of thought, is seen as comprising two and only
two conceptual levels: symbols, or approximations of our inner movements and
unconscous aspects, and anasemias, concepts that point to, denote, but never capture the essence of the innermost, unknown/unknowable kernel.
From this position Abraham takes on a
radical reformulation of a number of Freudian theses. The oedipus complex, for example, is described as the female or male
childs symbolic myth, not only of desire
and prohibition, of the fathers entry into
the mother-child dyad, which is the myths
manifest level; he also conceives the
myths latent level in that which it does not
say; via negation -not kill the father, not
love the father incestuously, i.e. not cathect
the father the oedipus myth can be seen
as a means of confirming separation from
the early mother through negation. The
myth thus conceals this latent aspect, that
is the prohibition against remaining in the
early, exclusive, mother-child dyad. Like4

wise, the Freudian hypothesis of the inherent masculinity/phallicity of sexuality is

reinterpreted in terms of the individual
dynamics of kernel and shell; as the implicitly penetrating, phallic character of the
kernels messages to the shell, in the male
and female subject.
DEPRESSION, OBJECT AND SYMBOL
Some of Abraham and Toroks most
important clinical writings refer to the problematics of depression. The fact that the
central axis of depression is constituted by
the subjects relationship to a lost object
has been described, with different theoretical foci, by several authors.
In Mourning and melancholia
(1917), Freud described how the melancholics self-reproaches, self-hatred and
self-contempt all veil battles of love and
hate with a lost object which has been
withdrawn from consciousness but is retained through identification, a relational
mode which, because of its inherent ambivalence, inevitably includes sadism and
hate.
Karl Abraham (1911, 1924) deepened
this understanding through detailed descriptions of those drive-aspects that characterize the relationship to the lost object in
melancholia and mania. He understood the
link between the cannibalistic colouring of
identification and the for depression/mania
specific symptoms as representing cycles
of incorporation/oral devouring followed
by destruction/anal expulsion of the loved/hated object. These processes occur in
normal mourning as well, but as an intermediary stage, until the subject has introjected the cathexes to that which has
been lost. The obvious futility of these
cycles in the case of the melancholic could
therefore be said to manifest the concreteness of the relation to the object: devouring
is followed by expulsion, nothing is gained, and nothing lost.

Klein (1935, 1940) expanded Abrahams thinking on the importance of orality and incorporation in grief as well as
depression. She traced the common roots
of both in the development of the small
child. For the baby, writes Klein, the difference between loving the object and cannibilastically destroying it is minute. This
gives rise to anxious phantasies of having
destroyed it, as well as phantasies of retaliation from a damaged object. These phantasies, in turn, pave the way to and characterize the depressive position, which has
been thouroughly studied by Klein and her
followers.
Where Freud was first to understand
the subjective contents of depression, it
could be said that the line of thought starting with Abraham and developed by Klein
localize the focus of depression, or the
inability to mourn, i.e. to introject that
which has been lost as well as the reality of
the loss, in the subjects ambivalence toward the lost object, generally, and specifically to the oral-sadistic, incorporative
aspects of the subjects drives. Depression
is hereby localized to the arena of internalization. Torok (1971-74, 1978) objects
that the drive-centered optics of this tradition tends toward an interpretation of depressive imagery which gravitates
around digestion in an overly concrete
fashion. Thus, the image of teeth, for instance, need not necessarily refer to the
wish to devour, nor need the image of the
corpse automatically designate the anally
expelled object. The oral and anal colouring of depressive imagery should be understood not as a direct derivative of the
drives, but metaphorically; as a way of
alerting the analysts attention to the existence of a conservation within the ego, that
indigestible aspects of the relation to the
lost object have been swallowed whole
without being symbolized, and therefore
have not gained access to the experienced
self.

Abraham and Toroks writings on depression, their emphasis on its subjective

contents, therefore constitute a link beween
Freuds 1917 description in which he
mentions, but does not dwell upon the instinctual grammar of depression and later
thinking, which could be said to focus on
its topography or contents. Andr Greens
description of the dead mother-complex
(1983), as well as Kristevas writings on
the symbolic depletion of depression
(1989), are examples of such thinking
which seeks to capture content-related aspects of negative, blank mourning, of absence, lack and non-symbolization, all reminiscent of Abraham & Toroks concept
of the phantom. The link, in my view, is
specifically to be found in their contrasting
concepts of introjection versus incorporation.
INTROJECTION, INCORPORATION
AND ENDOCRYPTIC IDENTIFICATION
The coming into existence of an individual and unique subject entails taking the
world in, allowing it to make its for each
human being particular marks; it is the
transformation of these marks into owned
parts of a unique inner world. Through this
developmental process, a human being
comes to own her/himself, her/his experiences and inner world. That the world is
made up of objects is all the more obvious
in the case of the small child. For the child,
the primary objects, in particular the
mother, are crucial to survival, and are
experienced as parts of the childs self.
This is an accepted truth; psychoanalysis
has studied how this surrounding worlds
characteristics; availability, presence or
absence, but perhaps most importantly,
how the loss of vital objects leaves its
mark on the inner world of the child, and
conversely, how the childs inner world of
fantasies colours the experience of the object world.

The writings of Nicholas Abraham and

Maria Torok specifically concern themselves with the nature of the link between a
subjects inner and outer worlds, that is,
the particular way in which a person transforms the surrounding world into a unique
experiential world. The nature of this link,
an individuals manner of taking in the
world, can either enrich or in a devastating
way deplete subjectivity; in the last case
leading to inevitable estrangement from
desire, and depression.
Introjection is the designation Abraham and Torok give one of these mediating links (Abraham & Torok, 1972). Their
concept originates in the work of Sandor
Ferenczi. They use it quite distinctively
and exclusively, so as to clearly distinguish
it from other modes of appropriation, such
as incorporation and identification. They
claim that the workings of introjection
within the individual are quite different,
and lead to diametrically opposite developmental consequences. They pay particular attention to the crucial difference
beween introjection and incorporation;
they show how in the handing down of
concepts in the history of psychoanalytic
theory there has been a tendency to treat
these concepts as if they were synonymous, or serial, that is denoting different
degrees of the same phenomenon. This,
according to the authors, is erroneous, and
leads to a blurring of the theoretical rigour
of the concept of introjection as it was first
intended by Ferenczi.
Introjection, according to Abraham and
Torok, denotes that gradual and life-long
process through which the small child,
later the adult, comes to own its drives,
feelings, desires; i.e. its particular subjectivity. To love, hate, enjoy, suffer, feel satisfaction or frustration are all manifestations
of the childs cathexes of the maternal object, that is, of the transformation of the
childs autoeroticism into object love, in
metapsychological terms. The childs wishes originally bear the objects name:
6

mother is love, hate, pleasure, pain, satisfaction and frustration. The childs dependency of the object is therefore absolute,
and the function of the object is to assist
the child in the naming of desire, in all its
different aspects. The drives are then superposed with fantasies, images and memories. This means that the caretaker returns to the child its emotions and wishes,
which with the objects mediation have
been legitimized by the verbal code of the
outer world, thereby gaining the right of
residence in the child, as the childs love,
pleasure, etc. The object thus becomes a
connecting link to the childs feeling of
vitality and sense of unique subjectivity.
Because desire is life-long and varying, the
need for introjection is also life-long. As
adults we feel the need of closeness to
others, of cultural experiences and of dreaming, all of which are pleasurable to the
extent that they help us recognize, name
and thus legitimize various manifestations
of our inner lives. With the help of introjection, the mothers absence becomes
bearable: it is not part of the child, of its
desire, that is missing, but its object. Hereby the child acquires the mental capacity to
contain mothers absence as well as her
return: absence and presence become thinkable, and therefore bearable perceptions,
whereas it is unthinkable to lose oneself.
The ultimate outpost of absence which
is the loss of the object through its deceitfulness, incapacity or actual death inevitably entail mourning, but not necessarily
the melancholics conviction of having lost
vital parts of the self. The work of mourning leads to a point where the subject can
reclaim her/his cathexes of the loved and
lost object. It is thereby possible to think:
It is he/she who is dead. Not I. I am alive. A work of introjection has taken place, and the subject is able to return with
hope and love to people in the outer world,
and cathect it.
What happens, then, in such cases where the object is lost before it has helped the

child, or the adult, to a rudimentary appropriation of its drives? Before desire has
been named and claimed? Those particular depressive states that follow have been
thouroughly studied by Abraham and Torok (Torok, 1968; Abraham & Torok,
1972,1975), who have given them a central
place in their joint production. Their point
is that, irrespective of the way in which the
loss takes place, it is in these cases inevitably traumatic (c.f. the authors conception of trauma, p. xx), it creates a gash in
the subjects psychic fabric, since the lost
object is precisely the object which should
have helped the subject to constitute itself,
and to bear the objects absence. The trauma, according to the authors, is not constituted by the loss as such, however painful
it might be, but by the loss of the very person who is cathected with the subjects
maturing drives, and therefore has the
function of mediator to its inner world.
This mediation may have been deficient or
lacking; the child has nevertheless maintained the hope to receive it one day. Definitive loss through death therefore marks
the extinction of this hope, and irrevocably
confirms the impossibility of regaining
various aspects of the maturing drives from
the object.
Faced with the extinction of this hope,
Abraham and Torok describe that the subject resorts to a last-ditch solution: the
fantasy of incorporation. Being precisely a
fantasy, incorporation functions according
to the pleasure principle and the magic of
hallucinatory wish-fulfillment, removed
from the reality of the loss. In contrast to
introjection, which takes place in the presence of the object, in the service of reality
and the expansion of the ego, incorporation
occurs in the objects absence, and is in
every sense compensatory to deficient introjection.
Faced with the trauma of loss; a wound
the healing of which would entail a gradual
and painful work of introjection or
mourning the fantasy of incorporation
7

supplies the subject with an immediate

solution, a shortcut the content of which is
that the subject literally and concretely
devours, swallows the object or parts of it.
The subjects wish is to thereby retrieve its
own desire through magical union with the
object. This wish is secret and felt to be
shameful, because the prohibition inherent
in the loss is neither heeded nor openly
defied, it is evaded.
Abraham and Torok describe how
analysands, after many years of analytic
work and with considerable shame, are
able to describe how, when faced with the
reality of loss, instead of experiencing grief, felt overwhelmed by powerful libidinal
wishes, sexual excitement resulting in orgasm. The authors understand this as a
manifestation of the magic and orgastic
fantasy of union with the lost object, the
intoxication of omnipotently reclaiming
the drives through incorporation, or devouring of the dead object.
This fantasy is also present in cases
where the loss is less complicated, and the
subject has been able to effect a partial
introjection, but then as a temporary solution before the actual work of mourning
sets in.
In the early life of the child, the process of introjection and the fantasy of
concrete devouring are superimposed: eating serves as a concrete depiction of the
childs hungry appropriation of desire.
Gradually process (introjection) and magic
fantasy (incorporation) separate. This takes
place when the mouth, previously filled
with the maternal breast, remains empty,
hungry, and desire is temporarily frustrated. The mouth can then be filled with
words that speak of hunger, longing, fullness and reunion, words for presence and
absence: with the help of thinking and of
words, the mothers presence becomes
possible to evoke, despite her actual absence. The maternal breast is thus replaced
by maternal words. Abraham and Torok

therefore describe the process of introjection as the work of empty mouths, thereby stressing the symbolic nature of introjection, as opposed to the concreteness of
incorporation. Accordingly, things that
concretely fill the mouth (food, alcohol,
etc.) can later be used to fill a mouth whose real lack is for words meaningful to the
process of introjection.
Thus the fantasy of devouring the dead
object serves as a compensation for the
emptiness of the mouth imposed by the
loss. Since this swallowing has taken place
according to a concrete fantasy far removed from associative links to the rest of
psychic life, it can neither be repressed to
the unconscious where it could be elaborated and integrated with other unconscious material through dreaming, slips, parapraxes etc., nor is it accepted by the rationality of the conscious ego. By way of
solution, the dead object is enclosed in an
isolated part of the ego, a kind of secret
tomb or inner crypt. The object is not
mourned, its image is not repressed it is
enclosed in a part of the ego that is sealed
by the repression of the shameful pleasure
of the moment of loss. This inner crypt can
be likened to the previously mentioned
enclave, albeit further sealed by the conserving repression of shameful desire.
Here, the object lives its secret life, and the
subject becomes the guardian of the secret
shared with it. Life goes on, seemingly as
if nothing had happened, and no loss had
taken place. It is as if the subject stated:
Since the dead object has taken my desire,
love and sexuality into the grave, I am obliged, in order to survive, to take the grave
into me. In the article The illness of
mourning and the fantasy of the exquisite
corpse (1994), Maria Torok quotes a male
analysand, a widower since several years:
My wife took my potency to the
grave. She holds my penis there, as
though it were in her hand (p.
116).
Where mourning, i.e. the work of introjection, leads to independence from the
8

object, incorporation works in the opposite

direction: in this case, dependency on the
dead object is crippling, since the dead
object disposes of and commands the subjects drives. This identification is termed
endocryptic, given the secrecy of the bond.
The clinical picture given by the
authors is that of classic melancholia: inhibition, lack of objectal love, depression,
self-reproach, self-contempt. They adhere
to Freuds 1917 formulation that these
manifestations are parts of an ongoing dialogue with the lost object. Freud claimed
that the subject bears the features of the
object as a mask, that the self-reproaches
should be heard as reproaches and devaluations of the dead object, for its betrayals
in life and in dying. The object accordingly
casts its shadow over the ego. Abraham
and Torok proceed a step further and claim
that the dead object has borrowed the subjects identity: such is the tangibility and
secrecy of the subjects fantasy of the objects survival within its self. The melancholic, in his discourse, acts as spokesman
to the lost object: the depression, pain,
emptiness and guilt are all understood as
the melancholic subjects fantasy of the
objects pain of having lost the subject, the
guilt as the objects guilt over having
abandoned its beloved object, the subject.
The voice and presence of the object are
thus conjured in melancholic symptomatology, which becomes the enactment of an
ongoing love story, the image of the objects endless suffering reassuring the
subject of being dearly loved and longed
for, notwithstanding the real loss. Suicide
then becomes a guarantee for the unchanged continuation of this fantasized love story.
The dissolution of endocryptic identification can only take place through the
tracking of the source of the analysands
symptoms, words, expressions and enactments. Who is speaking? Whose symptom? Whose pain? Whose physical suffering? Often, these are part of the fantasy of

the objects ongoing endocryptic life, the

object that has been swallowed whole.
In one of their articles on this subject,
Abraham and Torok describe psychoanalytic work with
a little boy, whose two years older sister had died. She had made
certain sexual advances to the
boy, before dying at the age of
eight. At a cerain point in the
analytic work the boy, suddenly
and inexplicably, began to steal
ladies underwear. This was as
incomprehensible to the boy as to
his analyst, until the day when
the boy, in a slip of the tongue,
instead of giving his own age,
which was his conscious intention, gave the age his sister would have been, had she lived:
fourteen years. This led to an understanding of the boys inner
situation: since his sister concretely lived within him, it was perfectly reasonable that she, reaching puberty, would require ladies underclothing. The sisters
sexual advances, the secret these
had created between brother and
sister, had halted introjection and
consequently mourning for this
boy, who obviously had incorporated his sister within himself,
swallowed her (Abraham & Torok, 1972, p. 266-267, authors
translation).
PENIS ENVY AS INCORPORATIVE
SUBTERFUGE
A less dramatic expression of incorporation as last resource in the face of deficient introjection is described in Maria Toroks 1964 article The meaning of penis
envy in women (english translation
1994). Here, she proceeds from the observation that the analyses of women often
include episodes of hopeless dissatisfaction
9

over the experienced imperfection of the

proper sex, its supposed restriction of possibilities and capacity for pleasure. These
compaints are accompanied by bitterness,
spite, resentment, feelings of emptiness,
powerlessness and depression. These feelings occur in both sexes, but remarkably,
it is only the woman who sees them as
direct consequences of her sex. It is as if
the woman said: My feelings of weakness, passivity, stupidity and dependence,
in short, all my shortcomings, are due to
my being a woman (implicitly, to lacking a
penis). Why, asks Torok, this monumental self-devaluation in woman? Why woman? And why sex? In her article, Torok
embarks on a radical reinterpretation of the
concept of penis envy.

a genuinely psychoanalytic understanding

of the problem. She questions the supposed
inevitability of womans contempt/envy
regarding her own sex. Confronting the
Freudian hypothesis of infantile sexualitys
inherently phallic/masculine character with
(among others) Melanie Kleins and Karen
Horneys observations of the little girls
early awareness of vaginal sensations,
Torok claims that these should lead the
little girl to an early preconception of her
own sex. Therefore the little girls later
discovery of the difference between the
sexes should, if anything, reawaken this
early conception of femininity, thereby
bringing the yet diffuse, if present, perception of the possesion of feminine sexuality
to the fore.

The clinical phenomenon exists, as it

did in the time of Freud. The classical
Freudian interpretation starts with the little
girls discovery of the difference between
the sexes. The girls perception and
knowledge of the boys penis is linked to
the hypothesis that the childs sexuality
girl or boy is phallic, masculine. The
girls discovery that she, in contrast to the
boy, lacks a penis, would consequently
rouse her envy with regard to the boy, as
well as her disappointment and hatred towards the mother, who has given her a
defect, castrated body. As a consequence
of this disillusion with the mother, she
turns to the father, who becomes her loveobject. This would herald her oedipal development. In his work with female analysands, and in accordance with the previous line of thought, Freud seemed to resign
in the face of the seeming unyieldingness
of womens belief in their own sexs biological inferiority. He therefore came to
regard penis envy as primary, a specifically feminine expression of universal human envy in the face of that which is inaccessible.

Torok locates the key to understanding

womans penis envy in the inherent character and emotional colouring of envy. As
opposed to desire, a state of being possible
to live with and in, envy is by nature hopeless, insatiable; objects of envy can always be found, they are always seen as
existing outside the subject, and are perceived as missing things. Envy is therefore
necessarily a smoke-screen covering the
real problem, the actual inner obstacle,
which is the difficulty of appropriating
specifically feminine sexual desire in the
face of inner prohibitions. Therefore
complaints of being a woman, over the
alleged deficiencies of femininity, in short
of the lack of a penis, can go on endlessly,
and that which is lacking can always be
perceived as a thing or appendage of the
womans self, notwithstanding if this thing
is a penis, child, fortune or beauty. What is
efficiently camouflaged is that which is
really lacking; namely the womans free
disposal of desire, the capacity for and
right to satisfaction in other words, the
introjection of femininity. The problem of
being-in-the-body is covered by the subterfuge of ownership of a bodily part, in this
case a penis.

Conversely, Torok claims that resignation in the face of biologistic and sociological approaches constitute evasions from

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This penis is, in the womans representation, violently idealized as to the advantages it is thought to entail: uninhibited
freedom, absence of anxiety, insecurity
and narcissistic vulnerability, access to
wealth and sexual pleasure without guilt.
Torok quotes two women:
I dont know why I have this feeling, says Agnes, when it has
nothing to do with reality, but its
always been like that for me. Its
as if men were the only ones
made to be fulfilled, to have opinions, to develop themselves, to
advance. And everything seems
so easy to them theyre a force
nothing at all opposes they can
do anything they want. And I
simply stagnate, hesitate; I feel as
if theres a wall in front of me
Ive always had the feeling that I
was not quite completed. Something like a statue waiting for
its sculptor to make up its mind
finally to shape its arms (p. 45).
Yvonne recalls always having thought,
when she was a little girl:
that boys succeed in everything, they are instantly fluent in several languages They
could take all the candles in a
church and no one would stop
them. If ever they encounter an
obstacle, they just naturally jump
over it (p. 45).
Envy, the representation of the penis as
idealized thing, combined with the powerful hate and resentment toward the mother,
indicate that what is in question is an anal
conflict regarding the mother, rather than a
phallic-genital one. Envy, which is dominated by acquisitiveness, the perception of
inner riches in terms of things rather than
as states of mind, is known to be a characteristic of anality.
For the small child, regardless of sex,
the anal phase entails training, with the
caretakers who is often the mother

help, to attain sphincter-control, the intentional emptying and holding back of faeces. The anal phase entails the fantasy that
the mother, through her control of the
childs sphincter, commands all that is
inside its body, that this is in fact the
mothers property, to utilize at her will.
For the little girl this includes sexuality,
which at an early stage is felt to be part of
the inside of the body (in contrast to the
boy, who localizes sexual feelings to the
penis, on the outside of the body). The
girls sexuality will therefore also be felt to
be the mothers possesion. The problem
arises when the girl wishes to reclaim as
her own desire, sensuality and awakening
sexual feelings, i.e. her gradual maturation:
her feeling, correspondingly, is of aggressively disposessing the mother of her property, of depriving and robbing her of inner riches. Since the little girl also loves
her mother and is dependent on her love,
this is perceived as infinitely dangerous.
When the girl later, in oedipal love, turns
to the father, thus in addition gaining a
rival in the mother, the obstacles are felt to
be insurmountable. Better then to resent
the mother for not having given her a penis, than to express her real hatred, that
which is the result of forfeiting desire and
sensuality for the mothers sake. Hence
penis envy, life-long because unfulfillable,
is simultaneously a pledge of fidelity to the
mother, a reassurance that the girl/woman
will never feel pleasure and therefore never
separate from her.
Torok imagines that the little girls discourse to the maternal imago could be
described as follows:
- It is the penis-thing that I have been
deprived of and lack, not parts of myself.
- This search is deemed to fail, which I
know. But on this failure I can blame that I
must give up pleasure. Actually, it is you
who command and forbid my pleasure,
since you own the inside of my body. It is
you who have emptied it.
- I insist on the infinite value of the penis-thing, so that you may understand the
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depth of my sacrifice: it is my sensuality

that I have given up.
- For this reason, I hate you and wish to
take revenge, eye for eye, by emptying and
disposessing you. But this I cannot, since I
also love and need you.
- So, I will make the lack of penis my
problem. In this way I can remain faithful
to you for the rest of my life: I cannot, with
my defect body, reasonably expect to feel
pleasure. I can keep secret my longing for
a penis that complements me, because it
would entail my leaving you. Obviously,
masturbation is forbidden, since I then
would risk coming into contact with myself as a female subject, with my desire,
which according to my anal fantasy means
depriving you of something infinitely valuable.

tion at several different levels of the experience of subjectivity, and with the help of
their specific concept of introjection seen
as the key to every aspect of psychic life.
The concept of introjection, due to the
distinctiveness the authors ascribe to it, is
seemingly unambiguous. At closer inquiry,
it can be seen to constitute a synthesis of
Freudian concepts from different points in
the evolution of his thought; it thus comprises the early Freud/Breuer concepts of
catharsis and abreaction, as well as the
later concepts of working-through and
above all, mourning. Due to the inclusiveness of the concept and the life-long duration the authors ascribe to the work of introjection, it is also reminiscent of the
Kleinian concept of the depressive position.

The analysis of womans penis envy,

claims Torok, is often fruitless because
interpreted literally, concretely, and not as
a symtomatic compromise-formation that
can be further deconstructed into conflictual representations. To the extent that
psychoanalysis, in a concession to biologism, regards penis envy an irreducible,
primary entity, it contents to womans confusion of penis-as-thing with desire-asstate of mind. To the sociological objection
that we, as a fact, live in a patriarchy, making penis envy inevitable, Torok points
out that social institutions arise as a solution to problems originating in the interaction of individuals. Where woman, in her
meeting with man, brings with her this
archaic maternal image, the social inequality between the sexes can only be conserved.

The work of Abraham and Torok, however, also comprises a radical approach
to metapsychology. Abrahams distinct
cleaving of psychanalytic concepts into
symbols and anasemias point out the essential futility of approaching the unconscious as if it were open to inquiry. That
which conversely is available and comprehensible are the symbolic transformations
of the unconscious and of the drives. He
claims that the mechanistic deduction of
human subjectivity to the drives as ultimate explanation risks attributing the status of truth to the drives, thereby leading
psychanoanalytic theorizing into the impasse of biologism. These thoughts are
illuminating with regard to such attacks
which have lately been leveled at psychoanalysis, focusing on the alleged datedness
and lack of scientific rigour of metapsychology, not least of the concept of drives.
These attacks can be seen as an expression
of the ever-looming confusion between
these by Abraham described categories;
(subjectively knowable) symbol and (antisemantic) anasemia. The criticism against
psychanalysis in part rests on the misconception of treating the concepts of metapsychology as subjectively knowable.

FINAL WORDS
The central idea running through the
body of Abraham and Toroks work is that
of the prerequisites for the emergence of
subjectivity. The question of how a unique
individual comes into being is only superficially simple. They approach this ques-

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Through the entirety of their work Abraham and Torok pledge their fidelity to
the Freudian canon. At closer inspection,
one wonders whether this does not apply
more to the spirit than to the letter of
Freud. In the final analysis, the authors
effect a radical decentering of psychoanalytic theory, due to the central importance
they attribute to introjection as the crucial
and absolute motor of psychic life. Sexuality becomes secondary albeit important, it
is regarded as one of many aspects of human existence that need to be subjected to
the work of introjection. From this follows
a reinterpretation of large segments of clinical theory. Thus, Maria Toroks deconstruction of the concept of penis envy entails the insertion of a metaphorical level
of discourse. Likewise, in the authors thought on the mute drama of depression, oral
and anal fantasies are seen as metaphorical. With regard to depression, their radicality can be seen in the descriptions of the
violent intrusion of a lifeless object at the
expense of a devastating loss of subjectivity. Their descriptions of the subjective
content as opposed to the instinctual
grammar of depression can be said to start
where Freuds work ends, cutting through
the conceptual confusion which has coloured the field of internalization, i.e. the central question of the emergence of human
subjectivity through appropriation of the
outer world.

Abraham, N. (1968). Lecorce et le noyau.

In LEcorce et le Noyau. Paris: Flammarion, 1987.
--- (1974-1975). Notes du sminaire sur
lunit duelle et le fantme. In LEcorce et
le Noyau. Paris: Flammarion, 1987.
--- (1975). Notules sur le fantme. In
LEcorce et le Noyau. Paris: Flammarion,
1987.
--- (1994). The Shell and the Kernel
(translation of lEcorce et le Noyau). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
--- (1999). Le Verbier de lHomme aux
Loups. Paris: Flammarion.
Abraham, N. & Torok, M. (1972). Deuil
ou mlancolie, Introjecter incorporer. In
LEcorce et le Noyau. Paris: Flammarion,
1987.
--- (1975). LObjet perdu moi. In
LEcorce et le Noyau. Paris: Flammarion,
1987.
Dupont, J. (2001). Repres sur la question
du trauma, Freud, Balint, Abraham et Torok. In Rouchy, J.-C. (Ed.): La Psychanalyse avec Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok.
Tolouse: Ers.
Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and Melancholia. S.E., XIV.

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--(1924). A short study of the
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Green, A. (1983). The dead mother. In On

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Torok, M. (1964). La signification de

lenvie du pnis chez la femme. In
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--- (1971-74; 1978): Deuil impossible,
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--- (1994). The meaning of penis envy in
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Swedenmark, J. (2001). Personal communication.

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Maria Yassa
Upplandsgatan 42
113 28 Stockholm
Sweden
E-mail: maria.yassa.00@net.ptj.se

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