ABSTRACT
In Metapsychological approaches to exclusion, Jonathan Davidoff aims to situate the “subjective” via an analysis that moves from the representational to the social. His starting point is Piera Aulagnier’s “metapsychology”. Having started out as a member of Lacan’s Ecole Freudienne, Aulagnier later broke with this school in disagreement about the training to form Le Quatrième Groupe. Her years of research in working with psychotic patients formed a basis for her theoretical explorations into psychotic, schizophrenic, and paranoiac thought processes (McDougall & Zaltzmann, 2001). She compares the activity of representation with metabolism, as it transforms originally heterogenous pieces of information into pieces shaped according to the structure of the representing agency, and thereby makes them homogeneous with it. Aulagnier presents a model of the mind with three types of metabolic processes: the primal, the primary, and the secondary. In the domain of the primal the type of representation is the pictogram, in the primary it is fantasy, and in the secondary the representation is the idea or statement. In the primal, the pictogram is analogous to the breast-mouth relationship; an omnipotent, partial, self-created representation. The infant attributes whatever is represented as the Other’s desire; as the mother’s desire to be there and provide, or not to be
there and frustrate. Her absence inaugurates a dimension of lack, thus desire as the effect of lack is established. Henceforth, in the primary, fantasies have the form of scenes attributed to the Other’s desire such as fantasies of a bad or good breast or Oedipal fantasies. Addressing these pre-linguistic elements in language inevitably constitutes abuse of language. The speaking “I” tries to convey the contents of the other two spaces, where representation obeys other paradigms. The activity of representation is pleasurable, either by entailing a state of reunification between the representative and the object represented, where this union is presented as the cause of the pleasure experienced, or such that the aim of the desire is the disappearance of any object capable of arousing it, which means that any representation of the object is presented as a cause of the representative’s unpleasure (Aulagnier, 2001). Following Freud (1920g), the aim of Thanatos would be to achieve an inanimate state prior to any desire and prior to any representation by destroying any object capable of arousing desire as well as its representative. Thus unpleasure, it is argued, has as its corollary and synonym a desire for self-destruction. The aim of the work of the “I” is that of forging an image of the reality of the surrounding world that is coherent with its own structure. It imposes the relational schema that conforms to the order of causality imposed by the logic of discourse on its self-or worldrepresentations. As with the Lacanian subject, to Aulagnier, a symbolic space and discourse already awaits the infant before its birth. The infant is first of all confronted with the mother, the first representative of the Other whom Aulagnier calls “the word-bearer”. The mother projects on to the infant “a spoken shadow”; a discourse addressed to a subject ready neither to understand nor respond to it; the mother even responds in the infant’s place. While this process is necessary for a subject to be integrated into the human order Aulagnier underscores its violent nature and terms this “primary violence”. If it surpasses its necessary character and continues in time, it can become “secondary violence”, where the subject is deprived of the right to think, the main element that would lead to psychotic functioning. The author suggests three levels of approach for the analysis of exclusion. The first is the intrinsic and inescapable exclusion performed on the very act of representation. The second, the exclusion present in the regulation of what might or might not be thinkable in the form of the closure of meaning performed by a social institution, and, last, intra-psychic dynamics in a situation of inter-subjective exclusion. These forms are not isolated from each other
and they intermingle. Ultimately, it is argued, the foreign signification might be felt by the excluding “I” at the most basic level as the cause of its unpleasure; hence the desire for the destruction of that representation. This kind of discourse conceals the projective aspect of scapegoating or victimisation by affirming a natural difference between two separate groups. This is not to say that victims and perpetrators have the same historical, ethical, or political status, but that every perpetrator, in “an-other” embodiment, has itself as a victim.
