ABSTRACT
Sandor Ferenczi’s Thallasal theorizations may be read as granting mythic form to the two economies Montrelay posits as at once incompatible and structuring of the feminine unconscious. M. Montrelay’s work on the structure of the feminine unconscious, to which Ferenczi’s formulations grant mythic resonance, alongside the late work of J. Lacan, suggests a possible orientation for the theorization of a woman’s covenant with the word, one which it is incumbent on a woman to forge if she is to emerge from the pain of primary narcissism by something other than a scream, an appeal to the Other for succour. The catastrophe in question is the primeval drying up of the oceans, Ferenczi writes, were nought but fish in an oceanic world where satisfaction was complete, and when the seas ran dry their organs could not breathe. For Ferenczi, Freud writes in his obituary for his Hungarian disciple, ‘the characteristics of psychic life preserve traces of archaic alterations in physical substance.’.
