4
Trauma, Depression, and the Sense of Existence

IN THIS CHAPTER, I PRESENT CLINICAL MATERIAL FROM TWO ANALYSES TO elaborate on the theoretical issues I have described previously and to develop the relationship between disturbances of the sense of self-cohesion and traumatic experience. To introduce them, I first take up additional elements of the Lacanian theory of trauma and compare them with some contemporary approaches, using principally the work of Phillip Bromberg, which most lucidly articulates a model of therapeutic action similar to my own. Because histories of trauma and states of depression are frequent (though not constant) accompaniments of complaints of "not having a life," in what follows I explore their connections and suggest what Lacan can contribute to our understanding of them.

As clinicians, I believe we should take seriously Schweder's (1991) anthropological insight that what we call depression is a collapse or breakdown of a subjective intrication of self with world. From a position of unself-conscious participation in the unquestioned "reality" of the surrounding social world, the depressed person suddenly feels oddly decentered. In depression, Heidegger's existential state of "thrownness," with all its discomforting strangeness, predominates. We are thrown like an odd-shaped piece into an arbitrary circumstance that no longer feels right, with a sense of disconnection from who we thought we were. Psychoanalysts, of course, have approached this phenomenon mainly through the notions of loss and helplessness. A human or symbolic object (a person, a social role, a set of beliefs or principles) is no longer available in psychic reality as it had been, with immediate consequences for mental functioning. The idea or image may be accessible, but it has become a shell, losing its power to animate and motivate. The subject may complain of a void, a feeling of impotence, or a total loss of initiative. In Lacanian terms, what seems at stake is the relation of the subject to the symbolic order, especially through the link of signifiers to the body and the real, for which I have followed Green in proposing affect as central. From this perspective, we might hypothesize that depressive guilt in its various manifestations represents an attempt to reestablish agency by seeking to reach the lost object (to be worthy of, to suffer for, to punish one's failures toward, and so forth). The fact that every depression is not characterized by these affects indicates the secondary nature of guilt and its essentially compensatory function (as Fairbairn, 1943, argued¹). People hold onto guilt, said Fairbairn, not so much for masochistic reasons but to preserve the moral authority of the superego.

Although Lacan did not speak much about depression, he can help us better understand what is involved in loss. Here we must take a brief excursion into his view of object relations, or, more precisely, his critique of that theoretical position, based on his well-known model of the three registers of psychic experience: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. In chapter 2, we discussed the tension between imaginary and symbolic relations at some length, the central idea being the grounding of the symbolic in speech, in the polysemous chain of discourse that is, on one hand, open-ended (as opposed to the more static images of the mirror relationship) and, on the other hand, limited or directed by the important signifiers received by the subject from the Other (from the parents, for all practical purposes). Lacan's third register of the real is perhaps most difficult to conceive but can be briefly defined as that which is excluded from symbolization and fantasy and cannot be assimilated into these functions. It refers to what inevitably cannot be captured in symbols of "reality" and to what seems to resist symbolization. For Lacan, the "object" as such does not have a true "essential" existence but is an unstable mental composite of these three registers, each of which attempts to circumscribe it in a different way, corresponding to their respective functions. Thus, the ego, as discussed in chapter 2, as an agency of the imaginary, seeks substantive mirroring objects to affirm its self-definition as a discrete entity, while the "I" expressed in the open flow of verbal communication pursues less definable symbolic objects of desire.

In essence, the subject or "self" (the term can be used here without undue distortion of Lacan's point) is empty. At the place where a signifier of self that could define the identity of the subject might reside in the unconscious (the answer to the question, "Who am I?"), there is only a lack, which fantasy attempts to fill. Narcissistic fantasies define the operation of the ego as constantly attempting to promote a substantial full self, which is by definition illusory. In contrast to this imaginary solution, the Lacanian subject leans on a symbolic identification, which installs her difference from other subjects as another "one."² Following Freud's comments on the origins of the superego and ego ideal, I believe we can extrapolate Lacan's version of symbolic identification to refer to the link between the subject and the surrounding cultural world of meanings by means of which the subject is stitched onto social reality. One definition of depression is that it describes the state of the person following damage to this link.

In today's "postmodern" psychoanalytic climate, the deconstruction of the notion of a substantial self has become a familiar feature of many theories, notably those of Mitchell (1991) and Bromberg (1994) within the interpersonal tradition and Ogden (1994) within the modern Kleinian movement. Bromberg and Kennedy (1997) stressed dissociation of intolerable or unacceptable experiences (commonly those associated with physical or sexual abuse) into sequestered loci of subjective organization, which is thereby rendered multiple. Although there are many points of convergence with Lacan acknowledged by these authors, there are, of course, important differences. The concept of dissociation represents a metaphor, which, if reified, suggests separate discrete selves that, at the limit, do not communicate, as in some theories of multiple personality disorder. Bromberg's appealing formulation of a subject "standing in the spaces" between these loci raises the question of who is standing. In general, spacial metaphors, useful as they can be in portraying a complex set of variables, foster a pseudovisualization of the psyche, which can support imaginary notions of a "thinglike self." On the other hand, Bromberg's principle of "unfreezing narratives" brings things back to where they belong in discursive reality.

Lacan's difficult concept of the Real supplements these formulations. Essentially, the Real needs to be conceived as referring to the body at a level of corporal experience that is pre- or nonverbal. For Lacan, all human experience revolves around an unassimilable kernel of the real, which simultaneously threatens and supports the symbolic order. To recall, language, as a system of differential sounds sliding over concepts to which they refer more or less loosely, carves up the undifferentiated facticity of physical reality. For human beings, "every reality is founded by a discourse" (Lacan, 1972-1973, p. 32). Without a discourse, we have no access to the real "thing" behind experience. Lacan's aphorism that what cannot be symbolized returns in the real,³ resembles Bromberg's thesis of split-off psychic elements.⁴ The hopeful therapeutic side of this conception is that the lost experience, returning in the real as repetition, hallucinations, or as symptoms in the body, can be recaptured through actualization in the transference. The Lacanian analyst, Harari (2001) insists that there is no true analysis, properly speaking, "if acting-out by the analysand does not take place during the course of the analysis" (p. 86). Similarly, Bromberg (1994) concludes, "for traumatic experience to be cognitively symbolized it has to be reenacted in a relationship that replays the interpersonal context without blindly reproducing the original outcome" (p. 538). Although there is an important difference between Bromberg's emphasis on the relational context, with implicit participation by the analyst, and the standard Lacanian approach in which the analyst remains remote and relatively unresponsive,⁵ I cannot make sense out of Lacan's argument without assuming a connection between something coming from the side of the analyst and its counterpart from the patient's unconscious that creates the need to act out. It is clear from Harari's (2001) discussion that the acting out to which he refers results from a failure of the analyst that provokes a more urgent communication on the part of the analysand. For Bromberg (1994), the relational context reproduces the painful situation that had originally led to dissociation, thereby permitting a reopened dialogue between previously noncommunicating parts of the self, with the subject now "standing in the spaces." This picture seems compatible with the Lacanian notion, elaborated in his Schema L, of the subject moving freely around a set of possible positions⁶ in a structure from which he can speak.

Lacan has something novel to tell us in his vision of a "real" that inevitably must escape symbolization. In this conception, the symbolic order cannot map totally onto reality (can never recapture all of the lost experience, for example). Žižek (1992) explains this issue as follows: The symbolic in its many linguistic/cultural versions covers the realm of the real completely, so that no culture has access to a part of reality which is not conceivable for any other (although it may be valued and thought about quite differently). At the same time, every symbolic system possesses a signifier that, like Freud's "navel of the dream," touches upon the unknown and demands a supernatural authorization. The point here for Žižek is that the figure of God, for example, that underpins the entire logic of the Judeo-Christian-Moslem symbolic belongs to the unsymbolized real. God represents a place in the symbolic where the chain of arbitrary signifiers is quilted down to an ineffable substrate of reality (that is, God really exists).

At the level of the individual subject, this kernel of the real also operates as a basic support, not necessarily in the supernatural sense of God authorizing our personal existence (although this is obviously one common construction), but more as a limit-setting foundation. To explain this, we recall Lacan's insistence on our constant attempt as subjects to repair a fundamental human lack and indeterminacy by pinning the flow of discourse to fantasies (including those that structure the body image), which we attempt to actualize. Ultimately, of course, the speaking subject is embodied. The physical body is a constant substrate on which we found our existence, even though we have no direct access to it in the real but depend on signifiers to represent it for us. Beneath the categories supplied by language and metaphor, however, when we bracket our socially constructed and imaginary body images, there remains a trace of the real of the un- (or pre-) symbolized body. Something of the real remains unmastered, imposing its disturbing presence within the symbolic universe. Žižek comments on the dual nature of this trace or "stain" of the real on the social fabric, as at once the guarantee of a sense of certainty of existence (and, no doubt, accounting for it in a way that mere thought cannot) as well as a potential source of disruption of our subjective coherence. We can see the latter effect in the psychotic, for whom "reality," in the form of omnipresent hallucinatory messages and delusional links, constantly threatens to invade private experience up to the extreme of beliefs of body and thought control by the Other. The psychotic subject thus teeters on the verge of collapse into a pure "thing," determined entirely by external, "real" forces. He believes that his unpleasant thoughts and feelings belong to the real, not to his private subjective existence.⁷

A more ordinary example is Lacans (1954-1955) interpretation of Freud's (1900) famous Irma dream. In the dream, during a reception at which his most important friends and adversaries seem convoked to attack and mock his discoveries, Freud peers into the raw throat of his patient Irma, where he glimpses the formless flesh of her inner body, an unmediated confrontation with the real that lies beneath his theory and science. This, Lacan suggested, is where his pursuit of the secret of hysteria (metaphorical speech, symbolic sensations, sexuality) has taken Freud, and he does not shrink (or awaken) from this encounter, as most of us might. It is a direct encounter with the corporeal real beneath Irma's symptom. Every medical student knows the overwhelming inaugural experience of confrontation with a corpse and its uncanny, inert presence, albeit veiled in wrappings and scientific discourse. Funerals, scenes of injury or diaster, wartime trauma, and other limit situations can also produce transient derealization and subjective fraying with a momentary (or extended) loss of landmarks and reference points that ordinarily cover over the real with familiar symbols. Approached from this perspective, loss inevitably evokes the real, either in the sense of a lost object that has supported our existence (the link with a parent or close relation that directly touches our biological life) or of an intrusive reminder of our presubjective, bodily foundation (for example, loss of a function or damage to the body). Symbolic loss, of course, can be considered to involve an underlying (sublimated) body function or a vital tie to the other.

To summarize the Lacanian position, self-maintainance (a sense of embodied existence) entails preservation of a certain equilibrium with the real. The subject must preserve contact with the traces of the "thing" (the unsymbolized part of the real), without being overwhelmed by it. Clearly, the multiple sutures of the subject onto a symbolic framework, which I have defined as operating through identifications in the ego ideal, help contain this trace of the real. Conversely, a failure or weakness of these linkages exposes the subject to destabilization by a real that cannot be contained or represented. Here, the Bromberg-Kennedy thesis assumes full value. Incestuous relationships and physical abuse effectively puncture the symbolic envelope around the child with direct biological force (for instance, by treating him as a pure thing) and thereby blur the distinction between fantasy, symbolism, and reality.⁸ Abuse of this kind amounts to the enactment of a fantasy "in the real" through exploitation of his or her symbolic power by a parent, teacher, or priest. Attacks on persons or signifiers representing the symbolic order can have a similar result of damaging the subject's linkages to affective discourse. Under such circumstances, depression can be an attempt to remove the self from a reality that is assaultive and castastrophic (for example, the "empty" depressions without affect or ideation, see Green, 1975). Another way to describe this is to say that a depressive sense of nonexistence may be protective against total disintegration in the form of madness or a suicidal desire for death and stakes a claim on an existence that has been lost.

The Cases of Mr. L and Ms. G

In the following section, I discuss two case histories to further explore the relevance of these concepts of trauma. Granting the highly inexact fit between theory and practice in psychoanalysis and the limitations of selective reporting of cases, I hope at least to convey how I utilize Lacanian constructs to make my way through analytic work with a group of patients who complain of problems of not feeling intact and present in the world. Although issues that suggest an enfeebled or fragile self arise often and can present in many ways, they emerge with much more clarity in patients troubled by a sense of nonexistence or of "not really being alive." This was the presenting complaint of two individuals, Ms. G and Mr. L, portions of whose analyses I now discuss. These were lengthy treatments, but a few major themes seemed to me to lend themselves to the fundamental questions of "having a life."

Like many of those who speak explicitly about lacking a sense of life, both patients in their initial contacts with me appeared cut off from their affects and expressed detachment and alienation from the world around them. Although depressed, they did not demonstrate the extreme melancholy with which other such "nonexisting" persons, like Margaret Little or the philosopher, Louis Althusser, were afflicted. In some ways, they demonstrate the empty type of depression, a kind of deadness of spirit more profound than a simple state of neurotic inhibition. Ms. G, a 35-year-old professional, had withdrawn from all involvements except caretaking her young child, stating that she felt like "a nullity" and insisting on her ephemeral sense of presence through many similar metaphorical expressions. She wrote in a journal that she shared with me, "Is it any wonder, then, that I don't exist?" Likewise, Mr. L, a married 38-year-old accountant, reported that he was "just going through the motions of life." He felt like a spectator on his own existence, declaring, "I'm not really in life at all."

In thinking about empty depression, I found helpful Green's (1975) description of a protective emptying of the self, in which object relations are attenuated or abandoned in a desperate effort to reinstate a kind of primary narcissism, safe from the threats of intrusion or abandonment by the object. He described a "negative hallucination" of the self, which I take as referring to phenomena like my patients' complaints of nonexistence. They reported as well a general loss of desire in sexuality, personal goals, and life interests, with little available fantasy life. Citing a patient's complaint, Ça ne chante pas (it doesn't sing), Green (1999) commented, "This is one of the most mysterious things: why the playing stops, or the song stops, or the vitality disappears" (p. 57). In Lacanian terms, this state of affairs suggests effects of a traumatic real without symbolic means of expression. In a succeeding phase of the analyses I describe, however, there was a dramatic change, in which the patients relinquished their defensive stance of noncommunication of affects and gradually became overwhelmed by intolerable feelings. This shift produced a rather chaotic interaction that was as difficult to support as the previous emptiness.⁹ At last, after lengthy work, in a third phase, they were able to find means to bear their emotions and to speak about them in a more integrative manner. I regard their impaired capacities to symbolize and communicate affective states (to knit the traumatic real to the symbolic) as the central psychological problem underlying the phenomenology of "not having a life."

Mr. L

Mr. L, whose case I now discuss in more depth, informed me that he could provide the details of a history he knew would be interesting to me, but for him was dead ground, a world of empty facts. His parents, severely traumatized Holocaust survivors who had lost virtually everything, had brought him to the United States at age 11 where they entrusted him to an ultraorthodox Jewish educational system favored by the father. The family lived isolated in a poor neighborhood, and Mr. L spent a lot of time alone, daydreaming. His mother, a depressed and embittered woman, was scornful of Judaism and disparaged American society. These attitudes appeared to extend to her husband, whose religious piety and enjoyment of shared observances with fellow Jews she mocked. The deep schism between the parents rendered Mr. L's identification with this simple, religious man, who died three years after immigrating, problematic. On one hand, he struggled with a devalued image of his father as a weak Jewish victim, based on stories of his abject existence in hiding from the Nazis and of his evident passivity and ineffectiveness both in the new country, where he had difficulty with the language, and in the home, where mother was the dominant and scornful person. Father's progressive illness with rectal cancer when the patient was 14 years old reinforced these images of weakness. On the other hand, Mr. L recognized his father's warmth and humor outside the home and for a long time devoted himself to studies in the yeshiva as his father had encouraged. Ultimately, it seemed that the important signifier, "Jew," was compromised as a support for his symbolic identification, just as the paternal role itself seemed to have been within the household.

Starting very young, at least by age nine, Mr. L was having disturbing sexual fantasies with anal content, sometimes stimulated by pictures of nude victims of Holocoast atrocities. These fantasies aroused enormous guilt and a sense of unworthiness, fueling his compliance with religious ritual as he entered his teens. Despite the reassurance provided by his observances, however, he felt himself to be emotionally abused at the orthodox school where he was educated, developing a consuming hatred for the rabbis there, who seemed hypocritical and sadistic to him, even as he depended emotionally and intellectually upon the structure they provided. One could say that the tragedy of his parents and of the world from which they came was played out in sexualized terms within his restricted Jewish environment. To be humiliated or to be degraded—ultimately by anal penetration—seemed to be the fate of the weak and passive. As he was to express it many times, Mr. L grew up in a medieval world with its earthy sensuality of odors, physical closeness, and mysticism that offered him shelter and acceptance away from his own sad family and the foreign society around them. Yet, looking at the yeshiva through the gaze of the "other," he felt contempt and rage. When he much later made his departure from that world, he saw himself as an alien in modern America with a secret, shameful past. Away from home for the first time at graduate school in his twenties, he pursued intense sexual relationships to combat a deepening sense of isolation and deadness. A sense of despair was never far away, however, and, with a gradual drifting away from his religious commitments, a sense of unreality and of leading an unreal life began to pervade his experience. After graduation, in part to flee from these feelings, Mr. L married a Jewish woman for whom he felt no passion and settled down to lead a superficially normal life. It was out of a growing sense of an inner void and of existing "outside of life" that he decided to seek treatment, ultimately psychoanalysis.

Mr. L did have a fascinating and dramatic history, but he did not begin to come alive for himself or to move in the analysis until our work on transference resistances and resistance to transference (he wanted to protect me and himself from what he knew lay underneath) began to permit what became an ever more violent and archaic expression of his sadistic impulses. The story he told with detachment at the beginning of analysis then became a passionate outpouring of hatred and contempt for his parents and teachers accompanied by a recitation of sexual fantasies, in extreme contrast to his previous flat and depressive demeanor. At this point, his experience of depersonalization gave way to a panicky and desperate state in which, one might say, his imaginary fantasy life became plastered up against his sense of external reality in a way that left little space for symbolic elaboration or differentiation of the two domains. In psychotic-like rages filled with scatological terms, Mr. L vomited or defecated speech that seemed filled with presence and action. Frequently, he rushed from his car directly to my office bathroom toilet. En route to one session, he had an episode of encopresis. "I'm bringing you my shit," he joked. Here, we could refer to a disruptive return of trauma in the real in a concrete fecal form as a part of his own body, linked to pleasure as the unsymbolized lost part object, partly representing a gift to the Other in the transference via an acting out (Lacan's objet petit a, which I will explore in chapter 5, seemed in play). Mr. L's eruption in action was destabilizing and anxiety producing, but also strangely exciting for him. To reverse the Freudian dictum, "Where Id was there shall Ego be," we might say, "Where I thought I was, I no longer am," or, as Žižek (1992) rephrased it, "The story I have been telling about myself to myself no longer makes sense" (p. 162).

In fact, Mr. L described depersonalization feelings after his anal outbursts, and, at times, his diatribes against the rabbis took on paranoid dimensions, a slippage from his usual exacting reality testing. He was "not himself." Driving his car along back roads, where he could stop to relieve himself, he saw the world in a Swiftian vision of excrement, roamed by human cattle depositing their loads. These ravings were not psychotic because they held to a metaphoric frame, one in which the historical symbolic referents were all too clear (cattle, filth, and so forth). Moreover, he could create a kind of grim humor and thereby experience pleasure (which entails a nonpsychotic structure). In this sense, his anal self could be viewed in Bromberg's terms as dissociated and seeking to compose its narrative (directed to the Other in the transference).

Loewald (1980) cited Valery's observation that poetry restores to language "those things that tears, cries, and caresses try obscurely to express" (p. 204). Although Mr. L's diatribes were not in the least poetic, his switch from empty to intensely charged emotive speech illustrates the inherent dilemma of the subject striving to sustain a discourse. Affect may be the flesh of the signifier, yet as pure discharge, it can obliterate the symbolic framework that differentiates self from objects. This is a familiar problem in the treatment of many borderline patients, whose explosions of emotion can be overwhelming and lead to self-destructive action. In Mr. L's case, verbal expression of hateful anal rape fantasies, fusing early memories, parental accounts of the Holocaust, and his own pornographic sexual interests, were not tenable. He felt like "a murderous shit who deserved destruction." Had this process not occured within the safe, if precarious, setting of analysis, Mr. L might well have acted on the suicidal feelings he so often expressed. Conversely, his rigid character defenses against this otherness within himself had left him in an equally untenable position of a deadened, "lifeless nimbleness." In my own countertransference position, initial reactions of fascination and concern with the flood of negative affects gave way to feelings of hopelessness and emptiness, for which at moments I began to hate the patient. My highly invested embrace of the analytic role as one supporting value and meaning carried me through difficult periods, although it may also have restricted my capacity to receive more fully the primitive communications he expressed. These issues are further elaborated in what follows.

Ms. G

Ms. G had similar problems with reality. She dreamed repeatedly of raising her head from a washbasin to confront a featureless and empty visage, as though approaching the status of a desubjectivised "thing," a pure stain of the real. This dizzying sense of losing her self was repeated at certain moments in the transference, when she felt that she existed only in my presence. She had fantasies of transforming herself into a small statuette, which I could carry in my pocket, or at least allow to be left inside my office, almost as if she sought to attach herself to my imaginary body. The analyst, she was certain, did exist, but her fantasies suggested that I represented the omniscient sujet supposé savoir (the supposed subject of knowledge) of Lacan, who, possessing signifiers of his identity, is part of the impossible real.¹⁰ Another way to say this is that the patient imputes to the analyst answers to basic existential questions which would restore a complete self—a perfected self that is not attainable within the limits of the symbolic order.

In Ms. G's case, her tenuous grip on her personal reality was revealed in many ways. A long-term struggle with bulimia had resulted in a roller coaster history of enormous weight gains and losses, so she could joke that she had gained and lost herself dozens of times. "Is it any wonder that I don't exist?" she wrote in a poem. Indeed, she often used drawings and poems to convey a precarious and evanescent sense of her own presence, which seemed belied by a history of acting out in which she could be in turn cruel, seductive, or self-destructive. The attraction she could exercise on men when she was thin fascinated and enraged her, and in the past had often produced sadomasochistic encounters from which she would emerge exhilarated and terrified. In those situations, such as an encounter with a North African porter on a European train or shady characters in clubs, she could be extremely sexually provocative, only to turn scornfully on the men when they moved to respond to her invitation. This had resulted in truly dangerous situations for her. When similar wishes surfaced in the transference, her analysis was threatened and she felt compelled to isolate herself as before.

For example, once entering the office for a Monday session, she began teasing me about the belt buckle I was wearing, using a coy tone I had not previously heard. She asked if she could touch it, extending her hand, and then withdrew abruptly into prolonged silence on the couch. Although I immediately was aware of the teasing scenario she had previously recounted, I was momentarily without words, with the sense that anything I might say would be humiliating or sadistic. Later I jotted down the phrase, "in the grip of a projective identification." Whatever this phrase might actually mean, I have come to think of this type of event as a complex communication using certain cultural stereotypes—a spanking or whipping, a flirtation, a defiance—known to each of us and conveying a set of attitudes involving fear, desire, use of power, violation, and other sensations, perhaps approaching what a young child might implicitly understand but be unable to say. Later, we realized that her seductive behavior was connected to the fantasies of becoming a statuette in my pocket. This worked as follows: As object of a seduction (in the objectifying gaze of the train porter or bar pick-up), she thought of herself as a sexual "thing," an entity to be physically used (perhaps one vital to the user). This restaged a piece of the real, as we will see, and temporarily mobilized a sense of existing as an embodied sexual being (it was not simply a mirroring state). At the same time, it threatened to explode that existence, to plunge it into pure "thingness."

Ms. G spent many sessions ridiculing and excoriating her conventional appearing but rather strange parents, who, by her description, seemed totally incapable of raising children. Her mother was a self-absorbed nonpresence, whom she imagined masturbating under the covers while Ms. G attempted to gain her attention as a child, and father was a scientist who conducted her upbringing like a laboratory project in operant conditioning. Frequent affectless physical punishment, including beatings on the buttocks while he pursued her with a strap, in an atmosphere of pseudoreasonableness, left her with intense feelings of rage and humiliation, which she discharged in sexual fantasies and, at an early age, in sexual acts. For example, she manipulated a younger boy into allowing her to undress him and touch his genitals from the rear and also commanded him to masturbate her while she crawled under a table away from him. To what extent were these behaviors sexualized repetitions of father's punishments and to what extent expressions of her awareness of his unconscious sexual interest in the spankings? There were additional indications from later in her development of father's disguised libidinal pleasure in her body, which were acted out in complicit episodes of physical exposure to him. As an adolescent, she staged a scene suggesting unconscious identification with the mother of her earlier fantasies by masturbating while father talked to her outside her door. She also found herself in situations in which men exposed themselves to her, for example in movie theaters, which she cut school to attend. Some of her teenage behavior had the flavor of a prostitution fantasy. "What does this other desire of me?" seemed to be her constant question. All too often, taking the part of an object of desire was apparently the best she could do to affirm herself.¹¹

Through his repeated, intrusive punishments, Mr. G (the father) may have offered her a pseudorecognition or sense of her own importance to him that she yearned for as a child, but the price was engagement in quasiperverse scenarios of spankings and whippings. In adolescence, she fled his presence, but seemed drawn to reenact their relationship outside the home. At a relatively young age, she married a devoted older man who was protective and made few demands, even when her fear of repetition forced her to keep him at a physical and emotional distance. During the analysis, when the old fantasies associated with her abuse again threatened to spill over into action, as in the incident of the belt buckle or in similar situations with male colleagues at work, Ms. G became frightened and withdrew home to her bedroom. At those times, she needed to communicate with me by writing to maintain contact. It seemed that, at such moments, speech could become once again a pure instrument of discharge (speaking about the belt buckle, for instance, on the model of "verbalizing a fantasy," became equivalent to enacting it).

Course of the Analyses

For both Mr. L and Ms. G, the analytic experience evolved from an initial flat or depressive period into a phase of intense negative emotions, often bound to perverse sexual fantasies. The eruptive surge of emotion and action I saw in this second phase of analysis, as it replaced the initial "psychic death of an ego starved for affect" (Green, 1973, p. 226), could scarcely be contained; it rendered subjective organization or signifying discourse extremely problematic and seeming to threaten a more serious regression. Although the material appeared to point to the way in which their fantasies carried an historical (symbolic) truth, intertwined with an imaginary sadomasochistic scenario, communication of a message or intention in these hours took second place behind discharge into nonverbal behaviors. At times, the "I" of the speaker seemed reduced to its most elemental components, like the scream of a distressed infant approaching the presymbolic real. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the "message" communicated in these sessions had to do with collapse of structure and the ensuing exposure of a point of trauma at which language to speak about overwhelming experiences was lacking.

Ms. G's acting in the session was a signal of danger. The belt buckle condensed a sexual with a punitive reference, reminiscent of Freud's (1919) "A Child Is Being Beaten," which suggests her early history of masturbation, itself an echo of the earlier beatings. In Lacanian terms, the significance of the phallus seemed in play, albeit in the form of a dangerous conflation of the imaginary with the real object, evoking the unmastered trauma. That is, Ms. G's father had transgressed his symbolic role by violating her bodily space, interfering with the paternal function of separation and entry into the symbolic order by imposing what was apparently a perverse desire upon her. The object cause of desire (this concept is further elaborated in chapter 5) appeared to be represented by the penis, but as the organ of a young child's fantasies. The repetitive acting out (in theaters, with strange men, and so forth) seemed to blur the metaphoric status of the phallus (signifying lack) with its imaginary one, representing completion, fusion with the Other, and loss of subjective integrity. For this reason, her acting never led to sexual contact, about which she was phobic, but generated enormous anxiety and seemed to threaten a more drastic loss or fragmentation of self.

In chapter 3, I argued that for Lacan and Kohut, a quest for self-affirmation through a selfobject or mirroring partner (a narcissistic object relationship) was a response to the threat of fragmentation. Most contemporary analysts would probably agree that an empathic stance, which meets this need by mirroring the patient, is a necessary and proper technique in similar situations. Nonetheless, although the selfobject relationship and the imaginary transference that underlies it may appear to stabilize the patient (or her ego), Lacan argued that they do not solve the underlying problem and may even represent a clinging to old symptoms and failed solutions. The therapeutic challenge is how to move beyond the empathic holding of a set of reparative or defensive fantasies without reinjuring a very vulnerable patient. In my attempted integration of Kohut with Lacan, I suggested that an empathic position that fosters reconstruction of a deficient selfobject function might permit the eventual reestablishment of a symbolic link to values and intersubjective relationships (beyond the mirror). I think of this process as navigating the mirror relationship without being stranded within it, and I hope to demonstrate this model in what follows.

Mr. L had for years clung to a ritualized form of Judaism that was apparently not deeply felt but rather supported a kind of false self, which could be understood, in part, as an attempt to mirror his orthodox father and teachers. From a Lacanian perspective, Mr. L identified with the set of images and attitudes that were available to him to define a "self" that was inevitably a defensive or false self. Notably, his Jewish identity was saturated with fantasies of imaginary relationships as either victim or persecutor, which seemed to admit of no alternative life possibilities. He referred over and over again to scenarios derived from his parents' accounts of their experiences during the war or from lessons told by his Yeshiva teachers that involved many versions of a dyadic encounter between a helpless Jewish victim and a persecutor, occasionally alternating with a revenge fantasy. At times during his rages, Mr. L would even assume the persecutory position directly, reviling his former orthodox masters (by whom he had felt mistreated) in neo-Nazi language, calling them filth, swine, parasites, and other racist terms. It was difficult to detect the functioning of an effective ego ideal in this simplified (binary) self-structure or any connection with a symbolic order outside the realm of narcissistic fantasy (there was no symbolic structure within which victim-persecutor roles could be relativized or surpassed). Rather I heard the pleasureless repetition of sadomasochistic stories with their monotonous pairings. Albert Camus (1948) once spoke of the need for modern man to reject both these alternatives by confronting the traumatic realities of the war and eschewing grandiose or utopian solutions in favor of a broader human identity. He was aware of the dangers of taking this step of greater uncertainty and risk, which I would summarize as a potential loss of self upon failure of the pole of ideals (that humanity might not uphold) and a kind of veering away of the arc of ambition toward idiosyncratic fantasy.

Ms. G's case was different from Mr. L in that she had previously established a meaningful role in an occupation for which, despite a lack of formal training, she was gifted. Her duties there seemed to involve genuine commitment and pride in activities beyond her own narcissistic interests. However, this engagement, which could be viewed as a strong connection to Kohut's pole of ideals, became undermined by the progressive intrusion of sexual fantasies about colleagues or clients analogous to Mr. L's, and, at a certain point, she found herself unable to continue working. Like him, she was drawn to the abuser-victim dyad as an imaginary model for all relationships. Just as Mr. L was able to gain a sense of male vitality through perverse fantasies, for example, about victims of Nazi soldiers, Ms. G sought the stimulation of sadomasochistic encounters in which she too felt alive and possessed of a sexual identity. When she could succeed in seducing someone (which she experienced at times as an almost irresistible impulse), she felt a renewed sense of vitality and power, provided she could maintain control and avoid the possibility of an actual sexual encounter. Earlier in this chapter, I explored these actings from the perspective of the Lacanian real (the need for repetition of unsymbolized trauma that brings the body back onto the stage). Fantasy enactments also illustrate the concept of a defensive function of mirror solutions to the threat of fragmentation and loss of self. From this perspective, reciprocal sadomasochistic images of self and object (the mirror relation) provided a kind of stabilization and cohesion for Mr. L and Ms. G, but left them with a sense of inauthenticity and constantly risked spilling over into overstimulation and action (in lived reality, of course, the strands of the three Lacanian registers of Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real are inextricably woven together).

Seen through a Kohutian lens, both analysands demonstrate the difficulty of sustaining self-cohesion when affect, "signifier of the flesh," fails to be mediated and given narrative shape by the symbolic structure of "the pole of ideals" or of the ego ideal. One could see this failure reflected in the profound disillusionment and alienation from human relationships and cultural activities reported by Mr. L and Ms. G. On one level, chronic failures of their primary objects and traumatogenic events had disrupted the establishment and maintainance of these mediating functions, which depend upon symbolic identifications. They expressed cynical and bitter attitudes toward their lives, struggling constantly with feelings of emptiness and meaninglessness. Repeated attacks on their objects through accusations of hypocrisy and falseness characterized a transitional period of their analyses, during which they attempted to convey the terrible void in their existence. Erik Erikson's profound concept of basic trust is again relevant to this situation, particularly in the sense in which his schema requires a continual reworking and reestablishment of trust at every developmental stage. Basic trust is the result of ongoing exchanges with others who respond with adequate recognition and empathy, fulfilling age-appropriate needs for such activity. Over time, parental responsiveness must inevitably strike a balance between developmental misattunements and reasonably good matches and between intrusion and sensitive responsiveness, which, if "good enough," anchor the child in the symbolic world of defined roles, social structures, and individual boundaries established in the family. In an analogous way, my hypothesis of a failed connection to the symbolic order, via its internal representations in the ego ideal, does not refer to a reified or static deficit or to a damaged concrete structure, but is the outcome of a process unfolding in time within a real context. As discussed in chapter 2, the Lacanian perspective privileges the paternal function in developing this process, by opening a symbolic space of triangulation. At the same time (and this may represent an omission in Lacan's writings¹²), it is the good-enough mother who supports this function by remaining herself within the limits of the symbolic maternal role, by her transmission of language and custom, and by establishing a place for the "third," thus validating the father's place.

In the case of Mr. L, the harshness of his denunciation of Jewish orthodoxy and his cynicism about American values and institutions echoed a maternal discourse for which he had become the mouthpiece, an extension of his mother and perhaps a vital prop for her. Even in their infrequent contemporary interactions, he reported feeling either "nonexistent" or as part of some fantasy of hers that excluded all others, including his wife. In her intrusive presence, a transitional space for his subjectivity collapsed, as he moved defensively into what Green (1975) called "a negative hallucination of self" (p. 55) in which he disavowed personal desires or interests and even pretended to share her thoughts and opinions. By negating his presence as a desiring subject, he kept a distance, balanced tenuously between merger and total isolation. This position extended to other important relationships, in a version of Modell's (1984) "sphere within a sphere" (p. 34) set-up, in which the unrelated self is contained by a surrounding object buffered by a protective space. Awareness of his pretense of intersubjective relatedness produced a sense of fraudulence for Mr. L, notably in his marriage, portrayed by him as a kind of parody of a relationship. "I'm pretending to live," he said many times. At other times, however, Mr. L was in the position of the degraded "anal" father—a paternal identification—which could also serve as a bulwark against mother's engulfment, even if putting him in a humiliating posture.

In Ms. G's history, her mother was depicted as oblivious and absent, rather than potentially engulfing, although her fantasy of being used as a masturbatory object had similarities to Mr. L's accounts of his behavior around his mother. I wondered whether her fantasy wasn't constructed in part to provide a connection to a truly uninvolved mother. From this perspective, the sexuality may have been an attempt to inject vitality into an otherwise lifeless relationship (I believe that this would be a correct Kohutian interpretation). Faced with an affective emptiness, perhaps only sadomasochistic enactment offered a simulacrum of aliveness and coherence. Her father, on the other hand, did seem to have a covert desire to use her for narcissistic (autoerotic) purposes, through behaviors that violated his symbolic paternal role. As already noted, prior to analysis, she had abandoned her career and artistic pursuits and further pushed away her husband, focusing exclusively on her young child as giving her life a purpose. We might hypothesize that she was struggling to create basic trust from whole cloth by devotion to her maternal role.

Experiencing the enormous vulnerability of these analysands to any but the most empathic or mirroring responses early in their treatment, I was able to appreciate once again the relevance of Kohut's selfobject concept. For a lengthy period, we remained within this framework, without much possibility for other types of intervention. With time, however, they began to express more safety and comfort in the treatment situation, feeling contained and, to an extent, understood. In retrospect, my holding of painful past memories and my validations of the failure of parental responses to their developmental needs could be viewed as supplying the symbolic points de caption to which I referred earlier. As a witness to things that really happened to them and which exceeded bounds of culturally accepted laws of parental function, I could represent the paternal role (the symbolic function) as a "third." That is, their experiences were not simply subjective constructions or fantasies carrying irrational demands for gratification and denials of parts of themselves (no doubt, such motivations were also present), but dramatized the real absence of a needed presence and a concomitant failure of internalization. The needs of the child for a developmentally necessary parental response are enshrined in common cultural narratives and in ideals (of parenting) that the therapist in a symbolic role inevitably represents.

To lend support to this perspective, in both cases I was soon made aware of the appearance of an idealizing transference that for a time made the treatment a central focus of their lives. Kohut, I suspect, would have interpreted these idealizations as a natural progression from the predominately mirroring transferences that (not without difficulty) had previously been established. This new development also seemed based, at least in part, on preexisting idealized views of psychoanalysis. Mr. L, I later learned, had developed a teenage appreciation for Freud, whom he saw as exposing all the hypocrisy and corruption of the religious and cultural institutions he had come to detest. Similarly, Ms. G recalled that an admired aunt and uncle who had very little tolerance for her parents had made positive comments about psychoanalysis during their infrequent visits. The seeming normality of these relatives was connected in her mind with their interest in analytic ideas, which made them, she said, more human than her rigid parents. Although these idealizations had selfobject qualities (e.g., support of a grandiose self by association with an idealized psychoanalysis), the dominant theme of this phase of the treatment was not grandiosity but a struggle to find people or institutions sufficiently reliable to sustain meaning and value. I suggest that both analysands may have been seeking to reestablish a link to symbolic ideals that had been damaged much earlier in their lives.

The fate of the phase of renewed searching for reliable and worthy objects in the treatment, itself an achievement in the analysis of severely traumatized patients, may depend upon the differentiation of a symbolic transference from the simple idealization of the analyst as a magical figure (the imaginary transference). That is, the analyst may stand in for ideals as symbolic Other without pretending to incarnate them (for instance, in her own narcissistic fantasy) and thereby falling into the countertransference error of perpetuating a grandiose, ideal ego in the mirror. The analyst, if he or she practices correctly, does not simply present his or her own identity and values for mirroring, but holds the place of the Other, that is, of the larger symbolic framework, which is the ground of subjectivity. Just as parents assume symbolic roles that transcend their individual qualities, there is a global structure of signification standing behind each particular analyst who represents those wider functions of the Other in the symbolic transference. These include the rules of secondary process logic, personal boundaries, and recognition of differences of gender and generation that provide a matrix upon which unique historical and biological variables play out. Lacan regarded the analyst as the vehicle for the patient's reengagement in "the universal discourse" of intersubjective speech into which he or she must insert himself or herself to find a place as subject. Kohut saw the importance of idealization genetically as a stage in this process of organizing a "self" that needed to be relived in the transference. Clearly it is crucial how the analyst handles an idealizing transference—not to reject or interpret it away, nor to collude unconsciously with it. Both errors may occur in the course of treatment and are usually apparent only retrospectively, when they can, with good fortune, be interpreted.

An important aspect of idealization is the growth of trust in the analyst, who experiences a greater sense of freedom to express himself or herself as his or her interventions begin to be heard as well-intentioned and constructive. Trust develops within the transference if the analyst does not exploit her role, although, of course—as clinicians have learned from years of experience—there will be lapses and "enactments" in which past disappointments are repeated in modified forms. Subsequent working through of betrayals of trust may then lead to a revival or refinding of values and ideals, often personified, as in the example of Freud for Mr. L. The ideals, one might say, were always already there within the symbolic (cultural) universe, which contains vocabularies representing the possibilities for human experience (qualities of mothering, for instance) and representations of affective response (depictions of loving behavior). These might exist as formal narratives like legends or myths, as ideal types, or as familiar scenes portraying character that enter into the consolidation of the ego ideal. To a great extent, the symbolic function must operate through a set of stories and traditions that circulate in the cultural discourse as a reservoir of common knowledge. These provide a stock of relational models against which the subject can measure and judge his own personal situation and through which his private feelings can be communicated to others who share these narratives. From this perspective, the vocabulary for complex affects, beyond simple discharge or display phenomena, is regulated by a symbolic function that defines the cultural sense of emotions and thereby permits a coherent discourse. To again cite Lutz (1988): "Emotion is about deep commitments to particular other persons and to seeing events in certain ways" (p. 216).

Mr. L saw the major events of his life in drastic terms with a sense of betrayal, humiliation, and rage that seemed to pass indistinguishably from his parent's experiences as deracinated Holocaust survivors to his own childhood. Their torments merged in the retelling with his own experiences of a bitter and depressed mother and a defeated, passive father, as well as of his confining religious life in the ultraorthodox school. His mother's repetitious stories of atrocities and displays of books and drawings from the ghetto were constant presences in his life. It seems likely that her traumatic past had impaired her capacity to sustain a symbolic maternal role (she apparently had no real faith, nor much remaining "basic trust," nor meaningful ideals for herself), just as the father seemed to abdicate his. Here we could speak clearly of transmission of trauma. In Ms. G's history, the cultural context was a less obvious factor, although we knew that the paternal grandmother had been quite disturbed, and there was a sense of hiding secrets to protect social appearances. Yet her sense of betrayal was equally powerful, as a result of the father's sadistic practices and mother's noninvolvement. Speaking directly about what was actually occurring in their lives was almost unknown in the two households, a commonly reported feature of families of patients suffering traumatic childhoods. Meyerson (1991) emphasized this linguistic deficiency in his papers on childhood dialogues. He stressed that the ability to use traditional analysis depended on the early experience of speaking about emotionally significant events with parents. With patients who have lacked such opportunities, reliving and reenactment are the order of the day. The analyst's task is then to help them move beyond defensive mirroring and idealization to a broader symbolic understanding of the elements in play in their specific histories.

Having experienced elsewhere the impasse that can arise in a static mirroring transference, I tried to remain alert to this potentiality with Mr. L and Ms. G and be attentive to any indications of an acceptance of idealization with grandiose or magical qualities. As a general principle of technique, it is important to maintain a position that is at once attentive to other messages than those contained in the imaginary discourse directed at the selfobject and, at the same time, remains sufficiently flexible and empathic not to lose contact with the patient. While attempting to maintain this rhythm of responsiveness to unconscious communications in counterpart to participation in the imaginary role, the analyst is likely to disappoint at some time, and a reaction of narcissistic rage may then ensue. In such situations, the patient has experienced a failure of attunement with a preferred self-image or self-state, and this loss of the mirror threatens his sense of cohesion. Earlier, I emphasized the dangers of slipping into a subtly sadomasochistic enactment by which the patient may attempt to avoid this risk of fragmentation. Certainly there are mutual elements in all enactments and, in this case, I have always felt that there must be some, at least transitory sharing of the threat by both analyst and patient. Something from the side of the analyst that has entered into the selfobject transference can also become destabilized as the mirror relation breaks down. At such moments, enactments can erupt around seemingly mild exchanges that may take on enormous significance for the analysand.

On one occasion, Mr. L, arriving at the wrong time for his appointment, knocked impatiently at my office door. He perceived my disconcerted reaction as one of disdainful rejection. At the same time, he was bringing a book that he thought would interest me, thrusting it forward in the doorway as he realized I was with another patient. I was left with feelings of intrusion, combined with a kind of excitement and annoyance, as well as a strange sense of loss around the unknown book, now withheld, which had been proferred. Mr. L felt humiliated and subsequently expressed outrage and a sense of betrayal. When I commented on my sense of intrusion during the session and linked it with the larger theme of similar interactions of this kind in the past, both within and outside of psychoanalysis, he became reflective and sad. He said that he had wanted to share something important he believed I would appreciate and to gain reassurance that I was "really there" with him, standing for "something real," not simply acting as the vehicle for another humiliation. This by now familiar scenario of object seeking derailed by anal fantasies (being repudiated as an "undesirable shit") brought into the foreground Mr. L's wish for a "real" and trustworthy connection, succumbing once again to the repetition compulsion. Of course, I had to acknowledge that in my annoyance at his intrusion (and from deeper reactions of which I was finally becoming aware), I had certainly humiliated him. There was no mistaking my part in the sequence, and this admission seemed to bring tremendous relief to Mr. L. As is typical after such exchanges, he was now free to explore his own contribution to the incident, which he could readily see. Through offering me the book, he had created a kind of test situation, which had a high probability of failure, but succeeded in its true goal of bringing the issue of betrayal squarely into the analysis. My recognition of the impact of my reaction at the door helped frame his question of trustworthiness and the "real engagement" he sought, as well as clarifying the childhood traumatic situation for him.

In retrospect (in the après-coup), I could now understand the early explosive phase of the analysis as an analogous repetition of trauma. It seemed to me that in my earlier silent struggle with feelings of hatred, as though personally assaulted by Mr. L's nihilistic attacks, I had been unable to respond sufficiently to his extreme distress, perhaps reliving with him an early maternal failure. I found Ferenczi's (1933) moving description of the traumatic effect of a "confusion of tongues" quite helpful in this regard, in the sense that the analyst's failure to respond at the level of the patient's demand can repeat an earlier traumatic situation. Mr. L had been speaking in terms of his early reactions of fear and danger to the transmitted parental traumas, while I was hearing the violent rantings of a neo-Nazi thug. I hypothesize that my interventions at the time, along the lines of an attempt to demarcate past reality from the present, may have been barely enough to hold him in the analysis.

The issue of "reality' arises frequently with these vulnerable patients, who seek a new and not artificial relationship but who have trouble with the dangerous otherness of the object. Of course there were many possible implications of the book incident with Mr. L, of which I would highlight the symbolic failure of his father to pass on a symbolic heritage of Judaism or simply to sustain the paternal function in the transference (the book was, in fact, a biography of Freud). The performative offer of the text suggests an actualized fantasy of Freud occupying the vacated space of the ego ideal, as well as an attempt to install a circuit of reciprocity in which he might learn the nature of his desire from me (my analytic notebook seemed implicated). There was also a reference to his childhood history of anal humiliations in family exchanges (around cleanliness, odors, and bathroom intrusions), about which he had spoken many times. As a boy, Mr. L had been aware of thinking his parents had motives for such behavior that were hypocritically disguised or secret—mother wishing to humiliate him, for example. The book in this respect was a signifier, a metonymic junction of different chains of associations leading in many directions. On yet another level, the book as a concrete link between our outstretched hands suggests the concept of the objet petit a of Lacan, the fantasmic lost hyphen connecting and uniting the subject to the Other. In this sense, it could carry a part-object (fecal) meaning of a forbidden enjoyment associated with the object. For all these reasons, Mr. L's expressed wish for a new and authentic friendship was constrained and ultimately undermined by disavowed fantasies that touched the core of his psychic life.

Pressure on the analyst to express what she "really" thinks or to "be real" usually carries the hope for a more authentic relationship, even though it may feel controlling to the analyst or like a misguided effort to actualize a fantasy of an ideal (impossible) situation. Ms. G also spoke about her desire to make her treatment "real" (as opposed to her sense of the "phoniness" of most professional roles and the artificial flavor of interactions in her family). It was easier for her to expose hypocrisy or pretense than to reflect on what she was truly seeking through the set of wishful fantasies she attempted to impose upon me. Usually, analysts attempt to explore this kind of demand, hoping to maintain the field of desire and engagement open, without rejection or undue frustration to the patient. Ferenczi emphasized that analysts who behave in an excessively "clinical" or detached manner may retraumatize a vulnerable patient in urgent need of more frankness and emotional contact. I knew from the beginning that I had to take Ms. G's concerns about "being real" to heart and, hoping to learn more about what was going on, encouraged her to convey her impressions of my behavior and demeanor (which, of course, did not seem so artificial to me). At the same time, I tried my best to remain within the rhythm of movement just suggested and to support the "analytic third," by asking her to reflect on what she was asking of me.

Inevitably, there was a similar enactment with Ms. G that proved important for her analysis. At a certain point, she began to display all the appearances of a negative therapeutic reaction, becoming more hopeless and suicidal with each passing week, without any obvious explanation for her downward spiral. I was very concerned, but also frustrated and impatient, as though it were almost a willful refusal on her part to improve (I was aware of this attitude or my part). Uncertain about what was going on and alarmed by her deepening depression, I decided to raise the suggestion of consultation with a psychopharmacologist. Ms. G was quite outraged, leaving the session early. The following day, she interpreted to me that I was now behaving like her mother, who in her preoccupation with her daughter's physical appearance had sent her to a diet doctor after an adolescent suicidal gesture (the mother believed that her weight was the issue). My proposal of a consultation was thus another betrayal of trust, which we were fortunately now able to reconstruct. My fantasy that she could will herself to recover and use her talent to create a better life for herself proved to be part of this complex reenactment. I, like her mother, expected Ms. G to actualize my (objectifying) image of her as an attractive, talented woman (daughter). Her deepening depression may have been a reaction to finding herself once again, in her analysis, in prey of the other's desire.

As Ms. G and Mr. L were gradually able to gain more distance from their painful memories after many years of work, they became more able to speak thoughtfully about their experiences without recourse to action or emotional explosions. Slowly, space began to clear for the symbolization of these intolerable states. I saw such changes as a result of a lessened need to rely on the mirror and of the reconstitution of a symbolic space, which opened up possibilities for creative elaboration of affects, now connected to formerly disavowed aspects of their own fears and desires and to a richer understanding of the behaviors of others. Instead of a repetitive fixation around specific traumatic memories and the stereotyped roles associated with them—of which I have highlighted those of victim and persecutor—they could begin to entertain other possibilities for relationships. They seemed freer to undertake a productive reevaluation of the past, notably of transgenerational patterns and continuities that had undoubtedly shaped the early years of their lives (they also accorded me more freedom to explore this history with them). Mr. L, for example, obtained information about his grandparents and great grandparents and contacted other Jewish natives of his country of birth. He also took an interest in the histories of other traumatized peoples. Gradually he spoke of his current relationships in more subtle and sensitive ways, including dialogues with a sympathetic rabbi whom he had encountered. This was in contrast to the earlier monotonous invocation of the cruelty and hypocrisy he found in most institutions. His descriptions now took on a complex moral coloration, with the more primitive inflections assuming a newly humorous form.

Mr. L began to speak about possible explanations for his parents' behavior and for his own emotional states as a young adolescent when his symptoms first appeared, permitting him to locate his perverse fantasies within broader cultural contexts. For instance, his forbidden desires to penetrate, degrade, and dominate, along with their more deeply unconscious passive counterparts, had been accompanied, to his great shame, by a visual image of a Nazi SS trooper and accompanying notions of virility and strength. He was able to trace some of these images more directly to his mother's stories and to photographs and drawings he had viewed as a boy. Eventually, he could speak about them in terms of his own life history without a disruptive enactment of shame, excitement and rage. The Nazi images seemed to involve a complex fusion of narcissistic rage at numerous deprivations and injuries and of a feeling of dirtiness conveyed by his mother toward him, the messy anal child, and toward Jewish men in general. Her obsessive concerns with cleanliness were close to an open fascination with fecal products, an interest that had found a strange counterpart in her encounters with the German invaders in their polished uniforms and their racist tracts about "vermin," of which she had kept copies. Her deep resentment of a controlling, orthodox father, who had limited her education, made her gravitate toward Czech friends, only to feel deeply betrayed by them during the war years. Mr. L's existence as a subject grew out of this soil, with a kind of fecalization of thought and identity. His later guilt-ridden fantasies, which seemed closely related to his mother's preoccupations, expressed both vengeful wishes toward her and submission to her desires. He attacked her viciously at certain moments, only to turn to identification with her against her father and the Jews. Here we could glimpse a certain fundamental satisfaction (a jouissance) in his participation in the maternal discourse, which united them in a scorn for lesser mortals.

As he explored these connections between his relationship to his mother and signifiers of the Nazis, the emotional charge seemed to diminish and the memories and images became a history with sad but logical consequences. Mr. L began to express more affectively modulated concerns, like how to get what he wanted from his life, to deal with his unhappy marriage, and to make his Judaism meaningful. The question of what he could get from me without the reduction to anal incorporation became important, as well as his differentiation from me as someone who did not possess the richness of his Jewish experience, which might after all be worth something. He now saw this cultural tradition as a substantial possession that could be shared with many others. At this moment in the analysis, there was a shift in the transference-countertransference, as I experienced a letting go of his fantasy that I carried the knowledge to restore his lost sense of being alive, which seemed to be returning on its own.

Ms. G had a more uneven course in this regard. Despite considerable work on her tendancy toward a sadomasochistic sexualization of her relationships, there were aspects of the erotic transference that were never adequately resolved. She did, however, initiate some important activities that could be regarded as straightforward sublimations of desires that had previously been expressed mainly through acting out. Her pervasive cynicism, always verging on contempt, gave way to enthusiasm for a new professional career, enabling her to find more satisfaction in life outside analysis. She observed that she saw things less in terms of victims and abusers than as a series of complex circumstances affecting families that might even be approached with cautious hopefulness. With these developments and the concommitant loosening of the rigid identifications of mirror relations, she demonstrated more freedom to move between different subjective positions. Her associations showed more openness and play, with greater tolerance of separation and "otherness" from her objects, a change that she recounted in her marriage. We could see that a certain fascination and pleasure in teasing, using, and hurting was a substitute for a more reliable connection with people. As the pull toward these destructive interactions diminished, people remarked that she was easier to be with. At the end, a certain equilibrium of affective presence seemed to have been attained.

Having a Life

I began with a question: How does a person sustain a life and maintain a position as a speaking subject? Although clearly many things were going on in these two long analyses and the results did not indicate that any miracles had transpired, some answers are suggested by the examples of Mr. L and Ms. G. At first, a flow of affect necessary to animate the tension arc of vital speech seemed lacking, and the state of psychic deadness referred to by Green was palpable in their sessions. After this initial lifeless period, the global repression broke down and, in a second phase, powerful manifestations of emotion appeared. At this point, the failure of Kohut's pole of ideals or of a suturing of experience to the symbolic register (to a network of signification), as proposed by Lacan, seemed in question. Affective expression was raw, barely translated from somatic experience into subjective mentalization, apparently re-producing earlier states of helplessness and "subjective annihilation" (Little, 1990), pulling them toward the real of dedifferentiation. At this point, solely enactment of sadomasochistic fantasies seemed to provide coherence by stabilizing images of self and other around these primitive affects. I have discussed this phenomenon in terms of a clinging to an imaginary or mirroring relationship as a solution to the threat of fragmentation, although at some cost.

Trauma appeared to be an important thread in both analyses. I have understood it in terms of parental failures in symbolic holding, which had left these analysands caught between an intrusive overpresence of the object, usurping their subjective space, and an intolerable absence and deadness of the object. I have hypothesized that this oscillation between abuse and abandonment damaged basic trust and thereby interfered with symbolic identification and establishment of an ego ideal. In general, one could hypothesize a vacillation or even the abdication of a symbolic role at crucial times by the parents that, apart from specific destructive acts, produced the trauma. Verbal expression of these experiences of betrayal by parents emerged through analysis of enactments of similar experiences in the transference, reopening issues of trustworthiness and worthy ideals. My unconscious participation in these reenactments, of which I have discussed the book episode for Mr. L and my psychopharm referral for Ms. G, provided a context in which the issue of betrayal of trust could be addressed. The presenting picture of disillusionment, alienation, and cynicism may have been a defensive response to such traumas, conveying in the transference both an appeal and an attack on the ego ideal. Behind this presentation, a fantasy structure of a kind of enjoyment and satisfaction (jouissance) in an impossible joining the too absent or too present object could be discerned.

Placing the question of sustaining a sense of aliveness in Lacanian terms, I highlighted the embeddedness of my analysands in two forms of imaginary discourse, one expressing a "negative hallucination of self," the other adhering to objectified images of self as victim. In the absence of a symbolic link to social narratives, values, and principles, they were unable to pursue desire through fuller speech and through more reciprocal intersubjective relations. I have situated the analytic work (selectively, of course) within the framework of reconstitution of the functions of an ego ideal or of reestablishment of links to the "pole of values" within the symbolic order, which allow for variegated affective narratives. Both analysands were increasingly able to carry their desires, hatreds, and fears into dialogue with others, perhaps with a link to the Other in Lacanian terms (entering into the universal discourse instead of captation by images). First, there was an expanded ability to interact in the analysis and to consider what was being said by me without the exquisite sensitivity to disconfirmation in the mirror. Gradually there was increased interchange with others, without loss of the vital (and painful) content of their histories. In this way, affect as a "signifier of the flesh" could fuel a reestablished tension arc, binding private self experience to the cultural symbols that alone can provide a symbolic anchoring for the fragmented self.

¹In this disturbing and original article, Fairbairn addressed the structuring function of guilt, which by implication belongs to the depressive position of whole object relations. The attack by a primordial bad object harkens back to Freud's (1895) speculations in the "Project for a Scientific Psychology" on the origins of the infant's apperception of the other. Where the primary object is poisonous and hateful, in Fairbairn's conception, the sense of hope or goodness is destroyed and the subject feels menaced by death. Lacan's critique of Fairbairn (uncharitable, as usual) emphasized the imaginary nature of his approach, in which everything seems to reduce to fantasy, rather than building on his innovative model to show how the tie to the good object (to the symbolic Other) must be preserved at all cost.

²Lacan's psychoanalytic approach to understanding the nature of the subject partook of a philosophic tradition that had been renewed in France through the seminar of Kojeve on Hegel's phenomenology, translations from Heidegger, and the competing reading of these authors by Sartre, who emphasized in a more closely argued way the thesis of the emptiness of the self. The innovation of Lacan was to center his approach around the nature of language. With his concepts of the unitary trait, which marks the subject, and of the binary signifier, instituting the signifying chain, discussed in Seminar IV (1956-1957) and Seminar VIII (1960-1961) among other places, Lacan develops and greatly modifies Freud's (1921) relatively minor point on identification based on a single feature (einziger Zug), mentioned in "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego." For Lacan, the single trait taken from the father is represented by a signifier that installs a symbolic identification.

³Lacan (1964) discussed trauma in relation to the real in his discussion of the Wolfman case. "At the origin of the analytic experience," he said, "the real presented itself in the form of that which is unassimilable in it in the form of the trauma, determining all that follows and imposing an apparently accidental origin" (p. 55).

⁴Bromberg also referred to Ferenczi's work, which is at the heart of the paradigm shift in contemporary analysis toward attention to the analyst's experience and participation. Lacan treats their metaphor of "split off" in terms of a failure of symbolization (Kirshner, 1994).

⁵See Apollon, Bergeron, and Cantin (2002) for a strong presentation of the rationale for and clinical application of this position.

⁶In my article "A Postmodern Realism for Psychoanalysis" (Kirshner, 1999), I attempted to elaborate this point. A self cannot be "restored," but the subject can enjoy the freedom to move around the determining structure that sustains him. I discussed Lacan's depiction of the subject in schema L in "The Concept of the Self in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis" (1991).

⁷In his seminar on the psychoses (1955-1956), Lacan presented his metaphor of the point de capiton discussed in chapter 2. These "quiltings" of signifiers to signifieds anchor the normal subject to symbolic reality and presumably to the real as well (to a real referent).

⁸This puncturing of the symbolic could be a psychoanalytic definition of trauma, as I proposed in an earlier paper (Kirshner, 1994).

⁹Green relates states of empty depression to "decathexis," meaning a withdrawal of psychic energy (libido). "When you undergo depression," Green (1999) writes, "you understand that what you thought were normal processes in life are loaded with cathexis. . . . All this means that you have a permanent flow of energy that you put into these activities. . . . You really discover cathexes when you have lost them" (p. 55). For Lacan, the term "desire" derives not from the Id, but is contingent on language and inherent in the metonymy of symbolic activity as it creates the speaking subject. Biological energies or drives are then utilized secondarily. Green's view retains the corporeal "juice" of the drives, but has the problem of the shaky scientific status of Freudian biology. Lacan grounds his theory in what is specifically human in language and culture, but does seem to lose touch with the phenomenology of lived bodily experience that he mistrusted as a guide.

¹⁰The analyst in the symbolic transference represented the Other for Lacan, holding the place of the supernatural signifier of the real—the place of the master who "knows" (see Zizek 1992, pp. 102-104).

¹¹The notion here is that she had never been recognized in her own desire, which, I hypothesize, lay in the wreckage of a collapsed symbolic structure, damaged by early abuse.

^l2This would have to be an understatement. Granted Lacan's aim to formalize psychoanalytic theory and avoid sentimentalizing or assuming some kind of natural harmony in human relationships, his replacement of the figure of the mother by the Other and by the concept of das Ding and his subsuming mother issues under the retroactive effect of castration produce a striking effect of scotoma. Barzilai (1999) nicely documented this evacuation of mother from Lacanian theory.