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Abstract
Nicolas Abraham (1919–75) rethinks the symbol as the very fabric of being. The author examines how this notion challenges the limitations of Husserl’s phenomenology and its reliance on a transcendental ego that can apprehend hyletic data in its purity. For Abraham, the symbol is worldly and resonates with its emergence from intersubjective foundations to constitute subjectivity impurely as a Dyad. It is born from trauma, a cut that differentiates Ego from Other but also generates anxiety (and Time) to keep its operation unfinished. This projection into the future implicates intention (agency) that builds upon origins that are opaque and immemorial. Abraham denotes this origin as the Arche, conceiving of it as a primary symbolism that renders the traumatic cut but without temporal or structural guarantee. It is a beginning that is beyond the phenomenal, requiring exploration through a radical transphenomenological perspective derived from psychoanalysis. Here, trauma is both the debilitation of the symbol and (potentially) the impetus for its transformation, (re)iterating structures of subjectivity that have greater complexity and degrees of freedom. This is, of course, as circumstances allow. Abraham’s construction of symbolic subjectivity is stratified as the symbol negotiates levels of existence from basic Ego-integration to sophisticated social organizations, none of which can individually capture its operation. The journey to a fulfilling existence is riddled with obstructions that could be physiological, relational, cultural or otherwise. The author highlights this multivalence as a complexity that must be carefully navigated – especially when there is suffering – by attending to the symbol and its resonances where creative transformations cannot be mapped in advance.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The titular theme of that year was “Entretiens sur les notions de genèse et structure” [Discussions on the concepts of genesis and structure]. For a list of presentations, see http://www.ccic-cerisy.asso.fr/genesestructureTM65.html.
2 While it is not my specific focus here, Derrida’s many engagements with Husserl’s work have deconstruction of the transcendental ego at their heart. Both “‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology” discussed here and his later text Speech and Phenomena, published in 1967, put the presence to self of the transcendental ego in doubt through questions of historical, worldly constitution in the former text and Husserl’s use of temporality to overcome the structural statis in phenomenological method in the latter. It is worth noting that similar criticisms of Husserl came from within phenomenological circles. Social phenomenologist Alfred Schutz also highlights the limitations of Husserl’s monadic focus on the transcendental ego in explaining intersubjective phenomena in his 1958 paper “The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity in Husserl.”
3 Abraham’s example is that sociocultural conflicts can lead to headaches.
4 There are clear parallels here with Derrida’s logic of deconstruction that performs similar distortions of Husserl’s theory of time and space in the ideal unfolding of the living present that endures despite changes in its appearance.
5 Abraham borrows Husserl’s notion of Lebenswelt to describe the subject’s experience of the everyday world.
6 Palingenesis features as an idea in both “Réflexions phénoménologiques” and “The Symbol,” as a reference to the notion of biologist Ernst Haeckel, already discredited before Abraham’s use of it, that in evolution, the development of the individual (ontogenesis) recapitulates the development of the species (phylogenesis). Although mindful of its limitations at the biological level, Abraham develops palingenesis through his transphenomenal method as a repetition (or more strictly, an iteration) in the individual of an ancestral legacy, although the reference points for this ancestry move fluidly (and therefore indeterminately) between biological, social, familial, psychological and historical registers. The most transformed and influential articulation of this is no doubt his notion of the phantom introduced in the final years before his death.
7 Reflecting on the limitations of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology in “The Symbol,” Abraham notes similar problematic trends repeated in the psychoanalytic canon, especially when the reality of the primal event is sought. Despite Freud’s equivocations as to the truth value of the Wolf Man’s primal scene, he still fell into this trap.
8 It is important to note here Abraham’s capitalization of the term Ego and with it other key psychoanalytic concepts that he draws on in “The Symbol.” This follows the French psychoanalytic tradition of denoting its changes to everyday terms by capitalizing them and is the springboard of Abraham’s consideration of the complexities that psychoanalysis introduces to language and to thinking in “The Shell and the Kernel.” There seems to be some inconsistency in what Abraham considers properly psychoanalytic terms in “The Symbol,” especially those he introduces such as the kernel. For both clarity and to continue Abraham’s arguments I have tried to maintain his formatting as faithfully as possible.
9 We can include in these first stages notions like Freud’s thing presentations and Klein’s formulation of phantasy.
10 Anasemia is so important to Abraham’s oeuvre that it denotes his collected works by Aubier Flammarion in French. The term combines ana from the Greek for “up, back, again, anew” with a derivative of the Greek sēma pertaining to the production of meaning, prompting meditation on the foundations and broader implications of this process.
11 Abraham does not make this explicit connection to the mother–child duality in “The Symbol,” perhaps because it is too exemplary and would render an otherwise complex theoretical argument in terms that are too literal. He does, however, explore this in later texts, especially “Seminar on the Dual Unity.” My text “The Subject in Transmission” provides a useful commentary on this.
12 The connection here to Freud’s notion of leadership in “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1921) is clear, although this is now reframed in terms of a nodal point that draws together the potential for more sophisticated operations than it is down to charismatic personality and the surrendering of ego of their acolytes.
13 This case centres much of Abraham’s later work with his reconsideration of the Wolf Man’s primal scene as a complex and indeterminate process of reconstruction in his text, co-authored with his partner Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word (1986).