The Symbol

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Notes

1 “The Symbol: Or Beyond the Phenomenon” translates perhaps Nicolas Abraham’s most important early text “Le symbole: ou l’au-delà du phénomène” originally published in 1962 and collected in his posthumous 1978 collection L’Écorce et le noyau (Paris: Aubier Flammarion). In this translation, footnotes without attribution are from the original text. Where I have added notes to clarify more ambiguous terms or unfamiliar concepts in the translation, I begin these with the initials TG.

2 TG – This translates Abraham’s term in-détermination better than the more obvious “indeterminacy” as it suggests a more active process of rendering the symbol indeterminate, that will be more useful as the term is developed here.

3 TG – This is a term coined by Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) to describe an object-fetishism that he saw as pervading a realist scientific approach. In a different context it is also used to describe the fiction of Alain Robbe-Grillet (1953–2008) who uses obsessive descriptions of inanimate objects to produce narrative effects instead of the more typical tropes of characterization, temporality and dramatic action.

4 TG – Imaginal here translates imaginale in the original. It refers to the transphenomenal processes underpinning the emergence and understanding of the symbol that cannot be reduced to object or subjective explanations. Unlike Abraham’s use so far of “imago” as the inner and unconscious representation of a key figure in infancy, this is not a realm of images (as one meaning of the term suggests) although it explores the operations through which conscious images emerge. A more useful understanding is taken from the metamorphic processes of lepidoptera where the imaginal stage describes the final emergence of the butterfly or moth in its adult form (also the imago). This analogy bristles beneath the surface of Abraham’s text as the metamorphosis of lepidoptera suggests processes that are hidden (in a chrysalis), in which there is a complete decomposition of the caterpillar form through cellular collapse and the re-emergence of a butterfly or moth as a brand new and superior form. The movement between indetermination and redetermination in the symbolic operation parallels this transition, with the avenues of higher potentiality being inscribed in silences in the lower form – in lepidoptera, dormant imaginal cells are activated to form the butterfly from the organic matter of decomposition. Transposed into the realm of psychoanalytic listening (clinical and theoretical) the metamorphic process is more uncertain and difficult to locate using the usual tools of subjective or objective enquiry – its processes are both hidden and indeterminate. Abraham describes the new senses and capabilities required to engage with the symbolic operation in terms of resonance and unconscious communication and the always ambiguous reveries that result.

5 This resonance was described as the basis of aesthetic experience in a talk given at Cerisy-la-Salle for a conference on “Art and Psychoanalysis” in 1962 (see Abraham’s text “Psychoanalytic Aesthetics: Time, Rhythm and the Unconscious,” Rhythms: On the Work, Translation, and Psychoanalysis (Stanford UP), pp. 107–32).

6 TG – These terms refer to Husserl’s phenomenology and generally denote enigmatic things and mechanisms that form the (unconscious) substratum of phenomenological experience.

7 TG – Abraham is again drawing on his expertise in phenomenology (especially Husserl) here. The distinction between descriptive and genetic phenomenology Abraham uses is a distinction between the classification of various mental phenomena and a search for its cause. The genetic horizon of phenomena is precisely this turn towards causes – or more specifically causal operations.

8 TG – Note how Abraham capitalizes Arche at this point. French psychoanalysis capitalizes distinctively psychoanalytic terms as standard practice, a point that Abraham explores in detail in his 1968 text “The Shell and the Kernel” (The Shell and the Kernel (U of Chicago P, 1994), pp. 79–98). We can see here the change from a phenomenological to a psychoanalytic-transphenomenological register, as also happens with related terms in this text such as Dyad, Ego, Other and Anxiety. I will maintain Abraham’s uses of capitalization in every case in this translation.

9 TG – In his text “Systems Theory, the Key to Holism and Reductionism,” BioScience, vol. 24, no. 10, 1974, G. Becht notes, “Biology is […] above all, the doctrine of ‘real’ intra-individual living systems. Transbiology, therefore, becomes the doctrine of extra- and interindividual living systems” (573).

10 TG – The term “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) here is borrowed from Husserl and has two senses. The first is to denote the set of beliefs that form the intentional background of a subject from which his or her actual acts make sense. Secondly, there is a social dimension to this that is increasingly important in Abraham’s usage. Here, the lifeword denotes the way members of a social group create a common “homeworld” that can be looked upon as a system of cultural and linguistic meanings that provide an a priori framework for interpreting the world according to categories and objects provided by this structure.

11 See “Parenthèmes,” in Abraham’s “Pour introduire l’Instinct filial,” L’Écorce et le noyau (1978), p. 335.

12 We can observe that in our terminology, the genetic centre corresponds with the “germ,” the external horizon with the “soma” and the synoptic centre to the “nervous system” of biologists.

13 TG – For Husserl, when we perceive an object, we see only one aspect, or “profile” (also “adumbration”) of it. Our intention, however, is directed toward the object as a whole; the kernel of what is actually presented. Our perceptual profile, therefore, anticipates other possible profiles of the object that could be perceived (inner horizon) as well as other objects that formulate the environment of what we perceive (external horizon). With every “given” of perception, co-givens are also anticipated that create the intentional fullness of object-perception. Perceptual experience of an object is not only constituted by what is given but also by expectations of how it will look from different profiles.

14 TG – Abraham uses “la signition” in the original text as a neologism to refer to how the symbolic operation creates meaning and references points in the lifeworld so that potential conflicts can be better anticipated. It also denotes how the symbol can manage these conflicts should they occur.

15 TG – I translate Abraham’s “tiers” here as “thirdness” (and sometimes “third term” when it suits the grammar) to denote its lack of a specific object, or at least the supplementary status of that object – the term is functional. Thirdness has more recently become a particularly prominent and useful designation of the triangular structures that proliferate in psychoanalysis and stretch beyond a simple Oedipal dynamic. A generation after Abraham’s writing, thirdness has been developed in a way that is pre-empted here, especially in the work of André Green (see his On Private Madness (1986)).

16 TG – In his description of the phenomenology of aesthetic experience, Étienne Souriau (La Correspondance des art (Flammarion, 1947), pp. 45–72) determines that the study of aesthetic objects must proceed according to three degrees or planes of existence: the phenomenal (how it appears to the senses), the reic and the transcendental (an appreciation of the inexpressible content). The reic is the world of being and things that art produces through its sensuous play in bringing qualia together in different harmonies.

17 TG – The nomination that issues from cultural language and carries its rules and conventions. Readers will hear the resonance between Abraham’s Nom du Tier and Lacan’s nom du père introduced in his 1955–56 seminar, The Psychoses. Lacan’s term denotes both the function and prohibition of the father-figure in the Symbolic Order and becomes more detached from his person as the concept is developed. As such, the resonance with Abraham’s Nom du Tiers is more than just phonological, although Thirdness here is opened beyond the subjection of individuals to cultural patriarchy and has a distinct creative function as well as the imposition of law.

18 TG – The authority figure that haunts the scene (the Third Term) and institutes rules, accepted meaning in language and, ultimately, the superego plus the others in the scene (the mother and father) who are positioned under its sign and with whom the child can now identify less chaotically.

19 The ability to sublimate deserves the name of instinct insofar as it results from an indetermination operating from the genetic centre and it requires complements (inhibitions) from the external horizon (of the social group). Furthermore, according to our hypothesis, the sublimation inserted into sexual development cannot be separated from the sexual instincts, precisely for which it would alter its course in the direction of indetermination.