Birth of A Body, Origin of A History Piera Aulagnier

Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96:13711401 doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.
12345
Birth of a body, origin of a history1
Piera Aulagnier
Preamble
The traveller who roams the mythical world will be certain to come across
soothsayers and, among them, a number of illustrious blind persons. The
latter will tell him about the punishment awaiting anyone who, by fulfilling
a prohibited desire, has dared to make knowable, manifest to himself and
to others that which should have remained unknown, latent. But their
divinitory power might suggest to the same traveller that true knowledge
demands that we free ourselves from this screen constituted by the visible.
Either we trust in the sensible world, believing that reality conforms to its
appearance, or alternatively we refuse to allow ourselves to be trapped; and
the best thing, then, is to eliminate the trap itself.
If we followed this advice literally, however, we would very soon realize
that human reality, rather than mythical reality, can only be grasped by
means of this sensory activity which serves as a selecter and a bridge of pas-
sage between psychic reality and those other spaces from which it draws its
materials, beginning with its own somatic space.
Before discussing the function that the body will have as a mediator and
an object of interest in the relations between two psyches and between the
psyche and the world, let us consider the three forms of existence under
which reality (and thus the body) presents itself to the human being, the
fourth being given to us by the compromise that will necessarily result from
it. I am employing the term reality here in its least theoretical sense and the
most natural for human thought: for the subject, reality coincides with the
totality of the phenomena of which existence is self-evident. This does not
mean to say that every subject recognizes the same ensemble of existents,
but that, conversely, only this ensemble will have a place in the construc-
tions of each and every subjects reality.
But these constructions, whether they are the work of the primal, primary,
or secondary processes, also teach us how the psyche reacts to the presence of
any phenomenon that has the power to modify its affective state. By trans-
forming the latter into a psychic event, this power imposes on the psyche the
self-evident nature of its presence. Every act of knowledge is preceded by an
act of cathexis and the latter is triggered by the affective experience that
accompanies this state of encounter, always present, between the psyche and
the milieu physical, psychic, somatic that surrounds it.
1
Translated by Andrew Weller. Translated from the French: Aulagnier, Piera, Naissance dun corps,
origine dune histoire in Corps et histoire, Les Belles Lettres, 1986. pp. 99141
Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis

1372 P. Aulagnier
Psychic reality, as Freud defines it, attests to the successive and changing
effects of its encounter with this milieu whose modifications will signal to
the psyche its reactions to the encounter. The psyche will decode these signs
by using different keys depending on the moment when this inter-reaction
occurs. We will see at the end of this preamble how the primal process deals
with these first relational signs or these judgements of existence, whose
effects it will suffer even though it is unaware of the exteriority of their
source, before considering first of all what happens as soon as the psyche is
able to recognize the existence of an other and of a world separate from
itself. The phenomena that oblige the psyche to take into account the con-
cept of separable (not fundamental, according to Freud, for psychic func-
tioning) could be the manifestations of desire operating in the psyche of
those other occupants of the world, or the consequence of the laws organiz-
ing the socio-cultural space, or alternatively of those that govern somatic
functioning. These manifestations are heterogeneous, but the psyche will
not only include them in the same term of reality but it will begin by posit-
ing one and the same relation of cause and effect between them. In the
organization of this fragment of reality that he inhabits and invests, as in
the functioning of his body, the subject will first read the consequences of
the power exerted by the psyche of these others who surround him and who
are the privileged supports of his cathexes.
Whence the first formulation that the child will give himself of reality:
reality is governed by the desire of others.
As long as one is still in early childhood the subject retains the conviction
that everything that happens or does not happen in his (or her) environ-
ment, everything that affects his body, everything that modifies his psychi-
cal experience, attests to the power that he attributes to desire (his own or
that of his parents), that these events, however different they may be, are
the signs whereby an avowed or hidden desire, permitted or prohibited,
assumes a visible form in his eyes. (An infantile point of view that is still
active in the adult, whatever agency he substitutes for the parents: each time
an event in the world strikes and disturbs our existence, chance rarely has a
place in the register of causes. If the subject is ready to recognize the natu-
ralness of the event, he will not, however, recognize the naturalness of his
encounter with it.)
But once childhood has been left behind, the subject will not be able to
cohabit with his partners in one and the same socio-cultural space if he or
she does not adhere to the consensus respected by the large majority of its
occupants concerning what they will define as reality. Without this consen-
sus, no society whatsoever could preserve itself; if he or she is unable to
share it, the subject will find him or herself excluded.
That is why the subject takes into consideration this second formulation:
reality conforms to the knowledge that the dominant knowledge of a culture
gives of it.
Let us remember that this is not a new observation, nor does it date from
Freuds era: we have known for a long time that there is no natural reality
for man, any more than there is a purely sensory reality. What appears on
the retina of the eye that sees a tree is no doubt identical, but what the sub-
Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96 Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Birth of a body, origin of a history 1373
ject perceives will be very different depending on whether he recognizes in

this tree a vegetable species or the depositary of the spirit of an ancestor.
The analyst is best placed to know that he or she will never be able to know
from the inside what this other subject sees.2
It is to Freud that we owe this last formula: reality, ultimately, is
unknowable.
A formula which, this time, is the observation of a theoretical way of
thinking that has examined from every angle what it could know of reality
and which has come to accept that a remainder eludes indefinitely this
acquisition of knowledge.
This remainder, which is located beyond what is knowable, seems to me
to be close to what Lacan defined of the concept of the real (r eel), differen-
tiated from that of reality. The real, I would say, paraphrasing another of
Lacans expressions, is that which resists reality as reality for and of the
human order. But in this human order we must also include the analyst and
recognize that, like every subject, he is subjected to the limits that the nat-
ure of his psyche imposes on the activity of his thought, on his wish to
acquire knowledge.
But let us leave the theoreticians and return to the layman: the two for-
mulations proposed above suppose, as we have seen, that the psyche has
been able to make this fundamental step which allowed it to recognize the
existence of an elsewhere. But what was the situation before this moment?
As long as psychic space and somatic space remain indissociable, as long as
no external existent can be recognized as such, everything that affects the
psyche, everything that modifies its own felt experiences, will correspond to
the sole postulate of self-procreation. The psyche will attribute to the activ-
ity of the sensory zones the power of generating its own experiences (plea-
sure or suffering), its own movements of cathexis or decathexis and,
consequently, the only self-evident fact that can exist at this dawn of life.
During this time that precedes the ordeal of separation, reality, a term
that deserves here to be placed between inverted comas, will completely
coincide with its effects on the somatic organization, with the modifications
and the reactions that take place there. The only formulation that could be
applied to it would be the following: reality is self-generated by sensory
activity.
Once the exteriority of the breast is recognized, the first representative of
a separate world, the subject will have access to this new space of reality in
which signs picked up by our senses will inform the two supports of every
relation of what they perceive or suppose about their reciprocal desires:
these signs are pre-eminently part of those aspects of the thinkable that can
be fantasized and interpreted. However different they may be, they will
share the same character: their presence or their absence exerts a power of
modification on the environment, on the body, and, first and foremost, on
the subjects own psychic state. Whether this modification is objective or a
2
Of course, the impact of the cultural discourse is just as active in the organization of our relational and
ethical world, and it is this same discourse that supplies us with the criteria that alone can decide on the
truth or falsehood of our judgements.
Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96

1374 P. Aulagnier
modification that only the one who is interpreting sees or thinks he sees, it
will suffice to bring about a self-modification of his own psychic experience.
That is why it can be said that our relational space has its anchor points
in the signs by which the modifications at work in the psychic space of the
two poles of the relation are presented and inscribed on the stage of reality.
These modifications will have a particular signalling function when they
concern somatic space.
The three formulations that I have proposed to account for the psyches
relationship to reality may be applied as such to the relationship that exists
between the psyche and the subjects own somatic space. Here again the
activity of the sensory zones, the omnipotence of desire, what is announced
by the cultural discourse concerning the body, will give rise to three repre-
sentations of the body and to the three forms of knowledge that the psyche
gives itself of it acquisitions of knowledge which succeed one another in
time, albeit without excluding each other. They confront us with the three
forms of existence and with the three principles of causality that reality and
the body must preserve so as not to endanger their cathexes; and that is
why all three will participate in the compromise that constitutes the fourth,
which is the most decisive for our psychic functioning.
The relationship of every subject to this body that confronts him (or her)
with his closest, most familiar, and most cathected reality will depend on
the compromise that he has been able to make between three causal
conceptions of the body, the first two of which correspond to universal and
a-temporal exigencies, whereas the last not only depends on the cultural
time and space specific to the subject, but will also be the only one that the
psyche can reject, or modify and reinterpret to make it compatible3 with the
two others. Our relationship to the body, like our relationship to reality, is
thus a function of how the subject hears, distorts, or remains deaf to the
general discourse. It is obvious that his reactions are the consequence of the
specific nature of his psychic economy, and not of the particularity of his
culture, except under certain exceptional conditions. But an analysis of the
postulates of the cultural message seems to me to be an excellent way of
approaching an analysis of the responses that the psyche will give it.
I do not think I am betraying the complexity of the analytic process if I
say that its aim is to succeed in bringing to light the reasons and follies
responsible for the compromise chosen by this particular subject, and the
ensuing consequences for his relations to the body, to others, and to him-
self. But in order to do this we are obliged to refer to a form of compro-
mise that I would say is essentially shared by all those subjects who have
been able to remain outside of the field of psychopathology: I am not sure
if this compromise should be defined as characteristic of the majority or as
normal but, in any case, it is a compromise that allows the analyst to
observe and evaluate the impact of the dominant discourse in a given cul-
ture, a scientific discourse in ours.
Whence the question that I am posing: what did the decline of the reli-
gious discourse in favour of the scientific discourse signify for our relation-
3
In the French text com-possible.

Before concluding this brief incursion into the world of infantile psycho-
sis, I want to compare these phenomena with certain momentary experi-
ences present in the schizophrenic experience of the adult subject, but
which can also be part of a fleeting experience to which every subject is
vulnerable. It was in connection with them that I (Aulagnier, 1984a)14 had
proposed the term sensory hallucinations: experiences during which the
subject is nothing more than the sensation of somatic space that is losing
its limits or contracting, the sensation of an inner gulf in which the inter-
nal organs are swallowed up. I am not so sure today of the legitimacy of
the term hallucination. To hallucinate is to project outside the agent of an
auditory, visual, and tactile stimulation that comes back to you as a sign
of the hostility of the world, but equally as proof of its presence and of
your link with it, a link that is persecutory and persecuting, but a link
nonetheless.
The autist does not hallucinate a sensory stimulus, he creates it. As for
the sensations of somatic origin proper to the similar, though not identical
experiences encountered outside the world of autism, I would be just as hes-
itant in seeing them as forms of hallucination in the strict sense. I would
prefer to consider them as the fleeting manifestation of the affect resulting
from an encounter between the subject and an event experienced by the
psyche as a cataclysm which has momentarily destroyed all possibility of
preserving its relation with the other and with its world. All that remains,
then, of this world is the somatic effect of this encounter that is effectively
catastrophic: this effect becomes the representative of the world but, as we
have seen, this substitution can only occur in the primal process and can
only find a place in a pictographic representation.
This means that, among the possible consequences resulting from the
encounter between the psyche and the world, there is one that can only be
represented by the primal process. The presence on the psychic stage of this
construction can only be a fleeting experience, for the primary and second-
ary processes will have to succeed as swiftly as possible in resuming their
activity in order to give shape to constructions in which the sign relation
has its place. The subject will then immediately afterwards be able to fanta-
size and think again about the intentions of the world towards himself by
attributing to them the cause of this presentation of the experienced of his
body. This retroactive formulation of what remains unexpressable at the
moment when it occurs will come back to our ears in the form of what the
subject, this time, hallucinates by projecting outside the agent of a disorga-
nization of the space of the world which substitutes itself for this experience
during which the order that governs somatic organization and its responses
was disrupted.
This last incursion into the primal seemed necessary before considering
what is going to be played out for the body when it encounters the emotion
that its manifestations arouse in the mother, emotion whose perception by
the infant inaugurates the junction between his psyche and the discourse
and history that were waiting for him.
14
Paper read at a Colloquium on Psychoanalytic Approaches to Autism in Monaco, June 1984.

1376 P. Aulagnier
encounter with a body that would have confronted it with an interior con-
sisting of parts, organs, and bits.
This fragmentation has become more and more accentuated: biology no
longer studies grand systems; it studies the cell and the systems composing
it. This knowledge has substituted the image of a body with that of an
assemblage of millions of cells in the service of a highly sophisticated
machine whose functioning eludes the knowledge that the layman could
have of it. And God created the cell. It matters little in one sense whether
this statement is true or false, but it is sufficient to formulate it to realize
that it is no longer possible to add, in the image of the cells of God.
Of course, the subject can give a place again to a creative God in himself,
attributing to him a project concerning living substance in its totality; but,
as Freud had already pointed out in connection with Darwin, are we sure
that man is able to be satisfied with the place that such a project assigns
him? I doubt it. Be that as it may, it is not the relation between man and
God that interests me here but the subjects relation to his body. Once we
have substituted the cell for the body as a totality in an attempt to elucidate
the laws of its own functioning, and once we have shown that these laws
concern all the cells that constitute living substance, it becomes very diffi-
cult for the subject to posit a desire as the cause and organizer of his
somatic functioning. The vicissitudes of his body are situated outside desire.
As long as the knowledge of the body privileged its visible aspects, the sub-
ject could form the image of an interior which remained familiar for him,
an image that he could express to himself in words by resorting to meta-
phors compatible with his fantasmatic constructions. When this interior
became visible, it paradoxically became what the lay subject could hence-
forth only know by trusting in the knowledge of specialists. Others know,
others have the power of demonstrating the truth of their affirmation, oth-
ers have the power to act on the functioning of the body. This knowledge
about the body is part, of course, of a body of research which, beyond the
body, inquires into the phenomena of the world as a whole. And this indeed
is why mythical discourse, religious discourse, and scientific discourse lead,
in the final analysis, to the same result, namely, of imposing their construc-
tion of reality. (I will just make a brief digression here to underline the fact
that one of the particular consequences of the scientific discourse has always
been, but in an increasingly radical manner, to call into doubt the certainty,
the status as fundamental evidence formerly enjoyed by our sense-impres-
sions. But we must not forget that if the psychic functioning of each man is
to be maintained, this doubt needs to be displaced onto a theoretical level
so that it does not intervene in his daily existence.)
Let us return to the body of science and to what the lay subject can or
cannot do with the knowledge that he will have of it. Rejecting it en bloc
would imply that by the same token he rejects what science, and thus our
culture, says about reality: we have seen that the subject can only sustain
this refusal by excluding himself (or herself) from his social space; and that
to keep his place in it, he must accept a consensus of opinion as to what
the term reality means. To do this, he is obliged to make a loan from the
dominant knowledge of his culture.
In our space-time, schools, the mass media, and the current discourse will
propose, and impose, on each subject the appropriation of certain elements
of knowledge that are more or less fragmentary, more or less confused, but
thanks to which he or she will possess a theoretical discourse of the body
that refers to a model body and to a universal body, but to which his or
her own body also belongs. A model body or a model of the functioning of
the body which, however different it may be from what science says about
it, is nonetheless a derivative of it. This derivative will be dealt with in two
ways: on the one hand, the subject will extract from this discourse a certain
number of statements thanks to which this theoretical knowledge about the
body (and thus about reality) will become part of his or her global compro-
mise. The choice of these statements will depend on their aptitude for reach-
ing an accommodation with a body that can be fantasized and cathected by
the psyche. On the other hand, the subject will make use of other state-
ments to give form and place to a theoretical construction of the body that
he or she will preserve, along with a few others of the same kind, in a res-
ervoir of his or her ideational capital. A reservoir that is a counterpart to
the one that has the task of protecting repressed fantasies from the light of
day. This ideational reservoir (remember that I situate myself and remain
in the register of the constructions of the I) is protected from the action of
repression; the subject retains the power to keep at a distance, in a sort of
forgotten state, the constructions that it contains or, conversely, to memo-
rize them and to make of them, under certain conditions, the privileged psy-
chic referent of his or her body. (I am speaking, of course, of the lay
subject and not of the scientist whose relationship to his own discoveries
and knowledge deserves a particular analysis which would no doubt teach
us many things about what may or may not be defined as splitting.)
The place thus occupied in these particular situations by these theoreti-
cal constructions will assign them with a quite specific task: that of playing
the role of a fantasy-barrier (pare-fantasme) to the benefit of the subject
and his body. This long detour on reality, the body, and cultural demands,
seemed necessary before tackling the psychic status of the spoken body
(corps parle).
Discourses on the body

Freud taught us that the latent content of a dream can only be analysed
from its manifest content. Which is why I will begin with what our body
makes visible in the registers of emotion and of somatic suffering in an
attempt to understand their role in the constitution of this latent body
which is its other side and its psychic double.
The successive representations of this body will accompany the evolution
of somatic life, but each time this body will conform to the unconscious
motivations which determine the causalities to which the subject attributes
the important events of his life experience. This causal choice will in turn
determine the place that the body (its birth, its evolution, its future death)
will occupy in this historicization of its time and of its life which is the con-
dition for the initiation and continuation of the process of identification.

1378 P. Aulagnier
The I (Je) can only exist by becoming its own biographer, and in its biogra-
phy it will have to give a place to the discourses through which it speaks
and makes its own body speak. These discourses on its singular body will
give expression to the only inscriptions and modifications that the subject
will be able to read and decode as the visible marks of a libidinal history,
which, for its part, has been inscribed and continues to etch itself on this
invisible side that is the psyche: it is as much a libidinal history as an identi-
ficatory history. Once this history has been written, it will periodically
require the inversion of a part of the paragraphs, requiring the erasure of
some of them and the invention of others, resulting in a version that the
subject believes each time to be definitive, whereas in fact it must remain
open so as to lend itself to a work of reconstruction, a reorganization of its
contents, and, above all, of its causalities, each time that it proves to be nec-
essary. It is only because this version continues to evolve that the subject
can assure himself of his own permanence while accepting the inevitable
physical and psychic changes that will follow one after the other until death
puts an end to the process. This necessary permanence of certain identifica-
tory reference points would disappear if the I did not retain the certitude of
inhabiting one and the same body irrespective of its modifications.
To do this, the I will attribute one and the same relational function and
causality to a certain number of feelings and experiences, even though they
have been lived by its body at different times and in different situations.
This analogy reconstructed in the aftermath, near or distant, of the acci-
dent-event is necessary so that it can put in place the quilting points
(points de capiton) connected by a leading thread by virtue of which the I
can find itself and orient itself in this story (its own) which, like any story,
is specified by its continuous movement.
Hence the importance that must be accorded to the ensemble of signs
and bodily inscriptions which can lend themselves to this function of tempo-
ral and relational reference points.
This ensemble includes the somatic manifestations of emotion and those
that signal to the subject and to others a state of suffering in his own body:
they are the only ones I will be focusing on in this paper.
The term emotion, unlike that of affect, does not have a particular place
in analytic terminology. Consequently, I feel more at ease in giving it a pre-
cise acceptation: I shall therefore use it to designate the visible part of the
iceberg which is affect, and thus the subjective manifestations of those
movements of cathexis and decathexis that the I cannot grasp because they
become a source of emotion for it. The I can ignore in its relation to the
other and to the world the role played by these affects which are envy, hate,
and love; it is not aware in general that they are responsible for the way
that it lives this relation and remains convinced that the cause is to be
sought outside itself. Conversely, emotion refers to a lived experience of
which the I is not only aware but of which, more often than not, it also
says it knows the cause. Now this cause has a privileged rapport, albeit not
exclusively, with something seen, something heard, the experience of touch-
ing or being touched, in other words, with the sensory domain. Further-
more, this emotive state is part of what can be seen by the other: one can
be unaware of what causes one to feel moved; but one can nonetheless per-
ceive the signs of the participation of the soma in this experience. Emotion
modifies the somatic state, and it is these perceivable bodily signs that move
the person who witnesses them, triggering a similar modification in his or
her own soma, even when he or she is not the direct cause. Emotion thus
makes two bodies resonate with each other and imposes similar responses
on them. The body of one person responds to the body of the other, but as
emotion concerns the I, one can also say that the latter is moved by what
its body allows it to know and to share of the other persons bodily experi-
ence.
The other somatic manifestations taken into account here do not concern
the state of illness but the experience of suffering that may accompany it.
Such suffering informs the subject and the other that something that may
remain hidden has modified the state of his or her body. Of course, pleasure
has one and the same function of message and self-information; the experi-
ence of suffering is neither more nor less important than that of pleasure:
both are necessary and both are unavoidable. But whereas suffering appeals
to the power of the one who is supposed to be able to modify somatic real-
ity and the milieu surrounding the one who is suffering, pleasure (like jouis-
sance later on) is accompanied by the opposite message: what could be
modified in the body or in the outside world is perceived as a menace.
These signs and messages of somatic origin will have a decisive impact on
the ordering of this time of childhood during which the family environment
and, more particularly, the mother, have the task of watching over the state
of the body, of detecting manifestations expressing the being well of the
body (l^etre bien du corps) or, on the contrary, the presence of a com-
plaint (mal), which, generally speaking, is decoded as a sign of the as yet
unknown danger which menaces the child. From this point of view, we can
say that the child lets the mother see the manifestations of its well-being,
but that it imposes on her the manifestations of its suffering; particularly as
the latter has the power to accuse those to whom she shows herself (she
sometimes has the same function of self-accusation for the one who is suf-
fering). Suffering, in general, but more particularly a childs suffering rarely
leaves others indifferent. It awakens in most people the recollection of fra-
gility, dependence, and the need for help, all traits that are part of the pic-
ture the adult retains of the child that he or she once was. More than any
other infantile experience, suffering induces a movement of identification in
the person who is no longer an infant and who will momentarily find him
or herself in the place either of the suffering child or of the one who could
abolish all suffering, a power that had been attributed to his or her own
parents.
This empathy partly explains for other factors are involved why the
suffering of the childs body permits him (or her) to carry out the psychic
work which will transform an accident or an ordeal (which are part of uni-
versal experience) into the singular event that will have its place in that
equally singular history that he constructs of his body and his psyche. To
do this, it is true, suffering alone is not enough: to this suffering must be
added the response that it has received, even if this response is one of
1380 P. Aulagnier
silence in this case pregnant with meaning and first and foremost what
the mother might say retrospectively about the suffering experienced. The
account that the mother will give of the ordeal inflicted on the body or the
manner in which she will exclude it from what she says to the child about
his or her past, will have a decisive effect on the relationship that the sub-
ject will have with this complaint (mal) from which his body may suffer
during the rest of his or her existence. A first experience of suffering that
has long since disappeared will be substituted by this discourse which allows
the subject to keep a memory of it: this discourse resonates in his ears each
time a new experience of somatic suffering reappears in his body in a rela-
tional conflict which will mark his psychic life.
This putting into history (mise en histoire) of somatic life requires the
presence of a biographer who is the only one who can link an accident to
an event which he considers to be responsible for his own psychic destiny.
To do this he still has to be able to occupy the place of the one through
whom and to whom events happen and not the place of the event itself.
There can be neither a biographer nor a biography as long as psychic space
and somatic space, after an initial state of indissociation, have been brought
into a relationship with each other in which psyche and body each occupy
one of the two poles. This process marks the passage from the sensory body
to the relational body which permits the psyche to assign a function of mes-
senger to its somatic manifestations and equally to read in the responses to
this body messages that are addressed to it. The evolution of this relation-
ship is not only variable from one subject to another, but it must remain
modifiable in each subject depending on the experiences he or she is con-
fronted with by his or her psychic and somatic life. I shall only give an out-
line here of these relational vicissitudes which link the evolution of the
body with the evolution of the psyche, focusing rather on what is organized
on the occasion of a first encounter between the psyche and this body on
which the action of the world exerts itself from the very beginning. The tra-
jectory that I am going to follow will seem less obscure if I formulate the
three hypotheses on which it is based:
1 The act which inaugurates psychic life posits a state of sameness between
what occurs in a sensory zone and how it manifests itself in psychic
space.
2 The I cannot inhabit or cathect a body dispossessed of the history of its
lived experience. A first version constructed and kept in waiting in the
mothers psyche welcomes this body in order to unite itself with it. The
image of the body of the child that the mother was expecting always
forms part of this anticipated I to which the maternal discourse is
addressed. If the anticipated I is already a historicized I which includes
the child from the outset in a system of kinship and thereby in a tempo-
ral and symbolic order, the bodily image of this I as the word-bearer
(porte-parole) has constructed it retains the mark of her desire (maternal
desire). If she is not permitted to dream with eyes wide open that this
child to come realizes the return of her father or her mother, that he will
be man and woman, that he will be protected from death forever, the

mother has the right (and this is a necessity for the child) to dream of
beauty, of future resemblances, in the strength of this body to come. I
am speaking, of course, of daydreams. But when one takes the (neces-
sary) risk of creating and pre-investing an image in the absence of a real
support, one also takes the risk of discovering the non-conformity, the
gap between the image and the support. This is an inevitable wager that
the mother will generally succeed in winning. But it may be the case that
the image is unable to accommodate a body that is too different, too
foreign for the maternal gaze. The mother always encounters the infant
(infans)4 body as a risk; she may also encounter it as a resistance or as a
deception, the source of an immediate and sometimes insurmountable
conflict. We shall see at the end of this text why this conflict can be
responsible for a very particular situation of mourning.
3 From the moment the psyche is able and will have to think about its
body, the other, and the world in terms of relations, the process of iden-
tification will begin, which means that each identificatory position deter-
mines the relational dialectic between two Is and that any change in
one of the two poles will have effects on the other. From this same
moment, the body (its changes, its sexuality, its eventual accidents) can
become the representative of the other and the witness of the latters
power to modify reality each time the relation between the subject and
this other becomes too conflictual and too painful.
By substituting itself for the I-other relation, the I-body relation will
make the same conflict its own.
This substitution may induce the other to take care of your body, to be
concerned about what happens to it, to surround it with care: when this is
the case, the body will give back to the other his legitimate place and will
take up again the role of relational mediator that it will continue to play
throughout childhood.5 If the other remains blind or deaf to what happens
to the body or if his or her responses are inadequate, what was a transitory
substitution may become a definitive state. By occupying the place of the
other the body preserves for the psyche the ultimate possibility of keeping
the sign relation in its alphabets, a sign that is indispensable for the orga-
nization of the constructions of the primary and secondary processes.
A transitory substitution between the other and the body is a phenome-
non to which every subject has recourse, whether he appeals to it to modify
the responses received or whether this substitution is imposed on him by
the body itself. The danger of death that can, in reality, menace the body, a
mutilation that risks dispossessing the I of a particularly cathected function,
will modify the relation between psyche and body and, in the best of cases,
make the psyche occupy the place of a repairer and protector of the body
as long as is necessary to overcome the danger, or for the psyche to be able
4
Translators note: infans (not speaking, before the acquisition of language). Throughout this article I
have translated infans as infant and enfant as child.
5
During childhood, and afterwards, but more sporadically if the child has inherited a body which has
succeeded in overcoming the infantile illnesses of the psyche.

Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96:13711401 doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.12345
Birth of a body, origin of a history1
Piera Aulagnier
Preamble
The traveller who roams the mythical world will be certain to come across
soothsayers and, among them, a number of illustrious blind persons. The
latter will tell him about the punishment awaiting anyone who, by fulfilling
a prohibited desire, has dared to make knowable, manifest to himself and
to others that which should have remained unknown, latent. But their
divinitory power might suggest to the same traveller that true knowledge
demands that we free ourselves from this screen constituted by the visible.
Either we trust in the sensible world, believing that reality conforms to its
appearance, or alternatively we refuse to allow ourselves to be trapped; and
the best thing, then, is to eliminate the trap itself.
If we followed this advice literally, however, we would very soon realize
that human reality, rather than mythical reality, can only be grasped by
means of this sensory activity which serves as a selecter and a bridge of pas-
sage between psychic reality and those other spaces from which it draws its
materials, beginning with its own somatic space.
Before discussing the function that the body will have as a mediator and
an object of interest in the relations between two psyches and between the
psyche and the world, let us consider the three forms of existence under
which reality (and thus the body) presents itself to the human being, the
fourth being given to us by the compromise that will necessarily result from
it. I am employing the term reality here in its least theoretical sense and the
most natural for human thought: for the subject, reality coincides with the
totality of the phenomena of which existence is self-evident. This does not
mean to say that every subject recognizes the same ensemble of existents,
but that, conversely, only this ensemble will have a place in the construc-
tions of each and every subjects reality.
But these constructions, whether they are the work of the primal, primary,
or secondary processes, also teach us how the psyche reacts to the presence of
any phenomenon that has the power to modify its affective state. By trans-
forming the latter into a psychic event, this power imposes on the psyche the
self-evident nature of its presence. Every act of knowledge is preceded by an
act of cathexis and the latter is triggered by the affective experience that
accompanies this state of encounter, always present, between the psyche and
the milieu physical, psychic, somatic that surrounds it.
1
Translated by Andrew Weller. Translated from the French: Aulagnier, Piera, Naissance dun corps,
origine dune histoire in Corps et histoire, Les Belles Lettres, 1986. pp. 99141
Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis

The bringing to life of the psychical apparatus

I have often compared the action of the primary process with that of a stage
director (metteur en sc ene) and the action of the secondary process with that
of a sense-maker (metteur en sens), but both presuppose this bringing to
life (mise en vie) of the psychical apparatus which we owe to the activity of
our sense organs. The life of the psyche has as its first condition the possi-
bility of presenting to itself its property of living organization. The first ele-
ments of the only alphabet or of the only pallette which the primal can use
are the product of the metabolization that the psyche imposes on the very
first bits of information it receives from sensory activity through its reac-
tions to these stimuli that accompany what inscribes itself, disappears, modi-
fies itself, on the stage of the world. But these stimuli that the world emits
would not be transformed into psychic information if someone did not play
the role of emitter and selector of this sub-group of stimuli which, in this
first period of life, are the only ones that can be metabolized by the psyche
into indicators of its own movements of cathexis and decathexis.
However elementary or complex a living organism may be, we cannot study
it by isolating it from this environment which acts on it and to which it reacts.
If somatic life is to be preserved, the physical environment must satisfy the
unavoidable needs of the soma. Likewise, if psychic life is to be preserved, the
psychical environment must respect requirements that are equally unavoidable
and, furthermore, it must act on this space of reality over which the newborn
has no direct control. In the majority of cases, it is the mother who assumes
this double function and who, at the same time, will have to organize and
modify her own psychic space in such a way as to respond to the requirements
of the infants psyche. Both the physical and psychical environment will bear
the imprint of the model proposed by the cultural discourse, and in particular
the paternal discourse. This imprint is necessary to relativize that which is
owed to the effects exerted on the childs psyche by the primary environment,
namely, that of the mother, and by the reshaped memory that she retains of it;
but this latter imprint nonetheless remains the most decisive. And that is why
the mother will be the privileged agent of the modifications specifying this psy-
chic and physical milieu which welcomes the newborn infant: it is under the
aegis of this modifier that the infant will encounter her.6 If he begins by being
6
Giving a predominant place to the mother, as the majority of analysts do, does not imply forgetting the
place occupied by the father. From the beginning of life, the father also exerts a modifying action on the
ambient psychic milieu of the newborn. But in almost all cases, one person most often the mother
has a privileged feeding role, whether she offers a breast or a bottle, and consequently brings through
desire or duty a vital satisfaction for the infant. This person who has the power to respond to the
needs of the infant and, in so doing, to be the source of the first experiences of pleasure and of suffering,
occupies this role of modifier of the somato-psychic reality through which the presence of an inhabited
world is announced in advance. That is why the mother is also the one through whom the first sign of
the presence (or absence) of a father will make a breach in the infants psyche: her choice of these signs
will depend on her relationship to this father. Subsequently, but no doubt very soon, the child will be
able to reject them and forge his own signs and in so doing establish a relationship with the father in
accord or disaccord with the one that preceded it. It remains true that in the register of time, there is
effectively a primacy of the relationship to the mother, just as the experience of pregnancy induces in the
mother a form of cathexis for this being that she is carrying within herself which is not of the same qual-
ity as the fathers cathexis while he is waiting for the child. This is a natural privilege the mark of
which the man will always bear, whether positive or negative.

1384 P. Aulagnier
unaware of her existence, he cannot avoid the consequences of these modi-

fications of his immediate environment which will go hand in hand with a
modification of his own somatic and psychic experience. As he lacks any
awareness of a separate modifier, the coextensive affective movements of
his own lived experience will present themselves to the psyche as self-
engendered by his power alone. On the mothers side, we encounter on the
contrary a psyche that has already historicized and anticipated what is
being played out in these encounters and which from the outset decodes
the first signs of life through the filter of her own history, thereby writing
the first paragraphs of what will become the history that the child will
recount about the infant that he was.
But let us leave the mother to one side for the moment and return to
these inaugural productions of the psychic life of the infant. I have
discussed this problem at length in the chapter of The Violence of Interpre-
tation (1975) devoted to the concepts of primal process and pictogram, and
to the postulate of self-procreation which determines the organization of
both of them. I would like to refer the reader to them and will confine
myself here to insisting on the role of sensoriality in the bringing to life or
activation of the psychical apparatus.7 Current research into the earliest
interactions between the infant who enters into a living world and those
who inhabit it leads me to advance the following hypothesis: among the
stimuli registered by our sensory receptors, some of them, due to the quality
and intensity of the excitation, but even more so to the moment when the
encounter between zone and stimulus occurs,8 will be the origin of a sensory
experience that has the power to pervade all the zones. The pleasure or the
suffering of one zone becomes pleasure or suffering for all the senses.9
If we confine ourselves to this representative process alone, we realize
that the object only exists psychically by virtue of its unique power to mod-
ify the sensory (and thus somatic) response, and thereby to act on psychic
experience. Hence, the first observation is that in the constructions of the pri-
mal, the effects of the encounter take the place of the encounter. This
explains why pleasure and suffering can only present themselves to the psy-
che as self-generated by its own power. But if these effects of the senses
furnish the psyche with these signs of the existence of the world that it can
metabolize into the only ones that can affect, make an impression, on its
surface, we have already seen that the mother is the emitter and principal
selector of the large part of these stimuli. Their quality and their frequency
depend on what the emitter wants to transmit or transmits in spite of
him/herself; he or she is thus an integral part of the resultant effect of plea-
7
The present essay draws on and extends the metapsychological hypotheses defended in my book
(Aulagnier, 1975) concerning the concept of primal process that it introduced. Consideration of the
moment when the succession of encounters between the psyche and the world occurs is a factor that
seems to me to be increasingly important.
8
Consideration of the moment when the succession of encounters between the psyche and the world
occurs is a factor that seems to me to be increasingly important.
9
Such somato-psychic experiences of pleasure will facilitate the future representation of a unified body.
Conversely, the psyche, as soon as it has the means, will try to oppose this irradiating power of suffer-
ing with the risk of only having at its disposal a fragmented representation of the somatic space.

sure or of suffering. Hence, the second observation: this pleasure or this

suffering that the psyche presents to itself as self-engendered is the psychical
existent which anticipates and pre-announces the object-mother. A bodily
feeling occupies the place that will later be occupied by the mother: the
anticipated I thus has its counterpart in an anticipated mother through a
bodily feeling.10
Here we have the starting-point of the child-mother relationship that the
subject will discover and cathect subsequently, but which he may also decat-
hect at times to return to a remodelled relation between the psyche and the
body.
The third observation is that before the gaze encounters an other (or a
mother), the psyche encounters itself and is reflected in the signs of life that
are emitted by its own body.
These three observations prove that the pictogram of the complementary
zone-object is the only one at the disposal of the primal process. (It would
be well worth reflecting from an analytical point of view on the psychical
reactions that follow certain experiences of sensory privation.)
This power of the senses to affect the psyche will enable it to transform a
sensory zone into an erogenous zone.11 The first psychical ear does not pick
up sounds and even less significations; it picks up the variations of its own
state, of its own felt experience, the succession of an experience of pleasure
and of an experience of suffering. And if this pleasure or this suffering are
lacking, the sensory reaction may exist physiologically but it will have no
psychical existence. Concerning the primal, I want to place particular
emphasis on one point: whether this process the only one that can trans-
form the signs of somatic life into signs of psychic life lasts three hours,
three days, or three weeks is of little importance, its activity will nonetheless
persist throughout our existence.
I propose to compare the materials on which the primal processes, pri-
mary and secondary, are going to draw with three sets of elements constitut-
ing three writings or three languages, each of which has its own syntactic
laws. The metasign (the sign relation), which would be necessary if primal
writing was to give a place in its figurations to the concept of the separable,
is not part of these elements. Without its presence, there can be no link
between these productions and a recipient who is supposed to respond to
them. Its figurations share the character of certain statements; that is to say,
they are performative. The writer is what is written, and this writing is at
once a figuration of a demand and a self-response. What is written (or picto-
graphed) has metabolized a somatic state into the presentation of a psychical
affect, experienced and depicted at one and the same time as self-engendered.
10
This anticipated mother may be compared with what Bion defines as pre-concept: in both cases, a
relational mould waits and precedes that which will be one of its supports. But the resemblance does not
go any further than this: Bions hypothesis appeals to a vision which is reminiscent of the Kantian con-
cept of intuition. Mine, which is more materialistic presupposes the presence of this element of reality
furnished by a somatic experience.
11
To speak of an erogenous zone is, ipso facto, to pass over from the register of the body to the psychic
register: in psychoanalytic terminology the terms pleasure and suffering, regardless of their source and
the activity that has produced them, only have meaning when applied to a psychic experience.

1386 P. Aulagnier
The writing that will be used by the primary possesses the metasign (I
mean the sign relation) that is necessary for fantasizing the desire present
between the fantasizer and the desire imputed to the other that has been
reshaped in his fantasmatic scenario. It is true that as long as we are only
considering the primary, this fantasy realization enacts a relationship of
fusion, of possession, of mastery . . . two spaces, but only one desire that is
omnipotent and always realized.12
The signs used by secondary language in its utterances have the particu-
larity of being doubly in the service of the laws governing a relation of reci-
procal communication: the utterance is constructed from the outset with
reference to the recipient to whom it is addressed, and the signs of this lan-
guage are communicated to somone who does not possess them yet by
someone who already has access to them. As in every known language, cer-
tain words of this third psychic language will fall into disuse, others will
become forbidden, and new ones will be invented. The particular language
that we speak to describe the world is marked by the historical movement
of the culture that speaks it; the language we use to become aware of our
desires, our feelings, and our identificatory projects is, first and foremost,
marked by the singular history of each utterer, through his exclusions, his
forgettings, and his innovations.
Once these three languages have been learnt, the psyche will continue to
use them throughout its existence. But while a part of the signs of the pri-
mary and of the secondary will be interchangeable, resulting in the forma-
tion of a sort of composite language, precedence being taken by one or the
other of them depending on the affective experiences of the utterer, this is
not the case for the primal language. The latter continues to be unaware
that body and psyche react and live thanks to the continuous state of this
relationship between them and between them and their environment.
The writing of the primal can only give shape to this figurative corporeal-
ization proposed by the pictogram, the only figuration that the psyche can
forge of its own space, of its own affective experiences, of its own produc-
tions. The primal process only knows the world through its effects on the
soma, just as all it knows of somatic life is the consequences of its natural
and constant resonance with those movements of cathexis and decathexis
which are the mark of psychic life. I do not know if this representative
background which continues to borrow from the soma its materials is the
cause or the consequence of the preservation of this participation of the
body in our affective and emotional states; but, at the risk of tiring you
with my insistence, I am going to return to one of the consequences of the
permanent activity of this representative background.
12
It is important to have a clear understanding of the expression fantasy of fusion: the desire realized in
this fantasy is the fusion between two psychic spaces, two bodies, two pleasures. What is denied concerns
the power of refusing this state of fusion. But that supposes that their separation has been perceived and
that it has been abolished and substituted by a relation of fusion, of reunification between two parts
which would exclude the slightest difference or which would prove to be complementary. We could
attach to this fantasy the mathematical formula: 1 + 1 = 1; the result is false but the sign + between two
terms is preserved.

The somatic effects through which the life of the world breaches every
new organism are not a transitory phenomenon; they only cease with our
death. Freud spoke of a somatic source of affect; I would readily suggest
the expression somatic source of the psychical representation of the world to
emphasize that everything that exists only becomes as such for the primal
process by virtue of its power to affect the somatic organization (of course,
ones own psychic productions are part of this all). The figuration of a
body-world that is the pictogram cannot have a place in the primary or sec-
ondary process; nor can it be part of a secondary repression which, for its
part, only contains representations that have already been subjected to the
work of the stage director (metteur en sc ene) and of the sense-maker (met-
teur en sens). You must not let yourself be caught in the theoretical trap of
the construction that I am proposing: if it approximates to what I conceive
of as the pictogram, it also confirms that it is only from the outside that we
can imagine this psychical being, and that to do so we need to put on our
theoretical glasses and place in front of us, and at a distance, what we are
trying to see. We will never be able to conceive of, or fantasize, from the
inside, the somatic effect as the sole representative of the world, and psychic
life as the sole reflection of this effect of the body. But this theoretical con-
struction helps us to understand the role that can be played out again by
what was organized during the psychic time preceding this view of the
world that will make it fantasizable and thinkable by and for the subject.
Each time our relation to the world eludes any attempt to confine it in a
fantasy or in a thought, for lack of having been able to preserve the cathe-
xis in at least one of its occupants, we find ourselves in a situation that is
close, albeit not identical, to that which inaugurated our existence: the life
of the world and the world are henceforth only representable through the
somatic effects that accompany the anxiety of an encounter with an empty
scene. The representation of this somatic experience remains the last
recourse permitting the primary and secondary processes to fantasize and
think their relation with this last and only psychical construction through
which traces of the world continue to exist for the psyche. An ultimate link
is thus preserved, which is the condition that must be met if the primary
and secondary are not to be forced to cease their activity. If this were to
happen, it would also involve the silencing of the psychical apparatus
which, except in the case of premature death, will nonetheless have learnt
well or badly to speak its three languages, and which cannot completely
forget one of them without becoming silent.
The world in which the autist moves and certain particular hallucinatory
phenomena encountered in psychotic experience throw light on the conse-
quences of the catastrophe that the disappearance of the sign relation from
the subjects representative capital represents for him or her, or more
exactly, the reduction of its usage to a relational form that is fixed once
and for all, unchangeable.13
13
A total disappearance of this sign is not compatible with the preservation of some sort of psychic life,
once the dawn of our existence has been left behind.

1388 P. Aulagnier
Many analytic contributions devoted to the autistic and schizophrenic

child seem to confirm my conception of the primal dimension.
What do these investigations tell us about the status that the autist
imposes on the object if not that the child substitutes his own sensory
power for the object, and that this is the only property that gives the object
existence for him?
The object is no longer anything more than the sensation of hardness
characteristic of that little thing in wood or in metal that the hand fiddles
with and manipulates in a stereotyped fashion, the repetitive movement in
which it falls, twirls, and is picked up again by the hand.
Just as (I am referring here in particular to the work of Frances Tustin
on the autistic shape) it is nothing more than the soft imprint left by
the tongue on the inner wall of the cheek, the mass of saliva which finds
its way onto this or that surface of the oral cavity. As for the body, as a
whole it may at moments only exist through and in this rhythmic, rock-
ing movement; it may be reduced in its totality to the pure sensation of
the movement that animates it. These somatic sensations, which have
become for the psyche the only evidence of its life and of life itself, are
effectively self-created by the subject. Once the object has been reduced to
its sensory power alone, it is equally engendered by this self-stimulation
by means of which the psyche brings its complementary object to a sen-
sory zone and function which confirm that it has maintained itself in a
state of survival.
As for the stimuli from outside, the autist will try to oppose their power
of intrusion by requiring an unchanging environment. He cannot impose
immobility on the world, which would signify his death, but he can try to
demand the identical repetition of the minimum of inevitable movements
thanks to which he no longer sees them and can continue to believe in the
fixedness of the environment. Any unforeseen stimulus which comes from
the other and thereby from a space of the world that is no longer perceiv-
able as a reflection of the space of the body will be experienced as an
intrusion that risks causing the body to explode and destroying this con-
tainer, which alone is capable of guaranteeing the psyche the preservation
of its space and, consequently, of a psychical apparatus which cannot rest
on a void.
I would liked to have broached the question posed by self-mutilation in
autism, and the strange capacity to ignore the suffering that would ordinar-
ily accompany it. It would lead me too far from the subject of this essay,
but the strangeness of this behaviour seems to confirm, in another way, the
non-dissociation present between the space of the body and the space of the
world: one imposes on the body what cannot be imposed on the world,
whose existence one wants to ignore. Does the indifference to suffering con-
firm the indifference to a world that one can destroy each time there is a
danger that its movement will impose itself? The autistic or schizophrenic
child does not mutilate him or herself at just any old moment. I do not
claim that these summary remarks shed light on this particularity of
psychotic behaviour in the face of suffering, but they do at least indicate a
possible path forward.
Before concluding this brief incursion into the world of infantile psycho-
sis, I want to compare these phenomena with certain momentary experi-
ences present in the schizophrenic experience of the adult subject, but
which can also be part of a fleeting experience to which every subject is
vulnerable. It was in connection with them that I (Aulagnier, 1984a)14 had
proposed the term sensory hallucinations: experiences during which the
subject is nothing more than the sensation of somatic space that is losing
its limits or contracting, the sensation of an inner gulf in which the inter-
nal organs are swallowed up. I am not so sure today of the legitimacy of
the term hallucination. To hallucinate is to project outside the agent of an
auditory, visual, and tactile stimulation that comes back to you as a sign
of the hostility of the world, but equally as proof of its presence and of
your link with it, a link that is persecutory and persecuting, but a link
nonetheless.
The autist does not hallucinate a sensory stimulus, he creates it. As for
the sensations of somatic origin proper to the similar, though not identical
experiences encountered outside the world of autism, I would be just as hes-
itant in seeing them as forms of hallucination in the strict sense. I would
prefer to consider them as the fleeting manifestation of the affect resulting
from an encounter between the subject and an event experienced by the
psyche as a cataclysm which has momentarily destroyed all possibility of
preserving its relation with the other and with its world. All that remains,
then, of this world is the somatic effect of this encounter that is effectively
catastrophic: this effect becomes the representative of the world but, as we
have seen, this substitution can only occur in the primal process and can
only find a place in a pictographic representation.
This means that, among the possible consequences resulting from the
encounter between the psyche and the world, there is one that can only be
represented by the primal process. The presence on the psychic stage of this
construction can only be a fleeting experience, for the primary and second-
ary processes will have to succeed as swiftly as possible in resuming their
activity in order to give shape to constructions in which the sign relation
has its place. The subject will then immediately afterwards be able to fanta-
size and think again about the intentions of the world towards himself by
attributing to them the cause of this presentation of the experienced of his
body. This retroactive formulation of what remains unexpressable at the
moment when it occurs will come back to our ears in the form of what the
subject, this time, hallucinates by projecting outside the agent of a disorga-
nization of the space of the world which substitutes itself for this experience
during which the order that governs somatic organization and its responses
was disrupted.
This last incursion into the primal seemed necessary before considering
what is going to be played out for the body when it encounters the emotion
that its manifestations arouse in the mother, emotion whose perception by
the infant inaugurates the junction between his psyche and the discourse
and history that were waiting for him.
14
Paper read at a Colloquium on Psychoanalytic Approaches to Autism in Monaco, June 1984.

1390 P. Aulagnier
Let me repeat, and primarily for my own benefit, that this essay only has
a chance of being something more than a mere reformulation of something
already written by virtue of the place that I am trying to give to the differ-
ent statuses that the body assumes in the successive constructions that the
psyche forges of it. Attempting to elucidate the evolution of these represen-
tations by separating them from the evolution of the psychical apparatus in
its totality is rather pointless, unless, and this indeed is my hope, this addi-
tion concerning the body can have its place within a more global discourse
on the psyche, certain obscure points of which it would serve to clarify. But
this history of the body that I have proposed should also enable us to com-
plete that which we are constructing of the psyche. These two histories
would not exist if we could not draw on those that the subject had already
forged well before he encountered us.
The body for the mother

This brings me to my second hypothesis which I will formulate with a ques-
tion: what does the infants body represent for this mother who is supposed
to be waiting for it and to welcome it? I would readily say that where the
mother was waiting (for the one who would put an end to the waiting? for
the one who would be proof to her of the realization of her desire to be a
mother? For the last elaboration of the object of a long dream that began
in her own childhood?) she encounters a body: that is, the source of the
risk for their relationship to which I was referring at the beginning of this
essay. This encounter will require a reorganization of her own psychic econ-
omy which will have to make this body benefit from the cathexis enjoyed
hitherto by the psychic representative alone that had preceded it. I have
already emphasized the power of modification that the mother has over this
part of reality to which the psyche and soma of the infant react, reactions
that reveal to him his own capacity to be affected by the life of the world
and of being modified by what affects him. But this revelation is equally a
revelation for the maternal psyche: the first manifestations of the infants
psychic and somatic life will show her how much power this little bit of
reality, so very close to her, represented by the childs body, has to emo-
tionally affect and modify her own psyche. The manifestations of the
infants somatic life will move the mother; the modifications of this emotion
will modify the environment to which the infant reacts and, consequently,
the effects of the world on his psychosomatic life. And it is here that we are
reminded of the importance of the somatic component of emotion: the
mothers relationship to the infants body contains from the outset an ele-
ment of eroticized pleasure permitted and necessary which she can par-
tially ignore but which constitutes the foundations of the somatic anchoring
of this love that she has for the childs singular body, love which, far from
ignoring, she is ready to proclaim. This body that she sees and touches, this
mouth that she brings into contact with her nipple, are, or should be for
her, sources of a pleasure in which her own body participates. This somatic
component of maternal emotion is transmitted from body to body; the con-
tact with a body that is moved touches your own; a hand that touches you

without pleasure does not provoke the same sensation as a hand that takes
pleasure in touching you.
If this shared pleasure between two bodies is permitted, the mother will
only be able to legitimize it in her own eyes if she can link the emotion felt
to the message of love, to the demand for protection that an I that has not
yet come into being is supposed to address to her. The first representation
that the mother forges of the infants body attributes it from the outset with
a relational status that will transform the expression of need into the formu-
lation of a demand (for love, for pleasure, for presence) and, at the same
time, transform the majority of the somatic accidents and the sufferings of
the body into an accident and suffering which are connected with the rela-
tionship which links her to the child. What the mother sees of the expres-
sions and evolution of a body (its sleep, its state of well-being or suffering,
its growth, its feeding, the first signs of its awakening to the world, its cries
and its silences. . .) will give rise to a double decoding: on the one hand she
will recognize in them the objective signs of the somatic state, but if, most
unfortunately for their present and future relationship, her gaze does not
become that of a neutral unaffected witness, these signs that affect her psy-
che and her body, and which are accompanied by pleasure or suffering, are
decoded as a language anticipating the presence of a future I. What the
maternal gaze sees will likewise be marked by her relationship with the
childs father, by her own infantile history, by the consequences of her
activity of repression and sublimation, by the state of her own body by a
whole set of factors that organize her way of living her investment in the
child. That is why her gaze finds in the manifestations of somatic function-
ing a sort of proof through the infants body of the truth of the feelings that
she has for the one who inhabits this body. The lived experience of this
body confirms for her in turn the legitimacy of the anxiety that she had
been feeling, the legitimacy of her guilt for not loving him enough and of
the sense of guilt that accompanied a birth subject to an interdiction, as
well as the validity of the protective power that she attributes to the love
she has for this child. This partially arbitrary and always singular decoding
will affect her reactions to the somatic manifestations of the child; it will
determine the mothers behaviour, that is to say, her acts in general which
will modify the infants environment. These modifications may or may not
be in tune with the unconscious motivations (an excess of presence, of con-
tact, may either correspond to a fantasy of fusion or to a defence against
repressed aggressiveness), and these motivations will affect the quality and
intensity of the somatic participation which accompanies the mothers
behaviour. The infant will perceive more or less obscurely what is being
expressed here in a disguised manner; but that does not prevent the behav-
iour, whatever its unconscious motivation, from acting on the objective
arrangement of the space of their relationship, and equally on what will or
will not be said in the discourse with which she tries to render this first
phase of their relationship thinkable and with which she will try, at a later
point, to make it thinkable for the infantile I. If the word-bearer (the
mother) believes she is putting into memory what is being played out in
the present, her own past, her own history, will from the outset leave their
1392 P. Aulagnier
mark on this portion (the most important) of the visible, which will be the
object of her interpretation and a source of emotion. This does not imply,
or should not imply, that any expression of the infants body must be inter-
preted and trigger an emotional experience in the mother. She must remain
capable of modifying certain phenomena arising in the present of somatic
experience by appealing to that other discourse on the body kept in the
theoretical reserve of her ideational capital. This recourse is necessary to
moderate the emotional power of the infant and his body; it shows the use-
fulness that the body of knowledge can have as a fantasy-barrier, making
it possible for the maternal psyche not to see death looming on the horizon
of each illness, or under-nutrition at each feed that is refused. But it is
equally important that this body of knowledge only takes front stage dur-
ing the time needed to avoid an excess, a summation of emotions which the
infant himself could not cope with. Apart from these emotional pauses, a
privileged relation (which may at times take the form of confrontation) will
have to be preserved between the psychical body as forged by the primal
process and the relational and emotional body that is the work of the
maternal psyche. This relation will permit the representation of the body
that the child is constructing to be given shape and dramatized scenically.
The effect of suffering in infantile life

Let us begin by examining what I would call the effect of suffering in infan-
tile life. Whether or not the illness has a clear organic aetiology, it is of little
importance to the child who generally does not possess this knowledge
about pathology. But were he to have this knowledge, he would continue to
ask himself what determined the encounter between his body and this virus
(a question, as has been said, that every ill subject, whatever his age, asks
himself, if the illness worries him); and he never imputes this encounter to
chance or to the weakness of his immunological defences, but to what is
going on in his psychic environment. This psychical causality attributed to
the illness is confirmed for the child by the effects that it provokes in the
mother and by the discourse that she holds both on his present illness and
on those that may have occurred in his past. In a paper on masochism,
Micheline Enriquez (1985)15 insisted on the inducive role of a maternal dis-
course transforming the suffering of the infant into a sort of ordeal which
confers him with a heroic status, the time of suffering being magnified as
the time that gave birth to a hero. In Lapprenti historien (Aulagnier,
1984b), I insisted, on the contrary, on the consequences of a discourse
which, owing to its blanks, dispossesses the child of the past history of the
body of the infant that he was, a bodily history which, as we have seen, is
indissociable from that which the infants psyche forges of itself. If I am
placing such importance on this sign of illness that suffering can be, it is
first and foremost because it has a self-informing function for the child
himself; next because the suffering of the childs body will in one way or
another induce a modification in the mothers behaviour and in the
15
See particularly Chapter 2, pp. 126ff.

organization of the surrounding milieu. Psychic suffering can be interpreted

as a whim, as the consequence of a frustration, or a refusal that the child
must accept, as a manifestation that can easily be modified, and above all
as an event that generally has no consequences thereafter.16 That is why the
mother can counter, with a good conscience, the childs statements express-
ing his psychic suffering (I am unhappy, I am sad, you dont love me any-
more, you have abandoned me, etc.) with her own (youre not unhappy but
capricious; we havent abandoned you, we have punished you; its not you
that I dont love anymore but the disobedient child that you can be, etc.).
The same is not true for physical suffering. Its manifestation has a self-
evident character and contains a risk which, far from being denied, is often
amplified; it never leaves the mother indifferent, whether she responds to it
by trying to attenuate it or by fleeing from what, for her, feels unbearable,
or alternatively by reacting aggressively. Hence the first consequence: the
bodys suffering induces a response from the mother which the child will
receive in the form of a revelation about what his suffering represents for
the other. The suffering body whether the cause of this suffering is an
organic affliction or the consequence of the somatic participation in a psy-
chic affliction will have a determining role in the history that the child
will construct concerning the evolution of this body and thereby of himself,
of what is modified in it in spite of oneself, of what one would like to mod-
ify, and of what resists this desire. As we have already seen, the opposite is
true in the experience of pleasure which is accompanied by the hope that
nothing will change either in oneself or in the other or in the environment.
In one sense it could be said that the experience of pleasure gives rise to a
single demand: that nothing changes. The experience of suffering not only
demands the opposite (that things are modified), but the hoped-for modifi-
cations vary from one suffering person to another, and in one and the same
person. The responses will also vary: demands and responses in the register
of suffering are polymorphous.
It is for this reason, among others, that I have suggested the term of
polymorphous somatizing to designate a normal component of the childs
relationship to the other and to reality. To understand the reasons for this
second polymorphism, two characteristics that specify the world and the life
of the young child must not be overlooked:
the decisive effect that the parents objectively have on the environment
in which the child lives and the impossibility for the latter to influence
certain factors;
the enigmatic and unexplainable nature of reasons, from the childs
point of view, which the mother or the parents use to justify the whys
and hows of this organization of their reality; and the whys and hows
of the consequences of this for the child and the place that he must
occupy as a result.
Not only is his capacity to modify this reality limited but his possibility
of appropriating the significations referring to it significations that would
16
A belief that is sometimes quite erroneous, but in which the parent continues to have confidence.

1394 P. Aulagnier
give meaning to an organization that initially appears arbitrary or chaotic

to him is also limited.
On the contrary he notices a symmetry in the emotional register between
himself and his mother, a symmetry in their respective possibilities of modi-
fying their relationship: the modifications will often be different, even anti-
nomical, but they will nonetheless be present. These modifications of the
mothers behaviour can be provoked by the verbal messages that he
addresses to her, thereby obtaining satisfaction for formulating his
demands. But it may also sometimes happen that his demands and his mes-
sages, expressed by the voice of the I, are ineffective, even though experi-
ence has shown him that this is rarely the case for those emitted by his
own somatic state. Faced with a milieu that is deaf to the expressions of his
psychical suffering, the child will attempt, and will often succeed, to make
use of somatic suffering to obtain a response a response that will often be
disappointing. It is rare for a mother who is deaf to psychic suffering to be
able to hear what the child is demanding via his body. (This suffering some-
times becomes the only voice-path that reveals to the sufferer the unknown
cause of his psychic suffering.)
Making use of ones somatic suffering: in effect, even if the cause of this
suffering is purely organic and owes nothing to the effect of the psychic on
the soma, the response that it provokes will nonetheless reveal to the child
the use that he can make of it. This revelation will mobilize a particular
interest in every sign of suffering, which explains the very different way in
which the subject will deal with his suffering unless, of course, it exceeds
certain limits. The child may be suffering from a throat infection and con-
tinue quietly to play, chatter and communicate; he may also make his sore
throat (son mal a la gorge) the sole and unique path of communication
and be nothing more than this complaint (mal) as long as the response,
whether it makes it disappear or not, does not give a voice back to the
suffering I, inducing him to reoccupy the place of someone seeking psychic
care.
Once childhood has passed, and if we leave to one side the bodys role in
the experience of jouissance, the subject will have less recourse to his body
as a privileged transmitter of messages insofar as he has been able to diver-
sify both the addressees and the objects of his demand. But for this double
diversification to come about, the body (at the end of childhood the mother
will hand over to him the responsibility for taking care of it) must have as
referent a psychical body whose history provides evidence of the love that
has been given to him, the recognition and valorization of his sexual iden-
tity, of his singularity, the desire to see him take care of himself, change,
and become autonomous.
In the contrary case, the illnesses from which the psychical body con-
tinues to suffer will mean that the I will maintain a relation with its body
that repeats the relation that the mother had with the childs body; or, more
exactly, the relation that the child attributes to her in the history that he
has constructed of it. When this is the case, the adult subjects relationship
to the suffering of his body transforms this suffering into the representative
of the body of the infant and of the child that one once was an infant
and child that one can also desire, want to repair, overprotect or, con-
versely, hate or punish with some form of suffering that will be imposed on
him or exacerbated, or alternatively simply ignored thereby making the
maternal deafness his own.
The suffering body can always reoccupy the place that the biographer
had accorded in a remote past to other somatic accidents in this history that
had transformed them into psychical events. And as it is the same biogra-
pher who experiences the present suffering, the signification attributed to
the past sufferings will form an integral part of the signification he attri-
butes to his present suffering. The responses that had been given to him, as
well as those that he had given himself, will influence the demands he will
make, when his suffering returns, on others, on his body, and on himself.
I will conclude this essay by dwelling on a situation and an encounter
which will determine a type of prologue in this play in which the hero is the
body and the author is the psyche: a prologue that is as particular as it is
dangerous for the satisfactory composition of the acts that will follow.
From different angles, and for a certain number of years already, the
mothers depressive experiences during her first contacts with the child have
become increasingly important in accounting for the earliest and most
immediate signs of the infants psychic distress. Now, whatever the cause of
these depressive feelings, they will always manifest themselves by the impos-
sibility of the depressed person to feel pleasure in and through his or her
contacts and cathexes, an impossibility to feel it and thus to show it and to
share the signs of it. I have left to one side the very important question
raised by this very early capacity of the infant to perceive the contribution
of a shared pleasure or its absence; although what I said earlier about emo-
tion may offer us a path of approach. Let us focus for the moment on this
connection between maternal depression, her impossibility of feeling/mani-
festing pleasure in her contacts with the child, the lack of shared erogenous
pleasure and the destructive consequences for the psyche of the infant who
must see himself as capable of engendering his own pleasure.17 If this
maternal depression seems to be almost a constant among the traumatic
factors, it is evident that it may be the consequence of a bereavement, an
illness, or an acute conflict. It seems to me, however, that these effects on
the infants psyche, in this initial phase of life, correspond to the manifesta-
tions of the depression more than to its cause, even if the impact of the lat-
ter can be seen in the way in which the mother lives her relation to the
child. She will project on to the latter from the outset the image of the one
17
It is evident that the impossibility of taking any pleasure in suckling, washing, and touching her baby
will affect the movements necessary for doing any of these things, but I do not think that we can content
ourselves with this mechanistic or realistic explanation. I think that the mothers experience of a psy-
chic pleasure, with its eroticized components, is necessary if the infant is to be able to fully feel his own
experiences of pleasure. The mother may have the same gestual behaviour, the same dexterity, but my
feeling is that if she does not experience pleasure herself, if there is no circulation via the body of a
shared experience of pleasure, the infants psyche will not receive the aliment of pleasure that it needs
in a form that can be assimilated or metabolized. There will be some pleasure for it is a vital energy
without which the psychical apparatus cannot function but its quality, its properties, will find expres-
sion in anomalies and especially in the resistance that this form of energy opposes to the relational func-
tions of the apparatus.

1396 P. Aulagnier
(often a first child) whom she has not been able to mourn, the menacing
shadow of an image of the partner who has become an adversary in the
conflict that one is living, the shadow of a father or of a mother who has
passed away, the mourned image of ones own body that one thought was
protected from illness.18
The clinical picture on which I am going to focus is specified by the
event responsible for the maternal depression and by the immediate conse-
quences that will result from it for this state of complementarity which,
during a certain time, must link psychic space and somatic space, affective
experience and sensory experience. I want to recall what I was saying ear-
lier about this history and this image of a body which precede its arrival
into the world. We have seen that even in the most optimistic hypothesis
of a future mother in whom the mechanisms of repression, sublimation,
assumption of castration, have retained their structuring functions, this
anticipated I carries with it the image of this child who is not yet there,
an image that is faithful to the narcissistic illusions of the mother and an
image approximating as closely as possible to an ideal child. (This pre-
cathexis also explains why for every mother this infant to come will be
the support for everything that may, at moments, crystallize her anxiety,
her guilt, and her fear of loss.) Clinical experience shows us how fragile
any apparent psychical equilibrium may be in the face of certain ordeals:
I have often pointed out the uniqueness of the experience of pregnancy,
and why for some women it may represent a psychically dangerous ordeal
owing to the fact that it will reactivate and remobilize relationships in the
past that have more or less been left behind, but which they will have to
re-experience in an inverted form. We have also seen that the messages,
the offers, that the mother addresses to the anticipated I, as well as the
responses that the latter is supposed to give to her in return, will find sup-
port in the relay represented by the infants body, its expressions, its state,
its movements, its apathy, its crying. But this body, or rather the manifes-
tations which express its life and its singularity, and thus the unforeseen
element that makes it a living body, will have to be welcomed by the
mother as the referent on the stage of reality of the psychical representa-
tive that preceded it and was waiting for it. The infants body is the neces-
sary complement for establishing a state of junction between a psychical
representative pre-forged by the maternal psyche, and which referred to
her child idea (or her ideal child), and the actual child who is there. The
infants body alone is able to furnish the mother with the signalling mate-
rials that guarantee the anticipated I an anchor point in the reality of a
singular being. These materials oblige and permit the mother to preserve
her cathexis in her psychical representative of the infant, and thus in the
psychical body present in her own psyche, while cathecting the gap
because it is a sign of life between this representative and the actual
infant. A gap that differentiates but also links; it alone can link her psy-
chical body to this singular body. But what happens if this anchoring of
18
We shall see that in one case the consequences of the maternal depression on the infant are, on the
contrary, directly linked to the encounter.

the psychical representative in the reality of the infants body fails? Two
outcomes are possible:
In the first we are confronted with a phenomenon of partial idealiza-
tion which, consequently, is very particular: the more the infants devel-
opment risks underlining this gap, the more his psychical representative
will be idealized, and the more everything in the child that is in the reg-
ister of what is different, what is unforeseen, will have to be denied.
The decoding by the mother of the messages emitted by the infant will
prove to be correct each time the message confirms her own representa-
tion of the infant; in the contrary case, it will inverse the signification
of the message. Certain traits of behaviour, of somatic functions, of the
first manifestations of awareness, of attention, will be idealized and
over-cathected, while every sign of life, every modification that shows
and underlines difference will be devalued, combatted or, more radi-
cally, not seen. This fragmentary idealization risks provoking in the
infant a fundamental insecurity concerning his own sensory evidence, a
mutilating uncertainty concerning the conformity between oneself and
the image reflected in the mirror, a very strange rapport with the ideal.
Such reactions may be encountered in the schizophrenic and they throw
light on how the appeal of delusional certainty can serve as a bulwark.
In the second case, we find ourselves confronted with the impossibility
for the mother, faced with this same situation, to effect this fragmen-
tary idealization which at least preserves certain points of anchorage
between the infant and his psychical representative. It is an impossibil-
ity that will confront her with a task of mourning concerning a living
infant. Mourning a living person: in one sense this is an experience
that affects us all deeply because life imposes it on us when our love is
rejected by another person whom we still love.
However, a radical difference separates these two situations; in the sec-
ond, a subject was first strongly cathected because he seemed to conform
particularly to his psychical representative. This link really existed, and was
even over-cathected, which is why the rupture that is imposed on you will
modify the psychical referent that one had forged of the loved one, gradu-
ally permitting the elaboration of the task of detaching oneself from the
loved one and his psychical representative alike. In the first, it is the possi-
bility of a link between the infant and the psychical representative that pre-
ceded him that has to be mourned and, whats more, at the moment when
a real body cannot remain alive without external help, which presupposes
that the life of this body is cathected. But how could one cathect a human
object, whatever it may be, if it did not have a psychical representative?
How could one cathect a living person who required, ipso facto, the killing
of his representative in your psyche? This dilemma could be formulated in
the following terms: either the infants death makes it possible to preserve a
psychical representative whose idealization will not meet with any obstacles,
and which will remain unchanged while waiting for a new body, or the
infants life is preserved and his psychical representative will be condemned
to death; but in that case, a first representation of the mother/infant

1398 P. Aulagnier
relation will have to be effaced forever from the psyche to make room for
another. But which?
Unless actual death is involved, the mother finds herself faced with a situ-
ation bordering on the impossible. On the one hand, she will have to pre-
serve a desire for the life of this infant, cathect the functions necessary to
this end, try to pick up the disturbing messages emitted by the infants body
and, on the other, to mourn the anticipated I which had served as a deco-
der. To do this, she will have to deploy a new psychical referent without
which the infant will be in danger of becoming non-existent as soon as his
presence is no longer confirmed by a gaze that sees a body, that hears a
cry, that notices a mouth swallowing an aliment.
But this new representative will lack roots in time, in desire, in a history
that is present in all the other cases. Each new object cathected during the
course of our existence occupies the place of something already expected
(un d a attendu). It is not only that, of course, but it benefits from what I
ej
have called a cathexis in quest of support. Experience teaches us that not
just any old support is up to the task, that a certain idea preceded it and
anticipated it, and that it is the discovery, always partially illusory, of its
conformity with this anticipated representation of the expected object that
triggers the phenomenon that we call love.
In the encounter analysed here, it will or would be necessary for the
mother to give a place to a psychical representative of the infant that
requires her to abandon the one that preceded it, which alone was able to
support a representation of the mother/infant relation in conformity with
the maternal psychic economy, not to mention that this abandonment
imposes itself in a situation of urgency. Now what is true for any bodily
accident is true for any psychical accident: if you fall badly, it only takes a
few seconds to fracture your body; in the best of cases, it will take months
for the fractured bits to heal, and often many more months to discover the
mechanisms that will compensate for the functional handicap that may
result.
Now the psyche of this type of mother suffers from what I would readily
call a traumatism of the encounter. This newborn infant who imposes him-
self on her gaze is situated, in spite of himself, outside history or outside
his history; he breaks its continuity with the risk of endangering the totality
of a construction whose fragility had remained hidden to the historian. By
drawing on the means of her psychical limit (bord psychique), the mother
will have to try to weave the threads of it again, to link up the present time
with a past time so as to preserve a relation to temporality that is compati-
ble with the identificatory process and its movement. If she fails, her depres-
sive reaction may lead to a melancholic state, a psychotic episode, or the
onset of a depressive state. In the contrary case, and regardless of the psy-
chical mechanisms that have helped her to overcome the consequences of
this traumatic encounter, she will have to carry out a much more arduous
task than that of mourning, one which will also require a period of elabora-
tion whose duration will be variable but always substantial. This period of
time will generally coincide with the time needed for the infant to develop
into a child, a transition that will help the maternal psyche to overcome her
trauma by proposing signs for his cathexis, verbal this time, that will be
evidence to her of the presence of an I and the function of messenger that
the latter will attribute to his own constructions. These new constructions
and messages will lend themselves more easily to the interpretation that the
mother gives to them so that they approximate more closely to those she
expects.
But this child was first an infant dispossessed of the psychical representa-
tive that ought to have welcomed him. He too will appeal to the means of
his psychical limit in order to overcome the consequences of this experi-
ence of dispossession, of this first phase of life that placed him outside his-
tory; and he too will be able to succeed in constructing a history (his own)
while leaving the first chapter blank.
Success here will, however, prove more problematic for the child than for
the mother: the psychical work that it implies falls to an I that is just begin-
ning its apprenticeship as a historian and constructor.
That is why the consequences of such a start to life will often leave indeli-
ble traces in the psychic functioning of the child, or of the adult that the
analyst, depending on the case, will encounter. These traces throw light on
the particularity and complexity of the responses that the child has found
to enable the life of the infant to continue.
These responses can be separated into three scenarios which will help us
to see the determining psychic mechanism in each of them:
1 The infants psyche may succeed in anticipating its need to take into
consideration separation, reality, the beginnings of an understanding of
the maternal discourse. Thanks to that, it will facilitate maximally the
task of the external decoder by making its messages conform as closely
as possible to the only responses that the mother is capable of giving.
This reality-testing that occurs too early will be at the expense of psy-
chical autonomy: as soon as he is able to formulate demands, the child
will remain as closely as possible to those that he thinks are expected by
the mother in order to approximate more closely to the psychical repre-
sentative that she had pre-invested. The biographer will transform him-
self into a copyist condemned to transcribe faithfully a history written
by an other once and for all.
2 This anticipation may not occur or, in any case, may fail: this other that
the psyche encounters will not be cathected as a bearer of a desire for
life and as a dispenser of pleasure. The affect pleasure will no longer
have a fantasy of fusion as a representative support, but will accompany
an auto-sensory activity whose psychic figuration takes over the postu-
late of self-procreation. Whereas in auto-erotic activity pleasure is sup-
ported by the fantasy of a fusional relationship with the object of desire,
in auto-sensory activity pleasure accompanies, as we have seen, a figura-
tion in which the effects of the encounter become the substitute for an
object whose psychical referent refers purely to ones own body. If, in a
very early phase of life, the postulate of self-procreation is the only
organizer of psychic constructions, it is because the maternal psyche
organizes a space for relationships that anticipates the presence of a

1400 P. Aulagnier
representative of the external object; this will continue for as long as is

necessary for the infants psyche to give it a place and thereby to appro-
priate the metasign of the alphabet of the primary process which gives
him access to a space and world of relationships. If, however, this
access, once taken, becomes at times impracticable, the ultimate recourse
left to the psyche will confront us with the mechanism analysed above in
connection with autism.
3 In the third scenario, the presence of a very particular form of splitting
can be observed; and although it is a source of conflict, it will help the
subject to preserve for himself a space for relationships as best he can,
though probably with great difficulty. The external object which is recog-
nized as the only one capable of satisfying the need will be disconnected
from every erogenous source of an experience of pleasure that has become
autonomous from the experience and time of satisfaction. The conse-
quences of this splitting, which is as particular as it is early, will appear in
the status and function that will be preserved by the object of the need.
They throw light on certain forms of anorexia and addiction, and also on
the troublesome relationships underlying a portion of those clinical pic-
tures which, for lack of a precise classification, we define as borderline
states. The relationship that the psyche establishes with the other will be
organized around the sole desire and power that it attributes to him (of
granting or refusing what the body needs) and around its own power to
demand or refuse this contribution, irrespective of the actual state of the
body, whether it is a question of food, of sleep, or the satisfaction of any
other need. The only signs by means of which the psyche can make room
for a body that could serve as a relay for relationships are those through
which a body in a state of need manifests itself which is not the equiva-
lent of a suffering body. If we put ourselves in the situation of the parent/
child relationship, we must remember that if it is not within the childs
power to satisfy certain bodily needs without external help, it is within his
power to refuse this help and in so doing to trigger an acute conflict.
Whether it is the child or the adult that is concerned, this refusal, and the
conflict that it provokes, will become for the psyche evidence of the power
that it has over the body and of the links that it continues to have with
the other: here the conflictual relationship always involves real and vital
issues and, whats more, issues that are fixed once and for all. There will
be no further bodily accident that can be transformed into a psychic event
that finds its place in the movement that specifies every history. The char-
acteristic of need is its repetition, which can only give rise to the same rep-
etition of the interpretation that the psyche makes of it and repeats
indefinitely. This helps us to understand the immutability of the conflic-
tual relationship which, at this price, can be preserved between the subject
and an other, sparing the former, whether child or adult, the encounter
with a deserted world which, at best, he will be able to fill with his
mirages.
I will conclude with just a few words: a body without a shadow is no
more conceivable than a psychic body without the history which is its

spoken shadow. This shadow may be protective or menacing, beneficial or

maleficent, protecting the body from a source of light that is too bright or
announcing a storm; but, in all cases, this shadow is indispensable, for its
loss would imply the loss of life in all its forms.
References
Aulagnier P (1975). The violence of interpretation: From pictogram to statement (The New Library of
Psychoanalysis). London: Brunner-Routledge.
quivalent du retrait autistique? Published in
Aulagnier P (1984a). Le retrait dans lhallucination: un e
Lieux de lenfance, 3. Toulouse: Privat.
Aulagnier P (1984b). LApprenti-historien et le ma^tre sorcier: du discours identifiant au discours
lirant. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
de
Enriquez M (1985). Au carrefour de la haine. Paris: Epi.

Birth of A Body, Origin of A History Piera Aulagnier

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Birth of A Body, Origin of A History Piera Aulagnier

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96:13711401 doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.

Birth of a body, origin of a history1

Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis

ject perceives will be very different depending on whether he recognizes in

Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96

Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96 Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis

Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96

Discourses on the body

Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96

Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96 Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis

Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96

Birth of a body, origin of a history1

Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis

The bringing to life of the psychical apparatus

Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96

unaware of her existence, he cannot avoid the consequences of these modi-

Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96 Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis

sure or of suffering. Hence, the second observation: this pleasure or this

Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96

Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96 Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis

Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96

Many analytic contributions devoted to the autistic and schizophrenic

Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96

The body for the mother

Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96 Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis

The effect of suffering in infantile life

Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96 Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis

organization of the surrounding milieu. Psychic suffering can be interpreted

Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96

give meaning to an organization that initially appears arbitrary or chaotic

Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96

Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96 Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis

Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96

Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96

representative of the external object; this will continue for as long as is

Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96 Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis

spoken shadow. This shadow may be protective or menacing, beneficial or

Copyright 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96

You might also like