【2】'Loshrcbrn mrdr#lr'. Thir notion combiner in the word 'cadre' the meaning of 'frame', but u ah used in the French acnsc of the 'setting', 'le adre malytique' (of technical importance in this paper). [Translator's note.]
Above all, Kleinian contributions concentrated on projections relative to the bad object. Up to a point this was justified in the face of Freud's denial of their authenticity. Frequently one has noted the way he overshadowed the 'bad mother' with his immovable faith in the quasi- paradisical bond uniting the mother to her infant. So it fell to Melanie Klein to touch up this partiel (第二部分)and partial picture of the mother-infant relationship, and this all the more easily as the cases she analysed -whether children or adults -, being mainly of a maniaco-depressive or psychotic structure, revealed the evidence of such projections. Thus an abundant literature describes to the full this omnipresent internal breast which threatens the infant with annihilation, with fragmentation and infernal cruelty of all kinds, that a mirror-relation links with the baby, who defends himself, as well he may, by projection. When the schizo- paranoid phase starts to give way to the depressive position, the latter, which coincides with the unification that links the object and the ego, has asa fundamental characteristic the progressive cessation of the projective activity, and the fact that the infant becomes able to assume his own aggressive drives -he becomes 'responsible' with regard to them, in a way -, which in turn encourages him to take care of the maternal object, to worry about her, to fear losing her, by reflecting his aggressivety onto himself by way of archaic guilt and with the aim of reparation. This is why, more than ever, there is no question here of incriminating the mother.
In the configuration that I have described, where vestiges of the bad object may persist, as a source of hatred, I suspect that hostile characteristics are secondary to a primary imago of the mother, where she happened to be devitalized by a mirror reaction of the child who was affected by her bereavement. This leads us to develop the hypothesis that has already been proposed. When conditions are favourable to the inevitable separation between the mother and the child, a decisive mutation arises in the depths of the ego. The maternal object in the form of the primary object of fusion fades away, to leave the place to the ego's own cathexes which will found his personal narcissism. Henceforth the ego will be able to cathect its own objects, distinct from the primitive object. But this effacement of the mother does not make the primitive object disappear completely. The primary object becomes a 'framing- structure' for the ego, sheltering the negative hallucination of the mother. Most certainly, the representations of the mother continue to exist and are projected inside this framing structure onto the backdrop of the negative hallucination of the primary object. But they are no longer frame - representations or, to make myself clearer, representations that fuse what comes from the mother with what comes from the child. One may as well say that they are no longer representations whose corresponding affects express a vital character, which is indispensable for the baby's existence. These primitive representations hardly deserve the name of representations. They are the compounds of barely outlined representations, probably of a hallucinatory nature rather than representative, and of loaded affects which one could almost call affective hallucina- tions. This is just as true in the hopeful anticipation of satisfaction as in states of want. When these are prolonged, they give rise to the emotions of anger, rage and then catastrophic despair. Now the effacement of the maternal object that has been transformed into a framing structure comes about when love for the object is sufficiently sure to play this role of a container of representative space. This latter is no longer threatened with cracking; it can face waiting and even temporary depression, the child feeling supported by the maternal object even when it is not there. The framework, when all is said and done, offers the guarantee of the maternal presence in her absence, and can be filled with.fantasy of all kinds, to the point of, and including, aggressive violent fantasies which will not imperil the container. The space which is thus framed constitutes the receptacle of the ego; it surrounds an empty field, so to speak, which will be occupied by erotic and aggressive cathexes, in the form of object representations. This emptiness is never perceived by the subject, because the libido has cathected the psychical space. Thus it plays the role of primordial matrix of the cathexes to come.
However, if a traumatism such as blank mourning occurs before the infant has been able to establish this framework solidly enough, there is no psychical space available within the ego. The ego is limited by this framing structure, but in the circumstances this frame surrounds a conflictual space which strives to hold the mother's image captive, struggling against its disappearance, and alternately noting the revival of the memory traces of lost love, with nostalgia, which is expressed by the impression of painful vacuity. These alternations reproduce the ancient conflict of unsuccessful primary repression, in the measure that the effacement of the primordial object will not have been an acceptable experience, nor mutually accepted, by the two parties of the former mother-infant symbiosis.
Arguments on the theme of the antagonism between primary narcissism arid primary object-love are perhaps. . . without object. AU depends on the point of view adopted. That primary object-love can be observed straightaway by a third party, an onlooker, can hardly be disputed. On the other hand, that this love should be narcissistic from the child's point of view could hardly be otherwise. Doubtless, the debate has been
To complete this description, I propose to distinguish a positive primary narcissism (attachable to Eros), tending towards unity and identity, from a negative primary narcissism (attachable to the destructive instincts), which is not manifested by hatred towards the object -this is perfectly compatible with the withdrawal of positive primary narcissism -but by the tendency of the ego to undo its unity and to proceed towards nought. This is clinically manifest by the feeling of emptiness.
What we have described under the name of the dead mother complex helps us to understand the failures of favourable evolution. We watch the failure of the experience of individuating separation (Mahler) where the juvenile ego, instead of constituting the receptacle for cathexes to come, after separation, relentlessly endeavours to retain the primary object and relive, repetitively, its loss, which on the level of the primary ego (which is melded with the object) gives rise to the feeling of narcissistic depletion, expressed phenomenologically by the sentiment of emptiness, so characteristic of depression, which is always the result of a narcissistic wound experienced on the level of the ego.
The object is 'dead' (in the sense of not alive, even though no real death has come about); hence it draws the ego towards a deathly, deserted universe. The mother's blank mourning induces blank mourn- ing in the infant, burying a part of his ego in the maternal necropolis. To nourish the dead mother amounts, then, to maintaining the earliest love for the primordial object under the seal of secrecy enshrouded by the primary repression of an ill-accomplished separation, of the two partners of primitive fusion. 【3】
【3】What I have just described unnot fkil to evoke the very intenting ideas of N. Abraham and M. Torok. However, even if, on numerous pointr, our conceptions converge, they differ elrewhere on a theme to which I attach gnat importance, namely the clinical and meupychologicrl rignificance ofrtata olemptincar. The manner in which 1 attempt to account for them is taken upin a continuour thread ofthought, when, after having tried to define the heuristic value of the concept of negative hallucination and proposing the concept of 'blank psychosis' with J. L. Donnet, I have in this work been engaged on the elucidation of what I call blank mourning. One might rummarize thee differmcu by stating that narciuism conrtitutca the axis of my theoretical reflection, when- N. Abraham and M. Tomk a n essentially concerned with the relation between incorporation and introjection, with the crypt-like effect to which they give riu.
It seems to me that psychoanalysts should have little difficulty in recognizing a familiar clinical configuration in the description of the dead mother complex, which may however differ in one or another aspect from my own account of it. Psychoanalytic theory is elaborated from a limited number of observations, and it may well be that what I have described covers at the same time sufficiently general characteristics to coincide with the experiences of others, and more singular characteristics which would be particular to the patients I have had in analysis.
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