The relationship between trauma and the symbolic function of the mind is discussed in three parts. First, a short outline is given of the long-lasting split within the field of trauma: it consists in a dichotomy between the symbolic and anti-symbolic reading of the traumatic experience – as I have called it in a previous paper. In the second part, it is maintained that the work of Ferenczi represents an attempt at overcoming this split. In the third and last part, the notion of symbolic adaptation is introduced. The process of adaptation has to ensure the survival of the individual along lines capable to foster the hope that the lost equilibrium between the individual and his environment will one day be restored. This function is performed by symbols: by linking together the lost satisfaction and the hoped-for wish-fulfillment, by creating bridges between past and future, symbols enable us to adjust to the new environment without renouncing hope. Symbols are mediators between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. When a person is struck by trauma it is precisely this unifying function which is broken. A typical consequence of this situation is described by Ferenczi as a rupture between feeling and intelligence.
Emma Eckstein's circumcision trauma has been powerfully suppressed, denied, and dissociated from the history of the origins of psychoanalysis. Even though Freud did not categorize it as a trauma, he was deeply impacted by it in the period when he provided psychoanalysis with his foundation. Despite Freud's intellectual erasure of the trauma that Emma experienced, her >cut< never ceased to unconsciously break through Freud's fantasies and discourse, haunting the psychoanalytic building as a veritable ghost. Sándor Ferenczi became the recipient of what Freud could not consider in his own mind, and his revision of the >Bausteine< (building blocks) of psychoanalysis featured an attempt to heal the split embedded in the foundation of psychoanalysis.
When Freud began his professional career, psychotherapy was already an established practice, standing upon the theory of ideogenesis, according to which certain motor symptoms were caused by ideas . This theory offered the rational ground for psychotherapy: if a symptom was provoked by an idea, it was possible to undo it by finding and erasing this very idea. Freud developed this theory into the model of unconscious ideas and into the technique of >interpreting the contents<. Whereas the later discoveries of resistance, transference, and character structure, should have promoted a break with the ideogenetic model, Freud never gave up the erroneous assumption that behind an action there was an idea, which had to be captured if one wanted to stop the action. This assumption was questioned again and again during the interminable controversy over the relative importance of remembering and experiencing: by Ferenczi and Rank in the Twenties, Alexander in the Fifties, and Gill in the Eighties, when they tried to shift the focus from remembering to experiencing, in order to make psychoanalysis an effective psychotherapy. Today, the view that what organizes our actions is stored in the form of >ideas< is no longer accepted by the scientific community. Instead, we speak of >operative models< and implicit or procedural memories.
The broken symbol: The fear of the mind of the other in the symbolic history of the individual
(2006)
In Ferenczi's idea of identification with an aggressor we can distinguish two sides. One is what we might call an interactive tactic or a social strategy, which is used in upsetting or unbalanced relations of power in order to forestall lack of control, fear, and the like. This is the side that is explored in great detail by Jay Frankel. The other side consists in a intrapsychic change, which flows from severe trauma. The specific effects of the latter are described by Ferenczi as dissociation/fragmentation of the personality, sequestering of the trauma, emotional abandonment, and isolation. Elsewhere, Ferenczi refers to this as a form of psychic self-mutilation.
The gaze is originally experienced as a disembodied force. This experience is discussed here from a psychopathological prospective and from a developmental perspective. In certain states of regression, when the boundaries between the self and the others are fading away, the gaze is again experienced as a disembodied force that radiates from the eyes and can dangerously penetrate into the mind. The body and its extensions are usually used as a shelter. The body performs this sheltering function in a natural and silent way, and only when this function is lacking do we become aware of it. Shame then signals the failure of the ordinary sheltering function performed by the body. If the external body is not sufficiently cathected, its sheltering function is also decreased, to the point that the body is experienced as transparent, and the most intimate feelings and thoughts become dangerously available to others. In primitive societies, this situation is reflected in the universal belief in the >evil eye,< the most common defense against the evil eye having been a representation of an erect penis. In ancient Rome, the phallus-shaped amulet used to ward off the evil eye was called the >fascinum<: this magic phallus was supposed to neutralize the attack by fascinating the disembodied gaze, that is, by binding it (from the latin verb fascio, fasciare, to bind). The construction of mastered visibility is an organizer of the ego structure. The fascination of the mythical Narcissus for his own mirror image illustrates a central moment of the dialectical construction of the self: the effort to bind the disembodied gaze that is threatening the self, by giving a body to it and by fixing it to an image. Narcissism is thus the effort to bind an almighty free-floating gaze.