This book's title and subtitle indicate its essential argument. The I is the apprentice historian, the psychological space in which identifications or delusional statements are worked out. According to Aulagnier, two questions have inspired her writings, including this book: the function of the I as the builder of its own libidinal history; and the relationship between this I and the analytic approach, where the concept of "the repressed" is of central importance.
The master sorcerer is another name for the id, for the psychological place where primal and primary processes write a story without words. In some cases, the subject may experience the "telescoping" of an event, a fantasy, and an identification in such a way that the subject is "stuck with" an identification which he is unable to assume, and yet finds it impossible to repress the fantasy. The task of analysis is to seek out the event that marked the infantile psyche, to bring to light how the irruption of affect contributed to fixing the identification in the subject's mind and worked to impede repression. The I can then replace this lived/lost moment with a history of the identification that makes sense of the subject's present life and makes an investment in his future possible.
The first part of Aulagnier's book presents the cases of Philippe and Odette, focusing on their relationships to time. Philippe is a young, delusional, psychotic patient who was treated by Aulagnier, initially during his hospitalization and later in her home, with the idea of undertaking an analytic treatment. Odette is a woman of about forty who elected to undergo analysis (which lasted five years) to help her in her struggle against what she called "dehumanization crises."
Aulagnier presents four versions of Philippe's history: that of Philippe himself, which embodies a delusional causality that brings about "temporal indifferentiation" and seeks to exculpate his parents; that of the parents, who deny the role they have played in Philippe's life; the version that Aulagnier develops based on the preceding two histories, and on her own suspended theoretical attention; and, finally, the history that evolves within the therapeutic relationship.
Behind the claim of Philippe and his mother, that he "had a wonderful childhood," the analyst clearly discerns the annihilation of a birth. When the therapist suggests that the future is not decided in advance, Philippe responds: "I can't tell the difference between the past and the future. I just don't understand all these dichotomies: past/present, life/death, present/future." Aulagnier believes that in trying decathect her child, the mother has "roboticized" her relationship with him. This is reflected in the leitmotiv of Philippe's delusions: "We are all robots." He has been forbidden, he says, to see his birth. This evokes the prohibition against conceptualizing the mother's desire with regard to that birth. "My father has always been a brother to me," says Philippe. In other words, the paternal function has always been a blank in his history.
The act of eating a San Pedro cactus (Trichocereus pachanoi), which marks Philippe's entry into a delusional episode, causes him to meet "the unspeakable." His fantasy is to incorporate "a power close to that of God," but this idea opens the way to a characteristic primal metabolization. He acts out a pictogram: He incorporates and "autolyzes" the stone maternal breast, giver of indistinguishable "life-death"; "his bones and his thoughts" disintegrate, and he self-destructs and destroys the forbidden core that is the cactus/breast. The autolysis actualizes the decathexis that will satisfy both his mother's desire, and his own.
Odette, for her part, substitutes "bodily perceptions" for what she should have borrowed from her mother's discourse to construct the first paragraphs of her history. For lack of an ear capable of hearing her mother's words, her I was unable to metabolize into ideational representations those representatives of the suffering body that the psyche then metabolized instead into pictograms and fantasies. Her delusional causality is an attempt to fill the void created by the discourse of the spokesperson. To reconstruct her history and account for the events that have marked her, Odette invokes a single causal factor, "the abjection of the father"—a father whose powers of maleficent desire she idealizes. She then constructs an analytic theory for herself, apparently "the equivalent of a split-up delusional theory" that is compatible with the discourse of her environment.
In the second part of her book, Aulagnier proposes a theoretical outline of the process of identification. She expands and refines the concept of potentiality as elaborated in her earlier works. While psychotic potentiality is characterized by the conflict between the "Identifying I" and the "Identified I," neurotic potentiality involves the relationship between the I and its ideals; polymorphous potentiality, when it becomes manifest, leads to symptoms such as love relations or alienating relations, certain forms of somatization, and the like. In this theoretical scheme, T0 corresponds to the birth of the infant, T1 to the emergence of the I, and T2 to the conclusive moment when the I makes a compromise with reality; this compromise determines the type of potentiality. Potentiality is thus a specific organization that under certain circumstances moves from the potential to the manifest.
Faced by an idea that is "unthinkable and impossible to take on," and that is evoked by a particular book, Philippe eats the cactus and plunges into a delusional state. Similarly, the revelation of "the magic of analytic knowledge about desire" confronts Odette with an unbearable discovery, the analyst becoming for her an idealized, all-powerful mother. Aulagnier uses the expression "encounter effect" to refer to this type of catalyzing cause that prompts a conflict of identification to pass from the potential to the manifest state.
By way of conclusion, Aulagnier shows how George Orwell's fictional world in 1984 prefigures her theories of repression and of the process of identification. What Orwell calls "doublethink" is meant to produce a kind of repression within the subject that destroys ideas, consuming them utterly. The objective is to strip the I of all confidence in its own thinking. The subject is alienated, for he has internalized the mechanism of repression, but it is Big Brother who decides what the repressed object is. This mutilation serves to provide an idealized figure for repression in the psychotic patient: its function is to prevent the revealing of non-repressed elements active in the mother's psyche. It thus serves an entity that is external to the subject, whereas in neurosis repression is imposed by the I's own thinking. The neurotic forbids him- or herself to desire the forbidden, but the psychotic suffers an external prohibition on the thinking of non-repressed thoughts. The I's power of thinking is inhibited in neurosis, whereas in psychosis it is damaged.
In short, Aulagnier's hypothesis of a ternary system of representational activity, and the notion of potentiality, profoundly transform and reinvigorate the Freudian understanding of possible mental organizations.
Source Citation
Aulagnier, Piera. (1984). L'Apprenti-historien et le Maîtresorcier. Du discours identifiant au discours délirant. (The apprentice historian and the master sorcerer: From the discourse of identification to the discourse of delusion). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Bibliography
Aulagnier, Piera. (2001). The violence of interpretation: From pictogram to sttatement. (Alan Sheridan, Trans.). East Sussex, Philadelphia: Brunner/Routledge. (Original work published 1975) ——. (1979). Les destins du plaisir. Aliénation, amour, passion. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
—GHYSLAIN CHARRON
