Social Theory since Freud by Elliott Anthony;

Author:Elliott, Anthony;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Primary Repression Rethought: Rolling Identifications and Representational Wrappings of Self and Other

There is, I believe, much that is of interest in Kristeva and Laplanche on the constitution of the unconscious through primary repression. Both Kristeva and Laplanche, in differing theoretical ways, underline the importance of primary repression as the support for the arising of an elementary form of subjectivity, which is subsequently secured through the Oedipus and castration complexes. However, there are also serious theoretical difficulties arising from their work. Kristeva has been much criticized, in both psychoanalytic and feminist circles, for linking the moment of identification with the imaginary father. For feminists such as Cornell (1991:68–71), this has the effect of reinscribing gender stereotypes within the pre-Oedipal phase, resulting in a denial of woman’s imaginary. As Cornell (1991:68) develops this:

The later Kristeva, like Lacan, insists that the very condition for the arising of the subject is identification of the phallus. This identification results not from the desire for the mother, but the reading of the desire of the mother which the child interprets as the mother’s desire for the phallus.

Cornell’s critique of Kristeva interestingly stresses that it is from a reading of the desire of desire, the desire of the Other, that primary identification arises and grants the subject’s assent to identity in the symbolic order. From a feminist angle, Cornell is especially attuned to the abjection of the mother that this moment of identification involves, though she is also to some degree aware of the positioning of desire as an external, impersonal force (the desire of desire) rather than as emanating from the child’s desire for the mother. From a related but distinct perspective, Laplanche’s work has also been criticized for its neglect of the more creative dimensions of sexual subjectivity. As Jacqueline Rose has pointed out, Laplanche’s reinterpretation of primary repression means that the ‘child receives everything from the outside’, desire being inscribed within the repressed unconscious via the deformations of parental sexuality itself (Laplanche, 1992: 61). In my view, these criticisms are indeed valid. The standpoints of Kristeva and Laplanche are flawed in respect of the power accorded to the other (imaginary father/seduction) over psychic interiority, or the outside as constitutive of desire itself. By contrast, I suggest that we must develop a psychoanalytic account of subjectivity and intersubjectivity which breaks with this inside/outside boundary.

For these accounts I suggest we should substitute the delineation of an elementary dimension of subjectivity formed in and through primary intersubjectivity—a mode dependent upon the fixation of primal repression and identification. In the constitution of primary intersubjectivity, the small infant actively enters into the push-and-pull of object—or, more accurately, pre-object —relations. This is less a phenomenon of the other ‘breaking in’ from the outside than one of ordering psychic interiority within intersubjective boundaries of shared, unconscious experience. The organizing of shared, unconscious experience occurs through a process that I call rolling identification. Derived from the representational flux of the unconscious, rolling identifications provide for the insertion of subjectivity into a complex interplay between self-as-object and pre- object relations.

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