Piera Aulagnier, an Introduction: Some Elements of Her Intellectual Biography

Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96:1355–1369 doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.12409

Key Papers

Piera Aulagnier, an introduction: Some elements of her intellectual biography

Patrick Miller Member of Societ e Psychanalytique de Recherche et de Formation, 31 Quai des Grands Augustins, 75006 Paris, France – [email protected]

The title of this paper, ‘Naissance d’un corps, origine d’une histoire’, bears witness to the importance that Piera Aulagnier granted to the dimension of history, and more precisely to the notion of historicization which she emphasized, and is related in some ways to that of the identificatory process in the development of personality. However, as far as her biography is concerned, we are left with scarce material, and the essence of it is mostly intellectual. It lies mainly in her books and articles where we can try and retrace the development and transformation of her thinking. It also resides in the Journals she created: first L’Inconscient (in collaboration with Jean Clavreul), then Topique which she launched in 1969 as sole chief editor, and in the part she actively played in the history of the French psychoanalytical movement, its controversies and schisms. First in the Societe Francßaise de Psychanalyse (SFP)1 where she trained and graduated and began publishing, then at the Ecole Freudienne de Paris founded in 1964 where she followed Lacan who had just been banned from being a training analyst by the IPA site visit committee when the SFP became an IPA Study Group, out of loyalty and solidarity because she thought the ban was unacceptable rather than out of support for his positions on training. When Lacan implemented a new graduating procedure he called ‘La Passe’, she, together with Francßois Perrier and J.P. Valabrega fiercely criti- cized it and refused to comply. As Lacan refused any discussion, she first resigned from her position as Director of Training, then in January 1969 decided to resign from the Ecole Freudienne de Paris together with Francßois Perrier and J.P. Valabrega. They founded the fourth analytic group in France, which they simply named the Quatrieme Groupe. The first issue of Topique was on analytic training. Piera Aulagnier was keen to denounce all forms of abuses and alienation by way of transference in the training, and the intrusion of institutional issues in the personal analysis of candidates. A very interesting debate on issues of training took place within

1The Societe Francßaise de Psychanalyse was founded by Daniel Lagache and Jacques Lacan, after the first split in the history of psychoanalysis in France in 1953. There trained a number of talented young analysts who greatly contributed later to psychoanalytic thinking in France: Piera Aulagnier, J.B. Pontalis, Jean Laplanche, Francßois Perrier, Wladimir Granoff, Daniel Widlocher,€ Guy Rosolato, J.P. Valabrega.

Copyright © 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis 1356 P. Miller the Quatrieme Groupe, published in Topique, which led to a critique of the didactic aspects of training analyses and to a decision to give up the notion of Training Analyst and training analysis, which much later inspired the two French IPA societies to do the same. She was born in Egypt in 1923, Piera Spairani, in an Italian family; she then grew up in Italy, where she studied medicine. With her medical diploma she came to France to marry and to do research as she was very interested in biology. Her encounter with psychoanalysis was somewhat for- tuitous as she once explained to me. Her Italian medical degree was not rec- ognized in France at the time and she could not pursue research in an interesting scientific environment in the way she would have liked. One of her friends, who was a professor of aesthetics at La Sorbonne, told her about psychoanalysis as an interesting field. She began reading Freud methodically and ‘scientifically’, thought he was a great mind, applied for training, and chose as her first analyst another great mind who impressed her by his intelligence when she met him: Jacques Lacan.2 Piera Aulagnier had a sparkling intelligence, reflected in the vivacity of her beautiful green eyes, and an imposing and sophisticated mind, the head of a highbrow intellectual, a passionate theoretician, who intimidated many who kept their distance and missed the warmth and generosity. Canadian psychoanalyst Julien Bigras once told me with his marvelous Quebec accent: “En fait Piera c’t’ une embrasseuse!” (“Actually Piera, she’s a great hug- ger!”). And he was right. She had an amazing openness to everything foreign: cultures, strange ways of being and thinking, alien food (she was always interested while she was traveling, to taste the most ‘alien’ of dishes without any sign of repug- nance). Considering her tightly knitted rational way of theorizing and writing, one could not have suspected that she had a fascination for Africa and its animistic traditions. She also had a tranquil capacity to establish contact in the most candid and straightforward way with the ‘disinherited’: a home- less person on the street, a delusional psychotic in a public place, etc. There was no trace of pity or commiseration: it was Mensch to Mensch. All of this already says a lot about the way she handled her clinical prac- tice. Her encounter with psychotic patients3 was a determining factor in her

2She did a second analysis with Serge Viderman which she began towards the end of the 1960s. She must have been in analysis with Viderman while she was writing her first book La Violence de l’Interpretation (1975). 3Dr Georges Daumezon, who was head psychiatrist of Hopital^ Henri Rousselle within the Hopital^ Sainte-Anne in Paris, a prominent figure of Psychotherapie Institutionnelle, encouraged psychoanalysts, regardless of their institutional belonging, to have a consultation at Sainte-Anne, and/or to hold semi- nars. That is where Lacan first began his seminar, at Henri Ey’s invitation. Daumezon offered Piera Aulagnier a weekly consultation, where she received numerous psychotic patients hospitalized there and a room where she held her seminar. Her public seminar was opened, without registration, and was the place and time when she would present the first drafts of what later became chapters of her books. Interest for psychoanalysis has now, sadly, almost completely disappeared from Sainte-Anne. The legacy has not endured.

Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96 Copyright © 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis Piera Aulagnier, an introduction 1357 relentless endeavor to deepen and enlarge Freud’s metapsychology in order to forge4 representations of the origins of psychic life which might, in turn, help us better understand what psychotic patients need from an analytic listening to come to terms with the “blancs” (blank spots) in their early development. In the first pages of the introduction to The violence of interpretation she explains what lay at the origin of her theoretical endeavor: the experience, while listening to psychotic patients, of a split between what her “thinking was experiencing” and “the knowledge of the psychotic phenomenon which proves ineffective when confronted with the field of experience” (Aulagnier, 1975, p. xxvii. Citation translated by author.) Trying to bridge this split by revisiting Freud’s metapsychology and his drive theory was going to occupy almost 30 years of her thinking and writing,5 and embarked her on a working through journey from her early con- tributions, still permeated with Lacan’s vocabulary and disembodied formalized way of thinking about the workings of the psyche to a conception of the origins of psychic life deeply rooted in the soma (biological) and in the body (as erogenous body). The violence of interpretation, the title of her first book, refers to this “radical and necessary violence” exerted on the infans in order to enable access to this “shared patrimony: language”. Piera Aulagnier has retained Lacan’s justified insistence on the issue of language in psychoanalysis. But she attempts to rethink it, not starting from the external “chain of signifiers” but from the analyst’s experiencing, confronted to a psychotic “discourse”, of an irruption, within his/her psychic space of a “speech- thing-action” (Aulagnier, 1975, p. 18). This led her to elaborate on what she called the pictographic activity, or representative process of the primal, giving birth to the first representational ‘product’: the pictogram, “which ignores the word-presentation and is only constituted of the image of the corporeal thing” (Aulagnier, 1975, p. 19). Piera Aulagnier’s thinking and her way of expressing it in writing, are dense and highly organized in that the author tries to be as consistent as she can be and proceeds by closely tied together definitions. Reading her requires a step-by-step gradual exploration. She is certainly not an easy-to-read author who lures you quickly into a feeling of being smart and illuminated. One needs to make one’s way slowly into the metapsychological landscapes she draws, and redraws, a ‘corpus’ hard to penetrate. It certainly is partly due to her own idiosyncratic way of thinking, but is also a reflection of her topic:

Confronted by (the psychotic) discourse, I have often felt that I was receiving it as the wild interpretation made to the analyst of the non-evidence of the evident.

(Aulagnier, 2001, p. xxv)

4To forge, forging, are typical of Aulagnier’s vocabulary. The words appear very often throughout her writings. They certainly refer to the intense psychic work required from the psyche to metabolize bodily feelings into psychic representations. It should be remembered that Aulagnier wrote in French, which was not her mother tongue. 5Between 1962 and 1990, at the time of her untimely death at the age of 67, of a lung cancer which killed her within two months after the diagnosis.

Copyright © 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96 1358 P. Miller However, her highly theoretical books, which discouraged many readers, found a deep echo in some psychotic patients who consulted her after leaf- ing through one of her books in a bookshop! An exegesis of her main notions and concepts would require the space of a whole book. For the sake of this short introduction to her work as a preamble to my commentary of ‘Birth of a body, origin of a history’, I shall focus on what constitutes the ground of her metapsychology: the pictogram, the pictographic activity and the primal dimension, which were the founda- tion of The violence of interpretation, and remained the touchstone for understanding the rest of her work. In order to understand how her theoretical mind works, one should bear in mind that she starts from Freud’s definition of the drive as “a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work as a consequence of its con- nection with the body” (Freud, 1915, p. 122). Just as Freud drew some of his vocabulary and representations from his intimate knowledge of neurology and neuro-physiology in order to construct a meta-representation of the workings of the mind which he called metapsychology, so did Piera Aulagnier from her initial interest in biology to find images which could give a presentation as close as possible to a thing presentation of the early moments of psychic life. In that respect the notion of metabolization is central to her way of thinking. The activity of representation is the psychic equivalent of the biological work of metabolization, as one can observe it in cellular physiology. The work of metabolization is a function which either transforms an element which is heterogeneous to the structure of the cell into an element which is homoge- neous to it or rejects it. The ‘taking in’ or ‘spitting out’ activity as a first model of the mind (cf. Freud’s Negation) following the bodily model of orality, is here transposed to the more elemental workings of a cell. This gives an image of how far into the organic somatic functions one should ‘regress’ in order to find a figurative way of thinking about the origins of psyche. In this transposition what is being absorbed is not a physical element, but, as Piera Aulagnier indicates, an element of information coming from the senses. That element of information comes from the sensory activity which triggers the need to represent. In the beginning, somatic and psychic survival are so intricate that they cannot be distinguished. The condition for survival is entirely dependent on the capacity to cathect an activity of representation. That cathecting activity constitutes a minimal pleasure and is a life- preserving condition. Each time this cathecting prevails the psychic activity has reached its elemental aim which yields a ‘bonus’ of pleasure. This is how the sensory information becomes libidinal and related to the pleasure of cathecting. That pleasure of cathecting will be a determining factor in the best possible development of the mind. If cathecting becomes prevalently connected with unpleasure what will develop is a tendency to avoid psychic development. A ‘desire of no desire’ will prevail, hence destroying not only the represented but also the representing agent. This constitutes the basis of Piera Aulagnier’s conception of the death drive. The prevailing affect of unpleasure cannot allow for the pictographic activity to represent the cause

Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96 Copyright © 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis Piera Aulagnier, an introduction 1359 of unpleasure. The question of the death drive (which Piera Aulagnier usually names Thanatos, as opposed to Eros) is revisited from the standpoint of a primal radical hatred of the need to represent. At the root of psychic economy Piera Aulangier places the omnipotence of pleasure.6 In her attempt to describe the emergence of psychic life, Piera Aulagnier confronts herself with the epistemological difficulty of having to represent a moment where the emerging activity of representation is not the result of a pre-existing agency, but is itself constitutive of the agency. That is why any failure in the early phases will affect not only the represented but also the representing capacity of the nascent representing agent (the future subject, or ‘I’). This of course shows how her theoretical endeavors were also grounded in her experience with psychotic patients. They also open up to a very rich field of investigation in the domain of what we call ‘psychosomatics’, which she never explored herself as such. This primal activity of representation, which is constitutive of representations and of the representing agency, she named the pictographic activity and its product the pictogram. Why the pictogram? The pictographic representation is not connected to language and is an attempt to represent and find meaning through the figurative use of bodily, sensory ‘images’. In order to appear in the psychical field a phenomenon must be metabolized into a pictographic representation. For this metabolization to happen there must be conditions of representability. What does the pictographic activity try to represent in a pictogram? What is being represented is an encounter and the affect experienced during that encounter. The theoretical construction lies on the necessity to represent the inaugural mouth-breast encounter and the affects of pleasure and unpleasure experienced during the encounter. The first encounter of psyche with the world is actually an encounter with two spaces which are external to it, but not experienced as external: the subject’s own body and the mother’s psyche. In the primal dimension the pictographic activity has no capacity to represent the separation between internal and external spaces. This leads to the important notion of “auto-engendrement”:7 the limited conditions for representability at this stage imply that the emerging psyche is in the illusion of creating itself and the world (the breast), the world represented in the pictographic representation being only a mirroring of itself.8

6‘Erogeneous pleasure is a vital necessity’ (1975, p. 42). 7There are some very difficult issues of translation. ‘Auto-engendrement’, in French, was translated in the English version of The violence of interpretation by ‘self-procreation’. I prefer to keep auto- (as in auto-eroticism) and translate ‘auto-engendering’. There is no pre-existing self procreating a self-image. A need situation within the soma creates the necessity to auto-provide a first degree of ‘meaning’ where meaning has no meaning for an agency which does not exist yet. The organism is ‘auto-triggered’ by the sensory dimension and the resulting pleasure/unpleasure effects to construct the first degree of a psychical agency. 8A potential link could be made here with Winnicott and his insistence on the necessity to preserve, by the quality of the holding, the illusion of omnipotence allowing for a sense of creating the object. But the metapsychologies and the styles remain very different.

Copyright © 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96 1360 P. Miller The illusion of auto-engendering opens up to a more and more advanced form of mentalization. What is being represented in the pictogram is the junction (or disjunction if unpleasure prevails) of a two part unit which Piera Aulagnier named “l’objet-zone complementaire” (the object-complementary zone) and the relational quality of affects uniting them or disjoining them. In the positive case of a ‘pictogram of junction’, the affect of pleasure enables the representing activity to yield a bonus of pleasure. However, Piera Aulagnier always stressed the fact that there must be a very early perception of an increased pleasure when the representation (the pictogram) is accompanied by the experience of a real satisfaction, as long as that experience can be represented as giving pleasure to both parts of the object- complementary zone.9 The corollary of this complementarity between object and zone is the illusion that any zone can auto-engender an object conform- ing to its needs. This two-part unit called the object-complementary zone, is the precursor, in the primal dimension, of what will be elaborated in the primary dimension and its production: the phantasy, as the primal scene.10 In that respect it is important to note how Piera Aulagnier establishes a strong link between the quality of the primal scene phantasy and the quality of junction or disjunction in the pictogram. This seems to indicate that for her, the elaboration of infantile sexuality is deeply rooted in the early ‘engendering’ of the representational capacities. The pictogram is defined as being both at the same time representation of the affect and affect of the representation. In that respect it is important to note that Piera Aulagnier, although she had been an analysand and a ‘stu- dent’ of Lacan, eventually situates herself at the opposite end of the spec- trum of theoretical thinking. Lacan in the beginning of his first seminar had explicitly declared that the concept of affect should be forever banned from psychoanalytic thinking. At this point we understand that the primal activity of representation yields two opposite forms of representation of the primal mouth-breast encounter and the concomitant affects: a pictogram of junction or a pictogram of rejection or disjunction. Let us consider the consequences on psychic development of the preva- lence of a pictogram of disjunction.

9There seems to be an affinity here with what Bion developed as a commensal relationship between container and contained, both container and contained growing due to their mutual relationship. However, the notions of container and contained remained alien to Piera Aulagnier’s theoretical thinking. 10For Piera Aulagnier psychic activity consists of three modalities of functioning, which appear chrono- logically in time: the primal (originaire) processes, the primary processes and the secondary processes. The representational product of the primal is the pictogram and the agency resulting of its activity is the representing agent (le representant). The representational product of the primary is the phantasy, the agency resulting from its activity is the phantasying agent (le phantasmant) also called the stage director (metteur en scene). The representational product of the secondary is the ideational representation or the enunciation, the agency resulting from its activity is the enunciator or speaker (l’enoncßant) or the I (le Je). There exists a strong relationship between the three successive modes of psychic activity and the evolution of the system of perception. All three modalities remain active throughout life.

Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96 Copyright © 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis Piera Aulagnier, an introduction 1361 Piera Aulagnier stresses the antinomic aspects of the aims pursued by desire. On the one hand a desire to cathect the object, by producing a pictographic representation of the object as a part of one’s own body, an incorporating desire, which means also a desire to cathect the incorporating agent. But on the other hand, when the unpleasure produced by a persisting need forces the pictographic activity to represent the source of unpleasure, there appears a desire of auto-annihilation, which corresponds to a desire of non-desire, closely related, in Piera Aulagnier’s thinking, to the expression of a death drive. If one follows the logics of the pictographic activity the representing agent must, by representing unpleasure in the mouth-breast encounter, also represent itself as the source of unpleasure. If the source of unpleasure must be destroyed, then the destruction also targets the representing agent. Before commenting on ‘Birth of a body, origin of a history’ we need to understand another important concept in Piera Aulagnier’s metapsychology, that of ‘borrowing’ from the somatic sensory model for the psychic constructions of the pictographic activity. Instead of Freud’s notion of anaclisis to describe the relationship between need and drive, Piera Aulagnier sug- gests that there exists an effective relation of dependence between the expression of somatic need and its sensory correlates and the psychic mate- rials used in the construction of the pictogram as primal psychic representation. The psyche ‘borrows’ from different forms of somatic activity, the shapes and texture, one might say, of the psychic representative. There exists, in her conception, what she calls an enigmatic relationship, between a ‘representative background’ on which psyche relies and the activity of the organism. No other metapsychology brings forth such an intricate relationship between the workings of the soma and the working through of the mind.

Commentary on the work of Aulagnier

Piera Aulagnier wrote ‘Birth of a body, origin of a history’ exactly ten years after The violence of interpretation was published (Aulagnier, 1975). Although she considers this writing as a continuation of major themes introduced in her first book, namely metapsychological and clinical developments on the pictographic activity as the only source of transformation of signs of somatic life into signs of psychic life, and her ideas concerning the borrowing by the psyche of somatic models for shaping mental life, she also stresses further developments:

... 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 different statuses that the body assumes in the successive constructions that the psyche forges of it.

(Aulagnier, 1986a, p.17, Translation)

The body, the infant’s body but also the mother’s, is here conceived as a relational mediator through which are metabolized the infant’s relationship to himself, or to mother as first represented by a bodily sensation or feeling, the mother’s relationship to her infant’s body, the modifications it induces in her own psychic space and economy, how she brings her own unconscious motives and history into the nascent psyche and deals with the more or less important gap between what she had anticipated of this body and what she encounters once the baby is born.

Moving away from Lacan’s theory This new approach bears witness to the long conceptual and clinical road that Piera Aulagnier has travelled from her early views that were influenced by Lacan’s thinking. Even though Lacan refused to be thrown into the “waste basket”1 of structuralism, the evolution of his structural conceptions of the organization of the psyche moved towards formalism, mathematized abstraction and a disembodied mind. His definition of the signifier is, in that respect, quite telling: “The signifier is what represents the subject for another signifier” (Lacan, 2004, p. 178). In one of the first sessions of his first seminar he had solemnly declared that the notion of ‘affect’ should be banned from psychoanalytic vocabulary. In her early papers, even if her vocabulary is influenced by Lacan’s for- mulas and concepts, one can sense that Piera Aulagnier follows her own independent way of thinking, far from any kind of “langue de bois”. She was never easily intimidated, the issue of totalitarian thinking was center- stage in her concerns (she often quoted from Orwell), and she had an amazing intellectual poise and confidence. Her frame of mind was that of a scientific researcher, with an interest in philosophy, actually mainly in epistemology (one of her great influences was Ernst Cassirer). She could not follow Lacan’s approach drifting progressively towards a fascination for a strange combination of mathematics and mysticism. Actually she seems to have been wary of Bion’s approach for the same reasons. The violence of interpretation, published in 1975, was a powerful tour de force showing that she had radically moved away, conceptually and clinically, from Lacanism. She had forcefully brought back the soma, the body, the affects, as primum movens for the emergence of psychic life, rooting her own “return to Freud” into the drive theory: “[the] theory of the chain of signifiers tends to forget the role played by the body and the somatic models which it provides” (Aulagnier, 1975, p. 42, French edition). What she kept of Lacan’s insistence on language, on symbolism, on the paternal function, more generally on ‘thirdness’, is actually what is already in Freud.

1He used to say that he refused to be ‘poubellique’ as a structuralist. This complex neologism is a con- densation of: poubelle (waste bin), publier (to publish), and belliqueux (belligerent).

However she still refers to the notion of ‘discourse’, so insistent in Lacan’s thinking and her definition of the mother as “porte-parole”2 may sound, at first reading, as being still caught in a Lacanian representation of the “treasure trove of signifiers” imprinting the symbolic function on the infant’s mind. A closer scrutiny brings forth a very rich complexity, binding together voice, speech, language, affects and emotions. Voice in its libidinal and bodily aspects holding the infant and conveying meaningful (or meaningless) unconscious messages laden with affect, inducing pleasure and relief or unpleasure and helplessness. In the primal dimension the mother’s voice establishes a communication between two psychic spaces. The word presentation is not an abstraction, its source is in the “talking-milk-breast” of the first “porte-parole” (Aulagnier, 1975, p.101).

From discourse to voice: The holding function of speech In the primal dimension there must be first a pleasure of hearing (plaisir d’ou€ır) which is only connected to the sensory quality of what is audible, and not to the semantic meaning of the sounds carried by the voice. This essential cathecting to a pleasure of hearing must precede the pleasure and desire of listening, and renders them possible. The pleasure of listening belongs to the primary dimension where the psychic production is the phantasy. The sound is then a sign of the presence or absence of the object and becomes, in the phantasy, a sign of motherly desire. The mother’s voice, in this dimension, is the sound-equivalent of the breast, and its presence or absence is metabolized in the phantasy according to the logic of intentionality of giving or refusing pleasure. In Piera Aulagnier’s thinking, those primary signs, caught in the pleasure/unpleasure intentionality, are the nucleus out of which language, as a system of significations will later develop. The appropriation of the semantic dimension itself will only be possible in the secondary dimension, where the I develops meaning in enunciation through the need to differentiate by reality testing between true and untrue. From the primal to the secondary we have the following sequence: pleasure of hearing (pictographic representation), desire to listen (phantasmatic representation), and requirement of meaning (enunciation), which is the aim of what is demanded by the I. It is already very clear in The violence of interpretation that Piera Aulag- nier’s metapsychological description of the development of the mind is not limited to the intra-psychic. She constantly goes back and forth between what is going on in the infant’s mind and in the mother’s mind, and how they both, a-symmetrically, influence and modify each other. What the infant’s mind has to metabolize through the pictographic activity of representation is not the ‘raw’ material of external reality, but a material which already bears the mark of the mother’s mind transformation.

2Parole in French is both a spoken word (une parole) and speech (la parole). Porter is to bear but also to hold. As we will see there is a reference to a holding function of speech, almost in a Winnicottian sense of holding. So actually porte-parole can be translated as word-bearer, but also as speech-holder.

She offers an ‘aliment’ which is already remodelled and, in principle, respects what is required of a psychic element to be repressed. In that respect what the infant receives is already marked by the reality principle. At this early stage the infant will assimilate this material and metabolize it according to the rules of representability prevailing in the pictographic activity. But somehow a ‘breach’ will be opened allowing elements that are alien to the logics of the primal in some way to ‘infiltrate’ its activity. Traces will remain, acting as precursors of the secondary, obscure ‘witnesses’ to the existence of alterity, otherness.

The mother as emitter, selector and modifier In The violence of interpretation what was conveyed of the mother’s unconscious intentionality remained mainly at the ideational level of unconscious representations subjected to the secondary process of repression. In ‘Birth of a body, origin of a history’ Piera Aulagnier pushes her thinking further and places emotion at the center of her constructions and of the determining factors regarding what she had already called in The violence of interpretation the ‘interaction’ between the two psychic spaces. Now the interaction is even more embodied than before. Remarking on the fact that the notion of emotion, contrary to affect, is not often used in analytic terminology, she defines it as “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” (p. 7, Translation). Piera Aulagnier continues to stress the major importance of sensoriality in what she calls the “bringing to life” of the psychical apparatus. The sensory stimuli coming from the world need to be transformed into psychic information by the infant’s psychic environment, that is, prevalently the mother. This goes one step further than what we have just described of the role of the ‘porte-parole’. The mother becomes both the emitter and selector of the stimuli coming from the world, she “act(s) on this space of reality on which the newborn has no direct control”. Just as meeting the needs of the soma preserves physical life, assuming the transformative requirements in order to feed the psyche with assimilable stimuli is preserving psychic life and even is a condition for bringing it to life. This conception of the mother’s life-preserving role matches the idea that “... the psyche encounters itself and is reflected in the signs of life that are emitted by its own body” (p. 13, Translation). As a matter of fact the mother by being both the emitter and selector of stimuli, but not a separate object from the infant’s viewpoint, enables and protects the illusion of auto-engendering (auto-engendrement) which is essential for the pictographic activity of representation to take place in the most elaborative way. As I wrote in my introduction there is a possible link here with Winnicott’s holding preserving for the infant the necessary omnipotent illusion of creating the breast, hence reality and the object. It seems to me that Winnicott’s mother in her role of adapting to need, is required to be more passive and self-effacing than Piera Aulagnier’s emitter

Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96 Copyright © 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis From signifier to emotion: A metapsychological and clinical journey 1365 and selector. As I wrote elsewhere there seems to be, in Piera Aulagnier’s way of thinking a paradoxical conception of the protective shield as a stim- ulating function.3 The mother has a role of modifier of external reality, the quality of what she transmits to the infant’s body will play a part in how the infant will experience pleasure or suffering in a bodily way. The way in which the psyche represents what it is experiencing of pleasure or suffering in a pictographic representation is felt as auto-engendered. It is an early precursor of what will become the mother-object. In other words it is Piera Aulagnier’s way of depicting the earliest version of an internal object, if we refer to Melanie Klein’s vocabulary. This is how Aulagnier puts it:

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.

(Aulagnier, 1986a, p.13, Translation)

Emotion, shared pleasure and the origins of meaning It is interesting to see how Piera Aulagnier’s metapsychology has progressively brought her closer to Anglo-Saxon authors, and in particular Frances Tustin. She found the pathological aspects of the mother-object through a bodily feeling in Tustin’s descriptions of autistic children and autistic shapes:

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-stimu- lation by means of which the psyche brings its complementary object to a sensory zone and function which confirm that it has maintained itself in a state of survival.

(Aulagnier, 1986a, p. 16, Translation)

In those clinical situations Piera Aulagnier observes an almost complete disappearance of what she calls the sign “relation” which usually bears witness of an ongoing process, since the earliest pictographic activity, which establishes early causal relations giving meaning to different somatic experiences resulting from the interaction between the two psychic spaces, the mother’s and the infant’s.

3“By emphasising the fact that, in order to give life to the psychical apparatus, the object must be endowed with a power of excitability, she invites us to think in paradoxical terms: it is this power of excitability which, by enabling the processual capacity of the psychical apparatus to be set in motion, acts as a protective shield against excitation” (Miller, 2014, p. 132).

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.

(Aulagnier, 1986a, p.7, Translation)

This relational function and causality is necessary to build and maintain a sense of the permanence of the body through its changes. So it contributes both to the birth of the body and to the early “writing” of its history. The process of historicization of the body stems out of the early meaningful interaction of two bodily minds, it brings the first bricks to an edifice which will later be called the identification process:

The I (Je) can only exist by becoming its own biographer, and in its biography it will have to give a place to the discourses through which it speaks and makes its own body speak.

(Aulagnier, 1986a, p.7, Translation)

The mother as ‘modifier’ makes herself ‘known’ to the infant by the different changes he experiences in his body which are resulting from the modifications that the mother has managed to impose on reality in order to meet what she intuits of the infant’s needs in a meaningful way. Piera Aulagnier focuses here on a new approach of the process of modification, one which essentially revolves around emotion:

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 ... Emotion thus makes two bodies resonate with each other and imposes similar responses on them ... 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 person’s bodily experience.

(Aulagnier, 1986a, p. 8, Translation)

We are now a far cry from “The signifier is what represents the subject for another signifier”. Meaning is conveyed and constructed through the quality of shared bodily experiences within a topography implying the blur- ring of body boundaries. The mother’s past, her libidinal history, her unconscious motives are transmitted first through the non-semantic way in which she bodily responds to her infant’s needs. The mother’s emotion, related to the manifestations of the infant’s body will be perceived by the infant and it will “inaugurate the junction between his psyche and the discourse and history that were waiting for him” (p.17, Translation). We can see how this junction brings together the first transformations of somatic experiences into primal psychic representation, the beginnings of a history and the perspectives of meaning. It seems that the question of mean-

Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96 Copyright © 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis From signifier to emotion: A metapsychological and clinical journey 1367 ing is present for Piera Aulagnier as a vital vector, already in the depths of somatic experience and as a basic need pushing the organic to become psychic. Piera Aulagnier closely examines the effects of reciprocal modifications that the somatic component of the mother’s emotion, including a part of eroticized pleasure, triggers. This complex circuit of interaction involving the modification of the mother’s internal world and milieu, the modification of reality and the somatic modifications of the infant’s body will finally result in the building up of the infant’s psychosomatic life. If we follow this idea it is not only the development of the brain which is affected by this early history of interaction, but also the psychosomatic development of the body. As I said in the introduction this should open up to a vast field of research in psychosomatics and in trying to understand the place and function of somatic illnesses in the brain-mind-body loop. This dimension of research seems to have been, strangely enough, quite alien to Piera Aulagnier. But it is quite clear how she conceives of the fostering and preservation of both physical and psychical life: the somatic component of the mother’s emotion, combined to the eroticized pleasure that she experiences in the contact of her infant’s body are what gives ground to “the somatic anchor- ing of this love that she has for the child’s singular body”. This idea actually ties together what she says of the importance of the past history projected before the birth of the child, in what she calls the “anticipated I”, infantile sexuality and somatic health. The quality and intensity of the somatic participation which accompanies the mother’s behaviour are of course deeply marked by her unconscious motives. The quality of shared pleasure accompanying the early psychic event of junction is the most important determining factor of the best possible development of psychic capacities in all three dimensions: the primal, the primary and the secondary. In my view one could also add that the shared quality of this somatic component of emotion is a determining factor for the best possible development of mind, brain and body, in their mutual, and very likely shared, interactions.

The trauma of the encounter The word-bearer’s task is normally that of ‘putting into memory’ what is being played out in the here and now of the early interaction and of trying to render the early phase of her relationship with the infant thinkable. She can only do so by somehow blending the here and now with her own past and history, and also sometimes, when the somatic intensity of the encounter is too heated up, “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 on his body” (p. 19, Translation). Piera Aulagnier calls this “theoretical reserve” on the body a “body knowledge” and sees it as a kind of “fantasy-barrier” whose function is to

A privileged relation (which may at times take the form of a 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 construct- ing to be given shape and dramatized scenically.

(Aulagnier, 1986a, p. 19, Translation)

What happens if the sharing fails, if the somatic component of the emotion is neither intense nor of good quality, or even worse expresses absence, or rejection, rather than a constant attempt to create the conditions for a psychically qualifying junction? Physical suffering has a self-informing function for the infant, but it also “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 ... will have a determining role in the history that the child will construct concerning the evolution of this body and thereby of himself ...” (p. 20, Translation). If in the early primal phase of the pictographic activity of representation the mother’s behaviour creates ‘blanks’ in the interaction with the infant, blanks related to blanks in her own discourse, the child will be dispossessed “of the past history of the body of the infant that he was, a bodily history ... indissociable from that which the infant’s psyche forges of itself” (p. 19, Translation). Piera Aulagnier focuses on maternal depression. It should first be reminded that she always insisted on the fact that a woman who has dif- ficulties in getting pregnant and/or is reluctant to have a child should never be ‘forced’, whether by herself or by ‘culture’ or anybody significant in her environment, to become pregnant. The experience of pregnancy can become ‘a dangerous ordeal’. The encounter with the child and his body on the stage of reality can be a very traumatic one, especially if the gap between the ‘anticipated I’ and the child in reality is so wide that it is unthinkable. This is one example of the prototypical traumatic situation created by the telescoping of an unconscious fantasy with an event on the scene of reality. The depressed mother’s incapacity to touch and to be touched, to feel and share pleasure in her contacts with the child will have very destructive consequences on the infant’s psyche.4 When the mother’s libidinal cathexes are absent from her mechanicized gestures “the infant’s psyche will not receive the ‘aliment’ of pleasure that it needs in a form that can be assimi- lated or metabolised” (p.22, footnote). The main destructive effect will be on the quality of the pictographic activity of representation because the necessary illusion of auto-engendering

4There is an affinity here with Andre Green’s seminal paper ‘Le complexe de la mere morte’ (1981).

Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96 Copyright © 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis From signifier to emotion: A metapsychological and clinical journey 1369 one’s own pleasure and one’s own self-image will not be sufficient “for the psyche of the infant who must see himself as capable of engendering his own pleasure” (p.22, Translation). When the mother is unable to maintain the idealization of the psychical representative of her anticipated child, she will have to mourn this psychical representative. If she doesn’t manage to “deploy a new psychical referent ... the infant will be in danger of becoming non-existent ...”, he will find himself “out of history”. He may become able to construct his own history, but he will have to leave “the first chapter blank” (p. 25, Translation). This extreme difficulty for the mother to cathect her infant as a living person with a future and as her own child will leave indelible traces in the mental functioning of the infant, and then of the child. Depending on the responses that the child has found “to enable the life of the infant to con- tinue”, the analyst will be confronted to different clinical scenarios, each determined by the nature of the defences found. Piera Aulagnier describes three of those scenarios towards the end of her paper. In this text Piera Aulagnier is also questioning her own epistemology, warning the reader not to get trapped in her theoretical constructions which are only approximations. It is sufficiently rare to be noted.

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.

(Aulagnier, 1986a, p.15, Translation)

Two months before she died, and just before she was diagnosed with the lung cancer which killed her, in her last lecture she was still trying to tackle the origins of her epistemophilia:

Sometimes I wonder if my thinking has ever really succeeded in giving up the illusion that it will discover its own origin; perhaps that is what I am forever trying to do.

Yes, Piera Aulagnier was an interpreter in quest of meaning (Aulagnier, 1986b). References Aulagnier P (1986a) “Naissance d’un corps, origine d’une histoire” In: Corps et Histoire. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Aulagnier P (1986b). Un Interprete en Quete^ de Sens. Paris: Ramsay. Aulagnier P (1975). La Violence de l’Interpretation Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Aulagnier P (2001). The violence of interpretation. London: Brunner-Routledge. Freud S (1915). Instincts and their vicissitudes. SE XIV. London: Hogarth Press. Green A (1981). Le complexe de la mere morte. In: Narcissisme de vie, Narcissisme de mort. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Lacan J (2004). Le seminaire X, L’Angoisse, 27 fevrier 1963. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Miller P (2014). Driving soma: A transformative process in the analytic encounter. London: Karnac Books.