A Poetics of Psychoanalysis: "The Lost Object: Me"

Abstract

Translator's Note: This article is excerpted from Nicolas Abraham's L'corce et le noyau (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1978), with the permission of Maria Torok. It is being published simultaneously in Psychoanalytic Inquiry (forthcoming 1984). The Hungarian-born French philosopher's and psychoanalyst's works are being systematically introduced to the English-speaking scholarly community. Diacritics has devoted half of a special issue (Spring 1979); the University of Minnesota Press has recently commissioned the translation of Abraham's and Torok's Cryptonymie: Le Verbier de l'Homme aux loups (Paris: AubierFlammarion, 1976); and the Georgia Review has published the English translation of Jacques Derrida's prefatory essay, Fors, to Cryptonymie (Spring 1977). The original title of the essay, L'objet perdu-moi, has been supplemented here by A Poetics of Psychoanalysis to underscore its contribution to both psychoanalysis and literary theory. The essay offers a privileged entry into Abraham's works in that it puts forward a theory of fiction in the place of the psychoanalytic subject. The type of fiction outlined here is not based on the workings of the unconscious or the illusion of an imaginary self, it is the result of a loss. In setting up the fiction of being another, the subject creates himself as a dialogue or, more precisely, as a system of analogical references to a fictitious other. The status of the subject becomes poetic in that the dialogic structure can only be recognized through linguistic acts. The essay thus implies a dia-logic theory of readinga subject or a text may be read through to another text which is its own fictitious (and concealed) system of reference.