Après-coup in Psychoanalysis

277 Pages·2022·3.448 MB·English

by  Bernard Chervet

Après-coup in Psychoanalysis
This important book argues that après-coup, a concept that has blossomed in French
psychoanalytic discourse, not only allows an understanding of how repressed
early memories determine adult life, and how human sexuality develops, but also
allows for a richer and wider explanation of our mental structures and thinking.
The book outlines how après-coup has been understood and defined by Freud,
Lacan and other authors, considers it in diverse psychoanalytic cultures and
explores its resonance in dream-work, sexual drives, thought, and the experience
of trauma. Bernard Chervet considers that the totality of human thought can be
approached according to the theory of après-coup. It offers a metapsychological
approach to the operation of après-coup, bodily erogeneity and the regeneration
of libido. Chervet’s compelling work argues that the phenomenon of après-coup
allowed for the development of the psychoanalytic theories of causality, sexuality,
temporality, memory and trauma.
Illustrated by clinical vignettes and written by one of the leading theorists
on the topic, Après-coup in Psychoanalysis will be an invaluable resource for
psychoanalysts in training and in practice.
Bernard Chervet is a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst of the Paris
Psychoanalytic Society and a former SPP President. He is a European
Representative on the IPA Board of Representatives and the IPA ExCom and
Scientific Director of the Congress of French-Speaking Psychoanalysts (CPLF).
His numerous and distinguished publications cover a wide range of clinical and
theoretical psychoanalytic topics. He was awarded the Bouvet Prize in 2017 for
his work.

Après-coup in Psychoanalysis
The Fulfilment of Desire and Thought
Bernard Chervet
Translated by Andrew Weller
Designed cover image: The Stryge. Photograph by Bernard Chervet
First published in English 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Bernard Chervet
Translated by Andrew Weller
The right of Bernard Chervet to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 9780367188788 (hbk)
ISBN: 9780367188795 (pbk)
ISBN: 9780429198953 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780429198953
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents
1 The emergence of desire and thought 1
2 Semantic and semiological vicissitudes of the term
Nachträglichkeit 14
3 The work of Freud and his followers as a clinical illustration
of the operation of après-coup 26
4 Evolving clinical situations 71
5 Metapsychological approach to the concept of après-coup 115
6 A theory of human thought 143
7 Saturation in dreams, sessions and sciences 163
8 Après-coup and bodily erogeneity 181
9 The missing trace and feelings of lack 206
10 The foundational murder and the superego 231
Index 263

10.4324/9780429198953-1
Chapter 1
The emergence of desire and thought
Psychoanalysis is a discipline and method that attempts to promote, thanks to
their links to consciousness, desire and human thought in all their forms as emer-
gences of psychic matter. It proposes a theory of thought that extends its definition
to all expressions of the psyche, whether they belong to the register of the verb,
the image, affects, feelings and emotions, experiences, sensations, or sensuality
and erotogenicity.
Beyond this extension, psychoanalysis thinks about human thought and its
various expressions, bringing into play a reality that is apparently in total hetero-
geneity with this emergence. Initially referred to by the term “unconscious,” this
reality turns out in fact to be the extinctive tendency of every instinctual drive,
its regressive tendency to return to an earlier state of things, even to the inorganic
and “inanimate” state (Freud, 1920, p. 38). It is expressed in the session by all the
forms of resistance in both senses of the term: as resistance to becoming conscious
and resistance to erasure (the resistance of materials). This extinctive regressivity
peculiar to every drive impulse cannot, by definition, be directly registered by a
specific thing-presentation. There are no traces or thing-representations of lack.
It is linked to the sensory perceptions of lacks arising from destruction and loss,
but above all to those arising from the sensory perception of differences. These
cannot produce either traces or thing-presentations. Only the tangible realities
involved in differences are representable. Extinctive regressivity can only be rep-
resented by operations of disappearance and erasure concerning representations
arising from the differentiation of perceptual traces of tangible realities. These
thing-presentations ground the positivity of the drives. The negative extinctive
tendency of the drives has a counter-effect. It obliges expressions of thought to
emerge and participates in the registration of the various drive vicissitudes. An
imperative of registration is required as a counterpoint and grounds the positive
registration of the drives. While this negativity is opposed to any new registra-
tions and tends to make all the formations produced disappear, it can also be used
to accomplish psychic registrations and to promote the assumption of a bonus of
desire that can be cathected in the body and the world.
In psychoanalysis, the term thought designates all the forms of emergence of
elusive psychic matter. The existence of the latter can only be deduced from its
DOI: 10.4324/9780429198953-1
The emergence of desire and thought
2 The emergence of desire and thought
manifestations as they appear on the screen of consciousness. A generic wish is
thereby fulfilled that is inherent to life itself. This wish is fulfilled through all the
other wishes on the basis of which it can be recognized and interpreted. It is the
wish to generate a bonus of desire that finds its ideal fulfilment in erotic life, but
that can also be used for an infinite number of other achievements, so great is its
plasticity. The assumption and availability of this bonus of desire is the goal of all
psychic work. A teleology of psychic life can be inferred here.
All the productions that form human thought are therefore after-effects of
the psychic work required by the tendency to extinction and by the imperative
of registration. This work of the psychic apparatus constitutes the operation of
après-coup.
Thus conceived, thinking is one of the major achievements of organic matter.
That is why Freud always supported the idea that psychoanalysis belongs to the
field of the natural sciences, namely the science of psychic life.
This explains why we can consider the advent of psychoanalysis as an emer-
gence of thought, since the elaboration of desire requires the appropriation of the
drives and the establishment of their vicissitudes in the form of the various forms
of thought. Erotic desire is an aim whose advent requires a precise temporal order
and the establishment of many other vicissitudes of thought arising from the trans-
formations of primary instinctual drive impulses.
This detour via the advent of thought allows access to mature sexuality and
requires a long process in two stages. The in-between period of latency establishes
the regressive forms of thought in the making. The latter are indispensable for the
future sensual regression characteristic of erotic desire, and for the formal regres-
sion of the dream-work. Erotic desire and dreams are deferred effects because
they are the result of the operation of après-coup. Erotic life follows a sensual
regression that requires, like dreams, a prior deployment of regressive modes of
thinking.
Psychoanalytic treatment is part of this detour, and the analyst participates in
the advent of thought from which he expects the advent of desire as a corollary.
This additional benefit of recovery finds its specific and object-related enacted
scene outside the sessions. These belong to the in-between period of latency.
With the fundamental rule, the analytic method does not require reflexive
thought, but speech uttered in the presence of another person who listens to this
speech as an instinctual drive vicissitude and interprets it as both a failure to speak
out and a revelation of a lack at the heart of the nature of the drives. Saying eve-
rything reveals the lack inherent in speech arising from the heterogeneity that
exists between language and drive. The only thing the analyst observes concretely
is this enunciation and its link with psychic functioning. He does not observe the
thought or desire directly. By means of this method, the instinctual vicissitudes of
thought can be registered in language and in the body via two paths – affects and
erotogenicity and objects and the world.
By supporting the link to consciousness through speech, the fundamental rule
promotes all the instinctual vicissitudes. The latter can only be established thanks
The emergence of desire and thought 3
to the positive action of this imperative of registration that makes the goal of
reaching an attractor and speech a vehicle of all drive vicissitudes.
The psychoanalytic conception of psychic formations takes into account not
only the unconscious instinctual drive tendencies, but also the equally uncon-
scious processual activity. Both are involved in each of them. All psychic forma-
tions participate in the fulfilment of this wish to make desire come into existence.
All these manifestations are overdetermined by such negative and positive uncon-
scious attractions. They all express the wish to experience ourselves as desiring
beings, on which our joy of living depends.
Psychoanalysis, a science and a discipline
From an epistemological point of view, psychoanalysis, more than any other sci-
ence, presents a close proximity between its object of study (thought), the tool
used to conduct this study (the apparatus for thinking), and the method employed
(thought itself); thus, an isomorphism exists between what is being studied, the per-
son doing the study, and the study. It is a matter of thought thinking about thinking.
This synergy explains why psychoanalysis is better described as a scientific
discipline rather than as a science, since it obliges anyone who takes the mind as
an object of study to accept a self-discipline that consists in recognizing that they
are fully engaged in a process that escapes them for the most part. It is a discipline
of decentering, of being powerless to free oneself from it. An ethical duty arises
from this in all psychoanalytical research. The results and theorizations proposed
are always subject to interpretation retrospectively to free them from the mortgage
of certain unconscious determinants. Like dreams, theories are also attempted
wish-fulfilments based on temporary denials of reality. The exegetical reading of
Freud’s work is driven by this motivation to render psychoanalysis impersonal
and universal. This theoretical ideal is asymptotic, in fact mythical and unattain-
able. Scientists working in the so-called exact sciences are increasingly aware of
these psychic, historical and bodily implications. This explains why this reading
is sometimes used, conversely, to denigrate the value of psychoanalytic thought
itself.
Psychoanalysis is concerned with the infinite set of productions and achieve-
ments of which men are capable. In particular, it has participated in modifying
the definition of the term science by including in its corpus the concepts of the
unconscious and interpretation, which could not be part of traditional positivist
objectivity since they are neither tangible nor measurable; nor are they identically
reproducible.
Interpretation: A scientific concept
The concept of the unconscious is the result of a logical inference, which, in turn,
has very concrete heuristic consequences concerning the existence of irrational
infantile theories and the reasons for them.