Abstract
For those interested in French psychoanalysis, Michel de M’Uzan is a singular figure whose work has extended over five decades. Starting in the 1960s, he, along with Pierre Marty, Christian David, and Michel Fain, pioneered a new form of psychoanalytic psychosomatic medicine and founded the Paris School of Psychosomatic Medicine. Also the author of three literary works, de M’Uzan writes in an elegant French for which he is renowned. Moreover, as Dominique Scarfone has noted, his writing bespeaks an elegance not only of style but also of psychoanalytic thinking.
As he explains in the foreword to Aux confins de l’identité, de M’Uzan continues to rethink and extend his formulations, constantly pursuing further possibilities of elaboration or revision. Throughout his career he has stressed the importance of retaining the economic point of view, that is to say, thinking in terms of energy and the vicissitudes of the investment of energy in the formation of the mental apparatus. His concern for the energies at stake in forming the psychic apparatus leads directly to his way of theorizing about identity. As for the sources of energy, a cornerstone of de M’Uzan’s thinking regarding the earliest levels of psychic life is his work on Freud’s concept of Selbsterhaltungs-triebe, which Strachey translated as “instincts of self-preservation” and Laplanche and Pontalis as “pulsions d’auto-conservation.” We can notice here differences in the translation of both parts of the German word. Triebe is translated by Strachey as “instincts” and by Laplanche and Pontalis as “pulsions”—in English, drives. For our purposes, in French psychoanalysis “drive” has come to mean more specifically the psychic representative of somatic energy, whereas “instinct” tends to overlap the idea of energy itself and its psychic representative. Selbsterhaltungs-triebe is a conceptual “term by which Freud designates all needs associated with bodily functions necessary for the preservation of the individual: hunger provides the model of such investments” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1967, p. 220). There is an issue about terminology here that I must address. The reader must on the one hand stay connected with the familiar term in Strachey, “self-preservative instincts,” but on the other appreciate its subtle difference from the French auto-conservation. The French term gives more of a sense of something that works on its own. Because of potential confusion about the word “self” in psychoanalysis today, I have decided that when de M’Uzan uses the term auto-conservation I will treat it as a French word and place it in italics. I hope when the reader sees auto-conservation, he or she will at the same time think “self-preservation.”
It was with psychosomatic patients who had a great poverty of fantasy life and a concrete relation to reality (called pensée opératoire in French) that de M’Uzan began to think that a reduced capacity for libidinal investment in people’s lives was related to an early point in the development of the infant’s mental apparatus. The hypothesis would be that early on in life, the psychosexual investment in the child from the environment was either insufficient or disturbed in such a way that the forces of auto-conservation were called on to sustain life at the expense of the individual’s capacity to be invested with libido from the other or to invest libido in the other.
These beginning formulations have evolved in many ways over the years, ultimately leading to the book under review here. Aux confins de l’identité was published in 2005 and contains ten papers published between 1996 and that year. Two of the papers are particularly important for understanding de M’Uzan’s thinking: the title paper, “Le jumeau paraphrénique ou au confins de l’identité (The Paraphrenic Twin or, At the Far Reaches of Identity),” and a paper on separation and identity. Other papers in the book are concerned with the psychoanalytic treatment of a man dying of metastatic brain cancer; the question of “after analysis”; the analytic session as an erogenous zone; the author’s reminiscence (when he was an intern) of a patient who died of self-inflicted knife wounds to the chest; the “unformed” (an elaboration of the facteur actuel, which refers to the “actual” neurosis of Freud), which involves an energy without quality; and understanding addictions in terms of the problematic of identity. The last chapter is a new paper in which de M’Uzan sums up his views on how the psychic apparatus develops depending on the individual’s capacity to elaborate anxiety mentally (mentalization) and how auto-conservation is involved in the formation of personality or identity.
The evidence for de M’Uzan’s way of theorizing grows out of his many years of clinical experience as a hospital psychosomatician, as well as out of his acute observation of patients in his psychoanalytic practice. He is particularly attuned to what disturbances in early life may tell us. For instance, he views the experience of depersonalization in its various forms as giving hints to how “personation” or identity formation takes place. His clinical perspective is informed by acceptance of the radical importance of Freud’s discovery of the unconscious in the topographic theory. He emphasizes the need for the analyst to let his own sense of identity float, to stay close to primary process experience both in him- or herself and in the patient. He suggests avoiding overly rational, secondary-process ways of talking to the patient.
My Approach in This Essay
This review of Aux confins de l’identité is written in the context of the coming publication this year of a representative English-language collection of de M’Uzan’s papers, almost none of which have appeared in English before. Aux confins de l’identité is much narrower in scope, but two of its papers are particularly central to de M’Uzan’s thinking and give the reader a sense of the major thrust of his work at this point in time. I will give a detailed reading of “The Paraphrenic Twin or, At the Far Reaches of Identity” because his work on auto-conservation and the twin/double is an approach to issues of repetition, identity, and authenticity very different from the ideas Anglophone readers are familiar with; this work is the basis of much of de M’Uzan’s other work.
The Paraphrenic Twin or, at the Far Reaches of Identity
At the start of this paper, the problematic of identity is depicted in a scene in which a three-year-old girl, standing beside her mother and looking at her reflection in the large mirror of an armoire, anxiously asks, “Mama, tell me, tell-me mama; why am I me?” Simultaneously the little girl realizes for the first time that her thoughts belong to her very own self. This clinical example leads to de M’Uzan’s reflection on the question of the dimensions of l’identitaire, which includes the themes of identity, the double, and faithfulness to oneself.
However, before developing de M’Uzan’s thoughts about identity, we must look at his position on auto-conservation and the death instinct because this is where he distinguishes himself from Freud and from authors who accept some version of the death instinct. To put it perhaps too simply, Freud struggled to theorize the conflicts he saw in himself and his patients in various ways over time. The early epoch of this theory of conflict was dominated by an opposition between pleasure and sexuality on one side and reality and the ego on the other. The ego was seen as having its own kind of energy and being the part of the mind that dealt with reality on its most basic level. For instance, the forces of the ego would be enlisted in the service of hunger to find nourishment. In the human nursing situation, hunger, the ego drive for self-preservation (auto-conservation), is the basis on which the stimulation and pleasure of contact and sucking at the breast develops in what becomes a sexual erogenous zone. Thus, auto-conservation refers to a radically individual level of somatic energy that “needs” to be able to sustain life in whatever libidinal environment it is born into.
As we will see, auto-conversation is the cornerstone on which de M’Uzan builds much of his other theory. He starts, as did Freud, with the quintessentially clinical phenomenon of the repetition compulsion. This is something every psychoanalytic practitioner sees over and over, with greater or lesser severity. Two quotations from Freud give us a further sense of why auto-conservation is so critical for de M’Uzan and why he split so definitively with Freud at the point where Freud decided to explain the repetition compulsion as based on a death instinct. First we see how Freud (1920) emphasized the repetition compulsion as foundational in humans: “Enough is left unexplained to justify the hypothesis of a compulsion to repeat—something that seems more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle which it over-rides” (Freud 1920, p. 23; emphasis added). Coming at it in another way a decade later, Freud (1930) emphasizes again the depth of this phenomenon, which he now calls the death instinct: “The name ‘libido’ can once more be used to denote the manifestations of the power of Eros in order to distinguish them from the energy of the death instinct. It must be confessed that we have much greater difficulty in grasping that instinct; we can only suspect it, as it were, as something in the background behind Eros, and it escapes detection unless its presence is betrayed by its being alloyed with Eros” (p. 121).
Thus, from a clinical point of view, Freud tried to explain the repetition compulsion by moving into speculative regions and invented the death drive. De M’Uzan certainly accepts this “something in the background behind Eros,” but he underlines for us the importance of an alternative that Freud decided not to follow. There was a time when Freud wanted to place the forces of auto-conservation on the side of the death instinct. However, he changed his mind and put them on the side of the life drives. Here is the relevant quotation from Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “Our argument had as its point of departure a sharp distinction between ego instincts, which we equated with death instincts, and sexual instincts, which we equated with life instincts. (We were prepared at one stage [p. 39] to include the so-called self-preservative instincts of the ego among the death instincts; but we subsequently [p. 52] corrected ourselves on this point and withdrew it.) Our views have from the very first been dualistic, and to-day they are even more definitely dualistic than before—now that we describe the opposition as being, not between ego instincts and sexual instincts but between life instincts and death instincts” (pp. 52–53).
De M’Uzan has returned to this fork in the road where Freud turned in one direction—repetition compulsion becomes synonymous with the death drive—and de M’Uzan takes the other, where the repetition compulsion is a form of auto-conservation in opposition to the pleasure principle. Thus it is auto-conservation that is “beyond the pleasure principle” for de M’Uzan, who preserves an original dualism between the forces of auto-conservation and the psychosexual instincts.
Moreover, de M’Uzan is in agreement with Laplanche’s view that the child is “seduced” by the parents, whose unconscious generates all kinds of libidinal impressions that become internalized or implanted in the child and then form the basis of the child’s own unconscious. I will use the term psychosexual in this paper as shorthand for this entire process of libidinization of the infant by the parents. This libidinal investment forms what eventually becomes the child’s own libido, in terms of both narcissism and libidinal investment in objects. So de M’Uzan conceptualizes the forces of auto-conservation as being beneath (or before) the psychosexual forces (both narcissistic and object-directed). He has been impressed by clinical situations in which patients experience themselves as a double, in one way or another. He interprets this experience as originating from traces left from the level of auto-conservation. He has come to think that if the patient’s experience of a double of himself is a trace left by the forces of auto-conservation, then there must be a kind of double formed in the evolution of those forces.
In the paraphrenic twin paper de M’Uzan extends his radical view that there is a program of auto-conservation that needs to be distinguished from what the French call the psychosexual, which includes both narcissistic and object-directed libido. In fact, for the individual to form a functioning unconscious that allows for the binding of psychic energy and its circulation in the form of fantasy formation, the psychosexual must evolve within the context of libidinal investment in the child by the parents. Thus, de M’Uzan has eventually come to see identity development as consisting of two channels, one related to auto-conservation and the other to the psychosexual. In all of this, he keeps to a strict definition of drive, whereby it refers only to the psychic representatives of forces that perform work in the mind and not to the forces themselves, which must be bound in some way if they are to lead to mental phenomena as such. The forces of auto-conservation can be experienced in the mind, in the form of “ego-drives,” as Freud spoke of them; these refer to some experience by the person of the structuring of his mental apparatus. As noted above, one of the dimensions of identity involves the forces of auto-conservation; de M’Uzan suggests that an early form of splitting involving these forces precedes identity proper, and this splitting is the substratum on which the sexual drives must eventually rest. This splitting involves the development of a double. “Before progressing in acquiring an identity of its own, in supporting itself through an antagonism with the non-self, the archaic my-self must first be differentiated from it-self.” What does this mean? De M’Uzan elaborates: “this archaic my-self, the essence of the subject to come, has as a first task to emerge from a muddled syncretic entity that I call the primordial being . . . a state of being from which . . . the ego . . . will evolve” (p. 20). Thus, to repeat, de M’Uzan thinks that the forces of auto-conservation develop in the form of a primordial being or state of nondifferentiation out of which ego and non-ego differentiate. “This [primordial being] is a where that prevails rather than a who: a space crossed by enormous quantities of overflowing energy that obey only the principle of discharge . . . a state of being seen in the earliest time of life of the newborn” (p. 20).
This state of the primordial being would be incompatible with life—or, more precisely, with the fulfillment of the genetic program, in whose service the drives open—were it not interacted with eventually by an external object, the mother for example, who invests the baby with its own libido. However, before that can happen there occurs a fabulous “find,” the creation or invention of a double, an authentic twin: “A double because it is strictly similar to the subject and as such, a twin born at the same time as the subject, this creature comes out of the same entity. Through the complex psychic operation that creates a twin and the antagonistic relation to the twin, the archaic my-self will be able to emerge from the primordial being and forge the beginnings of a distinct identity.” This double/twin emanating from an original psychic activity indicates a work of “person-ation” that afterward cannot be easily accessed, except during experiences of depersonalization (p. 21).
It is important to realize that for de M’Uzan this twin has nothing to do with any external object; rather, the development of the double/twin is an economic (i.e., an energetic) necessity. There must be an energetic balance in order for interactions with objects to proceed in such a manner that libidinal forces can be received by the twinned primordial being and lead to psychosexual development with reasonable functioning within the pleasure principle. In contrast to the majority of analysts worldwide, who see the great divide of human development being between narcissism and object relations, de M’Uzan believes there is a more profound and logically anterior divide between the forces of auto-conservation (including the splitting that leads to the paraphrenic twin) and the forces of psychosexual investment by the other.
In the problematic of identity, de M’Uzan considers the primordial being to be the entity from which the paraphrenic twin emerges. The paraphrenic twin is not to be confused with the sketch of a subject erected by discovering part objects through hate; nor is it related to castration anxiety in Freud. It is also not to be confused with Winnicott’s transitional object, which is endowed with an unquestioned external materiality. De M’Uzan maintains that the paraphrenic twin is not a transitional object; rather, it is a transitional subject. It concerns a psychic being whose traces persist throughout the individual’s history; we can infer from these traces both the place and the nature of this double/twin. These traces are not as noticeable as those of pregenital libidinal development but can clearly be spotted clinically, when the figure of the double erupts onto the analytic scene (p. 22).
De M’Uzan gives four clinical examples of the kind of experiences that led him to postulate the formation of the paraphrenic twin/double. I will give two of these examples to illustrate de M’Uzan’s method of proceeding from clinical experience to theory. One was a female patient who had a repetitive dream that at first seemed banal. In a deserted street at night, the young girl hears walking behind her. As the steps approach her, she speeds up, only to wake up in a state of great anxiety. Commenting on the nightmare, she told him she hoped that one time she could turn around and be able to identify her pursuer. And yes, that did happen in a subsequent dream. In an unnameable terror, what she then saw was—she—herself, very, very old, like her demented mother, with disheveled hair sweeping across her face. In the second example, de M’Uzan recalls the words of a patient, only a few days before her death from a generalized cancer, who let him know about a phenomenon she had just observed: “You see, it is not me that is sick, it is the other. . . . No, I am not schizo, do not believe that. It is something light and thin; a sensation beside me. How painful it is to have something like this beside you.”
Continuing his theorization, de M’Uzan notes that if the elementary my-self is constructed because of the intervention of a double and comes only from it-self, then this means that the elementary my-self is fundamentally different from the world of objects, including narcissistic objects. Moreover, being a transitional subject, it is charged with energy different from that invested in the world of objects. To put it another way, the elementary my-self and its double are not invested with sexual-libidinal energy but with the nonsexual forces of auto-conservation. So one could say that the establishment of this first stratum of identity is made under the authority of the program of auto-conservation as opposed to the psychosexual.
Nothing in this discussion gainsays the fact that libido from the psychosexual forms a second channel contributing to the construction of identity. Even if there is a slight separation in time, the two channels at the origin of identity, one nonsexual and the other sexual, develop concurrently. At this point in the paper, de M’Uzan’s conceptualization develops into a theory about the relation between identity and authenticity. We need to understand the forces of auto-conservation as the economically charged psychic representation of the instruments whose task is to fulfill plans for a general program of creation, development, and preservation, a program whose essence is genetic. As de M’Uzan also notes, because life is not infinite, death is a part of the program, another reason he sees no need to postulate a death instinct.
De M’Uzan takes an initially rather startling perspective on the question of authenticity in relation to identity. According to him, authenticity and faithfulness with regard to my-self, in their almost iconic relation, hold to a total allegiance of the subject to his most intimate my-self. That is to say, the allegiance is to this foundational entity brought forth out of the primordial being by way of the intervention of a double. The authenticity here refers back in an absolute way solely to exchanges that unite the inherent my-self with its double. Consequently, one cannot recognize a real, total, or undeniable authenticity in the web of interpersonal relations or in any object relation, from the most archaic to the most evolved. And the degree of authenticity varies inversely according to one’s engagement in the terrain of objects. De M’Uzan asks, “In relational life, would there then be only a place for varieties of false-selves, more or less triumphant?” (p. 26).
De M’Uzan realizes that this is a provocative suggestion and elaborates on the complexity of the dialectic of authenticity and identity from various directions, including a reference to Kafka’s work. One direction he takes is to conjecture about the implications of this idea of authenticity for the process of analysis itself. He wonders whether this dialectic of authenticity and identity implies that there is an interpretive spiral proper to analytic work that has as its function the projecting of the subject, in a retrograde manner in the direction of a place of “madness,” wherein resides the truth. How could the analyst accept being simply the agent of an adventure that leads the patient to rejoin his double/twin, undoubtedly gaining in authenticity, but exposing the analyst to undertaking a sort of danse macabre with the patient? And is it a twin with whom the analysis might have to identify? De M’Uzan comments that Bion is not far away here: “How to understand that the most authentic part of the person is to be discovered in a psychotic basement of his mind?” This way of conjecturing and projecting an idea to see how far it will go is part of de M’Uzan’s style.
De M’Uzan traces out some further possible ramifications of his rather challenging view of the dialectic of authenticity and identity. He asks, “Are we in a position to speak of choice? We can weigh the pros and cons: on one hand faithfulness, specifically to ‘the my-self,’ with the eventual deadly consequences of a rigorous and paradoxical preponderance of forces of auto-conservation and, on the other hand, in order to survive in the relational field and submit oneself to the ‘diktat’ of the libidinal drives there is a betrayal with regard to this my-self.” In fact, he replies, perhaps happily the two paths evolve concurrently, and in the image of what happens in other domains, it is the quantitative factor that has the last word (p. 28).
The rest of the essay goes into questions about an early form of verbalization proper to the place of the paraphrenic twin; though it may be the most “authentic” form, it is fundamentally a private language. The different levels of speech in the poetry of Antonin Artaud are used to illustrate the range of language possible within a poetic idiom.
I have gone into some detail to try to put across the importance for de M’Uzan of auto-conservation, the formation of the paraphrenic twin, and the complex development of two channels of identity: these are the core concepts positing an opposition between auto-conservation and psychosexual development. For me this concept of auto-conservation helps make clinical sense of situations where narcissism and object relations do not in themselves explain a certain negativity toward self-as-love-object and negativity toward the other, without having to appeal to the mysteries of the death drive. I will next discuss the other seminal paper in the book.
Separation and Identity
In the beginning of his comments on separation and identity, de M’Uzan points out that every psychic representation of an object includes object-directed libido but also narcissistic libido, this by virtue of the fact that the representation is inside the psychic apparatus of the subject and is the subject’s narcissistically invested version of the object. This leads to the idea that separation is mainly about disinvestment and splitting. This disinvestment either is from the object or is a narcissistic disinvestment of libido in self-representations. The other mechanism, splitting, is not strictly within the context of libido. It is a phenomenon, one we often think of only pejoratively (as in fetishism and psychosis), that intervenes at the level of the ego or the object. De M’Uzan makes a plea for understanding the economic value of splitting in one of its extreme clinical forms: fragmentation. We need to keep in mind that there is a functional importance to fragmentation. In a severe crisis, it is preferable that an ultimate effort is made so that life may continue in the fragmented parts; this certainly changes the form of identity, but is preferable to extinction (p. 126). In a case like this, the economic factor, the role of excess or insufficient quantity, is primary. De M’Uzan believes in the constitutional power of the drives, which start as structuring forces, but holds that excessive pushing by the drives can lead to a disastrous process unless fragmentation intervenes as a defense against cataclysmic narcissistic disinvestment.
De M’Uzan returns to the topic of the double in this paper. As I have noted, he believes we can’t look at identity within the libidinal context alone; we also need the point of view of the nonsexual forces of auto-conservation. To recapitulate, it is by means of the forces of auto-conservation that a double is created within the primordial being, leading to one channel of identity. This is an economic necessity that keeps the quantity of energy in the psychic apparatus within a usable range. If the double fails to develop, the buildup of energy can be handled only by discharge to the outside of the mind, either to others or as forces leading to grave physical illness. If the creation of the double is able to come about by auto-generation, the libidinal forces can then “lean on” this early doubled structure. De M’Uzan is well aware of the argument that the “other” or the Winnicottian “environment” takes part in the forming of a double. He himself thought about the double in that way for a long time. Now, however, he thinks that to keep to the clinical and theoretical legitimacy of the opposition auto-conservation/psychosexual requires that the tension and conflict between the two channels of identity be conceived of as quite separate. The existence of two parallel dimensions of identity does not allow one to be substituted for the other in the creation of the double. Be that as it may, the complexity of the situation can certainly lead to the double’s being erotized or being the object of a narcissistic investment (p. 129).
De M’Uzan notes that others say the forces of auto-conservation cannot function if it were not for the look of “the other”—that is, the mother. Certainly he agrees. But he would say that it is a matter of timing. And he would say rather that the forces of auto-conversation cannot continue to function if the look of the “other” is missing. Of course these two channels of identity formation interact over time in development. He points to the case of infants who frenetically hit their heads against the bars of their cribs and says that this behavior, governed solely by the demand for total discharge, shows precisely what happens when splitting fails; that is to say, a failure of splitting means not having the “double” in the register of auto-conservation available to manage tension states within the psychic apparatus and thus within the individual, which leads to the need to discharge tension to the outside. In other words, the head banging is a form of discharge of unbound energy to the outside of the organism, beyond the pleasure principle. His idea is that the formation of the double allows for an internal circulation of energy on a primitive level. Without the formation of a double, the role of the look of “the other” will be severely and ineluctably restricted in the construction of identity and in the ability to form a transitional object, because the transitional subject (the double) has not come into being. Economic aberrations can wipe out the “physiologic” functions of splitting.
De M’Uzan adds that when there is an early trauma (an excitation coming from the outside would be the model), what then develops is true distress (like Winnicott’s breakdown) and helplessness. This is a “danger” that cannot be foreseen, so the ego cannot metabolize what has happened into an excitation that produces signal anxiety. What has happened, distress, results in discharge outside of the psyche, into the body as psychosomatic disruption or into others as unmetabolized acting out. The splitting involved in the process of separation with the paraphrenic twin plays a decisive role in the development of the individual’s capacity to deal with trauma and in the construction of his identity. Although it is paradoxical, the splitting that forms the twin is both a “functional foundation” for the libidinal drives and, at the same time, the origin of authenticity to which the subject may remain faithful as long as possible.
Conclusion
My aim here has been to give anglophone readers an overview of auto-conservation and identity as the major motifs of Michel de M’Uzan’s Aux confins de l’identité. The other papers in the book explore various ramifications and extensions of these central themes, including the irony that someone who does not believe in the death instinct has written a great deal about working with dying patients over the years. I hope to have shown how de M’Uzan starts from a fundamental clinical phenomenon, the repetition compulsion, and develops his theory of identity formation based on the forces of auto-conservation contributing to one of two channels of the dimensions of identity. Again ironically, it is the channel related to auto-conservation that de M’Uzan considers the most authentic aspect for the individual.