You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book is remarkable for its depth and its originality. With new hypotheses on the formation of the psyche, it is an attempt to approach the world of the "unknowable" per se, the preverbal, in healthy and pathological development.
Aulagnier focuses on the development of representational activity as determined by the functioning of the body zones, their respective excitability, their vital demand for erotogenic pleasure, preconditions for a happy cathexis of one's own functioning up to the cathexis of one's own thinking I. It is one of the deepest investigations on pleasure and unpleasure with reference to autism, delusional thinking, psychosomatic symptoms, and suicide.
Aulagnier's model for psychosis rests on the assumption of "primary delusional thinking," which is deeply rooted in the first of three normal developmental phases. The first phase, the originary (l'originaire), refers to the pre-thinking phase. Elaborating on Freud's distinction between verbal and thing images, the author postulates and describes a specific mode of representation resorting to a "pictogram" (representation from the thing image). It is universal but may have, as shown, dramatic effects on the psychotic solution.
The second phase is called the primary (le primaire), and the third one, the secondary (le secondaire). The three are also referred to as systems and as processes. The primary opens up the world of fantasy. The secondary corresponds to the birth of the I, to verbal representation. These three moments are metabolizing productions, resulting from the mother-infant interaction.
The first part of the book presents the theory; the second applies it to the schizophrenic and the paranoiac.
The author's concept of violence refers to the mother as verbalizing her child, as talking for him before he can do it for himself. The maternal words, in identification with the infant, pour out a flux that carries and creates meaning. This is the primary violence, necessary, natural. It