The Foreigner and the Foe, We Saw them Both in the Mirror1: Maturational Aspects of the Encounter with “The Foreign”

Had I known you, I would have possessed you, and had you known me, you would have possessed me. But then you and I would not be.2

Whilst perusing a dictionary in search of an unknown word, I came across a most extraordinary entry. The Arabic word acem which has the meaning ‘he who is not cognizant of my mother's tongue, the barbarian, the foreigner’, appears to derive from the old Aramaic root agama - ummah meaning mother. The conventional interpretation would most probably refer to him who is not of my mother i.e. not a brother to me, but an alternative interpretation might wonder whether mother herself, may not in fact be the original Foreigner. The fundamental psychic reality, that the object of one's earliest, most intimate bonding, indeed the object of one's self-forming primary identification, is at the same time, a primary representation of both external and internal alienness, is thereby marvellously captured in one single word.

In his Project for a Scientific Psychology, published in 1895, Freud attempts to describe a condition he calls the ‘Fellow Human Being Complex (Nebenmenschenkomplex)’. He states that this complex is comprised of two components: a) the first (which he names ‘neuron a’) that is a non-variant, evades judgment and hence any possibility of cognition, thereby remaining as ‘The Thing (Das Ding)’, and b) the second (which he names ‘neuron b’) that is variable, amenable to cognition through the work of bodily memory and a variety of identificatory processes, and is thereby a product of judgment. Whereas neuron b promotes knowledge derived from perception and bodily experiences and thus constitutes the building block of ego-formation through judgements, internalisations and subsequent identifications, ‘the Thing’ evades judgment and comes to stand for the incomprehensible, the unreachable, the unintegrable, and therefore the forever alien. Lacan has famously correlated Das Ding with the objet petit a - that mysterious, unreachable primary object