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Nicos Nicolaïdis is a member of the Swiss Psychoanalytical Society and teaches psychoanalysis at Geneva University. In his latest book, brimming over with working hypotheses and signposts for research, he examines the genesis and evolution of the psychic apparatus from the viewpoint of how the symbolic function is introduced during the development of the psychic representative of the drive.
The author, who has read Hesiod and Freud, shows that this process is ushered in by the ‘magnetising’ force of sensory perception in the mother-child relationship, but that if this imaging force is too intense and persists for too long, the result may be the failure of symbolisation observed in the dissociative psychoses (freezing of the ideational representative of word-presentations) and in cases of psychosomatic disorganisation (unbinding of the affective representative of the drive).
The introduction of the symbol into the psychic apparatus—which is an apparatus for representing—is bound up with the structuring of language and writing. The author examines linguistic theories (Saussure, Peirce, Jacobson) and the signifier-signified dynamic both in figures of speech (metonymy, metaphor) and in the psychoanalytic literature (Freud, Marty, Green, Lacan and others) on the role of the preconscious, of repression and of the negative in the symbolising processes—the processes of evolution as a human being—that operate in the infantile neurosis/transference neurosis dialectic, before allowing us to savour the clinical part of his book. Here he gives an excellent account of the symbolic function of interpretation and of Freud's hypothesis of the dual inscription of representations, based on interpretations from sessions, whose form, content and mutative effect are analysed in great detail.
Nicolaïdis discusses the psychoanalytic controversy about the death drive (Nacht, Marty, Fain, Green and Laplanche) and challenges the relevance of the concept in counterdevelopmental forms of disorgani