Language, A Shell?

On the couch, he was silent. A period of time passed. Then he recounted what he had just experienced in the entrance hall of the analyst's building. As he was looking in the mirror, he saw his analyst's face appearing and felt an irrepressible urge to smash it in. His associations expressed his fear that his words, which he experienced as “empty shells”, would not protect the analyst from this instinctual drive upsurge.

This calls into question the nature of the barrier protecting the subject from strong quantities of excitation, which Freud calls a “stimulus barrier”. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), he elaborates the elementary model of the psychical apparatus and describes the functioning of psychic substance in these terms: “This little fragment of living substance is suspended in the middle of an external world charged with the most powerful energies; and it would be killed by the stimulation emanating from these if it were it not provided with a protective shield against stimuli” (p. 27).

In Avant d'être celui qui parle, Jean-Claude Rolland (1998) renews this approach. For him, the Freudian description is a metaphor of the “obscure relations that psychic substance has with its language surface” (p. 33). The ego would be destroyed by the repeated assaults of the unconscious if it were not helped in its task by the action of language. The latter, “like a shell”, ensures a protective function against stimuli. This function is twofold: it is “both one of rejection and also of integration owing to the compulsion to represent.” (p. 87). Its operation of filtering takes two directions: first, by participating in the repression of psychic traumas and in their returns; some analyses bear the marks of this in the drying up of language that occurs in them, which is completely devoted to the service of counter-cathecting repressed ideas, but also in the use of ordinary language that reduces the polysemy of its discourse in order to be communicable for others; and, s