The Pictogram of the Primal

It is rare, even exceptional, that “engrams”, which Piera Aulagnier referred to as “pictograms of the primal” and Freud called “memory traces”, can reach a state of representable and thinkable consciousness. This is because the psychic imprints of the metabolising relationship of the primal process are deployed on the basis of perceptual and sensory emotions received by the infans through the impacts of the maternal and environmental relationship, at a time when the other heterogeneous metabolisations, primary and secondary, have not yet come into being. Piera Aulagnier regards them as the representation of the “image of the bodily zone”, the first relational schema inscribing the “image of the complementary-object-zone”.

Literature sometimes offers us fine examples of the enigmatic experience of these strange and residual sensations; psychoanalytic work also sometimes gives access to them, albeit in a way that is more or less partially identifiable and expressible.

This original concept is developed in the Violence of Interpretation (Aulagnier, 2001 [1975]), which offers a theory of representation illuminating the fate of the psychotic's being and discourse. The work of Piera Aulagnier , an eminent psychoanalyst and co-founder in 1969 of the “Quatrième Groupe (OPLF: Organisation psychanalytique de langue française) and of the journal Topique, is centred around psychosis and narcissistic pathologies in her articles and other books: Les Destins du plaisir (1979), L'Apprenti-historien et le maître sorcier: du discourse identifiant au discourse délirant (1984), and Un interprète en quete de sens (1986).

The first session of a patient's analysis was taken up with the account of a dream that had left her feeling overwhelmed by the “nightmarish” final element, not dissimilar to the fantasy themes dear to Edgar Allan Poe. She was lost, wandering amidst ruins when, from a vestige, a woman of fascinating and magnetic beauty appeared. Paralysed with emotion, she could neither sp