The Violence of Interpretation

The violence of interpretation described in the eponymous work by Piera Aulagnier (2001 [1975]) concerns neither the “wild” interpretation nor the “violent” interpretation that might be proffered by a psychoanalyst to his analysand. It is a matter of understanding in the emerging psyche the complex and sometimes seriously impeded path “from pictogram to statement”, as the subtitle makes clear; in other words, of following the vagaries of the psychic birth of a subject “I” to his own speech, the emergence from the primal “pictogram”, the inexpressible imprint of the perceptual and sensory experience of the infans, towards a form of autonomous thought that can be enunciated as such. This gradual negotiation of the metabolising processes, primal, primary, and then secondary, is exposed to many factors of disturbance of a relational and environmental nature that are more or less combined or dominant. If, after birth, the maturing infans remains subject to the univocal power of the “thought of the other”, that is, of a mother who continues to exert this sort of “primary violence” beyond her necessary and primordial prior concern for the baby's survival - if, therefore, the infant remains under the weight of the maternal interpretative injunction of the external and relational world, this excess imposes real violence on the developing psyche. Under such circumstances, the “psychotic potential” that is latent in each one of us may turn into manifest psychosis in its various forms, hallucinatory, delusional or compulsive.

Different stages open up the paths of metabolisation of the function of psychic representation until it gradually becomes expressible for a subject who is supposed, in the best of cases, to gain access to an existence that has already been thought about and that becomes thinkable for the subject in the external world as well as in his internal world. It is with the primal process that is active at birth, determined by the state of “helplessness” of the infa