The Meaning of 'Nothing'

BY SAMUEL ABRAMS, M.D. (NEW YORK)

A few years ago, Lewin (1948) suggested that during free association the use of the term 'nothing' refers to the female genital. More specifically, its use refers to the concept of the female genital from the vantage point of the centrality of the penis in the phallic phase. One of my analysands offered an opportunity to study a bit of the ontogeny of this 'nothing'.

While making a deprecatory evaluation of her chores as a 'typical housewife', this patient remarked that such a critical assessment was a common 'flatitude', thus condensing 'flatus' and 'platitude'. She reacted to her slip with laughter and concomitantly recognized an urge to pass flatus. This called to mind frequent feelings of disappointment when she merely passed gas while attempting to move her bowels. Feces were worth her efforts and had merited praise in earlier times, but flatus was 'nothing'. A certain trait of character was suddenly illuminated. In weighing abstract principles against concrete issues, invariably she had leaned toward the latter. This was a derivative of her infantile judgment about the relative worth of flatus and feces respectively: principles were 'nothing' compared with matter, such as money. Her recognition of this helped overcome a resistance to free association, based on the related misunderstanding that organized material was more valuable than spontaneous ideas and feelings.

Somewhat earlier in the analysis, she had described feeling like a 'nothing' herself when separated from whomever currently represented the image of the omnipotent preoedipal mother with which she was transiently in a regressive symbiotic attachment. Subsequently data derived from attitudes about her 'nothing' genital and her penis envy, of which the flatus-feces and mother-infant issues were regressive equivalents, were to appear in abundance. This amplified and extended the study of her characterological bias concerning abstract ve