The Affirmation of Primary Repression Rethought: Reflections on the State of the Self in Its Unconscious Relational World: Anthony Eliott. Pp. 55-79.

Reviewing the contributions to the Freudian notion of primary repression which have been made by object relations theory (Sandler and Benjamin), by Lacanian theory, and by Lacan's commentators (Laplanche and Pontalis, Castoriadis and Kristeva), Elliott offers his own contribution. Kristeva and Laplanche posit an elementary form of subjectivity created when the small infant enters an identification with signifiers in the preoedipal phase binding unconscious drives through primal repression and constituting the intervention of the Other into psychic interiority. Elliott himself suggests that we must speak of pre-object relations in the constitution of primary intersubjectivity, which is less a phenomenon of the Other breaking in from the outside than of the ordering of psychic interiority within intersubjective boundaries of shared unconscious experience. From the representational flux of the unconscious, “rolling identifications” provide for the insertion of subjectivity into an interplay between self-as-object and pre-object relations, spilling across libidinal space in pre-self experience before the differentiation of self and other. This emergent relation to the pre-object internally splits the infant's subjectivity, and the experience of loss is felt as a result of the preliminary disillusion of basic representational self-sufficiency. The loss of selfreferential representation fulfillment substitutes a relation to pre-objects and to self-as-object, with an imaginary anchor in parental significations. Representational wrappings of the self and other spiral in and out of the intersubjective life ordering and reordering the psychical imagination and the social process. This allows the subject to negotiate the imaginary tribulations of potential space as the individual, through representational wrappings, establishes the imaginary and sociosymbolic forms through which human beings can establish a psychical relation to the self, to others, to received social meanings