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The secret we don't know we're trying to find, the thing unseen,the suction-point of which we now are trying to feed our lives…—the secret—the place where the words, twist,…We try the nipple…—we lookaway—…into the edifice of your whisper…
The ghosting of the mother deranges the psychic economy of the child who has been nominated to carry the spectral prefigurations of the ghost. The one so haunted is spooked by two impossibilities: impossible mourning and impossible longing. While these two impossibilities are inseparable, I wish to begin with the second, as impossible longing shapes and deforms the first impossibility.
There are many ways to ghost the mother. The one that I shall focus on is the inscription of a dead child in the maternal psychic economy and its elegiac transmission as an atmospheric surround of a subsequently born child, the so-called replacement child. Abraham and Torok (1986), who are the first since Freud to take psychic haunting seriously as foundational to the problematic structurations of psychic life, distinguish between two modes of inscription: introjection and incorporation.