Presence and Absence – Some Psychoanalytic Semiotic Pre-Conditions for the Psychoanalytic Work

Linking the contradictory terms of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ is from a clinical perspective a fundamental working condition for the psychoanalyst. Nothing in the psychoanalytic space can be exchanged without the presence-absence dialectics making its mark in the psychic material. Different psycho- semiotic approaches provide different understandings of how these phenomena are structured and can be conceptualized. The Lacanian understanding of the orders of language (Symbolic, Imaginary, Real) is drawn into attention. Finally, three forms of “present-absence dynamics” will be presented. One form concerns oedipally linked representations of signs in which part of the emotional meaning of a conflict is repressed but still with symbolic connections to the spoken narratives. Another form concerns narcissistically linked representations of signifiers (not yet signified) where the dynamics of splitting leads to repetition without gaining a symbolic meaning unless the psychoanalyst links a not-yet-thought-of signifier to the speech of the analysand. The last form concerns pre-represented or un-represented memory-traces, not yet having any associative representation, or any psychic link and often only repeated by the psychosomatic body harbouring non-organised memory-traces.