Digging up the Body: Lucy in the Session with Pictograms
PASCAL SAUVAYRE, PhD, ORSHI HUNYADY, PhD, and VERA OSIPYAN, LCSW
FRIDAY, MARCH 17th from 8:00-10:00PM
Part of the live streamed webinar series. All events are held in Eastern Standard or Daylight time.
ABOUT THIS PROGRAM
‘Lucy’ was the name of an excavated skeleton; it was theorized to be the missing link between Homosapiens and their evolutionary predecessor, the ape. The archeological work, one of Freud’s pivotal metaphors, that (re)’discovered’ her, allowed the modern human to recognize his connection to the forgotten animal in him. In a similar vein, we propose to devote our efforts to the archeological work to rediscover the body in psychoanalysis. The body needs to be rediscovered because it has, for the most part, been forgotten and buried in our field, in preference for the more formulated and developed linguistic media at the heart of the ‘talking cure’. But, witness this colloquium series, there has been a concerted effort to pull together disparate but brilliant attempts to bring it to light, both in theory and in practice.
We will use the work of Petra Aulagnier, and her concept of the pictogram, assisted by the work of the philosopher Laszlo Tengelyi, and his concept of the wild region of experience, to help us theorize the missing links between the body and the psyche, and their elusive but key presence in clinical experience.
It is in the terrain of ‘unformulated experience’ (to use a phrase with which many of us may be more familiar) that the archeological efforts are directed to find ‘shreds of experience’ (Tengelyi) that have remained unattended, unformulated, and buried. ‘Unformulated’ should not be mistaken as undifferentiated and non-differentiable. It is as if this terrain “were an indefinite, but very greatly abundant, luminous switchboard; and the pattern of light which would show on the switchboard in a discrete experience is the basic prototaxic experience itself” (Sullivan). We think that the “patterns of light” Sullivan speaks of are a way to understand Aulagnier’s “pictogram”, something that has a proto organization, an organization that can become a symbol, but that cannot yet enter the realm of the symbolic (just as the common definition of pictogram has it).
If we take Aulagnier’s distinctions between the primal, the primary, and secondary process (going from the soma to the psyche) – and bring them into correspondence with Sullivan’s prototaxic, parataxic, syntaxic experience, then the pictogram would be revealed as the (missing) link between the prototaxic and the parataxic. The pictogram comes into existence in interaction with the mother; it is the infant’s first ( body) attempt at representation, a response to the excitation engendered by the enigma of the mother’s psyche. In this sense, at the beginning there is only the infant’s body and the mother’s psyche. The infant’s psyche – and his body as his – does not pre-exist the relationship with the mother, it is given birth through that exchange. (This approach is different from the Bionian mother’s “pre-digesting experience” for the baby; it is closer to an interpersonal formulation). An erogenous zone becomes a ‘zone’ neither from stimulation from the inside, nor imposed from the outside, but emerges in the interaction. This phenomenon, uncanny when revealed in clinical work, is the foundation for the elaboration of new meanings rooted in shreds of unattended experience.
If the fundamental psychoanalytic endeavor is framed as the inclusion of the excluded, to attend to the unattended (Tengelyi uses the compelling phrase ‘an ethic of alterity’), we can then see that the attempt to refind the body is fundamentally psychoanalytic. But, in line with archeological digs, there is no direct route to the body, just as there is no direct route to the unconscious – drilling for oil it is not. Indeed, the intrusive and violent aspects of an oil drill would destroy the very object of our search. The work of archeology is painstaking, delicate, and incremental, and while it certainly disturbs the buried, and while it cannot reveal the artifacts in their original state, it respects the elusiveness of its object. And in the same vein, we insist that what could be referred to as ‘the opacity of the body’ must be respected, which means any approach that claims to ‘unlock’ the mysteries of the body must be looked upon with much suspicion, not only theoretically but also in clinical practice as well.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Pascal Sauvayre, PhD, is faculty and training analyst at the William Alanson White Institute. He studies and writes at the interdisciplinary borders of psychoanalysis. A recent project is the co-edited volume, with Roger Frie, of Culture, Politics, and Race in the Makings of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis published at Routledge in 2022. In addition to the above entitled paper to be co-presented for this event, among his current projects are the translation of Jean Laplanche’s Problématiques V: The Tub: The Transcendence of the Transference, to be published at The Unconscious in Translation, editing the English translation of Tomas Casado’s Early Relational Trauma and the Development of the Self, to be published at Routledge, as well as work on the question of the scientific status of psychoanalysis. Dr. Sauvayre has a private practice in New York City.
Orshi Hunyady, PhD, is a supervising analyst and faculty at the William Alanson White Institute. She is an Associate Editor for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and she studies and writes about topics that highlight the link between psychoanalysis and social-societal phenomena. She has a full-time practice in New York City.
Vera Osipyan, LCSW, is originally from the Republic of Georgia. She holds a Masters Degree in Physics from the Tbilisi State University and an MSW from Hunter College School of Social Work. She is a graduate of the Psychoanalytic Training Program at the William Alanson White Institute, and is currently in full-time private practice in New York City.
To see the entire Colloquium series schedule for 2022-2023, click here
