Psychoanalytic Inquiry

ISSN: 0735-1690 (Print) 1940-9133 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hpsi20

“The lost object‐me”: Notes on identification

within the crypt

Nicolas Abraham & Maria Torok

To cite this article: Nicolas Abraham & Maria Torok (1984) “The lost object‐me”:
Notes on identification within the crypt, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 4:2, 221-242, DOI:
10.1080/07351698409533542

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Published online: 20 Oct 2009.

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 "The Lost Object-Me": Notes on
Identification Within the Crypt

N I C O L A S ABRAHAM
and M A R I A TOROK
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The Haunted Analyst

That soul who, here on earth did not push forth its part
Divine, has not, even down in Hell, repose.
-Hölderlin, To the Fates

T HUS SPEAKS THE POET. Y e s . T h e " p a r t d i v i n e , " t h e

work born on the encounter with oneself only comes into being
if one pushes one's self forth, only if one is acknowledged. Ac-
knowledged by oneself to oneself before the whole world. Some-
times the "whole world" is represented by the occupant of the ana-
lyst's chair. Before him this "part divine" is created or, gradually,
unveiled. If only the analyst would understand it, admit it, rejoice
in it! As one would rejoice in poetry. But how many the ways of
reaching there. And how many the traps along the way. Does the
analyst have an ear for all "poems" for all "poets"? Surely not. But
those whose message he failed to hear; those whose deficient, muti-
lated text he listened to time after time, the riddles with no key;
those who left him without yielding up to him the distinctive oeuvre

This article, which will also appear in Sub-stance (Fall 1984), has been published previ-
ously in the collection L'Écorce et le noyau by Nicolas Abraham (Paris: Aubier Flammarion,
1978). It is translated by Nicholas Rand, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

221
 222 NICOLAS ABRAHAM and MARIA TOROK

of their lives; these come back forever as phantoms of their unac-

complished destiny, haunting ghosts of the analyst's own de-
ficiency.
Who among us is not at odds with spectres that demand their due
from heaven while being the debtors of our own salvation? Just
think of Freud and his Wolf Man. From 1910 well into his extreme
old age, the case of this enigmatic Russian—bewitched by some
secret—never stopped haunting him, drawing from him theory
upon theory because he could not deliver the key words to the
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poem.
It is the same for us when it comes to the enigma of this great po-
etics, a poetics not of a single individual but of an entire and vast
family, dubbed rightly or wrongly with the common name:
Manic-Depressive.
It has been a long while since we joined forces to establish its se-
mantics and formulate its prosody. Let us bring to you here, after a
long and groping search inspired by many haunting enigmas, a few
examples and outlines drawn from our practice. It would be
presumptuous —and how!—to pretend that we have reached our
goal. At the same time, it would be false modesty to deny our suspi-
cion that we are finally entering an open road.

. . . And the Crypt on the Couch

Obviously, the figure of the ghost does not come to us accidentally

as a name for the torment of the analyst. ' This same figure points to
1
This image of the ghost, or "phantom"—meant at first to point out a rift (inflicted upon
the listening analyst by some secret of the patient which could not be revealed) that creates a
formation in the unconscious of the listener—lent itself to a variety of theoretical elabora-
tions. The analyst, readying himself to be keyed to the dictates of the couch, is surely, in some
respects, comparable to a child maturing on the psychic nourishment received from his par-
ents. Should the child have parents "with secrets," parents whose speech is not exactly com-
plementary to their unstated repressions, he will receive from them a gap in the unconscious,
an unknown, unrecognized knowledge, a nescience, subjected to a form of "repression" be-
fore the fact.
The buried speech of the parent becomes (a) dead (gap), without a burial place, in the child.
This unknown phantom comes back to haunt from the unconscious and leads to phobias,
 IDENTIFICATION WITHIN CRYPT 223

the occasion of torment for the patient as well: a memory he buried

without legal burial place, the memory of an idyll experienced with
a prestigious object that for some reason has become unspeak-
able —a memory thus entombed in a fast and secure place, awaiting
its resurrection. Between the idyllic moment and its forgetting (we
have called the latter "preservative repression"), there was the meta-
psychological trauma of a loss, or better yet: the "loss" by dint of
this trauma. It is this segment of painfully lived Reality, whose un-
utterable nature dodges all work of mourning, which has stamped a
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covert shift on the entire psyche. The shift itself is covert since both
the fact that the idyll has taken place and its subsequent loss will
have to be disguised and denied. Such a situation leads to the setting
up within the ego of a closed-of f place, a crypt, as the consequence
of a self-governing mechanism, a kind of anti-introjection, com-
parable to the formation of a cocoon around the chrysalis, which
we have called inclusion.2

Living in a Crypt

Indeed, the "shadow of the object" keeps on straying about the

crypt endlessly until it is finally reincarnated in the very person of
the subject. We will see that this kind of identification, far from
displaying itself, has as its calling to remain utterly concealed. We
thought it expressive to complete Freud's metapsychological for-
mula, showing "the ego under the guise of the object," by its oppo-

madness, and obsessions. Its effect can persist through several generations and determine the
fate of an entire family line.
Could this be the "mysterious" primary repression hypothesized by Freud? It is too early to
provide an answer. All the same, the clinical impact of the phantom theory is becoming ever
more precise. In this text (first delivered as a lecture in March 1973), the image of the phan-
tom simply represents a specific malaise of the analyst; it has since been transposed into a
metapsychological notion, a matter for new research and renewed analytic listening. It has
been further expanded on in a seminar on "dual unity" and one of its consequences: the meta-
psychological phantom (see Abraham, 1974-1975). Further applications can be found in
Abraham (1975b) and Torok (1975). [Translator's note: see also Abraham's (1975a) interpre-
tation of Shakespeare's Hamlet.]
2
See Abraham and Torok, "Introjecter —incorporer: Deuiel ou mélancholie" (1972).
 224 NICOLAS ABRAHAM and MARIA TOROK

site, which reflects a first clinical appearance to be taken into ac-

count: the "object, " in turn, carries the ego as its mask. The ego or
some other façade. For, necessarily, we are talking about an imagi-
nary and covert identification, a cryptofantasy which, given its un-
utterable nature, cannot show itself in the light of day. The identifi-
cation concerns not so much an object who no longer exists but
essentially the "mourning" that this "object" allegedly carries out as
a result of losing the subject; the subject, consequently, now ap-
pears to be painfully missed by the "object." It is obvious that an
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identifying empathy of this kind could not say its name. Let alone
its aim. Accordingly, it hides behind a mask, even in the so-called
periodic states. This mechanism consists in exchanging one's own
identity for a phantasmic identification with the "life"—beyond the
grave—of an object lost as a result of some metapsychological
trauma. Awaiting something better, we have named this very spe-
cific mechanism: endocryptic identification.
A fantasy of identifying empathy! What does it mean? First the
fantasy: we hold that it is never a simple translation of the psychic
process; on the contrary, it is the illusory and painstakingly reiter-
ated proof that no process whatever has or should take place. Only
in this one sense can fantasy refer to a metapsychological state of
affairs. With this much set in place, we can glimpse the status of the
identification now known as endocryptic. To state that it is the
work of sheer fantasy means that its content is governed by a con-
cern for maintaining the illusion of the topographic status quo as it
had been prior to the transformation. As for the inclusion, it is not
fantasy. It points to a painful reality, forever denied, the "gaping
wound" of the topography. It is therefore essential to set down the
following: the melancholic's complaints translate a fantasy—the
imaginary sufferings of the endocryptic object, a fantasy that only
serves to mask the real suffering, this one unavowed, caused by a
wound that the subject knows not how to heal.
Thus in short is our argument. It is obvious that this poetics
born of the crypt brings to life as many poems as individual
cryptophores. A great number of creations of a definitely non-
melancholic appearance also turn out to come from the same
 IDENTIFICATION WITHIN CRYPT 225

school. "Melancholy" in fact seems to occupy a rather small area of

the possible uses authorized by the notion of intrapsychic crypt as
well as endocryptic identification. In point of fact, these notions
had been familiar to us before they were found appropriate to cir-
cumscribe the "manic-depressive." For years, we have been talking
about "preservative repression," "unutterable libidinal experi-
ences," "covert identification." Now that the nature of "melan-
cholic" identification is finally stated clearly, quite a few other
modes of being, just as enigmatic, are becoming crystallized around
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the same notions. We are going to mention—in addition to the

"manic-depressive"—two other modes, commonly called "fetish-
ism" and "neurosis of failure." It seems to us that these inventions
of the mind also rest on some "gaping wound," opened long ago
within the ego and disguised by a phantasmic and secret construc-
tion in the spot and place of the very thing from which, through the
loss, the ego was cut off. To disguise the wound is, in all cases, the
destination of this type of construction—to disguise the wound be-
cause it is unspeakable, for to state it in words would be fatal to the
entire topography. Individual cases only differ in the manner of the
wound and the particular form of the arrangement invented in or-
der to reveal nothing about it.

The Wolf Man's Secret

Recently, we thought it necessary to violate with impious hands

the (hypothetical) "sepulcher" the Wolf Man supposedly carries
within him in order to uncover—behind the utterable memory of a
seduction by the sister — the memory of another seduction to which
the sister herself must have been subjected by the father. To be sure,
the Wolf Man was only vicariously a "melancholic." His crypt did
not contain his own illegitimate object (as would the be the case
with a true "melancholic") but someone else's object: that of his
older sister. His wound does not seem to be — as Freud was inclined
to think —the loss of his own object, the sister, but the fact that he
was neither able to participate in the scene (which, according to us,
 226 NICOLAS ABRAHAM and MARIA TOROK

had been narrated by the sister and renewed with him) nor tell any-
one about it and thereby legitimize it. The disappointment at not
having been the one seduced by the father would connect him with
the hysteric who is never quite seduced enough: the impossibility of
exposing this fact without bringing down the whole world has ap-
parently forced him to transform his vindictive tendencies into an
intrapsychic secret. Otherwise he would lose his other wish as
well—supplanting his sister in the scene. The solution he found to
this square circle, as we established it, was—let's admit it—most
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ingenious.3 He managed to make, from the ideas related to the ac-

count so marvelously illustrated by the sister, a crypt within the ego.
With the same care and intent, he preserved in the crypt the words
of the account, words that proved truly magical since they were
good for making statements and for producing pleasure. Thus pre-
served, the words were readily available. To use them, all he had to
do was apply them innocently in a different sense, and construct —
thanks to astute homonyms—quite another scene, not recalling in
the least the encrypted one. This other scene, although altogether
different, was no less effective in producing pleasure. One of these
words seems to have been the Russian verb teret, first used to mean
"to rub" (the penis is understood) and then applied, for the benefit
of the cause, in the altered sense of "to polish," "to shine." Thus, in
the new scene, translated from the old one: the woman rubbing the
penis becomes one polishing the floor. A fetish image taken from a
fetish word whose meaning has been forgotten. Shine-gleam-
glisten.

The Man of Milk and His Fetish

All of us must have a Wolf Man on the couch or other similar

cases. Let us draw on one briefly from our practice. A middle-aged
3
See Abraham and Torok, Cryptonymie: Le Verbier de l'homme aux loups (1976,
pp. 135-160). This chapter is a contribution to the psychoanalysis of dreams and phobia. It
elaborates on the secret content of the Wolf Man's "crypt" and the manner in which it returns
in his famous nightmare. The chapter was originally given as a lecture in Paris on January 15,
1974, to commemorate the centenary of Ferenczi's birth. [Footnote modified by Translator.]
 IDENTIFICATION WITHIN CRYPT 227

man. A lengthy analysis with a colleague: improvement. Feelings of

inadequacy, not always founded. Persistent fear of impotence,
rarely justified. Married, he is the father of a large family. Consist-
ent and effective in his professional life, but has difficulty playing
his role in public, asserting himself in accordance with the demands
of his position. What is "wrong" is "in the head" and sometimes "in
the body."
In listening to him, one wonders how sturdy common sense can
coexist with cranky fantasies devoid of any apparent link traceable
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to some tension within the topography. It is the same with his some-
times fantastic feelings which are out of place, and which never fail
to surprise him, though he has been accustomed to them since child-
hood. A few themes recur in the flood of engimas he pours out
while on the couch for several years. It takes some time to under-
stand that he speaks and lives someone else's words and affects.
Whose? It will be established later: those of his encrypted father. It
is now possible to grasp the theme of the cemetery, apparently visi-
ble to the analyst through the window but now within view of the
patient. With good reason. For he himself lives in this tomb. A le-
thargic beauty is waiting in a glass coffin, is still waiting to be awak-
ened by a magical kiss.
Why is he dead, if indeed he is dead? Because he is a monster.
"Here comes the monster," they say when he comes forward with a
wish. But what kind of wish? Who will find out? A strange mytho-
maniac theme: once in South America he was a front-wheel drive
champion [traction avant, literally "front-pull drive"]. He doesn't
understand it. Is he made to be so convinced of the truth of his ac-
count? "Am I mad" and then: "a goat herd, goatherds, milking
[traité], goat's milk." (Front-pull: drawing milk, goat's milk [lait de
chèvre] : leche, the word for milk in South America, thinks the ana-
lyst.) This confirms a hypothesis formulated several months earlier:
the physical and mental demise of the father and the older sister's
psychosis have something to do with each other. This relationship is
in pulling the udder [pis]. "Punch the puppet," he says, "I could
never stand him. He moves and jumps about. I especially hate the
pasty paint smeared all over his head and that white stuff dripping
 228 NICOLAS ABRAHAM and MARIA TOROK

down" (leche . . .). These must have been the words the sister used
in telling him about her "scandalous encounter" with the father's
penis. This had presumably taken place on a South American farm
during a family trip. A recurring dream: game of billiards, a billiard
ball hits another, the second one is third on the rebound. Yes, that's
it precisely. He is hit on the rebound. But when he wants to play
with himself, one name is enough: Letitia [lait is "milk"], to fall in
love and marry a women on whom he will often perform
cunnilingus (leche [from lécher, "to lick"]. The magic word leche,
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i.e., sperm, the outcome of the "front-pull" on the penis, thus leads
to a sexual practice which is the opposite of its original model.
Cunnilingus (lécher ["lick"]) corresponds to a dreamlike staging of
the magical word leche.
The analyst only learns about this toward the end when he learns
about another key, the one which explains how endocryptic identi-
fication with the father becomes manifest. First, the analyst had to
undergo lengthy and insidious testing. (Would he be able to hear ev-
erything? Would he feel sympathy for the father who considers
himself a monster? Could he listen without spurning him, without
condemning him to death and so not repeat what the father had
done to himself?) The patient finally reveals that the father had
gone nearly blind for refusing medical care and that, to end it all, he
had slashed his wrists. Many things clear up: the patient's recurring
experience of losing his sight in large areas of his visual field—not
due to scotoma or negative hallucinations as one would think, but a
result of his identification with his father's blindness, precisely
while coming to the analyst's office . . . An example of empathie
identification with the phantasmic remorse of the "guilty" father.
This also causes his truly unjustified panic at having scratched his
wrists while doing odd jobs. The effect of the same empathy was
that he experienced (unaccountably for himself and the analyst for
a long time) "affects" that were not his own. Now we understand
that they were the father's affects, his ruminations, his remorse,
fantasies, his desires —all imagined and surmised. The patient's
long walks invariably led him to the same spot. Once there, an inter-
nal dialogue emerged in him; it was always the same: "Is there some-
 IDENTIFICATION WITHIN CRYPT 229

body here?"—"No, there's nobody.. . .We're alone." At a clearing

he has the impression of being a character in a fairy tale: Sleeping
Beauty.
One day, anxious before entering the door to the analyst's office,
a sudden impression that there is someone inside. The meaning of
the fantasy he is acting out: father (the patient) is going to see his
daughter (the analyst). A recollection: the sister gone mad shows
her clenched fist while her other hand moves up and down. The fa-
ther cannot stand to see it. Beside himself, he shakes her. Shortly
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afterward, she is institutionalized. "What did your father feel

then?," asks the analyst. Then, for the first time after a very long
period of analysis, the patient bursts out in tears. "My father must
have been so awfully miserable," he says in his own name this time.
Officially, he has revealed nothing, but he understands that his
drama is known. Father cannot stand his daughter's gesture, whose
tragic and ironic meaning he alone is supposed to understand: she
replayed the secret scene —clenching the father's penis in her hand
while he caresses her. It is also clear why he thinks his mother is so
"cold." Yes, the father (he believes himself to be) deserves a wife
who behaves like an "ice statue" toward him. Another dream for
confirmation. "A gang of shady characters [toute unefaune]. There
was going to be a bawl. I was stifling, I was stifling." Father is a goat
(faun), but the scandal has to be stifled. If the scandal is stifled in-
side, shut up in a crypt, only the word of the desire returns with an
altered meaning—the word thing—the only survivor of a topo-
graphic catastrope. A silent witness to the unspeakable. Leche(r),
lick—yes —and all can live.

Fetish: The Symbol of Nonsymbol

Many points of this type of analysis seem instructive compared

with certain received ideas. If a fetish is to be understood as a penis
attributed to the mother who is devoid or deprived of it, then the
meaning of this deprivation becomes more precise: it is linked to the
parallel fate of the son and the mother, both being excluded from
 230 NICOLAS ABRAHAM and MARIA TOROK

the libidinal and illegitimate scene. The "fetish" and its counterpart,
"the penis of the mother," are invented, among other things, to
compensate for the mother's lack of pleasure and the son's loss of
his ideal while the topography is maintained as is without the son's
having to give up his own pleasure. In fact, if it were necessary to ac-
cept "castration," i.e., the lack of sexual pleasure due to an exclu-
sion beyond repair, it would unleash a lethal aggressiveness and, as
a consequence, push the young subject (now inseparable from the
wronged mother) into betraying the illegitimate scene, annihilating
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it along with its participants. By the same token, what has secretly
become one's own libidinal ideal, one's own raison de vivre, would
also be annihilated. How can we find a way out of this impasse? By
creating for one's "hysteria" (which varies according to age) an in-
ternal or narcissistic public, so to speak; by creating a self-to-self
"hysteria." All that survives of the relationship to others will be the
dynamic repression, not of the desire to have pleasure, but of the
desire to speak out. Apart from this relational residue, everything
can work in seclusion: there need be no witnesses for the fetish to be
effective, except precisely to test its opaqueness. The analyst who
"will never understand" has no other apparent vocation than to
bring to the fore the constant temptation to speak out while
permitting to verify, day in day out, that the crypt has remained
unscathed.
Let us return to the split in the ego that Freud finally surmised in
1938 in order to provide an explanation for cases like the Wolf
Man. In our view, these belated yet new findings only need one final
complement. The split shows up in a "double tendency" which, in
these cases, feeds the patient's words during analysis. There is, on
the one hand, a conformist tendency, but lacking adequate affec-
tive charge, and, on the other hand, an enigmatic tendency which
translates, in a cryptic manner, the identification with one of the
participants in the scene. This second tendency is — as we saw in our
patient's case—entirely parallel to and independent of the first, and
is usually expressed in incomprehensible terms or in the description
of "feelings" that are experienced as incongruous. If this were the
case of a phantasmic empathy with someone who is bereaved by the
 IDENTIFICATION WITHIN CRYPT 231

loss of the subject, i.e., his beloved, we would speak of "mel-

ancholia." But, in this case, the subject was simply a witness
and excluded from the idyll. Not having either to give up or to use
what had become his libidinal ideal, he has created a symbol: the
allo-seme of the wish word made into a thing and acted out, in
short: the fetish word, strictly speaking. What creates the symbol
here is not, as in a neurosis, related to prohibition, but the intrinsic
impossibility of having recourse to it. The impossibility itself bears
no name, and therefore becomes one with the very word of the im-
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possible wish: this is the structure of the symbol leche. As for

cunnilingus, the fetishistic act, it is not symbolic in this case, but
works instead as a veritable symbol-cover. The magic word, i.e.,
the true symbol, the authentic and full creation of the subject, re-
mains concealed by the fetish. The triple complement of such a hid-
den symbol—(1) the desire to participate in the illegitimate scene;
(2) the desire of aggressive intrusion; (3) the desire to speak out —
does not appear therefore as the latent counterpart of some mani-
fest discourse since this discourse is itself concealed behind acts,
dreams, and symptoms that disguise the symbol emerging from a
different world which cannot be symbolized. The analyst's work
does not consist in condoning this concealment but in bringing to
light the wish word, in recognizing it precisely as a symbol, i.e., as
an exceptional work (of art) and therefore all the more precious: the
very symbol ofnonsymbol— of what cannot be symbolized. Freud's
splitting of the ego thus gains in precision. The enigmatic trend is-
sues from the crypt or the inclusion in the same way as the magic
word itself. As for the conformist trend, it results from the wish to
conceal the symbol; it is a product of the crypt and includes, how-
ever paradoxical this may seem, the description and the develop-
ment of the fetishistic act as well as other everyday trivialities.
Coming back to the Wolf Man, we had no idea until recently that
he had also been attracted, through some semantic contagion, not
only by the squatting position of the floor scrubber but by the sight
of a "shining nose." For confirmation, it will suffice to read care-
fully Freud's essay on "Fetishism" (1927). It is easy to guess that in
this "shine of the nose" the Wolf Man alludes to the word teret,
 232 NICOLAS ABRAHAM and MARIA TOROK

"rub," "shine": the very symbol of his interred desire. The ailments
of this same nose—pimples, holes, blackheads —symbolize the de-
sire to break into the scene while the choice of the nose as their place
(the nose betrays lies) tells of the desire to speak out. This is a good
example of the covert and threefold purpose of the fetish-work,
which had been fated to remain obscure. Only after it has been deci-
phered, understood, and appreciated can it render to its creator his
own "part divine," hiding under enigmas yet demanding the light of
day.
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Some Model Crypts

Both the Wolf Man and the Man of "Milk" created their crypts not
because they knew of an illegitimate sexual scene, but in order to
overcome a double impossibility: to make the scene into an admissi-
ble ideal or to reveal it, thereby, destroying the libidinal ideal. This
contradiction is not characteristic of neuroses. The impossibility of
telling curbs neurosis, as it were. Relinquishing, at least apparently,
supplants the betrayal of both the libidinal ideal and any wishes for
revenge. Preservative repression safeguards public opinion while
the fetish, a most ingenious conceit, reduces the danger of a "cosmic
cataclysm" to a harmless oddity capable of reviving desire.
There is another form of crypt: the crypt of the blameless and
guiltless object who, after the idyll, left the subject for good reason,
so to speak, or in spite of himself. This object has been totally good,
absolutely perfect, and no one should suspect his secret love. The
loss of such an object — always innocent of desertion — produces,
instead of an impossible mourning, an endocryptic identification
free of any aggressiveness, at least as far as the partners themselves
are concerned, if not the outside world. This is the crypt psychiatry
would call "melancholic."
Altogether different is the fate of those who benefited from an
unutterable favor in person. Not being able to put their loss into
words or communicate it to others in order to resign themselves
through grief, they chose to deny everything—the loss as well as the
 IDENTIFICATION WITHIN CRYPT 233

love. Deny everything, shut up everything in themselves, both

pleasure and suffering.
The concrete variety of such cases is infinite. There are some
who, at the time of the loss, suffered a disappointment in their ob-
ject, in his sincerity or value. Their crypt is under double lock while,
due to a tragic split, they desperately try to destroy what is dearest
to them. These people are deprived of even the hope of ever being
acknowledged.
It is also possible, in some cases, that a trend of covert aggressive-
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ness, directed against the object, remains in the deserted partner in

addition to his endocryptic identification. This creates a useful ar-
rangement on the couch as the presence of the patient's own
aggressivity directed at the object —first manifested in a "failure
syndrome"—favors the opening of the crypt.

"Victor" and "Gilles, " or How to Keep?

"I'll bash your head against the wall, that'll cure you from loving
me." This sentence, never uttered but put into action, was an end-
ing. It was preceded by another that did not have to be said either:
"I'll bash your head against the wall if you tell anyone what we did
together." No more was needed to cut off speech. To say everything
once and for all, there was only one recurring theme left:
contrition —failure, failure—contrition. "No, I should not have!
. . .""I can't control myself! . . ." Words laboriously illustrated by
deeds. Victor is also middle-aged. "I am neurotically unsuccessful,"
he says right away. "Yet, I am like any other man, married, chil-
dren, executive position. Yes, power, giving orders!. . . that's what
I'd like most. But I can't bring myself to do it. Something always
makes me side with my subordinates. I am always on the verge of
fighting with my superiors. It ends in dismissal." He is aware of it
and contrite, but the analyst is perplexed. Acts and words recur be-
fore his eyes and he obviously understands nothing.
From the start, the fight with repression is missing, the neurotic
compromise that signals the existence of an "I." Above all, the
 234 NICOLAS ABRAHAM and MARIA TOROK

transfer onto the analyst is lacking. For want of it, what is said
seems empty of any present content. Timeless words directly at no
one. The present, if it exists — and we are justified in doubting that
it does—is the indefinitely reiterated account of day-to-day failures
and the regret over having sunk so low. No accusations, no projec-
tions: everything is taken on almost too conscientiously. Boredom
sets in, stagnation . . . If the analyst thinks for a minute that he
should feel affected, that he is going to be involved in some re-
peated experience, in some affective recollection, he is greatly mis-
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taken. Whatever he does know, he did not learn from associations

but by drawing his own conclusions. At this rate he would have
been better off becoming a detective. For how on earth could this
"boat ride" at age eleven, with his elder brother of seventeen, have
caused an almost fatal illness the following day? Complaints about
his wife who is jealous, shrewish, possessive, frustrating —
according to what he says. Another question: if she is this way, how
could he have stood her for so long? Yet, he seems to desire her in-
tensely on occasion, his potency never letting him down. "When I
see her in the bathroom in certain positions, / cannot hold back.
Why doesn't she tolerate the least bit of interest on my part for any-
one else, man or woman? She is jealous of even the reading I do.
Does she expect me to succeed professionally? No sooner do I
achieve something than she despises it.— She wants me to be hers,
totally and only hers. —During intercourse she accepts readily all
positions, except the one I would want most."
Does Victor like suffering? Humiliation? Nothing in the analytic
relationship leads one to believe this. Does he perhaps say all of this
after an oedipal fashion to pacify his father? If this were indeed the
case, the analyst would have no reason to fret. And then there is the
brother: "He was so mean and so stupid. When he got engaged, he
gave me such a thrashing, I had to stay in bed for three days —
which, by the way, kept me from taking part in the festivities." The
detective surfaces then: Was the patient possibly in love with his
brother to the point of provoking him, out of frustration, at the
time he was being unfaithful? The analyst, however, has not the
faintest idea about anything . . . Then, one fine day: an account of
 IDENTIFICATION WITHIN CRYPT 235

one of the numerous car accidents he is used to having, an accident

which almost cost the life of a young friend who was with him. "I
only had a concussion, but after the coma I could no longer find my
young friend. Dazed and confused, I sleepwalked from house to
house in the village where I had been taken in, asking: 'Where is the
little one? Where is little Viki?' "
Finally! The detective is let go. The analyst reassumes his func-
tion. With hindsight he finally hears behind the dreary everyday of
failures and regrets, the sounds of the love Victor attributes within
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himself to his brother Gilles. And he himself is that older brother,

even in the coma. That's clear. Strange paradox of actions. The
elder one searching for the younger one. In real life was it not the re-
verse? Gilles, the elder, had jilted Viki —first to act macho, then to
marry a woman. Gilles, once his guardian angel in school, his pride
in front of everyone, this handsome guy, virile and muscular, the
delight of their mother; Gilles who could be tough with father;
Gilles the pure, the ultimate, with a temper worthy of Jupiter; yes,
Victor was this ideal brother in secret—he was this brother while
driving with his young friend; he continued to be him even in the
coma and the subsequent daze as he desperately searched for his
young friend after he had awakened. According to his fantasy, the
little one lives on in the big one whom Victor has become —as re-
morse, as a lack.
But why the accident? This lack of attention on a deserted road?
. . .There lies the question mark of Victor's whole life. He is Gilles,
sure enough, that much we now know, but he is him in order to up-
set him all the time, to defeat him all the time: that's what "Gilles"
his lover, deserves for having rejected him.
Our hearing opens up at long last. What appears now and later is
"Gilles in love and contrite, remorseful at not being able to stop lov-
ing and then at being unfaithful." Meanwhile, Victor deserts him-
self by taking up residence in this Xanthippe-like woman, his nag-
ging and quarrelsome wife. She will say to "Gilles" the big brother
all that "Victor" the little one has on his mind. As far as "Gilles" is
concerned, "Gilles," his lover, Victor recoups him as well by becom-
ing "Gilles" for "Victor" . . . Yet, it is a shaky solution. He contem-
 236 NICOLAS ABRAHAM and MARIA TOROK

plates divorce. But how could he go through with it if, with his
wife's departure, he would also have to give up Victor whom she
embodies? Day by day, he and she will thus jointly defeat "Gilles"
and his ego ideal—the recognized cause of their traumatic separa-
tion. Does he expect to get ahead in business? We are going to
thwart him. He wants to look at women? He's going to have a hard
time. Blocked in all acts of life, "Gilles" remains, "Gilles" will not
leave. His wings clipped, he will not fly from the hiding place Victor
has set up for him. One day the analyst announces: "Victor does not
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want Gilles to make it, to go out with women: he straps him down,
he wants to keep him for himself." This moment marks a turning
point. Recollections, then: contours of a transfer.
Why did it take years to unmask "Gilles" hidden under Victor's
guise? For the simple reason that there is no cryptic identification
which does not emanate from a crypt, an inclusion, or from an un-
speakable scene. This scene had taken place, we learn bit by bit,
during a boat ride. Once more, this ride recalls the image of an im-
passable wall: "I'll bash your head against the wall if you say a
word"—says the analyst. It is not yet Victor who recounts the scene
but "Gilles." With reserve, embellishments, and omissions. In the
boat, between his legs, leaning back on his penis, is little Victor.
The day after his account there is no longer a serious illness, as there
was after the event, but a dream: "A chicken he is disemboweling
while pulling on the esophagus and windpipe [trachée-artère]. But
the chicken won't relinquish life [n'arrivepas à mourir]. It becomes
his little daughter. He wants desperately to take her life [lui donner
la mort] so she no longer suffers. No use." Yes, Gilles can "wind up"
(ejaculate, windpipe) [cracher par terre—"spit on the ground"—
trahée-artère], but little Victor has to swallow (esophagus) his or-
gasm. His own penis is really only a "little girl" whose "life" (love)
[la mort-l'amour] cannot be had yet. This was the situation when
Victor's orgasm was taken abroad by Gilles —right up to his return
which immediately preceded his marriage. Only at age sixteen and a
half, after he had received his brother's thrashing, did the aggres-
siveness of despair finally set off the process of puberty. Being
unable to dislodge "Gilles" (whom he has become) from his twofold
 IDENTIFICATION WITHIN CRYPT 237

and incompatible position of being both his lover and his ego ideal,
Victor spends his life attacking Gilles by attacking himself, by
thwarting Gilles in his own endeavors prescribed by their shared ego
ideal. In the same way, the ostensible belligerence he directed
against his wife for not wanting to perform coitus a tergo is in fact
"Gilles's" belligerence; as for Victor — in his heart of hearts—he can
only gloat over it. "It serves him right, that betrayer, who used to
love me so much and then left me." "Gilles" fantasizes about wild
orgies. . . but alas, they don't work out. "Fortunately," hoots little
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Victor up his sleeve.

We understand now that, were it not for his aggressiveness di-
rected at the older brother, Victor would remain crestfallen in his
identification with a phantasmic object, supposedly in mourning
for him. If it has not turned out this way, Victor has to thank a spe-
cial situation. For, in his case, another conflictual element is pres-
ent on top of his phantasmic identification with his older brother.
This element works the way a neurosis would. It is the fact that his
own and the brother's ego ideal coincide in Victor. It was precisely
this ideal inherent in Gilles that had once separated them and ex-
plains why every attempt to realize this shared ideal brings with it a
large measure of aggressivity directed against the ideal. Hence the
illusion, but only the illusion, of a masochistic or self-destructive
neurosis. Hence also the relative ease of a pseudo-analytic dialogue.
Indeed, there is obviously a conflict, but it is not where it first ap-
pears to be.

The Afflicted Dead

The following case is quite different; no conflict can be seen be-

tween the cryptophoric subject and the object of her crypt. The two
are accomplices in secretly hating the outsiders who had long ago
separated them. Together they shall live and die.
At the time of her suicide attempt she had just given birth. A won-
der that she could be saved. A few years spent in a sanitarium, then
a lengthy and unwieldy analysis. Themes of self-depreciation,
 238 NICOLAS ABRAHAM and MARIA TOROK

worthlessness, void, internal rotting, refusal to get medical care, all

of this alternating with periods of bravado, contempt, feelings of
superiority filling the universe. A psychiatrist might describe her in
this way. As for the analyst, he too, being unable to understand, is
reduced to as much. Listening to her, he fixes on an enigma: when
the little girl is still too young to go to school, her "irresponsible fa-
ther" deserts the family for some obscure reason and is gone for-
ever. Is he still alive? This question is without an answer to this day.
The analysis begins in an atmosphere of elation. Here she finds
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again the "warmth of the fire" that had fed her bygone dreams.
"Someone is happy and full of hope." If only the analyst had heard
it this ,way from the start! He would have been spared having to
grope for several years, not fruitlessly to be sure, but also not with-
out running the risk of some serious errors. "Someone is happy." Is
it really the young woman or some other person? The father, per-
haps . . .This is how we would formulate the question today. Short
of this, the analyst is disoriented. He looks for the transfer or at
least the role he is meant to play. To no avail. He does not suspect
yet that it is possible to disguise under one's traits a fantasied person
endowed with entirely fictitious greatness and torments. Is it sur-
prising that afterwards the analyst's words bounce off like peanuts
thrown against the wall, without making any difference? The
dreams are monotonous: cuts, dislocations, scattered limbs. Are
they ideas of castration that torment her? Or is she cut off from
her father? Or castrated by her mother? Or full of hatred against
some people or the analyst? Still. . . Nothing budges. Whose are
these scattered limbs! Is it she herself who has to recover a lost ob-
ject, an object that could be projected onto the analyst, an object
that the oedipal mother, for instance, might have taken away from
here? . . . Very much the stuff of fairy tales with no other effect, all
in all, than the benefit of a stable and secure relation. But whose are
these scattered limbs!
The turning point comes, thanks to insights gained from other
cases, as soon as the hypothesis of mourning arises —a cryptic
mourning, however, fantasized as the incessant affliction of an-
other. Retroactively, it is easier to clarify the meaning of her repeti-
 IDENTIFICATION WITHIN CRYPT 239

tious and alternating attitudes of depression and activity. How

could she have transferred her feelings of a little girl looking for her
father when she lived entirely on the concealed fantasy of being her-
self the father weeping over her, the father who suffers because he is
bereft of her, and who, forever disconsolate, accuses himself of the
worst of crimes since he had to be subjected to the punishment of
losing her; or the father, equipped with every guile, who flies, in
"manic" moments, to his beloved darling, taking on giant propor-
tions and being absolutely confident that nothing will stop him? In
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these exalted moments, she runs from dealer to dealer trying to add
a precious doll to her collection: her father thirsting after he is look-
ing for her, is going to find her. Once she finds the "little specimen,"
her eagerness to acquire it knows no limits, and pushes her into
nearly criminal acts. Such must be the force of love.
In sum, she was the "father," but without its showing in her de-
meanor, which had remained most feminine, or in her professional
pursuits. Still, if the analyst had known about the mechanism of
endocryptic identification, he would have understood early on.
When quite small, she would daydream: "Someone was charged
with child murder, and finally I realized that the defendant was my-
self." Was it not the lost father who, in the little girl's fantasies, en-
dured the mother's accusations? The analyst's office is said to be fu-
nereal. To wit: a place of sojourn for the beloved girl, long since
dead for the father's desire. One day, she walks past an "escalator"
with her child (the father had been seen for the last time near one): a
sudden impression that the child is "devoured" by the machine. "I
felt my arms fall crushed." This is what it was like for him (the fa-
ther) to lose his little lover. Yes, all these speeches could have
guided the analyst, had he not been worshipping prejudices such as
that of the "I."
In endocryptic identification the "I" is understood as the fanta-
sied ego of the lost object. On the couch, even more than in life, he
stages the words, gestures, feelings, in short, the entire imaginary
lot of the lover who mourns for his "dead" object. As the patient re-
peats her experience of the escalator for the nth time (where her
arms fell crushed), the analyst finally states that all the "fallen
 240 NICOLAS ABRAHAM and MARIA TOROK

arms" and all the "scattered limbs" of her dreams, fantasies repre-
sent the dejected suffering of her father: his arms are as if cut off,
not having his little girl to carry.
From then on, the incorporated father becomes "decorporated,"
so to speak, onto the analyst. Witness this dream: "A quack doctor
cuts off one arm when he loses his daughter." "As a sign of mourn-
ing," says the analyst, the "quack."
It is the end of endocryptic identification. As proof: a drawing
she sketches hastily on the back of an album, a relic of her father's;
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the drawing is entitled "Aida." Here, the characters of the drama

find their places. Aida is the imprisoned daughter dying of starva-
tion. A living corpse, she awaits her former lover to come and de-
liver her. This reworking of identities does take place, to be sure, in
the crypt, but the edifice is swaying. Soon enough it will give way to
a true recollection: "It's shameful, it's disgusting," shouts the neigh-
bor in unison with the mother. "These women are tearing her father
away from the child." No need to fill in the dots between the shame
inflicted on the father and his subsequent disappearance. Hence-
forth the crypt is unlocked, the fight for the father goes on openly.
From this moment on, the infantile conflict reappears as it was be-
fore the loss, before the entombment.

Unlocking the Crypt: Before and After

We have sketched three very different cases of inclusion. In all

three, we are disoriented by the unnoticed action of a covert identi-
fication that leads to apparently unintelligible words and behavior.
Apparently unintelligible for analytic listening. Only once the ana-
lyst has shown his receptiveness to this mode of being can the inclu-
sion slowly give way to real mourning, whose name is introjection.
In this lengthy process, three successive movements can be
distinguished.
The first one coincides with the onset of the relationship. With-
out parting with his endocryptic identification, the subject secretly
projects, onto the analyst, the child partner of the crypt. Secretly, it
 IDENTIFICATION WITHIN CRYPT 241

is important to underscore this; in the manifest relationship none of

it must show. The partners' faithfulness to each other is surmised
only in the regularity of the sessions and a certain degree of anima-
tion. The first segment is followed by a very long period of seeming
stagnation, but it is in fact used surreptitiously to study the listening
capabilities of the analyst, i.e., his prejudices (and not his desire as
would be the case in objectai neuroses). During this whole phase,
the regular return to the couch has, by the way, the same libidinal
significance for the patient as the regularity of physiological func-
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tions: breathing, bowel movements, menstruation; symbolic recur-

rences of the interred experience. The illness affecting these func-
tions: asthma, colitis, painful periods or their cessation, involution,
etc., if it should become eloquent, speaks only to the subject and
not to others (as would be the case in conversion hysteria, for exam-
ple). The illness tells the subject: "The return is there, but it is an ill-
ness." This return is the mirror image of what happens on the
couch: when coming to the sessions and speaking are conceived of
as suffering, as torture. Thanks to this translation into words, the
self-to-self affliction can register a respite from the onset of the
analysis.
The second movement takes place when the secret projection of
the child onto the analyst gives way to the equally secretive
"decorporation" of the cryptic object. The impulse for this change
may be quite contingent. But, above all, it will be the work of inter-
pretation laying open, at the right time, the endocryptic identifica-
tion. The false "I" will be reconverted into a third person while the
patient is given to understand that it is possible to evoke the prodi-
gal love of his object without subjecting him to shame or losing him
morally: all the more so since the transgression itself implies an au-
thentic and privileged encounter with the depths of the object's psy-
che that the patient, henceforth, will attempt to fathom.
The great danger during this second phase is that, upon opening
the crypt, the object is implicitly or explicitly condemned by the an-
alyst; whereas what is required is the capacity to mourn, namely the
capacity to acquire for oneself the libidinal resources owned by the
object. To say in this context: "You want to seduce me," or "You're
 242 NICOLAS ABRAHAM and MARIA TOROK

making a seducer out of me," or "It's time to forget all that," does
not sound like a trivial comment but like an irreversible sentence,
capable of upsetting everything. If, on the contrary, instead of
shaming the object, the narcissistic value of the entombed experi-
ence (for both partners) is recognized —with the crypt unlocked, its
treasure laid into the open, and recognized as the tmalienable prop-
erty of the subject—the third and last movement will come into be-
ing, thanks to a new élan and with the task of undertaking the final
fight with the oedipal party: the last hurdle on the way to fructifying
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the treasure.
At the close of this all too rapid overview of some effects of inclu-
sion and of endocryptic identification in particular, let us express
the hope that these notions will lighten the arduous task of listening
to certain patients. There is also hope that, for them, we have in-
creased the chances of being heard. And, finally, the hope that the
treasures that lie buried in crypts can become the delight of their
owner and work to the benefit of us all.

REFERENCES

Abraham, N. (1974-1975). Notes du semminaire sur l'unité duelle et le fantôme. In:

L'Écorce et le noyau, by N. Abraham. Paris: Aubier Flammarion, 1978, pp. 393-425.
(1975a). Le fantôme d'Hamlet ou le VIe acte. In: L'Écorce et le noyau, by N.
Abraham: Paris: Aubier Flammarion, 1978, pp. 447-473.
(1975b). Notules sur le fantôme. In: L'Écorce et le noyau, by N. Abraham. Paris:
Aubier Flammarion, 1978, pp. 426-433.
(1979). The shell and the kernel. Diacritics (March), pp. 16-28.
& Torok, M. (1972). Introjecter—incorporer: Deuil ou mélancholic In: L'Écorce
et le noyau, by N. Abraham. Paris: Aubier Flammarion, 1978, pp. 259-275. Translated
in: Psychoanalysis in France, ed. S. Lebovici & D. Widlöcher. New York: Int. Univ.
Press, 1980, pp. 3-16.
(1976). Cryptonymie: Le Verbier de l'homme aux loups. Paris: Aubier
Flammarion.
Freud, S. (1927). Fetishism. S.E., 21.
(1938). Splitting of the ego in the process of defense. S.E., 23.
Torok, M. (1975). Histoire de peur. In: L'Écorce et le noyau, by N. Abraham. Paris: Aubier
Flammarion, 1978, pp. 434-446.

Maria Torok
16 rue du Cherche-midi
75006 Paris
France