Enlaces vestigiales, enlaces fantasma

Vestige links, ghost links anne loncan*

Wishing to delve further into the metapsychological status of the link, we shall concisely place the birth and evolution of this concept in context and then come to the enlightening aspect brought by the future evolution of the link itself. This main theme will lead us to the questions which emerge around the disappearance of the link.

Exploring these will help define it.

Introduction: birth and evolution of the concept

1.  The concept of link was born in Buenos Ayres many decades ago with the clinic and teaching of Pichon-Rivière. It was the fruit of this author’s long thoughts maturation and its transformed echoes last to this day. Combed through by the practicing and teaching of psychoanalysis, it took off considerably over the years, and now occupies centre stage in the theoretical corpus of a family psychoanalysis well in touch with social realities.
2. The future of the concept
   At the moment, several authors call upon this inheritance while upholding propositions which could be wildly diverging. Various trends in thinking have appropriated the concept of link to qualify it, to organise and clarify its meaning. According to the theoretical leanings and the clinical field of observation referred to by the authors, some connotations are prevalent, showing the relationship with attachment, notably as regard to the creation of primary links or object relation continuity, a focal point suggested by Pichon-Rivière, who strongly stresses the link with the internal object. In Europe, the closest and nearest legacy is found in the work of Alberto Eiguer (1997, 2001, 2006, 2008) who has progressively enriched and strengthened PichonRivière‘s basic hypothesis. Others plainly wander off this nodal point to give a specific importance to the “effect of presence” which works in an extemporaneous way and does not leave any intrapsychic traces, the link and the intrapsychic becoming at the same time heterogeneous. This theoretical viewpoint, useful, without any doubt, in a socio-political context, seems however hardly compatible with thoughts on unconscious intersubjective family links. We are talking here primarily of the work of Janine Puget and Isidoro Berenstein, the originality of which can be quite surprising. René Kaës (1993, 2005 b), with a somewhat more qualified work, insists upon the articulation and apparatus system of the various “spaces″ intra, inter and transpsychic leaning on the notion of groupal psychic apparatus. Even if these spaces remain distinct and dissimilar, they are still “articulated with each other, and this shows the flexibility and mobility of their topological conjunction, leading to ipso facto their respective functional organisation’s compatibility. In the author’s work, it is not totally clear to which psychic entity’s service these junction points are placed nor how they could be used as bridges or could act in this way.
   This brief scan shows from similarity to minor differences, being at odds, agreeing or reacting, the extent of the theoretical spectrum which is covered. At this spectrum’s edge, conceptions meet in one central point, which organises the whole range. All these works, though, leave pending a persistent question about the topology, the psychical mapping of the link.
3. The link’s topologyThere has been some research done, and a few ideas have been expressed to think up a new theory of categories which would be useful, as much to understand the psychic functioning of the single subject faced with himself when connecting with another, as when he is integral part of a group, the prototype of which is, in our field, the family group. A point shared by the various theories lies undeniably in the fact that the link works in “between″, in an unnamed place, which is sometimes called “extra-topological″ (Kaës, 2005, DF 15), or ectopic, the drawback being that it grants a crucial place to the heterogeneity of the distinct psychic spaces described and thus refers back to a paradox: these very spaces defined as “extra-topological″ (meaning outside the psyche) would nevertheless be the scene of psychic doings. Would not this extraterritoriality hide the awkwardness generated by the link’s status which is fed in the intersubjectivity, but still firmly dives into the intrapsychic? The attempts made to define its structure and its texture bring with them questions trying to delimit its spheres of work. But, in the link, these spheres fluctuate with the various investments and psychic formations qualifying them. Love for a partner might, in time, change into feelings more inclined towards tenderness than passion; following this thought, the link of a couple can, from time to time, and in a still very passionate way, be charged with negative affects, including hatred, which would quite efficiently hide a love gone into the background. The durability or the topography of the alliance link are put at risk in neither of these cases, however the texture of the link has changed. On the other hand, changing, multiplying or successions of objects modify the interpsychic areas where the link is at work. Thus what is in common and shared will be more protected in case of affect variations than when objects are changed or reduced in number; the different individual level being affected anyway. We can therefore notice that any changes in the family (conflict, arrival or disappearance of a family member…) will remobilise the investments, modify the texture of the links and reshape the area where they are at work.
   Knowing full well that the psychic functioning of a subject changes according to whether he is faced with himself, another or a group, we bring forward the hypothesis that the link and the multiplicity of links not only reveal the wealth, depth and spread of unexpected and innovative psychic potential created by putting things in common and sharing, but also that these contributions can be imported up to the intrapsychical level, where from they also partly emanate.
   Mnesic traces, whether conscious or not, and their emergence in couple and family therapy bear witness to this: similar levels of functioning found within the group are connected to the intrapsychical functioning of each of the subjects forming this group. If these subjects are not always on the same “floor/storey″ in the maze that is the subconscious, there are bridges, corridors, steps and lifts already available, or to be created, depending on the nature of the negative processes at work. If we postulated a radical homogeneity of the various psychic spaces, we would not be able to count on any therapeutic effect whatsoever for the members of a family in therapy resting on groupal psychic functioning. To qualify some as being “outside the psyche″ is to see them on the whole as being radically inaccessible, which they can be, in case of psychic pathologies affecting the group with several deep and unyielding clefts. These highly pathological processes can be out of reach of therapy, but it still doesn’t mean that they are “outside the psyche”.

The link’s primary functions

A brief look at the link’s functions will lead to thoughts on its future.

1. Redoing, reworking and mending
   Beyond the links built from birth in intersubjectivity, the constant risk associated with new links has mending as theme: redoing, renewing, or restoring what has been damaged or torn. Psychically too, the new links will undertake to redo what the person has known that was agreeable, either identical or fresh or something in between, but also repair suffering and what makes the person suffer, all theses psychic movements being placed as a matter of priority under the seal of the unconscious.
   In the pathological situations we treat, creating new links can mean repeating primary links tainted by deprivation or pain, dispossessing in advance the subject of an individuation opened enough to creativity. This latter will then endeavour to restore what was not at first beneficial to him. He enters in a link with others, risking the opportunity to find a restoring recovery. In the best cases, unconscious alliances (theorised mainly by René Kaës) offer a solid and helpful infrastructure on which settles this renovating redoing, mutually lived. But, very often, this is just the illusion of an opportunity, which is quickly defeated by the invincible return towards the identical; there again the unconscious alliances are at full tilt, but in their pseudo-protective and defensive version, which is in fact pernicious. From then on, it becomes impossible to obtain a bargain when taking away one’s objectal investments. The banking metaphor is cut short and the major and repeated libidinal destruction leaves the subject psychically anaemic and his family exhausted. Indeed, if we are talking about a particular family link, let’s remember that it resonates in reverberating and sometimes amplified echoes within the other members.
   Following these broken libidinal surges, we can feel the faintness and tenuousness of the links in their objectal components and the fight against psychic suffering enabling a massive narcissistic return of those investments still available. Thus Jean-Jacques Rousseau repudiates the importance of any link whatsoever (2^nd  walk of “Rêveries du promeneur solitaire″): «Getting used to retreating within myself made me lose the feeling and almost even the memory of my ills, I learned thus through personal experience that the source of true happiness lies within ourselves and that making someone who really wants to be happy truly miserable doesn’t lie with men». The regressive return to the illusion of omnipotence is here well in the foreground: this mechanism of psychic anaesthesia amputates the subject of all the wealth of links which makes him a social being; family is only just mentioned, and not without difficulties. This is what we have come across in the clinical case below.
2. To this function which falls to the link, orientated (ideally) towards creation and creativity, is added that of feeding the psyche, to ensure in some way its metabolism. When we mention the contributions received, the investments done or taken up again, the link is described in terms of economic quantifiers which leads to the belief in the existence of a directing device which would be the tool of the investments given and received in order to make it live. These representations introduce metaphorically the notion of reciprocity which is played out in the double vectorisation of exchanges. Nevertheless, the economic mass and its moves should not be thought of separately; the link’s intrinsic qualities enable the regulation of “the rate″ of its psychic value and put it into temporality, beyond the temporary or even fugitive relationships which punctuate the everyday normal social life and of which they are but a pale imitation. The perceptions, affects, fantasies, and representations which run through the link and colour the investments share in its qualitative definition. Passion, in all its meanings, can be there too, either as unreasoned and excessive surge of love or hate, or as suffering generated by the mobilisation of affects whose destiny can be discordant, or even violent when the cyclic and mutual processes of feeding and load shedding of the link are altered.
   Flux and reflux are then characteristic of the link which is simultaneously sought after and accepted, imposing a partial renouncement to the freedom specific to each of its terms, marking within it the principle of reality. The narcissistic embellishment produced by mutual acknowledgement is able to compensate for his narcissistic renouncement. Lack of or inadequate acknowledgement by one of the parts of the link is the cause of some of its pathologies, just like lack of or inadequate renouncement. Everything needs to be looked at, depending on the family sphere, this network of links forming the context of this particular link, and also according to the social environment at work underneath it all.

The link’s fate: Is the link as eternal as the unconscious?

We are coming now to the question of the link’s fate: can we bring out crucial elements surrounding its lasting power?

What happens, as time goes by, to the first links, models or reference points used to build later links open onto a world outside the family?  Fallowing, ruin or withering of a major link within the family happens because of powerful demands  which can be external, maybe linked to exile or migration, or internal, when a requalifying and/or withdrawal of investment (conflict, break ups or death) takes place. The strength to resist the fall depends on the link’s psychic anchorage. The agony or the “death″ of the link has to benefit from a psychic work just as important as its start, otherwise the link may be reduced to potentially toxic scraps. It is, for example, the fate of conjugal links we can often observe with break ups and divorces. In cases of death, particularly sudden death, the link can get stuck into a psychical no man’s land, acquiring at the same time tragic effects. The “remains″ of the intersubjective link lie deep in the unconscious, outside time, sheltered from all psychic linking activity, like a kind of ghost still carrying affects, fantasies and disafferented representations. Just like a ghost member, this banished link lets the suffering of still raw mourning feelings seep away. During therapy the echoes of vestigial links and ghost links with other “current″ links, activated by interfantasmatization in the transfero-counter-transferential bonding, allow to unfurl again the family myths and to build the family ego thus benefiting all the links, any changes helping calm the suffering.

A clinical case of family therapy^[1]

The P. family comes to consultation, under the energetic guidance of Mrs (Nathalie), who has managed to convince her husband to start family therapy to improve the abysmal relationship between herself and her step-daughter Roxane. She intuitively understands that the whole family is involved in this functioning. 

Both parents do not hold equal position with the children: the father, Noël, is the father of both the children, Roxane, 12, and Dorian, 2, while his wife is the mother of just the little boy. Roxane’ mother (never named) committed suicide three years previously (Roxane was about 9). At that time, the child lived mainly with her father, as a single parent at first, then with his second wife. Noël and his first wife had split up when Roxane was about 5. This split had been extremely acrimonious. The mother had left the father for a very rich man who worked in the milieu of nightlife and gambling. The courts eventually decided she should not have custody of Roxane anymore.

There was a string of such breaks in the family diachronic, marking Roxane’s first years with a strong lack of continuity. Dorian doesn’t really know he doesn’t have the same mother as his sister, even though nobody is actively hiding this fact from him. Roxane always calls her step-mother by her first name. 

The sessions establish themselves regularly every other week. From the very beginning, Mrs runs the show. She talks loudly, all the time and in a very high-pitched voice, mentioning a string of complaints about Roxane…and her father, whom she thinks is “overindulgent″ in the upbringing of his children and rather uncaring towards them and her. The father doesn’t react much, looks disenchanted. Roxane breathes heavily, bursts out laughing, cannot finish a sentence, all this being ignored by the rest of the family. From time to time she explodes: she shouts or cries without going to the end of her thoughts, which she has difficulties grasping anyway and which remains sketchy. She got considerably behind at school and goes to special needs classes. As for Dorian, he monopolises attention, without giving any to anybody, he creates one hell of a commotion, with large amount of toys he spreads out and plays with noisily. In spite of this apparent chaos which goes on for many months and calms down gradually during the first year of therapy, the modalities of presence change, even though the themes remain firmly centred on everyday life. Dorian realises I exist, expresses himself and from time to time asks me specific questions; he calms down, listens and takes part. He goes from crèche to pre-school without any problems. Nathalie manages to let the others speak, she is less strident. Very gradually Roxane and her father make up lost ground. The young girl can say complete sentences and the father doesn’t seem to be here just to pander to his wife’s “whims”. These behavioural clues and the feeling of being better which comes from them show deep mutations which nothing that was said actually intimated; they relate to a groupal transfer which at first included me through indifferenciation, and then told me apart somewhat: I am not called “the shrink″ anymore by the family (this is a term also used during sessions), I acquire a name.

Roxane’s mother’s suicide seems to have created a jam and obliterated the group’s abilities to think at a time when Dorian’s birth was imminent (just before or just after? this has never been clear). Laurie, Roxane’s older sister, born from her mother’s previous marriage is the only contact with her maternal family: married herself, with a little girl, she sees her younger sibling often and welcomes her in her beauty salon where little by little Roxane starts helping a bit. On day, bravely, Nathalie wonders ex abrupto, at the beginning of a session, if Roxane doesn’t fear disavowing her own mother by showing affection to her, the step-mother and to what extent her contrary behaviour stems from this. She also wonders if this is not reinforced by an Oedipal hostility that Roxane would have stored and directed towards her. The rigid associations will then be unlocked during a short series of sessions, involving everyone, before the therapy finds again its cruising speed.

Nathalie also says to Noël that he probably treats Roxane roughly because he sees her mother in her. The adolescent asks then where her mother died (in her bedroom, where she lived…), and her father reminisces about his ex-family in law whom he has known better when they went, him, his wife and their 4 years old daughter, to visit in the far away island where the mother came from. But Roxane’s mother died just a few kilometres from where they live and most of the family still live nearby. Mr regrets the cupidity of one of the dead woman’s brother who totally emptied the bedroom, not leaving one thing to the daughter as memento. Some elements concerning the mother’s sibship are ambiguous: «in this family, siblings marry each other» says the father before correcting himself: «I mean that Laurie’s –Roxane’s half sister- father , after splitting with his wife, married one of her sisters». And one of his sisters had already married a man from the same sibship. 

Dorian has now understood everything. Talking about an argument they had, he says to Roxane: «you won’t be able to tell your mother, she’s dead and she’s never coming back». Soon after this, Roxane comes to the session with a pretty little bag which is being ignored by everyone. She fingers it nervously and eventually opens it to reveal all the pictures of her mother and maternal family she’s got. I realise then that each member of this family is racially mixed to a greater or lesser extent, without this fact having ever been mentioned. 

The general involvement does bear fruit. Each of the family members seems to me more at ease with the therapeutic process and we witness the emergence of a new attitude, for the father, firm and calm at the same time: the children demand a new mobile for her and a new games console for him, just at a time when a short family break was being planned. The father refuses and both the children end the session in unending floods of tears because of their father’s firm refusal.

Conclusions taken from the clinical example

The thought process freezing which comes from the trauma linked to Roxane’s mother’s suicide becomes more fluid when a series of associations involves each of them again with the lost link. This ghost link, echoing the whole of the destroyed links, broken or corrupted within the family seems to have had a noxious influence not only on the link step-mother/step-daughter, but also on the couple’s link and father/children link. Brought to light, it enables a very important evolution of the family functioning to take place. For all that, it cannot be brought by to life by any impulses. It remains as a disembodied, skeletal form, in some way, form to which the boosted up interfantasmatization will give back functioning strength. The external object is not there anymore and investments have abandoned it, but the internalized version will be accessible again, at the edges of potential links, specifically the mother/daughter link. Now Roxane can answer back when being blamed for some things «At my mum’s, that‘s how it was done». We move away from the impulse, naturally, but we gain in thoughts.

Death causes the link’s decline in order to create a ghost link only when there are several pejorative elements which accumulate and are played out through the generations. We have quickly sketched an image where we can see several types of major trauma and acts of violence: exile, splitting of the family over several generations and across the lineage, suicide, theft of inheritance, false accusations, and incestuality. Indeed, wanting to get back custody of her daughter, Roxane’s mother accused to father of incestual behaviour. The shadow of incest which lies over the maternal family became more tangible when this happened, and this had a profound and distressing effect on the father.

Concluding on the link’s psychic topology

When broaching the question of the link’s disappearance, we have seen that the economic dimension wasn’t enough by itself to help us understand the link’s evolution: it presents a landmark, a base which allows articulation from a dynamic and topological viewpoint. Even if the link’s birth is being placed under its auspices, we still cannot conclude that the link disappears with the invested object. If the link’s worth existed only in the other’s presence, its strength would be minimal and its effects corrolarily labile. The link’s economic functioning fades little by little, the “recycling″ of libidinal investments being at work there, including that of hate, as is shown in the clinical example. But we notice that the link’s functionality remains, in respect of all the other links which are and have been echoing with it and which also are constantly being reorganised. Reciprocity in the link is now only virtual, but the representations relating to it remains vivid. With “physiological″ evolutions, what we find after the death of the object, is a “vestigial link″, discreet but there. Even cut off from its incarnation, it can be reactivated and useful, specifically if other links are put into play. Indeed its qualitative aspects remain. By contrast, the “ghost link″, has seen it functioning abilities choked by the amplitude and/or repetition of the traumas. It causes suffering which spreads through all the other family links.

Intangible and abtrusely threatening, it generates fear and freezes thoughts, mobilizing massive and unsuitable defences which lead to pathology. It is thanks to the functioning of the whole of the other links mobilized during therapy and articulated in synergy that it will lose its enigmatic even cryptic characteristics and free the subjects from its noxious, direct or indirect ascendency. The example of the supposed death of the link gives us, through therapeutic development, a light on hindsight about the link’s operations and psychic processes.  In this light, they can be understood only as extra-topological, their fall-back position and their continuity remaining in the individual psyche, often deep in the subconscious, where the feelings of shared intimacy are rooted, while the groupal functioning encourages their emergence. In a dialectic of mutual inclusion, the subject is in the link, subject of the link at the same time as the link is in the subject, marked by the fluctuation of its qualities and the variation in intensity of the forces at play.

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Bibliographie

Eiguer A. (1997), Le générationnel. Approche en thérapie familiale psychanalytique, Paris, Dunod.

Eiguer A. (2001), La famille de l’adolescent: le retour des ancêtres, Paris, Dunod.

Eiguer A., Granjon E., Loncan A. (2006), La part des ancêtres, Paris, Dunod.

Eiguer A. (2008), Jamais moi sans toi. Les liens intersubjectifs, Paris, Dunod.

Kaës R. (1993), Le groupe et le sujet du groupe. Eléments pour une théorie psychanalytique du groupe, Paris, Dunod.

Kaës R. (2005), La parole et le lien, Paris, Dunod.

Kaës R. (2005), Pour inscrire la question du lien dans la psychanalyse, Le divan familial, 15, 73, 94.

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Puget J. (2005), Dialogue d’un certain genre avec René Kaës à propos du lien, Le divan familial, 15, 59-71.

Rousseau J-J. (1782), Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Paris, Le livre de Poche, 2009.

Roussillon R. (2004) L’intersubjectivité et la fonction messagère de la pulsion, Psychiatrie française, XXXVI, 2/04, 45-54.

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[1] All identifying elements have been changed.

^∗ Psychiatre, Présidente de la Société française de Thérapie Familiale

Psychanalytique, Secrétaire général de l’AIPCF

135 rue du Roc – 81 000 Albi anne.loncan@gmail.com