Slaves of Quantity

Abstract

This paper outlines the author's view that certain individuals are “Slaves of Quantity,” condemned to a destiny dominated by the quantity of excitation that cannot be psychically elaborated. The sadistic killer known as M, in the film of the same name by Fritz Lang, and an extreme masochist interviewed by the author, illustrate the features of these perverse disorders, which are also linked to extreme psychosomatic states. The origins of these “slaves of quantity” are related to traumatic factors early in life. Freud's fundamental notions about anxiety and his debate with Rank on birth trauma shed light on a way to more clearly conceptualize the distinction between neurotic and perverse modes of psychic functioning.

From Freud’s dream‐work to Bion’s work of dreaming: The changing conception of dreaming in psychoanalytic theory

“…Undreamt dream‐thoughts remain as split‐off pockets of psychosis (Bion, 1962a). Ogden (2007b) refers to this as “undreamable experience” resulting from any of a number of external traumas or intra‐psychic forces that “remain with the individual as undreamt dreams in such forms as psychosomatic illness, split‐off psychoses, ‘dis‐affected’ states (McDougall, 1984), pockets of autism (Tustin, 1981), severe perversions (De M’Uzan, 1984), and addictions” (Ogden, 2007, p. 7). In these non‐dreams, no psychological work is being done; instead, symptoms are generated that are derived from the foreclosed, non‐symbolic experience (de M’Uzan, 1984; Schneider, 1995, 2003a, 2003b, 2007, 2009).…”

The processes of defense: Trauma, drives, and reality – a new synthesis

“…Implicitly nodding (though with reservations) to Bion’s notion that primary process is in some ways actually a mental achievement, rather than a biological given, Fernando’s third mode refers in part to the uncanny presence in the mind of ‘unclaimed experience’ (Caruth, 1996), happenings (memories?) that remain in splintered, unprocessed ‘disarray’ (De M’Uzan, 2003), like Bion’s ‘beta elements’.…”

Commentary on Pierre Marty’sThe narcissistic difficulties presented to the observer by the psychosomatic problem

“…Even the important early paper of Marty and de M’Uzan (1963) that established the importance of the concept of la pensée opératoire (a form of concrete, non‐self‐reflective, stimulus‐bound thought) had never appeared in English, so that, when I was researching the subject in 2002, I had to prepare my own translation. In introducing his recent English translation of a paper of de M’Uzan (2003[1984]), Simpson attributed the relative lack of representation of this French school in the anglophone psychoanalytic world to “difficulties in translation, both linguistic and cultural” (Simpson, 2003, p. 699)…”