(1990). Int. J. Psychoanal.

, (71):77-86

On Acting out

Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel 

It would be hard to find circumstances lending themselves more ideally to an

investigation of acting out than the analytic situation. From this standpoint, one
comes to see that it is not so much the nature of the act that counts but its
meaning, just as one comes to recognize behaviour which outside of all
reference to the analysis would not be considered as acting out but which, in
the light of the transference relationship and with the knowledge acquired in
the course of treatment, reveals itself as such.

Thus, Romain, a patient to whom I have referred on other occasions,

demonstrated a murderous jealousy with respect to a younger child, this being
well represented in a screen memory which condensed this jealousy, his
curiosity concerning the mother's nakedness (it can be supposed that this was
the case) and the primal scene. His mother is breast-feeding the baby in the
presence of his father and two elder brothers, whereas he is not allowed into
the bathroom where the scene is taking place. Struggling, in the transference,
against murderous wishes concerning the analyst's children, the patient spent
long moments telling me of the books he had read about Jewish children who
had either been deported to concentration camps or separated from their
parents and of the abundant tears he shed over their plight. At one of the
sessions he actually cried while on the couch. Curiously, his tears left me
unmoved, until one day, in this same associative context, the patient arrived
with the following dream.

His mother ordered a young boy to iron her white blouse. He, the patient,
was holding a bucket full of tears. The small boy could not manage to iron
the creases out of the maternal blouse. Putting himself in the place of the
child, the patient thought: 'It's really too hard for him'.

Then I understood that the patient's tears had failed to move me because they
were destined to save him the psychic process of working through, in this case
repair of the object he had damaged with his attacks. Rather than 'ironing the
creases out' of the blouse-breast, he wept into it (the bucket full of tears). Thus,
the tears and even the fact of speaking of them in the session (which can by no

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means be considered a classic case of acting out) are the way of avoiding a real
confrontation with the guilt experienced in the transference as well as its
consequences: the obligation to repair the object.

This example is to show why, following other analysts, mostly British, I insist
less on the classic oppositions between
repetition—rememorization
action—verbalization
than on the opposition between psychic elaboration on the one hand and a
saving of the process of working through on the other.

At this point I must make a digression. After completing this paper I read Adam
Limentani's article entitled 'A re-evaluation of acting out in relation to working
through' (1966). Whereas I have not concerned myself with the technical
incidences of my hypotheses, I totally agree with Limentani that with certain
patients, those he describes and those I have described—these being more or
less the same type of patient, the classical analysis has to be adjusted if one is
to avoid the unfortunate issue of, say, an accident, suicide or psychosomatic
illness. Acting out, in

Presented as 'Edward Glover Lecture', Portman Clinic, London, 5 December 1988.

(MS. received February 1989)

Copyright © Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London, 1990

77

particular, should be tolerated over a lengthy period of time. I have, however,

had occasion to observe the case of at least one patient who, having
interiorized what we could call a psychoanalytic ideal, found himself unable to
tolerate his habitual mode of functioning, based in large part on acting out. The
somatic route upon which he then embarked showed, however, that the
patient's self-imposed restrictions were premature. Though hard to identify
before the event, this was a repetition of the behaviour of the good child
wanting at all costs to gain the love of his mother (the analyst in the
transference).

The couple of opposites, psychic elaboration versus a saving of the process of

working through, is itself part of the more general opposition between process

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and compression of time with which I have dealt elsewhere. My studies on The
Ego Ideal(1973) which, at least in part, can be defined as the project of the ego,
what the ego wishes to become, have in fact led me to distinguish between the
two different forms this may take. One of these sets out to integrate all stages
in the evolution towards the Oedipus complex and genitality. Here, to put it
briefly, the ego ideal is to become the mother's object—in other words the
father—in order to accomplish the incestuous act at some point in the future.
The incestuous wish does not arise from sexual desire alone. Basically, it is
sparked by the fundamental desire to return to one's origins. The second form
taken by the ego ideal, the ego's project, is to strive for this same goal, but in so
doing to avoid evolution, the slow and painful process of maturation and
identification with the father. The ego ideal will therefore follow one of two
courses: the short route or the long route. Historically, the short route, based
on short-circuiting, skirting around, avoidance, is linked to the illusion that
evolution can be done away with, to an absence of idealization of the paternal
figure, idealization that goes hand in hand with the fact of taking him as a
model. I am by no means the only one to insist on the role the mother plays in
this destiny of the ego ideal and the trap into which she lures her child, leading
him to believe that small as he is, with his pregenital, non-fertilizing sexuality,
he has nothing to envy his father since he is capable of being an adequate
sexual partner for her.

This schema leads to perversion. And that indeed was where I started. But
perversion is a form of acting out and today I have come to believe that
whatever favours the opening up of the short route for the child favours acting
out as well. Clinically, moreover, I have found that perverse sexuality in varying
degrees accompanies all manner of disorders, such as drug-addiction or
delinquency for instance, which are also characterized by acting out. Bearing
this out is the fact that the Portman Clinic, which was originally to cater to the
needs of delinquents, rapidly found itself turned into a centre for the treatment
of perverts as well as delinquents.

Although I have just stated that the analytic situation provides us with an ideal
field for observation and investigation, yet I find it impossible to imagine that a
patient will resort to mechanisms that are totally new just because he is in
analysis. Experience has taught me, on the contrary, that in those organizations
where acting out is found prior to treatment, such as in psychopathy,
perversion and drug-addiction etc., there is persistent lack of psychic
elaboration throughout the treatment (needless to say, the aim of analysis is to
modify this mode of functioning) and persistent acting out, which can range
from the seemingly insignificant example quoted above (that of the patient
with the dream of the mother's blouse)—of fundamental importance, however,

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where the structure of the ego, the superego, the capacity for sublimation and
the ability to face up to depression are concerned—to acting out of a more
striking, although not necessarily more serious nature, such as conduct bound
to end in arrest.

In the case of patients with a neurotic organization, acting out may, on the
contrary, be induced by the transference neurosis and appears as a neo-mode
of functioning which acquires a significance when considered in the light of the
Oedipus complex.

In opposition to neurosis, however, it seems important to understand both the

typical and the distinctive features in the organization of patients like those I
first mentioned. It is impossible to cover all the aspects of such a vast subject in
this lecture. I shall therefore concentrate on the thought disorders of such
patients, since their essential characteristic is a

78

certain lack of psychic elaboration, of mentalization, which they evade by acting

out. Lack of psychic elaboration can, however, go hand in hand with brilliant
intelligence.

Several years ago (1984–86), I postulated the existence of an archaic matrix of

the Oedipus complex. This I attempted to differentiate from the Kleinian
concept of the early stages of the Oedipus complex (1928), (1930a), (1930b),
(1932). For Melanie Klein, the fantasy of destroying or appropriating the
contents of the mother's body is central. She essentially detects in this the early
manifestations of the oedipal conflict, which are sadistic in nature (oral and
anal), mingled with emerging genital tendencies.

In 'The importance of symbol formation in the development of the ego' (1930a)

she establishes that there is an equivalence between the external world and the
mother's body, and between reality and the mother's body. The child expects to
find excrement, the father's penis or the whole father and children within the
mother.

We have then, from Melanie Klein, a theory which gives a central position to the
fantasy of destroying or appropriating the contents of the mother's body, and
this is an impulse in which the author recognizes elements connected with the
positive and negative Oedipus complex, acting precociously and under
pressure from oral frustrations. It is a developmental theory and precisely
situated in time: oedipal tendencies occur in the second half of the first year of
life; the interior of the mother's body becomes the stage for the expression of

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these instincts, taking the place of the breast which is the object of oral
instincts.

The hypothesis I, for my part, have advanced is that of a primary desire to

discover a universe without obstacles, without roughness or differences,
entirely smooth, identified with a mother's abdomen stripped of its contents,
an interior to which one has free access. Behind the fantasy of destroying or
appropriating the father's penis, the children and the faeces inside the
mother's body, a more basic and more archaic wish can be detected, of which
the return to the smooth maternal abdomen is the representation.

At this point I want to insist on the differences between Melanie Klein's

description and mine. Firstly, in my opinion the 'archaic matrix of the Oedipus
complex' is inborn. It results from a tendency to revert to the previous
psychosomatic state, to oppose the state of affairs that goes with our postnatal
existence. For me, it is the inaccessibility of the mother's body after birth that
represents reality, not the mother's body. In other words, all obstacles on the
path back to the mother's body—the father, his penis, his children (the contents
of the maternal body in their totality) are powerful agents of reality to be
destroyed. For me, the archaic matrix of the Oedipus complex is principally
related to elimination of obstacles, not to their appropriation. Compared to the
initial state of the mind, the wish to appropriate presupposes a considerable
degree of development. So as not to be misunderstood, I hasten to add that I
am in no way refuting the existence of Melanie Klein's early oedipal conflict and
even less the classical Freudian fully developed Oedipus complex. What I
maintain is that there is a structural, inborn wish which is in conflict with
development, evolution, integration and the conditions of postnatal life in their
sum total. Of course there are other contrary forces which push the subject
forward along the route of development. Representations of this wish are
found in myths, ideologies and utopias. It has its place in political reality too,
especially the politics of our century, the age of mass murders and the
genocide. To remain on more familiar ground, we meet it on the clinical level, in
the pervert—but perversion acts as a buffer on the road to the Apocalypse—
and in borderline patients; probably too in certain psychosomatic illnesses
(although I shall not deal with this latter category of disorders).

In a (nevertheless well-disposed) review of my work on the archaic matrix of the

Oedipus complex I have been taxed with having made no mention of castration
fears or of rivalry with the father. In order to avoid all misunderstandings let me
say that the structural, inborn formation I have in mind cannot give rise to such
evolved and typically neurotic psychic constellations as the castration complex
and oedipal rivalry. These require a certain development of the mental

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apparatus, with, among other things, at least a skeleton superego and
differentiation of the erogenic zones, etc. What I am describing has the
potential for progressing towards the fully developed Oedipus complex, but is

79

fundamentally nothing more than a blind force and no more differentiated than
a bulldozer geared to flatten all obstacles in its path.

In point of fact, the idea that the return to one's origins and the fully developed
Oedipus complex are closely related is clearly expressed in Freud. Moreover,
this leads Freud to give the Oedipus complex a more structural and less
developmental core when he studies anxiety in 'Inhibitions, symptoms and
anxiety' (1926).

At birth, the baby is overwhelmed by excitations which are a source of

unpleasure. The corresponding affect is automatic anxiety. Then, when the
object (the mother or her substitute) is absent, anxiety recurs, to the extent that
this absence is the source of a situation of danger which creates a need and
increased tension, and, hence, excitation and unpleasure: the absence of the
object means the absence of satisfaction. 'The content of the danger it fears',
writes Freud, 'is displaced from the economic situation onto the condition
which determined that situation, viz., the loss of object' (Freud, 1926p. 138).
Anxiety has changed its status and become an alarm signal. 'What happens is
that the child's biological situation as a foetus is replaced for it by a psychical
object relation to its mother' (p. 138). The biological situation had allowed
absolute and immediate satisfaction of its needs. All anxiety situations can be
linked to separation anxieties. Castration anxiety in the phallic phase is the
danger:

of being separated from one's genitals. Ferenczi has traced, quite

correctly, I think, a clear line of connections between this fear and the
fears contained in the earlier situations of danger. The high degree of
narcissistic value which the penis possesses can appeal to the fact that
that organ is a guarantee to its owner that he can once more be united
to his mother—that is to a substitute for her—in the act of copulation.
Being deprived of it amounts to a renewed separation from her (Freud,
1926p. 139).

Thus there is a direct relation between the primary anxiety of birth and
castration anxiety proper to the oedipal phallic phase, between the incestuous
fantasy and the wish to return to the mother's womb.

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Reverting to the problem of mind formation which I describe by the name of
the 'archaic matrix of the Oedipus complex', it is essential to turn to the work of
Edward Glover, the first to try to differentiate the initial states of tension from
later disorders which give rise to symptom-formations of the psychoneurotic
type. Whereas the earliest state of the mental apparatus, which he terms the
'primary functional phase', is dominated by disorders of excitation and
discharge, the disorders of the following phases centre around psychic conflict.
The first phase is principally related to an economic problem of quantitative
energy, while the second is related to meaningfulness.

The ideas Freud expressed in 'Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety' can be seen
in profile behind those set out by Glover in his article 'Functional aspects of the
mental apparatus' (1950a), but at the same time Glover continues Karl
Abraham's attempt (1924) to relate the different morbid pictures to regression
to early fixation-points. His prime interest is in regression to the different
stages in the development of the mental apparatus rather than in libidinal
regression. This concept leads him on to claim, in 'On the desirability of
isolating a "Functional" (psycho-somatic) group of delinquent disorders'
(1950b), a historical priority for psychosomatic reactions over psychoneurotic
symptom formation in the developmental process. He uses the term
psychosomatic in an extended sense, as synonym of 'functional disorders',
encompassing traumatic neuroses, actual neuroses, organic reactions,
behavioristic disorders and many delinquent acts.

In my opinion these two short articles contain the gist of the concepts of French
psychosomaticians who, like Edward Glover, believe in the existence of
psychopathological manifestations of pure discharge. When he outlined his
'primary functional phase', concentrating on the different developmental
stages of the mental apparatus, Glover was possibly concerned with countering
the work of Melanie Klein, the stress she has laid on the earliest conflicts and
what he considered as forced injection of meaning into the patient's material by
the analyst.

It seems to me however that, within the limited scope of the archaic matrix of
the Oedipus complex which I have tried to introduce, both these conceptions of
the mental apparatus have a measure of truth. In fact, I tend to believe that
what I have outlined fits into Glover's 'primary functional phase', just as I am
equally convinced

80

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that the mental apparatus is from the outset structured on a ternary mode: the
subject's wish to return to the maternal body, and reality which is in opposition
to this. In the beginning, this wish is more biological than totally psychic.

At this point we should not forget that two years before the publication of
'Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety' (which cannot validly be read without
bearing in mind that it is always an implicit and sometimes explicit discussion of
Rank's The Trauma of Birth and Ferenczi's Thalassa, A Theory of Genitality) Freud
had sent his famous open letter of 15 February 1924 on the subject of these
recently published works to the members of the Committee. He states, among
other things:

We have long been familiar with womb phantasies and recognized

their importance, but in the prominence Rank has given them they
achieve a far higher significance and reveal in a flash the biological
background of the Oedipus complex … If one adds to Rank's
conception the one of Ferenczi, that a man can be represented by his
genital, then for the first time we get a derivation of the normal sexual
instinct which falls into place with our conception of the world.

Already in this letter of 1924, Freud connected the wish to return to the
mother's womb with the incestuous wish. The father, an obstacle to this two-
fold desire, became identified with reality at the same time:

Obstacles, which evoke anxiety, the barriers against incest, are

opposed to the phantastic return to the womb: now where do these
come from? Their representative is evidently the father, reality, the
authority which does not permit incest.

We see, therefore, that Freud believed there was a biological background to the
Oedipus complex and considered the father as the equivalent of reality.

By drawing the conclusions which follow from this point of view, it can be
understood that the human mental apparatus may well be constructed on the
oedipal model from the very outset, and that the Oedipus complex may
constitute the 'Kerncomplex' of human pathology in general. This being so, I do
not feel it is basically incorrect to attribute meaning to what takes place during
the primary phase of the mental apparatus Glover has described, considering
that evolution of the mental apparatus proceeds on the basis of destructive
drives which come into play as a result of discontent with the fact of postnatal
existence and are aimed at returning to the intra-uterine state of fusion. It is to
be supposed that these are tensions, affects without presentations, involving
essentially the subject's body. As the object relationship develops, affects will

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become linked to presentations, giving meaningfulness to the conflicting
forces; in other words, ushering in the era of psychic conflict proper, although
this is virtually present from the start. It is precisely to express this virtuality
that I speak of the 'matrix' of the Oedipus complex, in an allusion to both
meanings of the word, in the sense of uterus on the one hand and of prototype
on the other.

My work on the archaic matrix of the Oedipus complex has brought me to pay
special attention to the thought disorders stemming from the wish to return to
the smooth empty body of the mother. In fact, the question is to rediscover, on
the level of thought, a mental functioning without hindrances, with psychic
energy flowing freely. The father, his penis, the children represent reality. They
have to be destroyed so that the mode of mental functioning which obeys the
pleasure principle may be recovered. The fantasy of destroying reality confers
on the fantasy of emptying the mother's abdomen its primordial role. The
contents of the body are equivalent to reality, not the container.

The patient whose tears were a means of avoiding a working through of his
depression, and whom I have called Romain in other papers, had frequent
quarrels with other motorists. I have reported his dream in which

my street had been closed to traffic and thus cleared of its obstacles—cars
and their drivers

—objects of his constant hatred, a hatred he demonstrated in violent bouts of

acting out before and during analysis, but which took on their full meaning
within the analytical transference.

A mysterious system allowed us to communicate with each other, I from

my office and he from the basement of the building he identified as a
maternity hospital where he had worked.

It is clear from this dream that the issue is to rid the interior of my body of its
undesirable

81

contents (cars and motorists) and to regain the womb (the street which has
become smooth and the basement identified with the maternity hospital). We
thus establish immediate and complete communication, similar to that existing
between the foetus and its mother.

One of my female borderline patients had a dream in which

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 a landscape of hills, trees, paths and cultivated fields was suddenly
transformed into a desert-like plain she described as irresistibly beautiful.

This dream came just before a short break in the analysis, at a time when she
was aiming anti-Semitic remarks at me.

In thinking about the cases of my borderline patients marked by acting out, I

am struck by the frequency with which such patients use anti-Semitism the
frequency with which such patients use anti-Semitism in the transference,
whereas with neurotic patients this is quite incidental. This point alone merits
ample study. I shall confine myself to a few brief remarks:

— Jews are above all identified by these patients with brothers (or sisters) to be
eliminated. Siblings classically appear in dreams as parasites and vermin,
whereas in 'ordinary' anti-Semitic terminology these terms apply to Jews.

— the murder of Jewish children, which is characteristic of the Nazi genocide,

serves as a day's residue for the fantasies and dreams of these patients who
are dominated by the wish to destroy the contents of the maternal body.

— the Jew represents both biblical Law and the intellect (thought) which
prevent the union with the mother and thus symbolize the paternal principle of
separation.

— the existence of the genocide arouses persecutory feelings of guilt in

patients who are incapable of working through their guilt in a mature way. This
strengthens their fears and hatred. One day the female patient I have just
mentioned said to me: 'I feel persecuted by the Jews because of all they had to
go through'.

This patient went through a period during which she was set on convincing me
that the assassination of Aldo Moro was no more reprehensible an act than
capitalist exploitation. She then proceeded to pay me a considerably smaller
sum in cash than she owed me. She had a dream in which

she cheated on the amount she paid a salesman for the purchase of a car,
an Aldo-Moro.

The patient was ashamed of the dream, as if it betrayed her. Through

association, it was established that the Aldo-Moro car represented the parents
united in the primal scene (Aldo Moro's body was found in an Italian car) and
put to death. The Aldo-Moro car was also associated to the Alfa-Romeo and to
Romeo and Juliet, that is to a pair of lovers. Her knowledge of the reality of the

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primal scene and the murderous hatred directed at her parents, united in the
act of coitus, had to be denied at all costs, by 'cheating', in this case by
regressing to a mode of thinking where facts are equivalent, interchangeable,
where the act of murder is no different from capitalist exploitation. (In this
respect, I believe it is the fully developed Oedipus complex which places murder
above all other crimes.) The dream of 'cheating' in order to purchase the Aldo-
Moro is a demonstration of the use to which the patient put analysis: a means
to help her cheat about the reality of the primal scene. At the same time the
Aldo-Moro represented me, united with my husband (the hyphenated name of
the car, an Aldo-Moro, was associated with mine).

In my article on 'The archaic matrix of the Oedipus complex' (1984–86), I

commented on a dream from the material of my patient Franca whose case I
related in detail (1988) at the Montreal Congress. Briefly, she dreamed that

the world had come to an end, that the earth had returned to the Ice Age
and that its population was reduced to a small group of survivors. It had
become possible to travel right around the earth. With a few other survivors,
she was on a sled, circling the globe, experiencing wonderful feelings of
elation.

The associations of the patient clearly showed that it was the mother-analyst's
body which had become accessible. As I have already pointed out, the wish to
gain access to the empty, smooth and, in Franca's case, the slippery body of the
mother, a wish involving destruction of the contents of the maternal body in
order to render it accessible, 'represents destruction of reality itself'. This leads
me to examine the desire to empty the maternal body of its contents as being a
'concrete expression of the struggle between the pleasure principle and the
reality principle'.

I shall allow myself to quote yet again

82

another dream by Romain which, I believe, illustrates this hypothesis very well.

'A fish is exhibited with its mouth open. You can see the inside of the body
which is smooth. We bet that we can throw a pebble into its mouth and that it
will roll right down to the anus and come out. Then the fish's mouth puckers
up and changes into a vagina. It retracts. The vagina and the anus are now
one and the same thing. Then it becomes something like a snake-penis. Next
door there is an exhibition on the Jewish people. There stands X, a man whom

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 I feel homosexually attracted to. From time to time, people have to climb up
on to stepladders. In fact we are in a gas chamber.'

When I asked the patient what connexion there was between the fish story and
the exhibition, he replied: 'Anything can be done with either of them. The fish
changes into a mouth, a penis, a vagina and an anus. Soaps and lampshades
were made out of Jews'.

Note the smoothness and complete evenness of the fish's inside. It is the image
of an object, as well as of a world through which impulses run unobstructed,
without the different bodily parts, which change one into the other; a universe
submitted to total abolition of limits between objects and even between their
molecules, a universe which has become totally malleable ('anything can be
done with them'). It is also a fatherless universe where the subject endows
himself with the powers of the Almighty Creator.

I should like to point to the fact that the subject has found a way of functioning
once more in accordance with the pleasure principle, seeking satisfaction by
the shortest and quickest route, without detours and without postponements,
as shown by the bet that the pebble thrown into the fish's mouth will travel
through the body and emerge from its anus, according to the tendency of
freely flowing energy to circulate unimpeded. As I have just said, in this dream
the mental functioning proper to the pleasure principle is, in a way, represented
as such. It fulfils a wish by methods which are typical of dreams, yet at the same
time the wish which is dramatized and fulfilled is precisely that of thinking
according to the pleasure principle, in other words, a mode of mental functioning
that is in accordance with dream process itself.

When Freud studied 'Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning'

(1911) he introduced the activity of thinking as an important stage in the
acquisition of the reality principle. He said also that the action of thinking is
accompanied by a transformation of free-flowing cathexes into bound cathexes.
Thought therefore made its appearance in order to serve the reality principle,
even if a part of the activity of thinking can be detached from the confrontation
with reality and remains under the control of the pleasure principle (fantasizing,
daydreaming).

As I am fond of saying, the declaration of war that a certain type of patient

proclaims on thought has to do with the bond which links thought to the reality
principle.

Another of Romain's dreams bears this out, I believe.

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 'I am cracking walnuts with my hands and have a feeling I shouldn't be
doing this. They are fragile and I am not skilful enough. I put them in a
fondue pot. Upon waking, it struck me that walnuts look just like brains.
At the same time the swollen nutshell reminded me of a woman's belly.'1

This patient had just had a long dream in which the same fondue pot appeared,
full of diverse objects, including a pen and paper, representing the supposed
activity of the analyst taking notes about the dreamer, a ruler and a man's shoe.
All these objects were going to melt, like the chunks of cheese in a Savoyard
fondue, and become an undifferentiated hotch-potch—or like pieces of meat
which are being grilled in a 'meat fondue' (the patient's words).

In commenting on this dream, I stated that it is a question of destroying

thought, the brain, the analyst's tools of reflection, as well as the paternal
penis, the ruler (the rules), the foetus, i.e. the total contents of the maternal
body. In my opinion, the foetus is more than just a content of the mother's
body, more than just proof of the superiority of the father and his attributes
over the child with his small infertile penis. It represents life itself, that is,
everything which, by definition, involves development, evolution, a process, and
consequently implies waiting, hence the reality principle, as is likewise the case
with thought.

Life, the foetus, thought, the reality principle

1
Fondue comes from fondre = to melt.
83

and genitality bear the same relation to one another as do death, the corpse,
absence of thought, anality and the pleasure principle.

Moreover, the patient's personal history is such that he has motives for staging
themes, activated by the transference, which are obviously connected to
concentration camps and Nazi crimes: the shattering of babies' skulls (the nuts),
cremation ovens (heavy iron fondue pots for grilling meat), gas chambers, etc.
His father was an 'Iron Guard', in Romania, the equivalent of the SS.

To homogenize obstacles, to render them undifferentiated, is to make them

disappear as obstacles, and to seek the way back into the mother's body.

Thought which has gone through the process of elaboration is the opposite of
this fantasy—the obstacles are integrated, mainly through the process of
identification—and therefore the opposite of acting out, as well as, on the

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collective level, of ideologies and utopias which not only urge on to action but
also advocate the destruction of all obstacles coming between them and their
goal. I believe that the case Mervin Glasser describes (1979), of the thief who
used to break into houses and wreck everything inside, corresponds to what I
am describing. Consequently, I believe that acting out such as I describe here is
subtended by a fundamental aggressive fantasy, even though this may remain
veiled. This is as true of drug addiction and perversion as it is of extremist
political activism, even when not of an outright terrorist nature, and
delinquency. In each case the subject seeks his way into paradise (be it the
artificial paradise, the 'trip', orgasm by non-genital means involving the short-
circuiting of identifications and a saving of the process of evolution, militantism
in the name of an earthly paradise under the aegis of the one or another
ideology) or—and in this case aggressivity drops its disguise—in situations
where the subject appropriates or destroys personal property by criminal act or
by abolishing authority, at least in fantasy, in an effort to retrieve the absolute
and immediate wealth of the intra-uterine condition.

I believe, therefore, that, underlying acting out in the structures I describe,

there is always the fundamental fantasy of regaining the mother's body, freed
of its obstacles.

I shall briefly describe the model of mental functioning I propose, based on the
archaic matrix of the Oedipus complex, and which I relate to acting out, and
compare it to the model of thought based on oral activity and digestion.

The activity of thought, as Bion envisages it in his book Second Thoughts(1967),

is connected to the search for the breast (an inborn disposition of the infant)
and frustration, thought being born of this conjunction.

If the capacity for toleration of frustration is sufficient the 'no

breast' inside becomes a thought and an apparatus for 'thinking' is
developed (p. 112).

Inability to tolerate this frustration leads to

departure from the events that Freud describes as characteristic of

thought in the phase of dominance of the reality principle (p. 112).

Bion is evidently referring to the passage in 'The two principles of mental

functioning' to which I referred earlier. In the place of thought there is a bad
object (the no-breast does not become thought but a bad breast that is good
enough only to be evacuated).

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 Consequently, the development of an apparatus for thinking is
disturbed … The appropriate machinery is felt to be not an apparatus
for thinking the thoughts but an apparatus for ridding the psyche of
accumulation of bad internal objects (p. 112).

Taken to its most extreme, the functioning of the thought-apparatus in this

manner can be considered as being a concrete copy of the digestive tract, open
at both ends and unsegmented. Whatever goes in one end comes out the
other, unchanged. In somatic pathology, the model for such a mode of
functioning would be the diarrhoea of the infant. Bion, as we know, considers
that projective identification can take the place on the mental level of this
concrete evacuation. As I see it, Bion's model of the digestive tract is not
fundamentally opposed to the model of the archaic matrix of the Oedipus
complex which I advance. It seems to me that the characteristic smoothness
and the absence of differentiation that go with my concept of the maternal
body divested of its obstacles would also apply to Bion's conception of the
subject's digestive tract. But, as I see it, the notion of the

84

mental apparatus as a digestive tract without segments, serving not to

elaborate thoughts but only to evacuate them, like undigested food passing
through the system (beta elements as opposed to alpha elements undergoing a
process of elaboration) corresponds to the new-born infant's identification of its
digestive tract-thought-apparatus with the smooth undifferentiated interior of
the maternal body, freed of all obstacles, to which the infant wishes to return.
The smooth fish about which Romain dreamed can, on first interpretation, be
taken to represent the undifferentiated digestive tract of the subject. On
remembering that part of the dream where he mentions the 'Jewish people', as
also the patient's associations (he later spoke about my husband), it would,
however, seem more correct to interpret the dream in the light of a three-party
relationship, staging the wish to eliminate the paternal dimension from the
psychic universe.

Because these patients identify their own body with that of the mother, they are
suicidal. Glover, in his own article 'Functional aspects of the mental apparatus',
writes:

I suggested many years ago that the act of suicide, although

associated closely with depressive mechanisms, could be explained
only by assuming an instinctual regression which simultaneously
breaks down the defensive barriers existing at every stage of infantile
development. To this formulation I would now add that in effective

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 suicide the regression of dammed up energies activates the primary
functional level of the apparatus, producing an intolerable state of
stasis which overcomes primary inhibitions and seeks autoplastic
discharge through motor paths.

The patients I describe, who are all potentially or actually suicidal, are unable to
tolerate physical or psychical absences on the part of their love partner
(identified with the mother) and, in the transference, on the part of the analyst,
unable to bear the idea that the other's mind may be occupied by thoughts not
centring around themselves. This leads them to states of dereliction, rage and
despair. Attempted suicide thus has the meaning of ridding their bodies and
minds, which are identified with those of the mother, of the thoughts, babies
and penis that the mother contains, and of returning in this way to her now
accessible body. Suicides committed by throwing oneself from a height, as I
have been able to verify from dreams, fantasies or actual attempts, have the
meaning of plunging into a maternal body—the earth—whose obstacles—
houses, cars, trees—seen from a height become insignificant. Here again, I
would say the 'primary functional level' already has meaning, at least a virtual
meaning, by reason of what I believe is a similarity, a homology even, between
the mental apparatus and the triangular situation, with, on the one hand, the
pleasure principle, equivalent to returning to the maternal body freed of its
obstacles, and on the other, the reality principle, requiring integration of the
father, his attributes and his derivatives.

I hope I have made it sufficiently clear that in my opinion thought, in the sense
Freud uses this word in 'The two principles of mental functioning', i.e. thought
acquired in the phase of dominance of the reality principle, does not exist
independently of a triangular relationship—and this relationship is, I believe,
structural rather than acquired. Of course, in passing through the pregenital
stages, development will allow the archaic matrix of the Oedipus complex to
reach full oedipal development.

Although acting out is prevalent in a certain number of the structures we have

seen above (and psychosomatic disorders can be added to these), this is
something that is latent in us all. We may well have integrated the Oedipus
complex, yet the circumstances of life may be such that we regress to the state
of the angry, greedy and impatient infant and reactive the archaic matrix of the
Oedipus complex. In my opinion, the archaic matrix of the Oedipus complex I
have tried to describe and the fully evolved Oedipus complex form the
framework within which human development takes place.

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SUMMARY

The author sets out to compare her own ideas on the archaic matrix of the
Oedipus complex, as opposed to the fully developed Oedipus complex, with
Glover's conception of the different developmental stages of the mental
apparatus in which historical priority is given to what he calls 'psychosomatic
reactions' over later psychoneurotic symptoms. These former result in pure

85

discharge, whereas the latter are characterized by meaningfulness. She also

briefly tries to connect some of her views with those of Melanie Klein and Bion.

REFERENCES

ABRAHAM, K. 1924 A short study of the development of the libido, viewed in the
light of mental disorders In Selected Papers on Psycho-Analysis London:
Hogarth Press, 1927 pp. 418-501

BION, W. R. 1967 Second Thoughts New York: Jason Aronson.

CHASSEGUET-SMIRGEL, J. 1973 The Ego Ideal New York: Norton; London: Free
Association.

CHASSEGUET-SMIRGEL, J. 1984-86 The archaic matrix of the Oedipus complex In

Sexuality and Mind New York: New York Univ. Press.

CHASSEGUET-SMIRGEL, J. 1987 Reflections on some thought disorders in non-

psychotic patients Unpublished.  


CHASSEGUET-SMIRGEL, J. 1988 A woman's attempt at a perverse solution and

its failure Int. J. Psychoanal.69:149-161  


FREUD, S. 1911 Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning S.E.

12  


FREUD, S. 1924 Open letter 15 February In Sigmund Freud, Life and Work,
Volume III by E. Jones. London: Hogarth Press, 1957

FREUD, S. 1926 Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety S.E. 20  



GLASSER, M. 1979 Some aspects of the role of aggression in the perversions In

Sexual Deviation ed. I. Rosen. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

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GLOVER, E. 1950a Functional aspects of the mental apparatus In On the Early
Development of Mind London: Imago Publishing Co., 1956 pp. 364-378   

GLOVER, E. 1950b On the desirability of isolating a 'functional' (psycho-somatic)

group of delinquent disorders In On the Early Development of Mind pp.
379-389

KLEIN, M. 1928 The early stages of the oedipal conflict In Contributions to

Psycho-Analysis London: Hogarth Press, 1948   

KLEIN, M. 1930a The importance of symbol formation in the development of

the ego In Contributions to Psycho-Analysis  


KLEIN, M. 1930b Psychotherapy of psychoses In Contributions to Psycho-

Analysis

KLEIN, M. 1932 The first stages of the Oedipus conflict and the formation of the
superego In Psycho-Analysis of Children London: Hogarth Press, 1932   

LIMENTANI, A. 1966 A re-evaluation of acting out in relation to working

through Int. J. Psychoanal.47:274-282  


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