Seminar on the dual unity and the phantom.

“Seminar on the Dual Unity and the Phantom” translates into English Nicolas Abraham’s notes from a presentation series delivered at the Société psychanalytique de Paris in 1974-5. These were collected as a single essay and published in French by his partner Maria Torok following Abraham’s untimely death in 1975. The Seminar introduces the dual unity as a clinical concept to account for patient symptomatology where traumatic structures resist intervention and are seemingly impossible to locate. Abraham describes these pathologies in terms of a phantom; the transmission down generations of gaps and silences in comprehension that disrupt emerging subjectivity at its foundation. Abraham demonstrates through a number of clinical and fictional cases how phantoms are transferred unwittingly into an individual psyche and uses this to pose questions about the boundaries of selfhood that extend beyond his pathological examples. As a broader metapsychological concept, the dual unity explains the mechanisms of self-formation in general terms as the always incomplete separation of an individual from the maternal context. Abraham conceives of selfhood as a symbolic response to and overcoming of the traumas that characterize human existence, which begin with the loss(es) of the mother. He describes the birth of the subject, therefore, as the accession to symbolic life through words split off from the maternal context and used to designate objects in the outside world. The words, however, still retain traces of that first relationship in the connection they draw to the drama of separation and the maternal unconscious that haunts this scission as the protector and a danger to individuation. The duality of the mother-child relationship is transformed through the objective use of words into a relation between the shared meaning of language (understood at the level of ego) and a “whole stratification of maternal imagos” that constitute the individual unconscious and whose traces inhabit those same words. This constant connection to the mother means we are always separate-unseparated beings; dual unities open to the continual threat of haunting.