COMMENT

 

Transgenerational transmission in psychoanalysis: A phenomenology of dislocating errands

 

 

Maurice Apprey

School of Medicine, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA Correspondence: ma9h@virginia.edu

 

 

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ABSTRACT

In the process of psychical transmission from one generation to the next, who asks what of whom? The evocative expression of an 'errand' suggests that a subject is sent on a mission, sent in error, wanders away, and returns home, adversely changed. A vocative imperative is at the heart of a mission. When there is a call from an anterior Other, there must be a response. Before, there was an experience of a call and its response, then, there would be an errand. Precisely, the subject is preceded by the self-same subject's constituted and appropriated mandate from an anterior object. To upend an aberrant errand, a subject must reconfigure a posted imperative, ever altering, again and again, the call and summons of an alien and unwelcome guest turned host. Otherwise, the dissonant and unwelcome guest turned host may transform the na'ive subject into a ghost, a revenant that disappears and returns to haunt the subject. Thanks to the new and public space in the clinical setting, the entity that listens to the sub-ject will come to know that reception and perception of an errand is communalised in ways where there is a constant alteration, revision and co-creation of meanings of the received and perceived phenomenon through reciprocal connection and reciprocal correction. When subject's experiential acquisitions enter that clinical setting, a resolute upending of a retrogressive descent toward death may occur. Hence, the meaning of staying alive for an Other who is otherwise dislocated, thrown, posted into a transgenerational spiral, toward death. A toxic errand is thus potentially aborted in that new space where a new relationship for resubjectivising and sublimating the unwanted mandate happens. Resubjectivising the injected errand becomes the exit strategy so that positive change is now conceivable.

Keywords: dislocating errands; psychical transmissions; exit strategy

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Introduction

In clinical work, we differentiate between historical reality and psychic reality, between the events of history and the psychological appropriation of aspects of that history because they address different motivations, meanings and clinical procedures. In our hurry to arrive at meanings, clinicians tend to take precipitous leaps from their initial grasp of the events of history to their articulation of a meaningful sense of history. As a result, the sense of turmoil, in se, of the subject, especially by the turbulence of trauma, in that historical period, is not sufficiently interrogated or articulated in either the diagnostic phase, or early in the treatment phase. In haste, we proceed to interpretation without standing still with the patient, and without fully grasping the concrete materiality, visceral memory, or blood-churning vital essence of the phenomenology of the historical narratives themselves. Let us provisionally call this tumult a dislocation.

Gaston Bachelard (1939/1979), the French physical chemist turned aesthetician, addressed a similar problem of precipitous leaps in psychoanalysis, broadly conceived in his reveries on dreams, fire, air, water and earth, on one hand, and literary symbolism on the other. He wrote quite eloquently as follows:

Literary symbolism and the symbolism that is Freud's, such as they are executed in classical symbolism and normal dreamwork, are only mutilated examples of the symbolizing powers active in nature. Both represent an expression that has been arrested too soon. They remain substitutes for a substance or person that desert evolution, syntheses named too quickly, desires uttered too soon (Bachelard, 1939/1979, p. 31; emphasis in original).

'Substitutes...that desert evolution' is the key phrase here. His solution?

A new poetry and a new psychology that might describe the soul as it is being formed, language in bloom, must give up definite symbols or images learned merely and return to vital impulses and primitive poetry (Bachelard, 1939/1979, p. 31; emphasis added).

What is so special about returning to the concreteness, materiality, the physicality of vital impulses?

To get a sense of the value of a return to the relative concreteness of vital impulses, let us now turn to brief clinical vignettes that show some instances of palpable historical beginnings of human subjects where there is some semblance of premature closure. To that end, let us deploy the sense of emotional and physical dislocation in our subjects as metaphor for historical accounts where premature interpretation forecloses the powerful evocativeness of meaning that is faithful to the mind of an Other. Let us use three clinical vignettes to feed our imagination as we observe instances of dislocation prematurely interpreted, syntheses made too soon, as Bachelard would say.

First, an adult patient who revisits seeing her mother's dead body dragged out of a river when she was three. It is the story of her mother's suicide. She comes to treatment with a theory that her mother was too selfish to care about her and to raise her. The young psychiatrist, my supervisee, follows the patient's mind in addressing the patient's sense of abandonment by an allegedly 'selfish' mother. Soon, a family story emerges from an aunt that says that 'actually, the mother may have been killed'. Subsequently, the patient's original theory of a 'selfish' mother evolves into this: 'If she were murdered, then, maybe, I can forgive her'. Then, she fluctuates between her indictment of her mother as a selfish person that abandons her little girl and the impossibility of forgiving her mother. I ask the psychiatrist to pause and to explore with the patient at the next opportunity what the sense of dislocation in se, as remembered, was for her. It was not until the clinician could explore the fidelity of the patient's own experience that treatment could advance. For the first time, she could bring into the treatment, family stories of her refusal to walk and her persistent tendencies of biting everything in sight in protest, and in a return to vital impulses, as it were.

Here is a second example of a return to beginnings before treatment could begin in earnest. We are in the late 1970s. I am a student at the Anna Freud Centre, London, studying to become a child and adolescent psychoanalyst. At a diagnostic conference, an eight-year-old child is being assessed with a view to the treatment of his encopresis, invariably soiling themself before he could get to the toilet. An impressive clinical team of faculty, students and guests who are psychoanalysts mostly from the United Kingdom and the United States have come together, as was customary at the Anna Freud Centre. After about an hour of the most sophisticated accounts of the collective wisdom of various clinicians with their various theories underlying the patient's encopresis, Anna Freud wisely and independently asks: 'Has anyone noticed that this eight-year-old child cannot read?'. The group is stunned by the apparent simplicity and power of her question about the potential link between toilet training and verbal fluency. Now, ironically, it is the experts that are dislocated. Anna Freud asks for a student who possesses prior training in the field of learning disabilities to consider teaching the child to read in approximately six months. She asks for a supervising analyst who also has a background in reading disorders to assist with the project before we could resume a clinical assessment for analysability and psychoanalytic treatment. When analysis begins, his first drawings are about a pathway that was a dead-end at the destination, and a dead-end upon his return to where he originally started. In time, he could disclose to his analyst that going to school had been a dislocating experience because he could not read; returning home was an equally dislocating experience because he was returning home to scenes of turmoil and family dysfunction. Before he could learn to read, he soiled himself on the way to school as well as on his way back home. After reading competencies were established, he soiled himself on his way back home. Shortly after analysis began, the soiling stopped at both ends. A whole series of drawings of pathways such as that of the digestive tract in his play and representational world became part of his symbolic world. Vehicles he constructed had to have equal weights in the front and in the back. Toward the end of treatment, his teacher wrote as follows: N 'sees his picture as a whole and the result is therefore quite powerful. He can convey weight, strength, or other intangibles in his drawings and painting...He is capable of thought beyond the obvious. His enthusiasm and ideas and drive make him a good leader. His abilities artistically and physically assist him in achieving high personal satisfaction'. N could now become centred. He came to see me at age 7 and was quite dislocated, soiling himself to and from locations of tension and anxiety. At 9, and by his declaration, he had become 'the Field Marshall of the anti-girls' club'. Now, he is in full control of his sphincters, in charge of a world of vital impulses and in full command of his emerging symbolic world. Now, let us return to a concrete dislocation in his history. In such a return, we are not looking for a genetic fallacy of causality, but rather a phenomenology that allows us to grasp the intentionality of his presentation of the events of history. When he was four, he was crossing the street with his mother. He said it was unsafe to cross. His mother said it was safe to do so. He was hit by a car. He soiled himself in terror. A small scar on his forehead now makes sense; a mark that conceals and unconceals a personal story. Here was the continuity between the physically dislocating experiences in his history and the sublimation of his trauma in the course of treatment. Witness the reconfiguration of cars with balanced bumpers and the teacher's independent testimony of his new demonstrations and articulation of accounts of weight, strength and other intangibles in his drawings at school.

In a third clinical vignette, E is a nine-year-old girl referred to me to treat her for her accident-prone behaviour. As reported by her parents, she has been running into things ever since she could walk, often receiving serious injuries as a result of banging her head into the edge of furniture. At age nine, she has not stopped getting injured. In the eyes of her parents, it is more than being clumsy. In their own words, 'there is something more'. Treatment did not reveal anything remarkable about her dislocation, in se. Rather, much of the treatment was about the value she placed on being with an Other who paid close attention to her mind, i.e. myself. She enjoyed explaining things to an adult and beamed with smiles when she felt she had taught me something I had not known. She loved to sit close to me while she explored material that intrigued her. Treatment ended after one year when she was restored to where she should developmentally be, a latency age child who could create games and enjoy rules and the rules of a game, among other developmental indices. Rules gave her boundaries, as it were. It is as if she came into treatment to establish rules for herself; treatment as an epistemic place for discovering emerging frontiers of 'go' and 'no-go areas', as it were.

At age sixteen, however, her parents brought her back to me for a consultation because she had failed her driving test twice and was not likely to pass a third time. This time I referred her to Colonel Leonard, a local veteran who had a private driving school for teenagers who needed something extra to learn to drive. I also could not take her back into treatment because, after her treatment, her father insisted that it was his turn to be analysed by me. It was his 'turn', he declared. He refused to see any other analyst. I analysed him for six and a half years. It was after his analysis that the request for a consultation for the daughter who could not pass her driving test came.

Whereas the meaning of the dislocation was not evident in the treatment of the child, a major and dramatic dislocation was to be found in her father's analysis. Her father had killed his brother in an accident when the father was a pubertal adolescent boy. In his mid-forties, he was now ready to come to terms with the consequences, the length and breadth of his trauma that eventually brought him physically stooping, literally, into analysis. When he first entered the room in his stooping posture, the Latin for sending a convicted man under the yoke (sub iugum mittere) in Roman times came to mind. We shall return later to a brief vignette from the father's treatment. An account of a major dislocation deferred. Nachträglichkeit, par excellence!

Upon returning to a vignette from the father's treatment, I will link dislocation of the subject to the reception of the call that precedes an errand. In short, and to get a little ahead of ourselves, my provisional position in this article is that a dislocation of the subject occurs when a subject receives a call; the call precedes a summons; the summons precedes a mandate; an otherwise and increasingly unshakable response defines the posting of the subject; at length, a pluperfect errand will have already taken place. Now we may bracket and suspend this link between the call that, unbeknown to the subject, dislocates and the pluperfect errand that returns the subject to themself.

Let us now visit Martin Heidegger, the German existential phenomenologist and a former student of Edmund Husserl, the founding father of the modern philosophical discipline of phenomenology, to get a deeper sense of the thrownness of the dislocated subject. The French phenomenologist, Jean Luc Marion, follows to provide a view of the subject that is decentred by saturated phenomena and held at the centre. A hermeneutic phenomenologist, Claude Romano, follows Marion to demonstrate that the subject can reconfigure and resubjectivise their world.

The point here is that Heidegger's account of thrownness by itself is insufficient, Marion's subject too deeply ensconced in saturation, and Romano's a necessary predicate to Heidegger's and Marion's accounts of the experience of the subject.

My project, then, is to touch Heidegger, Marion and Romano without engaging them in the expatiation of my account of the pluperfect errand as a clinical concept that dwells in the epistemic gap between psychoanalysis and phenomenology.

It is this triadic sequence of (a) thrownness into indebtedness, as in Heidegger, (b) an awakening from a sense of a decentred saturation of the subject, as in Marion, and (c) a reconfiguring, as in Romano, by the subject as an emancipation that subserves my clinical project. If we could apprehend the fate of the subject through narratives of thrownness, as described by Heidegger, narratives of dislocation from saturation articulated by Marion, and narratives of reconfiguration as in Romano, we may loosen the grip of the unwelcome guest turned host to avert the demise of the subject into a ghost, a revenant, a subject that disappears and returns.

Now let us explore three forms of dislocation in (a) a subject that is thrown and dislocated by a call as in Heidegger, (b) forms of dislocation by saturation in Marion, and (c) vicissitudes of configuring and reconfiguring the eventness of dislocation in the form of dispossession as in Romano. We must do so to discover the engine that begins the dislocation: the call.

 

The 'call of conscience' to a thrown entity in Heidegger's Being and Time

In Heidegger's analysis, he takes conscience as 'something which we have in advance theoretically' and he considers the formulation of 'fundamental ontology' as his aim (1962, p. 313). Hence, he will come to treat the appearance of phenomena as pro-jections of the subject. To treat conscience as something which we theoretically have in advance and which we must deploy with fundamental ontology in mind, Heidegger will take a few steps to accomplish this aim. In his own words, 'we shall first trace conscience back to its existential foundations and structures and make it visible as a phenomenon of Dasein, holding fast to what we arrived at as that entity's state of Being'. Such an ontological analysis is, for Heidegger, 'prior to any account of experiences of conscience' (p. 313; emphasis added). Notice that such a reduction (Latin, re-ductio, I lead back to) is neither constituted as in Husserl's phenomenology nor leads back to the appearance of the phenomena themselves as in Marion's phenomenology. In such a reduction whose aim is to arrive at an entity's state of being, Heidegger writes, 'we must neither exaggerate its outcome nor make perverse claims about it and lessen its worth' (p. 313). Why? Conscience discloses and its disclosure gives us something to understand. Conscience, as discourse, then, reveals itself as a call. 'That which, by calling... gives us to understand is the conscience' (p. 316).

This call has the character of an appeal to Being to do something. The appeal takes the form of summoning an entity to 'its ownmost Being-guilty' (Heidegger, 1962, p. 314). To the call of conscience there must be an entity that does the hearing. Our understanding of the appeal that is heard shows itself as our wanting, as in lacking, and as our desire to have a conscience; a phenomenon within which lies 'the choosing to choose our Being-one's-Self which, in accordance with its existential structure, we call resoluteness' (p. 314; emphasis in original).

Where does this call of conscience come from? Penetratingly and decisively, the 'call comes from me and yet from beyond me and over me' (Heidegger, 1962, p. 320; emphasis in original). How may we understand that which comes from me and from beyond me and over me? Heidegger answers as follows: 'Only the existential constitution of this entity can afford us a clue for interpreting this kind of Being of the "it" which does the calling' (p. 320; emphasis in original). Cryptically, Heidegger (1962, p. 322; emphasis in original) defines the caller as follows:

The caller is Dasein in its uncanniness: primordial, thrown Being-in-the-world as the 'not at home' - 'that-it-is' in the 'nothing' of the world. The caller is unfamiliar to the everyday they-self. It is something like an alien voice.

Essentially, an individualised Self is thrown into an unfamiliar nothing; brought into its there 'not of its own accord' (p. 329; emphasis added).

The idea of choosing to choose in Heidegger's existential structure gives the entity considerable agency. Being thrown into an alien place renders the entity without anchor. The call to conscience that somewhat promised that we may discover the caller as an entity that comes from me, and from beyond me and over me comes to an aporia; a promise left unfulfilled. My search for a link between the call and an errand remains unfulfilled. Why is my search unfulfilled?

Heidegger's idea that something comes from me, something comes from beyond me and over me remains centred in my self-same intrinsic world. I am looking for an archaic entity that comes before.

We may baldly sum up his thesis as follows. Conscience may feel like an alien voice talking to me and it is not. Rather, it is a silent call that brings me back to myself. What subserves this uncanny call of conscience? The call bespeaks our thrownness into the world, a projection with a Heideggerian dash, as it were, that makes us want, lack and therefore be indebted, thrown into a surfeit of pangs of compunction, fraught with guilt and subsequently answerable to a sense of responsibility. In understanding the call, then, humans choose to have a conscience. To be human is decidedly to understand the call of conscience, to want to have this responsibility, and, consequently, become resolute.

Two contemporary French thinkers depart from Heidegger. Jean-Luc Marion and Claude Romano appropriate the thrownness of the subject, but decidedly depart from Heidegger in their account of the vicissitudes of the projection. A subject can be thrown in Heidegger, but its situatedness, its location, its experience of active and passive, the fate of its intentionality and destiny are decisively different in Marion and Romano.

Marion expatiates his phenomenology of the subject's experience of the phenomenal world in Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger and Phenomenology (1989/1998), In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena (2001/2002a) and Being Given: Toward a phenomenology of Givenness (1997/2002). Romano turns to a hermeneutic phenomenology to address the vicissitudes of the human subject in Event and World (1998/2009), Event and Time (1999/2012) and There is: The Event and the finitude of Appearing (2003/2016).

Marion (2002b) sees the subject as decentred. But contra Heidegger, the destabilised subject is held at the centre, 'placed where what gives itself shows itself, and there, it discovers itself given to, and as a pole of givenness, where all the givens come forward incessantly' (Marion, 2002b, p. 322). Marion will put forward his idea of saturated phenomena which decentre the subject, invert intentionality, and thus, impact the categories of active and passive.

 

The structure of experience of the subject in Marion, or, the subject is decentred and held at the centre

If saturated phenomena and their inversion of intentionality impact the categories of active and passive, how and why does this occur? The subject that experiences saturated phenomena receives and endures a call. When I read Marion's work, I understand the following. When I receive a call I obtain a gift that that comes before me. When I receive such a gift whose phenomenal origin precedes me, I recognize that I proceed from it. The subject that receives the call and endures it, appropriates a claim that is already given. For Marion, then, to actively speak invariably amounts to having passively heard a word that comes from an Other. Consequently, the originary comes before me.

The original starts with me. My subjective configuration of the received will be my original creation. We will continue with this line of thought below when we get to Romano. Before then let us consider how Marion deepens his thought with the concept of the pluperfect.

Marion takes us to the domain of the pluperfect and alters our sense of activity and passivity as well as event and time. Thus, the call gives me, the call gives me to myself, and the call individuates me. How? Before encountering and knowing an object in a surprise, before seeing the Other in an interlocution, I am already changed into a me under the impact of a call as summons.

Marion comes close to and stops short of using the word 'errand' to describe the sequence of responding to a call and returning to oneself. It would be the poet W.H. Auden that would supply the uncanny phrase: 'ships diverge on urgent voluntary errands' in his poem, 'On this island', that would get me started on this journey of pursuing a greater understanding of the vicissitudes of errands and how they link up to agency and dislocation. Inscribing Auden then, we have the following sequence: (i) subject receives a call; (ii) now the called becomes a receiver; (iii) the receiver claims the call; (iv) the call is given as a summons; (v) the receiver is gifted; (vi) the facticity of the donation will have already taken place; (vii) subject returns to self; (vii) upon the return to oneself after an errand, subject is changed, having found itself in the Other that summoned and sent the subject. Let us make a mental note. Something has changed here from Marion to Auden, from dethronement of the subject to a bifurcation of the experience of being decentred and being posted on an errand.

A clinical vignette could feed our imagination regarding what a human subject can undergo when saturation is at play. Now let us return to the father of the accident-prone child that came to me for treatment. Let us go back to the pubescent adolescence of this man.

What phenomenon could be more saturated than the experience of an adolescent boy killing a younger brother? What a saturated event. This is the memory of the twelve-year-old who grew up to explore his history of trauma in a psychoanalysis over which I presided when he was in his forties. I paraphrase such a vignette from the analysis and am as faithful to his mind as I can be to present an episode from his own childhood.

Once upon a time, a four-year-old was playing in a relatively orderly way in a sandbox. A two-year-old brother of his came to play in that same sandbox in a very disorderly way. Grandmother watched with consternation. She called out his name as if to say 'stop', and pronounced that one day when this two-year-old grew up, he would be quite 'a terror to deal with'. The four-year-old stored this vocative declaration in his head. He appropriated the declaration as his own resolute call to duty. He remembered this story in the fourth year of his analysis when he was exploring his own idea that his killing of his brother was an act of reciprocity: 'I killed Isaac; he killed me back. From his grave, he changed my life'.

In this enigmatic recall, there is a declension of the self, as it were. There is the nominative case of the boy who played with some order, and the accusative case of the disorderly boy, the object of his and grandmother's aggression, that he killed. There is the performative vocative of a grandmother calling out a disorderly child's name to stop creating disorder. There is the genitive relation of his brother as kin to himself. There is the dative case of sending his brother to the grave to stop him, at grandmother's bidding. There is the ablative of the murdered child's return from the grave (revenant) to kill him back.

Agamben (1999), drawing on Hegel's conception of the absolute (Hegel, 1977), thinks of "declension as the movement of the absolute; a circle that returns into itself, the circle that presupposes its beginning and reaches it at the end" (Agamben, p. 123). The self in all its permutations is here in a cryptic memory that descends uneasily into a declension of roles.

Behold, grandmother's script and a grandson's appropriation that comes out of the declension: the disorderly must die. In contrast, the orderly must live, albeit uneasily. The tension dwells in a sublimation that must not be easily resolved: one must write about love and death that walk hand in hand. This coexistence opens the door for a potential emancipation from the perceived or received pressure to kill to a representational world that drives a volition to become freer as a writer to write in tense spaces where protagonists are both decentred and held at the centre.

 

From the subject as adonné in Marion to advenant in Romano; or, from a saturated, upended subject to a configuring subject that advances from presentations of an event to represented evential phenomena

How are events eventualised, leading to a structural delay? Contra Heidegger, an event in Romano's account becomes evential in a reconfigured experiential world when something radically changes a subject's external fields of reference into internal fields of reference. Events as evential then overturn pre-existing possibilities, like lightning not created by us into a mental world with which we can reconfigure and resubjectivise the world anew. Subject to no universe of prior possibilities, an event as evential acquires a new meaning and attains a structure over time, and this structure can be interpreted. This interpretation is the hermeneutic dimension of Romano's phenomenology.

Consequently, an evential rendition, exercises a structural delay in the process of staging historical, cultural, and individual memories from archaic places into the present now. What subtends this structural delay? Five considerations apply in Romano's hermeneutic account of the structural delay.

First, there is the first component of Romano's account of the evential meaning of birth as originary dispossession; originary because it predates the birth of the child and its capacity for agency. For Romano, the advenant is born in the mutation of meaning-making from event to evential where I discover myself deprived of settledness, deprived of interpretive settledness, having been thrown into a gap in the 'world'. Now Romano would claim that at the core of this adventure, birth radically sets up a gaping fissure that will never again be closed.

A second component of Romano's account explores further what belies this structural delay when birth is a prepersonal history. Dispossessed at birth, to be born is nevertheless to be connected to history. This second component is a paradox:

the subject is dispossessed and still connected to history. For Romano (2009, p. 78; emphasis added), then, to be born is on one hand, 'to have a history before having one's own history: a prepersonal history, literally unable to be taken over, introducing into the human adventure an excessive meaning that is incommensurable with my projections and thus radically inexhaustible'. On the other hand, the human subject will always speak of its birth in the orbit of its prepersonal history as follows: 'I was born...'. I will never be able to say that I was the agent of my birth, but I can shape and reconfigure the received. This capacity for each child subject to shape its own history is why in clinical work we say that three children from the same family who have experienced the same history, do not have the same psychological parents.

A third component of what belies a structural delay is the inaugural dissymmetry of naming. Originarily dispossessed at birth, born into a prepersonal history, the subject is about to be dispossessed once again. Romano's (2009, p. 80; emphasis added) own words are apt: 'to be named is to be anticipated by the verbal initiative of another, called by a word that overhangs me and that I cannot completely appropriate, since my name, symbol of my ownership, [symbol] of my "identity", is at the same time, symbol of this initial dispossession'.

After dispossession, and this is not in Romano, subject is sent on an errand (see Apprey, 1993). The subject that goes on an errand returns to its introjected self. The subject that returns to self, advenant, must return to its own creation of the figure from whom the mandate came and hence the introjected self. Precisely because one returns not to the sender, but to the introjected self, the categories of active and passive are now overturned. Romano (2009, p. 72) coins a word to represent this overturning of active and passive, namely 'passibility'.

The fourth and penultimate component of that which belies structural delay is 'passibility'. What belies this penultimate structural delay? If passibility precedes active and passive, what happens to a subject's sense of time? In Romano (2009, p. 72; emphasis added) then, passibility is 'being exposed beyond measure to events that cannot be expressed in terms of passivity but precedes the distinction between active and passive'.

If to be born and named is to be dispossessed, if the subject is sent on an errand, if passibility precedes the categories of active and passive, and if the subject returns to its introjected self, what happens to the subject's sense of time? The pluperfect tense is evoked.

The fifth and last component of structural delay inscribes a pluperfect sense of always coming after into his schema. If to be born is to be connected to history, and if I am not my own origin, a destiny all laid out and pre-assigned to me, we are in the realm of a future anterior. So, poignantly, for Romano (2009, p. 78; emphasis added): 'if I cannot take over this past, if this prepersonal past, coming before all memory and forgetting, preceding birth and opening to it, is a pluperfect I always "come after", it is also what makes possible always "go before" me and thus well up from the future'.

Accordingly, when sub-ject is posted on an originary mandate, when sub-ject undergoes a passibility that precedes active and passive, when sub-ject as figure into whom the toxic misrepresentation or aberrant representation is stored adheres to a peremptory return, and finally, when sub-ject does return to itself after a structural delay, we have a motivated and turbulent pluperfect errand.

 

Antecedent and consequent dislocations: Reconfiguring originary figures and facsimiles of original figures into a spiral circularity

Following Romano, our birth is the originary dispossession of ourselves. Secondly, we are paradoxically connected and disconnected to someone else's history. Thirdly, the moment we are named, we are possessed and dispossessed. Fourthly, an originary dispossession of oneself and an original possession of oneself are juxtaposed in an unstable disequilibrium, a disequilibrium that accompanies an ecstatic sense of standing outside oneself. Fifth, I am predated in ways where I cannot take over my past. Now, active and passive alternate. Henceforth, I am stuck with a pluperfect sense of always coming after.

In the clinical relationship, then, a new and public space is created. In this new place, the subject creates new versions of original creations in the transference where the analyst is made to stand in for an anterior figure. As the transference intensifies, the originary project of an anterior figure catches up with the recent and original creation of the subject. Jacques Lacan (1966/2007; 1969; 1971/1972) describes this sequence as follows: Scene I catches up with Scene II in an 'après-coup'; a phenomenon Freud (1895) originally called 'Nachträglichkeit', and which tends to be insufficiently translated into English as 'deferred action'. Lacan's account of après-coup to translate 'Nachtraglichkeit' bespeaks circular and apparent causality. However, the preponderance of dispossession, disconnection, disequilibrium and alternation of active and passive destroys the circularity of departure and return. The subject's life journey with its myriad catalogue of dispossession of self as rupture, a suture to foster a negotiated rupture in anticipation of a return to self-same subject, among other twists and turns, cannot be a circle. A circle suggests completion upon return to self when the history of Scene I catches up with Scene II in an après-coup. Now the uneasy departures and returns constitute more properly a spiral circularity, where a perennial dislocation mandates repeated journeys in a never-completed series of postings and returns.

Let the poet, T. S. Eliot, seductively tease us into a poetic representation of endless returns in Four Quartets, an account that is in harmony with the conversations above:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from....
Accordingly,

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time (emphasis added).

In knowing the place for the first time, the circle is broken into a spiral circularity. When we know the place whence we departed for the first time, we can begin to reconfigure and to resubjectivise an errand again and again until we have acquired a measure of emancipation from historical postings by anterior and appositive subjects. In knowing the place for the first time and in a newly reconfigured way, our exit strategy from constructed, constituted, or induced dislocated and toxic errands will have begun.

 

In place of a conclusion, or, circling back to a delayed preface

When a subject is decentred and held at the centre, following Marion, there is, nevertheless, a dislocation that saturates that entity. When there is a 'call of conscience' to that thrown entity, as in Heidegger, there is the dislocation of a call that summons an Other to do something. There is, precisely, an errand. When the subject is possessed and dispossessed, as in Romano, there is a dislocating upheaval that changes the position of self and other, and the sense of time from linear to pluperfect. By the time the subject has realised the errand, it is already too late to control its toxicity. Now we need the idea of reciprocal connection in Husserl's Experience and Judgement (1948/1973) and the clinical experience of reciprocal correction to make change possible in the clinical setting. When an archaic call is made to a subject in dream, or in the transference, or in a psychologically charged external world event, a clinician can hear the weight of the dislocating errand with a subject in a new, public and shared space.

Thanks to the new and public space in the clinical setting, the entity that listened to the originary call will come to know that perception is communalised in ways where there is a constant alteration, revision and co-creation of meanings of the received and perceived phenomenon through reciprocal connection and reciprocal correction.

Decentring of the human subject, then, includes a series of dislocations, subsequentiality and spiral circularity until the subject will have arrived at some sustainable, sublimated and tolerable place of closure in the presence of a new and clinically informed Other who would stay alive for the anguished sub-ject. Staying centred for a dislocated Other, co-creating meanings, empowering the listener to hear differently and at one's own emancipating pace, revising the call and with one's own agency hearing the call in multiple and in life-sustaining ways, is precisely the aggregate praxis for loosening the grip of an alien guest turned host that calls for and scripts the demise of a subject.

Staying alive for a dislocated subject, however, does not mean that the listener is not thrown, from time to time. Rather, in the process of making meaning of the vicissitudes of dislocation, clinician and patient alike can become fellow seekers, as it were, as they negotiate processes of reciprocal connection and reciprocal correction. A symbolic order wherein subject is empowered to resubjectivise the injected toxic errand may now drive the creation of an exit strategy from an archaic mandate to die, or from derivatives of self-erasure.

 

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