PICTOGRAM

The term pictogram was used by Piera Aulagnier to describe the primal form of representation that is shared by all subjects but retains a special force of attraction for psychotics. According to Aulagnier, a pictogram represents not an object but the uncompleted experience of an encounter between a sensory zone and an object capable of completing it. The term thus has no relation to the way in which Freud used it in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) in connection to writing with images (Bilderschrift ) in the dream-work. A pictogram is a representation of an instantaneous action (introjecting/rejecting) whose principle feature, in this stage when the psyche is still unaware of anything outside itself, is the specular relation that comprises it.

Aulagnier's theory of the primal may be held alongside what Freud wrote in "Negation" (1925h) about the workings of the activity of the judgment that attributes existence based on an evaluation of whether an object is good or bad: "Expressed in the language of the oldest-the oral-instinctual impulses, the judgment is: 'I should like to eat this,' or 'I should like to spit it out'; and, put more generally, 'I should like to take this into myself and to keep that out.' That is to say: 'It shall be inside me' or 'it shall be outside me'. As I have shown elsewhere, the original pleasure-ego wants to introject into itself everything that is good and to eject from itself everything that is bad." (p. 237) In Aulagnier's view, introjection and rejection entail consequences for the psychical agency involved. In The Violence of Interpretation: From Pictogram to Statement (1975/2001), she writes, "seen, heard, tasted will be either well perceived by the psyche as a source of pleasure of its own production, and therefore especially forming part of what is 'taken' inside itself, or as a source of pain to be rejected and this rejection implies that the psyche cuts off from itself what, in its own representation, brings into play the organ and the zone, the source and seat of excitation" (p. 22). The postulate of a self-procreation specific to the primal is logically deducible from the fact that at this stage the object, whether it is to be put inside or outside of the self, is not external to the self in question, which is nothing more than a collection of sensations.

Having thus defined the pictogram on the basis of the dichotomy between introjecting and rejecting, Aulagnier took yet another step toward structural definition, no longer of the represented, but of the representative—of the psyche itself—as she had done for the primary and secondary processes. At issue here was the definition of psychical agencies other than those posited by Freud but that do not replace the latter and, above all, whose origin is different because each case involves the reflection (in the literal sense) of mental activity onto itself. The influence of Jacques Lacan's mirror stage (1966/2004) is felt here, but Aulagnier retained from that model only the movement of specularization, which she viewed as a constant of mental activity from its very beginnings. In The Violence of Interpretation she wrote that "any creation of the psychical activity is presented to the psyche as a reflection, a presentation to itself" (p. 24). This process becomes difficult to grasp, however, when the dichotomy between reflecting agent and reflected object does not yet exist; but whereas other authors had spoken of indissociability or fusion in these instances, Aulagnier adhered to the notion of the specular image. In the same book she wrote: "If one accepts that in this phase the world-the outside-the-psyche-has no existence other than in the pictographic representation that the primal makes of it, it follows that the psyche encounters the world as a fragment of specular surface, in which it mirrors its own reflection" (p. 24).

One might think that Aulagnier was begging the question when she asked us to consider a self (that is, a representing agency that is not yet either the Freudian ego nor what Aulagnier called the I) that can only know of the outside that which is given as a reflection of the self in question, and that can only know itself as that which has engendered the fragment that itself reflects it. The whole question, so thorny in Freud's work, of the outcome of primary narcissism is found again here, but here, too, it is appropriate not to conceptualize in realist terms what is presented as a theoretical fiction. What ensures that there is a way out of this play of mirrors is simply, as in Freud, the difference that exists between a representation of the object and the real object able to satisfy a need. The mind must thus face the obligation—and this from the beginning, even if the description of these mechanisms leads to evoking them in succession—to acknowledge that the breast is an object different from the mind's body itself, that it has an independence and is thus not self-generated.

What are the effects of desire and non-desire at the level of the primal representation constituted by the pictogram? To the extent the psyche engages in making representations, they point to the fact that it itself has produced the hated object and even—owing to the specular relation—that it at least partially identifies with the latter. "In this case," wrote Aulagnier in The Violence of Interpretation, "the agency that sees itself in the represented contemplates itself as a source of its own pain; it then tries to annul and destroy that image of itself" (pp. 19-20).

What Melanie Klein theorized as splitting between a "good breast" and a hated "bad breast" has been conceptualized in various ways. Freud for one asserted that the bad comes before the good to the extent that the obligation to desire disturbs an anterior mythical state of quiescence that is actually prior to life itself. Aulagnier did not adopt this perspective, in the sense that she saw love and hate of the object as appearing simultaneously. Freud, however, viewed hate as the initial repudiation of the external world by the narcissistic ego; in "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" (1915c), he wrote: "Hate, as a relation to objects, is older than love. It derives from the narcissistic ego's primordial repudiation of the external world with its outpouring of stimuli" (p. 139).

To the extent that, according to Aulagnier, primary narcissism is not a closed unity but rather the reflection that the representative perceives of itself in its self-generated representations, there is always either simultaneously, depending on whether we side with Eros or Thanatos, the image of a encounter involving pleasure, or that of a delay or a lack that occasions unpleasure. Thus, in Aulagnier's view, getting rid of the bad by rejecting it will require, since the bad is indissociably linked to a bad sensory zone that has engendered it, the destruction of the latter. "The wish to destroy the object," she wrote in The Violence of Interpretation, "will always be accompanied, in the primal, by the wish to annihilate an erogeneous, sensory zone, as well as the activity of which that zone is the seat" (pp. 27-28). According to Freud, rejection allows a "purified pleasure-ego" to remain. In this instance it cuts off a part of the representative's self, a process viewed by Aulagnier as the "archaic prototype of castration" (p. 28) that will be reshaped into a fantasm at a later stage. Where she is in agreement with Freud, on the other hand, is in the preeminence of Thanatos over Eros, since the latter can only win out by desiring an object that, by means of the satisfaction it brings, leads, at least momentarily, to a state of nondesire, of quiescence.

The analysis of the pictogram Aulagnier proposes amounts to developing, affirming, and complicating the notion of the drive and its representative. But where Freud spoke of excitation, need, or instinct, Aulagnier preserved the notion of a "body" that she described as being simultaneously—the provider of representational-models for the psyche, the irreducible proof of the existence of a "somewhere else," the privileged object of a desire for destruction and, lastly, the source and locus of an erotogenic pleasure.

The originality and the fruitfulness of the notion of the pictogram derive from the fact that its structure is based on specularity. This notion also allows an approach to psychosis based on the fact that, for the future psychotic, the experience of conjunction is most often one of violence and intrusion, and not one of a complementarity that occasions pleasure. This could be compared to the idea Winnicott furthered in "Psychosis and Child Care" (1952), of the need for "good enough" environment-that is, one that for a time preserves the illusion of omnipotence and thus an image of self-procreation formed under the influence of pleasure and Eros. As Aulagnier wrote in The Violence of Interpretation, a specific feature of psychosis is "to make possible the re-presentation between the primal space and the space outside-the-self of a state of specularisation" (p. 31).

Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor

See also: Apprenti-historien et le maítre-sorcier (L'-) [The apprentice historian and the master sorcerer]; Breastfeeding; Criminology and psychoanalysis; Idea/representation; Ideational representation; Infans ; Logic(s); Primal, the; Violence of Interpretation, The: From Pictogram to Statement ; Visual.

Bibliography

Aulagnier, Piera. (2001). The violence of interpretation: From pictogram to statement. (Alan Sheridan, Trans.). Hove, U.K., and Philadelphia: Brunner/Routledge. (Original work published 1975)

——. (1979). Les destins du plaisir. Aliénation, amour, passion. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

——. (1984). L'apprenti-historien et le maître-sorcier. Du discours identifiant au discours délirant. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. Part I., SE, 4: 1-338; The interpretation of dreams. Part II., SE, 5: 339-625.

——. (1915c). Instincts and their vicissitudes. SE, 14: 109-140.

——. (1925h). Negation. SE, 19: 233-239.

Lacan, Jacques. (2004). The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience. Écrits: A selection (Bruce Fink, Trans.) (pp.3-9). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1966)

Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1998). Penser la psychose. Une lecture de Piera Aulagnier. Paris: Dunod.

Winnicott, Donald W. (1958). Psychosis and child care. In his Collected papers: Through paediatrics to psycho-analysis (pp. 219-228). London: Tavistock Publications. (Original work published 1952)