The Shell and the Kernel

The Shell and the Kernel summary: Torok and Abraham's constellation of articles, written over twenty years, develops a form of Freudian psychoanalysis that rethinks the death drive, penis envy, and repression, focusing instead on the symptomatic value of fantasy, the development of desire through introjection, and the production and exhumation of psychic crypts which contain incorporated remains of unmourned love objects.

“Mourning and Melancholia” summary: Freud distinguishes between the titular conditions, both occurring with the loss of a beloved object, with the latter presenting the same depression, lack of interest in surroundings, and lack of affection towards others as the former, with the addition in the case of melancholia of self-hatred and recrimination, resulting from the melancholic subject's libido detaching from the object and regressing into his own ego into narcissism.

Passage for close-reading: “I, for my part, prefer to see in Freud's discovery the beginnings of a radical renewal of culture, laying bare the myths of the Oedipus complex, castration and the law—a renewal to be wrought at the point of origin of all these objectivations, at the meeting place between the Envelope and the Kernel, the place where, between two poles of non-meaning, the superior rationality of the symbol is born, where the innumerable forms of civilization disintegrate, originate, and bloom” (97)

This passage occur at the end of the penultimate paragraph of Abraham's essay from which the collection takes its name. In this section, Abraham is revamping readings of the Oedipus complex and the incest prohibition. Rather than succumbing to the seemingly hopeless repetition of the Oedipal compulsion that many have found oppressive, Abraham takes comfort in the notion that, with the Oedipal tale and its multiple implications in mind, each subject can introject his or her true desire towards sexual maturation. The selected sentence supports closer attention both because of its physical and structural place within this discourse, as well as because of the temporal and spatial registers of the renewal of the body and culture it lays out.

The last word of the sentence immediately preceding refers to the baneful influences of a hypocritical and moralistic society, which serves to block the road to “psychic equanimity” (97) offered by the process of introjection which the essay has served to champion. This society, despite the constitutions of its individual members, has hypocrisy inherent in its networks, and therefore serves to constrict the developmental desire for each individually desiring subject. Coming immediately after a view of this painfully universalist society, the sentence in question serves as a shift away from such a narrowed view of Freud's contributions, serving instead to recast his theories in light of the ability to move aside the net formed by society, to allow introjection to proceed unimpeded.

The sentence begins with a casually personal tone, which although seemingly hesitant, actually serves to instantiate the process of removing the self from the circle of “moralism and insincerity” (97) implied by this society, making it clear that the reader can choose to take, leave, or recast all or part of the following propositions. The appositive prepositional phrase, “for my part” encloses the writer's subject position, containing it between commas and hence separating it from “society.” The clause's seeming self-abnegation serves instead as a gently defiant gesture of sideways motion, taking the route of humble personal disclaimer in order to skip around the barrier constructed by insincerity.

Standing by itself before the interruption of the appositive, first-person-singular pronoun which starts the sentence is seemingly tenuous: grammatically unnecessary, since the sentence could begin equally effectively with the prepositional phrase, physically slim and easily overlooked, and positioned at the start of a sentence where its unique, subjectival, property of capitalization is lost. Yet, from this seemingly minimized position, the “I” serves as the subject of the sentence, powerful and self-reflexive enough to be able to do without a directly-stated antecedent. The pronoun, despite seeming forgettable, actually serves to structure all of what comes after it, so that the phrase “for my part” and the unscientific verb “prefer” lose their reservations and become, instead, subversive without being dogmatic or aggressive. Far from asserting, insincerely, the speaker's own insignificance, the sentence's opening performs the sidestepping motion necessary to undermine society's reservations.

A similar effect can be seen in the phrase “in Freud's discovery.” While the prominent mention of the name seems to serve to offer admiring homage to the master, yet the verb “see,” attached as a complement to the seemingly weak and highly subjective verb “prefer,” serves to make the content of Freud's discovery contingent upon the vision of the subject who occupies such a slender, introductory position at the beginning of the sentence. Freud's discovery, then, is remarkable for its pellucidity, a lens through which the subject can see into the depths, where the seed “of a radical renewal” (97) begins to bloom.

This word “radical” contains strident political overtones, borrowed from a context where to be radical frequently involves tearing down old and restrictive structures in order for the desired renewal to occur. This renewal, however, is radical through the function of sight: the renewal takes place in the way structures and functions are visualized and constructed within the mind of the subject radically seeing his way out of society's oppressions. In this way, the radical renewal is one that, rather than tearing down, functions by developing new positions from which to see, using as material the old stories and myths that appear, like the Emperor in his tale, denuded of the unnecessary.

This process of construction takes place at the “point of origin of all these objectivations,” so that the renewal itself must be “wrought” out of the commonality that can be lifted from these disparate myths, themselves turned to the material of construction for the purpose. This construction metaphor takes place at both a time and place that is undefinable, however. The point of renewal is the point where the Envelope and the Kernel meet, a point out of which is born “the superior rationality of the symbol.” Yet this point is not a point, but rather a flexible and fluidic plane which both separates and interpenetrates two concentric yet imbricated entities, so that the symbol is not born through a single point, or a single orifice, but simultaneously through all points in a plane that is itself indefinite.

Furthermore, this birth is not situated in linear time, but rather in a partially inverted, complicated temporality that echoes the Mobius-strip like shape of the point joining Kernel and Envelope. By laying bare and renewing the overdetermined myths, the temporality of the new vision doesn't need to build on the deaths (and death drives) of the entities on which it is founded, but rather enlivens the myths by modifying the implications of their foundations. In this way, the myths serve to repeat everything that comes after them, so that the after events refresh the potential of the originary myths, rather than the myths serving as deadening ballast underlying the only-superficial newness of the succeeding experiences.