This paper discusses the topic of panic seen as a “gap,” or failure, in primal repression. The mother’s sexual messages, violently implanted, prevent the “metabolic process” and remain as “foreign non-linked bodies” which reappear without connection and therefore cannot be placed in the chain of signifiers. In these cases, fears are not the substitution of anything but the continued presence of “non-metabolized” signifiers. The analyst’s work is to enable new links to be made where there were no words.
Primal repression; panic; thing-representation; catastrophe anxiety