Mária Török

In her 1968 article "The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse," Torok reexamined the problems of introjection and incorporation, as presented from the works of Sándor Ferenczi through those of Melanie Klein.

[1] Torok argued that in 'impossible or refused mourning...faced with the impotence of the process of introjection (gradual, slow, laborious, mediated, effective), incorporation is the only choice: fantasmic, unmediated, instantaneous, magical, sometimes hallucinatory'.

[7] Within the ego, the crypt represents the burial of an unspeakable lived shame: 'When one can not recognize one's grief, trauma and all the emotions that it provokes find themselves led away into a vault.

[10] The result is to produce ghost-like secrets in the family, unspoken, but indicated by so-called cryptic behaviour, by non-verbal para-speech, and sometimes by being incorporated materially into household objects.

After the 1978 publication of her collected clinical essays, Torok 'has outlined a new field of historical and theoretical research concerned with the psychogenesis of Freudian psychoanalysis'[12] — work culminating in 2000 with the posthumous Questions for Freud.

The advances of Mária Török have been taken up and continued in France by many psychoanalysts — among them Judith Dupont, Pascal Hachet, Lucien Melese, Claude Nachin, Jean-Claude Rouchy, Barbro Sylwan, Saverio Tomasella, and Serge Tisseron.

'The conception of psychoanalysis of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok extends to the whole lifespan the possibility of psychic fixations, something which reduces the relative importance of the conflicts and instinctual repressions of childhood, while increasing that of traumatic experiences, individual and collective, which may occur at any age'.