Maria Torok

Maria Torok (Hungarian: Török Mária; 10 November 1925, Budapest – 25 March 1998, New York City) was a French psychoanalyst, of Hungarian ascent.

Torok is best known for her idiosyncratic contributions to psychoanalytic theory, developed in the wake of first Freud, then Ferenczi, and also the critical study of Husserl, and often coauthored with Nicolas Abraham. With Abraham, Maria Torok has made significant advances in the study of the problem of pathological mourning and transgenerational influences.

Maria Torok flew away from Hungary in 1947 and came to live en Paris. She then trained as a psychologist at the Sorbonne in the 1950s, before meeting Nicolas Abraham and deciding to go into analysis. 'Torok went on to become an analyst and a member of the Paris psychoanalytical society'.

After Abraham's death in 1975, she continued their joint line of work in co-operation with Abraham's nephew, Nicolas Rand, until her death in New York in 1998.

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. She distinguished introjection, as a process that allows the ego to be enriched with the instinctual traits of the pleasure-object, from incorporation, a fantasmatic mechanism that positions the forbidden or prohibited object within'. 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'.

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