Found
This post is the first in a series that finds its point of departure in the activity Winnicott terms play, the activity that unfolds between child and “found” object. My premise is that this activity is not an event that the detached and adult Winnicott has merely observed in his young charges; it is also the object the analyst has “found” and with which he himself has gone on to play—clinically, meta-psychologically. Central for me here is the notion that psychoanalysis is much more than a descriptive strategy that may fuel a therapeutic intervention in the service of health. Psychoanalysis is, among other things, a creative elaboration that surpasses the clinical observations it finds, precisely because it has “found” them. (Obviously, this is equally true of most other strategies, perspectives, and judgements—therapeutic or otherwise.) I would like to follow in Winnicott’s footsteps and, in turn, play with his formulations as he ostensibly did with the child’s. I would like to assess the extent to which this very idea of play may shed light on our findings regarding, and indeed “findings of,” desire, on, in other words, the playful but no less compelling ways in which we have come to experience, identify, understand, suffer, deploy, question, and/or normalize this desire.
It seems to me that the relationship between subjectivity and desire is one of (chorno)logical simultaneity. Desire is neither an innately differentiating marker of what it means to be a human subject, for instance, nor a process that is undergone by the subject in accordance with the demands of a pre-existing superordinate law. Rather, desire—individual and experiential, in other words, lived—is a product of the uses the subject makes of the broad spectrum of physiological, discursive, juridical, ideological, as well as psychological objects it finds; it is in such a finding that the productions of desire lie. As well, and with regard to the subject, it is much less the expression of an autonomous and atomistic “will,” even if it be unconscious, that manipulates and consumes the objects it previously desired and has since been fortunate enough to locate—to find. Rather, the finding, too, constitutes the subject, for the subject is not only that which finds but also that which is found and is available to be found, continually, by the object as well as by other subjects. It is the ambiguity that seems to be inherent to this bi-directional and at times, indeed, circular finding that I wish to pursue and elaborate.
To begin: a rough sketch of the idea of the found object. Winnicott tells us that such an object is part of the world of the real—and is hence not the product of a mere delusional effort—while also belonging to the subject’s inner reality. Here, Winnicott sets up the triad inner reality/experience/external life and locates the found (aka “transitional”) object and its corresponding phenomena in the inherently illusory but no less crucial event of “experiencing” (“Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena” 230-31). At first glance, the found object facilitates the passage from oral erotism to object-relationship; it bridges the otherwise insurmountable gap between omnipotence and solipsism on the one hand and encounter and interaction on the other, between limitless delusion and limited and/or limiting action. In this sense, the found object makes it possible for the subject to transition, in the words of Winnicott, “from (magical) omnipotent control to control by manipulation (involving muscle erotism and coordination pleasure)” (TOTP 236). Like any such pleasurable manoeuvre, the transition will exert a toll on the subject; indeed, “some abrogation of omnipotence is a feature [of the found object] from the start” (TOTP 233).
In its earliest manifestation, the found object is the first other-than-me possession (a toy or a piece of fabric, for instance) the subject will incorporate (“weave”) into an already existing personal pattern (TOTP 231). It is more than an object that the subject discovers only to observe and catalogue, and then perhaps reserve for a future time when it may be of use. The found object is hardly inert; it is found at the very moment, and insofar as, it introduces itself into an already existing schema in which it will participate; it is an object that unsettles, disorganizes, and reconfigures. Moreover, and as much as it is put in the service of and, in the process, transformed by the psychodynamic needs and/or wishes of the subject that finds it, the found object is more than an object in use. It, in fact, displays many of the qualities that grammar has traditionally reserved for the subject, including activity, production, and effect. The found object is, and at least as far as its finder is concerned, an object that is other-than- and hence more-than-an-object, an object that has already been subjectivised. I will have to come back and treat this aspect in greater depth later. In the meantime, it is important to stress how, for Winnicott, the found object is not an object that is available for, say, consumption or assimilation; it is instead the ground for an experience at the boundary between primary creativity and objective perception, an experience that points to nothing short of “the early stages of the use of illusion, without which there is no meaning for the human being in the idea of a relationship with an object that is perceived by others as external to that being” (TOTP 239).
