Findings

I begin with the activity Winnicott terms play, the play 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. I would venture and say that 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, understand, suffer, deploy, question, and/or normalize this desire.

It seems to me that the relationship between subjectivity and desire is one of (chrono-)logical simultaneity. Desire is neither an innately differentiating marker of what it means to be a human subject, for instance, nor a predicament that is suffered by the subject in accordance with the demands of a pre-existing super ordinate 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 operations of desire lie. As well, and with regard to the subject, it is much less the expression of an identifiable “will” that may one day come to recognise its unconscious and/or intersubjective determinations, a will that, in the best of all possible worlds, manipulates and consumes the objects it previously lacked but has since been fortunate enough to acquire—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, by other subjects, and, perhaps most poignantly, by the subject itself. It is the ambiguity inherent to this bi-directional and at times circular finding that I wish to pursue and elaborate.