The Middle – 1: Limbus Analyticus
An object that is at times animated and at others inert, at times the focus of intense affective investment and at others utterly inconsequential is hardly an object that can be bound by a set of codifyable characteristics. Winnicott locates the found object in the space of creative illusion, the space that is cushioned between the heavenly omnipotence granted by hallucination and the hellish impotence suffered from empirical reality; but it is also in that very same space, ultimately identified as no more than an obsolescent “limbo,” that Winnicott declares the found object is doomed to spend its final resting days.
Should it after a rich and extended journey return to its place of origin, and hence to the site of its founding, where precisely did the found object get to live its intervening vibrancy and resilience? What of its itineraries, mementoes, and traces? Presumably, these are all to be found neither in heaven nor in hell but in the transitional space where the object itself was initially found(ed). While the question may come across as an exercise in sophistry, it is rather an argument for the over-determination of the space of the transitional as more than a topological third that is “neither here nor there” or “in between here and there” and as instead the space of “both here and there and everywhere else in between,” of the space of the found object whose reality is both inner and empirical, animated and aggressive, resilient and irrelevant, vital and deadly, of, in sum, the space of over-determination itself.
To speak of over-determination is to speak of dreams, of their components’ recurrences, frustrations, distortions, horrors even, as much as of their efficiently and unobtrusively gratifying functions. Safe as it ought to be, the transitional is not the space of safety where the subject can never be harmed. It is the space where the teddy bear, the parent, and the analyst may very well be the originators of aggression as much as they are its recipients and/or the targets of its persecutory projections. Of course, Winnicott was quite aware of the found object’s ability, and at times indeed responsibility, to frustrate and inflict what the subject will justifiably experience as an injury perpetrated by that object. However, Winnicott also held that such an injury must make sense and have a purpose, that it must be “optimal” according to the clever coinage of some of his North American followers. Presumably, once she has recovered from her “primary maternal preoccupation” , a mother ought not do all the right things at the right moments and without failure otherwise she will limit her child’s developmental options to either permanent merger or total rejection; similarly, it is the analyst’s responsibility to deploy the objective counter-transference, even if it is negative, as an indispensable guideline for analytic intervention. Whatever its harm, and in the mind of the one that carries it out at least, the injury in such circumstances is recuperated and redeemed as but a necessary misfortune for the sake of a greater gain. However, the over-determination of dreams, and hence of the transitional space, is slightly less reasonable, less harmless, and less convenient than such a calculus; it has not quite suffered, not fully and not yet, the censorial machinations of secondary revision; everything in it is not necessarily intelligible or good, and some of it may actually have no utility whatsoever. This, after all, is the space of illusion as it encompasses everything from lying and addiction to art and religion.
Much, it seems, happens in limbo. It is hardly just a junkyard for the un-found or the de-found; it is a treasure trove, a found if you will, of all that has yet to be found, or found again, and the very site that gives finding its occasion. Limbo is the pile of second hand goods, theories, facts, toys, hallucinations, of, in sum, all that is often mistaken as rubbish and relegated to the periphery, the outskirt, or the basement; it is precisely all that psychoanalysis rediscovers as memories, constructions, wishes, objects, demands, as, in sum, associations at the heart of the unconscious. Though Winnicott may have deployed the term in its most quotidian usage and thereby wished to sever it from its aetiology, or sever it again after Henri VIII had severed England’s ties with Roman Catholicism and Freud had severed psychoanalysis from all “illusion,” limbo as the middle ground remains a peculiarly evocative term. Aside from its echoes to the transitional space, limbo is the territory reserved for those in the afterworld who are neither sinners nor saints but who do merit redemption, for those on earth who are neither psychotic nor healthy but who can benefit from a cure, and, last but not least, for the members of the Middle Group in the British Psycho-Analytical Society who are neither Freudian nor Kleinian (or perhaps it should be the other way around) but who qualify for the title of psychoanalyst.
Much, it seems, thrives in limbo.
