other-than-me, more-than-me, other-than-mine
Of the found object’s various Winnicottian features, three are crucial for it to qualify as found. First, it must possess a modicum of vitality evidenced through warmth, movement, or texture for instance. Second, it has to be resilient enough to survive the loving and/or aggressive manipulations of the individual that finds it, with the proviso that, and herein lies its third necessary feature, its fate is that it be allowed to be gradually “decathected.” Winnicott explains that the found object “does not ‘go inside’ nor does the feeling about it necessarily undergo repression. It is not forgotten and it is not mourned. It looses meaning, and this is because the transitional phenomena have become diffused, have become spread out over the whole intermediate territory between ‘inner psychic reality’ and ‘the external world as perceived by two persons in common’, that is to say, over the whole cultural field” (TOTP 233).
Manifestations of the found object are therefore hardly confined to the earliest experiences of the subject. On this score, Winnicott is careful to remind us that “the task of reality-acceptance is never completed, that no human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality, and that relief from this strain is provided by an intermediate area of experience which is never challenged” (TOTP 240). An inanimate object, an animal, an event, a human being, an organisation, an idea, these are some of the categories of objects to be found, time and again, and are indeed found precisely because of their capacity to be, and because of the subject’s need for them to be, something other than mere objects. The experience of “experiencing” is a bridging and a weaving across inner and outer realities; it takes place in that “transitional” space in which the subject foregoes the certainties of, and, in the process, disencumbers itself from the ossifying demands of, both hallucination and concreteness.
As the experiencing is displaced and/or dispersed onto ever-newer objects and situations (“over the whole cultural field”), it is also opened up from the other-than-me toward the more-than-me, from the singular illusion (of play) to the plural collusion (of culture). Here, Winnicott is effectively privileging the experiencing over and above the found object itself, any found object. He is also hinting that, in principle at least, such an object is never truly a possession; it is not something that may be “had” and it is not something that may be “lost” either; it is, by definition, an object that can be, and most likely will be, relinquished. This is one reason why Winnicott will go out of his way to mark the found object as something other than a fetish (TOTP 234n1, 241-42).
However, while an adult subject may come to see that the found object that supports a cultural experience (an idea, a relationship, or a community) is never truly a property, a much younger subject will reject even the slightest suggestion that the toy or blanket it has found is not entirely its own; it will not look kindly upon the adult’s attempts to mend or clean or in any way alter said toy or blanket; it will tolerate even less the prospect of having to share anything it has found with those around it. As the first “other-than-me” possession, the found object is not automatically registered as “other-than-mine.” The implication here is that the passage from “other-than-me” to “other-than-mine” is one that the subject will have to undertake if it is to look both forward and backward in time on the objects it has found, and experienced, and eventually acknowledge them as such.
Taking this line one step further, it seems as if Winnicott may have inadvertently set the ground for an assessment of the experience of “private” property as inherently childish!
Subjects
Keeping in mind the initial definition of process as production, recording, and consumption, a third synthesis is invariably at work, a synthesis of consumption that belongs to the “subject,” a “subject” that is produced by a recording and that defines itself in terms of the recording it consumes.
How could a recording produce a subject? To begin with, here are two examples from the history and medicalization of sexuality. In the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault has outlined for us the recording of homosexuality from the 1850’s onwards and how it has come to produce not only the psychiatric category of the homosexual as presumably pathetic and pathological but also the possibilities for its modern day offshoot: the gay subject. As well, Sandy Stone has given us an image of the recording of the transsexual identity from the 1950’s onwards, a recording in which the shoddily researched notion of gender disphoria (being born in “the wrong body”) has seeped from the clinic and into the discourses of psychology, politics, and popular culture (“The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto”).
Ultimately, and for us here, the most poignant recording of all is Oedipus itself. As our social delirium and fetish, Oedipus records incest and patricide as primary. Supposedly, the taboo on incest is designed to curb an already existing wish, and guilt to redress and repair the effects of that wish. Freud was quite persistent on both scores and that is precisely why he could never accept the position of the budding Melanie Klein. As far as he was concerned, she had argued that one does not feel guilty because one has murdered one’s father but rather that one phantasizes the murder of one’s father because one already feels guilty. This made no sense to him!
