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Found Object

The Psychoanalysis of Irrelevance

May 1, 2009
Culture, Found Object, Limbo, MetaTherapeutics, Reflexivity, Transitionals, Winnicott

Picking up from where I left off in the previous post, there is little that’s comfortable or funny for an analyst to consider the possibility of having to dispense with the very practice that has been enlivening in the most fundamental of ways, personally and professionally. For most of us, analysis has been an animated and animating practice, a perspective and a procedure that have withstood some of our most demanding idealisations and harshest critiques, and a discipline that has given us a solid sense of who we are in the world, of how we can contribute to it, and of how we do matter in it. The thought that, at the end of the day, analysis, by its own nature rather than through, say, conquest or attrition, will have to come to nought is deeply unsettling.

Armed with the idea of a “life without analysis,” some detractors may be all to eager to declare, yet again, the irrelevance of psychoanalysis and to bury once and for all, but yet again, a practice that seems to contain within its very logic the necessity of its demise. If only things were that simple. Winnicott equips us with a tool that functions both within and without the analytic situation, a tool that allows us to pursue the relevance of psychoanalysis in light of the found object, which is to say to track the discipline’s relevance to the limit and hence to the point of its irrelevance. It is with that very same tool that we can and certainly must reconsider psychoanalytically the very notion of irrelevance itself, of how it has been conceived and practiced, of its scope and dynamics, and of, I believe, the radicalising effect Winnicott’s approach can have on it.

In principle, an object’s irrelevance is the outcome of the subject’s indifference to it, of the experience that neither its presence nor its absence deters that subject from a task or influences his or her function and position. Irrelevance is the limit a specific subject imposes on an object’s ability to make a difference at a given point in time and in a given context. Irrelevance then is a situational effect that the object must suffer rather than an inherent characteristic it may demonstrate. It is in the nature of its experience of this indifference and its response to it that the object manifests its more salient features: the extent of its vulnerability, its endurance, its need for the occasional reprieve, or, ultimately, the measure and quality of its investment in the relationship to the subject by which it is being made irrelevant.

If such a definition rings true, then “irrelevance” here is more in line with what Winnicott had identified as the found object’s capacity to survive whatever attributes the subject projects into it (reality, passivity, vitality) and whatever treatment the subject heaps upon it (possessiveness, affection, love, mutilation, hate, aggression) (TOTP, 233). Irrelevance is therefore not a discrete quality that the found object, or any other object for that matter, may or may not exhibit; it is inevitably bound up with that object’s resilience, with its ability to sustain its existence in the face of whatever may come its way—be it love, hate, or, perhaps especially, indifference.

When Winnicott speaks of the found object’s irrelevance, or, more accurately, of that aspect of the object I am choosing to label “irrelevance,” he is accounting for the requirement that, in the course of years, the found object be decathected, that it be “not so much forgotten as relegated to limbo” (TOTP, 233). The deployment of the image of limbo as the eternal in-between evokes that other earthly, human, and perhaps humane in-between by which Winnicott’s theoretical imagination, as much as his clinical concern, had been captured: the transitional. Wedged in between the heaven of hallucination, of instant and boundless gratification, and the hell of empirical reality, of helplessness and frustration, it would seem as if the transitional is a timeless and irrelevant “neither here nor there” in which no reasonable person would want to fall or get trapped. (Limbo is hardly the hoped for destination for one’s self, loved ones, or even enemies; it is heaven and hell that tend to be the choice spots.) As the drab and sense-less landscape that has been stripped of all desire and anticipation, as the endlessly grey atmosphere of apathy and unresponsiveness, limbo, it would seem, is the home of pure neutrality. While some clinicians have mistaken this neutrality for the epitome of analytic rigour, Winnicott’s transitional could not be located any further from such a dwelling. Or it is, but only from the point of view of those looking onto it from either side, those that are in heaven or hell, in hallucination or empirical reality, those that would like to sustain an attitude of indifference toward it, strip it of its ability to make any difference, and ultimately dismiss it as irrelevant.

I would like to take a few steps backwards before I go any further. My guide is the implication that the notion of the found object has for the practice of psychoanalysis, specifically for the principle of neutrality with which every analyst is vested by virtue of his or her having been “sufficiently” analysed. With Winnicott, neutrality is no longer just an imperative to neither correct nor direct but a fourfold responsibility with which every analyst must be charged:

  • first, to provide the basic context and tools for the analysand to move through the so-called intermediate space, at least for the duration of a session;
  • second, to keep as close a company as possible to the analysand’s movements in that space and hence limit the interventions to what is nowadays referred to as the “experience near”;
  • third, to keep watch over that space’s porous boundaries with its adjoining territories and encourage only as much or as little as is “enough” to seep through them;
  • and, finally, fourth, to provide an interpretation that will help the analysand transform whatever does seep through into a found object, i.e., into something other than an inevitable fact or an intractable phantasy.

In this context, analytic neutrality is an unambiguous endorsement of the intermediate space between empirical reality and hallucination, an active involvement in that space’s sustenance, and a continued participation in its inner workings. Rather than the silence of objectivity or the impartiality of disinterest, neutrality is a “Yes” to the investment in love, aggression, indifference, displacement, in the animated and unscripted, and a “No” to the collusion with, and the subjection to, the rigid demands of science (as observation and universality) and mythology (as confabulation and uniqueness). Is it any wonder that the practice that advocates such neutrality might not be welcomed, let alone tolerated, and that instead it be relegated to the status of the “irrelevant” by both science and mythology?

I do not mean to suggest here that the history of psychoanalysis is the history of a movement that has steadfastly resisted any and all heavenly aspirations; far from it. In fact, and as much as each and every analyst has been required to abide by the basic principle of neutrality and assume the position of analyst, as opposed to all the other possible ones (of parent, judge, doctor, or mentor for instance), he/she has been enjoined, repeatedly, uncritically, to think of him/herself as anything but an analyst (as a good-enough mother, a benign super-ego, a purveyor of health, or an expert tradesman), of, correspondingly, the work as anything but an analysis (as a nurture, an acquittal, a cure, or an apprenticeship), and, finally, of his or her function as anything but an analysing (as a feeding, a sentencing, a treating, or a teaching). This is the primary dilemma that has plagued psychoanalysis: to assume the instrumental position of a bridge to a healthier, freer, truer existence while holding itself up as the healthiest, freest, truest, to, in other words, privilege the mutability of the transitional without relinquishing its aspiration for the durability of the extreme—in health, freedom, or truth. Much as other disciplines and practices (including pedagogy, religion, science, and medicine) may have suffered the same dilemma, none is as vulnerable to its unsettling effects as the tradition that counts itself the model of unwavering reflexivity and introspection.

The Irrelevance of Psychoanalysis (?!)

April 27, 2009
Culture, Found Object, Play, Reflexivity, Transitionals, Winnicott

I want to turn to the possibility that psychoanalysis may acquire the status of a found object and hence, and for all parties concerned, be no more and no less than an animated, resilient, and, eventually (gasp!), irrelevant object.

The most obvious and frequent strategy for addressing this question has been to elaborate on the clinical and psychodynamic factors that allow for the analysand’s associations to take on the quality of a found object, for the expression of dreams, memories, demands, and affects to occupy the intermediate space between hallucination and reality, for, in turn, the analyst’s intervention to meet this expression on its own terrain instead of functioning as a correction according to a scientific fact (“this is what actually happened”) or an injunction in the name of a psycho-mythology (“this is what should happen”), for, in other words, the analyst’s intervention to take on the quality of a found object as well. Contra the classic strategy advocated by Freud and Klein according to which every clinical phenomenon ought to be identified, understood, and interpreted as the enactment of some pre-existing unconscious pattern, Winnicott’s elaborations have prompted many clinicians to focus and promote the analysand’s use of his or her words, wishes, and predicaments, of the person, presence, and utterances of the analyst, of the frame, the couch, and the money that exchanges hands at the end of a calendar period, of, in sum, the whole range of factors that constitute and shape the analytic situation as a found object. Transference, aggression, and defence, for instance, are no longer the unconscious puppet masters that need to be exposed and neutralised; they are to be understood and responded to as the effects of the analysand’s attempts at utilising the analytic situation and all that runs through it as a found object.

What become crucial in such a context are the analyst’s own responsibility in the face of such use, the interpretive, counter-transferential, and extra-transferential factors that correspond to and further that use. Such a responsibility entails the analyst’s recognition that every single aspect of the analytic situation must not only be animated and resilient, but that it must eventually cede its place to something other than and greater than itself, that, in other words, it must become irrelevant. Much like the found object that is a toy will sooner or later lose its meaning in favour of a broader field of cultural expression, the found object that is a dream, an intervention, a transference, an analysis, an analyst even (or perhaps especially) will not so much come to pale in comparison to a deeper or richer other of its own kind, it must eventually open onto an altogether greater experience, non-clinical and extra-analytic. To put it roughly, for a psychoanalysis to qualify as a found object not only can it not be its own end, it must also foster its own ultimate dissipation.

While setting its author apart from those orientations that construe the culmination of the analytic process as the analysand’s identification with or internalisation of the analyst, it seems as if there is nothing uniquely Winnicottian about this call for the dissipation of analysis. Classical Freudians have proposed that the “resolution of the transference” be the measure of clinical success and Lacanians have defined the cure in terms of the dissolution of the analytic “subject supposed to know.” What does set Winnicott apart is the fact that while the clinician in him equips us with the category of the found object as yet another instrument that serves our psychoanalytic objectives, the philosopher in him opens up for us the possibility of transforming that object into a meta-clinical frame by which we may understand and assess the practice and its objectives not only from within the analytic situation, and hence according to the needs or expectations of those that participate in it, but also, and, I believe, much more interestingly, from without.

Winnicott gives us not just a tool of analytic inquiry that may eventually be displaced by other more accurate or more efficient, but no less analytic, tools but also a standard grounded in analytic theory and practice by which both the theory and the practice (rather than any particular analytic moment or process) can be assessed. Psychoanalysis, Winnicott tells us, does not stand outside of the history of that quintessentially human phenomenon, play; it is only its “most recent form” (“Playing: A Theoretical Statement”, 41); and though he speaks of it as a “highly specialised” type of play, nowhere does he indicate that psychoanalysis is that history’s culmination; in fact, there is good reason to believe that Winnicott would have to agree with the idea that, much like the found object in the life of the individual, psychoanalysis is but a found object in the life of the species, an object that will neither die nor be repressed but will simply lose its meaning in favour of more subtle, more collective, or maybe even more enduring forms of “play.”

As a discipline, psychoanalysis seems to have entirely sidestepped the challenge at the heart of Winnicott’s notion of the found object. Freud could not have conceived of civilisation without analysis since civilisation is, as it were, the Petri dish of humanity’s psychological ailments which only analysis is qualified to handle. As for Klein and Lacan, and though they disagreed on just about everything analytic, they would have been in complete accord over the impossibility of even imagining humanity’s growth without a psychoanalysis that would temper culture’s otherwise devastatingly aggressive and distorting effects on the individual psyche. I doubt that, by definition, Winnicottians are more amenable to the idea of a “life without analysis” than their Freudian, Kleinian, or Lacanian counterparts. (A Winnicottian colleague I respect asked if I was contemplating leaving the profession; when I answered in the negative she jokingly requested that I hold off on expressing these thoughts till after she retires!)

Intelligibility – Ownership

April 21, 2009
Dreams, Found Object, Play, Possession, Repetition, Secondary Revision, Transitionals, Winnicott

If the found object must begin as animated and vital and only later can it move on to become irrelevant and inanimate, an object properly speaking and, hence, potentially a possession, then property and its corresponding experience of privacy may not be entirely childish but instead the effects of a process of concretisation and a rendering static, a “this is mine and you may not have it, use it, or change it” that the subject brings to bear on the object. I am expanding the references of “subject” and “object” beyond “child” and “teddy bear”; I have in mind any subject, regardless of age, and whatever object it may “find”—be it a toy, a body, an idea, a work, a grouping, or a property.

To my mind, this process of concretisation runs parallel to the systematising secondary revision Freud had identified in the work of dreams. Indeed, the principal function of secondary revision is to lend cohesion to the otherwise fragmentary content of a dream, “to establish order in material of that kind, to set up relations in it and to make it conform to our expectations of an intelligible whole” (The Interpretation of Dreams, 641). Secondary revision moulds the material offered to it “into something like a day-dream” (ID, 633) (∗); it re-writes, corrects, and edits that material so as to produce a definitive and self-evident story, the “official” story as it were, whose pleasure depends on its ability to pre-empt the need for any further explanation, and hence any further work, by either the dreamer or anyone else for that matter. This is a story whose pleasure lies in the fact that it does not stimulate(∗∗), that it does not produce other, which is to say different and hence unsettling and potentially transforming, stories. Therein lies secondary revision’s status as a form of censorship; it is a revision that may not be revised and a process whose aim is not only an “intelligible whole” but also a consolidation of that whole and a prohibition against anyone else to “have, use, or change” it, to dismantle it and, in so doing, to expose the richness of its underlying disorder and unintelligibility or, equally dangerously, to introduce into it the opportunity for new and unforeseeable uses or transformations, disorders or unintelligibilities. Ultimately, secondary revision is an injunction against mutation, and hence against transitionality and against finding.

It seems to me that secondary revision and private property are meant to secure the wish for, respectively, an incontrovertible intelligibility and a possession beyond doubt; together, they secure and authorize the ownership of intelligibility and the intelligibility of ownership. Utterances such as “this is so” and “this is mine” are not statements of fact but “demands” (∗∗∗) that are designed to eliminate any and all room for movement, for fragmentation, and, most importantly, most threateningly perhaps, for loss. Everything fits at the end of a revision; if the story is to be told again, the same elements must be recounted in the same order and in the same tenor, otherwise the result is a threatening distortion if not an outright falsehood (including the falsehood of a claim to ownership). Similarly with possession, its story ought to be clear as to where and to whom everything belongs so that it may both enforce the right to exclusivity and pre-empt the disorder of theft (including the theft of intelligibility).

My hypothesis is that neither property nor revision need be reduced to the expression of an unshakeable repetition compulsion or a primordial death drive (∗∗∗∗) ; rather, each may very well be the fulfilment of a wish to preserve a certain state and protect against anything that might threaten its stability (∗∗∗∗∗) . In light of this, the found object’s eventual loss of meaning (TOTP, 233) is never truly definitive and its relinquishment is hardly an outright rejection nor is it evidence of an irrevocable abandonment as with secondary revision’s finality, its “once and for all.” Much as the found object’s meaning is eventually displaced onto newer objects, its reappearance can, and often does, trigger a charged fund of memories of people and places, thoughts and activities. This object is relinquished not so much when it becomes utterly irrelevant or when its destruction is of no consequence to its finder but rather when its destruction is not a looming danger, when the other to whom it is relinquished is trusted, invested with the hope, and entrusted with the responsibility not to destroy it and along with it those parts of its finder that have become intertwined (“woven”) into it. Perhaps then the subject’s possessiveness, its “this is mine and you cannot have it, use it, or change it”, ought to be understood as a “this contains, and hence is, part of me and I don’t trust you (or at least not yet) not to destroy it and me in the process.” When given over to the other, the object is liable to manipulation and transformation, to mutation; and while the subject may be confident that the found object can survive its own aggression, it may be less than certain that the both of them together can survive the aggression of that other.
________
(∗) We shall revisit this daydreaming effect soon enough under the Winnicottian heading of phantasying and its logic of the dead end.
(∗∗) While this may sound highly counterintuitive, it is precisely in terms of such a stasis that Freud understood pleasure.
(∗∗∗) Freud is very clear on this quality of secondary revision; see The Interpretation of Dreams, 642.
(∗∗∗∗) In a topographical context, secondary revision belongs to the system of the pre-conscious; it is hence far removed from the strictly speaking unconscious workings of any such compulsion or drive.
(∗∗∗∗∗) Short of adopting Freud’s principle that the libido is pleasure-seeking and that stability is the guarantor of survival and hence the epitome of libidinal pleasure, the question as to why stability is so desirable remains unanswered.

Murky Subjects

April 15, 2009
Culture, Found Object, Language, MetaTherapeutics, Play, Possession, Subjects, Transitionals, Winnicott

Though he insists that any given found object must eventually be decathected, Winnicott does not so much privilege the experiencing that occurs between the inner and the outer over and above the found object. Winnicott grounds the found object in terms of the experiencing, and vice versa. Without the found object, the experiencing cannot take place and all that the subject is left with is hallucinations and/or sensory perceptions; without the experiencing, the found object is precisely nothing but an object—concrete and lifeless. Eventually, and as the experiencing is displaced and/or dispersed onto ever-newer objects and situations, it is also opened up from the singular illusion of play to the plural collusion (as in the co-, and hence shared, illusion) of culture, from the other-than-me to the more-than-me. Presumably, the subject of this experiencing has shifted in its sense of itself as solitary, autonomous, omnipotent even, to the experience and recognition of, which is to say the collaboration with, the other as subject. With such a shift comes the possibility that the subject might get caught up in a grandiosity that undoes the work of experiencing and ends up holding the cultural as, this time, a less-than-me.

The shift from omnipotence to collaboration brings out yet another layer to Winnicott’s understanding of the found object as something that will be relinquished. While an adult subject may come to recognise that a particular found object is not a true possession but the ground for a cultural experience (an idea, a relationship, or a community), a much younger subject is likely to 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 necessarily registered as an “other-than-mine.” Two provisional implications arise here; and both need to be tested. The first implication 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 found. The second implication is that Winnicott may very well have inadvertently paved the way for an assessment of the experience of the object that is “acquired” and “private” as inherently childish.

Much as these thoughts may convey a cohesive and unified theory that describes a developmental journey from object recognition (and objectification) to subject recognition (and subjectivisation), they are not entirely convincing, not to me at least. If, indeed, the found object is found by virtue of the fact that it has already been recognised as more than an object, if, in other words, it has already been subjectivised, then the subject’s capacity to recognise subject-hood, even if at the most elemental level of vitality and animation, is a precondition for the very possibility of an event such as “finding” and “experiencing” rather than its subsequent developmental achievement. Perhaps then a major fault-line in Winnicott’s thought has to do not so much with its attachment to a developmental model, as many (especially Lacanians) have argued, but more with its (and its detractors’) investment in a murky and, I suspect, not entirely warranted language of subjects and objects, at least as far as the psychodynamic underpinnings of “experiencing” are concerned.

Culture/Illusion

April 7, 2009
Culture, Found Object, Play, Transitionals, Winnicott

Speaking of “the whole cultural field,” and without straying away from the text where the found object makes its first systematic appearance, Winnicott curiously, playfully (?), expands the scope of this field from “the illusory experience” of art and religion (TOTP, 230-31), to the subject “of play, and of artistic creativity and appreciation, and of religious feeling, and of dreaming, and also of fetishism, lying and stealing, the origin and loss of affectionate feeling, drug addiction, the talisman of obsessional rituals, etc” (233), to “arts, religion, etc” (240), to “art or religion or philosophy” (241), and, finally, “to the arts and to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative scientific work” (242). This expansion is interesting on a number of different counts, not the least of which is the fact that its fluctuations have come to encompass, for Winnicott at least, the so-called pathological and criminal alongside the loftiest and most esteemed of human endeavours. Illusion is the common thread to all of these phenomena; illusion, however, that may no longer be either idealised or derided since it has been recognised as producing of the destructive as much as of the creative and without which, it seems, neither would be possible; illusion without which the human, as a subject that differentiates itself from all other subjects and species precisely because of its capacity for the religious, philosophical, scientific, imaginative, and/or moral—and hence, by extension, because of its capacity for the irreligious, un-philosophical, unscientific, unimaginative, and/or immoral—its capacity, in short, for the “cultural,” would not be possible either. Some among the artists and philosophers have wondered as to whether such a differentiation itself may be an illusion; some among the scientists are already quite confirmed in their belief that it is nothing but. (Rat lab science anyone?) That some among the psychoanalysts can summarily dismiss the work of the former as a distraction and instead seek out the empirical findings of the latter as proof of the reality (read: justification and efficiency) of their therapeutic procedures I find a bit confusing.

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