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Winnicott, playfulness, theft

November 12, 2011
Play, theft, Winnicott

In a frank and frankly irreverent introductory passage to his “Primitive Emotional Development” from the mid-1940s, Winnicott wrote: “I shall not first give an historical survey and show the development of my ideas from the theories of others, because my mind does not work that way. What happens is that I gather this and that, here and there, settle down to clinical experience, form my own theories and then, last of all, interest myself in looking to see where I stole what. Perhaps this is as good a method as any” (145).

Winnicott’s thievery here is hardly unfamiliar to those of us who track the vagaries of the unconscious as a primary process, as, in other words, a process that admits little of continuity (in time and space) or boundary (in property and reason). However, that such thievery also robs the question of provenance of its primacy and instead relegates it to the status of an afterthought, that the thievery may be “as good a method as any” in matters meta-psychological, and, furthermore, that it may eventually seep into and indeed direct whatever may come about as a psychoanalytic intervention is less evident to and significantly less reassuring for those clinicians who stake their professional standing and therapeutic competence on a mastery in matters of aetiology and development.

What I find most interesting about Winnicott’s strategy is that it speaks of a work that is always in progress, a work that has already begun (“this and that”) somewhere (“here and there”), a work that is grounded in neither an overarching theory nor a coherent set of clinical observations, but in a multiplicity of ideas and experiences. Winnicott’s is a porous work that mines in this multiplicity certain connections that may produce new theories, which, in turn, will hopefully serve as the “this and that” and the “here and there” of future episodes of work.

In one sense then, the components (abstractions, techniques, and vignettes) that have been gathered under the heading of “Winnicott” and identified as the benchmarks of what it means to be a “Winnicottian” are multiple and multiply sourced. They are heterogeneous, anachronistic, and sometimes even idiosyncratic. Last but not least, and though in a sense specific to Winnicott, such components nevertheless make themselves available as the potential raw materials of subsequent projects, psychoanalytic or otherwise, that may have little if anything to do with “Winnicott” or “Winnicottians.”

Trailing closely behind an investment in Winnicottian playfulness is the inevitable question of responsibility. What might be the risks of such playfulness sinking into either a “playing fast and loose” with the poignantly existential moments in the life of an individual or a form of intellectual gymnastics of interest only to its practitioner and, at best, a handful amongst his or her audience? Surely, the objection will be raised, the efforts of a theorist attempting to contribute to the understanding of the human psyche or of a clinician charged with the responsibility of alleviating another person’s suffering must outweigh, in both subtlety and impact, the playful meanderings of a mere child.

A healthy degree of reservation, if not indeed suspicion, seems well justified in response to any equivalence drawn between the impromptu squiggles of a two-year-old and the meta-psychological cogitations of, say, a fifty-two-year-old, unless, obviously, the latter are as easily reproducible, as superficial, and, ultimately, as inconsequential and dispensable as the former.

My response to this objection is twofold.

First, I do not consider the qualities of superficiality or dispensability, no matter how difficult it has been to generate the products they qualify, as markers of intellectual and/or clinical inadequacy. Winnicott recommends that psychoanalysis is best served by a practitioner who can curb the wish to dissect and catalogue and who can relinquish the need to have the final word, a practitioner who can occupy the position of an instigator of play rather than of a technician of truth. Such a practitioner must not only be intellectually and affectively agile, he or she must also tolerate the fact that, within the context of any particular analysis, his or her every experience and thought is potentially dispensable and the theories and strategies that guide that analysis, no matter how firmly grounded, are forever subject to a startling upset. Such precariousness is hardly a detriment to the practice of analysis; on the contrary, it propels it. For better or for worse, the analysis that has little room for surprise, and even less for curiosity, is no longer an analysis.

Second, the playfulness I am invoking here is hardly the carelessness that is of legitimate concern to the advocates of clinical sobriety. Rather, it is a playfulness that operates somewhere between objective reality and private fancy, between an abiding faith in the laws of causality and an utter disregard for consequences, between truth and myth, linearity and chaos.

Winnicott and Deleuze/Guattari: premise for a new project

September 13, 2011
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Found Object, Freud, Guattari, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Play, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Transitionals, Winnicott

I want to invoke Deleuze and Guattari’s double-sided interrogation: “Given a certain effect, what machine is capable of producing it? And given a certain machine, what can it be used for?” (Anti-Oedipus, F8, E3).

Such an interrogation has fed its authors’ insistence on the primacy of a “machinic production” for human nature, a production for which the greatest threat is the distorting transformation of its status from a fundament into a goal, from a process that deploys its productions, registrations, and consumptions along typically unpredictable lines, which is to say, from a process that plays, dreams, and associates, as Winnicott understood these terms, into a stagnant and interminable “wreck” (AO, F11, E5) that can only “fantasy” and “dissociate” in its struggle for self-perpetuation and propagation.

This is one of a number of links and relays that I would like to pursue between the presumably post-Freudian project of Winnicott and the supposedly anti-Freudian project of Deleuze and Guattari.

My investment is not in a history of psychoanalytic ideas that hopes to bridge the divide between the French and the British, each a tradition that, for the most part, has thrived on recognising its other only to dispute its legitimacy as fantasmatic and/or mundane, on, in other words, dissociating itself from that other, a history, and by extension a methodology, that would invariably, righteously, grant itself the status of an integration or incorporation that is greater, wiser, or truer than both.

Nor is my investment in exposing and clarifying the ways in which each of these two traditions is, after all and presumably, a metaphor for, or, better still, the metamorphosing outcome of the other. I would much rather spare both my Winnicottian and Deleuzo-Guattarian readers the disappointment and/or irritation of witnessing their distinctive perspectives and strongly held convictions dismissed as the derivatives of some previously or elsewhere more convincingly elaborated views.

Nor do I hope to facilitate a triumphal coupling of the two sets of disparate texts and strategies with the aim of producing a clinical and/or meta-psychological offshoot—-a strange beast indeed—-that is part Winnicottian and part Deleuzo-Guattarian, part post- and part anti-, forever honouring, which is also to say forever hemmed in by, its provenance and heritage.

Nor, lastly, is my investment in a utopian “in-between” that has gripped much of the imagination amongst contemporary readers of both Winnicott and Deleuze and Guattari, an “in-between” whose advocates, I suspect, must forever struggle to keep from drowning in the treacherous waters of the Oceanus Britannicus. On this score, and though the notion of a topographical “in-between” seems to be precisely what brings both projects in line with one another, I find the Winnicottian transitional and the Deleuzo-Guattarian intermezzo, when considered primarily as psychological topographies, to be particularly sparse and unyielding. Moreover, and just as the found object for Winnicott is an experience rather than an “object” that needs to be itemised and localised, I would like to suggest that the transitional and the intermezzo are a playing and a bricolage, a basic form of living (“Playing: A Theoretical Statement”, 50) and a handyman’s tinkering (AO, F7, E1) that have little to do with spaces or locations that ought to be mapped, striated, and/or bound, and everything to do with events, processes, and experiences that are lived. Ditto for the “in-between.”

My investment is primarily in re-posing the question of found object and play and of machine and effect, while doubling its data, so to speak. Given two machines, each with its specific set of clinical and theoretical procedures, what can their juxtaposition be used for and what effects can that juxtaposition be made to produce? At stake here is a process that treats of dynamic effects as much as it treats of developmental causes, of potential products as much as of hidden aetiologies, and of eventual deployments as much as of retrograde analyses. Ultimately, my hope in posing this question is that these effects, products, and deployments may not only communicate to us hitherto unexplored yet constitutive theoretical and/or clinical components about either Winnicott or Deleuze and Guattari, but that they may also shed a new light on, if not indeed instantiate desire, and, in the process, allow us to do with that desire, or do with it differently, as much as it does with us.

In positing this reflexive implication, I take my cue from the “machines” I am considering, insofar as each, in its own way, has more or less relinquished as artificial and ineffectual the distinction between the functions of theory and practice, observer and observed, analyst and analysand. Indeed, by the end of his career, Winnicott was quite unequivocal when he declared that psychoanalysis “has to do with two people playing together” (PTS, 38), that such a doing takes place “in the overlap of the two play areas, that of the patient and that of the therapist” (“Playing”, 54), that, in other words, psychoanalysis has little to do with one subject developing, interpreting, or correcting another subject’s experience according to some externally pre-elaborated path toward truth or health, and everything to do with the playing that occurs “in between” these two subjects. Winnicottian psychoanalysis is therefore as much a practice as it is a theory of transitionality; it is therefore as invested in consolidating and legitimising an Ego, a Self, or a Subject, be it true or false, as a found object could be said to consolidate or legitimise a reality, be it hallucinatory or concrete.

Similarly, and equally forcefully, Deleuze and Guattari identified the principal task of their analytic orientation (which they termed “schizoanalysis”) as the dismantling of the distinction between a subject that emits a statement and a subject about or on behalf of whom, or which, a statement is emitted (AO, F323-324, E271). In schizoanalysis, there is no subject that imparts to another its accomplishments in knowledge, health, or experience; there is only an analytic machine that is neither an imaginary projection, as phantasy, nor a real projection, as cure, but a recurring factor of production among parts (associations, syntheses, subjectivities) functioning alongside one another and under specific clinical conditions. These are the gears that create new gears alongside preceding ones, indefinitely, even if, or even as they seem to function in discordant or opposing ways. As Deleuze and Guattari have summed it up, “That which makes a machine [the schizoanalytic sine qua non] are connections, all the connections that operate the disassembly” (Kafka, 84).

That something may be gained from elaborating a relationship between these Deleuzo-Guattarian connections and the Winnicottian transitional, between, in other words, the machine and the found object, that such a relationship can be productive precisely because it is as fractious and abrasive as it may be smooth, that, in other words, the friction between the presumably incongruous concepts and orientations may set off a spark capable of shedding light on hitherto unexplored territories, these are the principle assumptions motivating the project.

Structure and Process

June 15, 2009
Aevum, Dreaming, Fantasying, Finding, Play, Transitionals, Winnicott

In the early 1950’s, Winnicott had identified the transitional (whether object, phenomenon, or space) as the bridge between inner life and outer reality, a bridge that, presumably, the subject must set up and continually cross if it is to pursue its developmental journey and reach its full potential as an adult. Twenty years later, Winnicott declared that the clinical focus on the tumultuous relations between the psychic and the shared as separate realities each with its particular set of principles and priorities had long eclipsed serious consideration of a host of experiences that, strictly speaking, belong to neither but are instead grounded in the field of the transitional. In an attempt to redress the paucity of the clinical literature’s treatment of this field and its repercussions for the broader culture, the psychoanalyst decided to republish his “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena” as the first in a collection of essays (Playing and Reality) that would recast transitionality not only as a function that speaks of a particular psychological dynamic or configuration but as a process that is key in the life of individual and group.

I believe there is more at work in Winnicott’s position from the 1970’s than the simple expansion of a previously elaborated point of view or the restatement, this time louder and more voluminous, literally, of the two-decade-old call that clinical attention be directed toward a crucial but so far under-investigated dynamic. Much as this was the last project Winnicott published in his lifetime and hence, as considered by many, the crowning achievement of his formidable clinical career, the collection stands as less its author’s synthesising and conclusive word on the status and function of the transitional and more as a self-contained but, nonetheless (thankfully), “imperfect” process in which both the transitional and the entire structure within which it operates are re-worked and re-calibrated.

I say “imperfect” because, indeed, there is much inconsistency to Winnicott’s last position, inconsistency of which, I imagine, its author was not entirely unaware, inconsistency to which he evidently had been all too eager to attach the label “paradox” as he had done to other aspects of his thought; but this is also the sort of inconsistency in which much remains to be mined and reconfigured. The following are some interrelated markers to consider. I will deal first with the ones that revolve primarily around the temporal and spatial aspects to Winnicott’s elaborations. Though I take them to be the most problematic, they fortunately remain the least relevant and hence the most easily dispensable. I will then turn to the procedural ones as I have found them to be most useful.

Priority: Many of Winnicott’s critics, big and small, have been keen, and perhaps not entirely unjustifiably, to point out that the found object cannot be a bridge between inner and outer unless the subject has already, even if provisionally, identified and mapped both sides of the divide, unless, that is, the subject has already acquired some albeit minimal sense of its own reality’s structural and pragmatic demarcations. Put differently, the subject must first consolidate for itself a position and a point of view from which it can distinguish between the inside and the outside, the me and the other-than-me for instance, before it can even recognise and utilise the object as bridge, as found. Contra Winnicott and the classic developmental tendency that locates the subject’s earliest and most primitive experiences in an undifferentiated and omnipotent state, an “oceanic feeling” as Freud was often fond of saying, and then posits frustration, or play, as the driving force behind that subject’s subsequent awakenings to reality and its demands, the found object cannot “antedate” (TOTP-2, 9)∗ established reality testing.

Sequence: Winnicott started out with the insistence that the found object’s richest quality is its ability to consolidate for the subject a space of illusion and play, a space that, in a sense, is free from the constraints of, on the one hand, rough concreteness and, on the other, solipsistic hallucination. Structurally, Winnicott had reached a count of 3 here (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Figure 1

In light of this count, the actual object itself will be decathected to the point where it will lose all meaning; the interaction between subject and object, the interaction whereby the one finds, and/or is found by, the other is what is most important. The fact of this finding must undermine Winnicott’s claim that the found object is merely a bridge to the yet to be established capacity for object relationship since it is none other than the found object that, in the very process of facilitating them, constitutes the encounter and the interaction. Contra Winnicott (again), the bridge that is the found object is not a pointer to future object relations; the bridge is itself an instantiation of that to which it points.

Distinction: By the early 1970’s, Winnicott elaborated further on the quality of this interaction when, with the help of one of his patients, he introduced a distinction between “fantasying” and “dreaming.” Fantasying is an isolated and isolating activity as with, for instance, the daydreaming of the perfect partner, perfect job, perfect home, or perfect finances, the daydreaming of, in sum, the perfect and perfectly satisfying life (the aeternitas) in the face of an intolerably disorganised, unmanageable, and fleeting reality (the tempus). Fantasying instigates no action; it at best runs parallel to and at worst substitutes for life and action; it is a fixity that distracts from and drains objects and relations; it inhibits and at times altogether paralyses them . Dreaming, on the other hand, corresponds to the agility typical of an excursion into an “imaginative planning of the future” (”Dreaming, Fantasying, and Living”, 35), an excursion that precipitates and looks forward to action as much as it is shaped by it (DFL, 26-33). Doctor and patient had come to see that fantasying about an action and dreaming about it belong to two separate orders; indeed, “fantasying was about a certain subject and it was a dead end. It had no poetic value. The corresponding dream, however, had poetry in it, that is to say, layer upon layer of meaning relating to past, present, and future, and to inner and outer, and always fundamentally about [the dreamer]” (DFL, 35; emphasis in the original). Doctor and patient had effectively found themselves in the midst of the aevum that erupts from the dream’s navel and brings about a meshwork of infinite meanings, a meshwork that, lest we forget and by virtue of the fact that it is available for a retrospective interpretation by the analyst, must have already been actively produced by the dreamer/analysand.

Process: With depth and deferral, the difference between fantasying and dreaming has therefore less to do with objects and their inherent qualities and more with processes and effects. In privileging dreaming, Winnicott was not so much singling out an experience grounded in reality, an experience that is more accurate, efficient, or tolerant, and hence more mature than another that repudiates that reality; he was highlighting an experience that is aware of its interconnectedness with and relatedness to reality, without either disavowing it or being completely bound by it . The distinction between dreaming and fantasying may hence be rethought as the difference between experiencing and dissociating (DFL, 26-7), with the proviso that, unlike hallucinating proper, dissociating is never truly cut off from reality. Here, Winnicott seems to be deftly re-conceptualising, and yet without entirely abandoning, Freud’s mid-career elaborations on the defensive mechanism of negation. Much as negation must first acknowledge that which it will come to reject or deny, dissociation is premised on the recognition of a link to reality upon which it may come to act as a severing. Dissociating hence does not occur without its fair share of aggression of which such severing is a telling manoeuvre. Ultimately, and within the context of such dissociating, the experiencing is only a seeming-to-experience (DFL, 28-9) that is there primarily to cover over the fact of its in-experience and/or of its unwillingness to experience.

While located on the other side of illusion and play, fantasying avoids lapsing into hallucination proper. I would hence suggest that fantasying is as much a part of that topological in-between Winnicott labels “transitional” as playing is, and that it might be useful to deploy the transitional as, in one respect at least, a bifurcated space that is occupied by fantasying and dissociating on the one hand and dreaming and playing on the other. Ultimately, what I am suggesting here is that, twenty years after he had first introduced his tripartite structure, Winnicott had effectively moved from a count of 3 to a count of 4 (Figure 2).

Figure 2

Figure 2

Winnicott had flushed out his triadic structure and introduced a space of activity that is of two possible qualities, each of which touches upon the borders of both hallucination and concreteness, resists them just as much as it draws upon their resources.

Yet, and however distinct they may be, fantasying and dreaming remain inextricably implicated in one another. The fixity that is the trademark of fantasying speaks a strong attachment and a wish to revise and preserve as is, in other words, a fidelity to a particular object or situation, while dreaming’s agility is the mark of a mucking about and a taking liberty with whatever it may encounter. As each disposition upholds the distinction in principle, it also undermines it in deed. Reading Winnicott’s text is as close and obvious an illustration of this phenomenon as any. Being faithful to that project requires that the reader step outside of a familiar terrain, even if provisionally, encounter that text, and eventually weave it into his or her already existing structures. Reading Winnicott’s text involves playing with it and taking the liberty to transform its procedures into something other than what simply belongs to either the world of privately held convictions or the world of readings and applications, Winnicott’s included, that are shared and/or objectively perceived∗∗. To a certain extent then, being faithful to Winnicott involves betraying him and the betrayal itself may also be a most Winnicottian thing to do. Obviously, the co-implication of fantasying and dreaming demands a subtler and more complicated assessment than what my example allows. I shall to return to it soon enough.
________
∗ I distinguish between TOTP as the original publication of Winnicott’s text and TOTP-2 as the slightly revised version that opens Playing and Reality.
∗∗ The interplay of fidelity and liberty in this process is as applicable to the reader’s own convictions as it is to Winnicott’s text.

Losing Objects

June 1, 2009
Aevum, Found Object, Language, MetaTherapeutics, Play, Speaking Desire, Subjects, Transitionals, Winnicott

Freud thought the dream the royal road to the unconscious and the dream book itself the jewel of his intellectual crown. While only a few of Freud’s followers would comfortably consider donning that crown, many would not hesitate to lay claim to the title of its most deserving guardian and, in the process, to the authority and authorship of its official story. This is a story that, after so many revisions, has become one of succession and access, rivalry and conquest, ownership and meaning. With his notion of the “found,” Winnicott rethinks the story into one of use and findability, into the story of an object (be it a spatula, a dream, an idea, or a practice) that belongs, when it belongs, “to the arts and to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative scientific work” (TOTP, 242) insofar as it is an object found, conjured, used, appropriated, an object hence relinquished, misplaced, misused, misappropriated. Winnicott’s is the story of “the intermediate area” between what is subjective and what is objectively perceived (TOTP, 231). To that area belongs an “object” that has little to do with the typology of the good or the bad, the fetishistic or the partial , an object that has even less to do with the absolute or the fleeting, the mythological or the real.

In telling such a story, Winnicott had effectively set for himself the difficult task of communicating an original perspective that challenges not only a psychoanalytic orthodoxy as it fosters the distinction between subject and object, but also the very structures of language as they speak both the perspective and the orthodoxy. Much as I appreciate the severity of his stylistic constraints, I am reluctant to carry on with the use of the terms “subject” and “object” for it seems to me that, given their habits and histories, these terms can only detract from the spirit of Winnicott’s project. To my mind, to the “intermediate area” belong neither the subject nor the object but the verb in its unfolding: finding, using, dreaming, playing, relinquishing. This verb is neither a passageway out of the subjective and into the objective, out of hallucination and into perception, nor a bridge across which the subject may amble from omnipotence to culture and along with it libido from childhood to maturity.

As an aevum, the verb speaks a process whose cadence gathers those components that, through it and in its space, get to be qualified as subjects and/or objects. Much as there is nothing to an object that renders it inherently irrelevant, much as, in other words, the object becomes irrelevant only in a given situation and as an effect of it being treated as such by a subject, there is nothing to an object that is inherently object-“ive” or to a subject that is inherently subject-“ive,” even when said object and subject are gathered in a single process. It is the verb, as finding, that founds the process and invests its components with their respective states and qualities.

Some will of course object that to the subject belong an inviolable will and an activity that the object in its inertia lacks. While this may very well be the case in the context of certain textbooks of psychology and philosophy, it is not so with respect to the transitional space, to the finding and playing where, already, the object is subjectivised and the subject is woven into the object. The transitional space knows as little of the “object” that is inanimate and unresponsive, that is dead, as the unconscious knows of death itself, which is to say nothing. And if this space knows nothing of the “object,” it might then make some sense to suggest that that space would know equally nothing of the other to that ”object,” of its linguistic and, presumably, psychoanalytic nemesis, the “subject.”

In assessing the viability of this suggestion, three questions present themselves. First, might the Winnicottian perspective not be enhanced if one were to rethink the distinction between subject and object in light of the “experiencing” that belongs to the found, an experiencing whose modes and itineraries may very well underlie the production of certain categories and their presentation as distinct? Second, what then can be said of the production of such distinctions and/or categories, specifically of its dynamics and relationship to the process of play Winnicott is describing? And, finally, third, what, if any, implications does the process of play have on the ways in which we think and live desire? I believe that the answers to these questions begin with Winnicott’s final contributions in Playing and Reality.

The Middle – 2: Aevum Philosophicum

May 13, 2009
Aevum, Culture, Found Object, Limbo, MetaTherapeutics, Play, Reflexivity, Transitionals, Winnicott

[Go ahead; look closer. It’s next to where just about everything Greek used to be trashed before it got cleaned up and anointed the Cradle of Western Civilisation. Yes; there, in that very same pile where you just dug up “limbo,” the one from which you’d once salvaged “libido.” The pile is marked “Medieval” though you can barely tell it’s so far out from the centre (apparently, there are gradations even in rubbish). It’s the pile from a period when Jewish and Islamic thought were thriving, side by side; perhaps that’s yet another reason why some of us prefer to think of it as “The Dark Ages.” But it’s the period nestled in between the Classical and the Renaissance, the period we also call “The Middle Ages.” That’s it; right there. We’re exactly where Winnicott wants us to be—in the middle.]

The Middle Ages can be a bit disappointing for those in search of serious debate re fabulous angelic dances on heads of pins as none really did take place within that period; but there is enough in it of the deliberations on the varieties of time and being that is actually worth revisiting, especially since such deliberations often created and criss-crossed “the middle.” The Ancients, Plato and Aristotle included, had essentially identified two measures of duration: eternity and time. Eternity belongs to being in its actuality and hence to that which is and is always already perfect; time, on the other hand, corresponds to change and potentiality, to that which becomes and is hence lacking. Duration in this context is as much a quality of being, an ontology, as it is an external standard of reference by which one may track an entity’s movements and transformations, as an abstract astronomical parameter for instance. Infused with the concerns of a theology of salvation that had set out to bridge the gap between the eternal and the timely, the intellectuals of Medieval Europe were faced with the task of reconfiguring their philosophical heritage in order to accommodate a new classification of beings, a new topography, and, consequently, a new time. Henceforth, man’s relationship to God was to be rethought in terms of analogy rather than the extremes of identity and difference; angels, considered to be neither godly nor human, needed to be accounted for; the souls of the innocent who, because of accident or history, had never been baptised deserved a purgatory as something not quite heavenly but far from the fires of eternal damnation. Ultimately, time, as a quality of being, had to be recalibrated in such a way as to reflect the emerging ontological diversity.

It was mostly the scholastic texts of the 13th century (beginning with the commentaries of Alexander of Hales and extending into the reflections of Albert the Great, Giles of Rome, Henry of Ghent, Theodoric of Freiberg, and, finally, William of Ockham) that undertook this recalibration by introducing, debating, fine tuning, and, finally, completely abandoning the idea of the aevum as a time quality in between, and distinct from, the eternal and the worldly. This is an episode in the history of philosophy that illustrates the experience of a “set situation,” to use a term of Winnicott’s which anticipates the transitional object by roughly a decade(∗), a situation in which the child (philosopher) discovers the shiny spatula (the aevum), uses it, and makes it its own by picking it up, sticking it in its mouth, dropping it, and picking it up again (by conceptualising it, debating it, writing it, and debating it some more) till, at a certain point, boredom sets in and attention moves on to another object that lies at hand. This is a “total happening,” a complete experience with a beginning, a middle, and an end that the subject, any subject, deploys as it ventures outside the mutually exclusive disjunctions of eternity and finitude, inner and outer, hallucination and reality; and by venturing outside the disjunctions, and hence outside of both inner hallucination and outer reality, as opposed to out the one and into the other, the subject can take hold of time in a new way or take hold of a new time.

In between aeternitas, a complete and indivisible eternity without beginning or end, and tempus, a limited and ever flowing time of change and decay, the aevum is a created perpetuity; it has an origin but is infinite in duration; it is, in other words, eternal in its substance but finite in its actions. The aevum is a “diminished” eternity whose time moves, in succession, in vicissitudo, and where each moment tells of a totality rather than a transient passage. The aevum is the time-stop that holds all the parts that make up a world simultaneously; it suspends them in a moment so that, in fact, they do get to make up a world. This is the audible time-stop, as the note of a bell, a chime, or an alarm, the ticking of the clock mechanically produced for the first time ever in the late 13th century. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

The aevum is also the time of libido. Indeed, and for Freud, the passages from narcissism to object love (via the ideal ego and the ego ideal), from repudiated homosexuality to paranoia (via negation and projection), from any one given modality, object, or aim of the drive to another, all happen in an episodic, spasmodic fashion. The unconscious does not drift seamlessly from one configuration to another so much as it hops, in fits and starts. Here. There. And there again. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. At each location and within each interval, the components are arranged in such a way as to make sense, be coherent, organised, and set. Addressing the drive’s developmental itinerary, Freud writes: “We can divide the life of each instinct into a series of separate successive waves, each of which is homogeneous during whatever period of time it may last, and whose relation to one another is comparable to that of successive eruptions of lava” (“Instincts and their Vicissitudes”, 128). The time of the drive is altogether different from, on the one hand, the arrow, river, or wheel (the metaphors are aplenty here) of the time that is continuity, becoming, and decay and, on the other hand, the still and indivisible time that is permanence and perfection. The time of the drive is the time of counting, in integers; it is the time of the vicissitudo.

In this context, and while some translators have accused James Strachey of betraying the letter of Freud’s “Triebe und Triebschiksale” by rendering it “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” rather than, say, “Drives and the Fate of Drives,” Strachey’s, for me, is a faithful capturing of the spirit of the text’s most radical and innovative contribution. Of course, the “instinct” has a fate and hence a history; this is a position Freud had been tirelessly advancing since the days of the Three Essays. The idea that such a history does not always unfold in “developmental” stages but that it often involves discontinuous and yet self-contained and coherent totalities in the style of a vicissitudo(∗∗), totalities that, inherently, lack nothing and lead nowhere is an idea he had not treated as clearly and forcefully before.
________
∗ See “The Observation of Infants in a Set Situation” in Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis.
∗∗ as with the drive’s reversal into its opposite, turning around upon the subject’s own self, repression, and/or sublimation

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