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.

From Eruption to Frontier to Aevum…

May 25, 2009
Aevum, Dreams, Found Object, Freud, Limbo, MetaTherapeutics, Secondary Revision, Transitionals, Winnicott

Be it in terms of the settling into the depressive position, the resolution of the Oedipus complex, the attainment of ego integration, the cure, or what not, when psychoanalysis prescribes a so-called “healthy” goal for the libido’s development, it also posits the desirability of the point at which the libido’s vicissitudes will have finally come to rest, the point at which Freud’s volcano will have acquired its crowning layer of lava. This, perversely enough, is also the point at which the volcano and, hence, the libido will have gone cold, become extinguished, died. Much to its subject’s chagrin, or perhaps even relief, the libido does die eventually. However, to suggest that the fact of this death is an indicator of health, or that, better still, it is the hoped for effect, if not indeed the mission, of a psychoanalytic cure is, obviously, a conclusion with which Freud would have been extremely uncomfortable.

This, I believe, is why Freud’s writing of the volcano metaphor is itself a volcanic writing. As the waves of lava, and of libido, gradually pile on top of one another and eventually harden, each may consider itself the summit by virtue of the fact that it is the highest and most recent. But each is such a summit only till the next wave erupts and covers it over, till it is nothing but a layer cushioned in between the before and the after, till, in other words, it is reduced to an entity whose time is the time of flow and decay, of the “not yet” or the “not quite,” falsely asserting itself in a hardening that will hopefully seal the crater and prevent the eruption of future layers that are thicker and harder. True to its pen’s volcanic spirit, no sooner had the ink that wrote the self-sufficiency of discontinuous moments and of the aevum dried on the page, that it got displaced by a dread of tempus and a wish for aeternitas, a dread and a wish that lock the fate of such moments to the laws of succession, accumulation, usurpation, to, in other words, Oedipal rivalry. And should such a manoeuvre not be enough to pre-empt any future questioning of these laws, Freud’s pen did not hesitate to retrace its steps back a decade and re-edit a passage from the Three Essays in order to erase any hint of the aevum and confirm that, once and for all, the “instinct” is indeed a “continuously flowing source of stimulation, as contrasted with a ‘stimulus’, which is set up by single excitations coming from without” (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 83).

Taken in its entirety, Freud’s thought cannot but both lure and disappoint those in search of a majestic volcano in which each construct, metaphor, and technique is simply a layer that builds on its antecedents and in so doing helps cushion whatever else has yet to come. I hardly wish to rehash the debates surrounding the turns, reversals, breaks, and repressions, regarding, in sum, the vicissitudes of a text and a thought that were over four decades in the making. I invoke the fact of such vicissitudes in order to unsettle one particular (secondary) revision, obviously perpetrated by Freud as much as by his readers, from which both text and thought have suffered: the re-writing of the discovery of an episodic and hence fragmentary libido into a cohesive “intelligible whole” that is the developmental paradigm. Secondary revision, as I have suggested in previous posts, is at bottom an injunction against mutation, transitionality, and finding; it is a prohibition against anything that would undermine its official story, in this case the story of a libido that is traceable, graspable. It would be convenient to think that such a revision is merely a defence against the continued threats emanating from outside the story and the practice, from, presumably, the detractors who have not read enough or analysed enough. But it is the story and the practice themselves that pose the greatest threat to their presumed stability.

“If now we apply ourselves to considering mental life from a biological point of view, an ‘instinct’ appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representation of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body” (“Instincts and their Vicissitudes”, 121-22) . Freud’s topography here has to allow that the “instinct” is equally “the psychical representation of the stimuli originating from within the mind and reaching the organism, as a measure of the demand made upon the body for work in consequence of its connection with the mind,” that, as a frontier, the drive is porous on the side of both the psychical and the somatic, that it is a passage in at least two different directions each trafficking its own set of demands, that its “source” is often as much psychical as it is “a somatic process which occurs in an organ or part of the body and whose stimulus is represented in mental life by an instinct” (ibid, 123). I hope to come back to this question of the drive and its sources later. In the meantime, I single out this passage of Freud’s not so much because it dovetails with the notion of an animated in-between that is the focus of my thoughts and not because it subtly, but perhaps inadvertently, lays the ground for Winnicott’s transitional object, but because it encapsulates Freud’s own long standing fascination with transitionality, a fascination which, by its very definition, questions any and all claims to coherence and completion.

Though he did not explicitly identify the frontier as a central dimension till the mid 1910s, Freud had been quite taken by that frontier from his earliest days. Consider, for instance, the dream book as it elaborates a topography that belongs to the dream as much as it does to the psyche and its three systems (conscious, pre-conscious, and unconscious). The essence of a dream lies in the distortions it performs as, again, “a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work” in consequence of its connection, in this case, with reality (as stimulus and/or residue) and the unconscious (as wish). The space of the dream is hence the Zwischenreich, as Freud writes in a letter to Fliess, that is not so much an intermediary kingdom but the inter-kingdom (the interregnum) and hence the kingdom in between two kings, itself without a king. The “inter” here is temporal (as a transitional phase between the end of one reign and the beginning of another), spatial (as a border territory created by two adjoining provinces ostensibly obeying the laws of neither), and procedural (as a translation or mediation between two otherwise incongruous systems). This is the inter-kingdom of the dream that is nestled in between a seemingly ever lasting and ever gratifying hallucination and a harsh survivalist reality. We find ourselves here not only in the “facilitating” space of the transitional as Winnicott understood it but also in the realm of the aevum. For what is a dream but a diminished hallucination that grows “like a mushroom out of its mycelium” and whose meaning is never a single abiding wish but a meshwork of latent thoughts that “cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite ending” (The Interpretation of Dreams, 5-525)? Such thoughts do not accrue into an ever higher, or reach into an ever deeper, organisation. Freud himself insisted on the necessity of over-interpretation as a clinical disposition that, contrary to what its “over” (or “über” as in “Überdeutung”) may suggest, makes manifest such a meshwork and, in so doing, betrays the hegemony of an overarching and immutable meaning. It is in this context that Freud wrote his by now infamous metaphor of the dream’s “navel” as a tangle of thoughts that cannot be unravelled at the spot where the dream is supposed to reach down into the unknown (ibid). Freud here tangles up two distinct thoughts: the first is that the multitude of interpretations brings the interpreter face to face with the limit of interpretation (the “unknown”); the second is that, since interpretation is the process that reverses the dream work, the “unknown” is less the spot into which the dream reaches and more the spot from which it emerges.

Though its images may appear chaotic and incomplete, the latent time of the dream is no different from the time of the aevum. It has a beginning but is without end. Interpretation brings to light its “succession of meanings” (The Interpretation of Dreams, 4-214) and clarifies the vicissitudo of its infinite series of thoughts, each as a consistent and useful totality in its own right. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

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

The Middle – 1: Limbus Analyticus

May 8, 2009
Culture, Found Object, Limbo, MetaTherapeutics, Reflexivity, Secondary Revision, Transitionals, Winnicott

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.

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