[CB has briefly outlined the classically Winnicottian notion of 'the transitional object', i.e. the blankie, soft toy, piece of fabric that the largely pre-verbal child makes use of as part of the process of differentiating self and other, learning about words concepts and symbols etc. We therefore have Donald Winnicott's ideas of the true and false selves, 'good enough' parenting, the uses of play and creativity etc as we read the following. CB's use of 'schizoid' also invokes Melanie Klein's ideas about the schizoid and depressive positions].
I think it may be useful to consider a particular use of objects that is to be found along the schizoid path. I refer to those children who turn away from transitional objects in order to foster alternative objects. The child silently refuses to use the actual object world (of persons and cultural objects). This schizoid development involves an appropriation of objects (actual and mental) to construct a special inner mental space (Stewart, 1985) that becomes an alternative world. The alternative object, if actual, is used as if it has no psychosomatic meaning. It is not loved and hated. It is not passionately enjoyed as is the transitional object. The alternative object expresses the child's sense of the death of transitional life, of the collapse of potential space, and the movement toward the compensatory construction of an alternative inner world, far removed from the actual.
This alternative area differs from the internal world proper, in that the objects that are transported to this region, or created there, have a special presence to them, a uniquely alternative object world, alternative even to ordinary inner space. I think these inner objects achieve this special presence, because they are the afterlife and personify the spirits of the dead. The dead here represent the death of self states or others (Green, 1983) and of futures.
For reasons that I hope will become clear, I propose that we recognise this special inner area as bounded by a ghostline. When the subject passes an object representation across this inner line, he deliberately alters it and defines it as a unique inner presence. In particular, he has a sense of creating something else out of the actual object world, of spiriting the essence of self and other states to this alternative world, where former self and others live on like spirits or ghosts. It is not like an internal object proper that represents an actual other. When this person thinks of others or objectifies the self, these internal objects reflect the anguish of this person's frame of mind, while the objects beyond the ghostline are fundamentally transformed into traces of actual objects that feel more within the control of the subject.I think the inner objects are ghostly because they are the remains of the body-self, and preserve the spirit of formerly meaningful psychosomatic experience.
It's a good book overall, dated in some of its assumptions about the nature of autism for instance, literate psychoanalytic writing par excellence, thought-provoking about what can happen between patient and psychoanalyst and also about the differences between 'fate' and 'destiny' (also etymologically savvy about the latter).
The above passage jumped out at me (as they say), putting me immediately in mind both of 'the Upside Down' in Stranger Things (and similarly hostile alteric states in other fictions). Reading the latter in the light of the above passage, we may be drawn towards thinking of 'the Upside Down' as a space where the human capacity to act upon reality through the use of words/ symbols have suffered an early collapse.
We may also be drawn into thinking about addictive psychic spaces and/or behavioural loops, separate from 'normal' above-ground life in ways that can feel simultaneously horribly alive (and thus fascinating) and definitively dull or dead.
(Other potential sources of psychic collapse, though this is to speak of something both 'later' and different: the siren song in Greek mythology, 'the funniest joke in the world' in Monty Python, 'The Riddle of the Universe and Its Solution' by Christopher Cherniak as collected and discussed in Hofstadter and Dennett's The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (1981), the titular 'Infinite Jest', also known as 'the Entertainment' or 'the samizdat' in David Foster Wallace's landmark mid-1990s novel of that name).
(We may also recall Guy Debord: "The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living").
[See also: Ghosts / Incomplete Site Index ]
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