The Shadow of the Object

Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known

Christopher Bollas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315437590
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In The Shadow of the Object, Christopher Bollas integrates aspects of Freud's theory of unconscious thinking with elements from the British Object Relations School. In doing so, he offers radical new visions of the scope of psychoanalysis and expands our understanding of the creativity of the unconscious mind and the aesthetics of human character.

During our formative years, we are continually "impressed" by the object world. Most of this experience will never be consciously thought, and but it resides within us as assumed knowledge. Bollas has termed this "the unthought known", a phrase that has ramified through many realms of human exploration, including the worlds of letters, psychology and the arts.

Aspects of the unthought known --the primary repressed unconscious --will emerge during a psychoanalysis, as a mood, the aesthetic of a dream, or in our relation to the self as other. Within the unique analytic relationship, it becomes possible, at least in part, to think the unthought -- an experience that has enormous transformative potential.

Published here with a new preface by Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object remains a classic of the psychoanalytic literature, written by a truly original thinker.

Part I
The shadow of the object

Chapter 1
The transformational object

We know that because of the considerable prematurity of human birth, the infant depends on the mother for survival. By serving as a supplementary ego (Heimann, 1956) or a facilitating environment (Winnicott, 1963), she both sustains the baby’s life and transmits to the infant, through her own particular idiom of mothering, an aesthetic of being that becomes a feature of the infant’s self. The mother’s way of holding the infant, of responding to his gestures, of selecting objects, and of perceiving the infant’s internal needs constitutes her contribution to the infant‒ mother culture. In a private discourse that can only be developed by mother and child, the language of this relation is the idiom of gesture, gaze, and intersubjective utterance.

In his work on the mother‒child relation, Winnicott stresses what we might call its stillness: the mother provides a continuity of being, she ‘holds’ the infant in an environment of her making that facilitates his growth. And yet, against this reciprocally enhancing stillness, mother and child continuously negotiate intersubjective experience that coheres around the rituals of psychosomatic need: feeding, diapering, soothing, playing, and sleeping. It is undeniable, I think, that as the infant’s ‘other’ self, the mother transforms the baby’s internal and external environment. Edith Jacobson suggests that

when a mother turns the infant on his belly, takes him out of his crib, diapers him, sits him up in her arms and on her lap, rocks him, strokes him, kisses him, feeds him, smiles at him, talks and sings to him, she offers him not only all kinds of libidinal gratifications but simultaneously stimulates and prepares the child’s sitting, standing, crawling, walking, talking, and on and on, i.e., the development of functional ego activity.

(1965, p. 37)

Winnicott (1963b) terms this comprehensive mother the ‘environment’ mother because, for the infant, she is the total environment. To this I would add that the mother is less significant and identifiable as an object than as a process that is identified with cumulative internal and external transformations. I wish to identify the infant’s first subjective experience of the object as a transformational object, and this chapter will address the trace in adult life of this early relationship. A transformational object is experientially identified by the infant with processes that alter self experience. It is an identification that emerges from symbiotic relating, where the first object is ‘known’ not so much by putting it into an object representation, but as a recurrent experience of being – a more existential as opposed to representational knowing. As the mother helps to integrate the infant’s being (instinctual, cognitive, affective, environmental), the rhythms of this process – from unintegration(s) to integration(s) – inform the nature of this ‘object’ relation rather than the qualities of the object as object.

Not yet fully identified as an Other, the mother is experienced as a process of transformation, and this feature of early existence lives on in certain forms of object-seeking in adult life, when the object is sought for its function as a signifier of transformation. Thus, in adult life, the quest is not to possess the object; rather the object is pursued in order to surrender to it as a medium that alters the self, where the subject-as-supplicant now feels himself to be the recipient of envirosomatic caring, identified with metamorphoses of the self. Since it is an identification that begins before the mother is mentally represented as an Other, it is an object relation that emerges not from desire, but from a perceptual identification of the object with its function: the object as envirosomatic transformer of the subject. The memory of this early object relation manifests itself in the person’s search for an object (a person, place, event, ideology) that promises to transform the self.

This conception of the mother being experienced as transformation is supported in several respects. In the first place, she assumes the function of the transformational object, for she constantly alters the infant’s environment to meet his needs. There is no delusion operating in the infant’s identification of the mother with transformation of being through his symbiotic knowing; it is a fact, for she actually transforms his world. In the second place, the infant’s own emergent ego capacities – of motility, perception, and integration – also transform his world. The acquisition of language is perhaps the most significant transformation, but learning to handle and to differentiate between objects, and to remember objects that are not present, is a transformative achievement, as it results in ego change which alters the nature of the infant’s internal world. It is not surprising that the infant identifies this ego achievement with the presence of an object, as the failure of the mother to maintain provision of the facilitating environment, through prolonged absence or bad handling, can evoke ego collapse and precipitate psychic pain.

With the infant’s creation of the transitional object, the transformational process is displaced from the mother-environment (where it originated) into countless subjective-objects, so that the transitional phase is heir to the transformational period, as the infant evolves from experience of the process to articulation of the experience. With the transitional object, the infant can play with the illusion of his own omnipotence (lessening the loss of the environment-mother with generative and phasic delusions of self-and-other creation); he can entertain the idea of the object being got rid of, yet surviving his ruthlessness; and he can find in this transitional experience the freedom of metaphor. What was an actual process can be displaced into symbolic equations which, if supported by the mother, mitigate the loss of the original environment-mother. In a sense, the use of a transitional object is the infant’s first creative act, an event that does not merely display an ego capacity – such as grasping – but indicates the infant’s subjective experience of such capacities.

The search for the transformational object in adult life

I think we have failed to take notice of the phenomenon in adult life of the wide-ranging collective search for an object that is identified with the metamorphosis of the self. In many religious faiths, for example, when the subject believes in the deity’s actual potential to transform the total environment, he sustains the terms of the earliest object tie within a mythic structure. Such knowledge remains symbiotic (that is, it reflects the wisdom of faith) and coexists alongside other forms of knowing. In secular worlds, we see how hope invested in various objects (a new job, a move to another country, a vacation, a change of relationship) may both represent a request for a transformational experience and, at the same time, continue the ‘relationship’ to an object that signifies the experience of transformation. We know that the advertising world makes its living on the trace of this object: the advertised product usually promises to alter the subject’s external environment and hence change internal mood.

The search for such an experience may generate hope, even a sense of confidence and vision, but although it seems to be grounded in the future tense, in finding something in the future to transform the present, it is an object-seeking that recurrently enacts a pre-verbal ego memory. It is usually on the occasion of the aesthetic moment, which I describe in the next chapter, that an individual feels a deep subjective rapport with an object (a painting, a poem, an aria or symphony, or a natural landscape) and experiences an uncanny fusion with the object, an event that re-evokes an ego state that prevailed during early psychic life. However, such occasions, meaningful as they might be, are less noteworthy as transformational accomplishments than they are for their uncanny quality, the sense of being reminded of something never cognitively apprehended but existentially known, the memory of the ontogenetic process rather than thought or phantasies that occur once the self is established. Such aesthetic moments do not sponsor memories of a specific event or relationship, but evoke a psychosomatic sense of fusion that is the subject’s recollection of the transformational object. This anticipation of being transformed by an object – itself an ego memory of the ontogenetic process – inspires the subject with a reverential attitude towards it, so that even though the transformation of the self will not take place on the scale it reached during early life, the adult subject tends to nominate such objects as sacred.

Although my emphasis here is on the positive aesthetic experience, it is well to remember that a person may seek a negative aesthetic experience, for such an occasion ‘prints’ his early ego experiences and registers the structure of the unthought known. Some borderline patients, for example, repeat traumatic situations because through the latter they remember their origins existentially.

In adult life, therefore, to seek the transformational object is to recollect an early object experience, to remember not cognitively but existentially – through intense affective experience – a relationship which was identified with cumulative transformational experiences of the self. Its intensity as an object relation is not due to the fact that this is an object of desire, but to the object being identified with such powerful metamorphoses of being. In the aesthetic moment the subject briefly re-experiences, through ego fusion with the aesthetic object, a sense of the subjective attitude towards the transformational object, although such experiences are re-enacted memories, not re-creations.

The search for symbolic equivalents to the transformational object, and the experience with which it is identified, continues in adult life. We develop faith in a deity whose absence, ironically, is held to be as important a test of man’s being as his presence. We go to the theatre, to the museum, to the landscapes of our choice, to search for aesthetic experiences. We may imagine the self as the transformational facilitator, and we may invest ourselves with capacities to alter the environment that are not only impossible but embarrassing on reflection. In such daydreams the self as transformational object lies somewhere in the future tense, and even ruminative planning about the future (what to do, where to go, etc.) is often a kind of psychic prayer for the arrival of the transformational object: a secular second coming of an object relation experienced in the earliest period of life.

It should not be surprising that varied psychopathologies emerge from the failure, as Winnicott put it, to be disillusioned from this relationship. The gambler’s game is that transformational object which is to metamorphose his entire internal and external world. A criminal seeks the perfect crime to transform the self internally (repairing ego defects and fulfilling id needs) and externally (bringing wealth and happiness). Some forms of erotomania may be efforts to establish the Other as the transformational object.

The search for the perfect crime or the perfect woman is not only a quest for an idealized object. It also constitutes some recognition in the subject of a deficiency in ego experience. The search, even though it serves to split the bad self experience from the subject’s cognitive knowledge, is nonetheless a semiological act that signifies the person’s search for a particular object relation that is associated with ego transformation and repair of the ‘basic fault’ (Balint, 1968).

It may also be true that people who become gamblers reflect a conviction that the mother (that they had as their mother) will not arrive with supplies. The experience of gambling can be seen as an aesthetic moment in which the nature of this person’s relation to the mother is represented.

Clinical example

One of the most common psychopathologies of the transformational object relation occurs in the schizoid self, the patient who may have a wealth of ego strengths (intelligence, talent, accomplishment, success) but who is personally bereft and sad without being clinically depressed.

Peter is a twenty-eight-year-old single male whose sad expressions, dishevelled appearance, and colourless apparel are only mildly relieved by a sardonic sense of humour which brings him no relief, and by an intelligence and education which he uses for the sake of others but never for himself. He was referred by his general practitioner for depression, but his problem was more of an inexorable sadness and personal loneliness. Since his break-up with a girlfriend, he had lived alone in a flat, dispersing himself during the day into multiple odd jobs. Although his days were a flurry of arranged activity, he went through them in a style of agitated passivity, as if he were being aggressively handled by his own work arrangement. Once home, he would collapse into the slovenly comfort of his flat, where he would prop himself before the TV, eat a scanty meal of packaged food, masturbate, and above all, ruminate obsessively about the future and bemoan his current ‘bad luck’. Every week, without failure, he would go home to see his mother. He felt she lived in order to talk about him and thus he must be seen by her in order to keep her content.

Reconstruction of the earliest years of his life yielded the following. Peter was born in a working-class home during the war. While his father was defending the country, the home was occupied by numerous in-laws. Peter was the first child born in the family and he was lavishly idolized, particularly by his mother who spoke constantly to her relatives about how Peter would undo their misery through great deeds. An inveterate dreamer about golden days to come, mother’s true depression showed up in the lifeless manner in which she cared for Peter, since she invested all her liveliness in him as mythical object rather than actual infant. Soon after Peter’s analysis began it became clear to me that he knew himself to be primarily inside a myth he shared with mother; indeed, he knew that she did not actually attend to the real him, but to him as the object of her dreams. As her mythical object, he felt his life to be suspended and, indeed, this was the way he lived. He seemed to be preserving himself, attending to somatic needs, waiting for the day when he would fulfil her dream. But because it was mother’s myth, he could do nothing, only wait for something to happen. He seemed to empty himself compulsively of his true self needs in order to create an empty internal space to receive mother’s dream thoughts. Each visit to the home was curiously like a mother giving her son a narrative feeding. Hence he would empty himself of personal desire and need in order to fulfil mother’s desire and he would preserve himself in a state of suspension from life, waiting for the myth to call him into a transformed reality.

Because his mother has transmitted to him his crucial function as her mythic object, Peter does not experience his internal psychic space as his own. Inner space exists for the Other, so that in reporting inner states of being, Peter does so through a depersonalized narrative, as this region is not the ‘from me’ but the ‘for her’. There is a notable absence in Peter of any sense of self, no quality of an ‘I’, nor even of a ‘me’. Instead his self representation bears more the nature of an ‘it’ on an existential plane. Being an ‘it’ means for him being dormant, suspended, inert. Peter’s free associations are accounts of ‘it’ states: ruminative reports on the happenings of his body as a depersonalized object. His mother’s primary concern was for him to remain in good health in order to fulfil her dreams for him. He was consequently obsessed with any somatic problem, which he reported with almost clinical detachment.

Gradually I recognized that the mythic structure (existing in a narrative rather than existential reality) disguised the secret discourse of the lost culture of Peter’s earliest relation to his mother. His ego-states were an utterance to mother, who used them as the vocabulary of myth. If he was feeling like a casualty because of ego defects and the failure of id needs, it was because he was her knight errant who had fought battles for her and must rest for future missions. If he felt depleted by his personal relations it was because he was a cherished god who could not expect to mix successfully with the masses. If he spoke to his mother with a sigh, she responded not by discovering the source of the sigh, but by telling him not to worry, that soon he would make money, become famous, go on TV, and bring to the family all the wealth that they deserved.

His existential despair was continually flung into mythic narrative, a symbolic order where the real is used to populate the fantastic. On the few occasions when he tried to elicit from his mother some actual attendance to his internal life, she flew into a rage and told him that his misery threatened their lives, as only he could deliver them. He was to remain the golden larva, the unborn hero, who, if he did not shatter mythic function with personal needs, would soon be delivered into a world of riches and fame beyond his imagination.

In the transference Peter spoke of himself as an object in need of care: ‘my stomach hurts’, ‘I have a pain in my neck’, ‘I have a cold’, ‘I don’t feel well’. He spoke to me in the language of sighs, groans, and a haunting laughter which served his need to be emptied of agitated desire and to elicit my acute attention. He rubbed his hands, looked at his fingers, flopped his body around as if it were a sack. As I came to realize that this was not obsessive rumination which served as a resistance, but a secret discourse recalled from the culture of his earliest relations to his mother, he found my attention to his private language an immense relief. I felt that he was trying to share a secret with me within the transference, but it was a secret utterance that was prior to language and masked by its enigmatic quality. I could only ‘enter’ this sequestered culture by speaking to him in its language: to be attentive to all groans, sighs, remarks about his body, etc. Above all, I was to learn that what he wanted was to hear my voice, which I gradually understood to be his need for a good sound. My interpretations were appreciated less for their content, and more for their function as structuring experiences. He rarely recalled the content of an interpretation. What he appreciated was the sense of relief brought to him through my voice.

Peter’s language, which I shared in the beginning of the analysis, reflected the terms of a minimally transformative mother. Later, when Peter would invite me to become a simple accomplice in the mother’s transformational idiom, I would refuse such transformations (such as the golden larva myth) in favour of achievable transformations. As I analyzed this transformational idiom, it gave way to a new culture of relatedness. The constellation had to be broken down through analysis before a new idiom of relatedness could be established.

Peter’s sense of fate, his remaining a potential transformational object to the Other, suggests that not only does the infant require separation and disillusion from the transformational mother, but the mother must also suffer a ‘let-down’ brought on by the real needs of the infant, which mitigates the mother’s unconscious wish for an infant to be her transformational object. Peter’s mother continually refused to recognize and attend to him as a real person, though admittedly there was a quality of what we might call covetous mothering. She possessed him like an alchemist guarding dross that was her potential treasure. His real needs went unmet, as mother insisted that Peter fulfil her sense that destiny would bring her a deliverer-child.

Discussion

The search for the transformational object, in both narcissistic and schizoid characters, is in fact an internal recognition of the need for ego repair and, as such, is a somewhat manic search for health. At the same time their idiom reflects a minimally transformative mother, a factor that becomes clear in the often meagre way they use the analyst in the transference. I will discuss the analyst’s confrontation vis-à-vis the transfer of the patient’s transformational idiom in the chapters on countertransference.

To be sure, one of the features of such patients is their comparative unavailability for relating to the actual Other – their obtuseness or excessive withdrawnness – but I think such characteristics, reflective of psychodevelopmental arrests, also point towards the patient’s need to assert the region of illness as a plea for the arrival of the reg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to the Anniversary Edition
• Introduction
• PART I The shadow of the object
• PART II Moods
• PART III Countertransference
• PART IV Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index