The Evocative Object World

Christopher Bollas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134026562
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In The Evocative Object World Christopher Bollas builds on Freud's account of dream formation, combining it with perceptive clinical, theoretical and cultural insights to show how the psychoanalytical method can provide a rich understanding of what has traditionally been regarded as 'the outside world'.

Moving from the fundamentals of the free associative technique, through an examination of how architecture and the built environment interact with individual and societal dream life, Bollas extends the work of psychoanalysis beyond relations with literature and culture to the actual objects which surround us.

As with the evocative external structures of our environment, Bollas describes how the family, with its inherited genetic structures, likewise constitutes a pre-existent unconscious formation into which we are placed, and demonstrates that there is more to this multifaceted unit than the traditional psychoanalytical notion of the Oedipal triangle.

In the process, Bollas also provides a fascinating and comprehensive review of how his own theories have evolved over the past three decades: a period during which, in his view, Western society has increasingly neglected – or even become actively hostile towards – unconscious life.

Throughout this engaging and accessible text, Bollas rejects the simplistic notion that mental life is unconsciously determined. Instead he provides a compelling study of how unconscious life is shaped by a diverse array of both internal and external factors, and how the work of the Freudian pair provides the best means to gain insight into our dreams, our surroundings, our families – and our mental life as a whole.

1
Free association

Riding the train

You are riding in a train, absorbed by the sights flying by. It passes an airport, crosses a canal, traverses a meadow, climbs a long, low hill graced by rows of vineyards, descends into a valley choked with industrial parks, winds its way through dark forests, and finally comes to the outskirts of the small city where you are to disembark.

Each location evokes sets of associations.

The airport reminds you of the coming summer and your holiday abroad. It recalls the plane that brought you to this part of the world in the first place; the never-ending expansions of airports; new aircraft on the design boards; the oddity of flight itself; and innumerable part-thoughts that almost enter consciousness but don’t quite make it.

Crossing the canal, you think of a longed-for trip on a canal boat, yet to be accomplished, signifying the potential remainders of a life. You think of the Erie Canal in America and the songs and folklore linked to it. You think of your mother and father-in-law’s former house which was alongside a small canal. You might also think of the dentist and a root canal.

And so it goes for the other ‘objects’ passed along this journey.

Freud used train travel as a model for his theory of free association: ‘Act as though, for instance, you were a traveller sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which you see outside.’¹

In a sense all Freud did was to take note of how when we think by not concentrating on anything in particular—moving from one idea to the next in an endless chain of associations—we create lines of thought, branching out in many different directions, revealing diverse unconscious interests.

For example, when electing a set of associations for the canal I came up with root canal work on one’s teeth after describing the former location of one’s in-laws: a line of thought I won’t explore any further, but one which, were I to do so, might well divulge through the process of free association a much more complex story—a story revealed not between the lines, but in the chain of ideas within the lines.

Psychoanalysis concentrates on the daily ‘trip’ which we all take, stimulated by desire, need, memory and emotional life.

Trains of thought

The method of free association was designed to reveal a ‘train of thought’. By just talking freely, any person reveals a line of thought—an Other line of thought²—linked by some hidden logic that connects seemingly disconnected ideas.

This is an ordinary part of everyday thinking. For example, I might start my walk to work thinking about a bill I must be sure to pay that afternoon when I’m at my office; then think about the rainfall and wonder if the sun will come out today; then think about a friend’s newly published book which I haven’t read and feel I should before we meet for dinner next week; then think about my early schooldays as I see children being dropped off at the nearby school; then think about how worried one could get as a child about being on time for school; then, on sight of a few sparrows flying by, think about the spring and wonder if they are now nesting; then think of the phrase ‘nest eggs’. Here we may observe, in brief, the following chain: bills; rainfall; friend’s book; children dropped off; on time for school; birds nesting; and ‘nest eggs’.

What do these ideas have to do with one another? Are they just random, or can we discern a train of thought?

I have a bill to pay and remind myself to pay it later that day. This is a kind of burden on my mind that may link with the rainy weather, itself burdensome: when will the sun shine? In other words, when will I be liberated from my burdens? Come to think of it, my unconscious seems to be saying, you also have another debt: you must read your friend’s book before you meet for dinner. The sight of children being dropped off leads to a thought about being on time: a fear of being late may be an expression of my anxiety about paying the bill on time; simultaneously, by ‘using’ the sight of children to locate this anxiety, I am also likely to be taking refuge in the notion that a child such as myself should not have to pay bills. The sight of the birds, which I take to be parent birds building their nests, may sustain the appeal of a child being looked after, but the phrase ‘nest egg’ is probably a way of thinking about the bank and putting money away: building something for the future. Hopefully, I am on the way to living up to my parental responsibilities.

The Freudian Pair

Although he did not ‘discover’ free association, Freud’s invention of the psychoanalytical session gave this ordinary way of thinking a highly privileged and utilitarian space. Most importantly, by asking the person to think out loud, he referred the monologist nature of solitary inner speech to the dialogic structure of a two-person relation, a partnership we might term the Freudian Pair. Let us see how he put it:

The treatment is begun by the patient being required to put himself in the position of an attentive and dispassionate self-observer, merely to read off all the time the surface of his consciousness, and on the one hand to make a duty of the most complete honesty while on the other not to hold back any idea from communication, even if (1) he feels that it is too disagreeable or if (2) he judges that it is nonsensical or (3) too unimportant or (4) irrelevant to what is being looked for. It is uniformly found that precisely those ideas which provoke these last-mentioned reactions are of particular value in discovering the forgotten material.³

Note that Freud does not give top priority to the disclosure of the disagreeable thought. The idea that the psycho-analyst is after one’s dark secrets would not seem to be borne out by Freud’s method. Instead, the most valued material is the apparently ‘irrelevant’.

Freud believed that banished mental contents reentered consciousness in thick disguise, and so it would be in the apparently trivial detail that forbidden ideas and emotions would more probably find expression.

The task assigned to the patient has been subject to various forms of misinterpretation. Did Freud really assume that anyone could disclose every thought passing through the mind? Indeed, would such a discourse not be rather bizarre? Almost immediately Freud qualified the injunction to speak the mind by indicating that there would be resistances to accomplishing this task, especially the arrival of the transference. But over time, psychoanalysts themselves seemed to change the meaning of free association into some form of ideal practice—so much so that by the 1950s it was common for analysts to say, sotto voce, that of course no one could do this. Even today, many analysts regard free association as a distant and unrealisable ideal.

Free talking

Matters come down to earth, however, if we redefine free association as free talking, as nothing more than talking about what is on the mind, moving from one topic to another in a freely moving sequence that does not follow an agenda. The analyst may encourage the patient to speak those thoughts at the back of the mind and, like Freud, will emphasise the need to interrupt a narrative if other thoughts arise; but even if patients rarely achieve this completely, they are nevertheless free associating if they move freely from one topic to the next in an hour.⁴

Embedded in such freedom of psychic movement are resistances to the return of previously repudiated ideas, as well as other defences against the mental pain derived from such freedom to think. Thus free association is always a ‘compromise formation’ between psychic truths and the self’s effort to avoid the pain of such truths. Ironically enough, however, free talking always deploys the mental process of the analysand, revealing the struggle inherent to thinking one’s self.

To patients in Freud’s time and today, however, the method has often seemed almost wilfully indifferent to their plight. ‘What, you mean, just tell you whatever is crossing my mind?’ ‘Can’t you give me some sort of direction?’ ‘Well then, can’t you ask me some questions, which I can answer?’ ‘But surely you have experience and know something of what I am suffering and what causes it—why don’t you just explain it to me?’ And often enough: ‘Well I’m sorry, but I can’t take this Freudian stuff. I have to go to someone who will really help me.’

Psychoanalysis does not provide ready answers to patients’ symptoms or lives. Instead, it supplies a relationship that allows the analysand to hear from his or her own unconscious life, and Freud’s insistence that the most valued material is to be found in the seemingly irrelevant—a kind of trivial pursuit—worked from modernist assumptions that to comprehend an object (a historical period, a novel, a person) one must study it in its ordinary sense, not pre-judged by hierarchical assumptions. If we see the belief in the quotidian as a valued source of human truth beginning in the Renaissance, continuing through Romanticism’s privileging of ordinary human lives, and continuing to this day in those academic studies that believe everyday data is the primary object of scholarly research, then Freud’s theory of evidence is the psychology of our times. Even the postmodernist tenet that any truth deconstructs into smaller truths—themselves disseminating through further epistemic declensions to fractions of their former assertions —is an important outcome of the method of free association. In free associating to the dream, not only does the patient provide evidence that will enable the psychoanalyst to understand certain aspects of the dream; but as we shall see, the method also breaks up the unity of the dream into disparate lines of thought—which had been condensed by the dream-work in the first place—now disseminating possibilities that open to infinity.

The floating analyst

If the patient finds the task upending, what would he or she make of the psychoanalyst’s job?

Experience soon showed that the attitude which the analytic physician could most advantageously adopt was to surrender himself to his own unconscious mental activity, in a state of evenly suspended attention, to avoid so far as possible reflection and the construction of conscious expectations, not to try to fix anything he heard particularly in his memory, and by these means to catch the drift of the patient’s unconscious with his own unconscious.⁵

This way of listening is revolutionary. The analyst is not meant to reflect on the material; not supposed to consciously construct ideas about the material; not encouraged to remember anything. And why? Because by surrendering to his or her own unconscious, the analyst is able to use it to ‘catch the drift’ of the patient’s unconscious. In other words, psychoanalysis works through unconscious communication!

Any patient searching for an expert with answers would be even more disconcerted to discover how this ‘mental health practitioner’ works: caught in the act of drifting, what could the psychoanalyst say to the patient? Not much, it would seem. Indeed, the point of the analyst’s task is to dissolve his or her own consciousness by not concentrating on anything, looking for anything, or remembering anything. Asking the analyst what he or she is thinking in the midst of listening to the patient would be akin to waking someone from a meditative state.

Freud’s method was so disturbing that even his followers could not adhere to his explicit instructions and their implications. Instead, psychoanalysts have tended to focus on other parts of Freud’s writings, especially on his view that psychoanalysis attempts to make unconscious conflicts conscious so that the patient has greater freedom of conscious deliberation. This is certainly true, up to a point. Through free association the psychoanalyst does indeed learn something about the patient’s repressed views, and through moments of revelation—when the train of thought becomes suddenly clear in the analyst’s mind—the psychoanalyst will disclose what he or she thinks he or she knows, adding perhaps to the patient’s understanding of the self.

But the method has implications more wide-ranging than the already impressive accomplishment of rendering unconscious ideas to consciousness: it actually develops the patient’s and the psychoanalyst’s unconscious capabilities. This, as we shall see, is a new form of creativity fostered only in the psychoanalytical space.

Unconscious communication

‘It is a very remarkable thing that the Ucs. of one human being can react upon that of another, without passing through the Cs.,’ wrote Freud in 1915.⁶ So, when the patient is free talking and the analyst is evenly suspended, the method becomes the medium for unconscious communication. Indeed, Freud had earlier likened unconscious communication to a telephone call, in which the receiver transforms the message into coherent speech. (To put it in a formula: he must turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient.’⁷)

We might well puzzle about how exactly this transpires, especially as Freud—metaphors aside—does not spell out the terms of unconscious communication. Certainly he cannot be referring to his topographic model of repression, for if so, this would be a theory of self-deception through distortion: how could one person communicate his or her self-deceptions to the listening other, who, presumably, is functioning along similar lines?⁸

Let us search for clues in the Freudian Pair: the free associating analysand, the evenly suspended analyst.

A sequence of thought is revealed through a chain of seemingly unconnected ideas. A patient talks about listening to Bach’s Mass in B Minor, then, after a pause, talks about going to Selfridges to buy a cricket bat for his son; then talks about a conversation with a friend in which the meaning of loyalty was the object of discussion; then talks about a memory from his youth when he found an abandoned car that proved to have been stolen a few days earlier, a topic the patient now realises is connected to a dream from the previous night; and so it goes…

What is the link between Bach/Mass and Selfridges/ cricket, and so on? Hard to tell, isn’t it? If time permitted, we should just drift along with the patient’s other associations until we reach a revelation—a point when suddenly we are struck by a pattern of thought, composed of those connecting threads between the disparate ideas.

Looking back, the logic of this brief sequence might reveal the following thought: ‘I would be in a mess if as a consequence of my wish to enrich myself [“self-rich-es”] I did not play cricket [fairly] with my friends, especially if I were [car]ried off by stolen ideas abandoned by other people.’

Of course, this would inevitably be an incomplete understanding of the associations. Certain words, such as ‘Selfridges’, might call forth other words, so that in addition to the above we may also hear the words ‘elf’, ‘rigid’ or ‘frigid’; the phrase ‘that’s not cricket’ might be evoked, as might the multiple meanings of the word ‘bat’, in many differing contexts: ‘right off the bat’, ‘old bat’. But even then, these signifiers meet potential other words on the rim of consciousness. Perhaps you can hear the word ‘get’ in ‘cricket’, or the word ‘bad’ in ‘bat’. As the analysand free associates, presenting a field of sounds, the analyst will receive—mostly unconsciously—a complex tapestry of many connections.

There is, then, no single chain of thought: rather, as we shall see, multiple lines of psychic interest, moving through moments of life like some silent radiant intelligence. As the analyst assumes the position of evenly suspended attentiveness, he or she comes under the influence of the unconscious order. Guided by the logic of the patient’s chain of ideas, the analyst at some point will retrospectively discover what the patient has, in part at least, been talking about.

The psychoanalyst’s subjectivity

We communicate with one another unconsciously, therefore, when we give ourselves over to the way unconscious thinking takes place: through the free association of ideas that manifests a hidden order of thought. The psychoanalyst’s unconscious recognises this as its own form of thinking and assumes the task of apprehending patterns of thought, some of which can be brought into consciousness.

But what about the psychoanalyst’s own ‘subjective response’? Would the analyst not distort what he or she hears? How could the analyst be relied upon to detect the chain of associations, given the dynamics of his or her own unconscious?

Confronted with the fact that the psychoanalyst will repress certain of the patient’s contents, will condense various psychic materials into his or her own constellations of thought, will distort or alter communications according to the dream-work of the unconscious, how do we claim a capacity to discern, receive, integrate, and communicate with the patient’s logic of association?

The problem is one of form versus content. The analyst’s unconscious life will alter the patient’s communications, dream-working them into unconscious complexes of the analyst’s own creation; but at the same time the ego will follow the structure of the unconscious logic, a procedural capability unimpeded by the work of the analyst’s own unconscious—much like operating a car is ordinarily uninfluenced by the driver’s passing thoughts.

Pattern recognition is the ego’s ability to perceive reality alongside the self’s own unconscious contents or emotional states of mind. If the analysand thinks through free talking, therefore using the analyst as a medium for thought, then both participants use a part of the ego accustomed to the work of unconscious reception. Such reception begins in infancy, when the mother communicates complex messages to the infant through forms of behaviour—recurring patterns—assimilated by the infant as inner forms for processing lived experience.

The ability to follow the logic of sequence is a formal quality of the ego—a type of intelligence—not fundamentally influenced by the internal life of the recipient or the circumstances of the relationship between its participants.⁹

Indeed, in free dialogue, when two people free associate in the course of a long conversation, as is typical of close friends, they create unconscious lines of thought, working associatively, as they jump from one topic to the next. This is easy to do because we are open to such unconscious mutual influence when relaxed in the presence of an other.

Even as the analyst’s unconscious tracks associative logic—doing nothing more than recognising the way we all naturally think—on other paths he or she will dream-work the patient’s mate...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Free association
• 2 Architecture and the unconscious
• 3 The evocative object world
• 4 The fourth object and beyond
• Notes/References