May 26, 2023
Last week, we used the teddy bear as our example of what object relations theorist D.W. Winnicott called a “transitional object.” A teddy bear or other comfort object exists in a transitional state that defies the central distinction of modern philosophy, the division between subject and object, self and world. A teddy bear is a real object, not just a subjective fiction like a hallucination or an imaginary friend; yet it is not merely objective, for it is animated by the subject. As such, it is a friendly oxymoron, a paradox with fur, simple and yet profound enough that its significance has expanded into a second newsletter.
Descartes proposed to doubt the existence of everything that could be doubted, and ended up certain of his own consciousness, his ego or “I am.” Everything else is objective to the ego, apart from it, not-self. The Cartesian paradigm has bedeviled philosophy ever since—I say “bedeviled” advisedly, for Blake called the subject-object division a “cloven fiction,” cloven like the devil’s hoof and ultimately, like everything diabolic, ultimately a lie. It seems so common sense: here I am, and everything and everybody else are out there somewhere. But how do I know? The cloven fiction brings with it an intractable problem of epistemology. How do I know that anything outside my conscious awareness even exists? Moreover, the objective world is largely a material world, and how can the opposites of mind and matter interconnect and interact? Overcoming the intractable problems stemming from Cartesian dualism has been the central task of modern thought for centuries. If Descartes had had a teddy bear, perhaps it would all have gone differently.
Depth psychology takes the first step towards an answer: Descartes was wrong. The ego or “I” is not the whole of the mind, but only the tip of its iceberg. Beneath it, an unconscious mind descends into mysterious depths. The foundational metaphor of “depth” psychology is a descent downward and inward, towards a state in which subject and object are not cloven but fused, in a state of what Jung, borrowing from the anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl, called participation mystique. Winnicott, the profoundest thinker of the object relations school of psychoanalysis, postulated a liminal condition between the subject and the object, a state in which the transitional object resides. These strike me as alternative models for the same phenomenon. Depth psychology’s metaphors are introverted: the unconscious and its symbols are downward and inward. Winnicott’s model is extraverted: he thinks of a child as developing through interaction outwardly with the external world and other people via the transitional state. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven is within you—but an equally acceptable translation is “among you” or “in the midst of you.” What the models have in common is the notion of something prior to both subject and object, out of which both come into being.
This may seem abstruse enough, but the idea of an original, non-differentiated unity appears everywhere in mythology, usually as the condition prior to Creation. Sometimes this original state is identified as Chaos, but more sophisticated Creation myths understand that Chaos could not have been mere incoherence, but rather an “enfolded” order, to borrow a term from the physicist David Bohm, which “unfolds” into the outward order of nature at the moment of Creation. However, it is true that the order is at first merely potential. In The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949), Jungian theorist Erich Neumann identifies the initial fusion of opposites with the Ouroboros serpent, the dragon with its tail in its mouth. An Eastern form of the archetype is the serpent lying coiled at the base of the spine in Kundalini yoga. Because this is a state of original unconsciousness, another mythical image for it is a cosmic being who is asleep and dreaming the universe—Vishnu in Hindu mythology, for example—but literature affords many examples of it, including Blake’s Albion, Joyce’s Finnegan in Finnegans Wake, Dylan Thomas’s “long world’s gentleman” in his brief epic “Altarwise by owl-light,” and, last but not least, the Red King in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, whom we dare not awaken because he is dreaming us. The united opposites are sometimes gendered, resulting in the image of male and female deities coupling or lying together in sleep, at other times fused into a single androgynous form. Finally, the coupling of male and female principles may result in the birth of a cosmic child who unites the opposites within himself. Perhaps that is what Stanley Kubrick had in mind in the final image of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
That image of a child one with the universe brings us around again to Winnicott’s theory of child development, which is, as I said last time, a kind of psychologized Creation myth. Winnicott begins from the theory of the object relations school that developed out of Freudian psychoanalysis. In the beginning, the infant does not distinguish between itself and its environment. In particular, it is in a psychologically fused state with the mother and only slowly learns that the mother is a separate being. Out of one comes two: this is a common pattern of Creation myths. But this Creation is also a Fall, for the loss of unity with the environment, especially with the mother, is a dawning of the “reality principle.” The infant repeats Descartes, saying, “I think, therefore I am.” The Cartesian ego or “I am” discovers itself as an alienated awareness surrounded by an environment independent of its wishes, even of its needs. As we saw in the previous newsletter, in Blake this is the fall from the state of Innocence to that of Experience, the repetition in the individual of the universal human fall. The original psychoanalytic point of view stops here, with the triumph of the reality principle. The one heroic virtue in Freudian psychology is the courage of the mature ego to stare unflinchingly at the truth of the human condition, a heroism that Freud identified with science and its disciplined intellectual detachment.
However, as I argued in The Productions of Time, that kind of rational stoicism is an unstable solution, maintained by force of will, usually the attitude of an elite few. Descartes thought he had achieved certainty at least about his own consciousness, but in fact the ego is haunted by a sense of its own unreality. It is intangible, indemonstrable, a ghost in the vast machine of an objective material world. Long before works like Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, both Hamlet and Lear are haunted by a fear that the self is ultimately “nothing,” a word that itself haunts both their plays. In a world dominated by the subject-object split, there are strong social pressures to eliminate the ego altogether. We speak of the capitalist machine, and it is not just a metaphor. For purposes of efficiency and profit, capitalism tries to reduce workers to the condition of being interchangeable parts with no needs or desires of their own. People like Bezos and Musk treat their workers like things because that is what they want them to become. Meanwhile, power-hungry politicians take advantage of the fact that the ego, surrounded by a largely unknown and threatening external reality, lives in a condition of continuous paranoia. People with no inner resources are tempted by the promise of release from the condition of being an anxious, threatened ego, either by being subsumed into a cult or mass movement or by becoming the godlike, charismatic leader of such a group. In short, the dominance of the subject-object cloven fiction has led to the potentially nihilistic collective movements of modern times.
Winnicott’s theory of the transitional object, from which develops the activity or condition he calls “play,” from which in turn develops the realm of “cultural experience” that, in a feedback loop, reinforces and nurtures individual development, has deep affinities with the Romantic theory of the imagination, of which it is in fact a later development. The subject-object split, dividing the self between a solipsistic subjective consciousness that the French analyst Jacques Lacan rightly called the Imaginary and a “reality principle” that negates that essentially narcissistic subjectivity, puncturing its delusions, denying its “pleasure principle,” is in fact not maturity but illusion. It is the result of a failed development, both individual and social. A healthy development does not renounce the early feeling of unity or intimate connection between the self and the world, including other people, but instead works towards an integration that Romantic philosophy sometimes called identity-in-difference. If you do not like philosophical jargon, there is a simpler term for it within literature: metaphor. Metaphor is a paradoxical expression of identity and difference at the same time: A is B, without ceasing to be A. The transitional object, the teddy bear, is a metaphor. It is me; it is not me. This is the world as the imagination sees it, a reality far beyond that of the “reality principle.”
All of which is denied by those who adhere to the cloven fiction. Such people see the imaginative only as the imaginary, as a form of clinging to infantile fantasy. As a child, I thought as a child, but as an adult I am expected to put away childish things, and start living in the “real world.” Insofar as we live in our imagination we are still living in paradise, and a good deal of the hatred of the imagination that pervades our society is envy of those who continue to live at least partly in a paradisal condition by those who are expelled from it, even though they are largely self-exiled. It is exactly the condition of Milton’s Satan looking with furious envy upon the happiness of Adam and Eve. To such alienated people, the deep identity between self, others, nature, and even God is an illusion, and an illusion needs, in a common term of literary theory, to be “demystified.” Against which, in the previous newsletter, I posed Winnicott’s quietly revolutionary statement that there is no disillusionment except on a basis of illusion.
All my life I have witnessed the hatred of those who do not merely reject the imagination but see it as a threat. The rage of some conventional people against us hippies had ostensible social causes—we opposed the Vietnam war, we refused to get conventional jobs. But the real outrage was that we played at being in paradise, or at least in getting back to the Garden, as the lyrics to “Woodstock” put it. We dressed in childishly outlandish clothes, substituted music-making and crafts for “real work,” and returned to the gender and sexual fluidity of childhood. The latter half of my teaching career has been conducted in the face of a war on the liberal arts, and especially upon the humanities. They are not practical: they are irresponsible escapism, and students should be forced to major in something related to the "real world." The most aggressive voices are of those who are in fact themselves divorced from reality—which is why, for example, they are so vulnerable to delusions and conspiracy theories. As Macbeth learned, when the imagination is thwarted, it turns demonic and pursues its enemies like the Furies. In part, the animosity against the imagination is, as I said, envy by those who feel trapped of people who have found some kind of escape from the “reality principle” and its discontents.
But there is an even deeper fear and hatred of the imagination as not just some ivory tower or Neverland, some fake womb to return to, but a transformative power. Wallace Stevens has a poem called “Oak Leaves Are Hands,” which, as its title makes clear, is about the transforming power of metaphor. The embodiment of that power is a mythical character, Lady Lowzen, “For whom what is was other things.” The identification of the natural and the human in the title is exactly the point: the power that produces change in nature and the power of the human imagination are forms of the same power: “As the acorn broods on former oaks…/ Skims the real for its unreal,” so Lady Lowzen, “Out of the movement of few words…/ invigorated / Archaic and future happenings.” The imagination plays, and its play produces metamorphosis. This has social implications. Utopia can be re-defined not as some social engineering blueprint but as a process of metamorphosis by which, through play, we recreate the world, society, and even our own identities.
In a section of an essay called “Creativity and Its Origins,” dating from 1966, long before it became fashionable to assert that gender and sexual identity are social constructs, Winnicott says, “There is nothing new either inside or outside psychoanalysis in the idea that men and women have a ‘predisposition towards bisexuality’” (72). He goes on to cite a moment in which a patient made a breakthrough because Winnicott took the risk of saying to him, “I am listening to a girl. I know perfectly well you are a man but I am listening to a girl, and I am talking to a girl” (73). Then, “After a pause, the patient said, ‘If I were to tell someone about this girl I would be called mad” (73). Winnicott continues, “It was my next remark that surprised me, and it clinched the matter. I said, ‘It was not that you told this to anyone; it is I who see the girl and hear a girl talking, when actually there is a man on my couch. The mad person is myself” (72-73). The patient replied, “I myself could never say (knowing myself to be a man) ‘I am a girl.’ I am not mad that way. But you said, it, and you have spoken to both parts of me’” (73). To the ordinary self, caught in the subject-object illusion of the “reality principle,” a man is a man and a woman is a woman. Just ask any conservative. But to the imagination, what is is other things, at least sometimes. This is what the culture wars are really about: they are a fearful attempt to defend against the imagination’s power to re-imagine, to recreate reality, something that threatens the dominance of the powers that be. The culture wars are conducted by those who want you to feel as powerless, passive, and afraid as possible, to fear all change, all difference.
It follows that the liminal space in which the transitional object exists, what in The Productions of Time I call the Otherworld, is more than just an escape hatch. It is also a process, the deeper levels of the mind working at development, at growth and transformation. It is as much a telos, a goal-directed activity, as it is a place. Which means that it is myth as well as metaphor, diachronic as well as synchronic, narrative as well as pattern. We grow by a series of deaths and rebirths, so that one way of thinking of the imagination as a total myth is as a death-and-rebirth story. Intuitive as he is, Winnicott has that one covered as well. The baby, he insists, should not lose its sense of unity with its environment, should not be cut off. That would be what he calls “trauma” and sees as the genesis of many if not most kinds of later dysfunction. Yet the baby has to come to recognize other people and objects as not-self. At this point, Winnicott takes another leap and identifies the agent of growth as “aggression,” but not aggression in the classic psychoanalytic sense of a frustrated ego reaching after and trying to possess or dominate objects of desire, the sense that will later develop into the will to power. That kind of aggression belongs to the subject-object illusion. Instead, in a remarkable essay called “The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications,” he says that the baby must be able not just to relate to the object but to use the object: “This is part of the change to the reality principle” (89). Then he says, “This change (from relating to usage) means that the subject destroys the object” (89). But in the desired outcome, the “object survives destruction by the subject” (90). The result:
The subject says to the object: “I destroyed you, and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says: “Hullo object!” “I destroyed you.” “I love you.” “You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you”….In other words, because of the survival of the object, the subject may now have started to live a life in the world of objects, and so the subject stands to gain immeasurably; but the price has to be paid in acceptance of the ongoing destruction in unconscious fantasy relative to object-relating” (90).
I think this means exactly what Northrop Frye means when he calls the redemptive process in Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest, an interchange of reality and illusion. In the play, survivors of a shipwreck on a desert island are trapped in various forms of illusion, from the narcissistic pleasure-principle fantasies of the low-life characters to the megalomaniacal will-to-power fantasies of the well-born. All of them, of course, think they are reality-minded, and that the unselfish idealism of the good characters is foolish nonsense, making them fit only to be exploited. The magician Prospero, whose magic is basically theatrical illusion, puts all of them through ordeals appropriate to their particular vices, using magical illusion to dispel and destroy selfish illusion, so that the characters undergo a death-and-rebirth disillusionment that releases them from the prison of their selfishness. What does this mean in common terms? That we have to destroy, not the real object (or person) but our unconscious fantasy of it. When that is destroyed, the real object will still be waiting to greet us—and we may be, perhaps for the first time, even able to love it. To avoid the ambiguity of “destruction,” I have my own term for this process: decreation. The imagination decreates, and by doing so recreates the world. Note that Prospero’s magic represents not only the power of art (he refers to it as “my art”), but the transformative ordeals he puts the characters through can also be seen as a process of education, or of therapy.
Which brings us back to teddy bears, and about time, as you might rightly feel. The transitional object is the child’s entry into the realm of play, and I have always been enamored of certain “childlike” artists who play. In the visual arts, this includes Paul Klee and Joan Miró. In poetry, this includes the seemingly naïve lyrics of Blake and Emily Dickinson, with their irregular rhythms and stanzas modeled on traditional folk songs, hymns, nursery rhymes, and light verse. One such poet is Jay Macpherson, whose first book, The Boatman, was a resource in my newsletter about arks and other preservational containers. Macpherson actually only wrote two books. The second is called Welcoming Disaster, and its chief character, other than the usually-first-person speaker, is the speaker’s teddy bear. It is organized into six sections, probably to suggest the sixfold (plus Sabbath) pattern of the Creation in Genesis and the apocalypse in the Book of Revelation. But this is a Decreation myth, as the section titles make clear: I. Invocation, II. The Way Down, III. The Dark Side, IV. Recognitions, V. Shadows Flee, VI. Epilogue. The implied narrative concerns “the use of an object.”
The first poem to mention the teddy bear is “Substitutions”:
Tedward was a Woolworth’s bear, Filling in for One not there (68)
We are not told who the One is. The capitalization suggests a transcendent figure, but the poem goes on to speak of a visit in which Tedward was left behind. The poem ends by asking “Is love haunted?” so a human love object is possible as well. The two possibilities are not mutually exclusive. Tedward is a substitution, a transitional object linked to an absence.
“First and Last Things” is a tour de force in which the speaker and Tedward act out the Sumerian death-and-rebirth myth of Dumuzi and Inanna. That myth follows the pattern laid out by Robert Graves in The White Goddess, in which a Triple Goddess takes a male lover who becomes her human sacrifice. Inanna kills her lover Dumuzi; her second self, Ereshkigal, embodies the Underworld itself; a third identity, Geshtihinna, redeems Dumuzi by offering herself for him, so Inanna “laid / Out his rebirth suit” (70). The speaker ends by saying:
All of those ladies I am—so my mother Was before me: you, doll and god, my first love --Last, too, most likely.
This is an ironic poem that, instead of genuine transformation, remains trapped in a what Northrop Frye in Words with Power called the sado-masochist cycle. As in The Boatman, Macpherson holds in balance both ironic and hopeful versions of the death-and-rebirth myth.
“After the Explosion” is a follow-up: “Let’s make a grave, my ted, and put you in it, / Under the compost heap where all things quicken” (80). “Surrogate” explicitly names Ted’s mythical role: “He is the Tammuz of my song” (Tammuz is an alternate spelling of Dumuzi), who has gone “to mend the primal wrong, / That rift in Being, Me,” thereby becoming “The first of me to die.”
“Messenger” (88) links the teddy bear with the imagery of The Boatman, as Ted finds an ark. The speaker begs, “Take me, guide of souls, with you, / Paddled in your ghost-canoe.” In the final stanza the speaker promises that she will not, “once we’ve passed the flood,” “ask you who you were.” Tedward has become what Jung would call an animus figure, a male alter ego for a woman, a messenger from another world, a psychopomp or guide through the land of the dead—becomes a male version, in other words, of what Beatrice was for Dante. The shifting identities, male and female, are all aspects of one identity.
In “Transformation,” the bear, who has a satiric nickname of Tadwit, achieves apotheosis: “Tadwit is the world-tree made” (89). The world-tree, or axis mundi, points north where “Whirls in play a smallish Bear…/ All the heavens turn on him.” Two pages onward, an illustration shows Ursa Major and Minor whirling like the Taoist yin and yang around each other, unified opposites, a starry mandala.
In his famous paper on “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” Winnicott said:
I am here staking a claim for an intermediate state between a baby’s inability and his growing ability to recognize and accept reality. I am therefore studying the substance of illusion, that which is allowed to the infant, and which in adult life is inherent in art and religion… (Playing, 3)
In “The Location of Cultural Experience,” he says:
I have used the term cultural experience as an extension of the idea of transitional phenomena and of play…In using the word culture, I am thinking of the inherited tradition….in the myths that were a product of oral tradition there could be said to be a cultural pool giving the history of human culture spanning six thousand years. This history through myth persists to the present time… (Playing, 99)
Jacques Lacan likewise speaks of the child’s escape from the prison of the Imaginary by means of being inserted into what he called the Symbolic order. But in Lacan this insertion is not a liberation, only a change from one kind of alienation to another, from dreamlike solipsism to what one critic called the prisonhouse of language. Winnicott by contrast is in the direct line of the high Romantic tradition that follows Frye’s recipe of an interchange of reality and illusion. The subject-object cloven fiction so commonly taken for reality, including by orthodox Freudianism, becomes seen as an illusion. Whereas the symbolic order, Northrop Frye’s “order of words,” becomes the locus of both reality and our true identity. The imagination is our Ithaca, to which, after long wandering, we at last come home.
And yet, like The Boatman, Welcoming Disaster refuses the happy ending. Its final section, the “Epilogue,” falls from its moment of fully expansive revelation back to the fallen world again. In “Old Age of the Teddy Bear,” the speaker says to Tedward, “Something in both of us / never got born” (95). In the Divine Comedy, although Dante the character leaves behind hell and Purgatory for heaven, for the reader all three modes of experience continue to exist as what Blake called “States.” In a poem titled “A Lost Soul” (76), the speaker wonders about herself:
Some are plain lucky—we ourselves among them: Houses with books, with gardens, all we wanted, Work we enjoy, with colleagues we feel close to…
Yet “Having so much, how is it that we ache for / Those darker others?” The poem ends with a plea to “restore my / Share in perdition.” One part of us, the Satan in us, the Jungian shadow, will always prefer damnation. From one point of view, hell is an illusion, to be dispelled in the final revelation. From another it is a permanent pole of the imagination, an eternal "State," in Blake’s sense, even if we harrow it and liberate individuals from that State. In Jung’s version of Christianity, the godhead is a quaternity: the Trinity must be completed by a dark fourth.
However, I would like to balance Macpherson’s renunciation of paradise with a great poem by another poet who moved in the opposite direction, renouncing it when young but embracing it in a new way when old and on the verge of death. The common critical view of Wallace Stevens is based on such an early poem as “Sunday Morning,” in which a woman stays home from church and, by the end of the poem, speaking for Stevens, abjures all religious transcendence in favor of life on earth, in time. In another poem, he declares, “The imperfect is our paradise.” Nevertheless, Yeats said that we make rhetoric out of our quarrel with others but poetry out of our quarrel with ourselves, and the careers of both Macpherson and Stevens demonstrate the imagination quarreling with itself. It is, incidentally, this in-house quarrel that I think the critic Harold Bloom really perceives when he speaks of the “anxiety of influence.” His own version of it, in which a poet conducts an Oedipal power struggle with some Precursor, is merely rhetoric, and neurotic rhetoric at that.
A good number of Stevens’ late poems seem to have grown restless with the humanistic latter-day-Keats attitude with which he began, and they are often poems haunted by the imminence of death. The Stevens criticism I have read does not seem to know what to make of these late poems, and grows evasive and vague in attempting to explicate them. One of my favorites, in fact one of my all-time favorite poems, period, is a long poem, “The Owl in the Sarcophagus,” in other words the voice of wisdom speaking within the body of this death. It is in fact an elegy, in the tradition of Milton’s “Lycidas,” written on the death of Stevens’ friend Henry Church, who in its second section walks “living among the forms of thought,” in a realm of being “Less time than place, less place than thought of place.” There, “Two forms move among the dead,” two brothers, high sleep and high peace, and a third form, “she that says / Good-by in the darkness.” This is Stevens’ trinity, which in the sixth and final section—like Welcoming Disaster, it has six parts—is deemed “the mythology of modern death.” The question that has to be confronted, however inconveniently, is, what does Stevens think he is doing? Peace and sleep like 18th-century personifications? But there is no mystery. In the poem’s great ending, Stevens tells us:
These are death’s own supremest images, The pure perfections of parental space, The children of a desire that is the will, Even of death, the beings of the mind In the light-bound space of the mind, the floreate flare… It is a child that sings itself to sleep, The mind, among the creatures that it makes, The people, those by which it lives and dies.
I think Winnicott would have loved this poem. Of the two brothers, sleep is the spirit of unity, “the whiteness that is the ultimate intellect.” Peace is the imagination as the power of difference and metamorphosis, adorned with “cryptic stones” and robed with “Generations of the imagination piled / In the manner of its stitchings.” These are the twin Contraries of identity-in-difference, of recreation. The third figure, “she that says good-by losing in self / The sense of self,” who “spoke with backward gestures of her hand,” saying “Keep you, keep you, I am gone, oh keep you as / My memory” is the spirit of decreation.
They are transitional objects for grown-ups, there in attendance at the teddy bear’s picnic held in the location of cultural experience. On the edge of death, we must become again as little children. Or, more accurately, we must remember the child who is still within us, like Citizen Kane remembering Rosebud, the flower of paradise, the child lost in the darkness, still singing, surrounded by its wonderful toys, which both are and are not part of the child itself.
Note: Thanks to Lori, whose degree in psychology, professional experience in the care of small children, and wise intuitiveness enabled her to make useful suggestions about this and the previous newsletter.
References
Macpherson, Jay. Poems Twice Told: The Boatman & Welcoming Disaster. Oxford University Press, 1981.
Winnicott, D.W. Playing and Reality. Tavistock Publications, 1971.