M105  

Mother as Environment

Object Relations Theory and Christopher Bollas

In The Shadow of the Object. Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known Christopher Bollas talks about ‘transformational’ rather than ‘transitional’ objects. [i] Our primary transformational object is the mother, and this mother/child relationship is a process and an environment.  Lacking awareness of the world, the child’s earliest knowledge is the way in which it is handled and its experience of mother is of ‘the other who alters the self’, which only later becomes ‘a person who has her own life and needs.’ [ii]

According to Bollas-

The ego experience of being transformed by the other remains as a memory that may be re-enacted in aesthetic experiences, in a wide range of culturally-dreamed-of transformational objects (such as new cars, homes, jobs and vacations) that promise total change of internal and external environment.

This implies that we continue to relate to objects as though they were transformational through our continued hope that objects will improve our environment, and we invest our interest in objects because of this transformational hope.  We do not wish to possess the object so much as to be transformed by it.

This subtle use of terminology not only transforms the understanding of a mother/child relationship, it takes the understanding of Western culture with it.  Terms such as ‘consumer society’ suddenly lose all their objects, and ‘acquisition’ becomes a desperate need.  The shopping malls full of cheap goods, fast food outlets and entertainments vaporise into desire for transformation, and all those kitchen gadgets and cosmetics, power tools and electrical goods are merely substitutes for the way mother once took care of the world and made everything right.  Consumer items and personal objects become not only extensions of the transitional object, ‘standing in’ as reassurance for loss, change and insecure identity; they also represent a memory pre-ceding the transitional object, where the mother/environment was a place without disappointments, before there was a world. 

Bollas only mentions aesthetic experience in terms of consumer goods, and it is unclear where ‘art’ might be positioned in this.  It is difficult to see why art should not be just one of many other ‘transformational experiences’.

Perhaps the subtext of art is more complicated, through being both explicit and implicit.  Implicit through all the ways in which objects ‘mean’ in society (status and identity, both inadvertently as well as intentionally), and explicit in the things that art attempts to communicate as meaning; the comments on society and on art itself.

Humans may want objects (relationships) to transform their world; but we also make objects.  Making objects is a way of relating to the world, of learning and thinking, of enjoying sensory experience.  Making objects is transformational, but not in the same way in which buying or acquiring objects would be.

Perhaps one makes objects because one won’t accept those transformational experiences made by others.