3 :: NEW TECHNOLOGIES,
NEW MOBILITIES
autonomous thought. The flipside, says Bion, is when people become emotionally
stuck, caught in stultifying routines and endless repetition. From this angle, if an
individual’s emotional repertoire becomes constrained or damaged, this in turn
discounts fresh experiences as new. Indeed, the emotional imprint of an individual’s
previous encounters – from early family relationships through childhood to maturity- is very often limiting or coercive to learning and development from fresh experiences.
One of us has elsewhere explored in detail the import of Bion’s psycho – analytic
approach for social theory, especially in terms of the analysis of modern
communications within contemporary societies.^23 What we under – score here is that
Bion’s work is insightful for the critique of mobile lives because of its emphasis on
both the projection outwards, and subsequent retrieval into self, of affects regarding
surrounding objects, both human and inhuman. In order for experience of the world
to become emotionally imprinted upon the psyche, according to Bion, the individual
self must surrender itself to the here-and-now of daily happenings. This involves, in
effect, a ‘letting go’ of consciousness of self and an immersion in sectors of pure
experience. Indeed, it is only through immersion in the object world that the self can
subsequently ‘attach meaning to experience’ in creative and open-ended ways. It is
only in terms of the ‘processing’ of experience, the origin of the reflective self, that
the individual comes to engage in that act which Bion calls ‘thinking’, as well as the
storing of thoughts as memory. Thus, there is an essential interplay between
experience and thinking, raw emotions and reflective life, which is essential to the
individual’s creative engagement with the self, other people and the wider world.The psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, influenced by Bion, has undertaken various
studies that demonstrate the emotional impact of nonhuman objects (such as
communications technologies) upon the self. In a passage from Being a character,
Bollas makes a fundamental point about the process of object engagement:the processional integrity of any object – that which is inherent to
any object when brought to life by an engaging subject – is used
by the individual according to the laws of the dream work. When
we use an object it is as if we know the terms of engagement; we
know we shall ‘enter into’ an intermediate space, and at this point
of entry we change the nature of perception, as we are now
released to dream work, in which subjectivity is scattered and
disseminated into the object world, transformed by that
encounter, then returned to itself after the dialectic, changed in
its inner contents by the history of that moment.^24(^23) Anthony Elliott, Subject to ourselves:
social theory, psychoanalysis and
postmodernity (Boulder, CO: Paradigm
Press, 2004), chapters 4 and 5. See also
Stephen Frosh, Identity crisis (London:
Macmillan, 1991).
(^24) Christopher Bollas, Being a character:
psychoanalysis and self experience (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1992), p. 60 and, for
following quotation, p. 59.