3 :: NEW TECHNOLOGIES,
NEW MOBILITIES
Understanding the interweaving of self and object in this way directs our attention to
the complexities of affect in the production of meaning. For Bollas, all psychic
engagement with others and the world involves a kind of ‘holding’ of the trace of the
object itself. It is as if part of the object itself becomes deeply lodged in the self. All
individuals, according to Bollas, inhabit highly condensed psychic textures of the object
world. Or, to put it slightly differently, it is as if the unconscious communications that
arise between people in their use of everyday objects are somehow deeply inscribed
within these structures of interaction, preserved in the object world for future forms of
self-reference, self-experiencing and self-understanding. ‘As we encounter the object
world’, writes Bollas, ‘we are substantially metamorphosed by the structure of objects;
internally transformed by objects that leave their trace within us’.What is meant by the term ‘trace’ in this context? And how, exactly, can the self use
an object (either human or non-human) in such a way that the latter comes to act
as a kind of emotional container for the former? According to Bollas, the trace of
any object lodged deep within the self has its roots in a web of affects, splittings,
projective identifications, part–object relatedness and omnipotent thinking. Such
psychic processes mark a structural boundary for the ‘self-holding’ of affective
states, preserved, as it were, for future forms of thinking and symbolic elaboration.
All object use is emotionally tensional, involving an unconscious oscillation between
love and hate, excitement and guilt. Seeking to capture the experiential dimensions
of emotional containment, Bollas contends that certain objects are like ‘psychic keys’
for particular individuals, in that they enable an opening out of unconscious
experience, a symbolic context for the elaboration of selves. Hence, Bollas speaks of
the transformational aspects of the object, as that which releases and preserves the
erotics of individual subjectivity.Provocatively, Bollas claims that the preservation of affective states – that is, their
storage – is based on modalities of conservative or mnemic objects. This relates to the
storing of affects within the object world of places, events and things.^25 This investment of
affect in objects, both real and virtual, can remain ‘stored’ until such time as the
individual is able to reclaim such self-defining experience in and through symbolic
elaboration. In so doing, the individual might be said to be engaged in an
act of ‘emotional banking’, depositing affects, moods and dispositions into the object
world and storing such aspects of self-experience until they are withdrawn for future
forms of symbolization and thinking. For example, the self-psychological analysts Atwood
and Stolorow discuss the case of a man who regularly used a tape recorder to deposit
and monitor his feelings outside therapy. ‘This use of the tape recorder as a transitional
object’, they comment, ‘both concretized the injured state of the self and reinvoked the(^25) See Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of
the Object: Psychoanalysis and the unknown
thought (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1987).