3 :: NEW TECHNOLOGIES,
NEW MOBILITIES
empathic bond with the therapist, thereby enabling the patient to regain a sense of being
substantial and real.’^26 This is suggestive of what we mean by affect storage.Different objects, of course, have different levels of significance for individuals. For
Bollas, individuals in the unconsciousness of day-to-day life invest various objects
(both human and inhuman) to both contain and elaborate the complexity of the self.
The investment of affect in objects is therefore something of an open-ended affair:
such investment can either help to unlock or to imprison the creativity of the self.
The imprisoning of the self within the object world – in which thoughts and feelings
are not experienced as symbolic elaborations, but as things-in-themselves – is
theorized by Bollas as a point of affective closure. Further, the mind is emptied of
pain through the defensive use of omnipotent thinking and denial, and the self is
fixed through an ideological framing (familial, religious, nationalistic and so forth)
of what the world is actually like. The unlocking of the self through the storing of
affects in the object world, however, permits a multiplication of experience and a
transformation in pleasure, creativity and fulfilment. The use of an object as
transformational, whether we speak of an immersion in music, literature or football,
can help open the self to the multiplicity and discontinuity of experience. Likewise,
in the context of mobile lives, the investment of affect in virtual objects, such as
Facebook, Second Life or Skype, can function as a form of emotional containment,
the storing of affect for subsequent retrieval, processing and thinking.From this psychoanalytic standpoint, the creativity of self, which means the capacity
to engage new experience as genuinely new, is closely tied to the openness of psychic
life. Openness in this context involves a kind of pro cessing – a thinking through – of
emotions. A creative involvement with one’s emotional life, as well as the emotional
lives of others, stems from an openness to the complexity, and indeed multiplicity, of
human experience. In this sense, both other people and surrounding objects can help
facilitate experience that is transformational in impact. That is to say, containing
environments supplied by other people and transitional objects assist in the
processing of unthought emotion. Where individuals cannot live creatively, either
because of dominant emotional imprints from past experience that are corrosive, or
because their capacity for processing emotion is underdeveloped or impaired, chronic
depressive and related pathologies are likely to emerge.Although this psychoanalytic understanding of containment only refers to ‘transitional
objects’ in a very general sense, there is no reason to suppose that the main lines of
this argument do not apply with less force to the impact of digital technologies in
day-to-day social life. While we are at the edge of where current psychoanalytic(^26) George Atwood and Robert Stolorow,
Structures of subjectivity: explorations in
psychoanalytic phenomenology (Hillsdale,
NJ: The Analytic Press, 1984), pp. 88–9.