Guest Editors' Introduction

‘I shall have to speak of things, of which I cannot speak’, writes Samuel Beckett in The Unnameable, ‘but also, which is even more interesting, but also that I, which is if possible even more interesting, that I shall have to, I forget, no matter’. Listening to the voice of folly can be like this: an endless flow of inconsistencies, of contradictions, sayings and unsayings; a tantalising, mischievous mockery of speech –unable to go on, unable to end. And yet – as this volume shows – we are irresistibly drawn to folly, its promises, its whispers of ‘even more interesting’ things: of how we are split between conscious and unconscious, familiar and unfamiliar, same and other. For psychoanalysis, folly is not only a site of hidden truths; it is also, perhaps more importantly, a source of unconscious freedom, a momentary escape from our obsession with rules and order. According to Christopher Bollas, the unconscious self is like a fool, who ‘raises potentially endless questions about diverse and disparate issues’ and thereby provides us with a ‘separate sense’, which opens us to others and to our own creative potential. As Rachel Bowlby elegantly puts it, folly is a ‘soul-mole’, forever shovelling our secrets out into the light: ‘there’s no possible moment of release or resignation when the mole might stop vainly, interminably working away’. Folly’s subversive, creative soliloquies reveal to us a psychic ‘underground repertoire of secrets’; they challenge our established knowledge and invite us, as Bolwby shows, to endless, titillating games of ‘suppression and confession’. For Anne Duprat, this deep-seated playfulness explains folly’s close relation to fiction: what makes them so atone is their ‘capacity of creating alternative representations of the world — and thus of re-figuring the world depicted by reason or history – […] but also their paradoxical structure, and hence the instability of their speech acts, which deny, suspend, or do not seriously guarantee the truth of their statements’. (First paragraph

Object Relations in the Museum: A Psychosocial Perspective

This article theorises museum engagement from a psychosocial perspective. With the aid of selected concepts from object relations theory, it explains how the museum visitor can establish a personal relation to museum objects, making use of them as an ‘aesthetic third’ to symbolise experience. Since such objects are at the same time cultural resources, interacting with them helps the individual to feel part of a shared culture. The article elaborates an example drawn from a research project that aimed to make museum collections available to people with physical and mental health problems. It draws on the work of the British psychoanalysts Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion to explain the salience of the concepts of object use, potential space, containment and reverie within a museum context. It also refers to the work of the contemporary psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas on how objects can become evocative for individuals both by virtue of their intrinsic qualities and by the way they are used to express personal idiom

A arquitetura e o inconsciente

De interessantes maneiras, o mundo da arquitetura – de modo geral aqui definido como a preocupação deliberada com o ambiente humano construído – e o mundo da psicanálise – de modo geral declarado como o lugar para o estudo da vida mental inconsciente – se entrecruzam. Uma construção deriva da imaginação humana, numa dialética que é amplamente influenciada por muitos fatores contribuintes – sua função declarada, sua relação com o entorno, suas possibilidades funcionais, seu aspecto artístico ou seu design, os desejos de seu cliente, a resposta antecipada do público e muitos outros fatores que constituem sua estrutura psíquica. Mesmo que a obra seja proveniente do idioma conhecido de seu arquiteto – e isto fica claro num Le Corbusier ou num Mies Van der Roe – ela passa também através de muitas imagens mentais, derivadas de vários fatores, que serão parte da direção inconsciente do projeto do arquiteto

Unconscious Thinking out of Bounds. Christopher Bollas as Thinker and Artist

status: publishe

Tesserae: essaying fragments of a life

‘Tesserae’ enacts its own content, being a lyric essay about memory, brokenness and how lyric essays can both tell a partial story and open up questions about this story. The mosaic is metaphor and subject, as the narrator remembers moments from her childhood and intimates their effects on her later life, and on her writing. The work aims to demonstrate how the lyric essay form can support life writing that embraces narratorial subjectivity that is complex, fluid, contingent and relational whilst still adhering to Lejeune’s (1989) ‘autobiographical pact’