occurs in a Christian’s conversion experience, a poet’s reverie with his landscape, a listener’s rapture in a symphony, or a reader’s spell with his poem, such experi-ences crystallize time into a space where subject and object appear to achieve an intimate rendezvous.
While such moments can subsequently be flung into hermeneutical explication, they are fundamentally wordless occasions, notable for the density of the subject’s feeling and the fundamentally non-representational knowledge of being embraced by the aesthetic object. Once experienced, these occasions can sponsor a profound sense of gratitude in the subject that may lead him into a lifelong quest for some other reacquaintance with the aesthetic object. The Christian may go to church and there hope to find traces of his experience, the naturalist may look for another sighting of that rarest of birds that creates for him a moment of sudden awe, and the romantic poet may walk his landscape hoping for a spot in time, a suspended moment when self and object feel reciprocally enhancing and mutually informative.
The hand of fate
Why does the aesthetic moment evoke in us a deep conviction that we have been in rapport with a sacred object? What is the foundation for this belief ? It occurs, in part, because we experience this uncanny moment as an event that is partially sponsored by the object. Further, we cannot calculate when we will have an aes-thetic experience. It is almost inevitably a surprise. This surprise, complemented by an experience of fusion with the object (icon, poem, musical sound, landscape, etc.), of feeling held by the object’s spirit, sponsors a deep conviction that such an occasion must surely be selected for us. The object is ‘the hand of fate’. And in our induction by the object we are suddenly captured in an embrace that is an experience of being rather than mind, rooted in the total involvement of the self rather than objectified via representational or abstract thought.
The aesthetic moment is an experience of ‘rapt, intransitive attention’ (quoted in Krieger, 1976, p. 11), a spell which holds self and Other in symmetry and soli-tude. Time seems suspended. As the aesthetic moment constitutes a deep rapport between subject and object, it provides the person with a generative illusion of fitting with an object.
A form of déjà vu, it is an existential memory: a nonrepresentational recol-lection conveyed through a sense of the uncanny. Such moments feel familiar, sacred, reverential, but are fundamentally outside cognitive coherence. They are registered through an experience in being, rather than mind, because they express that part of us where the experience of rapport with the Other was the essence of life before words existed. As I shall explain later, the aesthetic moment constitutes art of the unthought known. The aesthetic experience is an existential recollec-tion of the time when communicating took place primarily through this illusion of deep rapport of subject and object. Being-with, as a form of dialogue, enabled the baby’s adequate processing of his existence prior to his ability to process it through thought.
The first human aesthetic
The mother’s idiom of care and the infant’s experience of this handling is one of the first if not the earliest human aesthetic. It is the most profound occasion when the nature of the self is formed and transformed by the environment. The uncanny pleasure of being held by a poem, a composition, a painting, or, for that matter, any object, rests on those moments when the infant’s internal world is partly given form by the mother, since he cannot shape them or link them together without her coverage.
The infant has his own intrinsic ‘form’, given the design of his inherited dispo-sition, and his own cognitive abilities (ego capacities) bias his subjective experi-ence of reality. But as I have said earlier, these internal transformational abilities are identified with the mother. This first human aesthetic informs the develop-ment of personal character (which is the utterance of self through the manner of being rather than the representations of the mind) and will predispose all future aesthetic experiences that place the person in subjective rapport with an object.
As I have indicated in chapter 1 , each aesthetic experience is transformational, so the search for what Krieger terms the ‘aesthetic object’ is a quest for the trans-formational object. The transtrans-formational object seems to promise the beseech-ing subject an experience where self fragmentations will be integrated through a processing form.
Depending on whose representation of the person’s subjective experience of infancy we read, we focus on either the person’s capacities (development of cog-nition, motility, adaptive defences, ego capacities), his incapacities (arising from inherent deprivation and subsequent psychic conflicts), or both. No doubt the infant has an internal structural tendency at this point of being, as Piaget argues, but without a facilitative mother, as Winnicott stresses, the infant’s nascent ego capacities will suffer, perhaps irreparably. This is objective fact.
The infant, however, is objectively aware of neither his own ego capacities nor the mother’s logic of care. If he is distressed, the resolution of discomfort is achieved by the apparitional-like presence of mother. The pain of hunger, a moment of emptiness, is transformed by mother’s milk into an experience of fullness. This is a primary transformation: emptiness, agony, and rage become fullness and content. The aesthetic of this experience is the particular way the mother meets the infant’s need and transforms his internal and external realities.
Alongside the infant’s subjective experience of being transformed is the reality that he is being transformed according to the mother’s aesthetic. I believe that he incorporates the milk, the new experience (fullness), and the aesthetic of handling.
The baby takes in not only the contents of the mother’s communications but also their form. In the beginning of life, handling of the infant is the primary mode of communicating, so the internalization of the mother’s form (her aesthetic) is prior to the internalization of her verbal messages. Indeed, I believe that Bateson’s notion of the double bind, where message is contradicted by mode of delivery or vice versa, formulates the conflict between the form as utterance and the content as message. The infant is caught between two contradictory experiences.
The mother conveys her aesthetic by her style of being with the infant – feeding, diaper changing, soothing, crooning, holding, and playing – and it is the entirety of her way of being present with the baby that constitutes the phenomenology of her transformation of the infant’s being. With a ‘good-enough mother’ a tradition of generative transformations of internal and external realities is established. Con-tinuity of being is maintained.
Winnicott writes that this experience takes place in what he terms a ‘facilitat-ing environment’, which includes the mother’s system of care that protects the infant from either internal or external impingement. The baby is primarily protected against impingements which might lead him to replace being taken care of with pre-cocious mental processes that interrupt and dissolve being by means of premature thought and vigilance. Murray Krieger (1976), a literary critic, describes a similar process when he writes about the aesthetic experience. ‘I have tried to establish, then, that to the degree that an experience is functioning in the aesthetic mode, we find ourselves locked within it, freely and yet in a controlled way playing among its surfaces and its depths’ (p. 23). Like Winnicott’s facilitating environment, Krieger’s
‘aesthetic mode’ holds the self within an experience of reverie or rapport that does not stimulate the self into thought. Writes Krieger: ‘Would not such an object have, as a major objective, the need to keep us locked within it – to keep us, that is, from escaping into the world of cognitive or practical concerns?’ (p. 12).
I agree with Krieger, but we may also ask an obvious question. What are the origins of this experience? The aesthetic experience is not something learned by the adult, it is an existential recollection of an experience where being handled by the maternal aesthetic made thinking seemingly irrelevant to survival.
Eventually, under ordinary circumstances, the maternal aesthetic yields to the structure of language, and at this point being can be spoken. The mother’s facili-tation of the word-forming experience, together with the infant’s grasp of gram-matical structure, is the most significant transformation of the infant’s encoded utterance. Until the grasp of the word, the infant’s meaning resides primarily within the mother’s psyche-soma. With the word, the infant has found a new trans-formational object, which facilitates the transition from deep enigmatic privacy towards the culture of the human village.
When the transformational object passes from the mother to the mother’s tongue, the first human aesthetic, self to mother, passes towards the second human aes-thetic, the finding of the word to speak the self, or as a Lacanian might argue, the word’s discovery of the self. As it was mother’s style of transforming the infant’s being that constituted the first human aesthetic, so too, I believe, wording will handle and transform the moods of the self and constitute further terms of that individual’s personal aesthetic.
Thus the first human aesthetic passes into the idiom of formal aesthetics, as the mother’s aesthetic of care passes through her tongue, from cooing, mirror-uttering, singing, story telling, and wording into language.
As part of this extraordinary transition, we bear the structure of the maternal aesthetic with us in several ways. Embedded in Heinz Lichtenstein’s notion of
the ‘identity theme’ (1961) is not only a thematics but an aesthetics. Our internal world is transformed by the mother’s unconscious desire into a primary theme of being with her that will affect all future ways of being with the Other. In an earlier paper (Bollas, 1974) I argued that a person’s character is a subjective recollection of the person’s past, registered through the person’s way of being with himself and others. I would add that character is an aesthetic of being, as we have internalized the structure of our existence, the phenomenological reality of the maternal aes-thetic. We have internalized a process, a forming and transforming idiom, as well as the thematics of mother’s discourse. Whenever we desired, despaired, reached towards, played, or were in rage, love, pain, or need, we were met by mother and handled according to her idiom of care. Whatever our existential critique of her aesthetic, be it generative integration into our own being, compliance followed by dissociated splitting of our true self, or defensive handling of the aesthetic (denial, splitting, repression), we encountered her idiom. Indeed, the way she handled us (either as accepting and facilitating or as refusing and rigid or a mixture of both) will influence our way of handling our self, as I explore in chapter 3 . In a sense, we learn the grammar of our being before we grasp the rules of our language.
In a ‘good-enough’ situation, the mother as transformational object manipu-lates the environment to make it correspond to human need, but this does not preclude the internalization of a frustrating aesthetic. As this experience is inter-nalized into the structure of the ego, the self seeks transformational objects to reach relative symmetry with the environment or to re-create traumatic gaps in the symmetry. A person wants to express to a quizzical friend why he appears to be depressed. ‘Are you angry about something?’ asks the friend. ‘No,’ he replies,
‘I’m not angry. I’m bewildered by a letter I’ve received.’ The word ‘anger’ is not an adequate transformation of the mood to the word; it will not make the exter-nal expression generatively symmetrical with the interexter-nal impression. The word
‘bewildered’ does, and the subject feels relieved and may be understood. This no doubt reflects a need based on experience of a good-enough transformational process, while we know that in another situation another person might need to be misunderstood in order to experience relief.
If failure occurs, let us say at the point of acquiring language, words may become meaningless expressions of the child’s internal world. They may feel use-less, or, if the rules of the family prohibit words which speak the mood of the self, they may feel dangerous. Failure to transform the infant’s internal moods into language may facilitate the schizoid character position, where language is dissociated from feeling, and where the moods of the internal world are almost exclusively registered in the subject’s way of being. True self states then are mani-fested through the ‘language’ of character, held within the self, whereas compliant or abstract thought representations are placed into the word. As such, the subject’s internal or private self is continually dissociated from his executant self. An aes-thetic moment for such an individual may occur when he faces a formidable and confusing external object that establishes an internal confusion in the subject, pro-viding him with an uncanny feeling of the awful and the familiar, an experience
where this aesthetic object seems to demand resolution into clarity but threatens the self with annihilation if the subject seeks to speak it.
Literary examples
An example of the aesthetic experience described occurs in Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick , when Ishmael is captured by the confused portrait of a whale in the Spouter Inn. It is Ishmael’s captivation by the awesome representation of a large hovering mass about to impale itself on a ship that constitutes his aesthetic moment. He cannot define what he sees , despite his efforts to throw the experience into thought, for the experience of his captivity is outside cognitive apprehension.
When he does transform this experience into a word, ‘whale’, he can leave the painting and is released. Because Ishmael can experience aesthetic moments – he is captured by paintings, sermons, books on whales, the whale itself, and idiomatic presences of others (Queequeg for example) – he dwells in the aesthetic moment with a transformational Other: the object that captures and places him under the deep spell of the uncanny. Ishmael therefore reflects the creative alternative to Ahab, who scans the seas for a concrete transformational object (Moby Dick), because he occupies Melville’s position – that of the artist who is in the unique position to create his own aesthetic moments and find symbolic equivalents to psychohistorical experiences that henceforth (as text or painting) become a new reality.
Perhaps it is fitting to illustrate the reverie of the aesthetic moment by quoting at some length from one of the most popular stories read to English school-children:
The Wind in the Willows. A children’s story is a kind of transitional fiction, a text that emerges from a world of the child’s fantastical certitudes and captures this magic through its fairy-tale plotting and serene narrative voice. Children’s fic-tion is replete with moments of horror, awe, fascinafic-tion, and suspense. Self and environment are mutually transformative, as if something of the child’s sense of ontogenetic metamorphosis is registered in the fiction he reads. Often, as in The Wind in the Willows , the tale is about a journey, a picaresque adventure that is faithful to the child’s appreciation of his own psycho-somatic transformations.
The Wind in the Willows is a tale of discovery. A homely and frightened little mole is befriended by an adventuresome if rather reckless water rat who insists that they travel down the river to discover the world. One morning just before dawn they are rowing quietly downstream. Suddenly the rat is startled by what he feels is some ethereal sound. ‘So beautiful and strange and new,’ he says. ‘Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a long-ing in me that is pain, and nothlong-ing seems worthwhile but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it forever.’ The mole has heard nothing but he is respectfully alert to new possibilities. He asks his friend, the rat, what has hap-pened, but the rat is transported into a dream state. ‘The rat never answered, if indeed he heard. Rapt, transported, trembling, he was possessed in all his senses by this new divine thing that caught up his helpless soul and swung and dandled
it, a powerless but happy infant in a strong sustaining grasp.’ This experience – an aesthetic moment – feels new and strange, yet it arouses a ‘longing’; its immediate impact is not cognitively linked to any previous mental experience, yet affectively it evokes the past. Then the author, in the position of the omniscient identifier of the psychic locations of his characters, says that the rat is ‘transported’, possessed, like a ‘powerless but happy infant in a strong sustaining grasp’. The writer knows how to identify this type of experience for the child reader; he invokes the imagery of the infant being held by the mother and places the aesthetic moment in the space between the infant and the caretaker.
The spirit of place
In my view the aesthetic moment is an evocative resurrection of an early ego condition often brought on by a sudden and uncanny rapport with an object, a moment when the subject is captured in an intense illusion of being selected by the environment for some deeply reverential experience. This holding experience sponsors a psycho-somatic memory of the holding environment. It is a pre-verbal, essentially pre-representational registration of the mother’s presence. As with the rat and mole, the experience cannot be properly linked to any discrete object, but is placed instead with a notion of what the object thought to be sponsoring the event should be like: awesome and sacred. The reader of Wind in the Willows discov-ers that in fact Rat and Mole are experiencing the sun rise, but they cannot see the sun, they only experience its effect on their environment. The object casts its shadow on the subject. In much the same way the infant experiences the mother as a process that transforms his internal and external environment, but he does not know that such transformation is partly sponsored by the mother. The experi-ence of the object precedes the knowing of the object. The infant has a prolonged sense of the uncanny, as he dwells with a spirit of place the creation of which is not identifiable.
It is possible to see how the reduction of spiritual experiences to the discrete administration of the mother always strikes us as somehow an insult to the integ-rity of uncanny experience, as the sacred precedes the maternal. Our earliest expe-rience is prior to our knowing of the mother as an object in her own right.
Clinical illustration
A young man in psychotherapy, Jonathan (see C hapter 4 for further discussion of this patient), was born into a wealthy family dominated by an ambitious mother who refused to give up her active social life for the care of her new infant. She hired a nanny, and the infant was passed from one figure to another, from mother to nanny, from nanny to mother, during the first five years of his life. He is very fond of his mother, who is associated with warmth, smell, soft clothing, and tran-quillity. He has no memory of his nanny. As he says: ‘Just a blank. I remember nothing.’ Now, he has what I believe to be an aesthetic experience that utters the
terms of the first human aesthetic. As he wanders through the city, every so often he will see a young man, always in a bus or car, who is going in the opposite direc-tion (a momentary presence) who evokes a sudden feeling that he is the person who can ‘transform’ him. He considers such moments to be the most glorious moments of his life, because they fill him with a ‘transcendental’ sense of ‘exqui-site harmony’, even though they are followed by a sense of blankness and despair.
This transformational object appears and disappears; it promises deliverance but yields absence and blankness. As Jonathan has discovered in the psychoanalysis, the search for this transformational object and the nature of his aesthetic experi-ence belong to an existential memory of his experiexperi-ence of the maternal aesthetic (the past called into the subject’s being). When he was with mother he was filled with a sense of joy; when she left him to the nanny, he felt blank and deserted.
Transformational-object-seeking is an endless memorial search for something in the future that resides in the past. I believe that if we investigate many types of object relating we will discover that the subject is seeking the transformational object and aspiring to be matched in symbiotic harmony within an aesthetic frame that promises to metamorphose the self.
One of the features of Winnicott’s psychoanalytic sensibility is to look within the patient for the infant who lives within a maternal holding environment and to ask how patients communicate their knowledge of this experience through the trans-ference. In living with borderline, schizoid, and narcissistic character disorders, Winnicott knew that he was immersed in the patient’s unconscious reconstruction of a child’s environment, and I understand that it was a feature of his technique to adapt himself to the patient’s ego defects and characterological biases in order to allow for the transference to evolve without the impingement of a premature use of analytic interpretation. From this experiencing of the early infant environ-ment, the analyst could then interpret the past as it was re-created through the transference.
People bear memories of being the mother’s and father’s object in ego structure, and in the course of a person’s object relations he re-presents various positions in the historical theatre of lived experiences between elements of mother, father, and his infant-child self. One idiom of representation is the person’s relation to the self as an object, an object relation where the individual may objectify, imagine, analyze, and manage the self through identification with primary others who have been involved in that very task.
I find the concept of the relation to the self as an object to be of considerable use to me in my clinical work with patients, and although this idea is present in psychoanalytic theory (particularly in Milner, 1969; Modell, 1969; Schafer, 1968; Kohut, 1977; Khan, 1979; and Winnicott, 1965), I do not think it has been adequately conceptualized and it does not appear to be as prominent a feature in our interpretive formulations to our patients as it might be. Win-nicott (1965) said that there is no such thing as a baby without a mother. He also thought that there was no adult without a baby and mother portion or, as I mean to emphasize, there is no adult who, in relation to himself as an object, is not existentially through self management, or representationally through self objectification, managing certain aspects of himself as a mother or father does a child.