Othello: Faith and Doubt in the Good Object Introduction

I wrote this paper, I now see, nearly 10 years ago. It started life as a very personal series of thoughts and connections arising directly from the hot heart of experience in my own analysis. And it still seems, reading it now nearly 10 years later, to bear the marks in its writing of the intensity of immediate emotional discovery. But at the same time as being very personal, it also appears to me, from the vantage point of the present, as a very small but seaworthy boat in a big flotilla travelling along the mainstream of the development of post-Kleinian thought.

I trace one of the colours of this development mostly to Meltzer. Some would say Bion, but for me it's Meltzer. I mean the development whereby words like truth, goodness, beauty, mystery, faith, can now be used unblinkingly in the post-Kleinian consulting room, becoming part of the currency of daily analytic exchange. What has happened, I believe, is that an emphasis has shifted towards the good object and its dynamic properties within the self, and away from the many psychic forces which attack, impede and harass the introjection and subsequent stability of that object. It is a shift of emphasis only: the negative elements are not denied or trivialized. Iago remains Iago. But perhaps the play of new light has disclosed more hopeful and creative possibilities.

Something I was and remain very interested in when I wrote this paper is what happens in the personality when that which occupies the position of the good object is actually not good. This was my point about what Othello projects on to Desdemona. When Othello falls in love, Desdemona becomes for him what has the place and potency in him of the good object, but the internal object which is his to project is fickle and untrustworthy. Because of its untrustworthy nature, the carrier of the projection, poor Desdemona, can only be good so long as she is enthroned and imprisoned