A Glimpse into the Fold

Reminiscences of learning by identification and from precepts: A glimpse into the fold between private pain and psychologically charged external fields of reference.

The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside.

I write about internal and external structures of experience upon which I have cultivated a catalogue of cognitive and experiential funds of knowledge. In this piece I foreground mostly the latter. In a recent piece for the inaugural issue of the e-journal of the International Psychoanalytic Association, Psychoanalysis.today (psychoanalysis.today), I did emphasize part of my cognitive ancestry. Now, one may ask, “Who am I and from where have I come?”

I was born in Ghana, West Africa, a place filled with many ordinary and extraordinary personal narratives. I look back with surprise when I notice how these otherwise ordinary and quotidian narratives alternate with extraordinary moments of learning about myself in multiple environments. Let me start with what seemed like a very ordinary activity in my earliest childhood. It was a frequent Saturday morning activity. My next older brother, Tony, and our friends would play around my family's cemetery. We would sit on these marble stones and tell stories about people in our lives and about our grandparents while we explored their lineage. “Oh, this is James whose father was Joshua; this is grandfather Barkers who came after James,” and so on, and so forth. By the time I was ten, I felt comfortable with what I knew about five generations in my family. So rooted and so blessed, I had a good sense of who I was and from where I came. I had an intuitive sense that such a blessing was priceless. I have many interesting memories from that period. Two of them stand out.

In the first, if I may use the present tense