Umbilical Phantoms

The detachment of the subject from the object that establishes the room for abstract thought originates in the cutting of the umbilical cord.

I have long been fascinated by between states and places and the role they play in making art. I am convinced the psychoanalytic healing and art making are born in the between, a mix of here and there, me and you, dreams and waking reality, inside and outside, feeling and symbol, and the roots of this between reality pre-date the thinking subject but live on in the rhythms of our bodies in relation to other bodies and the world. By mix I mean that the borders we have erected between these binary concepts inevitably buckle, especially when they are applied to infantile experience, a time before such conceptual divisions are symbolized.

Transference and countertransference, which together constitute the electric between zone of analysis, have been theorized in various ways over time, but from the beginning Freud made it clear that transference is not confined to the analytic room, but is part of everyday life. Unrecognized patterns repeat themselves in relation to other people and may turn one person into another or create a mingled being, a fictional or dream character, who plays a role in the story being written and then vanishes or reappears in another guise.

D.W. Winnicott reconfigured Freud’s “intermediate area between illness and real life” (Freud 1955d, 154) into potential space, the rambunctious arena of human play, creativity and culture (Winnicott 2005). In a lecture I gave in Vienna in 2011 for the Freud Foundation (Hustvedt 2012, 196-222), I noted that James Strachey’s translation of Freud’s Tummelplatz as playground may have sparked Winnicott’s metamorphosis of this zone. Winnicott (1971, 100) defines the potential space of cultural experience as “between the individual and the environment (originally the object)”, a space that is not inside the person but not entirely outside them eithe