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Two images at the very outset of Jan Abram’s book The Surviving Object set the scene for her argument. The Ukiyo-e Kindergarten - Carp Fish painted by Chikanobu is a cheerful portrait of a mother holding a child with her left arm while playing with a toy fish suspended to a bamboo stick with her right hand. On the opposite page, Magritte’s The Spirit of Geometry (Motherhood) is more unsettling. In this paradoxical scene, the proportions and roles are inverted, showing a chimeric adult mother with a baby’s head holding a “baby” with an adult woman’s head. The tender gestures are obfuscated by the sad atmosphere emanating from the rigid and inexpressive faces of the adult baby and the inaccessible mother with an infant’s body. According to Abram, the Ukiyo-e shows the surviving object leading to self and creativity. On the other hand, Magritte’s painting represents what she calls the non-surviving object.
At the very start, Abram tells us that “the psychic survival-of-the-object” served as her “vital Ariadne thread” (1) for her “becoming and being a psychoanalyst”. In coining this term (Winnicott himself does not make use of it), she wants to designate, for the very first time, “the core concept in Winnicott’s theoretical matrix” and its “fundamental role”. According to her definition, the survival-of-the-object
refers to the crucial processes involved between object and subject that initiate healthy psychic development. Because it is only due to the object’s psychic survival of the subject’s primitive benign aggression, that the subject will be able to place the object outside in the world. (1)
This formula is thus at the core of both Winnicott’s lifelong quest and Abram’s borrowings from him in her own psychoanalytic practice. It serves as a bridge between two sides of her work: her re-reading of Winnicott’s oeuvre and her own Winnicott-inspired analytic practice.
Before addressing these two points, let u