Descartes and Shaw: Some Spatial Aspects of Object Loss

Data from the lives and work of Descartes and Shaw are presented in support of the hypothesis that real or threatened loss of the mother in infancy may be experienced in spatial terms, and that this may be related to the fact that this trauma occurs at a time when the infant's exploration of space is at its height. The 'latent content' of Descartes's philosophy and his analytic geometry, which defines mathematically the position and movements of any body in space, may be viewed as efforts on his part to deal with the trauma of the mother's 'disappearance' when he was 13 months old by the development of magical techniques aimed at forestalling or controlling any possible repetition of such an event. His marked need to keep on the move, moreover, as well as his tendency to hide from others, even to the point of himself 'disappearing, ' may have been a way of identifying with a mother unconsciously perceived as in vanishing motion.

Shaw's 'abandonment' by his mother when he was just learning to walk is reflected in his play Pygmalion, in which desertion by a mother figure is countered by the fantasy of being able always to pinpoint a person's present or past position in space almost as effectively as by the use of Cartesian coordinates. Shaw, who remained physically close to and dependent on his mother until well into middle life, symbolically immobilized the woman to whom he finally entrusted himself in marriage by rendering himself helplessly immobile at the time. His first reference to what later became Pygmalion was made shortly before this.