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The surviving object is a welcome new book by Jan Abram, the renowned Winnicott scholar, in which she brings together her writings from the 1990s through to the present day. The focus of the book is Abram's interpretation
of Winnicott's theory of early emotional development as set out in his later writings and particularly in “The use of an object” (1969). She argues for the central importance of Winnicott's theoretical matrix, both for psychoanalytic theory and for practice with adult patients.
Abram begins with Winnicott's ideas on the process of “survival-of-theobject”, (italicized throughout to emphasize it's centrality). She describes how the movement from object relating to object usage requires the infant's primary aggression which, in a sufficiently facilitating environment, will be met by the object's psychic survival of this aggression. Where, however, the environment is not sufficiently facilitating, there is an experience of the object's non-survival. The dynamics of this process, whether of survival or non-survival of the object, become internalized by the subject. Abram proposes the use of two novel, linked concepts to describe this process: the intrapsychic “surviving object” and “non-surviving object”. A surviving object is necessary for the subject to begin to perceive the object as separate, to distinguish the self from the m/Other and subsequently to reach “thirdness”. Pathology arises when the non-surviving object dominates, or “eclipses” the surviving object.
Abram goes on to consider the implications of these dynamics for working with adult patients. She proposes that there is an implied theory of desire in Winnicott's work since, where the non-surviving object dominates, “a desire that becomes conscious will feel terrifying because the subject has no experience of the Other having survived their desire related to appetite” (2022, p. 80). At the heart of the non-surviving object, then, lies a primitive terror, arising from early trauma in whic