Desiring So and So: Alina Szapocznikow's Attempted Reunification with Death

The author explores the genesis of desire as a phenomenon parallel to D. W. Winnicott's theory of clinical fear of breakdown as the fear of something that has in a meaningful sense already occurred, though without our awareness. Desire, in the same way, may be not new but rather a repetition triggered by a sensory reminder of a primitive experience or feeling that is already unconsciously known to us—in other words, has been integrated into our unconscious idiolects early on. Even as the moment of desire emerges, we mourn the loss of the new desired object—as we have mourned the loss of the original object—the devastating experience of separation from the mother in the moment that we gain a conscious understanding, as opposed to an instinctual sense, of self as separate from other/object. This new desire will have taken the form of an attempt at reunification with the original object. Our unconscious knowledge that such a reunification is impossible leads to an inevitable lack of fulfillment and a repetitive cycling, that retraces itself until it finds a home in a new object of desire—which we will learn to mourn in its turn. This topic is approached by means of an analysis of the sculptor Alina Szapocznikow's oeuvre.