Chapter 1 Keeping Death Alive

‘It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,’ the Queen remarked.

What does it mean to be fully and creatively alive? The question is at the heart of this book. It is the focus of this chapter and the next, and it resonates through all the rest.

Have psychoanalysts anything to say about this? Are there specifically psycho analytic ideas about what constitutes being alive in the full sense of the word? The answer given by this book is strongly in the affirmative. Psychoanalysis has a lot to offer on the subject, and two analysts who make a good starting point are Donald Winnicott and Thomas Ogden.

Winnicott’s work has been called ‘a kind of biography of the sense of aliveness as it unfolds in infancy and throughout a lifetime’ (Eigen, 1996: xxi). As regards infancy, Winnicott said that work with borderline patients took him ‘to the early human condition, and here I mean to the early life of the individual rather than to the mental mechanisms of earliest infancy’ (Winnicott, 1965: 235). At the other end of life, Winnicott’s prayer, ‘May I be alive when I die!’—reported by his wife Clare (Winnicott, C., 1989: 4)—confirms the continual importance to him of true aliveness.

In his book Playing and Reality, Winnicott makes a fundamental distinction between two ways of living. The first is based on a relationship to reality that he calls ‘creative apperception’ (Winnicott, 1971a: 65). ‘Apperception’ is an unfamiliar word but an important concept. It means perceiving something and setting it in relation to past experience. This is how we create our personal repertoires of meaning. Unconscious linking allows new perceptions to take on idiosyncratic significance, structuring an alive and dynamic internal world. Psychological health or illness depends on the extent to which this happens: on how far we are able, or find ourselves unable, to live creatively in this manner. And it does go t