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I got sleepy while driving and pulled in under a tree at the side of the road. Rolled up in the back and went to sleep. How long? Hours. Darkness had come. All of a sudden I was awake and didn’t know who I was. I’m fully conscious but that doesn’t help. Where am I? Who am I? I am something that has just woken up in a back seat, throwing myself around in panic like a cat in a gunnysack. Who am I? After a long silence my life comes back to me. My name comes back to me like an angel. Outside the castle walls there is a trumpet blast and the footsteps that will save me come quickly down the long staircase. It’s me coming! It’s me!
But it is impossible to forget the fifteen second battle in the hell of nothingness a few feet away from a major highway where the cars slip past with their lights on.
In this visceral short piece aptly called ‘The Name’, Tranströmer captures the challenges of embodiment in the absence of the receptive mind of an other who can lend meaning to, that is, ‘name’, the baby’s sensory-motor experiences from the moment he ‘wakes up’ to the external world and engages with it.
‘Where am I? Who am I?’ asks the protagonist. A sense of who we are – of our identity – evolves out of sensory-motor experience, which is inseparable from the interpersonal fields in which it is embedded. Because we are embodied beings we can become trapped in the body – ‘like a cat in a gunnysack’ – unless what is experienced at a bodily level can be mentally represented.
In the best of circumstances the experience of me, as Tranströmer puts it, evolves out of the repeated exchanges with a caregiver capable of mirroring back the child’s experience contingently and in a ‘marked’ manner (Fonagy et al., 2002). But if the experience mediated by the body cannot be mirrored back and named, the self?’s experience of being-in-a-body may feel like ‘the fifteen second battle in the hell of nothingness’ because there is no capacity to mentalize bodily experience (Gergel