The Internal Objects of Apartheid

There are folds in time, created by trauma. They foreclose the future, the blossoming of choice and ambition. They foreclose the rich tapestry of the past, channeling events into a single path, leading to the catastrophe, the breakdown, an encounter with “O,” with the Real. In this fold, the present constantly repeats. As Stolorow puts it, “Experiences of emotional trauma become freeze-framed into an eternal present in which one remains forever trapped, or to which one is condemned to be perpetually returned by what I call portkeys to trauma” (Stolorow, 2019). Bion describes just such a portkey, in his experience of the death of Corporal Sweeting on the Amiens-Roye Road on August 8, 1918 (Bion, 2018). It was a moment in which he “died.” And surely folds in time are a kind of death. As Adrienne Harris puts it, “So, Bion, in every waking minute, including the careful unfolding minutes of analytic sessions, is both changing, remembering, and still walking on that road, where his friend is still, in every present minute, being killed and he (Bion) not moving, or saving, or helping. And so forever, walking and dying on that road, both men” (Harris, 2012, p. 1). We are all familiar with folds like these – the moment of a death, a crash, a slip, and a fall. Moments such as these repeat as flashbacks and ruminations; we refer to them as “life-changing.” For as long as these moments repeat, they break down our experience of time.

But the breakdown to which Winnicott refers, and about which I write, is fundamentally different to Bion’s moment of dying, or Stolorow’s “portkey” event. My concern is with the internal objects of apartheid. I am describing an internal world split apart by experience of racism from the very beginning of life. This split parallels Bromberg’s description of the origins of dissociative states, or Donnel Stern’s “unformulated experience” (Bromberg, 2003; Stern, 1997). There is no road to Amiens, but an assault beyond or before words.

Winnicott’s fold in