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Jan Abram begins her book with two illustrations. The first she titles “The Surviving Object” and the second “The Non-Surviving Object.” The first is a woodblock print (ukiyo-e) by artist Yōshū Chikanobu called Kindergarten Carp Fish: A baby boy is nestled against his mother's body, a hand reaching for a toy on a string. The mother cradles the baby with one arm and holds a colorful paper kite streamer in her other hand. Mother woos the baby's attention with the dancing toy. The baby has both a safe base and encouragement to explore a bright, active world.
If this scene implies action, thought, comfort, and play, the second shows indifference, confusion, and deadness. A gouache on paper by René Magritte was first titled Maternité (motherhood) and then retitled years later as L'Esprit de géométrie. L'esprit can be understood in different ways: as the animating force of geometry, the thinking of geometry, or even the cleverness of geometry.
In Magritte's work, baby's and mother's heads are exchanged. Mother's shrunken head emerges from the baby's body, the baby's bloated head from the mother's. Eyes are wide open yet unseeing. There is no pleasure in the embrace, no toy, no fun, no outer world. Mother/baby clasps baby/mother with indifference. One can almost hear the despairing phrase: “It is what it is.” There is no shared attention. It is a fair trade but a bad deal.
A training and supervising psychoanalyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society, Abram is in private practice in London. With the highly praised book The Language of Winnicott , she established her prominence as the Winnicott scholar. She asks herself what makes for healthy psychological development. How do people become ill, with what Sigmund Freud would call the death drive, and D. W. Winnicott would reformulate into crude primitive excited
idea(s)? What can analysts do to locate and encourage the exploration of the alive and dead parts? And then sort out who is who?
Abram identifies the core problem o