ABSTRACT
In today’s session there were clearly brought together two sets of objects:
One set is similar to, if not identical with, the bizarre objects: the woman with freckles and red hair was felt by him to be part of his personality, a ‘thing’, an undigested object. This and similar objects, or fragments of objects, can be brought together, but cruelly to each other; or in combination, dangerously to him. They are also useless for dream thoughts, for storage as memory, or, as Freud said, for notation, and therefore no good for unconscious waking thinking. Furthermore, they are feared as evidence of the disintegration, under destructive attack, of his personality. They are feared as hostile to him because they have been destroyed so that they now exist only as fragments and not as wholes. They are felt as an internal or external social conscience of a hostile and murderous kind because of what he has done to them.
The second set, the α-objects, the red-haired, freckled woman, are felt to be visual images and to be capable of association. But it is felt that these visual images, by virtue of their suitability for dream-thought, make imminent the depressive position. This carries with it the danger, the certain danger, of the emergence of a murderous super-ego (‘brutal’); and also the problem of the onset of the depressive position, namely depression, a synthesis that reveals the enormity of the destruction already done, and the illimitable vista of the yet unintegrated elements that have not been synthesized.
