Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

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A room in the back of my mind

I built a room for you
In the back of my mind
Where the ravenous wolves
And the ghosts I know reside

In a few posts recently I’ve written about the notion of the transformative object from the psychoanalytical framework of Christopher Bollas. These are objects which open out the possibility of change for us, echoing the primordial transformative relation we experienced with the caregiver whose action enabled shifts in our early self states. As he writes in Shadow of the Object loc 656:

The search for transformation and for the transformational object is perhaps the most pervasive archaic object relation, and I want to emphasize that this search arises not out of desire for the object per se, or primarily out of craving or longing. It arises from the person’s certainty that the object will deliver transformation; this certainty is based on the object’s nominated capacity to resuscitate the memory of early ego transformation.

In practice our adult transformational objects can be utterly mundane (e.g. new jobs, homes, cars, holidays) but it’s also an object relation which can be immensely salient for relationships in which we invest the hope of a metamorphosis in being-with another. Much as with the primordial transformational object, in which the process of interacting with the caregiver comes to be located in the caregiver, the relationship becomes overburdened with hopes of personal change.

This is what I feel the Brian Fallon lyric captures so vividly: the fetishisation involved as real possibilities inherent in a bond come to be constructed as a mental alter to change against a background of psychological threat. Later in the song the real foundation underpinning this comes to the fore, as he shares a memory with the same suddenness with which it seemingly occurred to him: 

Last night I remembered being seventeen
I met a girl with a taste for the world
And whiskey and Rites of Spring
Spent every night with cassettes that she liked
In her car that I borrowed a lot
I could never get her to believe

It’s an idealised (though not idolised) memory of a first love, which I think underpins the idolisation express in the opening lyrics of the song. It’s in trying to work through something of this loss when he was seventeen that leads him to construct this “room for you” as an adult. This I think is what Bollas talks about as the conservative object. From Shadow of the Object loc 1962:

Moods typical of a person’s character frequently conserve something that was but is no longer. I will call that experience-memory stored in the internal world a ‘conservative object’. A conservative object is a being state preserved intact within a person’s internal world: it is not intended to change, and acts as a mnemic container of a particular self state conserved because it is linked to the child self’s continuing negotiation with some aspect of the early parental environment.

There’s something preserved in that memory which he hadn’t addressed. A sense of infinite possibility in an infinite summer of whiskey, music and driving which was somehow lost in an enigmatic personal failure: “I could never get her to believe”. In the breakdown of one adult relationship there lurks in the background the failure of the first romantic relationship. A sense that the fragility of one carries forward into the present an unexamined experience of fragility in another: 

But we tasted a kiss that was sent from below
It was cool in the night, I was old as a stone
In the back of a car where they try on your heart
And suddenly show you their teeth

The conservative object freezes the self-state in place which we lack the resources to cope with in the present moment. In the inability to process that sudden sense of danger and risk came an internalised state, expressed in an adult mood of intimate melancholy, echoing the past in the present. It is, as he puts in Being a Character, “Stored unaltered because it is not understood enough to be symbolically elaborated or repressed, this experience of self is sustained as a recurring mood available for understanding in the future” (loc 656).

There’s a dual character to the conservative object which Bollas hints at but I don’t think entirely elaborates. These objects hold us in place, leaving us haunted by ghosts which have failed to become ancestors. But these hauntings also becomes potential sites of reparative work where what we couldn’t symbolically elaborate in the past can now be symbolically elaborated in the present. That I think is why you find so many things that can be understood as conservative objects in song lyrics, as part of a working through that providers a motor for the creative process.

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