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What is a mood?

There’s a rather unique theory of moods from Christopher Bollas expressed in The Shadow of the Object. He writes (loc 259) that they are “storehouses of unthought known states arriving, apparently out of nowhere, as simple existential facts that envelop up”. There are two things I like about this account:

  • The idea of the “storehouse of unthought known states”: they are past states which have become frozen in some way in our unconscious personal idiom. We got stuck in them in the past and, when they return, we get stuck in them in the present.
  • This stuckness is experienced phenomenologically as an envelopment. The mood surrounds us, constitutes a sudden atmosphere to our being, cuts us off from the air of the object world.

There’s a positive kernel to this analysis in that he sees them as “perhaps awaiting that day when they can be understood and then either transformed into symbolic derivatives or forgotten” (loc 329). In this sense there’s an emancipatory possibility for moods, particularly when we are in them (isn’t that idiom telling…?) such that we have an opportunity to reach a symbolisation which eluded us at the time. What is going on now, in this moment, with what I am feeling? How is it different from what I was feeling only hours ago? We rarely feel moods settle down on us but their presence is striking once they have: a moment of awareness that offers an opportunity. He writes on loc 1787 of how moods shape our relation to the other:

A curious feature of being in a mood is that it does not totally restrict one’s ability to communicate with the Other. A person can be both in a mood and capable of dealing with phenomena outside the mood space. Yet to an onlooker it is clear that the person who is inside a mood is also not present in some private and fundamental way and this absence marks out the territory of mood space. The space in which a person experiences a mood is created, in my view, both by the territorial implications of the individual’s difference in being and by the Other’s recognition of such a state as a legitimate area in which self experiencing has limited priority over self‒Other relating. It is a space, therefore, that is often licensed by a recognition of its necessity.

What is this necessity? Bollas notes how often we intuit that someone in a mood needs space to emerge from it out of their choice. To try to reach them, particularly to go in and get them out, will be a mistake. He sees moods as fundamentally conserving something from the past. From loc 1692:

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.

A child left to solve a problem beyond their capabilities will often write that problem into the fabric of their identity, preserving it as a potentiality which comes to the fore in parallel situations in future. In a mood comes the possibility of reopening the problem as an adult with greater capabilities. It’s not just symbolising what was formerly left beyond the symbolic, it’s a case of finding some movement through the mood (rather than simply waiting for it to pass). It’s getting a grip as an adult on the transformational object that eluded the child: the possibility of resolving, diffusing or transcending what has been experienced as a continual tendency to get stuck on a certain terrain. He continues on loc 2052:

Consequently moods are often the existential registers of the moment of a breakdown between a child and his parents, and they partly indicate the parent’s own developmental arrest, in that the parent was unable to deal appropriately with the child’s particular maturational needs. What had been a self experience in the child, one that could have been integrated into the child’s continuing self development, was rejected by the parents, who failed to perform adequately as ordinary ‘transformational objects’, so that a self state was destined to be frozen by the child into what I have called a conservative object – subsequently represented only through moods.

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