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The objects which haunt us

In Vincent Colapietro’s book on Charles Sanders Peirce he describes how the subject furnishes their inner world with cultural riches that leaves them changed by the process. It’s a description which fascinated me when I read it as a PhD student and my thesis was in part an attempt to make sense of the process. It was only 15 years later when reading Bollas that I encountered an adequate theory of how this furnishing actually takes place. From Being a Character by Christopher Bollas pg 59:

I am inhabited, then, by inner structures that can be felt whenever their name is evoked; and in turn, I am also filled with the ghosts of others who have affected me. In psychoanalysis we term these “internal objects,” which clearly do not designate internal pictures, or clear inner dramas, but rather highly condensed psychic textures, the trace of our encounters with the object world. This suggests, among other things, that as we encounter the object world we are substantially metamorphosed by the structure of objects; internally transformed by objects that leave their traces within us, whether it be the effect of a musical structure, a novel, or a person. In play the subject releases the idiom of himself to the field of objects, where he is then transformed by the structure of that experience, and will bear the history of that encounter in the unconscious. To be a character is to enjoy the risk of being processed by the object—indeed, to seek objects, in part, in order to be metamorphosed, as one “goes through” change by going through the processional moment provided by any object’s integrity.

Our inner life is haunted by our past involvements in the world. To talk about this as furnishing mistakes the deliberate aspects of this process (i.e. the past objects which were more or less chosen, becoming highly reflective and self-conscious aspects of our identity) for the process as a whole. The objects we respond to in the world, the things which evoke reactions in us, become part of who we are because we discover our latent nature (what Bollas calls the ‘unthought known’) by elaborating it through these engagements.

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