EN EREBOS PHOS

Philosophy likes to present itself as a public practice, though the thinker is usually found at home, either symbolically or actually. Philosophers are private intellectuals long before a few of them vie for public attention, sometimes to disastrous effect. Philosophy is actually a kind of interior design put on public display—a house tour, as it were. I can enter some philosophers' space by engaging with their work, but I must remember that this is their mental space. I can pay a visit, but I can't move in for good. David Kishik, Self Study: Notes on the Schizoid Condition

We consecrate the world with our own subjectivity, investing people, places, things, and events with a kind of idiomatic significance. As we inhabit this world of ours, we amble about in a field of pregnant objects that contribute to the dense psychic textures that constitute self experience. Very often we select and use objects in ways unconsciously intended to bring up such imprints: indeed, we do this many times each day, sort of thinking ourself out, by evoking constellations of inner experience. At the same time, however, the people, things, and events of our world simply happen to us, and when they do, we are called into differing forms of being by chance. Thus we oscillate between thinking ourself out through the selection of objects that promote inner experience and being thought out, so to speak, by the environment which plays upon the self. Christopher Bollas, Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience

Ever since I began to think, I came to the bitter, inescapable conclusion that my life is always, at every conscious moment, an essentially painful one. Unpleasant events follow each other like the beads of a rosary changing from uneasiness to the discomfort of unfulfilled desires, to the most terrible bodily pain or desperation, with countless interim stages. Only the fear of the moment of death has kept me alive. Alfred Kubin, Visions from the Other Side

I shall extend the metaphor of our containment of ghosts, the feeling of being inhabited by our history and its objects, by saying that the objects we contain are spirits. We contain what for us will have been the essence of our encounters with objects, reflecting in the synthesis something that transcends our idiom and the structure of the object, but which owes its origin to each. They are the stuff of psychical reality. They can neither be seen nor described. It is possible to inaugurate an effort of representation through free association, but what that gains is less the articulation of the content of the spirit than its elaboration through the formal effect of the free associations, particularly if we consider this from the viewpoint of the transference and the countertransference, where what is being addressed tends to be enacted in the form of the discourse. Christopher Bollas, Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience

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 . . . . 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. Christopher Bollas, Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience

Each secret-theater self is thus engaged in repeatedly playing roles from the past, using techniques discovered in childhood and reproducing, with uncanny precision, the same tragedies and comedies, with the same outcomes and an identical quota of pain and pleasure. What were once attempts at self-cure in the face of mental pain and conflict are now symptoms that the adult I produces, following forgotten childhood solutions. The resulting, psychic scenarios may be called neuroses or narcissistic disorders, addictions or perversions, psychoses or psychosomatoses but they originate from our childlike's I's need to protect itself from psychic suffering. Joyce McDougall, Theatres of the Mind: Illusions and Truth on the Psychoanalytic Stage