Theory as an Object

Abstract

OCTOBER 113, Summer 2005, pp. 29–38. © 2005 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. To consider the question of theory as an object, I am going to reverse a trend and resort in the first instance to anthropomorphism. I am on safe analytic grounds, for in object relations psychoanalysis, the “object” is a person, invariably someone of significance to the subject. That a person should be seen as an object was offensive to second-wave feminism, which, with some justification, felt that behind the idealization of the mother was the denigration of the woman as a “sexual object.” That the feminine occupies the position of object, not subject, is endorsed in Lacan’s rereading of Freud. If we anthropomorphize theory, where does theory stand in the gender stakes? A few months after the revolutionary moment of May 1968, Donald Winnicott, extraordinary pediatrician and important psychoanalyst, gave a brief paper to the New York Psychoanalytic Society entitled “The Use of an Object and Relating through Identification.”1 A theme of his argument is the positive use of destructiveness, which, given the date of his presentation, suggests that Winnicott, unlike several other colleagues, may implicitly have been on the side of demonstrating youth who hoped (in vain, as it turned out) that May ’68 was “the beginning of the end.” I am going to use Winnicott’s brief, and apparently simple, paper as a focal point. But first I need to situate myself autobiographically in the discussion about art, criticism, and psychoanalytic theory that this issue of October is attempting to open up. I am not an art critic or historian; the nearest I can come to understanding the problems posed by art to psychoanalysis is through literature, which is the field of my original training. My own entry into psychoanalysis came about through the exigencies of the predicament of women. When I was first interested in the position of women in the early 1960s, women did not exist, in a sense rather different from Lacan’s formulation “the woman does not exist,” though ultimately connected to that gnomic utterance. Women were classified as wives of