NB: this essay was written in early 2021 and was originally published in Another Gaze 05.
We can think of the baby’s own experience as akin to a form of dream-life. The observer finds themselves ‘inside the dream’ in a kinaesthetic way – the experience is felt in different kinds of sensations, feelings and thoughts, at different levels of representation. Some occur inside the observer’s body or on their skin —The Infant Observation Handbook
The practice of psychoanalysis – and its training methods – are rooted in presence: two bodies sharing the same space and the feelings engendered in and between them. This experience encompasses not only what is shared through language (the “talking cure”) but, especially in the analysis of young children, non-verbal communication: moods, physicality, noises, symbolisations. Unconscious projections manifested and sent out through the body are felt by the analyst (or observer) kinaesthetically, and accessing this unconscious and pre-verbal mental space which “shows the same protean and kaleidoscopic changes as the contents of a dream” demands a particular kind of attention.1 The knowledge and truths arrived at in this way are felt, qualitative. They are personal, borne of and through the affective relationship shared between analyst and patient, or, in this case, me and baby Sam, whom I have been observing for the past year and a half as part of training to become a child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapist. The experience is one of great intimacy: I have visited Sam in his family environment from when he was nine days old and attempted to understand not just his developmental stages but his psychic states – his fears, desires, and anxieties. I have tried to gather something of how Sam experiences the world in his mind, the mental processes happening in the face of hunger, separation, need, satisfaction.
Melanie Klein famously emphasised the dynamism of mental life in the pre-verbal infant (“it is characteristic of the emotions of the very young infant that they are of an extreme and powerful nature”) and outlined the ways in which early life is defined by conflict.2 Babyhood is a time of terror: as babies we are trapped in a strange, alien world, unable to see properly, constantly surprised and alarmed by our unwieldy bodies, overwhelmed by feelings that are inseparable from physical states, totally vulnerable and dependent on our caretakers to soothe these feelings and make sense of the world for us – to contain us.3 Infant observation is central to psychoanalytic training, a requirement for all trainee psychoanalytic analysts because of its insistence on and evidencing of this immediacy of mental life, examining the ways in which our baby experiences are foundational to how we move through our lives, how we think, manage frustration, experience the world and others. The contours of our later mental worlds are etched out in these early moments, and the purpose of infant observation is to try to re-experience what this is like through engagement with the babies’ “extreme and powerful” states.
However, like almost everything else that depended on presence, my observation moved online last year and now I observe Sam through a screen. I call, via FaceTime, and the phone or iPad is propped up where I can see him, or his mother or sister follow him around. Sometimes he will wander out of view; at other times the device will fall or be knocked over. I will be ‘picked up’ and reoriented in startling ways: Sam might hold the phone to his mouth, or I may be placed high up on a shelf, surveying the scene from above, or balanced on the floor, looking upward at the undersides of the table. The camera might be close enough that I can see the texture of Sam’s clothes or the shininess of his eyes but I cannot smell him, or feel his warmth. The contrasts with my still and singularly located in-person observations are stark and many. I cannot control what I see or when I see it, my peripheral vision is removed, and there is a strange disempowerment: I am not a free agent but depend (much like a baby) on someone picking me up and moving me around the room. Simultaneously, there is also a heightened feeling of voyeurism – without my obtruding physical presence, looking feels more covert. I look out at the whole scene but register as no bigger than the size of the device. Importantly, the intersection of Sam and screen fundamentally alters the traditional mode of observation, giving it with a new mediatised and mediating component, which, although rupturing, potentially estranging, and so on, also opens up new possibilities and speaks to the reality of our contemporary screen-heavy life. Analytic theory and modernity do not always map, and so this rupturing demands theoretical rethinking. What happens to observation – to the dream-life – when mediated in this way?
Things are often made compellingly new to us through juxtaposition, and explicating connections is a primary aim of psychoanalysis, which strives towards understanding. The framework that analysis presupposes has been challenged by the pandemic via the movement from a screen-heavy life to one that depends on them almost entirely: as our interpersonal relationships are reduced to being primarily screen-based, certain psychoanalytic distinctions become hazy. The screen dislocates ideas of self and other, real and unreal, inner and outer world, body and mind, subject and object, material and immaterial. Like facing mirrors, these multiple and proliferating screens engender labyrinthine worlds containing a multitude of subject and object positions and different ways of looking at them. The sense is of a shift – a dislocation of focus. The dream is a different one, no longer the closed world of in-person attention, my regard zeroed in on Sam, but something fractured and unpredictable. The psychoanalytic observational method develops a capacity to open one’s interest to aspects of the experience that might otherwise be overlooked instead of evaluating what one is already looking for, what one is expecting and waiting to see. In this case, the screen itself cannot be overlooked, or indeed simply looked ‘through’. It is part of the dreamscape and demands its own attention.
Psychoanalysis also contends that ruptures can be breakthroughs. Can the newly enscreened nature of my observations tell us something about relationality and knowledge in this ‘new world’, and the forces that frame and structure it? There has been an affective rearrangement, and a “new structure of feeling” is emerging, one that psychoanalysis will have to contend with, and with new tools.4 As we become subjects mediated by the screen, analysis must respond to the ways in which this mediation impacts our selves and our collective life, the shared dream we are inside.
***
I have two nightmares […] I have the nightmare of the labyrinth [and the] other nightmare is that of a mirror. The two are not distinct, as it only takes two facing mirrors to construct a labyrinth —Jorge Luis Borges (from ‘Nightmares’, in Everything and Nothing, New Directions, 1999)
The labyrinth and the mirror are two central analytic metaphors, encompassing concerns with the self (who am I?) and the world (where am I?). If mirrors are objects designed to reflect at a distance – to be looked into – with their suggestions of other worlds and other selves, labyrinths are structures designed to be occupied experientially, to be inside. To be ‘within’ the labyrinth is to be affectively lost, to have a sense of edges and centres but without knowing where they are, with a concomitant uncertainty as to whether the endeavour is to get to the middle or to find a way out. Both Freud and Jung saw the labyrinth as a metaphor for the unconscious, and psychoanalysis posits that from our first moments our psychic structures develop to be defensive and protective. Our conscious mind turns away from threat, anxiety and suffering, creating complex, remarkable unconscious systems for avoiding psychic pain. As an infant the pain we are mostly trying to alleviate is absence or loss; a baby’s most terrified moments stem from fear of nothingness – of losing the world they have – and psychoanalysis suggests that we never fully lose this primitive anxiety. Watching Sam means witnessing the development of his selfbuilding and his worldbuilding, and the reflexivity of these endeavours. It means watching the unfolding of his own labyrinthine experience (new people, places, sounds, tastes, feelings) and the way these experiences manifest in his psychic world: will he be fearful, curious, coy, hesitant, short-tempered or robust in response to these inputs (inputs that have changed vastly in form and content during lockdown)? Everything that happens to and around Sam imprints itself on him neurologically and emotionally, adding another corner or turn to the labyrinth of his mind.
During the pandemic these two types of building have been revealed to be more risky than ever, as any sense of a stable self or setting seems to evaporate; the ephemerality of our world as we know it is glaringly apparent in the face of this alien invader that has disrupted everything from private intimacy to the flow of capital. We do not know what is going on ‘out there’ and this summons the same feeling inside us: reports on the rapid growth of mental health issues and the intensification of existing ones have been ubiquitous across all age groups as a direct result of the pandemic and its consequences. To have our worlds limited or invaded is to lose our sense of them and with it a large part of our sense of ourselves, and efforts to delimit the damage can be seen in attempts to control our environments. (Over lockdown there was a proliferation in requests for designs of personal home labyrinths – if we are lost, or trapped, we can at least try and design our own lostness or entrapment.)5 Phenomena like conspiracy theories arise not from a fear that someone or something is secretly in control but the opposite – that nothing is in control, least of all ourselves, and also that control is something anyone can lay claim to. In the face of uncertainty, we exert ourselves: force is always used to hold an iteration of the world in place (evidenced in, say, the Capitol riot), but this holding is always tenuous (hence the riot’s happening, but also its short-lived nature). Events that shake the world also create openings where the potential for change or remaking can gather strength – the specific velocity that the Black Lives Matter movement gained seemed to be catalysed by the strange summer of 2020. Perhaps the notional idea of an all-encompassing human vulnerability to Covid engendered a new empathy to the specific bodily vulnerability experienced by people of colour in the face of racist brutality; or perhaps the system was at last too weak to gloss over its own crimes. Coronavirus has brought us face to face with ourselves on both macro and micro levels, eliciting a reconsideration of the boundaries between self and other, self and world, and the web of relationships we are always already caught up in, along with the histories of these webs: two facing mirrors; a labyrinth.
To observe Sam – and to observe myself observing him – is to be intoxicated by the idea of subjectivity, by the boundary between ‘I’ and ‘Other’ in our shared world, and the conditions for how things can exist within it, or move around, or be held. Observing a baby is an exercise in understanding both world-dwelling and world-making – a constant, mutual negotiation. We oblige each other, as much as we may try to feign otherwise: Sam depends on his parents for survival, as I depended on mine – from the get go we are entirely interdependent, and our world-making and dwelling hold us in ethical tension with others. The creation and navigation of the labyrinths of our lives is always fraught. These routes overlap and bear upon each other, our mental maps in constant tension with themselves, those of others, and with the larger map of the world. As we make our worlds we act upon one another; we know it takes force to hold something in place, so we are all in a bind. If the virus strands us all in our personal labyrinths of a foggy present, suddenly unable to conceive of a predictable future, the conditions of lockdown simultaneously demand that we think about the larger world we share, the way our movements – the tracing of our own paths – might impact on the paths of others, and vice versa; how we extinguish one world in the very act of trying to keep another in place. The topologies we compose for ourselves to live in – and our movements through them that bear endlessly upon their forms – always have the figure of the Other as their ethical counterpoint. Around every corner this Other is engaged in their own navigations. Pushed together and held apart by the pandemic we all feel the altering of the shape of our worlds and must negotiate our responses to this displacement: both the moral implications of how we choose to move through the world we share and the recognition that our knotty labyrinths, insofar as they are a fight against loss, also contain the inherent idea of lostness.
At the moment, movement is fraught, containing contradictory energies: the (exacerbated) shutdown of borders and the curbing of public and embodied social life sits alongside the incredibly rapid movement of information, money and communications online. Our movements, for the most part, take place through computational tools. As Tom Holert and Doreen Mende observe, “a paradigm of navigation collapses all social and economic activities into the domestic, the facial, the optical, labour, exhaustion, and love are enmeshed into a techno-political website.”6 The screen becomes a portal, a route through which we operate a kind of moving, although of course, “things do not simply move. Routes figure space – they create worlds – and are figured by figurated space, by the worlds through which they move.”7 The movements we make through these technologies are formative, they impact us too. The screen functions as aggressive spacing within routes and worlds that already exist; rather than opening itself up to make room for us, it makes a demand on how we submit to its space.8
***
Sam keeps returning his gaze to the screen; I wonder whether he is looking at me or at his own image in the corner, observing his efforts to lean forward. After rocking a few times he sits back heavily, seemingly frustrated, then looks again towards the camera. From out of shot I hear Mum coo, “Who’s that baby?” and see myself smiling. He tips onto his knees, and launches head-first towards the screen – he crawls straight to the iPad and knocks it down, picks it up, turns it, pulls it to his face, puts his mouth on it – his face and hair fill the shot, and then it goes dark.
In analytic observation, knowledge and truth are only ever understood as points of view, encompassing the uncertainty, subjectivity and vested interests inherent to having a position. It is generally accepted that there is no such thing as a view from nowhere: my ‘somewhereness’ is presumed. However, I am not with Sam and the absence of our mutual presence, our being with each other in a shared space, disrupts this somewhereness, and I am reduced to an unanchored, enscreened gaze. The dislocating of locality, time and movement proliferates points of view, making them participatory, collaborative, multiple, competing. Places from which to behold multiply and change – the camera is without stable orientation, there is no longer any single ‘director’ backstage. Ideas of distance, viewpoint, feeling and of the capacity of language to describe are upset by the insertion of the mediating screen, which is both between us and connecting us, shield and portal, and this way of relating to another, although not new, is given new weight. The screen amplifies the participatory nature of the act of observation: I cannot unmesh myself and I cannot not watch myself watching. Although we watch as though from an outside, the nature of analytic observation demands we also watch ourselves – in a video call this is not metaphorical. For both Sam and I the screen and the camera are the same machine, simultaneously relaying ourselves and reflecting the other. Sam sees me watching him and can return my gaze, and watch himself returning it in real time: like light refracting, a labyrinthine web spins out between us, home to a larger and more incomprehensible dimensionality than the previous way of seeing. It only takes two facing mirrors.
These instabilities disrupt my ability to get ‘inside the dream’, to tune into Sam’s psychic state; unlike, say, the transporting and cohesive experience of cinema, video-calling always returns me to my own dream, my own face floating in the corner and my own locality returned and reflected to me even as I try to focus on Sam. I am not just regarding ‘there’ from ‘here’ – the binaries of here and there are unravelled, and instead two places inhere in the screen, local and foreign. By doing away with the anchoredness of each party, the screen creates a multiplicity of horizons – literally the horizon I can see out of my own window, then also reflected back to me in the window of the screen, juxtaposed with the horizon hanging behind Sam as he peers at me from the corner of my laptop – and this reshapes the topography of the world we are sharing into one with multiple horizonal claims. Rather than the symbol of a horizon (hope, the future) only ever approached from one direction, various directions make themselves known. Self and other are blurred, and both my own and Sam’s embodied selves are split – we are in our bodies but they are also outside us. In general, the self-image is essentially dissociative. Mum’s question to Sam, “Who’s that baby?”, speaks to Lacan’s theory of the mirror, which is that recognising oneself as ‘I’ is like recognising oneself as other (“Yes, that baby over there is me.”) and the idea that this capacity to see oneself as an object is fundamentally alienating. When looking in the mirror this is a process of thought but when looking in the screen it is literal: Sam is able not only to see himself mirrored in the screen, but also to see that self in direct response to the gaze of another (me); he sees himself from another point of view not metaphorically but actually.
Borges’s image of two facing mirrors elicits a paradoxical infinity: an enclosed and endless reflection that holds within it the darkness of a vanishing point. But the screen is not a mirror. The reflective and self-reflexive mirror image on FaceTime is dislocated by the horizon of the elsewhere that dominates the screen, a refracted labyrinth of recognition that encompasses the other, myself as other, elsewhere and here. There is also temporal disruption – the past-based memory of recorded video doesn’t apply, and nor does the absolute simultaneity of the mirror image: the image is live, but there is lag, delay, pixilation. I catch myself smiling or moving milliseconds after the act, frames freeze and then speed up, sound becomes distorted. These moments of slippage undo any sense of filmic ease and the ruptures return us to ourselves and reveal the lie of seamless connectivity, the labour involved in all our loving, but especially in this moment; as the screen reveals, engenders and comprises partiality, removal and dislocation, we must negotiate failed connections, absences. A new kind of intimacy is created in these ‘part’-observations that lack the wholeness of presence where my embodied eye can take in everything at once. Narrowing the focus into that single camera eye explodes what might be outside of it into endless imaginable ‘other’ scenes, belonging to fantasy and unconscious projection.9 There is always something outside the point of view that nevertheless is always felt as inside the world, and I am simultaneously within and beyond the scene. Wondering what goes on beyond the edges of the camera, I yearn to know that which I can only imagine: offscreen space is constantly evoked by the limited camera-eye, and fantasy becomes about what is outside of it, what is around the corner.
This sense of yearning is built into these technologies – it is not possible to meet knowledge’s demand (moving the camera only leaves something else out of view). Something is always absent, the gap cannot be closed (I am here, he is there and vice versa). Unlike the scopophilic pleasure of cinema, our looking is mutually constructed, and we share both the active and passive role, which results in a short circuiting of libidinal energies: “those instincts which have to do with all that may be comprised under the word ‘love’”.10 Sam not only cannot stop gazing at the screen, but physically endeavours to dispel gaps or absences: the space between us. He hurtles towards ‘me’ or perhaps ‘himself’ and yet always comes up against the wall of the screen: it is a hard edge, something we look both at and through, and it is this contrast that elicits desire. There is an erotics of the screen (endless deferral) that jars with the erotics of babyhood (the primary need that desire is eventually met). The limit of the physical boundary of the screen as opposed to the limitless vista presented within it creates this endless deferral, and though desire as deferral is a key tenet of psychoanalysis, the paradox here is that the substitution of the screen renders satisfaction literally impossible. We are in an irresolvable bind – what we want is out of reach and always mediat(is)ed by the interposed digital machinery. Moreover, when Sam reaches for the screen, I am being moved in more than one way. The dislocation of the camera is also the dislocation of affect, reorienting the disembodied me in a space I’m not sure belongs to any ‘where’ with attendant feelings, and in this space navigation is endless. Inevitably, the way we use and are used by these devices has been refocused by crisis, which emerge as necessary supplements. In Derridean terms, the supplement is an addition from the outside, and can only occur where there is an originary lack. Because it supplies what is missing it is already inscribed within that to which it is added: our yearning. The screen reveals both our lack, and then reveals itself to be a feature of it; somewhere between presence and absence, the supplement allows us to conceive of being present to and fulfilled by another, and, according to Derrida, all erotic relations have their own supplementary aspect, which is the very condition of desire and of enjoyment.11 However, the proliferation of the screen concretises a loss that is more total, and the supplement begins to feel like a substitute, with the idea of any kind of originary presence more distant than ever. Yet in the shock of dislocation we can potentially find ways of thinking about the contemporary subject as the inhabitant of a new structure of feeling.
Being so consistently enscreened is a simultaneous return to and disjunction from the self. The screen blurs the subject/object distinction: Sam and I are both both. And furthermore the screen itself and the platforms encoded into it are engaged in their own act of tireless observation; it is not just Sam and I involved in watching and being watched – the reflective surface is not neutral. Sam and I are both subject to something Other than each other. But this play of screens might hold suggestions of alternate worlds, new and unstable spaces and the possibility of other logics of interconnection. This is not to align with ideas of tech Utopianism – technology, as Melvin Kranzberg once said, “is neither good nor bad nor neutral” – but to suggest rather that these compromised devices, imbued with their own interests, also contain the potential to be ‘misused’ in productive ways, or to exceed their own designs.12 They can contain or manifest possibilities, dreams we might dream together, participatory dream worlds of multiple inhabitants that, in encompassing a multitude of positions, belong to nowhere or are knowingly partial, understanding themselves as points of view and celebrating it too. Perhaps the present circumstances demand a new type of imaginary, reflexivity without presumed positionality, that engenders not the circularity or the identical infinity of two facing mirrors but rather labyrinths, overlapping and multidimensional, and which acknowledges that there is no such thing as a view from nowhere – that we are always implicated in the creation of our view.13
***
If you can’t be there, feel there. With Portal from Facebook, distance is just a feeling.
Psychoanalysis posits that our relating is partly defined by lack, by the disappearances and reappearances of the mother and her breast in our babyhood, a sequence of absences and presences. Freud characterised dreaming as a form of wish fulfilment, and in the baby’s life – which itself is “akin to a dream” – desire is central.14 The baby wants (and needs) the things that are provided by the mother, and when the mother makes the baby wait, this deferral forces the baby to manage its desire. This managing is the beginning of thought: the baby is hungry, the breast doesn’t come, and so the baby fantasises (thinks) of the breast and might suck its fingers or purse its mouth. The baby tries to satisfy itself in its mind, and Freud saw dreams as providing a similar function. If the dream is ‘wish fulfilment’, then the screen is what draws attention to the dream and thus to the lack of fulfilment – that the satisfaction of our desires is a desire that itself cannot be satisfied, and we are left with its remainder, which is yearning: “a tendency without end; it is unexpiring, unself-consuming. […] [I]t can’t be purchased or accumulated, only embodied.”15 The advertising slogan for Facebook’s video calling platform ‘Portal’ thus taps into an affective yearning – we want to feel “there”, to disavow the absences between us; distance is just a feeling (rather than, say, the feeling), as though it isn’t feeling that holds us together but proximity.
For Klein, it is our capacity to “feel there”, to be able to hold the other in mind even in their absence – i.e. to come to understand, as a baby, that when the mother leaves she is not gone forever but will return – that is the starting point for a conception of life that is interdependent. It is our capacity to “feel there” – to feel for things outside of ourselves – that engenders empathy and love. It is also a point of anxiety; what if we are not being held in mind by the other? What if we have, in fact, been abandoned forever? And so the negotiation of absence also contains fear, resentment and aggression, negative feelings which are always experienced as though they are being done to us and that we work to evade at any cost. It is the desire to minimise anxiety and amplify love that leads to the creation of these devices that have so fundamentally at their heart the idea of ‘connection’; Mark Zuckerberg’s asserted intention in creating Facebook was not monetary but benevolent: “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected […] to make it so there’s as little friction as possible to having a social experience.”16 This aim for a frictionless world reads as one in which there is no risk: no touch, or rub, or burn, no edges meeting, or indeed (and this is the fear) not meeting, no rejection or absence. Someone, somewhere, is always at our fingertips.
Of course, now, in this time of hyper bodily anxiety, the screen is also a literal form of protection, a shield against the virus. Sam presses his hand to the screen and I can see the web of his fingers, and the sweat on his mother’s forehead is rendered in pixels – but despite their ‘nearness’ there is no ‘risk’. I find I am moved by these moments – physical contagion may be impossible, but affect seems to leap from the screen, traversing space and time in an instant. Our desire to be near other bodies prevails even in times when those bodies may be sites of specific and undefendable danger. Distance is not a feeling, but rather a position which gives rise to feelings. It is space between bodies, between subjects and objects, remote or proximate, something to be navigated, mapped, closed. The very word “portal” implies movement, the eradication of horizons. Digital devices are a means to enact this movement and, in facilitating it, endlessly recompose the world. Not only do they manifest the labyrinth of affect (structures of feeling that weave between bodies and through screens), they also enact their own labyrinth of engagement. ‘Portal’ functions as a connective device that makes legible our affective web and that can give form and route to our yearning or desire. Feeling holds us together. Affect, like a virus, is circulatory. These devices are part of that circulatory system and they have their own vested interests. As they watch and listen, the screen and the platforms it contains index a particular sort of material and extractive economy; data is mined, privacy is disregarded, information is gathered and sold.
When undertaken through the use of information gathering machinery, my observation of Sam cannot be separated from the interests of these platforms. The portals we choose to navigate remoteness contour the world we are traversing, figuring routes in relation to an economy of global corporate interest that we may not even be aware of but that itself shapes us. These technologies do not simply emerge from the world but refashion it in their emergence, and we are refashioned as we use them. We are worked upon, co-creators and inhabitants of a labyrinthine superstructure that surrounds us all. As Bruno Latour writes for the New York Times, “The idea that we can stand back and behold nature at a distance, as something discrete from our actions, is an illusion… in that sense, there is no outside anymore.”17 This sense of ourselves as all ‘inside’ is not just a material planetary phenomenon, but belongs to our psychic lives, our bodily lives, and our cultural lives. Claude Lévi-Strauss posited that because every cultural world feels like a closed space to those within it, each cultural world is structured immunologically in the sense that it interprets every difference within it as a possible foreign invasion and uses mechanisms to neutralise, expel, or extinguish this ‘invasion.’18 When every cultural world is facing the same invader, the sense of a larger shared world that holds these cultural microcosms in tension is glaringly apparent. In our physical atomisation from each other our webs of obligation have never been more apparent, nor have the structures that function to conceal these webs.
How, then, (as psychoanalysis purports to be able to do) can one move from a local position, with its personal horizons of revelation, to say anything about a broader, shared horizon on a planetary scale, not only in general but especially in our current moment? How do we go on being when our endeavours have been re-revealed as resting on exclusion, expulsion, and defence, and when the altering of the fabric of the world at large – our shared ‘there’ – has so starkly explicated not a communal loss but the fundamental imbalance of loss’s apportioning? Arundhati Roy sees this as a question of imagination: “[H]istorically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”19 But the virus is not a simply a gateway that we will pass through, as much as that sounds comforting – it is a ‘historically’ constituted and constituting force, and it emerges out of a past that created the conditions that have enabled it to proliferate. Trauma at this scale shows us the already pre-existing ruptures in our societal meshes and this is part of the horror of what we have to face. Much as in psychoanalysis, we must treat the virus as a symptom of a larger underlying pathology, to do with the environment, public health, institutionalised racism, global capitalism and state politics. We need to imagine not a new world and how to get there, but a new ‘here’. As Gertrude Stein said, “there is no there there.”20 The idea of ‘thereness’, in its implication of an alternate place – an elsewhere – has been swept away; there is no ‘elsewhere’ and there never was to begin with. Roy’s suggestion of imagination is key, but this should involve not an imagining of a future, a horizon to move towards, but an effort to rethink the world of the present, to consider the conditions that have produced our situation and the demand it makes upon us; a portal that does not move us from one world into another but that perhaps shatters our perception of the world we are in, or illuminates it as something experienced multiply. Connection has been exposed as enmeshment – rather than touching poles we have porousness, eternal movement, ricochet, and portals that can land us right into other places, working as gateways into others’ experience, emphasising that perhaps no world is actually one world; “the feeling that one lives in the best condition of the world unveils the intuition that there is always more than one world in the world at any one time.”21 The potential futures internal to every actual world are encumbered with past and present obligations that are constantly transforming, moving and contain their own implications, which – like the unconscious – we may not even fully be aware of, but that nevertheless are encoded with “alternative possibilities for life.”22
Psychoanalysis argues that we conceal the unconscious from ourselves because reality is too much to bear. Our motivations and desires are tacitly masked not only to others but to ourselves – repression, resistance, the tactics we use to keep the unconscious concealed are all indicative of the fear of what may lie beneath the mask. Borges’s nightmare continues: “I see myself reflected in a mirror, but the reflection is wearing a mask. I am afraid to pull the mask off, afraid to see my real face, which I imagine to be hideous. There may be evil or something more beyond anything I am capable of imagining.”23 But Covid has shown us that it is the mask itself that iterates horribleness, masks of power, or denial, or silence. The dread of the mask is always the dread of the unknown. Our mass masking seems to be indicative of a symbolic drawing attention to how little we may know about ourselves and others at any given moment, and yet the correlate is how largely we desire to keep ourselves and each other safe. As we try to secure the world we mark the itinerary of our desire as an obligation to something, rather than a battle for recognition for something.24 If, as Lacan argues, “the discovery of the unconscious is that the implications of meaning infinitely exceed the signs manipulated by the individual”, then the virus speaks to this excess, troubling ideas of ‘individual’ intentionality and, with hope, gesturing to a larger shared space of meaning, perhaps situated ‘beyond’ what I am capable of imagining, but reachable in the shared imaginations of an Us.
Maeve McIlwain is a trainee child and adolescent psychotherapist and writer based in London.
1. Susan Isaacs, The Nature and Function of Phantasy, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 29, 1948.
2. Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963, Hogarth Press, 1975, p. 176.
3. Wilfred Bion, Elements of Psycho-Analysis, Heinemann, 1963, p. 3.
4. Kim Stanley Robinson, The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations, The New Yorker, May 2020.
5. Michael Walsh, Quarantine’s Unlikeliest Trend Is Personal Home Labyrinths, Nerdist, July 2020, (Online).
6. Tom Holert, Doreen Mende, and Editors, Editorial: “Navigation Beyond Vision, Issue Two”, e-flux #109, May 2020.
7. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘Routes/Worlds’, e-flux #27, September 2011.
8. Ibid.
9. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Franz Deuticke, 1899, p. 535.
10. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1959, p. 90.
11. Jaques Derrida, Of Grammatology, 1967, p. 40-41.
12. Melvin Kranzberg, ‘Technology and History: “Kranzberg’s Laws”’, Technology and Culture, 1986.
13. Ava Kofman, ‘Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science’, The New York Times Magazine, October 2018.
14. The Infant Observation Handbook, The Tavistock and Portman Trust, 2021, p. 2.
15. Anna Gibbs, ‘Contagious Feelings: Pauline Hanson and the Epidemiology of Affect’, Australian Humanities Review, December 2001.
16. LETTER FROM MARK ZUCKERBERG, 2012.
17. Ava Kofman, op. cit.
18. Claude Levi-Strauss, Elementary Structures of Kinship, Beacon Press, 1971, p. 288.
19. Arundhati Roy, ‘The pandemic is a portal’, Financial Times, April 2020.
20. Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, Random House, 1937, p. 289.
21. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘Routes/Worlds’.
22. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘After the Last Man: Images and Ethics of Becoming Otherwise’, e-flux #35, May 2012.
23. Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights, 1984, p. 29.
24. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘After the Last Man: Images and Ethics of Becoming Otherwise’.