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This chapter talks about how people learn to feel alone and sustained, rather than alone and persecuted, lost, adrift, untethered. On loneliness and character in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the chapter describes the way people internalize novelistic structures and come to feel like literary characters. Like Tess, readers imagine that others are with them, narrating and experiencing their lives alongside them, even when they are alone. Alone with others, Tess introduces a notion of paradoxical solitude that D. W. Winnicott would explicitly theorize more than half a century later, as a fact of psychic life in his essay “The Capacity to Be Alone.” The chapter also shows how Thomas Hardy anticipates Winnicott's theory of relational solitude by making and unmaking his character Tess, who becomes an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations—an internalized presence—to her readers as much as to herself, and who seems to likewise sense the presence of the narrator and the reader in the world of the story.

This chapter examines “things” in Hannah Arendt's work in relation to D. W. Winnicott's object relations. Hoping to generate a lexicon for a political theory of public things, it analyzes Arendt's The Human Condition together with Winnicott's work. It notes the convergence of Winnicott and Arendt on the value of care and concern for the world and for others and argues that there is a case to be made for seeing Arendt as a kind of object-relations theorist whose concepts, along with Winnicott's, call attention to the centrality of public things to democratic life. Read with Winnicott, Arendt emerges as a thinker who is committed to the power of thingness to stabilize the flux of nature and the contingency of action.

This chapter treats von Trier’s Melancholia as a reception of Euripides’ Bacchae, a world-ending tragedy in which women leave their work to worship a hypnotic foreign god and are bewitched by strange visions of two suns. The focus here is on the youths—Leo, in von Trier’s film, and the young King Pentheus, in Euripides’ play. Both navigate their way through something like the doldrums of adolescence, a process that may involve violence, aggression, murder (of self, of other), and the renegotiation of identity. One of these two youths is a king whose death in Euripides’ play is the result of an act of regicide. Furthermore, D. W. Winnicott’s work on adolescence in particular invites a reconsideration of the Bacchae, which can enable us to likewise reconsider the politics of von Trier’s film.

This chapter examines how Learical play was central to the twentieth-century British tradition of psychoanalysis, in particular to the work of D. W. Winnicott. What the ‘absurd’ or the ‘surreal’ were to continental Europe, it argues, ‘nonsense’ was to the British tradition–and it was the absence of self-conscious manifestoes and programmatic self-definitions which lent ‘nonsense’ its particular value and force as an analytic tool. The investment of Lear’s poetic play in the play of childhood was vital for a tradition which placed the child’s experience at the centre of its method. In his essay ‘Playing, a Theoretical Statement’, Winnicott redescribed Freud’s ‘golden rule’ of free-association in terms of play, suggesting that rather than seeking to understand (after Freud) what verbal play is trying to hold at bay, psychoanalysts ought rather to attend to the play itself, even to the point of understanding analysis as a form of nonsensical play.

Through a discussion of the moral realism of George Eliot in relation to British psychoanalysis of the twentieth century, and the work of D. W. Winnicott in particular, this chapter demonstrates that there develops within the history of psychoanalysis a framework by which healthy moral development within ordinary conditions is described and avowed. The general forms of psychoanalysis within literary studies to date have been oriented toward the structural, drive-based models of Freud and Klein, which promote an understanding of power and aggression as primary and ineluctable. Through a comparison of the development of the conceptions of the ordinary and traumatic in Winnicott, and the opposition between the tragic and the ordinary in Eliot, this chapter develops a conception of psychological health and moral aspiration amidst precarious conditions, including contingent environmental forces of aggression, rupture, and trauma.

This book examines democratic theory in the context of object relations and asks whether democracy might be constitutively dependent on public things. Drawing on D. W. Winnicott's object-relations theory, in which objects have seemingly magic powers of integration and adhesion, and Hannah Arendt's account of the work of homo faber, the book thinks out loud about things (or “things out loud”) and their contributions to democratic politics. It considers Winnicott's “transitional objects,” “holding environments,” “object permanence,” and “good enough” (m)others as well as Arendt's ideas about the durability and permanence that “things” bring to the contingency and flux of the human world of action. The basic argument is that democracy is rooted in common love for, antipathy to, and contestation of public things.

This chapter discusses the role of public things in democratic theory and in democratic life. It examines the power of public things to stimulate the object relations of democratic collectivity by drawing on the work of D. W. Winnicott, who argues that objects are central to the developing infant's capacity to relate to the world as an external reality. According to Winnicott, the baby needs its transitional object (the blanket, a toy) to supply it with a kind of object-ivity, or realness. The baby learns about the existence of an external world when it destroys/disavows the object and the object survives. This is object permanence. The chapter also considers the views of Wendy Brown, Michael Walzer, and Hannah Arendt in the context of decades of charting the almost always already overness of democracy's (or of politics') necessary conditions.

To illuminate Bechdel’s inchoate kinship, this chapter turns to Are You My Mother?. Bechdel refuses to position Are You My Mother? as an Oedipal rival or heteronormative complement to Fun Home. In fact, neither text is compositionally “finished” within the narrative present of Are You My Mother?. Throughout the memoir, Bechdel struggles with articulating a framework for her life writing that does not recapitulate heteronormative logics of similitude based on sexual difference or Oedipal plots of exclusivity, which demand the substitution of the mother by another love object. This chapter contends that Bechdel turns to relational psychoanalysis, and D.W. Winnicott in particular, to develop a queerer narrative for kinship; in this narrative, the mother is not a taboo love object but an object to be used, played with, even affectively assaulted with anger and disappointment. Through this “mutual cathexis,” Bechdel is ultimately able to forge a relation with her mother that is not defined by their absolute similitude or radical difference. But more importantly, Are You My Mother? figures a queerer narrative for the psychoanalytic narration of kinship itself—a narrative in which the child’s and parent’s stories can exist in productive tension, even opposition, without being legitimated by or finally resolved in an external reality.

This essay suggests that Bechdel’s two autographic memoirs are indicative of the potential that exists in graphic narrative to provoke new dialogues with regard to how we approach, how we interpret, and how we interact with generational and familial trauma that stems from dysfunctional relationships with parental figures. Specifically, it examines how Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? builds upon the juxtapositions of the father-daughter bond in Fun Home by shifting the focus towards Bechdel’s traumatic relationship with her mother. This chapter argues that by explicitly weaving the narrative around a backdrop of psychology and psychoanalysis (D. W. Winnicott, Freud, Jung, and Lacan), Bechdel intentionally situates the “reader in the position of the analyst” (as quoted in The Paris Review). Drawing on Bechdel’s theory-rich content, this essay examines the figure of the mother as a shifting entity that mutates and molds itself onto substitute transitional objects and experiences, including Bechdel’s therapists and romantic attachments. Alternating among transcribed audio dialogues, diary entries, counseling sessions, dreams, letters, photographs, and memories, Are You My Mother? is an illustration of the Freudian concept of “afterwardness,” or, as Lacan coined it, après-coup—a retroactive understanding and re-visitation of earlier trauma.

This brief chapter summarizes the book’s argument as essentially the following: in a number of films from Italy, a drama is played out between the camera’s power to make visible forms of life and those filmed who are able to play with the cinematic apparatus as if it were a transitional object. By noting the creative tension between the generous mancus without hands and the apparatus, the book makes an argument for a creative and attentive spectatorship able and willing to forego mastery.

Claiming that torture is a phenomenon specific to societies rather than to human individuals or other forms of life, this chapter analyzes the psycho-social consequences of torture as a practice that denies to some of its members the protection against human vulnerability that is constitutive of society. Drawing on D. W. Winnicott's location of cultural experience in games of recognition, it claims that the tendency of culture to perform sociality in theatrical forms makes it possible to reverse this tendency and perform in torture the vulnerability and negation of sociality. Since denial of the other is also a theatrical act, it necessarily enlists a third party, or witness, who either resists the exclusion of the victim from the social bond orlooks away. Since the position of the third party now is increasingly occupied by the eye and ear of digital recording, the chapter describes the psychic structure of not-seeing that is produced by the paradoxical mediality of violence: that at once destroys the capacity for expression and lodges in the psyche, and group memory, more stubbornly.