Symbolization, Thinking and Working-Through: British Object Relations Theory

Abstract

Psychoanalysis, and particularly object relations theory, has put forward explicit theories of creativity and aesthetics based on, for instance, sublimation (Freud), reparation (Klein), potential space (Winnicott), illusion (Milner) and maternal handling (Bollas). Chapter 4 will, in fact, draw on Christopher Bollas’s essay ‘The Aesthetic Moment and the Search for Transformation’ (1978) to enrich its understanding of modernist formalist aesthetics. Yet, while these theories attempt to shed light on the nature of creativity (asking where it originates from and what happens in the creative process) and of aesthetic experience (asking what happens when we encounter a work of art), they do not necessarily deal with a particular aesthetics of trauma. By taking the psychoanalytic concept of symbolization as a model, therefore, this book presents a literary aesthetics that seeks to instigate, facilitate or represent a transformational process of working-through of trauma by successfully containing its emotionally overwhelming content through form and style. Within such a framework, literary form functions as container by offering a means to control, transform and gain distance from traumatic emotions. This offers an alternative to the prevailing model of trauma used in contemporary literary criticism, in which narrative form is often seen to mimic traumatic memory, and literary analysis tends to consist of identifying ‘symptomatic’ moments or characteristics in the text.