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From: Jean Fitzpatrick
Date: 08 Jul 1997
Time: 23:49:34
The idea of the arts as selfobject experiences reminds me of Winnicott's statement that culture and spirituality are the adult version of transitional space (I paraphrase from -- I believe -- his essay "Morals and Education.") Isn't this a complex subject, though? Sometimes ideas -- particularly religious or philosophical ones (or psychoanalytic ones!) serve as selfobjects. Yet some clients seem to "live in their heads," apparently never having had the chance to share their ideas with another person in a meaningful way so as to have had satisfactory selfobject experiences. They use the ideas to fill up the lack of early mirroring, or they feel enormously misunderstood and alone with their ideas. Likewise, some of us derive mature selfobject experiences from the arts, yet many of us have treated performers for whom the audience and even creativity seemed to substitute for nurture from early caregivers. I think actually that artistic or cultural experiences of various kinds might be seen as following along the developmental line of selfobject experiences, not as only mature ways to find nurture but as an intrinsic part of our humanity that we learn to experience in different ways from our earliest days. There is mother's loving gaze, and there is the lullabye. There is a parent smiling as a child learns to ride a trike, and there is the joy of fingerpainting. When we introduce a child to the natural world, to holiday songs, to religious rituals, to our family traditions, we are offering cultural selfobject experiences. I understand that our theory places symbolic thinking at adolescence, but I think we "use" art and culture in different ways long before that. Self psychology does not seem incompatible with these thoughts -- to me, at least! -- which I appreciate. In my ongoing attempts to compare it with object relations theory, I find the latter to be way too insistent on internal objects, as though they were photos from a family album. Not being able to reread this, I do hope it makes sense.