The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known by Christopher Bollas

Author:Christopher Bollas [Bollas, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9781138218437
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-07-20T04:00:00+00:00

Normotic breakdown

If psychotic illness is characterized by a break in reality orientation and a loss of contact with the real world, then normotic illness is typified by a radical break with subjectivity and by a profound absence of the subjective element in everyday life. As psychotic illness is marked by a turning inward into the world of fantasy and hallucination, normotic illness is distinctive as a turning outward into concrete objects and towards conventional behaviour. The normotic flees from dream life, subjective states of mind, imaginative living, and aggressive differentiated play with the Other. Discharges of mental life are favoured over articulated elaborations that require symbolic processes and real communication. We could say that if the psychotic has ‘gone off at the deep end’, the normotic has ‘gone off at the shallow end’.

A normotic family may be successful for quite some time, depending on material comfort and the availability of personal wealth. As they need a supply of material objects to enrich their personal happiness, they are far more dependent than other sorts of people on the flux of economic life. For example, if one of the parents becomes unemployed, this amounts to more than redundancy: it threatens the breakdown of a mentality. It does not lead to reflection or to affective states that deepen the family members’ understanding of themselves and of their lives. A father may become absent, either literally, by going off and staying away from home, or he may sit before the TV for long periods of time. We would say that there is a depression there, but from inside the family; it is the experience of ‘leave your father alone’ whose mental equivalent is ‘leave that part of your mind concerned with your father alone’. Such statements abound, and in this way the mind is gradually shut down.

A mother may convert the house into an object that must be exhaustively cleaned. Her somewhat lifeless and compulsive activity would be striking to us, but inside the family this might be described as ‘your mother is helping out’, whose mental equivalent is ‘when you believe you see signs of distress in us, cancel this idea, and replace it with an observation of the action you see before you’. If the father finds work again, this entire episode will be negated and probably only referred to in clichés: ‘boy, that was really tough’ or ‘well, you have your downs as well as your ups’. If matters do not improve, however, strain begins to enter the picture in such a way that a normotic defence cannot successfully endure.

The most common form of breakdown is alcohol abuse. When this person feels psychic pain or when he is invited by fortune to undergo incremental subjective experiences, he refuses to do so and drinks himself into an anaesthetized state. Alternatively, he may throw himself even more exuberantly into his work, staying at the office for inhumanly long hours. He might, along with other activities, become an exercise fanatic, jogging for ten miles a day.

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