Prologue

The discussant begins by describing her British Object-Relations perspective. She emphasizes the difference between obstructive or critical forces within the personality which are best described as a part of the self and those which are felt by the patient to have a quality of otherness about them: the latter are better conceptualized as internal objects since this is closer to the patient's subjective experience. The author stresses the importance—in Scharff's patient's inner world—of the useless maternal—and impotent paternal—object. ‘Stupid’ rather than ‘bad’ objects can affect introjective processes and limit the patient's intellectual functioning because, where the world is seen as uninteresting and unstimulating, it is therefore not worth attending to nor learning from. The author also made a further point. She saw the patient's repetitive bitter self-criticisms, although partly arising out of deprivation, depression, and abuse, as also possibly containing an element of masochistic pleasure in suffering and failure. This would raise delicate technical issues in balancing a sensitive approach to the real suffering with a clearly stated recognition of the addictive repetitive masochistic quality which accompanies it and which may be blocking recovery.     

Dystopia,Utopia, Atopia

In the face of contemporary critiques of dystopia as engendering political hopelessness and apathy, this article explores the instability of the category of itself. Bringing together work by the German jurist and political philosopher, Carl Schmitt, and the American ex-patriot poet, H.D., I show that each engages in thought experiments that might be taken as dystopic, but just as easily as utopic – and hence, as refusing the sharp contrast on which these generic distinctions are made. Schmitt and H.D. also bring into play issues central to the work of the contemporary U.S. poet, Susan Howe, with which I close. Howe’s poetry and essays, particularly in The Nonconformist Memorial, lead me to posit the usefulness of the idea of atopia, a thinking of the past, present, and future in which the alpha privative points to a more radical kind of “no place” than that first posited by Thomas More’s utopia. At the center of my argument is the idea that literature – and other works of the imagination – may be the necessary non-place, or place without the limitations of place, for thinking pasts and futures that are literally uninhabitable (as much as I may try, I can’t actually live in a book) – and yet whose psychic, imaginative, intellectual, and affective existence is vital for human life.