Toward a Phenomenology of "What About Bob?"

In that seminal work of 20th century cinema, “What About Bob?” (1991, Director: Franz Oz), Bob, a multi-phobic personality played with sensitivity and insight by Bill Murray is visiting his psychiatrist, Dr. Marvin, played by Richard Dreyfuss. On learning of Bob’s phobias, Dr. Marvin prescribes Bob a copy of his latest book, Baby Steps. In this work, the patient—Bob—is urged to conquer his phobias step by step, thus in the classic behaviourist manner, demystifying and desensitizing the initial source of his anxiety. At the centre of his Baby Steps philosophy is a dissection of Bob’s phobias. Instead of treating the phobias as a unified expression of Bob the subject, Dr. Marvin’s book attempts to convince us that Bob can free himself of his phobic self through overcoming the empirical obstacles that activate each phobia.


Thus, when Dr. Marvin is introducing Bob to the notion of baby steps, the psychiatrist tells him to think only of the immediate goal – of leaving the office, or entering the hallway, of descending the elevator, and so forth. As Bob complies with Dr. Marvin’s instructions, he is elated and empowered to find himself able to walk around the office with ease—albeit while still holding a tissue in his hand to avoid being contaminated by any potential germs. In another scene, having tracked Dr. Marvin down in his vacation home, a close up shot of Bob apparently sailing on a yacht(“I’m sailing, I’m sailing!”) gives way to a wider shot, which shows Bob harnessed to the mast with rope, his body fixed in place. The list goes on.


Oz’s film is a testament to the paradoxical nature of behavioural therapy. At stake in this paradox is an experience of psychic freedom in spite of the body’s retention of phobia. Each euphoric outburst Bob experiences is thwarted by another manifestation of his phobia, as though no bodily affliction were expressive enough to discharge the phobia of its power. Thus, despite his gradual adjustment to the world of things, Bob’s phobias are never successfully confronted, but instead transformed into different bodily responses and affects. Indeed, Oz’s film confronts a common criticism of cognitive and behavioural therapies: that they never “deal with the problem” but only attend to the symptoms. But it is not immediately obvious why this should be a problem. After all, what is at stake in the presupposition that symptoms are less important than causes?

In his lectures on anxiety and phobias, Freud characterises “true obsessions” as involving an “emotional state which remains constant in [people]; the idea changes.” For Freud, the emotional state is generally justified, as it responds to an original cause. The pathology of the obsession is that the “associated idea is no longer the appropriate original one, related to the aetiology of the obsession, but is one which replaces it, a substitute for it.” A history of symptoms unfolds, each with an increasingly opaque relationship to the original cause, each pushing the original conflict deeper into the intra-psychic unconsciousness as it becomes substituted.

Freud’s reliance on unconscious substitution is modified in his account of phobias, he writes: “Substitution is no longer the predominant feature in the [phobias]; psychological analysis reveals no incompatible, replaced idea in them.” Instead, what remains consistent is the emotional state, anxiety, which is not derived from memory but from the accumulation of sexual tension. Freud’s point here is one we can apply to “What About Bob?”

Even if we hold in brackets the notion of sexual tension as the cause of phobia, then what nevertheless remains intact is the impression of a libidinous force—a Schopenhauerean will—shaping and giving rise to phobia in the first place. For psychoanalysis, the force would reside in the unconscious. For phenomenology, it would reside in the lived body. In each case, it is clear that the removal of symptoms means that we lose sight of the conflict that gave birth to the symptoms in the first place. If the symptom carries with it a hermeneutic rather than incidental manifestation to it, then the symptom must be acted out in order to be understood. That is to say, the symptom must be attended to on both a phenomenological and hermeneutic level—as both lived and interpreted.


How does Bob overcome his phobias? After hunting Dr. Marvin down to his holiday home, he befriends the family, earns their trust and becomes an accepted member of the unit. All of this involves notable resistance from Dr. Marvin, whose preoccupation with the vanity of his public appearance leads him to reject Bob’s pathological attachment lest it ruin that appearance. In the end, Bob becomes a sort of demonic gadfly for Dr. Marvin, forever turning up, intruding upon his phantasies, and fragmenting the order of domestic life. At a surprise party late in the film for Dr. Marvin, his sister is introduced before Bob then enters the scene. Disgusted that he’s touching his sister, Dr. Marvin lashes out at Bob, the two of them fighting in the midst of the birthday crowd. In the next scene, Dr. Marvin has become the patient. Visited by a medical doctor, Dr. Marvin is prescribed Prozac. The camera then moves to Dr. Marvin lying in bed, his eyes twitching in an anxious state. At this point, a key turn in the movie occurs. Bob intervenes, questioning if Prozac is the best solution, suggesting that Librium might be a more suitable alternative. The doctor concedes; effectively fulfilling the dialectic engineered at the beginning of the movie, whereupon the two characters would swap identities while retaining their bodies.


The critical question is as follows: Is Bob an imposter assuming the appearance of a non-anxious angel or is he an anxious demon, whose symptoms have been covertly displaced into the body of Dr. Marvin? Oz leaves us guessing, and Bob’s “redemption” from anxiety is located in this ambiguity. Dr. Marvin, on the other hand, is reduced to a primal manifestation of the id: the final scenes show us the doctor in a hunting shop seeking the best weapon to murder Bob with. It is not by chance that he elects explosives. For if we take Bob to be not only a neurotic patient, but also a symbolic representation of anxiety itself, then we can understand this act of aggression on behalf of Dr. Marvin as a concession to his failure as a psychiatrist. In his treatment of Bob the patient via the baby steps methodology, Dr. Marvin fails. His failure is evident in the repetition and reprise of anxious symptoms (Bob’s very appearance at the summer house can be seen as a return of the repressed).


The dynamic conflict thus remains firmly in place no matter how desensitised Bob is the surrounding world. This last act of desperation by Dr. Marvin—not simply to shoot or stab him, but to literally remove all trace of Bob by killing him with explosives—is the logical expression of his flawed therapeutic methodology: to avoid the original conflict and erase the symptomatic matter that remains, as he says to Bob when tying him up: “You understand, don’t you? You won’t go away.” Is Dr. Marvin talking to Bob or to (his own) anxiety? Even here, Dr. Marvin is unable to terminate his therapy with Bob. Having freed himself from the ropes, Bob makes his way back to the home—back to the heart of domesticity—with Dr. Marvin outside reflecting on his success. Like a spectre on the horizon, Bob appears against the backdrop of the house with a cake, congratulating him on being cured by Dr. Marvin’s new model of therapy, “death therapy.” Thus, Dr. Marvin turns Bob the patient into an anxious force that not only returns from a state of repression, but also from the grave.

Out Now: "The Memory of Place"

It gives me a special sort of pleasure to announce that "The Memory of Place" is now out through all the usual outlets. As is customary with these things, it is invariably the author who is the last to receive a physical copy of the book. This publication is no different. (I would expect it to be stock in the Eurozone anyday now.) Luckily, Tim Morton has been able to verify the empirical existence of the book and has written a glowing first impression, my favourite part of which is:

"On a scale of 1 to Fucking Good, where would you put this book?

—Oh, Fucking Good, definitely. "

Big up to Tim for that. Now we just need to get Tim's scale adopted as the way to review academic books. I appreciate also that he picks up on the relation between place and the weird, which is a theme throughout the book, even - or especially - when the book is dealing with such innocuous places as Brooklyn supermarkets and motorway service stations.

Addendum

I'm pleased to be able to confirm the material existence of the book. It arrived this morning and is a joy to behold. Christopher Saunder's fine painting on the cover has come out splendidly.

Alien Phenomenologies – Uncanny Bodies

“Corporeality and alienness,” so Bernhard Waldenfels begins the fourth chapter of his recently published The Phenomenology of the Alien, “are intimately connected.” Why? Because the body is perfectly aligned between presence and absence, it is both thing and spectre together. Precisely because the body necessarily belong to the living subject is its mass of materiality at the same time distant to the subject. Here is a body, it is alive: – the body is the world, it is the source from which life and perception unfold. And yet: it is also flesh. It barks and recoils from the world, it wants what it lacks and then grows tired with those things. All of this takes place quite apart from “our” experience of things. The body has a freedom that is untouched by history; it belongs to neither culture nor society, and instead lodges itself in a realm beyond phenomena.

But the body exerts its presence from this anonymous realm, it becomes personal and in turn a voice speaks from the flesh that is both singular and irreducible to its own materiality, as Waldenfels writes: “Our bodily experience would then exceed by far the experience of the body.” Waldenfels prepares the ground for an alien phenomenology. He does this by placing the body at the heart of alien phenomena, accenting the body’s strange relationship to intentionality. Long before Freud, Lovecraft, Merleau-Ponty, and Schopenhauer, Waldenfels identifies Plato as marking the origins of this uncanniness: “It was Plato who was the first to insist that it is not our eyes that see, but rather our soul that sees by means of our eyes.” Here, a fundamental truth has been articulated. The truth of the body is its anonymity, its captivity in another realm, of which our personal access is severely limited. The soul speaks through the eyes, but whose eyes are employed as the instrument of sensibility? Thus, a breakage occurs, whereby the body becomes more than its own materiality.

The critical question in this discussion can be formulated as such: is thingness necessarily alien and inversely, is alienness necessarily a thing? Applied to the human body, the question would be reformulated in the following way: does the fact that subjectivity is extended into the world entail a relation of anonymity to that materiality? Sartre will speak of nausea in this regard, while Merleau-Ponty will talk of ambiguity. Husserl meanwhile, will only make a distinction between the lived and the physical body without drawing an affective distinction between the two. Waldenfels, for his own part, is almost certainly right to introduce the body’s biological being into the question of its thingnness, remarking that “blood pressure, hormone balance, firing of neurons and last but not least the functioning of ‘my brain’” all become critical in the tension between corporeal and cognitive intentionality. Several years before Waldenfel, it is Richard Zaner who pre-empted the biological basis of the bodily uncanny in his work, The Context of Self.

For Zaner, the key to the alienness of the body lies in the uncanny. As with Waldenfels, he begins with the intentionality of the prepersonal body, he writes: “...whether I like it or not, there are some activities, postures, gestures, sensory encounters, and sensory refinements, etc, which are just not within my bodily scope...” This division between the agency of the body and the agency of the self sets in place an inescapable structure to the body, in Zaner’s terms. The body is a limit, it is a border, against which the self is both placed and displaced. Were one to entirely transform oneself from one body to another, then the same limitations and inescapable structure would reappear, only now in a different guise.

Coupled with this inescapable limit, the body for Zaner also implicates the subject. I remain at the “mercy” and “disposal” of the body. The body, being “more ancient than thought,” implicates me – quite by chance – in its immemorial existence. The body brings me into life, and will in time, prevent me from life. I like Zaner’s language of implication and disposal very much. What I especially like about his onus on the body as implicating the self is twofold.

First, if one is to speak of a tacit dualism in this thought, then the question is not: can the mind exist without the body, but instead: for how long has the body existed without the mind? We who have bodies – that is to say, all human subjects – remain delimited to a world into which we as personal subjects are transitory visitors. Whatever Gnostic implications this entails, the fundamental point is that the body is ontologically prior to the self.

The second aspect that I admire in this thought is Zaner’s inclusion of the affectivity of bodily implication. He writes: “Finding myself thus implicated in whatever can and does happen to my embodying organism, not only its contingency but also its tenuousness vis-à-vis the ways in which things can and do impact it, my embodying organism is experienced as a kind of ‘chill’”.

The chill. It seems to me, if I can put it rather hyperbolically, that every phenomenology of the body can be measured in terms of how successfully it engenders itself toward the this moment of self-alienation, this beckoning of the strange facticity of there being a body in the first place, without which the body would be taken for granted in its pre-reflected unity. The chill is emblematically uncanny insofar as it forces us into an ecstatic relation with our bodies. We stand outside the flesh and for a brief moment the flesh stares back at us.

The chill of the body, the shivers crawling upon one’s back, and the hairs that stand on their ends when the body is experienced in its material phenomenality attests to the distance between the subject and the body. The distance folds back into the homeostatic operation of the body, as a thing that presents itself in the world as having its own set of ends to accomplish. Heraclitus is right here: nature loves to hide. Nowhere is this clearer than in the body, whose secrets are resistant to all modes of empirical investigation. Of the biological automatism of the body, Zaner writes: “Deeply familiar (what is more familiar?), my own body is thus at the same time curiously veiled and obscure.” Becoming aware of the processes that run the body does nothing to hamper the effectiveness of those functions. Unlike the self-consciousness of subjectivity, the gaze of the other as experienced by the liver, heart, and lungs remain insulated by an agency that plays no part in intersubjective life. Put simply, the body goes on.

The body is an alien life. This alienness is predicated not on the incursion of a foreign force from the beyond, but instead through the mutual estranging of self and body. The alien is alien precisely through already establishing a relation with the non-alien, and then retaining that relation through its alienation. In this respect, to speak of an “alien phenomenology” means to speak of being a body, and as Waldenfels, Zaner, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre demonstrate, no alien phenomenology that is in fact a phenomenology can take place without the body. The things that surround bodies – feel free to compile your own list of arbitrary and disjoined objects here – have an alien quality only insofar as they conform or fail to conform to an already established relationship to the body, which precedes all things, even the “chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”

The real Cape Kennedy is inside your head

Following my recent post on Darkspace and cosmic anxiety, readers who find themselves in need of more planetary hauntings may find winter solace in an article by me on J.G. Ballard, Max Ernst, and outer space, which is published in 3:AM Magazine. It just remains for me to wish you all festive joy during this time of warmth and repose.

The Memory of Agoraphobia

L'écluse de l'Arsenal, Paris. By DT.

A city unfolds, at once closing and exposing itself to the broader world. Streets and roads flood in from afar. In them, human beings emerge in this mass of materiality; there they find their way in the world, building homes that protect life from the world. Here, people live; they are alive and occupy a definite place within this world. The city grows, it has life. The wilderness will flourish in the middle of this dense world. A diverse eco-system spreads its way through the city, generating a rich atmosphere that is fed back into the people who live within its embrace.

Yet every now and then, empty squares punctuate the landscape, vast columns of unpopulated space float in the middle of the city’s pulse. For a while, you could not enter those empty squares without simultaneously entering another realm. There, your body would come to a standstill, frozen like a monolithic relic. Back then, there was no small danger that you would be unable to make it from one corner of the square to the other without collapsing in the middle of the great space. And so you remained in place, hovering on the border of the square so that an escape would be readily available should the urge to flee strike you. The square, however, was only a beginning that would soon spiral into the surrounding world.

For sixteen years, you could not enter a building. Buildings were prohibited for you. They were portals to a realm that you didn’t understand, a realm that didn’t coincide with your worldview. And so they fell to the wayside, all of them no longer accessible to your body. During this time, you withdrew from the world of buildings and enclosed spaces. Borders, doorways, and windows were your native haunts. There you would dwell, bridging the outside world to the terror of confined space. Closed windows and doors were an abomination to you. Very often, your vision of the world would be diminished when a door would close. Losing sight of your surroundings, you compensated with other senses, principally touch. In the absence of an open door, you would assemble a series of chairs around your body to generate the impression of a space contained within a space. The chairs were your companions in those dark hours; they would fend off the outside world from you, enclosing you within a sacred space no longer accessible to the public. And so you waded through the darkness with a chair by your side.

Without the chair, you made your way in the world with the assistance of other methods, above all else, a pathological attachment to the superstition of rituals—or, the rituals of superstitions. A set of circumscribed practices enabled you to cohere in the world, and without them, the world no longer made sense to you. If you were unable to hold a small metallic object in your left palm, then the world would assume a foreboding sense of general horror. For you, the small metallic object was a talisman of peace in a world marked by change, contingency, and violence.

Your disease was not only activated by space alone. For twenty-seven years, you could not voice certain words without reliving the meaning of those sentences in your body. Very frequently, you were reduced to a mute state. You remember a hallway and a conversation. Somewhere, the word “collapse” was mentioned, and you swiftly proceeded to fall to the floor in a state of slumbering stupefaction. Everywhere, people looked down at your lumbering body, possessed by the magic of inertia. Your body had given way, and since then you have exercised special caution about saying and hearing certain words. Words such as “frailty,” “blood,” and “flesh” are extremely hazardous to you, and you will think very carefully about your surroundings before you mention them.

Today, you must exert considerable effort to remember such episodes. They are buried in time, now assuming a photographic stillness devoid of their terror. But the experiences have not left your body. When crossing the street, you still feel that latent hesitation that comes with the phobic worldview. Beneath the electric lights of the world, you sense the vibrations that are otherwise invisible. Touched by the madness of phobia, you are unable to re-enter the world of things.

Today, a different emptiness unfolds. In the dreadful hours that plagued your phobia, you achieved the serenity of having a centre, around which the world would freely revolve. You termed that centre, “home.” Around it, you would construct your life, feeling its great influence cast a reassuring presence on your skin. In the mysterious aisles of supermarkets and in the wilderness of city bus journeys, your mind would forever be haunting the home, which was left behind. It was your declaration against the world, against life.

Today, the centrality of the home has been dispersed into the world: it no longer binds you to the enclosed spatiality of your past. Ever since you made your way across a small bridge overhanging a polluted river, your body has adjusted to the fact that there is a world in the first place. Soon after the bridge, the world lost its foreboding quality, and the boundaries attaching you to your home loosened. Finally, you were free. In the heady days that followed your liberation from the disease, you ventured far out. From the homogeneity of airports to the elaborate maze of shopping malls, the world shone with the dizzying lightness of a place untouched by anxiety. For you, the black demons that had accompanied your 56 years on this planet were delivered of their hold.

And yet, for all this freedom, the world now assumes a deadened appearance. On the other side of the visitation, the disease has left you damaged. Soon after the initial liberation, a grey bewilderment set in. Lacking a moral purpose, you are now unable to justify the existence of the home. Far from a beacon of meaning in the midst of a meaningless world, it has now become a continuation of the world without value—an empty space, glowing in the flat landscape of a desensitised and derealized world.

Visitor to a Museum

"In a post-apocalyptic world, in which a large part of the population consists of demented and deformed mutants being kept in reservations, a man embarks upon visiting the ruins of a museum buried under the sea which can only be accessed during low tide."

Written and directed by Konstantin Lopushansky

Black Metal & Black Holes

In perfect synchronicity with the discovery of our future homeworld, Kepler 22-b, readers with a predilection for black metal, sci-fi horror, and speculative astrophysics (that's most of the philosophical blogsphere, right?) might be interested in a piece I've written on Darkspace for The Liminal.

As if that wasn't enough, stay tuned for a very exclusive interview with Darkspace, which will also appear at The Liminal shortly...

Counter-Earth

The Earth’s Moon. Taken from Rue de Rivoli, Paris.

15:26, 02nd December 2011. By DT.

Concerning its [the earth’s] position there is some divergence of opinion. Most of those who hold that the whole universe is finite say that it lies at the centre, but this is contradicted by the Italian school called Pythagoreans. These affirm that the centre is occupied by fire, and that the earth is one of the stars, and creates night and day as it travels in a circle about the centre. In addition they invent another earth, lying opposite our own, which they call by the name of “counter-earth”

(Aristotle on Philolaus)

And the Pythagoreans called the moon the counter-earth, in so far as it is also an “earth in the aither,” and since it blocks the light of the sun, which is a peculiar characteristic of the earth, and since it marks the end of the heavens just as the earth marks the end of the region under the moon.

(Aristotle on Philolaus)

Philolaus [says] that there is fire in the middle around the center which he calls the hearth of the whole and house of Zeus... And again another fire at the uppermost place, surrounding [the whole]. [He says] that the middle is first by nature, and around this ten divine bodies dance: heaven, planets, after them the sun, under it the moon, under it the earth, under it the counter-earth, after all of which the fire which has the position of a hearth about the center.

(Fragments of Philolaus)

From the outset, at any rate, they considered ten the perfect number, but seeing that, in what appears to the eye, the moving spheres are nine in number - seven spheres of the planets, an eighth that of the fixed stars, ninth the earth (for they thought, in fact, that the earth too moves in a circle around the stationary hearth, which, according to them, is fire) - they themselves added in their theory a counter-earth as well, which they assumed to move opposite the earth, and for this reason to be invisible to those on earth.

(Aristotle on Philolaus)

Philolaus the Pythagorean [says] that fire is in the middle (for this is the hearth of all), and that the counter-earth is second, the inhabited earth is third and lies opposite to and moves around with the counter-earth. Accordingly, those on the counter-earth cannot be seen by those on this earth.

(Fragments of Philolaus)

“After the counter-earth this earth itself also moves around the middle, and after the earth the moon,” for this is what he himself reports in the treatise on Pythagoreanism. But the earth, since it is one of the stars moving around the middle, makes day and night according to its position relative to the sun. But the counter-earth, moving about the middle and following on this earth, is not seen by us because the body of the earth is always in our way.

(Aristotle on Philolaus)

Philolaus [says] that destruction [of the world] is twofold, on the one hand when fire rushes in from the heaven, and on the other from lunar water when it is poured out by the revolution of the air. And the exhalations of these are nourishment for the cosmos.

(Fragments of Philolaus)

Screen-shots from "Another Earth" (2011) and "Melancholia" (2011)

Winnicott and Agoraphobia

(Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, Paris. By DT)

In a passage from A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze writes the following:

A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of the chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip; it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment. There is always sonority in Ariadne’s thread. Or the song of Orpheus.

How does the child’s song speak through the darkness? Does the song substitute the formlessness of the dark with the form of a discernable melody? That does not seem correct, as it would imply a causal relation between the two: before there is a melodic structure to the world, there is not chaos but the occupancy of other people’s songs. “It is territorial, a territorial assemblage,” as Deleuze goes on to say. The child’s song does not suppress the darkness, but bridges the light of inner experience with the nocturnal world. Seen in this way, the song is what Winnicott would term a “transitional object.”

For Winnicott, the notion of a transitional object is predicated on an intermediate reality. Between the reality of subjective experience and objective world outside of that reality, an intermediate space opens up. Winnicott cites the infant’s caressing of external objects—cloth, wool, string, teddy bear, etc—as emblematic of a “defence against anxiety, especially anxiety of a depressive type” (Playing and Reality, 5). The transitional object and phenomena coincide, each aspect dependent on the other, and each emerging with greater intensity in times of insecurity.

Winnicott provides the reader with a list of the special qualities of the relationship between the baby and the object. The characteristics range from a will to destroy the object, an insistence on its permanence, a total possession of control, and a sense of it as having an autonomous life. Eventually, the baby outgrows the object and it becomes relegated to “limbo,” now deprived of its meaning, and yet still remembered. Having survived and testified to the destruction of the object, the infant proceeds to an ontologically secure place in the world, now able to experience his own autonomy without the need to possess or be possessed by the things and people around him.

Winnicott’s ideas have a particular appeal to an understanding of agoraphobia. If we—as I have previously suggested—are to understand agoraphobia as having a special relationship with the inability to cultivate a sense of home, then from a Winnicottian perspective, this inability gravitates toward the home as an intermediate reality. Psychoanalytically, there is, of course, a relation between the home and mother’s breast, insofar as both constitute a first point of contact with the world and the source of primordial nourishment. From a phenomenological perspective, “home” is not a geometric site in the world, nor is it a construct of the subject’s internal landscape. Instead, it is a relational mode of being-in-the-world: it is the bridge enabling one to set foot in the world.

It seems to me that in the case of agoraphobia, the “disorder” is a failure to negotiate or create the transitional space between self and world. Let us return to the relationship between the breast and the home. When the baby cries, the breast appears in the world, giving the impression that the baby’s will creates the breast to materialize. In turn, the mother submits herself to the needs of the baby. Once other objects are introduced into this dyadic relationship, the baby slowly begins to recognise objects as being “not me.” In time, the mother herself distances herself from the needs of the baby, and with the mother’s guidance, the baby enters the transitional space between subjective and objective realities. If all goes to plan, then the frustrations met in this phase are adapted to and the baby begins to find a place in the world.

In the case of agoraphobia, the anxiety experienced has its roots in the subject’s inability to will a state of familiarity instantly. For the agoraphobe, the experience of anxiety is primarily an experience of radical alterity: the world becomes hostile by dint of its unfamiliarity, and the one thing the agoraphobe lacks, is the ability to establish familiarity outside of his circumscribed sense of “home.” Panic ensues as the sensations the agoraphobe undergoes are interpreted as a threat to his already vulnerable sense of self.

In turn, the reliance on transitional objects within the transitional space becomes a pathology. Only now, those objects are not teddy bears and pieces of cloth—though they may well be—but instead particular modes of bodily comportment and navigation. Recall this from “victim” of agoraphobia:

I see a man hobbling past my house on crutches, a cripple for life, and I actually envy him. At times I would gladly exchange places with the humblest day laborer who walks unafraid across the public square or saunters tranquilly over the viaduct on his way home after the day's work.

Hobbling, crutches, umbrellas, tying one’s shoe laces, holding to the wall, sunglasses, hats—these are all props equivalent to the “trusted other” that enable the agoraphobe to get from one point to another. They are modes of retaining control over a world that does not spontaneously produce, in Winnicottian terms, the primordial shelter of the mother’s breast. Lacking ontological security in the world, the experience of intermediate space is not interpreted as a “potential space” of creation and growth, but as a space divested of all familiar attributes and so opposed to the singularity of the I. Indeed, in the failure to navigate the terrain of the intermediate space successfully, what the agoraphobe experiences is the reality of internal experience confront the external world, without anything to link them.

The Memory of Place: a Preview

In order to entice any potential readers into buying my forthcoming book, "The Memory of Place" (official release date: 15/01/12), Amazon.com have a limited preview of the contents online. If you are - for some unfathomable reason - not won over by such evocative chapter titles as "The Dark Entity," "Memories of the Flesh," and "This Place is Haunted," then perhaps the index listings will convert you. There, you will find an exciting range of entries, ranging from The Golden Nugget (casino) to 19th century occultist, Eliphas Levi, with all the usual suspects contained therein.

More here.