The Shadow of the Object

1. The Unthought Known Shapes Our Reality

While we do know something of the character of the object which affects us, we may not have thought it yet.

Implicit Knowledge. Much of our understanding of the world and our relationships is based on experiences that haven't been consciously processed or articulated. This "unthought known" resides within us, influencing our moods, behaviors, and perceptions.

Psychoanalytic Exploration. Psychoanalysis aims to bring these unthought knowns into conscious awareness, allowing for a deeper understanding of the self and its interactions with the world. This process involves exploring early memories, object relations, and the dynamics of transference and countertransference.

Impact on Character. The unthought known shapes our character, influencing our way of being and relating to others. By understanding these implicit influences, we can gain insight into our patterns of behavior and make conscious choices about how we want to live our lives.

2. The Transformational Object: Seeking Metamorphosis

A transformational object is experientially identified by the infant with processes that alter self experience.

Early Object Relations. The infant's first experiences with the object world, particularly the mother, are characterized by a sense of transformation. The mother's care and responsiveness shape the infant's being, creating a deep connection between the self and the object.

Adult Object-Seeking. This early experience influences adult object-seeking, driving individuals to seek out people, places, or experiences that promise to transform them. This quest is not about possession but about surrendering to a medium that alters the self.

Aesthetic Experiences. Aesthetic moments, such as encounters with art or nature, can evoke a sense of fusion and transformation, reminding us of the early relationship with the transformational object. These experiences can be powerful and meaningful, offering a glimpse into the unthought known.

3. Aesthetic Moments: Echoes of Early Being

The aesthetic moment is a caesura in time when the subject feels held in symmetry and solitude by the spirit of the object.

Sacred Encounters. Aesthetic moments evoke a deep conviction that we have been in rapport with a sacred object. This feeling arises from the sense that the object is partially sponsoring the experience and that the encounter is a surprise.

Existential Memory. The aesthetic experience is a form of déjà vu, an existential memory that is registered through a sense of the uncanny. These moments feel familiar, sacred, and reverential, but are fundamentally outside cognitive coherence.

Maternal Aesthetic. The mother's idiom of care and the infant's experience of this handling is one of the first, if not the earliest, human aesthetic. It is the most profound occasion when the nature of the self is formed and transformed by the environment.

4. The Self as Object: Intrasubjective Relationships

The relation to the self as object is a complex object relation, and also expresses one’s unconscious phantasies, but my emphasis in this chapter is solely on that aspect of this relation that constitutes a partial transfer of the maternal care system.

Internal Dialogue. We constantly engage in subvocal conversations with ourselves, objectifying the self for purposes of thinking and self-management. This intrasubjective relationship is a form of object relation, influenced by instinctual forces and superego activities.

Maternal Care System. The way we handle ourselves as objects partly inherits and expresses the history of our experience as parental objects. Our self-perception, self-facilitation, and self-refusal reflect the internalized parental process still engaged in the activity of handling the self as an object.

Dream Space. Dream space differs from intrasubjective subvocal space, since the former is an hallucinatory event while the latter is a mode of conscious objectification of psychic states within a relationship. In the dream, the dreaming subject is the object of the dream script, managed by the unconscious ego.

5. Dreams: The Ego's Theatrical Stage

The dream experience becomes an ironic form of object relation, as the part of the self in the dream is the object of the unconscious ego’s articulation of memory and desire.

Ego's Creative Function. The dream is a fiction constructed by the ego, transforming the subject into his thought and placing the self into an allegory of desire and dread. The ego's aesthetic function is to synthesize wish and thought, transforming the synthesis into a dramatic mask.

Dream Setting. The dream setting is the environment composed of imagery that leads the dreamer into the dream experience. It is the accomplishment of the aesthetic function of the ego, reflecting an organized and avowing unconscious whose discourse is structured like a language.

Subjective Experience. The subject's experience inside the dream is usually not as the director of the theatric but as an object within a fantastical play. The dream setting provides an ironic form of object relation, with the subject as the ego's object.

6. Trisexuality: Memory Over Desire

I define trisexuality as a state of desire characterized by identification with and seduction of both sexes in order to appropriate genital sexuality by redirecting it into a threesome’s love of one.

Beyond Bisexuality. Trisexuality goes beyond bisexuality by desexualizing the body and suspending gender categories. The trisexual seeks to be a vessel for a transcendent corporeality, the mother's infant as sexual object.

Conversion of Desire. The trisexual seduces both sexes and then transforms their erotic desire into a reverentially admiring gaze. His power resides in the act of conversion, appropriating his lovers to become that psychic income that generates his narcissistic wealth.

Erotics of Absence. The trisexual embodies the erotic function of memory, reacquainting his lovers with traces of their own infant desire. He signifies the mortality of ecstasy, his body bearing the memory of the Other's gratifications, not the object of desire but its mnemic province.

7. Loving Hate: Conserving Through Negativity

Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object.

Nondestructive Hate. In some cases, a person hates an object not to destroy it, but to conserve it. This "loving hate" involves preserving a relationship by sustaining a passionate negative cathexis of it.

Substitute for Love. Loving hate is not the opposite of but a substitute for love. The subject finds that only through hating or being hateful can he compel an object into passionate relating, fearing indifference more than retaliation.

Family Idiom. Loving hate can be a family idiom, where the subject transfers the maternal care system to himself as the object. The analyst's confrontation vis-à-vis the transfer of the patient's transformational idiom is crucial.

8. Normotic Illness: The Erasure of Subjectivity

People may be leading satisfactory lives and may do work that is even of exceptional value and yet may be schizoid or schizophrenic.

Abnormal Normality. Normotic illness is characterized by a drive to be normal, resulting in the numbing and erasure of subjectivity in favor of a self conceived as a material object. This individual is too stable, secure, comfortable, and socially extrovert.

Objective Mentality. The normotic develops an objective mentality, characterized less by the psychic than by the objective. He is disinterested in subjective life and inclined to reflect on the thingness of objects.

Material Objects. The normotic takes refuge in material objects, measuring human worth by collections of acquired objects. He seeks to become an object in the object world, a commodity object in the world of human production.

9. Extractive Introjection: The Theft of Mind

In this way an object-loss was transformed into an ego loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification.

Violation of Mutuality. Extractive introjection occurs when one person steals an element of another individual's psychic life, assuming that the violated has no internal experience of the psychic element that the violator represents.

Loss of Self. The victim of extractive introjection feels denuded of parts of the self, as the violator appropriates mental content, affective processes, mental structure, and even the self. This can lead to a sense of emptiness and a loss of personal history.

Paranoid State. The victim of extractive introjection may develop a paranoid state, believing that something hostile has taken something valuable from within. This paranoia is an attitude of mourning, of loss over the "gone."

10. The Liar: Reordering Reality Through Deception

Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object.

Metaphorical Truth. The psychopathic liar's lie is a metaphor, an evocative mode that reorders reality and allows him to believe that he is actually telling the truth. The lie becomes an articulation of psychic reality.

Compensatory Function. Lying serves a compensatory function, allowing the liar to manipulate the object world and create an alternative relation to reality. It is a way of actualizing dissociated self-experience.

Traumatic Revelation. The liar's madness is made explicit when the Other discovers that the world represented to him by the liar is not real. In that moment, both liar and Other share the trauma of a shocking departure of a shared reality.

11. Countertransference: The Analyst's Subjective Experience

Most of the essays in The Shadow of the Object were written in the 1970s. However, the concept of the “unthought known” did not arrive in my mind explicitly until 1985, when I was reading through them in order to prepare the book.

Receptive Organ. The analyst must turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient. This involves cultivating a freely roused emotional sensibility.

Situational Illness. The analyst must be prepared to become situationally ill, allowing himself to be used as an object and to re-experience the patient's inner world. This requires a generative split in the analyst's ego.

Subjective States. The analyst must find a way to make his subjective states of mind available to the patient, even when he does not yet know what these states mean. This involves a commitment to his own personal analysis.

12. Regression to Dependence: A Path to True Self

I was then director of education at the Austen Riggs Center, and I recall sitting at my desk in Erik Erikson’s former office and asking myself, “So what is this book about ?” The immediate reply was, “It’s about the unthought known.”

Invitation to Regress. The analytic setting and process invite the patient to regress to dependence, allowing him to relive his infantile life in the transference. This requires the analyst to understand and meet the patient's needs.

Suspension of Analysis. During regression to dependence, ordinary analytic work is suspended. The analyst functions as a holding environment, providing a space for the patient to explore his inner world.

Ego Transformation. The analyst's ordinary work of listening, clarifying, and interpreting introduces a different idiom of transforming psychic life. This can lead to a new culture of relatedness and the emergence of the patient's true self.

Last updated: March 16, 2025