And as imagination bodies forth
The form of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.
(Shakespeare 1969:125)
According to Scott Ellidge:
The psychology of Milton’s time was…neat and simple. The brain, seat of mental faculties…consisted of three cells. To the first cell, that of the fancy (literally phantasia or ‘imagination’), the spirits communicated the messages from the five senses. The fancy passed these images on to the second cell, that of reason, which acted upon the image (creating perhaps what we might call an idea) before passing it on to the third cell, that of the faculty of memory.
(Scott Ellidge 1975:463–4) At night only reason slept. There are two things which strike me particularly about the seventeenth-century brain-mind model: one is the size of the faculty of imagination in relation to reason and memory; and the other is that a physical space, a compartment in the brain, is given to it.
When we imagine things taking place we do so in a space, therefore we have also to imagine the space they take place in. Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, envisaged this as a room ‘inhabited thanks to the image, just as one inhabits an image which is “in the imagination”…a room which the author bears within himself, and which he has made live with a life that does not exist in life’ (Bachelard 1964:228–9). This passage surprised and encouraged me when I first read it because I had already equated the
The other room and poetic space
imagination, conceived of as a place in the mind, with something I had begun to call the ‘other room’ on the basis of my clinical work. The room described by Bachelard, which ‘the author bears within himself’ (ibid.), seemed to me to be the same room. I had adopted the phrase ‘the other room’ as a result of the imagery represented in the dreams and discourse of a particular patient.
Once I noticed it, I found it in various forms in the material of a number of patients. I was to meet it again clinically under the title ‘another place’, signifying a space that could be imagined or imaginatively created by a work of art but never physically entered. If this imaginative space, as in the visual arts or the theatre, is made to appear coincident with actual physical space it lends to that space of actuality the properties of the ‘other room’ in which phantasised events take place—but only while the participating observer allows the artist to enter his own ‘other room’ of imagination and refurnish it. It requires on the part of the audience that willing suspension of disbelief described by Coleridge (Shawcross 1968, vol. II: 6).
When we place our phantasies about events in this psychic ‘other room’
we know we are imagining something. It is the space for fiction. When we misguidedly locate phantasies that properly belong in the ‘other room’ of our imagination in the actuality of perceptual space instead, we are having visions. This is a privilege normally reserved for our night dreams. In waking life such visions are hallucinations or are regarded as privileged supernatural visitations sanctioned by religious belief. If when we witness actual events that generate phantasies we fail to locate the phantasies aroused by events in the imagination and thus believe that we witnessed, not only events, but also our phantasies, then we are deluded. If we are prepared to accept that the proper place for these phantasies is the ‘other room’ we can use our imaginations.
In his writings on ‘transitional phenomena’ Winnicott described a mental space as arising by the mutual consent of the two persons of the dyadic relationship of mother-infant; he conceived it as a sort of no-man’s land between subject and object, a neutral zone for illusion (Winnicott 1951:229–42). Where I differ from this is in seeing it as arising from within triadic triangular space. I said in Chapter 4 that I think triangular space originates when a position comes into existence from which one can be an observer of a relationship between two others. What I am suggesting in this chapter is that the ‘other room’ of the imagination comes into existence when this relationship is invisible. It is, in other words, the location of the unwitnessed primal scene. I think the quintessential primal scene is not observed but imagined, that it is the activity we believe takes place in our absence between our primary object and the other member of what we have come to call the Oedipal triangle. The invisible primal scene is populated only by our imagination; it is the space for fiction.
As I said, this room which ‘the author bears within himself’ I thought of
as the ‘other room’ because I took the phrase from a patient. He used it as a recurrent expression to describe any room other than the consulting room in which the analysis took place. It was in this ‘other room’ that events took place which he could never know about, he said. I became convinced from his material that the prototype for this ‘other room’ was the parental bedroom, a place which has acquired mythic qualities in the world of psychoanalysis.
In psychoanalytic discourse the parental bedroom has been the location of the primal scene since Freud’s description of it in the ‘Wolf Man’ case (Freud 1918). There he not only took great trouble to establish it in the actual history of his patient, but also suggested that it was an Urphantasie, a primal phantasy or innate idea. This moved him on to ground shared with Jung, and he takes a lot of trouble to differentiate his ideas from those of Jung. In particular, Freud thought that Jung had discarded the reality of infantile sexuality, the importance of early sexual experience and the intensity of the erotic imagination of the child. Nevertheless, at the moment of suggesting the existence of an innate phantasy of parental intercourse Freud was moving on to common ground. A number of Jungian analysts think that this move has gone further in the work of Melanie Klein and Bion.
Klein placed the primal scene centre stage; indeed she suggested, following Otto Rank (1915), that the theatrical stage had its origins in the imaginary location of the parental sexual act (Klein 1924). In her analysis of Erna, a 6-year-old girl, she found ‘that theatre and performances of all kinds symbolised coitus between her parents’ (ibid.: 39). Klein added a footnote: ‘In my paper, “Early Analysis”, I have considered in greater detail the universal symbolic significance of the theatre, performances, productions, etc., representing intercourse between the parents. I may also refer to Rank, “Das Schauspiel im Hamlet” [1915]’ (ibid.). In her account it is clear she thinks the primal scene is an innate psychic template waiting for events to furnish it with content. Bion’s (1967) notion of innate pre-conceptions makes it even clearer that Jung’s (1959) theory of Archetypes anticipated these developments. What the Klein/Bion conceptual development does that, perhaps, Jung’s theory does not is to include infantile sexuality, phantasy and actual experience in the incarnation of innate forms, which are therefore not just fulfilled by experience but given shape by it. There is an archetype of Jung’s, ‘the divine syzygies, the male-female pairs of deities’ (ibid.: 59), which I think of as the primal romantic couple, that is, the idealised Oedipal parents who exist only in the ‘other room’, the imagined, unwitnessed part of their lives. In my version of this I had thought of it as a phantasised ideal, super-sexual parental couple—the figures of myth, the stuff of opera, the stars of the Screen and the objects of endless media voyeurism. It is this couple that is represented by Milton as the prelapsarian, primal couple Adam and Eve. We, as the non-participating
The other room and poetic space
observers, are represented by Satan in this account of the primal scene;
already dislodged from Heaven we are compelled to imagine Paradise. At that moment Eden is the ‘other room’; Satan, however, complains that this
‘room of bliss’ has been stolen from him and if he cannot regain it he can at least have its occupants evicted (Milton 1975:95–6).
In Paradise Lost, Book IV, Satan first surveys Eden as a cormorant, perched on ‘the tree of life…devising death’ (Milton 1975:90). But it is in his next series of disguises, first as a lion and then as a tiger, that he witnesses his first primal scene; the coupling of our ancestral parents, Adam and Eve:
…aside the devil turned
For envy, yet with jealous leer malign
eyed them askance, and to himself thus plained.
Sight hateful, sight tormenting! Thus these two Imparadised in one another’s arms
The happier Eden, shall enjoy their fill Of bliss on bliss, while I to hell am thrust, Where neither joy nor love, but fierce desire, Among our other torments not the least, Still unfulfilled with pain of longing pines.
(Milton 1975:99) His curse on the couple still haunts us:
…Live while ye may,
Yet happy pair; enjoy, till I return,
Short pleasures, for long woes are to succeed.
(Milton 1975:100) Therefore we fear the evil eye when we believe we are once more
‘imparadised’.
When we claim to be one of the ‘happy pair’ we rid ourselves by projection of that aspect of ourselves which is forever ‘unfulfilled with pain of longing’, and with it we project our potential for envy and jealousy.
Having done so, we fear the envy of others, become anxious with success and prone to placation by sacrifice or renunciation. Clinically, this is familiar and frequent in analysis in various intensities, and in various forms of negative therapeutic reaction we pay a sacrificial price for our good fortune.You will have noticed that I described this as happening when we claim to be one of the happy pair, that is, not just one of a happy pair but one of the happy pair, one of the primal couple. We can never be the participants in our own phantasised primal scene; nor can we ever occupy a place in that ‘other room’ where our objects meet in our absence. If we
claim to have a place in our own imagined primal scene—to be one or the other, or both, members of the primal couple—we do so by projective identification, thus creating an illusion designed to protect us from the jealousy and envy intrinsic to the Oedipus situation. By becoming one of a parental couple we do not become one of our own parents; nor by sharing a nuptial bed do we become participants in what is forever the primal scene of our internal parents. Similarly, by becoming analysts we do not finally become the analyst of our own transference phantasies. If, as is not uncommon, this illusion is buttressed by actual success, then I think the real achievement is felt to be stolen property or false goods, and therefore the occasion of depressive guilt, manic assertiveness or persecutory anxiety.
Clinically, this seems to me prone to occur where the primal scene has remained idealised, where the parental relationship, rather than the infantile relationship itself, has been seen by the child as the ultimate source of happiness or triumphant success. In some cases this results in an idealisation of marriage and everything thought to be ‘adult’ in life; in others it gives rise to what might be called complacent coupling; in yet others it leads to a sense of permanent grievance that the individual has not simply suffered a deprivation in life but been deprived of a birthright.
Sometimes the idealised parental sexuality is claimed for the self by projective identification with one or other of the primal couple. This last use of the primal scene, I think, gives rise to hysteria, with its histrionic sexuality and erotisation of most of life’s transactions. I take the view that hysteria first described in analysis as arising from phantasised incestuous sexuality is based on projective identification with one or other member of the primal couple—in other words, the so-called classical Oedipus complex, in which incestuous sex with one parent and murder of the other are given effect by the usurpation, by phantasised projective identification, of one or other parent’s place in the primal scene. This gives substance to what is otherwise only a conscious or unconscious daydream; in other words, it is believed and therefore has real psychic consequences, such as guilt. It also imbues the afflicted individual’s sexual life with a dramatised quality arising from the fact that the individual is unconsciously playing a leading part in a theatrical performance scripted by him- or herself, based on his or her own phantasies of the primal scene. I would like to illustrate what I mean by describing a dream from the analysis of a patient who suffered from hysterical symptoms.
The patient was a young American professional writer of considerable talent but who was suffering from writing block and suicidal thoughts; she was also prey to hysterical and psychosomatic symptoms. In contrast to her intellectually serious, rather tormented fiction, which was usually about marriage, she was given to daydreaming in a blatantly unsophisticated way about romantic encounters. In analysis she formed an erotic transference of
The other room and poetic space
delusional intensity, precisely as described in Freud’s paper ‘Observations on transference-love’ (Freud 1915). The following dream was reported after a little time in analysis. The manifest dream contained a number of details which, by the patient’s associations, linked the man in the dream both to her analyst and to her father; the girl-woman on the bed looked like an actress with the same name as the patient’s mother.
The room in the dream was vaguely historical in appearance. An older man was doing something sexual on a bed to someone who was somehow both a woman and a girl; the patient felt the girl-woman to be herself, but at the same time she was watching the scene secretly from within a sort of closet. As the watcher she was feeling afraid; as the girl-woman on the bed she was aware of feeling very excited sexually.
My point in describing this is to suggest that in her dream the patient was watching a phantasised version of the primal scene in which she had inserted herself into the identity of her mother, producing the girl-woman.
The sequence I am suggesting is as follows: the young woman had an unconscious phantasy of herself watching the primal scene between her parents; this was transformed by a phantasy of her taking her mothers place by projective identification. The dream was enacted, in phantasy, by the patient, who believed herself to be involved in a secret sexual transaction disguised as an analysis, the outcome of which she thought would be marriage with the analyst. In the context of our discussion it is of interest that the relinquishment of this Oedipal illusion in the course of analysis exposed the patient to intense jealousy, envy and various aspects of a negative transference not previously present; it also enabled her, after a period of mourning, to pursue her own work and sexual life freely and productively.
Psychoanalysis provides us with an opportunity to explore these ideas about psychic spaces because they are manifest directly in practice and not as theoretical abstractions. In hysteria, I have suggested, individuals try to solve the problem of the ‘other place’ by living in it through projective identification, thus vacating their own room and the one shared as a patient with the analyst. In this way, the consulting room becomes in phantasy the parental bedroom. The risks of enactment that arise from the powerful phantasies provoked by that transformation in the transference and counter-transference are testified to in the history of psychoanalysis and remain a constant threatening complication of the process.
There are two other clinical situations that I think the concept of the
‘other room’ throws some light on. In one the ‘other room’ remains a distant unexplored place ignored and free of phantasies. The result is that the individual is described as ‘lacking in imagination’. In the second, in contrast, the dividing psychic wall of distinction between ‘this room’ and the ‘other room’, the perceived and the imagined, has collapsed. At these times such
patients take the room they share with the analyst to be the ‘other room’, and whatever phantasies they might have about events taking place in the
‘other room’ they presume are taking place in the consulting room. In other words, they take their imagination to be actualised in the consulting room, to use Joseph Sandler’s (1976a, 1976b) concept of perceptual identity. Just as triangular space collapses into a dyadic mode of two psychic dimensions, leaving no room for reflective thought, as I described in Chapter 4, so no mental space exists for non-consequential phantasy about events in absentia. In such circumstances here and there, like now and then, collapse into one time-space. Everything the primary object does is done in a dyadic mode, whether it is done in the presence or the absence of the self; there is no conception of an independent relationship with a third object and therefore everything that the object does is done for or against the self. At these times the analyst’s absence is taken to be an assault on the patient and not an event in the analyst’s life. The problems for the analyst of finding him- or herself moving through the patient’s psychic space when moving within his or her room have been discussed in earlier chapters. I want to contrast this with the other clinical extremity of ‘lack of imagination’ in order to delineate the customary place of the imagination in analysis.
I will call one such patient Mr D. He described himself as lacking in imagination, and that is how he was described by others. What this meant in common parlance was that he did not use his imagination when thinking about other people or alternative possibilities. In analysis this was manifest in relation to the analyst. He made no claim whatever to know, on the strength of his imagination, what the analyst was thinking or doing, either in his presence or in his absence. Far from it; he claimed instead that he never imagined anything about it. It soon became evident, however, that his mind was not wholly occupied with objective reality as he spent an unusual amount of his time daydreaming. These daydreams were not clearly identified by the patient as imaginary, as he took them to be possible adventures, usually of an erotic kind, but they were clearly
I will call one such patient Mr D. He described himself as lacking in imagination, and that is how he was described by others. What this meant in common parlance was that he did not use his imagination when thinking about other people or alternative possibilities. In analysis this was manifest in relation to the analyst. He made no claim whatever to know, on the strength of his imagination, what the analyst was thinking or doing, either in his presence or in his absence. Far from it; he claimed instead that he never imagined anything about it. It soon became evident, however, that his mind was not wholly occupied with objective reality as he spent an unusual amount of his time daydreaming. These daydreams were not clearly identified by the patient as imaginary, as he took them to be possible adventures, usually of an erotic kind, but they were clearly