Elizabeth Stewart

Department of English

A comparative and trans-disciplinary (psychoanalysis/social theory) look at the role played by destructiveness in the process of subject-formation in the thought of Walter Benjamin, D.W. Winnicott, Marion Milner, and Wilfred Bion. Benjamin’s theories of subjectivity, of the subject-object relationship, and of experience, often mystical and messianic in their thrust, are echoed in fascinating ways by these British psychoanalysts. The paper’s analysis will focus on Benjamin’s works on children’s art, colors, and graphology, and Milner’s presentation of her schizophrenic patient “Susan’s” drawings in The Hands of the Living God. The pronounced destruction of representational constancy in Susan’s drawings and their emphasis on anti-representational expressions of explosiveness and “catastrophe,” which tell the story of Susan’s process of reconstructing a badly damaged sense of subjecthood, finds an echo in Benjamin’s psychoanalytically rich theory of mimesis, specifically in the idea of “non-sensuous similarity,” and in his theory of handwriting. Winnicott’s “squiggle drawings” are discussed as well. All of these notions will be explained in the context of Winnicott’s theory of “Being,” Bion’s notion of “O,” Eigen’s notion of the core of the subject as “nothing,” the “gap” in the persona, and Benjamin’s understanding of “truth” as what emerges in the tension between “the language of God” and “the language of man.” These notions—often frankly characterized as “mystical”—are translated back into the Benjaminian register, in particular his theory of redemptive experience. Bion, too, talks about the “extraordinary experiencing” that can occur through this specific sort of psychoanalytic work. The conjunction of “Susan’s” and Benjamin’s work will illuminate the psychological question of how one can “rescue” one’s own history. The conjunction of Benjamin and the theories of Bion in particular illuminates the importance of “attentiveness” towards the pieces and fragments of one’s own “broken” experience in creating a truly dialogic subjectivity.

About Elizabeth Stewart