Objects Of Our Desire - Hardcover

Akhtar, Salman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400054443 ISBN 13: 9781400054442

Verlag: Harmony Books, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

A poet and psychiatrist draws on the multiple fields of psychology, history, literature, sociology, and philosophy to shed new light on how and why humans invest objects with meaning. 25,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Salman Akhtar is a professor of psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College and Scholar-in-Residence at the Inter-Act Theater Company in Philadelphia. He lectures widely and is the recipient of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Best Paper of the Year Award. Akhtar has written many books on psychiatry and psychoanalysis, including Immigration and Identity, the inspiration for the play Parinday (Birds), recently broadcast on the BBC. He has published six volumes of poetry in English and Urdu.

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Acquiring and Using Things

Look around. What do you see?

Lamps, tables, chairs, flower vases, paintings, pillows, newspapers, magazines, books? Or, if you happen to be in your kitchen, perhaps your eyes move from the refrigerator to the stove and from the microwave to the dishwasher and finally to the pots and pans in the sink. If you aren't at home but at a bus stop or an airport, you can hardly avoid noticing the large number of things that are—or, shall we say, have become—part of our lives and inhabit all the nooks and crannies of our existence. Things play an important role in how we navigate the world, communicate with one another, connect with our pasts, and express our desires. The emotional significance of physical objects is unmistakably evident all around us.

You don't believe me?

Notice the inviting contours of that sofa, the glint of a knife's edge, the sparkle of a diamond ring. Feel the softness of the pashmina around that woman's milky shoulders. Look at the majesty of a large jet plane. Take in the somberness of a gravestone. Put on an old pair of shoes. Clutch a warm mug of freshly brewed coffee. Sit on a rocking chair. Feel the sumptuous leather seats of a new car.

We are surrounded by things. We are involved with them, indebted to them. We speak to things and things speak to us. To say that we are interdependent is banal. Let us be courageous. Let us admit it: we are lovers.

And, like lovers, we are inseparable, even though we are often unable to express our love of things in words. Here poets come to our rescue. In his poem "Ode to Things," the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda openly voices his attachment to and his delight in the emotional gifts of the material world:

I pause in houses,
streets and elevators,
touching things,
identifying objects
that I secretly covet;
this one because it rings,
that one because
it's as soft
as the softness of a woman's hip,
that one there for its deep-sea color,
and that one for its velvet feel.

Even in less joyous forms, things form an integral part of our lives. We constantly discover, or as Freud would have it, rediscover them. Things affect our emotions and impact upon our thoughts. The arrival of a dozen roses from a lover or a letter from a grandchild makes our day. And we express our emotions, or innermost selves, with their help. Welling with love, we offer gifts, tokens of our affection. Feeling sad, we may reach for an old photo album that offers us friendly faces and memories of good times. Bitter and enraged, we give vent to our suppressed emotions by reading a book about a serial killer and vicariously identifying with his cruel acts. Such "conversation" between us and things is of course affected by our cultural heritage, by our gender, by our knowing and unknowing emulation of (or rebellion against) our parents, by our economic status, and by the value we place on material acquisitions, but it is universal. As such, we must first ask ourselves a truly basic question:

Why do we need things?

Things satisfy all sorts of physical and emotional needs in us. To begin with, they offer us "instrumental" help. We enlist their prowess to accomplish the tasks of daily living. We use cars, planes, trains, and boats for travel; clocks and watches for knowing time; knives to cut; spoons to feed ourselves with; chairs to sit upon; and so on. Actually, if we are honest and humble, we will acknowledge that our very survival depends upon things. As naked apes, which is what the ethologist Desmond Morris called human beings, we are hardly capable of surviving the harshness of nature alone. Inanimate objects come to our aid and save our lives.

We need enclosed spacesmade of "things"—to live, clothes to cover our vulnerable furless skin, artificial means to travel long distances, and all sorts of cooking utensils to render digestible what we devour. Our dependence upon things is not merely life-saving and life-enhancing, it confers upon us the dignity of our human status as well. Try walking out of your house naked on the street and you will immediately bow to the profound role such plebian things as clothes silently play in your acceptance by the society. It is a pity that the discourse on the Garden of Eden waxes eloquently about God's injunctions, Adam, Eve, the forbidden fruit, and even the wicked serpent but pays little attention to the poor fig leaf, the primordial hint of the human civilization to come

.The progression from that "original garment" to haute couture is mirrored in the transitions from wooden spears to Kalashnikovs, from flickering oil lamps to incandescent lightbulbs, and from horse-drawn carriages to gas-guzzling SUVs. Necessity, the mother of invention, has indeed turned out to be a fertile woman. As a result, the world is full of useful things that, in Borges's words, "serve us like slaves who never say a word."

At the same time, it is obvious that our dependence upon things has something more than their utilitarian value at its base. From birth till death, we draw all sorts of emotional sustenance from them.

Things and our emotional growth

At the beginning of our lives, man, animal, and things are all the same to us. Differentiation between them develops gradually. Over time, we begin to react differently to human and nonhuman objects. Upon seeing our mothers, we give a "social response," but to a toy we give an "acquisitive response." The former consists of smiling, chuckling, and reaching out to a person. The latter consists of deliberate movements of arms and hands to grasp an object. By six months of age, we no longer accept an inanimate object in lieu of a person. And yet we continue to think of objects as being alive. Until we are about six or seven, we think that the sun and the moon move because they want to and toys have feelings that must be considered.

Meanwhile, the game of peekaboo teaches us that just because we can no longer see an object, it has not actually disappeared. Over time, our understanding of this concept shapes our understanding of the entire world of things. A tree, we learn, will remain a tree; a house, a house.

During this time, which spans from about six months to eighteen months of age, we are also beginning to psychologically separate from our mothers. To handle the resulting feelings of loneliness, we find our first real possession, usually a teddy bear or a blanket. Affectionately cuddled, it provides a sense of comfort and safety. Donald Winnicott, the British pediatrician turned psychoanalyst, emphasizes that the child's teddy bear or blanket helps create the experiential realm between the inner world and external reality. A possession of this sort is tangible but its importance lies in the feelings it produces, not in its actual use. As a result, such an object becomes the harbinger of the capacity to experience the world on a metaphorical level. Reality no longer appears juxtaposed to unreality; emotions that bridge the two in subtle and intangible ways begin to be experienced. With further development, such "intermediate area of experience" allows for the enjoyment of poetry, music, fiction, and movies (all being neither real nor not real; intangible yet perceived).

The fact that potential groundwork for creative thinking is laid by the early interplay between the mind and its physical surround is well captured in a 1926 poem by Julian Huxley:

The world of things entered in your infant mind
To populate that crystal cabinet.
Within its walls the strangest partners met.
And things turned thoughts did propagate their kind.
For, once within, corporeal fact...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Harmony Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1400054443
• ISBN 13: 9781400054442
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 223
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar