Nostalgic Objects of Our Affection: Mouring, Memory, and Maternal Subjectivity

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Bassin, D. (1993). Nostalgic Objects of our Affection: Mouring, Memory, and Maternal Subje... Psychoanal. Psychol., 10:425-439.
(1993). Psychoanalytic Psychology, 10:425-439
Nostalgic Objects of our Affection: Mouring, Memory, and Maternal Subjectivity

Donna Bassin, Ph.D.
In this article, I discuss a nostalgic use of history that reflects arrested mourning of the early transformational mother who
“makes things happen.” Exemplified in aspects of popular culture, the past is recalled in foraging and collecting of “vintage
retro” items. Resistance to mourning ties the flea-market junkie to an endless elegiac search for “keepsakes from the past”
that will “complete the collection” and provide the self with the fantasy of transformational experience and capacity. In the
analytic transference, it ties the patient to a bittersweet process of reenacting and becoming. The legacy of transformational
capacities from the early mother are tied and wistfully sought in an array of historical objects of affection and desire. This
nostalgic relation to memory prevents a true identification with the transformational aspects of maternal practice. In
contrast, “mature memorial activity” (Loewald, 1980) represents the acceptance of loss and the potential for an animated
and dynamic use of memory in the creation of a generative maternal self.
From a psychoanalytic vantage, “the mother” has figured predominantly as a psychological object in the patient's psyche. This belief in
the omnipotence of an archaic, all-powerful object mother has been seen as the source of utopian fantasies of woman/mother as well as a
factor in her domination. The deconstruction of these illusions of transformation and utopian states has been a task of feminists and
postmodernists. The attempt to expose and derail belief in the destructive power of the so-called utopian, archaic, fantasy mother is seen
as
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necessary to explain and expose problems of domination (see especially Benjamin, 1988). These critiques have encouraged a shift in
theoretical attention from the impact of the mother on the child to the mother herself and the impact of mothering on her psychic
organization and personality development (Schuker & Shwetz, 1991).
However, despite the concerted attempt to elaborate on the mother as subject, her subject-object status oscillates as quickly as the
hand-tricks of the magician: “Now you see her, now you don't.” The representations of motherhood reverberate with the complexities of
our own maternal bonds as our own infantile experiences objectify the mother and tie her to images of nurturing provider and omnipotent
transformer (Bassin, Honey, & Kaplan, 1993). The pull of these early infantile memories and our wish for maternal perfection and
omnipotence contribute to the difficulties in disembedding the mother as a subject in her own right (Bassin et al., 1993).
Context
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Christa Wolf (1980) wrote: “What is past is not dead: it is not even past. We cut ourselves off from it: we pretend to be strangers” (p.
3). Wolf's commentary reverberates with the observations of other critics (e.g., Hines, 1987) who have noted America's preoccupation with
its own past and its difficulty in recognizing the past other than in fossilized memorials and keepsakes. A nostalgic pull to “vintage retro”
objects and activities among baby boomers is evidenced by the increased seeking and collecting of historical artifacts and the surging
increase in flea markets and vintage stores. A cultural fascination with collecting and quoting from the past, currently the 1950s, has been
noted.
Collectors of nostalgia are doing more than just recycling, collecting, or hoarding these fossilized objects; they are attempting to
collect material reminders of an utopian past. The 1950s, keep in mind, were an era built on nostalgia for better times and promoted
illusions of transformation and utopian possibilities after the U.S. victory in World War II. Collecting material reminders of an utopian past
is closely related to the means or procedure of transformation that originates in the mother—infant matrix and that, when internalized,
contributes to the development of subjectivity. The fantasies regarding a transformational mother that surround nostalgic activities can be
appreciated as a reflection of powerful affects and anxieties guarding against dependency, fragmentation, unresolved narcissism, and
powerlessness.
By looking at cultural life as a place where the psyche and its projections reveal themselves, therapeutic aspects of these nostalgic
fantasies can be seen. These are not so dissimilar from the therapeutic aspects of transference (Schafer, 1977); both offer a vehicle to
transmute fantasy. I suggest that these fantasies represent a thwarted attempt—but an attempt nevertheless—at
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mourning play.1 I am defining mourning play in this context as an activity of the ego that both mourns the loss of difference of self and
other and celebrates playfully the possibility of oneness regained.2 The attempt to refind the mother and to rehabilitate a maternal
sensibility in a new register requires the passage through this difficult and most resisted process of mourning.
As Winnicott (1986) pointed out, the issue of memory is tied to recognition of the mother. He stated: “Children grow up and become in
turn fathers and mothers, but, on the whole, they do not grow up to know and acknowledge just what their mothers did for them at the
start” (p. 124). Winnicott was not alluding to a lack of gratitude but rather to a lack of recognition. In her work on intersubjectivity,
Benjamin (1988) illuminated the need for recognition of the mother as children journey toward their own subjectivity. Benjamin's detailing
of the child's nascent capacity to recognize the mother as subject and to be recognized by her further pushes the question of maternal
subjectivity as a topic of grave concern for social change and growth.
Recognition of the mother requires the ability to contain and tolerate difference, the awareness of the separateness of the mother, and
freedom from the wish that she should have been different. Gaining this freedom requires access to and use of dynamic memory states of
the early relationship with the mother, a process of remembering and recognizing a past that no longer exists in its original form (Ogden,
1990). This process enables us to be influenced by and to use our history and not be limited to learning from immediate experience.
Furthermore, appreciation and gratitude, which keep memory of history animated and dynamic, allow us to have good mental
representations of significant others. Without this true recognition of our origins and of our maternal history, parenting and other
potentially generative work may become repetitious, nostalgic enactment. The awareness of the mothering subject within the self becomes
compromised, as does awareness of the subjectivity of the mother.
Bollas (1987, 1989) has contributed a generative understanding of the maternal object in his identification and amplification of the
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transformational object. Prior to his work, this “processor of the infant” aspect of the mother had been embedded within Freud's desired
omnipotent mother of need satisfaction and Winnicott's (1971) environmental mother of containment. According
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1 I have borrowed the term mourning play from Santner's (1990) brilliant analysis of mourning and memory in postwar Germany. Mourning play is a
variant of Walter Benjamin's analysis of Trauerspiel, which literally means “mourning play” and refers to the German baroque dramas. Santner suggested
that “the post-modernist appropriates the Benjaminian analysis of mourning play as one of mourning play” (p. 12).
2 Actually, this is how Loewald (1988) described the activity of sublimation. Loewald expanded the traditional and limited psychoanalytic understanding
of sublimation as a defense (albeit a good defense), describing it as a state of ego development. He fleshed out the proactive use of symbolism in this
oscillation of subject-object. Here differences are neither transcended nor ignored, but played with.
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to Bollas, transformational object-seeking is an endless memorial search for something in the future that resides in the past that is
associated with a transformation of the self. The transformational aspect of the mother is her dynamic activity—she is the mother who
makes things happen. To the degree that the growing child identifies with her power and agency, the child will in turn develop an internal
sense of her or his own efficacy. It is the metabolization of this process of identification with the transformational mother that I believe
facilitates and propels the regenerative cycle. This life cycle task of generativity encompasses hope and a belief in change through the next
generation or in one's own creations.3
Nostalgia
Nostalgia, exemplified in the clinical material I discuss shortly, is an incomplete mourning, an attempt to reenact reunion with the lost
object. It is a bittersweet pleasure tarnished with the adult knowledge of loss. Although the nostalgic fantasy renders the imagined self
back through reverie to a particular situation representing imagined metamorphosis or transformation, the fantasy is passive and devoid of
a sense of internal agency. In her description of nostalgia as the “desire for desire” Stewart (1984, p. 12) illuminated the inactivity and
stasis of the nostalgia state. The transformation that the nostalgic seeks is assumed to reside in the situation or the object rather than the
self. Geachan (1968) viewed nostalgia “as a relationship to a lost object which avoids mourning and subsequent internalization of the
object” (Werman, 1977, p. 391). The urge to hold on to the object that cannot be mourned precludes investment in or libidinization of a
new object. The nostalgic fantasy can be seen as a fantasy within the Kleinian paranoid-schizoid position where, as Segal (1957) and
Ogden (1990) argued, the symbol is experienced to be the same as what it represents. That is, there is no awareness that the subject is
creating the symbol, and therefore there is no freedom of use.
The holding on to the nostalgic memory is a holding on to the lost mother. The nostalgic object—the mother—is perceived as a needed
object for transformation; she is then subjected to rage and devaluation for withholding her perceived capabilities. The fantasy of
transformation itself appears to fulfill the subject's needs rather than to move the subject in the direction of initiative and action. In his
article on remembering and repeating, Freud (1914) pointed to a state of mind where
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3 See Erikson (1950) for a brief but seminal description of the life cycle task of generativity versus stagnation. The stage of generativity, he noted, is
less about biological parenting than such “popular synonyms as productivity and creativity, which, however, cannot replace it” (p. 267).
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… the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats
it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it [italics added]. (p. 150).
The pleasure of nostalgia resides in the search for the old object. Awareness of loss is avoided. This leads to an indefinite quest for an
object that can never be found—a quest that ironically temporarily fulfills the desire. In nostalgia, the linkages are unrecognized, the
mourning for the mother or powerful transformative other is refused, and one continually seeks to duplicate the transformational
relationship outside of oneself rather than recreate it within.
Clinical Commentary
The compelling interest in flea markets, garage sales, and 1950s-vintage objects of two middle-aged analysands (Miss A and Mrs. B)
suggested further consideration of the meaning of nostalgic preoccupation with objects of affection. Finding, restoring, and framing
objects of affection and memory for both these female patients was more than just a compulsive activity; it suggested a valued and
inarticulate object relationship. For these two women, as for many other individuals out in the flea-market “field of dreams,” objects,
keepsakes, and souvenirs of a childhood past seemed to be the main vehicle for memories and the relation with a good transformational
maternal object. Noteworthy in both these cases was their relative silence regarding their past (they reported little history) and the
specter-like presence of their mothers in their associations. Despite disparate presentations of their complaints, Miss A and Mrs. B shared a
preoccupation with nostalgic activities and fantasies.
Mrs. B, a child of the 1950s, experienced great anxiety around what she perceived to be unresolvable conflicts about mothering and
her professional life. At work, she suffered from panic regarding the safety of her child, poignantly remarking that having a child was like
“having your heart live outside your body.” Her anger and frustration was often displaced to her husband, who she viewed as able to
separate from their child without psychic pain. Mrs. B struggled to make decisions that she experienced as requiring a choice between
herself and her child. Despite her great intellectual understanding of her need to take care of herself, she felt herself to be only her
daughter's object and not a woman who mothers. Mrs. B was an ardent collector. She found herself rummaging around at yard sales and in
the bric-a-brac of flea markets. The objects she sought satisfied her need for control and stimulated the excitement of getting a bargain
—getting something for nothing. Mrs. B was looking for something she called “comfort from the past.” She depended on the clutter of
objects she had accumulated while disavowing any larger meaning they might hold for her.
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What was she actually shopping for, and what was the 1950s dream she remembered as she tried to re-collect and recall herself
through this weekly sifting and browsing? She was not just looking for comfort but for generative aesthetics, sensuous and fun. The
objects she found—lunchboxes with early superheroes, old radios with the sound of crackling tubes, brightly colored kitchen clocks with
loud ticking—represented more than just possessions. Someone else's clutter and castaways offered her renewal—the objects were
recycled from valued possibility to discarded possession and back to valued possibility. Possibilities for what? She wasn't sure. There was a
pleasure in seeking and finding that sometimes led to the discovery of something momentarily satisfying. However, these objects were
never quite right, and her thoughts about finding more always began again. There was a 1950s dream here, she thought, tied to her
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mother and her own relentless preoccupation with finding a better place to live her life. She craved a move to the suburbs on one register,
hoping to refind there a mother who could mother her daughter and herself in a way she could not.
Another patient, Miss A, was a shopkeeper specializing in vintage clothing and retro artifacts. She spoke of the glamour of the object,
of getting the “real thing.” She discussed the thrill of acquiring a certain dress that was just like one she had as a child. She didn't
remember much about kindergarten; it was all locked up with this plaid taffeta dress with its dotted Swiss collar. She had lost memories;
she said that she didn't have a “good sense of history,” so she collected to remember. What she wanted to know and remember was not
clear. But it was clear that she was looking to make sense of her own activities, to gather some understanding of what she was doing. She
sensed that she was involved in something other than buying, collecting, and selling.
She walked with her head down, “looking for stuff.” She didn't know what she was looking for; if she did, she said, she wouldn't be in
the vintage store business. She knew immediately, however, what it was when she found it: “I found the genuine Dale Evans mug, my
fingers grasped the handle, it fit exactly, the price was right, I knew it was mine.” She opted to go with the pleasure of the seek and find,
which would inevitably lead to the discovery of something. Despite her economic needs, an object could not be sold until another, more
satisfying one entered her shop. Her own mother, a major collector since the 1940s, had filled Miss A's childhood home with bric-a-brac
and kitsch of the 1950s. Miss A's attempt to extinguish the clutter and to order her life brought her to a stark loft space during her
treatment. After some time, she felt something missing in her home and found herself creating what she called her “homey altar.” This
altar was constructed out of pieces of her baby blanket, china roosters and figures from her mother's kitchen, and other more recent
keepsakes from her life. These keepsakes were more than a collection of souvenirs; she claimed that they provided an internal space in
which she could continue to renew herself and establish a sense of place.
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Despite the fact that both patients reported active and competent mothers, neither spoke much about them. But the “transformational
mother” was remarkably present for both women, appearing for Miss A as her next “major find for her shop” or at her homey altar and for
Mrs. B in the longed-for home in the suburbs or in her relationship with her daughter. Eventually, as the transference developed, the
analysis itself took over as the ultimate transformational possibility.
In the transference, both patients looked to me for the “big and pivotal interpretations” that might bring about change. However, they
used interpretations as they used nostalgic objects. Transformation was not seen as interaction between themselves and the world or as an
identification of earlier ego change associated with the mother, but as an envied capacity belonging only to the analyst. As a resistance in
treatment, the fact of being in analysis enabled them in part to sustain their character-protective positions of becoming something and
someone in the distant future. As long as they were longing and existing in this nostalgic state, they could continue to delay confronting
the necessary mourning and loss. From the very beginning, Miss A talked about the end of her treatment when she would be nostalgic for
the wonderful time in psychoanalysis and remorseful that she hadn't allowed herself to appreciate what was happening for her during
treatment. Mrs. B's 1950s collectibles and even her daughter were objects with possibilities that she could not grasp, and yet they
perpetuated her search to own and control her past nostalgically.
For both patients, a never-experienced present, a never-arriving future, and a lack of generativity and agency related, at least in part, to
lack of a detailed sense of a dynamic past that was usable in the present. They had foreclosed mourning, focusing instead on some variant
of a nostalgic object that resided safely away in an unclear past and unattainable future. Both were eventually able to articulate, to varying
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degrees, their unconscious organizing fantasy of a transformational object and to begin the mourning process that facilitated an
identification with the transformational aspects of the mother. Their nostalgic preoccupations were seen as nascent attempts, although
ineffectual, to identify and recognize an internal maternal history.
Transforming Nostalgia
At this point, I reframe the case material to examine an aspect of both patients' activity that involves mourning play and points toward
a collective cultural strategy that makes use of transformational mother fantasies. I wish to place the transformational object proactively as
an aid in mourning, a sign of hope and possibility, and a component of generative transformation. Through acceptance and interpretation
of transformational fantasies in the transference, in which I, as the analyst, was alternately a transformational object and the
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passive, nostalgic, ineffectual self, a new aspect of each patient emerged.

Miss A eventually began, albeit with a smirk and smile, to recognize her resistance to mourning. She made a last-ditch effort to
recreate me and the analysis as yet another nostalgic state. Her difficulty in relinquishing the object tie to the transformational mother
(among others) was apparent. Due to avoidable financial difficulties, she orchestrated a situation where she could no longer pay her
already low fee and thus once again would have to give up something she valued. Her fantasy was to leave treatment for a little while
without actually terminating the relationship. In this way, she would imagine herself in treatment simultaneously thinking about what she
was missing. However, she gradually experienced not only her loss and her grief over what was missing for her, but also how I, like her
mother, had disappointed her. As these feelings surfaced, they ushered in a welcome change. She was no longer compelled to leave the
relationship to relish nostalgia's bittersweet pain.
Mrs. B was initially unable to resist her nostalgic longings for her mother in her attempt to recollect her own internal transformational
activity. She experienced herself only as an object, and a mothering object at that. Currently, rather than seeing herself merely as an object
for her daughter, she is finding glimmers of herself as a woman who has chosen to mother. Mrs. B's relationship to her objects has
changed. Rather than focusing on ownership and control over someone else's discarded possessions, she is beginning to experience the
objects she has collected as valued possibilities and as inspiration for transformation. For Mrs. B, recycling junk into possibility was an
ideal metaphor for the psychic activity that was simultaneously occurring—the transition from inert use of objects and things to a
relational, creative interplay with the self.
Now that more and more of the world is invested with pieces of herself, she can allow new experiences to feel familiar and more
homey. For example, she is now able to let her child play at someone else's house, feeling the extension of her own motherliness there.
This shift represents the development of Mrs. B's identification with the transformative mother. Her new sensibility, which I see as similar
to a “camp sensibility” (Sontag, 1983), has revealed the fantasy aspects of the transformative object as she begins playfully to appropriate
or identify with it. The fantasy has been disturbed but not superseded. As she becomes conscious of her own desire, she inevitably
renovates her own fantasies.
The objects that she appreciatively sees as reminders of transformational activity within herself, illusions notwithstanding, become
symbols for possibility. This new appreciation is akin to the sentiment expressed in Quinlan's (1988) essay, “Tag Sale,” in which she
discussed preserving a relationship of possibility vis-à-vis the objects of her child's infancy. Quinlan described her
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wish to leave the door of motherhood open, symbolized in her unwillingness to part with the
box of crib sheets, yellow with milk stains, yellowing just a bit with age…. I have a feeling of possibility within me that means too much to give away. I could
use the closet space, but right now, it is something else I need much, much more. (p. 87)
It is the feeling of possibility and the ability to use the transformational fantasy to renew and recreate that anchor motherhood in a
truly generative place.
Mourning Play
Many of the people who spend their time in the flea-market field of dreams are seeking out the missing pieces of their collections.
Their excitement increases when they get more than they give. However, a collection in its ability to excite and renew embodies an object
relationship of early maternal generativity. The objects that make up a collection are not as directly transparent as the earliest symbolic
displacements of the mother-infant relationship, such as the crib, teddy bear, or blanket. The objects that Winnicott (1971) called
transitional objects, the generative maternal spirit, may be experienced either in the act of collecting (giving life to an object) or in the
texture and form or overall aesthetics of the collections. It is in this generative space that the objects embody something significant to the
collector/ observer. The pleasure of the object emerges in part from its role as a reminder of the deeper, forbidden, repressed, regressed,
politically incorrect, dissociated and/or denied pleasure with which it is associated. The object is the subject's chosen key, real or
symbolized, to the containing/transformative space.
Some adults played with dolls or plastic horses as children; they pretended they were good mothers who knew exactly how to take care
of their babies. But eventually the doll, horse, or teddy became just an inanimate object again and might have been tossed out, mutilated,
or simply ignored.4 If the disillusion was not too great, the doll, horse, or teddy was replaced with other objects and activities that
encompassed transformation and animation. These “babies,” the individual objects or the collection as a whole,
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4 See Judith Kestenberg's work on doll play and maternal experience (1956, p. 286).
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give material representation to the wished-for link between mother's and subject's own insides, where the fantasy of generative
possibilities and interesting transformations exists. The child is able to transmute his or her connection to the transformational mother to
a new form of empowerment through the capacity to represent absence and loss in manageable doses through substitute figures and play.
The invisibility of the mother, when she disappears as object for the infant—either by her own actions or because of the infant's rageful
“dismissal” of her—heralds the beginning of the child's use of substitute objects to comfort and to act as a holding environment until the
return of the real mother. These transitional objects, as Winnicott (1971) described, temporarily deaden the longing for the mother and
simultaneously initiate the infant's relationship with the world of others and his or her own subjectivity.
These same objects need to be seen as aids in mourning. The stress here is not on the object but on objects used playfully. Freud's
(1920) description of his grandson's fort/da (gone/here) game illustrates the child's working through the everyday losses of mother as she
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comes in and out of the child's view. By throwing and retrieving a spool, the child duplicated the mother coming and going. He not only
had the object under control to mediate grief and re-creation but was able to transform the feeling state. Without the opportunity to play
out her leaving, the child would have been left with only her loss or an inert substitute. The playing gave him something else; it shifted the
feelings of transformation and agency to himself (“mother leaves and transforms me from a happy, contented, safe child to a frightened
and lonely one” to “I can make things come and go, and I can feel myself as an agent of change”). It is not within the scope of this article to
discuss the actual operative processes of ego identification, which as Meissner (1970) noted were left rather vague in Freud's work, except
to say that there can be an alternation in the ego before the object is lost, and there can be an identification with attributes or activities of
the object. Thus through simultaneous leave-taking and identification the child obtains a sense of power to change feeling states and
becomes empowered as a transformer.
First's (1993) observation of children's reactions to maternal departure suggests that a toddler “allows” the mother to leave as he or
she identifies with the mother's subjective experience of having her own life. The toddler comes to realize, as Benjamin (1988, 1990,
1991) articulated, that separation (object loss) is the other side of connection to the other. That is, through this process of identification,
one can imaginatively appropriate aspects of the other for the self. The process of transformation means not just that the substitute object
is sought (again not just the archaic, all-perfect, instinctual mother) but that through the playful process of substituting, one achieves a
sense of agency and activity. An identification with the transformational activity of the lost mother
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becomes part of the self, and this allows one to be creative and generative. Memory and history thus become possible. However, when the
process of mourning and subsequent identification is forestalled, objects are amassed indiscriminately and nostalgia takes the place of
agency and dynamic memory. The subject tries to use these objects as a substitute external mother but is never satisfied.
Camp: A Strategy Toward Representation of the Invisible

In contrast to the psychoanalytic task of illuminating and understanding the fantasies of the perfect archaic mother, feminism as a
political project seeks to “treat” those fantasies insofar as they are responsible for the social domination of women. The cultural strategy of
camp may be one such “treatment” intervention. The camp mentality moves the subject toward a position or sensibility that is not so
different from the analytic attitude toward desire. Freud
encouraged his patients to abandon a hysterical position (a position of repression that allows us to treat desire as alien) with respect to the terrible idea [of
desire] and take up a position of sympathy and distance reminiscent of the engaged spectator in the theater. (Lear, 1990, p. 58)
A camp sensibility is very much like this position of engaged spectatorship; a place between sympathy and repulsion. As a collective
cultural strategy for the most difficult project of mourning difference (gender or self-other), it represents an attempt to make the symbol
stand independent of the symbolized. Though nostalgia contains the preoccupation with difference and loss, it neutralizes neither the
threat nor the regressive pull. Camp, as Ross (1989) argued, is a more comprehensive strategy for containment that provides the pleasure
of the fantasy while also securing the necessary distance to reflexively experience the activity of the fantasy within oneself. Camp is
respectful of the fantasy, yet it includes within its sensibility a simultaneous interpretation or partial objectification of the fantasy. For
example, Arnold Schwarzenegger's films are filled with a campy subtext: self-conscious references to hypermasculinity that result in both
mocking appreciation of the need for phallic fantasies and an acknowledgment of the absence of phallic power in reality (Moore, 1989). A
camp relationship to the retro 1950s or to the utopianlike transformative mother represents an attempt to recall and reposition the self in
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relation to the mother-infant matrix in a manner suggestive of agency and play. The self-conscious use of camp is about knowing that the
transformational mother is a long-gone moment but allowing the fantasy, with a wink,
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to be used. Thus, the mother is emancipated from her symbol as an object, and her symbol can be utilized as a transformational process
in the service of play and mourning.
“I'M in the Milk and the Milk'S in Me”5

The mother or the mother-infant relationship has been appropriated as a metaphor or a symbol for subjectivity in an attempt to
capture the mind's symbolizing and generative processes. The mother-as-metaphor has become a primary structure in mothers'
experiences of themselves and in men's experiences of women. The image is a complex and conflicting one, manifesting static images of
mother as container/vessel as well as more dynamic images of mother as agent of transformation and change.6 The mother, in her
fecundity, serves as a substitute, but the awareness of her as a symbol often slips. The gaps among the symbol, mother, and
transformational properties of mind must remain open. The longings and efforts to refind and re-collect a mothering self and/or a
generative subjective self lean on memories and fantasies of a utopianlike transformative state.
Furthermore, identifications with the activity of transformation, not only with the mother or the father, constitute an aspect of maternal
subjectivity within the mother as well. The subjectivity of the mother is not only a function of her status as subject or object in the eyes of
the other (Chodorow, 1989). Rather, it rests on her own ability to symbolize and be aware of her own symbolization. The attempt to
midwife this process in others outside the self (e.g., our children and our community) encourages a regenerative circle that is in itself a
living memorial to the mother.
As daughters, women need to be able to acknowledge their own subject-object status in the eyes of their mothers. For mother-
as-subject, the work of mothering may not always be in the best interest of the child's needs. In fact, maternal pleasure and selfhood may
rest in part with the endowment of a piece of the self into the other and a refinding of that self experience through the other. The poet
Anne Sexton (1960) wrote about her daughter, “I made you to find me” (p. 23). Maternal subjectivity, in this sense, is an ongoing recycling
of the self in the production of meaningful objects and others.
Erikson (1950, 1959), in his profound but undeveloped idea of generativity (in which fertility and productivity are related but not the
same), attempted to elucidate a sensibility of adulthood. This adult sensibility is not about the reproduction of parenting per se, although
mothering and fathering may be a
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5 This is a line from Sendak's (1970) wonderful children's book about mothers and dreaming, entitled In the Night Kitchen.
6 See Neumann (1955) for an analysis of the preverbal images of the maternal.
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vehicle for it; it has to do with our creative nurturance of the next generation. Erikson's model is based on the wish to rework the life cycle
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and to take part in it as a conscious, active contributor. The crucial note here is the agency involved; without it, adulthood would merely be
stagnation. In this light, to be used as a so-called object in the regeneration of another is not an obstacle to our own subjectivity but a
moment of development.
Benedek (1959), who examined the reparative function of parenting, argued that mothering changes not only the infant but the
mother as well. Through maternal activity, there is an opportunity to rework the relationship with the mother, although, recalling
Winnicott's (1986) observation, the biological process of motherhood is not sufficient to do this piece of work alone. Mothering at times
evokes nostalgic longing for one's own mother (fantasized or real), and yet the nostalgic pull that binds must be partially resisted.
Nostalgia yearns toward reconciliation, but the “forgetting” or lack of true acknowledgement of the mother's contribution leads to the
nostalgic insistence of repeating rather than to true recalling. Such repeating is a defensive act, and subjectivity is lost.
Repetition—rather than true remembering and identification with the early transformational relationship with the archaic mother—is
seen as one of the obstacles to maternal subjectivity. If motherhood is taken on for nostalgic reasons, in an attempt to redeem a self that
has lost its history and awareness of an internal transformational space, the mother can only experience herself as an object. It is not until
the old object (the maternal fantasy) is effectively mourned that the mothering subject can libidinally invest in a new other. For daughters
who are now mothers, when the old object can be mourned, investment in self can occur.
Paradoxically, “retro culture” can be seen both as a representation of the interruption of the mourning of the transformational mother
and as an attempt to express the lost, invisible mother who makes things happen. With a camp sensibility, we use props to dramatize this
invisible dwelling space where discovery and transformation are possibilities. In a sense, then, our creativity in the production of cultural
objects simultaneously siphons away the direct anxiety of loss and satisfies the transformational pleasures associated with the maternal
relationship. In other words, the unconscious wish to be back with the omnipotent mother does not change, but the fantasy is experienced
differently (Benjamin, 1988, 1990, 1991; Ogden, 1990). In turn, this transformational matrix, symbolized by the “fantasized relationship
with our own mother,” is the basis of our own subjectivity. This transformational moment is experienced in our active creation and creative
reading of culture as well as in the experience of motherwork.
If, in collecting objects of the past, we are only quoting, then we are caught in nostalgia. But if, as copartners with these objects, we are
cocreators, then we are clearly occupying the space of subjectivity. The task for the mother-as-subject is to bring forward into the present
the old fantasies and
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feelings from the original dyad with an awareness of their origin. In this article, I suggested that the ability to see the mother as a subject
and to experience oneself as a maternal subject is an elegiac process. That is, it is dependent in part on the successful mourning of the
early maternal transformational object. The act of collecting keepsakes associated with the early transformational object may be seen as an
effort toward a playful mourning of the early mother. The potentially generative process of engagement with artifacts of culture where loss
is temporarily and playfully forgotten is contrasted to the denial of loss in nostalgia.
Acknowledgments
This article grew out of a talk given at the meeting of Division 39 of the American Psychological Association, Philadelphia, April 1992. A
different elaboration of this talk, entitled “Maternal Subjectivity in the Culture of Nostalgia: Mourning and Memory,” will appear in
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Representations of Motherhood (1993), edited by D. Bassin, M. Honey, and M. Kaplan, Yale University Press.
I am grateful to Dr. Virginia Goldner for her discussion of this article and her phrase, “transformational aspects of maternal practice,”
which led me to a much fuller understanding of my own work. I also thank Drs. Jessica Benjamin, Christopher Bollas, Daniel Hill, Margaret
Honey, and Adria Schwartz for their generative comments.
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Article Citation [Who Cited This?]

Bassin, D. (1993). Nostalgic Objects of our Affection. Psychoanal. Psychol., 10:425-439
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(1993). Psychoanalytic Psychology, 10:425-439

Nostalgic Objects of our Affection: Mouring, Memory, and Maternal Subjectivity

passive, nostalgic, ineffectual self, a new aspect of each patient emerged.

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“I'M in the Milk and the Milk'S in Me”5

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