Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

development of Winnicott and object relations thinkers found in his seminal The Shadow of
the Object (Bollas 1987). 552 Here Bollas advocates a sophisticated vision of transformation
as a transition from an aesthetic object to a transformational object, as the core aspect of full
personhood. For Bollas the aesthetic object or moment is experienced as a profound but
subjective rapport with an object, and like Winnicott, Bollas sees the arts as a similar
symbolic search for transformation. This includes ‘non-representational knowledge of
being embraced by the aesthetic object’ such as ‘the sudden enclosure of the self by a sacred
presence’ (Bollas 1987: 30) as occurs in conversion experiences, however it is not limited to
religious events and includes a wide range of aesthetic experiences. It is an ego memory of
the first aesthetic moment of a mother and baby simply being, then being transformed by
these encounters that are recalled as radical otherness. Akhtar writes, ‘the transformative
potential of mother and of experiences with her is imbued with a reverential and near-sacred
quality’ (Akhtar 2009: 292) and it is this that informs Bollas’ thinking.
An aesthetic moment however does not automatically lead to transformation, as much can
go wrong in a person’s developmental phase of being. Psychoanalysis therefore offers a
reparative encounter where the analyst becomes a potential transformational object, but
recognizes that a patient may experience them as pathological transformational objects.
Similarly Bollas identifies the danger that if a person experiences a profound aesthetic
moment this can weld them to the aesthetic object and a lifetime of trying to recover
something that once was but remains elusive now. Bollas was also alert to the pathology of
such an aesthetic moment leading to a conviction or state of mind so welded to an idea or a
552 This builds on ideas Bollas published in psychoanalytic journals on the aesthetic moment, the search for
transformation and the transformational object from the mid 1970s.
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