We live today in a world fractured by an environmental crisis whose violent social repercussions are testing our zest for life, our bonds of solidarity, and the balance of our emotional and mental health—both individual and collective.
The environmental crisis has a traumatic impact on everyone—sometimes subtle and insidious, sometimes loud and overwhelming. It is a planetary catastrophe for humans as well as for living beings other than humans. This catastrophe, slow but ongoing, is not a crisis—which is by definition temporary—but a disaster that is here to stay.
One of the beauties of psychoanalysis, gained over a century of practice in conditions of peace as well as of sometimes extreme social violence, is that it reveals to us that human beings possess an ability to develop fronts of psychic survival in situations of catastrophe as well as in the simple adversities of daily life.
The “object to be saved” is the name that psychoanalyst Silvia Amati Sas has given to a register of thoughts that help one “hold on” in adversity and pain, and that help one endure potentially overwhelming climatic or political contexts. The “object to be saved” is a front of psychic survival. Amati Sas gives the example of such a thought that carried and sustained a woman who was a victim of a dictatorship’s torture regime and who, later in life, turned to psychoanalysis: “I don’t want my child to grow up in a world ruled by those people!” This intimate, secret thought sustained her during her ordeal, helped her survive, and then accompanied her throughout her life. Conceiving this thought was for her like “a tiny second of eternity,” in the words of psychoanalyst Danielle Quinodoz: a thought that gives meaning to life even under extreme conditions; a thought that carries her hope; a thought for others despite the extreme solitude of her situation under torture.
This thought was the heart of her spirit of resistance. The beauty of a thought for an “object to be saved” is that it arises spontaneously: it springs from our Unconscious, or even from a biological survival instinct, when an adverse, threatening historical context demands it. The “object to be saved” is the expression of a human capacity to remain human in an inhuman or dehumanizing situation. Just as the “object to be saved” can give meaning to our most ordinary daily lives. To remain human means preserving the capacity to think of others and to think with others—“the child,” in the example above—even in a situation of catastrophe. The great beauty of a thought for an “object to be saved” is that this thought, in the very act of its emotional and psychological birth, saves the human quality of the thought of the person who conceives it. Having an “object to be saved” means existing at one’s highest level of emotional humanity and thought, even in the worst of circumstances.
For a century, we have witnessed the extreme forms that human barbarism can take when it puts the contemporary overpowering force of Technology at the service of delusional ideologies. When this barbarism becomes genocide, yesterday as today. It is then the very belonging of the victims to the human species that is denied by the work of the executioners. A sense of belonging to the human species, this is what the “object to be saved” preserves. Robert Antelme, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, bears powerful witness to this: “The driving force behind our struggle was nothing other than the frenzied—and almost always solitary—demand to remain, to the very end, human beings… an ultimate sense of belonging to the human species. To say that we felt our humanity—our membership in the human species—was being challenged at that time may seem like a retrospective sentiment, like an explanation in hindsight. Yet this is what was most immediately and constantly felt and experienced, and this is precisely what the others (the SS) intended. The questioning of one’s humanity provokes an almost biological demand to belong to the human species.”
It is this claim that takes the form of an “object to be saved,” as illustrated by a scene in the camp described by Antelme when he recounts a rare moment in which he is driven by a desire other than the obsessive need to search for food: the desire to visit a “buddy,” as he puts it, who has moved to what serves as the infirmary. He searches for him as he passes between the beds but cannot recognize his buddy, whose frozen gaze gives him no sign of recognition. Dread seizes Antelme, who, to reassure himself, looks at the other humans near his friend’s bed. “Because I couldn’t find the person I knew, because he didn’t recognize me, I doubted myself for a moment. And it was precisely to make sure I was still myself that I looked at the others, as if to catch my breath,” he says. The friend shows no reaction to his friend’s arrival. He no longer exhibits any of the hallmarks of human interaction; he is a living dead. This loss of a fellow human, of a friend, shakes the foundations of Antelme’s humanity, threatening to bring him crashing down. But his humanity is saved by his “object to be saved,” by his altruistic impulse toward his “friend,” through his concern for taking care of him.
This scene seems timeless. It speaks of a past that is certainly also present, and that the Anthropocene could project into the future.
An “object to be saved” can also be a very simple thought that arises in everyone’s daily life. Danielle Quinodoz gives the example of a grandmother shelling peas with her granddaughter. The granddaughter asks her grandmother: “If you were to die in a quarter of an hour, what would you do?” The grandmother pauses, reflects, and replies: “I think I’d keep shelling peas with you.” There is a brilliance in the immediacy of this response, in this “tiny second of eternity,” that nonetheless embraces the human quality of a whole lifetime. And which gives meaning to this life as well as to this encounter.
We live in a society that psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe describes as a “culture of uncare,” that is, a culture that, by failing to care for its ecosystemic environment, does not truly care for its citizens. In this culture of uncare, our need for “objects to be saved” is great. Entering a new geological era, the Anthropocene—that is, an era of depletion of food and energy resources—could mean entering a state of helplessness, experiencing the distress of becoming without material resources, and having to face great social violence. As the rich biodiversity and relatively stable climate of the Holocene disappear, we have a particular need for the “immaterial” resources inherent in the humanity of “objects to be saved.”
“I don’t want the ‘Greta generation’ to grow up in a world governed by neoliberal economics, in an uncontrolled environmental crisis, under the threat of thousands of nuclear warheads and a shameless Artificial Intelligence! ” we might think today. The creation of an “object to be saved” is the expression of an ethical surge from the most differentiated part of our personality that aspires to resist massification and despair. As such, the object to be saved is the bearer of hope. The remarkable aspect of the capacity to harbor within oneself a thought for an object to be saved is that this thought simultaneously aspires to save others in both the external and internal worlds while, in the same movement, rescuing the very act of thinking of the human being who thinks of an object to be saved.
The radically new emotional and historical context of the 21st century is bound to give rise to a wave of “objects to be saved.” Let us listen to them! Let us gather this treasure! Let us share our “objects to be saved,” our “tiny seconds of eternity,” so that, in the face of adversity, we may develop new bonds of living together. In order to care for this ultimate and essential resource: the humanity of our thought, which can only be a shared thought. The emerging history of our contemporary “objects to be saved” will be the prehistory of tomorrow’s world!
So let’s share our “objects to be saved,” our “tiny moments of eternity,” no matter how humble they may be! A thought, a life-changing encounter, a moment of miraculous emotion, a landscape, a work of art, a fulfilling job, a project, and so on, felt as a help in the environmental context in which we find ourselves living. (Contact)
References
Amati Sas, S. (1992). Ambiguity as the route to shame. Int. J. Psycho-Anal. 73, 329-34.
Amati Sas, S. (2011). Ambiguity as a defence in extreme trauma. In Bearing Witness. Psychoanalytic Work with People Traumatised by Torture and Extreme State Violence. Ed. A. Gautier et A. Sabattini Scalmati. Karnak Books 3-12.
Antelme, R. (1947). The Human Race. Marlboro Press, 1992.
Quinodoz, D. (2009). Growing old: A psychoanalyst's point of view. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 90:773-793.