What’s an “object to be saved”?
One of the beauties of psychoanalysis is discovering and describing the human resources that develop consciously and unconsciously in situations of social and environmental catastrophe. The “object to be saved” is one of them.
In this spirit, the IPA Climate Committee supports the need to share an ethical alarm in the face of the reality of the catastrophic state of civilization in which we live. This is a catastrophe that has “come to stay,” as Silvia Amati Sas writes[1], where severe climate disruption, mass species extinction, the ever-present threat of nuclear war, and the potentially sordid consequences of mass manipulation through powerful digital and virtual technologies are intertwined.
In this context of disaster, issuing an ethical alert means making human psychic survival a specific subject of concern and psychoanalytic reflection, with the intention and conscious commitment to confront, understand, and challenge the confusion, disarray, and anxiety in historical and environmental circumstances so deceptive and bewildering that they impair our ability to think.
The concept of the “front of psychic survival” lies at the heart of Silvia Amati Sas’s work[2]. It stems from psychoanalytic clinical practice with individuals who have experienced situations of extreme social violence, such as those inflicted by the torturous systems of dictatorships. However, Amati Sas’s reflection is not limited to the clinical work with victims of the extreme social violence of dictatorships. Her thinking focuses on the fronts of psychic survival in the face of other, more insidious forms of social violence, following an approach that extends from the clinical study of torture, to the clinical study of dictatorship, to the clinical study of our contemporary culture. It extends to the suffering caused by the injustices and social violence stemming from the environmental crisis and the nuclear situation.
Amati Sas observes that two fronts of psychic survival emerge spontaneously, unconsciously, in disaster situations: a capacity to “adapt to anything” and a spontaneous ability to find “objects to save.”
On the one hand, Amati Sas notes that victims of such “states/States of catastrophe” have survived physically and psychologically by developing an ability to “adapt to anything,” even to a situation as extreme as torture. This first front of psychic survival—adapting to anything—is the expression, she says, of a “primary defensive tendency (of the human being) to accommodate oneself to immediate reality, however painful and traumatic it may be, without conflict—neither emotional nor psychic […] What I call “adaptation to anything” is a plastic and malleable capacity of the human psyche that functions as a “survival mechanism” in situations of extreme violence, but which is already present in the newborn, who, in fact, adapts to the living environment and cultural milieu they encounter at birth. »
This “basic conformism,” this fundamental mimetic capacity of our personality to connect with the natural and cultural environments in which we happen to live, “makes us unconsciously sensitive to the existential emotional movements of our loved ones and to any change in the social and environmental context. At this profoundly unconscious level of our personality’s functioning, we are literally massified by a subtle and tenacious exchange of undifferentiated emotions that allows us to imagine a region of primary undifferentiation beyond individualities[3], a “trans-subjective” region common to all[4], where our mimetic tendencies manifest, enabling us to be adaptable and manipulable as a mass. »
On the other hand, Amati Sas observes a second front of psychic survival through the creation of what she calls an “object to be saved,” that is, a form of resistance to social and environmental violence “in the form of concern for another (a child, a spouse, living, dead, or missing) […] or the fact of being concerned with the existence, destiny, integrity, and dignity of another subject.” “As a psychoanalytic concept,” she adds, “the object to be saved allows us to preserve the idea of the human in opposition to being treated as a thing. It represents an obvious challenge to the “human tendency to become a thing” (Lichtenstein, 1963)[5][5] because, in situations of extreme social violence, humans are treated as things caught up in a mass […] The object to be saved expresses an intrapsychic dimension of differentiation and otherness that can be considered a challenge by the subject to its own adaptive defense [against anything].” Amati Sas gives the example of a woman’s thought who, under torture, thought: “I had to resist because I could not accept that my child might live in a world ruled by those people.”
“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. 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—inscribed in the register of the depressive position—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.
So, let’s share our objects to be saved!
[1] Personal communication.
[2] Bibliography to follow.
[3] Bleger, J. (1967). Symbiosis and Ambiguity. PUF, Paris, 1981.
[4] Berenstein, I., Puget, J. (1997). Lo vincular. Buenos Aires: Paidós. Psychoanalysis of the Bond. Éditions érès, 2008.
[5] Lichtenstein, H. (1963). The dilemma of human identity. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn 11, 173-223.