String

the function of the string is changing from a joining into a denial of separation. As a denial of separation spring becomes a thing in itself, something which has dangerous properties and has to be mastered.

Winnicott formulates the pivotal diagnostic distinction: string as symbolic joining belongs to healthy transitional phenomena, but when it becomes denial of separation it acquires an autonomous, potentially perverse character.

Winnicott, Donald, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965thesis

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Just before loss we can sometimes see the exaggeration of the use of a transitional object as part of denial that there is a threat of its becoming meaningless. To illustrate this aspect of denial I shall give a short clinical example of a boy’s use of string.

Winnicott introduces string as his clinical illustration of how transitional objects are exaggerated precisely when meaningful contact with the primary object is threatened, linking string to the dynamics of denial.

Winnicott, D W, Playing and Reality, 1971thesis

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nearly everything I did was translated by him into something associated with string. Among his ten drawings there appeared the following: lasso, whip, crop, a yo-yo string, a string in a knot, another crop, another whip.

The squiggle game reveals that string has colonised the boy’s entire symbolic world, demonstrating the degree to which an object can become the organising axis of a child’s psychic life.

Winnicott, Donald, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965thesis

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from the moment that she had this conversation with him the string play ceased. There was no more joining of objects in the old way.

The clinical outcome demonstrates that once the mother addressed the underlying separation anxiety directly, the compulsive string play — the externalised symptom — dissolved, confirming Winnicott’s aetiological hypothesis.

Winnicott, D W, Playing and Reality, 1971supporting

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Out of the muddle there he brought a tangle of string. The mother (undoubtedly affected by his choice of string, but not conscious of the symbolism) made the remark: At his most non-verbal Edmund is most clinging, needing contact with my actual breast.

In a second case, a child’s spontaneous selection of string during play is linked by the mother to her son’s most primitive dependency needs, extending the symbolic equation of string with longing for bodily contact.

Winnicott, D W, Playing and Reality, 1971supporting

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Who tempers the zither with strings, and with strings the bow. And now we finally come to Apollo’s attribute which, next to the lyre, is the most celebrated and most important … the bow.

Otto notes that Horace’s magnificent prayer to the Muses captures the Greek polarity in which the same string both produces music and drives the deadly arrow, emblematising Apollo’s double nature.

Otto, Walter F., The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion, 1929aside

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he could not string it; before that he ruined his soft, uncalloused hands, pulling at the string, and now he spoke to the suitors: ‘Friends, I cannot string this; let one of the others take it.’

The suitors’ collective failure to string Odysseus’s bow serves in Homeric epic as a test of heroic identity and masculine authority, making the stringing act a threshold ritual of recognition.

Lattimore, Richmond, Odyssey of Homer, 2009aside

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No-one has been, and maybe no-one ever will be, able to detect a string (or the existence of the six extra dimensions the equations of string theory require). My point is not about string theory: it is that science is, and must be, alive, provisional and uncertain.

McGilchrist uses the undetectability of strings in physics as a figure for the irreducibly provisional character of scientific knowledge, a point tangential to depth-psychological usage of the term.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside

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