Material Culture in History and Psychoanalysis

This paired contribution explores the theme of material culture and psyche from the perspective of the consulting room and the archive. Material culture studies is a thriving field, with scholars from history, anthropology, archaeology, art history and literary studies unpacking the many layers of meaning embedded into objects throughout time. But the psychological and emotional role played by material objects in human life remains vague and under-theorised – a problem that this contribution uses interdisciplinary dialogue to address. In the first section, psychoanalyst Maia Kirchkheli discusses the material objects in a psychoanalyst's room and their importance for the psychoanalytic process. She explores how material culture in the consulting room is part of psychoanalytic frame and can provide a form of holding in the course of the often destabilising psychoanalytic process, ideas that are discussed in the framework of D.W. Winnicott's theory of transitional object (1951). In the second section, historian Anna Parker takes the transitional object theory to the archive. She applies it to a single dramatic episode from early modern central Europe, investigating how psychoanalytic methods can help historians to understand how individuals' externalised inner feelings. The chapter concludes with a discussion surveying the productive theoretical and methodological frictions between the two fields.