An Affinity of Amulets

By G Lori Millon

This project collects writings from the SSCP trainee group in response to two seminars I gave in March 2024. I spoke about trans embodiment and survival; all the while, Gaza was being razed to the ground. I wanted to think psychoanalytically about political solidarity, wondering how we might speak through what Naomi Klein names as “ambient genocide”, the silence and passivity that surrounds Israel’s sustained attempt to annihilate the Palestinian people. With this backdrop, the invitation was for each trainee to bring an amulet from their lives, gathering them together and seeing what tentative affinities might form. In the following months, we agreed to push these ideas further, through developing the seminar into a collection of writings. In this first piece, which introduces the affinity, I raise a question about the temporality of the amulet.

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A cross, two pebbles, a mixtape, a fragment of bronze, a carved tiger, an LP, a dandelion petrified in plastic. Precious objects, the things we would save from the fire. We relate to our amulets through touch: we wear them against our bare skin, we feel the weight of them in the palm of our hand, we finger their textures. Kept in secret hiding places, only taken out in moments of solitude; they give us strength, they connect us to that which is absent. These are not defence mechanisms but objects of protection. More often than not, we are chosen by the amulet; it finds us. An amulet may originally enter our life as a gift, from someone now long gone. It might have been plucked from a sacred place in a moment of great significance: a token, a keepsake, an object of nostalgia. “Transparent things, through which the past shines!” writes Nabokov, who shows us how everyday objects hum with instability, giving way to unsuspected histories when we pay attention. But an amulet is a very particular kind of object, with its own temporality: it does not just provoke a backwards fall into the past.

In Enduring Time, Lisa Baraitser suggests that contemporary experience of time is characterised by its suspension, in the temporalities of waiting, staying, repeating. She refers to the philosopher Michel Serres’s suggestion that time is structured like a lump of dough that is kneaded, folding in on itself. These folds of time produce unexpected contiguities. Two moments may ostensibly be separated by years but through such a fold become imbricated, overlapping and connected, like the scales of a fish. When the dough of our lives folds in on itself, the time and space between the two moments collapses. Such an imbrication causes us to come undone through what Laplanche terms “afterwardsness”, when an encounter in our contemporary life opens up a point of enigma in our history.

In psychoanalysis we come undone; through the patient’s transference to the analyst, time folds in on itself and we re-encounter a lifetime of being disrupted, formed and mutilated by the other, in ways that are entirely specific. Transference is love, and what is love if not an unexpected contiguity? The phrase in French, “un coup de foudre”, situates love as an astonishment, a blow, a thunderbolt from the blue. Love, including transference, is traumatising in the way we are radically, overwhelmingly transfigured by it. However, there are also spans of time when this astonishing relational opening is lost, the times when we find ourselves most alone: waiting, staying, enduring. How do we sustain a tie to the other across time, when there is no certainty of a return, when we are out of the fold? A span was originally a means of measurement, usually recognised as the distance between the tip of the thumb and the forefinger. An amulet is used to hold open possibility, for something invisible to happen in the gap that separates two moments. Through our amulets, love’s work happens in the span between our fingers and thumbs.

During the long separation over one of the pandemic lockdowns, when meeting in the flesh was not possible, I gave a patient a small framed photograph of Kew Gardens that had stood on the mantelpiece of my consulting room over the years she had been coming to see me. This image of a tropical palm house from another era was an amulet that gestured towards a time when the conditions of life might be different. Bion writes of “a memoir of the future” in suggesting that the infant can have a memory of something that is yet to exist. These memories, of the breast for example, are pre-conceptions awaiting a future in which the object can come into being. Is the analyst’s role to be the guardian of hope for a better future? Perhaps the analyst must keep alive a transferential openness to that which is yet to come, a potentiality empty of representational content, which is at the same time a form of memory: I have hope for the past. This differs from a fantasy of believing that one knows which particular direction a patient’s life should take in order that they may be freed from their particular mode of suffering. The amulet works in the strange temporalities of afterwardsness, through which memories only take on their fullness and potency in the future.

Freud claims that love is always fashioned on something prior: “The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.” He names a latency period, between infantile sexuality and the sexuality that emerges at puberty. He likens this gap in the development of sexuality to the moment when a milk tooth falls out in readiness for the adult tooth to take its place. Latency is a missing tooth, a lost object. With the amulet, we also find ourselves in proximity to Winnicott’s transitional object - the corner of blanket, the fragment of tune, “between the thumb and the teddy bear”. The transitional object enables the infant to make the passage from the illusion of omnipotent control over the mother to developing a relationship with so-called external reality. The developmentalism of these normative trajectories has rightly been questioned, but the introduction of a period of latency, or transition, seems vital to any consideration of the temporality of love. In order for a future to come into being, we must submit to losing the love we hold most precious; we abide in the time between two blows, the amulet the missing tooth, the gap between them. In this gap the unassimilable quality of our relation to the other gets worked over unconsciously, creating a future in which we can be found anew.

How can we bear latency; what do we do when love is gone and its return is shrouded in uncertainty? When the other upon whom our existence depends has left us, how do we survive? Freud’s grandson throws his cotton-reel, while his mother Sophie dies of influenza. Fort-da; here, gone; the word comes in the place of the thing. In fact, when we look closer, Freud’s texts are full of children desperately alone. In a footnote in the Three Essays on Sexuality, he describes hearing a three-year-old boy call out: “‘Auntie, speak to me! I’m frightened because it’s so dark.’ His aunt answered him: ‘What good would that do? You can’t see me.’ ‘That doesn’t matter,’ replied the child, ‘If anyone speaks, it gets light.’ Representation, Freud confidently claims in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, is how we cope with ambient death. Language manages something that would otherwise be overwhelming, but as a friend’s 10-year old daughter said, “there are not enough words to fill my mouth”. In the Three Essays, Freud says that the child turns to autoeroticism, rather than language, for comfort and satisfaction when they are disappointed in love. Then, in Mourning and Melancholia: “By taking flight into the ego love escapes extinction”. We become archives of lost loves. The amulet is no doubt an object of auto-eroticism; more than anything, we fiddle with our amulets, we fuss them, we cannot keep our hands off them. They are also profoundly melancholic; they enshrine the love to which we cling most tightly, of which we are most loathe to speak. The amulet may not be a source of light, but perhaps we place too much faith in illumination to protect us.

We cannot claim to be in the dark about the horrors wrought in Palestine. From 1905 until just before the Nakba - the 1948 catastrophe through which over 700,000 Palestinians were violently expelled from their land - the Palestinian physician Tawfiq Canaan collected around 1,400 amulets from his compatriots. These included glass beads, animal bones, hands made of silver, and cups that would be filled with water and left under the moon to cure fear. Canaan was given many of these amulets by his patients, grateful for his help. They believed the amulets would offer protection from harm, warding off envy, or representing the 99 names of God. Canaan was interested in how people’s relationships with these amulets did indeed seem to contribute to the alleviation of their suffering. Since the Nakba, the temporalities of Palestinian exile orient around the prospect of a right of return to the land, a future of self-determination. Israel’s campaign to annihilate Gaza has perpetrated the murder of tens of thousands of children. Infanticide is not incidental to the imperial war machine; it is the means to wipe out the future of the Palestinian people. When such numbers of children are intentionally targeted, we are witnessing a concerted effort to destroy what is generative in the gap between generations. It is a relentless assault on hope: hope of return, hope of endurance, hope of refinding. Palestinian amulets are dropped or left behind, vanished in bomb craters or burning hospitals.

Freud was a great collector of antiquities, the “old and grubby gods” that he would obsessively hunt down and display with pride in his study. A kind of extractivism, rooted in colonial practices of archaeology, such a drive attempts to master lack through inexhaustible accumulation; the past is something to be grasped, possessed, and ultimately neutered. Such a collection does not permit us to think through the ways in which we are undone by loss, how the past refuses to be controlled. Perhaps collections could give way to affinities. Sara Ahmed argues that a collective history of having our personhoods eroded by regimes of normalisation can create a foundation for resistance, here conceived as a retaliatory or reciprocal chipping away at oppressive structures. The shared experience of being chipped away at opens onto a solidarity, “an affinity of hammers”. This does not equate to an ethics rooted in mutual recognition of vulnerability. As Lara and Stephen Sheehi show, the demand for the colonised person to empathise with the troubles of their oppressor is another form of violence that perpetuates the status quo of colonialism, pathologising the resistance and refusals necessary in the fight for liberation. An affinity, in Ahmed’s formulation, is a way of establishing solidarity between subjugated people without negating the structural inequality between oppressed and oppressor.

I had a dream that I am collaborating with a regime in the Middle East that is imprisoning and murdering trans kids. I have the intention of trying to save them but I don’t seem to be doing any good - I try and throw one through a window to safety but they just fall with a sickening crunch. The trans kids are dehumanised, like sacks of flour. The authorities catch on that I’m not going along with their regime and pursue me.

In the folds of the dream, unexpected contiguities are formed: Palestine and queerness, an imbrication and invitation. To be trans is to know what it is to be unwanted. This is not the same as knowing what it is to be colonised and dispossessed, exterminated while the world does nothing, but when a wound touches another wound we find ourselves reeling, a pain that can jolt us out of apathy and cowardice. Dreams are not reducible to wish fulfilments, we also treat them as precious objects stowed in our pockets, turning them over in the gaps in our day, showing them to our friends. A dream is a pebble, a snow globe, an amulet.

We gather up our individual amulets, passing them around, placing them alongside each other, listening as their stories unfold, our fingers lingering on them like holy relics. We share the ways we have been delayed in love, falling into love’s gaps. Some amulets fall out of our hands, slipping away, buried for years. There are some in this world who have lost more than we could fathom. A Palestinian father, Mohammed Abu al-Qumsan, gone out to collect the birth certificates for his newborn twins, returns to find them killed by an Israeli air strike. Their mother, his wife, Dr. Jumann Arfa was also murdered in the attack. Somehow the Palestinian will to endure is not extinguished. Perhaps there are objects that survive annihilation, and in the hands of those who have lost everything, we might wonder what strange temporal folds emerge. The word “affinity” has roots in the Latin “ad-finis”, “to border”; even in times of untold despair unexpected contiguities will form, producing new borders. Perhaps an affinity of amulets might span the gaps between us, creating new forms of love, new modes of solidarity, establishing a community in which we are all worked over by time, not exactly waiting, but brought into being by a thunderbolt that is yet to come.