From Ghosted Images to Ancestral Stories: Spectres and Narrators in Dickens' Great Expectations

I
Visual Perception and Verbal Reception

As the narrator and the protagonist of Great Expectations, Pip has two distinct identities. A speaker in the present and an actor in the past, his divided role creates narrative complexity. The two Pips separate and connect in a creative relationship that drives the novel. Tracing his development as it happens, Pip understands his story by telling it. The changes in self-understanding are reflected outward and seen, by both him and the reader, as changes in the characters around him. Thus, two contrasting ways of apprehending others are achieved in Great Expectations: first, the visual way, where others are perceived by their images, and, afterward, the verbal way, where they are experienced in their stories.

We meet the character Pip as a suffering orphan when he is five or six years old. Early on his child's mind houses an imagination intimidated by frightening appearances—he receives speech more in the impression it makes than in the meaning it holds. The result is a superficial (supra/facial) or sur/face mode of perception. As he grows up, Pip moves into the story mode of reception, where he listens as well as looks. Taking in the words with their overtones, he achieves more complicated integrations in his way of understanding others.

Like Pip, for this goes beyond a particular child-character to a wider human experience, we perceive others better when we receive their narratives, not limited to what we see, but open to what they say. Combining perception and reception, we process impressions. Listening to stories we piece together a comprehensive tale comprised of memories and experiences, shared in the combined knowledge of listener and teller, and received by a sympathetic imagination to achieve a full narrative.

II
Time in Loewald, Space in Winnicott

The movement from image to word in Dickens' novel finds a parallel in psychoanalytic theory. In his "On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis" (1960), Hans Loewald writes about ghosts and ancestors as two ways of understanding the parental figures within us.¹ Among our inner objects, there are the ghosts who haunt us. Versions of bad parents, these are static presences trailing unresolved issues and calling us back into the past. Opposed to these ghosts are the strengthening ancestors, internal images of the good parent allowing an independent state of being demonstrated by the capacity to live in the present.

Loewald traces the bridge from ghosts to ancestors in the process he calls internalization. Here the constructive influences from the past are strengthened in analysis itself; we grow in the analytic dialogue. We move forward in the presence of an insightful therapist who incarnates a lost or never found good parent. The movement from one mode to the other, in both Dickens and Loewald, necessitates a certain kind of supportive presence, a good object who is also a speaking object. That good parent, the ancestor, may underlie the bad parent, the ghost, but the lost connection needs to be found in dialogue with a current presence. In Loewald, we are talking about a temporal process, speech in time; this therapeutic action occurs within the subject over time working in language between past, present, and future.

D.W. Winnicott notes the importance of a "good-enough" object, one who neither stays too far from nor comes too close to the subject. But where Loewald is notably concerned with time, Winnicott places development in space. Tracing growth in what he calls "going on being" (1956, p. 303), Winnicott considers experience in the outer actuality of place, as well as experience in the inner abstraction of time.² Not focusing mainly on therapeutic experience, Winnicott looks to developmental experience generally; yet, as in Loewald, the movement forward necessitates a supportive, non-interfering good object.

We can enrich the concept of going from ghosts to ancestors by considering that all-important passage forward in relation to Winnicott's own notions around transitional or potential space and the good-enough figure who helps us negotiate the crossover. In the in-between area...