“‘Significant other’ calls up the invitation from a host who wishes to strip away presumption. But we insist it is a fertile concept. It was propagated in the post-war decades by the American psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan. In his early work, Sullivan found that schizophrenic patients managed their lives better when they could count on regular contact with the same people. He was convinced that we cannot develop our sense of self in isolation, and that from the earliest stages the approval and disapproval of others pushes the self in radical directions. He grew up as a lonely gay boy in upstate New York at the turn of the last century, the sole Irish Catholic in his school. Certain kinds of alienation, he believed, could be manically productive, but without a sympathetic significant other, life was liable to be ruinous.
There can be any number of significant others in a life. Some we know for a long time; others are meteoric: we may see them only once.”
Thomas Meaney, Introduction, Granta 168.
… claw its way into the day, selling fruit,
selling futures, futures north of food and fictions,
bottom-line the violent caption, no this is notattraction, yes the fruit fields by the highway, yes
Zoë Hitzig, cache 9, Granta 168
the berry heavy wind, …
