ZERO

Back to the beginning: 


The Phantomology project is about  absence, about the feeling of or for something that is no longer there, or that never was there.


Ultimately it seeks to grasp nothingness, emptiness, timelessness.


The focus is on the void – and our striving to fill the voids in our lives. It is this basic desire that can be assumed to explain, why the mathematical concept of ZERO was rejected when Fibonacci first introduced it in Europe in the 13th century (Matson, 2009). This number without content met resistance because it is the mathematical nothingness – or, as Kaplan (2000) puts it: the nothing that is. Calculation with the number zero therefore remained a secret science for some time. Eventually, however, it prevailed – because the advantages were too great to be ignored in the long run.

 

 

But not only the fear of breakdown can be explained by the zero process during a traumatic event, also the longing for emptiness and the longing for non-existence. The emptiness and the state of non-existence, caused by the zero process during the trauma, have also not really been experienced; and this longing for emptiness and non-existence, that can be observed in people with a history of trauma, is also a longing for something that already has happened but hasn’t been lived fully. 

Winnicott therefore suggests, as a therapeutic intervention, to let it happen – the experience of emptiness, the experience of non-existence – , to go through with it, to allow it and thereby be able to process it. He states: “It can be said that only out of non-existence can existence start. "(Winnicott, 1974, p. 107)

 

If a traumatic event occurs in early childhood, something happens that psychoanalyst Joseph Fernando (2012) calls THE ZERO PROCESS –  the event is not filled with content, it is not really experienced, therefore it cannot be integrated and is not in memory. Perhaps there is just a note in the mind, as Winnicott suggests, saying: something might have happened.

The agony persists, stored in the body, but it is not located in time, it is not brought into the order of time. Therefore, Winnicott talks about the fear of breakdown as being related to something that has already happened – it has not been stored in memory as something from the past, because it has not been processed and integrated. Consequently, it is projected into the future, causing the fear of imminent breakdown – a fear that a breakdown could happen next year, tomorrow or in the very next moment.

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