Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

When Teddy met Teddie

2018; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 16; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14733285.2018.1457754

1473-3285

Chris Philo,

Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics

TeddyI no longer live with Teddy.He decided to stay at my parents' house when I went to university, probably because he is a creature of haunts and habits.Teddy -for that is his unimaginative name -was not my original teddy, and he always struggled to fill the role vacated by his predecessor, also called Teddy, who was left on a train when I was very young.Original Teddy, even now, possibly retains a higher place in my affections than replacement Teddy: the former really was my most crucial 'transitional object' as I grew from 'crib geographies' (Aitken and Herman 1994) into the bedroom geographies of a small boy.Replacement Teddy was nonetheless a significant actor in the context of my micro-world-making from circa 4 to circa 12 years of age.Unlike original Teddy, he almost never accompanied me, being very much a stay-at-home bear rather than constant travelling companion.Typically he inhabited my bedroom, sometimes sitting on my bed but more normally standing on a shelf (Figure 1), where he increasingly spent his days as I grew into my teens, the call to be involved in my activities becoming ever rarer.Indeed, he saw me less and less as my bedroom ceased to be a site of sustained encounter and more a functional site of sleep, clothes-changing and homework.It mattered to me that he was there, however, and it matters, not massively but in a small way, that he remains there still, on the same shelf in the same room in the same house.A day may arrive when he can no longer stay there: perhaps then we will be reunited wherever I am then living.Teddy was not alone in my bedroom, even when I was away, for he was one among a menagerie of other cuddly and not-so-cuddly toys, the specificities of whom are now lost in the mists of forgotten childhood.What I remember more vividly is that Teddy and this menagerie lived with a much larger population of objects lodged in every cupboard, drawer and under-bed space.These objects included hundreds of toy vehicles, particularly the small Lesney Matchbox cars, buses and lorries, and hundreds of toy soldiers, particularly the small Airfix sets and cheap imitations bought in plastic bags at the seaside.There was also a motley array of other things, always miniature, such as tiny wooden balls (the origins of which escape me) that I had coloured as if they