Why “Zurvan Object”?
I chose the name “Zurvan Object” because I wanted the structure’s relationship with “time” and myth to be present in the name itself, although in my earlier writings I used the term “Transitional Time Object.”
I borrowed this name from the myth of the god Zurvan, who, in the Zurvanite branch of the Zoroastrian tradition, is the personification of “Infinite Time” and the primordial principle of creation. In some Zurvanite accounts, Zurvan is a being who is at once one and twofold. He simultaneously contains masculine and feminine aspects, and it is from this two-sided totality that two children are born: Ahura Mazda, or Ohrmazd, as the principle of light, wisdom, and goodness, and Ahriman as the principle of darkness and destruction.
In one of the later Zurvanite accounts, Zurvan performs sacrifices for a thousand years in the hope of having a son. Yet, at a moment of doubt, a shadow emerges within him. From this conjunction of sacrifice and doubt, two embryos are conceived: one from the luminous side of his being and the other from its dark side. Zurvan vows to grant sovereignty to the first child born from him. Ahriman, having become aware of this promise, violently and prematurely breaks out of the womb of Time before his brother and gains dominion over the world for a finite period. Yet, on the final horizon, it is Ahura Mazda who will ultimately bring the struggle to an end in his favour.
In this myth, Infinite Time, embodied by Zurvan, is both the ground from which good and evil emerge and the “womb” that carries them and brings them into the world. For this reason, I believe that, as I search in this book for a name for a structure that makes time bearable within a relationship and carries the subject from being trapped in the present moment toward the future, the reference to Zurvan is entirely fitting.
The Zurvan Object is both the container of time and the contained, both the field of struggle between destructive and life-preserving forces and the only possibility through which Being can continue. Moreover, as we shall see, the first bearer of the Zurvan Object function, which lays the foundation of our earliest object relations, is not essentially determined by gender. It may be the mother or the father, although it is most often the mother.
To Be-Analysis
#Psychoanalysis
#Freud
#Time
#Being
#ToBe_Analysis
#Zurvan_Object
#Zurvan_Phenomenon