world around us. The Breedloves' absence of any memorable moments lived and shared

in their house indicates their estrangement from each other and the emotional barrenness

of their lives.

 Christopher Bollas asserts that we use objects to express our own unique self, and

these "evocative" objects become part of our self-experiences because we use them "in

our unique way to meet and to express the self that we are." "The object world," Bollas

thus notes, is "a lexicon for self experience, to the extent that the selection of objects is

often a type of self utterance."95 Drawing on and extending Winnicott's term "subjective

objects," Bollas argues that the objects of our choice and use are "a vital part of our

investment in the world" and calls them "mnemic objects" in that they "contain a

projectively identified self experience, and when we use it, something of that self state

stored in it will arise."96 Kai Erikson also analyzes people's emotional attachment to their

belongings in his study of the victims of the Buffalo Creek disaster. After witnessing

survivors' intense grief over the loss of their home, he draws the conclusion that the

furniture or personal belongings are more than a reflection of one's style; they, according

to him, are "a measure of one's substance as a person and as a provider, truly the

furniture of self' or "the outer edge of one's personality, a part of the self itself."97 As

Bollas and Erickson theorize, endowing the object world with personal meanings and

emotional values presupposes the intactness of self as a psychic structure and source of

agency.

 With a severely "eroded" self, the Breedloves cannot invest emotionally in their

environment or organize their lives in a meaningful order. Nor can they express their

unique idioms creatively through object choices and uses. Instead, they resign themselves