Maurice Sendak Beloved Children's Illustrator and Author Dies

Maurice Sendak, acclaimed children’s book illustrator and author, died today a few weeks shy of his 84th birthday. His most famous book Where the Wild Things Are, a Caldecott Medal winner, is also beloved to psychoanalysts because it lends itself beautifully to metaphors about the unconscious life and about therapy. We pledge to open ourselves to the scary and the wild in our patients and in our selves, and to go with them to places where others are not allowed or fear to tread. His illustrations of monsters are personal to Sendak (not griffins or gorillas) derived from his childhood experiences with all his Jewish relatives with “big warts and hairs growing out of their noses,” adults who “treated them in silly fashion” as kids constrained in best clothes awaiting dinner and having to “listen to their tedious conversation” as well as having been told he and his siblings had gotten big or fat and they would “eat us up.” The monsters tell Max: Please don’t go, we’ll eat you up, we love you so. [Sendak lamented that book signings unwittingly turned him into a strange monster to the children shoved at him to autograph (write in their books, an action forbidden to them) and whom they imagined wanted to take, keep, as well as defile their favorite book. Sendak said, “A child was a creature without power, …pocket money or escape routes of any kind.” He detested Peter Pan because he could not conceive that any child would want to remain a child, powerless. He thought “all kids would like to have control” And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all. Max not afraid of the montsters and so child readers likewise were not afraid. Sendak’s own fears included the vacuum cleaner and The Invisible Man, a movie which he credited for his lifelong insomnia. He found “terrifying” the unraveled bandages (of head) exposing nothing there. Big events in his childhood were “being sick” and “being expected to die” (discussed in front of children by his parents) which “pervaded my soul apparently.” In the days before antibiotics and vaccines, Sendak spent lot of time, sick, in bed with childhood illnesses. When sick, before TV, Sendak spent a lot of time looking out windows, happy memories which appeared in his books. His father left Eastern Europe before the Holocaust but all father’s relatives perished there and father grief stricken all Sendak’s life. In the Night Kitchen was banned in some libraries across the USA because its protagonist Mickey appears nude. Sendak said of this that he was “not out to cause a scandal”… “I assumed everyone knew little boys had that.” Outside Over There is about sibling rivalry and responsibility; Ida is left to babysit her baby sister, who is kidnapped by goblins, and Ida must come to terms with her ambivalent feelings as she goes on a magical adventure to rescue her sister. Among other awards, Sendak also received a Newbery Award for his illustration of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s children’s story Zlateh the Goat. Sendak’s family moved a lot due to money problems growing up in Brooklyn. He also wrote a book about homelessness We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy: Two Nursery Rhymes with Pictures.

A Contemporary Look at Conflict

I am always delighted when I read how contemporary relational thinkers reconfigure century old tenets in psychoanalysis. Adrienne Harris does just that with conflict in her 2005 paper Conflict in Relational Treatments (PsaQ 74:267-293). Though finding her paper somewhat confounding, the TBIPS Relational Study Group delightedly discussed the elaborations of conflicts in human experience which Harris considers. She elaborates on conflicts between the needs of self and others (interpersonal conflicts), between two unconsciouses (intersubjective conflicts), and conflicts between self states, in addition to the traditionally understood conflicts between wishes and between wishes and their prohibitions. Along with conflicts between ego-id-superego, additional intrapsychic conflicts exist between the multiple selves of one person and the multiple unconsciouses found within these multiple selves. Disavowed or dissociated parts of self may then never come into the treatment with the selves states of a particular analyst. Conflicts for the analyst, too, include the conflict between sticking to the rules of training and being spontaneous; the conflict of desiring the imposition on the patient of the normative and the hope for the patient to have freedom from these constraints. Speech, too, provides for conflict, for example, between what is said and how it is said, between content and tone/prosody, or content and intention. For both participants there is the pull between the wish to change and the wish to stay the same. There are the interpersonal and intersubjective conflicts between analyst’s and analysand’s agendas, both overt and covert, and also those between the unconscious(es) of the analysand and the analyst. Consider then the multiplicity of the analyst’s selves and those of the analysand in their innumerable combinations! I often think that the analyst must juggle a huge number of balls in the air-- while walking a tightrope. Harris made me consider adding to that number.

The Limits of Desire

In the Development course of First Year at the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies, the paper Aggression and Sexuality in Relation to Toddler Attachment: Implications for the Caregiving System by Alicia F. Lieberman (1996, Infant Mental Health Journal, 17(3) 276-292) was recently discussed. I recommend this paper for its elegant vignettes which readily illustrate how parents might enhance a child’s sense of self and self worth by their responses to a toddler’s aggressive or sexual strivings. But it is its applicability to the psychoanalytic situation that cause me to quote from what Lieberman describes as the outcome of well or poorly handled responses.

She writes that when negative feelings are generated in the attachment relationship around sexuality or aggression, there occurs

a constriction in the areas of experience where the child can rely
trustingly on the attachment figure’s emotional availability …
Attachment loses some of its richness and range because certain
domains of experience must be kept secret from the parent for the sake of not risking rebuke and disapproval.

And its corollary:

When aggression and sexuality are appropriately accepted, modulated, and socialized by the attachment figures, in contrast, there is an expansion in the range of affect that becomes permissible to experience and to share. Toddlers acquire a visceral [procedural] sense of pleasure in who they are and how they are made when their parents cherish and celebrate their body and its accomplishments…when appropriate limits are being set that allow the child to learn what is permissible and what is not in a clear and nonpunitive manner.

Certainly, the analyst hopes to invite in to the consulting room the broadest range of affective experience and to eschew rebuke and disapproval for what a patient brings. We want our patients to cherish and celebrate a broad range of self experience. Likewise in the psychoanalytic situation it is incumbent upon the therapist to remain emotionally available to analysands even when they bring potentially unwelcome strivings, to remain emotionally available by empathizing with and remaining sensitive to the patient’s strivings, keeping open the elaboration of wishes and desires without unduly frightening a patient and without foreclosing the transitional space for play by reifying or concretizing patient’s wishes through action. Keeping the elaboration of desire alive while holding sensitively to the limits of its permissibility is a very difficult balance, reminding me of what a medical school, surgery mentor used to say when things got unpredictable and potentially dangerous on the operating table, “We’re in tiger country now.”

Happiness

I recently began musing on happiness when invited by David Burton, a local, independent, documentary filmmaker to be interviewed on this very subject for his present film project. I thought about how the human brain is wired for moments of happiness; it releases happiness chemicals during certain experiences such as love or orgasm or a runner’s high. The more experiences our brains have with happiness, the greater our faith that we can expect future happiness to be forthcoming. As such, I recommend we practice some joyfulness every day.

Because as infants and toddlers we require attachment for our very survival, each of us as children constructs what we believe will maintain that attachment bond. As such, children will comply with parental demands to themselves be the parent to the parent, or to be the container of all bad feelings or behaviors, to achieve in sports or academia, and so on. Even with good enough parenting, eventually well-fed and well-loved infants who have delighted in playful interchanges with caregivers learn as toddlers that their caregivers are no longer under the child’s omnipotent control, a loss compensated, ala Benjamin, by the joy of two separate minds coming together, because they choose to, to share one thing, e.g. the child’s wonder at a dandelion. Later when we are aware that we are finite, mortal, and alone in the universe, this meeting of the minds bridges the gulf of existential isolation, and momentarily we are joyful.

Happiness, or at least contentment, comes with satisfaction of certain innate strivings of human beings, five that Lichtenberg beautifully delineated: physical needs (food, safety, shelter); needs for creativity, exploration, and play; for sensual and sexual pleasures; for attachment and affiliation; need to defend against or escape adversity as well as to assert ourselves. Happiness is co-created in the context of relationships. When we have had the experience of being welcomed and enjoyed, then our parents’ joy infuses us. We learn joy and to enjoy ourselves, as well as others. Happiness comes more easily to those who have been welcomed and enjoyed. And when we despair, it is easier to keep the faith that happiness will eventually be coming around again.

I remembered a psychiatry resident from a few years ago whom I was to supervise. She came to me, terrified about the prospect of doing psychotherapy without sufficient training, and I asked her what she thought most people want. After a few moments she answered, profound in its simplicity, "love and acceptance." That is, then, I told her, exactly what we must learn as psychotherapists to weave into the treatment relationship.

I advocate, then, for love and acceptance in the psychoanalytic situation, welcoming and enjoying our patients, even their darkest self states, such as anger, despair, envy, and murderous rage, self states of which they are ashamed and may disavow, but being welcomed into the treatment room can find voice, and, ideally, can find dialogue with one another. The psychoanalytic experience of love and acceptance coaxes forth shamed and disavowed self states, invites in play and creativity, and a communion between self states, mine and the other’s, in a panoply of possibility. When I experience myself with another, intimately, fully, authentically, there is happiness.

Female Sexual Development and Fathers

The Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies, Inc's first year class has been reading Freud’s ideas on female sexual development in the Development course. Because in each class we try to offer a dialogue between antipodal points of view, as a preview to the readings in today’s class I thought I might comment on Jessica Benjamin’s 1991 paper Father and Daughter: Identification with Difference — A Contribution to Gender Heterodoxy.

It seems Freud could not conceive that small children wanted it all, to be and to have all, but instead thought both male and female children only wanted the penis. Likewise, Freud did not conceive that 'normal' children might have homoerotic longings but instead only heterosexual ones: when little boys longed for attention, affection, love from their fathers, they must be feminized (the negative oedipal complex) and likewise little girls attached in an active way to their mothers must be like little men, be little men, just like little boys who want their mothers in a heterosexual way. While Freud postulated that the fear of losing his penis catapulted the little boy out of the oedipal phase, he posited that little girls enter the oedipal stage from their castrated state, turning to the father in search of a penis (or its psychic equivalent, a baby).

Benjamin revisits and reconfigures penis envy of little girls and places it not at the cusp of the oedipal configuration but instead squarely in the pre-oedipal period, noting that pre-oedipal girls turn to the rapprochement father, not yet an object of erotic love, but instead as an object of identification. The father, the penis, the phallus all stand for independent agency, subjectivity. Little girls, as do little boys, use the glamorous, exciting out-in-the-world-father as an idealization of subjectivity, a role model, a subject with agency, will, and desire. It is identification with this father as subject, separate from and independent of mother, that allows for children of both sexes to individuate from mother. Benjamin further expects that the latency age girl who wishes to be buddy to her father seeks to consolidate her identification with an independent subject. Rather than seeing this behavior as a masculine protest (Freud), Benjamin notes that it further consolidates a feminine identity.

Benjamin proposes that thwarted identificatory love may also explain girls’ fantasies in Freud’s A Child is Being Beaten. Thwarted identificatory love may lead a woman to privilege desire of a man over her own desire, whereas welcomed identificatory love, Benjamin writes, may sow the seeds for later erotic, mutual heterosexual love rather than being complicated by submissive, even masochistic, behavior towards men.

Easter Sunday musings on Resurrection

For Christians, Easter Sunday is the holiest and most joyous holiday, the day they believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. While their believe insubstantiates the triumph over death, psychoanalysts engage instead in the metaphorical (re)vitalization of their analytic partners who often come to analysis with the complaint of feeling empty, dead inside. In feeling their suffering I sometimes wonder to myself, ‘where was the parent with the gleam in her/his eye to enjoy this self as baby, infusing the self with joy and enlivening it via connection with a mutually attuned other?’ Is analysis some kind of ‘corrective emotional experience’ in which there is a way that together we can find a moment of connection that enlivens us both? Before we were isolated, separate, and hopeless, and then, in an unexpected and miraculous moment we meet, are fleetingly connected. Is this connection (perhaps more protracted for the faithful) not what a god promises its supplicant?

Because we can never know the suffering of others, I am reminded of Roger Rosenblatt in Kayak Morning quoting Philo’s admonition “Be kind for everyone you meet is carrying a great burden.” This resonates for analysts who recognize that all of us, like Christians who walk in Jerusalem the Via Dolorosa (translated as the way or road of suffering) to commemorate Jesus’ carrying the cross to his death , walk through the world in suffering, suffering both made worse and caused by isolation from others.

Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma

Doris Brothers, author of The Shattered Self, spoke in Tampa March 10, 2012 on trauma,and briefly alluded to intergenerational transmission of trauma. I would like to elaborate on some of the neurobiological mechanisms that might illuminate how intergenerational transmission of trauma occurs. To that end, I utilize Alan Schore’s Advances in Neuropsychoanalysis, Attachment Theory, and Trauma Research: Implications for Self Psychology.(2002). Psychoanal. Inq., 22:433-484.


As we are aware from infant research and neurobiology, an infant requires the presence of an attuned other for its optimal development and to optimally organize its experience. Winnicott said there is no such thing as a baby, that is, there is a mutual (interdependence) influence (regulation) between infant and mother in which the two function as a unit, including unconscious communications that serve to develop the brain of the infant. [This bulwarks the relational theories which take psychoanalysis from a one-person (intrapsychic) to a two person (intersubjective) psychology.] The 'good enough' caregiver helps the infant maintain its homeostatic equilibrium and facilitates the emerging self. Instead of the Cartesian mind-body duality (or of self from the environment) regulation of physiological functions builds the brain (the mind, the self) in particular ways.

A mother who may herself utilize dissociation as a result of her own childhood trauma, or due to depression, may be unavailable to regulate her infant. The 'good enough' caregiver helps the immature (as yet unformed neuronal connections, and unmyelinated peripheral nerves) infant regulate through her gaze, soothing voice, etc). Ruptures in regulation affect the infant’s homeostasis, and negatively affect attachment. They may even threaten the infant’s survival. Additionally, the infant is unable to acquire experience for self regulation and restoration of its equilibrium. In an attempt to restore homeostasis, the infant must divert energy away from needed growth, development, and learning (sometimes leading to failure to thrive, to lower IQ, and lower socio-emotional learning). Because brain growth is experience-dependent, experience with dysregulation negatively impacts the developing brain, the self, and the sense of self in relation with others, particularly during the brain’s growth spurt in the first three years of life. It can lead to later psychopathology, e.g. affect dysregulation commonly found in certain psychiatric disorders.

The right hemisphere, larger in the first two years, and, more than the left, processes and stores early infant experiences. Resonant attachment experiences involve “synchronized and ordered directed flows of energy” in the primary caregiver’s brain and the infant’s brain. The right hemisphere, more than the left, also has extensive connections with the limbic system. The limbic system is the emotional processing center which helps to guide emotional expression and behavior and organize new, procedural learning. The right brain is central to “integrating and assigning emotional-motivational significance to cognitive impressions” and “the association of emotion with ideas.” The right brain, with its connections to the right prefrontal cortex, allows the sense of self continuous through time. The right hemisphere, with its bodily connections, analyzes signals from the body, and helps regulate appropriate survival mechanisms, through the autonomic nervous system (ANS)which, in turn, help maintain a cohesive sense of self.

An infant responds to traumatic chronic misattunement by hyperarousal or by dissociation. When attuned response is not forthcoming, a distressed infant initially increases its attempts (e.g. by crying) to engage the mother. Should this fail, the infant, hopeless to effect the other, conserves energy, and seems to implode, go limp, itself dissociate, becoming helpless. The ANS lends a physiological explanation for hyperarousal and subsequent hypoarousal. The sympathetic and parasympathetic systems work to maintain homeostasis. The sympathetic ANS prepares the body for fight-flight (increased heart rate, increase blood flow to the skeletal muscles, etc); and the parasympathetic, responding to elevations in stress-induced cortisol, is energy-conserving (going quiet, staring off in space, and becoming limp).

As Winnicott noted, “ If maternal care is not good enough, then the infant does not really come into existence, since there is no continuity in being; instead, the personality becomes built on the basis of reactions to environmental impingement.”
We know that dissociation affects one’s sense of subjectivity. A mother, or grandmother, who has suffered herself with unresolved trauma conveys her terror and dissociation to her infant via infant matching of the mother’s right corticolimbic firing patterns, inadvertently transmitting to the next generation her, or her mother’s, experience of trauma. Mother’s “regulatory strategy of dissociation is inscribed into the infant's right brain implict-procedural memory system.”

Maltreatment in childhood, then, is a growth-inhibiting environment for the developing brain and results in “structural defects of cortical-subcortical circuits of the right brain, the locus of the corporeal-emotional self.” “[D]issociation is associated with a deficiency of the right brain” and “early relational trauma is particularly expressed in right hemisphere deficits”. The untoward consequences include disorders in attachments, regulation of affect, and subjectivity and sense of self, with threats to going-on-being.

Reducing Uncertainty

Doris Brothers spoke to the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, Inc on March 10, 2012 on uncertainty and trauma. Brothers notes that people are motivated to reduce uncertainty--despite there is no certainty in the world-- by simplifying experience, accomplished by dissociation. We think, feel, fantasize, and make decisions, all regulatory processes created to have a sense that we will go-on- being [WInnicott]…until trauma shatters this sense.

Brothers defines trauma as that which threatens our going-on-being, threatens us with the fear of annihilation. Trauma threatens us with uncertainty. While her formulations about trauma are ongoing, she says a few ideas about trauma persist for her:

1. Trauma is relational, that is, trauma always has a relational meaning.

2. We always make restorative efforts, however faulty, that give us a sense of certainty that we will go-on-being, and that the relational surround will be there so we can go-on-being. We restore ourselves by clinging to convictions (certainties), from which we cannot be dissuaded.

3. Trauma goes hand in hand with dissociation. Brothers says dissociation is a restorative effort to reduce uncertainty by simplifying that which is complex. For example, while others purport that feelings are often too intense to be born, Brothers says it is the range of feelings, often contradictory, that we cannot bear. (As a colleague noted, perhaps all defenses, and all symptoms, are restorative attempts.) I agree with Brothers that therapists need to respect symptoms, which Brothers says allow for safety and certainty that otherwise would not exist. Therapists ought not seek to take away prematurely what is necessary to the patient to stave off terror of annihilation.

4. Shame is an inevitable companion of trauma.
On a note of self disclosure, such as therapists admitting to failures of empathy brought to our attention by our patients, Brothers notes an implicit ‘Ah, you notice my humanity, it may be safe to show me yours.’

Brothers also spoke of trauma as having a before, during, and aftermath, and what’s more, the before can have occurred before conception, as in intergenerational transmission of trauma. As Winnicott noted in The theory of the parent–infant relationship (1960, NY, IUP) “If maternal care is not good enough, then the infant does not really come into existence, since there is no continuity in being…” Winnicott (1958, IJP: The capacity to be alone) also noted that when a mother is depressed or dissociated (perhaps from her own past trauma or that of her mother’s) and unable to provide mutual regulation of experience, the infant, in matching its mother’s state, is devoid of subjectivity at a time critical in development. An infant who has extreme fluctuations in subjectivity, a traumatically dissociated infant, experiences discontinuity and threats to its going-on-being.

Poem: Witness

Having read the previous post (also found in the TBIPS Spring 2010 Newsletter) on Winnicott and the comment " ... to recognize that we all need, at times, the presence of the effected other to come into being", David Baker, PhD recently wrote this poem (after a party) with a thought to the analytic encounter:

Witness
I know you’ll know what I’m talking about.
You’ve walked out of the house
Into the yard
In the middle of your own party
And looked back through the living room window to see
The outlines of your friends
As they laughed and danced and drank
And you wondered
Among other things
If they knew you were missing
From your own party.
Wondered if they knew you were out there watching them,
If they would look back at you through the window,
Maybe set down their drink and ponder you
As you ponder them.
In the air just above you
Thoughts rise to meet theirs and from that ether is born
a knowing of each other.
It’s hard to know each other at a party.
We play at it, we like a party.
We like to see and be seen,
We like to be known,
Like to be missed.
But the almost-collisions of human-to-human
Never really allows for the deeper knowing.
It’s the depths we crave
Within ourselves and in others.
We need witnesses to our life, in order to really have our lives.
Perhaps that is why you walked outside,
Looked back,
Delighted in them.
In those few moments you were witness to their lives,
Held them, loved them into the eternity of your own memory.
How fortunate they were.
How they may never know about the gift you gave
By stepping out and away
To hold them closer than you ever could
Had you stayed in the room
Politely listening to their laments over real estate.

David Baker

Using Winnicott, Part II

In Playing and Reality (1971) Chapter 4: Creative Activity and the Search for the Self, Winnicott hopes to illustrate how, if the analyst would sometimes just get out of the way, the patient will come into a sense of self in her/his “search for the self.” In his clinical example, Case In Illustration (pp. 56-64), he allows a three hour session with a patient because she needs a lot of time to come into being, as it were. He believes he is allowing the patient freedom from his intrusions, impingements, derailments, [and cleverness] by his protracted silence. [Indeed, the patient may have felt Winnicott to have been palpably present by his demeanor, benevolent attitude, ability to hold her in his mind, etc., but the reader does not have this benefit.]

Upon rereading this case with the first year class at the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies, Inc, I was struck by the patient’s many attempts to feel Winnicott more significantly engaged with her. She says: “I’m loathe to come into this room…I feel of no consequence.” Winnicott adds that she cites “Odd details of my dealing with her, implying that she is of no consequence.” She states “I don’t matter.”

When the patient eventually speaks of positive feelings and activities, Winnicott takes this as evidence of her be[com]ing real as if this naturally unfolded by her creative play, alone in the presence of the other. What Winnicott does not acknowledge here is that this ‘positiveness of being’ followed both his interpretation (indicating he understood how withering and deadening it is when there is no one to give back to her her experience; no mutuality, as it were) and his responsiveness that she drink up the milk he had made available there for his patients.

Having reported more of her feelings and activities, she then asks, “Where are you? Why am I alone so?...Why don’t I matter anymore?” And, after talking about her birthday experiences, the patient says, “I feel as if I have wasted this session. I feel as though I came to meet somebody and they didn’t come.” [Here I think the patient is talking about Winnicott’s absence, as he tries to stay out of her way, from being in the space with her.] Winnicott speaks, reflects back, and the patient says, “I get a feeling sometimes that I was born.” [I take this as further confirmation that it is Winnicott’s participation which enlivens the patient.] Winnicott reflects for her what she may have always felt: that others were not glad that she was born, that they did not enjoy her. She confirms this with: “what is so awful is existence that is negatived” [negated]. She continues and asks [hopefully], “…is there a little soul waiting to pop into a body?”

Winnicott emphasizes, from the patient’s dream: “I might find a me—get in touch with a me,” that the patient is “trying to show you me” for the first two hours of the session. Winnicott writes: “The searching can come only from desultory formless functioning, or perhaps from rudimentary playing, as if in a neutral zone.” Yet I could not help noticing that the patient was only enlivened, came into being, when Winnicott spoke to her in such a way as to communicate his understanding of her, thereby giving her evidence of his having been listening attentively, and had done so because she was significant to him. Perhaps his patient felt his silence as an indication that she was insignificant to him.

In class, I was equally struck by one first year student who could so adeptly feel her way into Winnicott’s position, illuminating to the class a different point of view from mine, and imagine that his patient, having perhaps had demanding, intrusive parents, who forced compliance of her being to theirs (that she please them, say what they wanted to hear), would very much need an analyst who stayed out of the way, letting the patient say what she wanted, or say nothing at all, indicating she would not have to please the analyst. [Still, I thought, when Winnicott was pleased to let the patient give an interpretation that he would have made himself, that the patient was indeed saying something she thought he might want to hear, and doing so perhaps to keep him engaged with her.]

Had Winnicott lived today, would he now drop the ‘the’ of “the self” and characterize self as a more fluid, emerging entity? More importantly, would he have transformed his theory to view interaction through a slightly more contemporary lens, a lens which recognizes the need for all of us, including patients, to be seen, to have an effect, to feel significant to someone, even to one’s analyst, to recognize that we all need, at times, the presence of an effected other to come into being? Or would silence, as an indictor of respect for the patient's creativity and being alone in the presence of the other, still loom so large with a patient so desperate to feel significant to her analyst?