This year’s Memorial Day also happens to be the 100th Birthday of John F. Kennedy. Born May 29, 1917, he was the 35th president of the United States, and himself a WWII veteran of the Navy. A quick study, having learning from the Bay of Pigs debacle and negotiations with the then Soviet Union to get missiles out of Cuba, under pressure from Freedom Riders, Martin Luther King, Jr, and many others, Kennedy turned his attention to Civil Rights. It was only after his assassination in November 1963 that his successor Lyndon B. Johnson was able to get passed through Congress the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. [We might remember today just what types of discrimination were outlawed.]
Monday, May 29, 2017
The 100th Birthday of John F. Kennedy falls today on Memorial Day
Friday, May 26, 2017
From Fantasy to Imagination
Bromberg tells us that “the negotiation of selfhood and otherness...has a lot to do with imagination and creativity.” and that “The relative presence of “imagination” in human discourse overlaps to no small degree with the relative capacity for intersubjectivity that exists in any relationship.” [Being able to let in another’s experience allows for a “shared intersubjective space.”] Bromberg expands the shared space to include shared imagination, “loosen[ing] the rigidity” of one’s singular believes about the self [and other] to allow for a “relational unconscious.” I take this to mean if one is stuck in solipsistic fantasy, there is little to no room for interrelating with others much less comprehending that there exists another’s mind, one with separate contents from one’s own. He writes:
The cocreation of a lived, relational unconscious more and more nourishes the willingness of each person to participate in a growing sense of “We” that includes “Me” and “You” as part of their individually expanded self-experiences. By living together in the enacted shadow of what is visible but not perceived, an opportunity is afforded to encounter what has been hidden in plain sight. … This allows their relationship greater interpersonal spontaneity and creative self-expression that is carried by an expanded sense of selfhood into the world “out there.”
Relying on Winnicott’s 1971 paper on “Dreaming, Fantasying, and Living,” Bromberg elaborates that fantasy is a dissociated (‘Not me’) state while imagination embraces the ‘Me’. A colleague of mine noted that fantasy is somehow without hope [a remedy to hopelessness], while imagination includes hope about the future. Winnicott put it, in his enigmatically paradoxical way, like this: ”In fantasying, what happens, happens immediately, except that it does not happen at all.”
Bromberg explains:
For a person who is “imagining,” the state of affairs is different; the person is experiencing the self as it now exists, projected into the future. Because the self being imagined is the same self that is doing the imagining, the person as he is now has the capacity to act into a future that is real to him because the future that is imagined in the here-and-now is itself real. When the capacity to transform fantasy into imagination starts to increase, self-state transitions do not disrupt self-continuity, which in turn allows the present and the future to be bridged and thus to coexist. The person does not have to remain stuck in fantasy. What is imagined is not impossible for the self in the present; it just hasn't happened yet. [Einsteinian]
When the therapist can imagine, much like the mother for the infant, the patient’s expanding future on the horizon, then the patient, too, can consider such a future. The mother develops the mind of the infant by holding the infant in mind. The therapist develops the imagination of the patient by imagining.
Monday, May 22, 2017
Co-creation of Dreams
A therapist discloses to a patient the dream she had about him the night of their previous session:
I was sitting next to you on the couch in my office. You were sitting in the middle of the couch and I was to your left. We were facing each other. I reached over and touched your face. Your skin was soft. You then reached over to me and I felt guilt and sadness. So I turned away crying, feeling that loss. I wondered if you felt I was rejecting of you. I turned back to you and you said, “I love your father.”
The therapist recognized the resurgence of familiar feelings: her love for her patient, the patient’s love for her, and how it could not be; also familiar feelings with the therapist’s father. The therapist knew she also loved her father, and he, her, and it could not be. So, said the therapist, I am in touch with my sadness.
The patient shares his dream:
I was in the backyard. There was a helicopter overhead. It started coming down, through the trees. I could see the pilot, we made eye contact, and waved, two men with white hair. Then the fence disappeared. Then it changed to the backyard of my childhood home and there were fields with no end.
The patient quipped [associated], Why can’t I dream about sex instead of about benevolent old men with white hair?
The therapist mused aloud, Maybe this is about your father, the unspoken lifelong wish that there were no longer barriers between the two of you, instead of your usual, professed indifference toward a preoccupied, distant and disdainful father.
The patient and therapist had long since past been in the throes of an erotic transference- countertransference. The patient, old enough to be the father of the female therapist, had, before therapy, used extra marital affairs to help him feel desired and competent. The female therapist had lost her own father when she but was a toddler. Now there was more honest, intimate relating between therapist and patient, able now to uphold boundaries without the presence of fences between them, and without the fear that boundary violations would occur. The patient, now able to talk about sexual desires without the urge to have to act on them. He no longer could accept hurting his wife with his infidelities.
Bromberg writes that the feelings stirred up in the therapist about the patient are not the personal property of the therapist, but belong to both.
The therapist, having understood about co-creation, no longer felt ashamed about her dream. She was able to feel the mutuality of her own father’s love. The patient said, “There is something so romantic about recognizing feelings that one can’t act on.” The therapist felt sadness, not romance.
Wednesday, May 3, 2017
Envy and Failed Mutual Regulation
The final semester at TBIPS for fourth year candidates and students includes an Electives course in which each candidate has the opportunity to teach the rest of the class about an area of interest chosen by the candidate. We are presently learning about the relationship between mothers and daughters and how not ‘good enough’ mothers can affect their daughters, daughters who later come to us for treatment. Those in the class with a Kleinian bent emphasize envy. We were discussing today Charles’ (2001) paper “Stealing Beauty” about how narcissistic mothers envy their children and cannot help them succeed, nor bear to see their children as separate subjects. Sometimes their envy is transformed into self sacrifice (a reaction formation).
I have my personal doubts about whether envy is innate and, instead, see it as a problem arising from failed early relationships. An interesting, more specific thought came up in class today when Bharat Bharat, an aspiring psychology student auditing the class, asked about whether envy is genetic and whether it is somehow linked to children in those delayed gratification studies (don’t eat the marshmallow now and get an extra one later) who may later grow up to want (enviously) what they do not have (and cannot manage to get due to problems with delayed gratification). Because I see children with poor impulse control as having a problem with self regulation, and problems with self regulation as a product of failed mutual regulation in early attachment relationships, I then wondered whether envy, if a problem with self regulation, stems from failure of early mutual regulation. Is failed mutual regulation (and, thus, insecure attachment) a mechanism for the development of envy?
If the caregiver, -- due to a history of trauma which now leads the caregiver to be preoccupied, dissociated, and unable to be with the child and with the child’s mind-- is unable to help the child feel attuned to and seen (unable to feel important enough), a child might feel deficient and defective, setting up a vulnerability for envy. This mechanism does not require envy of a good breast (but may include it), and, moreover, does not require gymnastic feats of imagination to explain envy, at least, to my mind.
Thursday, March 30, 2017
Dissociation as the hallmark of trauma
Because Adrienne Harris so eloquently discussed intergenerational transmission of trauma on March 18, 2017 at the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society [see 3-21-2017 post], I thought I might share a bit of what Bruce Bradfield’s wrote on the subject:
“[P]sychic trauma...attempts to make meaning out of a phenomenon that resists knowing. … [D]issociation [i]s a primarily relational process, which keeps traumatic experience
unformulated and ambiguously signified in both the mother and her child. … [It is] a defense against intolerably painful affective states,which manifests in the mother’s intrapsychic experience, and in the relationship between mother and child…[T]rauma [is]...an experience that overwhelms the individual with inassimilable affects.
“[E]lements of parental traumatic experience are passed on to their children …and… subsequent generations. …[D]issociation is a consequence of a disruption of the parent’s caregiving capacity. [The parent’s] disrupted capacity to be emotionally attuned to the child ...[and] may impact on the child’s expectations[.]... [W]hat may be dissociated are not only the emotions associated with the parent’s trauma, but also the child’s need for relationship with the parent. …[T]rauma [is] communicated through patterns of relationship. … [C]hildhood interpersonal trauma has implications for the development of a particular disruption in lived experience [going on being], affecting attachment relationships directly. [There is] a relation between attachment style and posttraumatic responses.
“[A]ttunement within the relationship between mother and child facilitates the development of a capacity to integrate and contain painful emotions. … [D]issociation [is] an experience of disruption of the... capacity to integrate painful affective experiences. [D]issociation [is] manifest in future interpersonal relationships. …[and] reflects the incommunicability of traumatic histories, with trauma being held in familial and individual narratives as something unformulated and nameless.”
Bradfield, B. (2011). The Dissociation of Lived Experience: A Relational Psychoanalytic Analysis of the Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma. Int. J. Psychoanal. Self Psychol., 6:531-550. […]
Thursday, March 23, 2017
Survival, Destruction, Attachment and Going on Being, and Sexuality
Winnicott wrote of the importance of the mother’s survival (neither retaliating nor withdrawing) [see post of 2-28-12] of the the infant’s aggression, but, lest we forget that the mother does not survive unscathed, Harris [see post of 3-21-17] referred us to Ogden’s Destruction Reconceived (1) in which Ogden states that the destruction must succeed in part, that is, the infant must know he has an impact. Referring to Winnicott’s ‘The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications’ Ogden writes:
.... In my reading/writing of the paper, the mother becomes real for the infant in the process of his actually destroying her as an external object (destroying her sense of herself as an adequate mother), and his perceiving that destruction. She also becomes a real external object for the infant in the process of his experiencing the psychological work involved in surviving destruction, a form of work that does not occur in the world of fantasied objects. The analyst or mother may not be able to survive destruction. It is essential that the analyst be able to acknowledge to himself his inability to survive and, if necessary, to end the analysis because of the very damaging effects for both patient and analyst of prolonged experience of this sort.
In discussing Winnicott on bisexuality (2), Harris considered - for Winnicott’s patient- the conditions for going on being, to feel continuous in time. She considered that Winnicott’s patient’s mother’s “madness,” intergenerationally transmitted to the patient, might include a break in her going on being-ness. Then I had what I thought to be an exciting thought about attachment. Schore writes that attachment is affect regulation (or, conversely, that affect regulation engenders attachment) but what if attachment is also the capacity to be sufficiently present (hold in mind the infant) such that the infant experience a continuous going on being? Failure of the mother to go on being vitiates, maybe momentarily annihilates, her ability to facilitate her infant’s going on being, leading to disorganized attachment.
Another exciting thought of the day came from Peter Rudnytsky. Harris was discussing the “excess” of sexuality which Ruth Stein wrote was “essentially traumatic” for the infant and Peter mused: shouldn’t a ‘good enough’ mother be able to help the infant regulate this ‘excess’? [just as she does for other excesses, such as hunger. That is, what makes sexuality so unique that it cannot be contained and managed within a good enough relationship? Have we really returned to essentialism to give sex such a boogeyman status?]
2. Winnicott, D.W. (1971). Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock Publications. The Split-Off Male and Female Elements to be Found in Men and Women p.72
Tuesday, March 21, 2017
The Analyst's Self-care; Ghosts, and Witnessing
The local (Tampa Bay) psychoanalytic society had the pleasure of hosting, on March 18, 2017, Adrienne Harris, renowned psychoanalyst and author, known for her work on gender and, more recently, on the analyst’s ‘ghosts,’ that is, what ‘haunts’ the analyst and makes her or him less able to see the patient’s ghosts. Ghosts are a sign of blocked mourning of what has been lost or never was, but also, pointedly, about the confrontation with the limits of our immortality/omnipotence by the knowledge of the finality of death.
This countertransferential problem of ghosts may be aggravated by the analyst’s overlooking the importance of self-care. Therapists get so interested in taking care of others that they often ignore their own self-care. Citing Lyons-Ruth, Harris reminded us that children with disorganized attachment can cope by becoming disorganized, and, later, our patients, or they organize the best they can and become caretakers of their parents (what Lyons-Ruth called “tend/befriend”) in a “precocious maturity” and, later become therapists and other caregiving professionals.
Rey noted that many of his psychotic patients sought not to change themselves but, instead, to repair damaged internal objects from their childhoods. Apprey called this the “pluperfect errand,” an impossible task to go back and fix the other of the past. Harris said, therapists, too, may have an unconscious hope in our mission as analysts, which is “organized around our omnipotence,” to help others. “Some therapists have masochistic levels of commitment” to their patients, where they will try to do anything to intervene or help their patients. This penchant also may come with an increased capacity to be attuned to others. Harris mused about one version of the Greek myth of Philoctetes: that he could only be a perfect archer if his wound remained unhealed.
Unfortunately, self-care may be circumvented by the shame felt over needing, neediness, the shame of disappointed or unfulfilled need, as if all are not entitled to self-care.
Harris also talked about “Ghosts and Demons in the 21st Century.” She asked, “How do cultures come to terms with impossible betrayals?” and noted that “ghosts proliferate when there is no witness” to trauma. Ferenczi had also pointed out in Confusion of Tongues that the lack of a witness is as catastrophic as the traumatic event itself. Harris cited Ireland’s great famine. When catastrophe goes unwitnessed, it reveals itself in symptoms (e.g. alcoholism), sometimes generations later. “Melancholia is a hallmark of ghosts.” These “ghosts are lived through enactments, carrying and reproducing historical trauma.”
Another unwitnessed or insufficiently witnessed historical catastrophe is US slavery, its unfaceable and unspeakable horrors more recently coming to light. Stalinism, too, went long unwitnessed, with its subsequent flourishing of “the grotesque,” the admixture of horror and comedy, in art and literature.
Tuesday, March 14, 2017
Where is the pre-oedipal father in psychoanalyic theory?
Freeman advocates for increased conceptualizing of the pre-Oedipal father in psychoanalytic theory. Freudian psychoanalysis placed the Oedipus complex at the foundation of neurosis: “from its inception, psychoanalytic theory has been thoroughly imbued with allusions to the symbolic power of father…[m]ost poignantly...in the formation of the individual psyche [the Oedipus complex] and of civilization itself” [the superego], yet requires the relative absence of the pre-Oedipal father for its theory, an assumption now questioned, as well as found to be constraining on men, and unnecessarily gendered. Freeman finds a “curious tension between the symbolic presence and substantive absence of fathers… embedded at the heart of psychoanalytic theory.” (Yet psychoanalytic theory represented this pre-Oedipally absent paternal authority in the so-called phallic mother.)
The paradox: father, the “absent authority”, is relatively absent in psychoanalytic discourse, yet the “symbolic weight” of the father in psychoanalytic theory overlooks the “exclusive presence of the mother...as the lynchpin of early childhood development.” (Klein first turned our attention to the mother-infant dyad, but its importance was previously overshadowed by the Freudian idea of the Oedipus complex where the child must repress earlier fantasies, developed in the relative absence of the pre-Oedipal father, and “yield...to the moral order represented by the father” which will then give rise to the child’s separate identity and morality. The disembodied father was also emphasized by Lacan: the “real father” distinguished from the “symbolic father” or “the-name-of-the-father.”)
The paradox: father, the “absent authority”, is relatively absent in psychoanalytic discourse, yet the “symbolic weight” of the father in psychoanalytic theory overlooks the “exclusive presence of the mother...as the lynchpin of early childhood development.” (Klein first turned our attention to the mother-infant dyad, but its importance was previously overshadowed by the Freudian idea of the Oedipus complex where the child must repress earlier fantasies, developed in the relative absence of the pre-Oedipal father, and “yield...to the moral order represented by the father” which will then give rise to the child’s separate identity and morality. The disembodied father was also emphasized by Lacan: the “real father” distinguished from the “symbolic father” or “the-name-of-the-father.”)
In the Oedipus complex, “the child’s initial confrontation with the father is marked by aggressive resentment and fear”. This pejorative take means the boy reveres and resents the father. Freud ignored or denied the early paternal-infant interaction. For the boy, father arrives on the scene and severs the mother-infant engulfment (and risk of incest). The boy "turns... toward culture” as if the father psychologically birthed the child [just as Zeus, from his head, birthed Athena]. (Western religion, too, emphasizes the symbolic role of the Father (God) as procreator.) The girl, however, disavows her mother for bringing her into the world without a penis. In actuality, father’s role is not merely as authority, but also includes “containers, protectors, facilitators, models, challengers, initiators, sanctioners, and mentors.” including “a prenatal role (father as “mother-facilitator”), and pre-oedipal roles (e.g., “identification” and “gender identity”).”
It is the quality of parenting and not the gender or sexuality of the parent which is important. Freeman questions psychoanalytic theory’s gendered Oedipal theory which serves to suppress female sexuality and to deny male “access to the psychological vocabulary of love and emotional connectedness that define the maternal sphere.” She notes the male dilemma: “the expression of involved forms of fatherhood ... would at once provide emotional relief from the inevitable “discontents” of civilization while presenting a painful threat to masculine identity within a patriarchal culture. … Rather, parenting is identified as a form of compensatory pleasure for mothers alone”. Freeman makes a point for the benefits of both parents participating in child-rearing.
Thursday, March 9, 2017
Envy Revisited: From intrapsychic to relationally co-created intersubjective envy
Envy was originally conceived as a derivative of the death instinct (Ego psychology, drives). Eventually environmental failures were posited as causes of envy (Object relations, Self psychology), and envy is now seen as coming out of the intersubjective matrix (Relational). Segal posited that need (in neediness envy) might be met in relationships, or it might be denied, with deadening effect. The authors conversely note that denial of need might not be deadening, but an attempt at self preservation in the face of environmental (relational) failure, as noted by WInnicott. [Chronic denial of need (and desire) can lead to an existential emptiness, deadness.]
In the clinical situation, an area for envy is when the patient envies traits, imagined or real, of the therapist (patience, or equanimity, or friends, or a family life) which the patient does not possess, or vice versa. Sometimes envy, whose neediness is shaming by revealing the imperfect or incomplete self, makes it hard for one to accept something from the other, except perhaps to grab and steal it. The acceptance and containment by the self of envy allows one to feel sadness and loss for what one does not have. Some people feel chronically deprived.They may wonder why others have love or friends or accolades, and ‘Why not me?” They may hold no hope for their future, for getting what they want, except sometimes when they are demanding. When envy is present in patients, they may criticize others and the therapist; they may accuse the therapist of withholding help and care. [Because of the unpleasantness of their chronic criticism, patients may be accurate about the therapist’s withholding.] A patient’s deprivation and envy may leave the therapist feeling guilty,frustrated, incompetent and helpless. Fees are also fraught with envy dynamics, for either party. The patient can have much more income than the therapist, or much less.
“Envy attacks the links of relationships” rejecting what is given to avoid admitting need, eschewing mutuality and reciprocity because separateness seems unbearable. Narcissistic envy destroys meaning and creativity, because, say the authors, progress means moving toward death. [Perhaps, it destroys creativity because it is an injury not to be born, like Venus on the halfshell, fully formed.] They conclude, “The capacity to contains the pains of envy serves to reconstruct or create a link in which the pathological envy that destroys the linkis transformed into an awareness and a recognition that subjects are immersed in the endless dialectic of sameness and difference. They therefore constantly compete, desire, and attack each other in the intersubjective encounter. This awareness becomes synthesized into a synthetic whole of love and hate, enriching and destroying, recognizing and separating and knowing.”
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Three Forms of Envy
Shoshani, et al delineate three forms of envy: neediness, separation, and narcissistic. They illustrate their ideas with clinical cases illustrating how dissociated parts are regained and how the therapeutic dyad can help contain envy. The authors conceive of envy both as a drive and an intersubjective co-creation, “as both an object and a relation,...coexisting without being mutually exclusive.” They see these two as a dialectic, that is, “each creates, destroys, and re-creates the other...”
In citing Klein and Segal, the authors note that both Klein and Segal saw envy as partly constitutional deriving from aggression and the death instinct and is the wish to take away and/or destroy something desired that another person possesses. Envy, said Segal, is derived from both need and admiration of that which is desired. They see Spillius as adding a more relational aspect, noting that no one is comfortable with envy.
The authors find it “clinically useful to conceive of malignant envy as one of the leading anxieties,” a “disintegrating feeling” that humans are “desperate” to avoid and thus “evoke hatred, cruelty, blindness, narrow-mindedness, self destruction, and destruction of the other
both as expressions of envy and as a means of counteracting its devastating influence.”
Neediness envy, “results from the realization that the other has something we need but do not have” and the wish to be connected to the other includes the wish to secretly posses the coveted possession. In Othello, envy, “the green-eyed monster,” is directed at the nurturing other and includes the wish to devalue/destroy the other. “[T]he most consuming aspect of envy is the one directed against the person who gives us what we so desperately need but feel helpless to provide ourselves with.” (The authors consider jealousy triadic, and envy dyadic, thus interpreting Shakespeare’s ‘jealousy’ to really be envy.) Neediness envy arises from recognition by child that I am small and needy.
Separateness envy results from the “dependency on the other who is separate from me, has a mind of his or her own, and who is not in my possession” [under my control]. Here the wish to be connected includes eliminating separateness through merger. The author’s use Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata and its protagonist’s envy and hatred toward his wife as an example of “imprisoning and objectifying the other.” He finds his wife’s subjectivity (separateness) so unbearable that he murders her.
According to the authors, separateness is the precondition for envy, as when when the child discovers it cannot control its mother, and gives rise to all three forms of envy, including invidious comparison of self to the separate other. They agree with Symington that “shame, [then] is the progenitor of envy.” For the infant who maintains the grandiose self (fails to move, in Winnicott’s terms, from object relating to object usage), there still exists the awareness of the self as deficient, separate, and needy.
Narcissistic envy “arises from the painful realization of one’s own limitations...vis-a-vis fantas[ies] of all-inclusive omnipotence and immortality” and entails, not the relationship between self and other (object), but between self and unconscious fantasy. Agnon’s short story, The Doctor’s Divorce, shows a man unable to accept that he did not exist for his wife before they met, that is, “he did not always exist” for her and so is not eternal, death being the deepest narcissistic injury. Narcissistic envy can also arise when a parent who is competent explicitly or implicitly belittles the less competent child by, for example, failing to allow twinship or idealizing transferences.
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