An excellent article describing in depth
many of the core dynamic features that impairs individuals in the capacity to
love others or themselves.
Simply put
To Love and the accompanied vulnerability, engenders panic, to the level of
psychotic anxiety. The individual feels
as though there will be a total annihilation of the Self, the Self will merge
and be devoured by the “Other”. The
schizoid withdraw defensive system to protect the Self is discussed. For those with an interest in Dynamic Psychiatry.
Authors
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Jean
Knox
1.
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Cited by: 0 articles
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English
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French
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Italian
Abstract
Abstract: This paper explores the fear of love and
relationship which develops when a child has experienced parents who cannot
tolerate emotional separation and so attempt to retain perfect contingency with
their infant, long after the infant needs to begin to separate and individuate.
The child is a ‘self-object’ for the parents, who depend on the responses of
others, including their own child, to maintain a sense of their own identity.
The impact of this demand for ‘reverse parenting’ on the child's development is
explored and clinical work with an adult patient whose history reflects this
process is described.
Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous.
Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
(Kundera 1984, p. 10)
Introduction
In the Greek
myth, Pandora's curiosity leads her to open the box the gods have given her and
into which they have each put something harmful to humanity. As soon as she
lifts the lid, the evil contents escape, but she slams the lid down in time to
keep Hope inside. We remember the myth mainly in terms of the enduring nature
of hope, but its other message is that it is Pandora's curiosity, her desire to
find out for herself what the box contains, rather than be obedient to the
gods, which brings disaster.
The danger inherent in the wish to become fully a
subject, to explore and understand the world for ourselves rather than be
subjugated to god-like parents whose every wish must be obeyed is a recurrent
theme in religion and mythology. When Eve takes the apple from the Tree of Knowledge,
the desire to know things for herself, to have a mind of her own, is an
irredeemable sin for which humankind is banished forever from the garden of
Eden—a story which conveys the terror a
child feels at the threat of expulsion from the paradise of parental love.
Prometheus steals fire from the gods to give to the human race and his temerity
in attempting to give humans control of their environment in this way is
brutally punished by a state of unending torture in which his insides are eaten
away each day—a story which can
imaginatively capture the child's experience of being the passive object of
endless sadistic parental intrusions which eat away at his very self.
The message
conveyed in these narratives is that the struggle to become an independent human, essentially to develop a sense of
self-agency, risks provoking
catastrophic retaliation from parents who are unable to relate to their
children as separate, independent beings. These are parents whose own failure
to individuate, or in attachment theory terms, to develop a secure
autobiographical self, means that they depend on the responses of others,
including their own child, to maintain a sense of their own identity (Fonagy 1991). Kohut describes this as relating to others as ‘self-objects’ and
suggests that this means that ‘the expected control over such (self-object)
others is then closer to the concept of the control which a grown-up
expects to have over his own body and mind than to the concept of control which
he expects to have over others’ (1971, p. 28). He further describes the effect
this has on the person who is related to
as a ‘self-object’, ‘the object of such narcissistic “love” feels oppressed and
enslaved by the subject's expectations and demands’ (ibid., pp. 28 & 32).
However,
Kohut does not really develop this account of the effects of being on the receiving end of a ‘self-object’
projection and the serious and damaging impact it can have on a child's psychic
development. It leads to a relationship of ‘reverse parenting’, in
which the child's unconscious belief is that his or her task is to contain the
parents' anxieties and meet their needs. Such parents experience any difference or independence as rejection. The child learns that she must not
have a mind of her own, that her own thoughts, needs, emotions and desires are
so dangerous for her parents that her own emerging independent sense of
identity must be eliminated and she must always be exactly in tune with her
parents' desires. It is the individuation process itself
which such parents experience as threatening and which they seek to destroy.
My central
theme in this paper is that this demand, either conscious or unconscious, for a
child to remain totally attuned to the parent, profoundly inhibits the development of the child's independence and
sense of agency. Parents who fear
their child's growing autonomy attack and undermine any deintegrative process because it contributes to the
process of individuation by which the child eventually develops into a mature
adult with his or her own autonomy and agency. So, the child's curiosity, appetite, desire, love or hate are all
undermined, attacked or invalidated, sometimes in quite subtle, but devastating
ways. The child ends up feeling that
both to love and to be loved are equally dangerous. To be loved is to be a
self-object for the parents and so to lose one's independent identity; to love
seems to be too dangerous because it is a demand which is experienced as a
threat by a parent whose own needs must always have priority.
I will focus
in this paper on some of the more extreme manifestations of this relational
dynamic, but it often appears in less dramatic forms in ordinary encounters. I
can give one brief illustration from a chance observation of a father and child
in a supermarket near my home. The child, a girl of about 8 or 9, was scanning
in the purchases. The father, clearly impatient and irritable, could not allow
her time to work out how to do it, but as she uncertainly picked out an item
from the basket, said in an annoyed tone, ‘pay attention; careful what you are
doing’, sighing loudly as she tried to scan the item and when the machine
misread it, he immediately and triumphantly blamed the child saying, ‘now look
what you've done’, although it was clearly a machine error and not the child's
fault. She picked up each further item with greater and greater hesitancy, her
body language conveying her self-doubt as she fumbled and glanced anxiously at
her father each time. He responded with remarks such as ‘don't get it wrong
again’ and ‘this is rather a slow process—we haven't got all day’, eventually
taking over the job from her in exasperation. He certainly expected her to fail
and my impression was that he needed to destroy her developing independent
exploration of the world and perhaps even more importantly, her self-confidence
and trust in her own judgement.
I would not
suggest that occasional episodes of that kind of insensitivity offer proof of
an unconscious envious attack on the
child's self-agency, but would agree with a number of authors who have
recognized that if such a pattern is repeated regularly it provides strong evidence of destructive intent (Khan 1974[1963]; Miller 1988). In this kind of experience, the child comes to believe that he or she
is only lovable when he/she is exactly in tune with the parent—a masochistic sacrifice
of self to protect the caregiver whose needs are felt to be paramount. This
places the child in an impossible dilemma—to be loveable and loved, he or she must cease to exist in his or her own
eyes and so must destroy all his or her own aliveness; the constant struggle
against the individuation process becomes a kind of self-torture. On the
other hand, to experience oneself as a real person, with a sense of self and a capacity to make one's own choices brings
the risk of violent retaliation, as Cordelia discovered when she did not
say exactly what her father, King Lear, wanted to hear. It is an irresolvable
impasse, which eventually leads the child to a state of despair. A total shutdown of the attachment system
itself is felt to be the only means of survival, and no relationship ever feels safe because it risks activating loving
feelings. This is the basis for the
fear of love. To love means to exist and to want to have one's independent
existence recognized and responded to by the loved other. But if those whom one loves fear and hate
any psychic separateness which they cannot control, a terror of relationship
and love seems to be the inevitable outcome, maintained by dissociative
processes. All libido, all emotional intensity is avoided as a defence
against relationship with a love-object who is experienced as destructive of one's own process of
individuation.
This kind of experience does not particularly arise
from acute trauma, which overwhelms the processing capacities of the human
mind, but on much more everyday and less obvious painful experiences, whose
harm lies in the message which they convey to the child that his or her
autonomy and self-agency are a threat to the parents. Parents who can only relate to others as self-objects cannot tolerate
the child's need for recognition of his or her emotional needs, nor respond to
their child's love in a way which fosters individuation and the development of
self-agency.
Winnicott
described this kind of situation as a form of parental impingement which leads the child to develop a ‘false
self’ in order to protect the ‘true self’ (Winnicott 1960). But the use of the concept of
‘self’ as a psychic structure is problematic; Kohut, Winnicott, Jung and
Fordham, all define ‘self’ differently so that integrating different models of
the self is fraught with confusion. I have suggested elsewhere (Knox 2007) that some of these theoretical
incompatibilities can be overcome if we re-frame our models of the mind less in
terms of psychic structures and more in terms of psychic processes. So, in
attempting to understand the clinical material in this paper, I describe it in
terms of an active and continuing process of self-agency and the ways in which
this can become inhibited, rather than in terms of the self as a psychic
structure.
Another
difference from the false/true self-formulation relates to the active internal
attack on self-agency. It is not about a false self protecting a true self from
impingement but about the child
experiencing any self-agency as dangerous
and destructive, as a direct consequence of identification with parental
introjects. The badness is located inside and identified with self-agency,
rather than outside. Linked to this is the child's unconscious motivation
for this identification, namely to
protect the caregiver rather than his or her self. The caregiver's needs are
prioritized over those of the child's. Although Alice Miller highlighted the
damaging effects of parental narcissistic demands, she describes the resulting
inhibition of the child's capacity to express hate, but only hints at the
child's experience that his or her love
is a demand which parents cannot tolerate (Miller 1988).
In attachment theory, the concepts
of ‘mentalization’,
‘reflective function’ and the ‘alien self’ offer a helpful theoretical
framework for understanding the developmental basis for this kind of
experience. The importance of the parent's capacity to mentalize, to relate to
themselves and others as psychological and emotional beings and the central
role of parental reflective function in the infant's self-organization has been
extensively mapped by Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist & Target (2002).
In general we might say that the self as agent arises
out of the infant's perception of his
presumed intentionality in the mind of the caregiver. Where parental
caregiving is extremely insensitive and misattuned, we assume that a fault is
created in the construction of the psychological self. We follow Winnicott's (1967) suggestion that the infant, failing to
find himself in the mother's mind, finds the mother instead.
But in such cases the internalized other remains alien and
unconnected to the structures of the constitutional self.
(Fonagy et
al. 2002, p. 11)
Fonagy et
al. suggest that the ‘“absence of a reflective object” for the child's
experience creates a vacuum within
the self, where internal reality remains
nameless, sometimes dreaded’ (ibid., p. 419). Since internal reality
includes the whole of the infant's emotional and motivational world, all this
must also be eliminated as alien and dangerous. So the child also fails to
develop the capacity to mentalize, to
relate to his or her own mind and emotions and in this sense, successfully
eliminates the sense of self-agency. The self, in a Jungian sense, cannot be
destroyed, but it can be defensively isolated from the impact of all experience
through the creation of impenetrable defences, described by Michael Fordham (1985) as defences of the self; to my mind, the defensive
inhibition of the reflective function, described by Fonagy and others, is
virtually identical to Fordham's concept of defences of the self. I am
suggesting in this paper that the unconscious purpose of this defensive system is to inhibit the process of individuation and
separation which are felt to threaten the person's key attachment figures.
This
unconscious dynamic underlies and contributes to a wide range of clinical
phenomena, including eating disorders, self-harm, addictions, sexual
perversions, psychosomatic and borderline phenomena, sometimes contributing to a complete dissociation from any form of
relationship or desire and sometimes to a devouring desire to be merged and
fused with the desired other, to swallow the loved object or be swallowed by it
(Crowther 2004; Knox 2005; Seligman 1982; Sidoli 1993; Solomon 2004; Wilkinson 2003).
The states
of mind associated with severe eating disorders seem to demonstrate very clearly the importance of the fear of love.
Catherine Crowther explores anorexia as one manifestation of addictive states
of mind, in which there is an overwhelming longing for love and relationship
which must be displaced and managed in relation to food: 
[Figure reproduced with kind
permission of Terrence Deacon]
[Figure reproduced with kind
permission of Terrence Deacon]
The anorexic person, feeling neediness as an unbearable tension, unable
to disentangle emotional hunger from
bodily greed, deflects her dangerous desires away from her human object
(almost invariably her mother) and projects her greed into the food. She has
the delusion that her actual self is being gobbled up and swallowed down by the
food if it is allowed inside her body. What comes through in the transference
is that any need of another person is felt as a loss of self-control and as
complete capitulation to the person who could fulfil that need, who threatens
almost to devour her. In other words it
is a terror of normal dependence.
Crowther
views schizoid withdrawal as a form of
catastrophic defence in response to this terror:
This claustrophobia prompts her to withdraw emotionally from the
relationship, to a safe distance, professing
self-sufficiency—i.e., a narcissistic flight. This in turn becomes a place
of abandoned isolation and terrifying
separateness, with extremely painful affects, leading full circle back to
the longings for the safe blissful union with another.
(ibid.)
Hilda Bruch (1973) also views this dissociative state as fundamental in
anorexia, quoting one of her anorexic patients:
I am completely isolated. I sit in a glass sphere. I see other people
through a glass wall; their voices penetrate to me. I long for being in real
contact with them. I try but they don't hear me.
Ogden
suggests that the child's experience of the internal deadness in the mother or in the parental couple is
internalized as an internal deadness in the child (Ogden 1999, p. 183). Along similar lines, AndréGreen (1986, p. 168) proposes that maternal depression is
experienced by her infant as a mutual death.
What all
these authors describe is a subjective experience of internal psychic deadness,
but I do not think they adequately explain the unconscious logic which drives
this state, the fantasy of unquestioned domination by the internal ‘other’
which sustains the malignant power of the denial of love and relationship. If parents themselves have no capacity to
mentalize, have no internal working model of themselves and others as emotional
and psychological beings then their relationships are based on a primitive
level of self-agency in which each only feels real when they are having a
direct behavioural or emotional
impact on the other. Fonagy et al. describe this as an early stage of the
development self-agency, the self as teleological and intentional agent, which
precedes the emergence of mentalization. (Fonagy et al. 2002).
Although
Fonagy et al. explore the unconscious dynamics which arise from these developmental
failures in mother-infant interaction and reflective function, their
description of this kind of self-agency does not explore it from an
evolutionary perspective, as a primitive form of communication which may be
drawn on when survival is felt to be at risk. Terrence Deacon states that
it should be remembered that a large fraction of a species'
communicative repertoire may have evolved for manipulative purposes, ensuring
that one animal's alarm call creates the same emotional state, in this case
alarm, in all the other members of the same species nearby.
(Deacon
1997, p. 426)
In
evolutionary terms, this has great survival value in the animal world, in that
a single alarm call from one animal in the group ensures that they all flee the
approaching predator. It is a sub-cortical system which functions automatically
and has no place for any kind of choice
about how to respond; in that sense it is controlling and coercive in
evoking a specific emotional response in other animals. Deacon describes this
as indexical communication (ibid., p. 235). It is a pattern of relating in
which any communication only has one possible meaning—like the animal's alarm
call—and its function is to evoke a specific behavioural or emotional response
from the other person, without giving them any space to reflect on that
response or choose an alternative. This is why metaphors are so dangerous, as
Milan Kundera recognized in the quote at the start of this paper. They reflect
the capacity for symbolic functioning which is only possible at the most mature
level of self-agency, that of the autobiographical self. And at that level of
functioning, it is also possible to love another person who is recognized as
separate from oneself.
A mother
whose self-agency is functioning at the teleological level relies on indexical
communication, even when she is using words which are, of course, symbols. The
point is that the words do not mean what they say because the unconscious
emotional signals the mother conveys, for example in her body language, facial
expression and tone of voice, put pressure on the child to respond in one
specific way, regardless of the conscious verbal message. The child feels coerced, manipulated and constantly intruded upon. The impact of this kind of parental
intrusiveness can be to undermine and sometimes even annihilate the child's
sense of his or her self-agency and value as an independent person, as much as
rejection or humiliation, contributing to the ‘destruction of the personal
spirit’ so eloquently described by Don Kalsched (1996), but also by attachment theorists
such as Hopper (1991). In this paper I want to explore in
more depth the various forms this relational
trauma may take and the nature of the defensive reactions they bring about,
but first I will describe some clinical illustrations of this kind of
experience.
by a
reptile. At other times, her presence felt like being cut by shards of broken
glass. He could not look directly into her
The
denial of self in relationships—clinical and developmental aspects
Fairbairn recognized the despair that comes from
feeling unlovable, worthless or dangerous to those one most loves to be the
fundamental anxiety behind schizoid withdrawal:
It is the great tragedy of the
schizoid individual that his love seems to destroy; and it is because his love
seems so destructive that he experiences such difficulty in directing libido
towards objects in outer reality. He becomes afraid to love; and therefore he
erects barriers between his objects and himself.
(Fairbairn
1952[1941], p. 50)
In
describing the erection of barriers between self and object, Fairbairn is
describing a state of defensive dissociation resulting from barriers that exist between the self and
its internal, as well as external, objects. Mollon (2001, p. 4) defines dissociation as a state which ‘requires a degree of detachment of one
part of the mind from what another part is experiencing’. I think the
implications of this are wide-reaching, in that
dissociative defences therefore strip events and experience of meaning, since
meaning depends on the integrative processes of the transcendent function,
which compares and contrasts conscious and unconscious experience, allowing new
symbols to be created (Jung 1921). I have explored elsewhere the way in
which contemporary neuroscience and attachment theory help us to extend Jung's
original use of this term and so recognize it as the essential process by which
the human mind evaluates information from a range of internal and external
sources, analysing similarity and difference and integrating the result into
new forms of understanding (Knox 2003). Appraisal is the name given by
attachment theorists to this process and research suggests that it is based on
the integration of explicit and implicit knowledge (Fosshage 2004; Siegel 2003).
Dissociation strikes at the heart of
this fundamental process by which new meaning and new symbolism develop,
preventing the recognition of similarity and difference between a new event and
past experience, between conscious explicit and unconscious implicit knowledge,
between cognition and emotion or most importantly for this paper, between self
and object. A rigid defensive system becomes elaborated
which removes the sense of self from all experience. This denial of one's own
or others' subjectivity has been described by attachment theorists such as Peter
Fonagy as a defensive inhibition of reflective function, the unconscious
awareness of self or other as mental and emotional beings (Fonagy 1991). It is a process which relies on a
fundamental and wide-reaching assault on the transcendent function, or, using
Bion's term, on attacks on linking (Bion 1977[1965], p. 54). Both the transcendent
function and ‘linking’ describe the mind's capacity to form connections between
mental contents and it is this fundamental meaning-making process which is inhibited
by dissociation.
I suggest that if a person's
dominant and fundamental fantasy that he or she is not allowed to exist as an
independent person in the eyes of the other, then the compensation provided by the unconscious in the form of dreams or other imagery is
not in itself enough to overcome this defensive denial of self, contrary to the
view offered in classical Jungian theory. Dreams, fantasies or unconscious
enactments are experienced as meaningful only when they are integrated with the
desire and excitement, the emotional involvement of self in relation to other;
otherwise the symbolic imagery of the unconscious begins to lose its
life-giving qualities and is experienced as either dangerous and/or
meaningless. The consequence is that the very creativity of the unconscious
must be attacked and the individuation process repeatedly and triumphantly
destroyed. I think this is the basis for the ‘addiction to near death’
described by Betty Joseph (1982), although I offer a different
aetiological view in suggesting that the destruction of the sense of one's own
separate identity and one's own desire is a necessary sacrifice in order to be
loveable to the other.
One of the
most vivid literary accounts of this is given in a novel by Joanne Greenberg (1964), I Never Promised You A Rose Garden. It is a fictionalized account of
her therapy with Freida Fromm-Reichmann and while somewhat sentimental at
times, powerfully conveys her terror of existing as a real person—someone with
her own independent identity. The patient, Deborah (diagnosed then as
schizophrenic whereas she would be more likely now to be labelled as suffering
from severe borderline personality disorder), has constructed a beautiful but
terrifying imaginary world, Yr, peopled with gods, while the real world is one
she can only see in flat monochrome and in which she does not exist as herself
but simply as a robotic puppet. Any attempt to engage with the world, to love
or enjoy anything or anyone in it, risks dire punishment from the gods and
their agent, the Censor, because not only might the real world destroy her, she
might destroy real people by any attempt at closeness or intimacy. She tells
her analyst that she has destroyed her sister, and then says, ‘I didn't mean
to—she was exposed to my essence. It's called by a Yri name, it's my selfness,
and it is poisonous… it's a quality of myself, a secretion, like sweat. It is
the emanation of my Deborah-ness and it is poisonous’. Deborah does not mean
that she is selfish and so destructive, but rather, that her very existence is
poisonous to those she loves. Her sense of her self as destructive, which leads
her to a denial of the reality of her own existence, leads to a splitting off
of all her imagination and creativity into something separate from herself, a
world which she experiences as separate and other, not as an imaginative
construction of her own. To own it would be to acknowledge the unconscious
symbolism and imagery as her own and her increasingly desperate attempts to
deny these as expressions of her self lead the kingdom of Yr to become a
steadily darker, more dangerous and persecutory state in her mind.
Warren
Colman has explored the nature of true symbolism as the ‘capacity to
acknowledge the absence of what is imagined from the world of material
actuality’, so that a symbol ‘points to what it represents, without being what it represents’ (Colman 2006, pp. 21&37). I suggest that,
linked to the symbol's independence from an object, a true symbol also carries
more meanings than the one specific object it seems to refer to. Deacon (1997) discusses the difference between symbolic and other
kinds of communication, primarily in relation to language development, but he
extends it to apply to emotional communication and this has some important
implications for analytic theory and practice. The crucial point Deacon
highlights is that in indexical communication, a communication is a sign which
not only refers directly to a specific object, but it also successfully coerces
a specific action from the other. It carries only one meaning for the
recipient, in terms of the nature of their response.
In contrast,
symbolism is the existence of multiple meanings in any communication. A fully
symbolic level of mental functioning is one of a rich network of thoughts,
desires, beliefs, fears which can be explored and related to for their own
sakes not primarily to evoke an action or emotional response in the other. It
is a truly symbolic state of mind, in that eventually there is no coercion or
manipulation of the other, who does not feel under emotional pressure to
produce one specific response but feels free to reflect on the communication
symbolically. There is no experience of ‘thought-action fusion’ (Rachman & Shafran 1999).
In the
introduction to his paper ‘Reverie and interpretation’, Ogden (1999) offers a quote from Henry James which makes the same
point as Deacon's diagram, but more poetically:
Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense
sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended
in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its
tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is
imaginative, it takes to itself the faintest hints of life.
(James
1884, pp. 44-65)
The
indexical pattern of relating clearly has survival value for infants. Their
cries of alarm evoke a visceral response from the parent who then rushes to
protect the child. I have explored elsewhere the idea that archetypes are not
genetically determined but are early emergent developmental achievements (Knox 2003). The indexical level of communication
can be viewed as an archetypal pattern, an embodied experience of self-agency
in relationship which emerges in the first few days of the infant's life; the
powerful, even coercive impact the infant's communication has on the parent is
essential for the survival of a helpless infant.
However, in
adult humans the persistence of this pattern of relating creates significant
problems because it arises from a sense of self-agency in which a person only
experiences that they themselves exist when they are directly coercing or
manipulating the other. I think this lies behind projective identification and
the countertransference experience of being coerced or manipulated—it is an
experience of the patient's sense of self-agency operating at the teleological
(or in Deacon's terms, indexical) level. In this state of mind, thoughts and
intentions are inseparable from the action they point to, or the emotional
states they so powerfully elicit in the other person. Alan's mother's body
language, tone of voice and facial expression were all controlling signals to
Alan, conveying one message, that her survival depended on being constantly in
a state of harmony and identity with him and so being validated by him in her
role as his mother. Any criticism or rejection by him would destroy her.
In this
context, Alan's fantasies conveyed his experience of relationships as
persecutory and sadistic, as the second dream also shows. This arose from the
intense intrusive anxiety of my patient's mother—a mother who related through
fusion and was therefore totally unable to allow her husband or children to be
separate people with minds and desires of their own. Such a mother is unable to
mirror her baby's emotions, the importance of which Sue Gerhardt (2005) has so vividly described in her
recent book Why Love Matters. For someone whose unconscious fantasy or belief is
that to be a self is a crime, making choices means having a mind of one's own
and this would invite punishment from the powerful ‘other’, who can only relate
to a self-object, by means of coercion or manipulation.
The first
and third dreams convey his bland withdrawal into non-relationship, where he is
‘at sea’, not knowing why he is there or what he is doing, probably based
pretty much on his identification with his father's defensive mindlessness. The
third dream is I think more to do with the analysis, his sense of having to fit
into my expectations (the narrow corridor) and his anxious wish for me to give
him a sense of direction, to tell him what I wanted him to do. It may also
reflect his secret contempt for me, as someone taking part in an elaborate
pantomime of relationship in which he wanted to play no part.
The
developmental distortions which lie behind this defensive state of mindlessness
arise from an inhibition of the transcendent function and the individuation
process, preventing the move from indexical to symbolic communication. Initially,
the infant's developing sense of self, indeed his or her very survival, depends
on being able to have a direct physical and behavioural impact on the caregiver
and so a perfectly contingent response in the first months of life is crucial;
it allows the experience of the teleological sense of self to develop, through
the infant's repeated experience of agency in creating the caregiver's
predictable responses. In Deacon's terms, this relies on indexical
communication, in which one person's signals guarantee a predictable response
from the other. At this stage, as Winnicott pointed out, it would be
catastrophic for the infant to be disillusioned about his or her role in
creating the maternal response (Winnicott 1975[1951]).
Increasing
separation and individuation require an emotional response from the caregiver
which is close to the infant's but not identical with it, thus allowing the
infant to become aware that his or her desires have been communicated to
another mind which has understood them, processed them and responded in a way
which reflects both the infant's and the caregiver's intentionality. A perfect
attunement at this stage would fail to allow the sense of intentional and
reflective self to develop because there would be no experience of dialogue
with another, different mind. Gergely and Watson (1996) use the term ‘marking’ to describe a
mother's ‘pretend’ exaggeration of her response to her baby and suggest that
this allows baby to recognize her reaction as a response to him (finding
himself in the other). This is a form of contingent mirroring but imperfect, in
the sense that it conveys the mother's state of mind as well as that of the
infant.
I think we
can see that problems will arise at key points in the infant's development if his
mother lacks reflective function, basically the awareness of herself and her
baby as separate mental and emotional beings. She can only relate at the
teleological/indexical level, attempting to retain perfect contingency and
total identity with her infant, long after the baby needs to start the process
of separation and individuation. She feels she is only good and valuable if she
is in total harmony with her baby and is using her baby as a substitute for her
own absent, internal reflective parent. Her communications to the infant remain
at the indexical level, and so will be experienced by the infant as intrusive
and coercive attempts to elicit specific emotional and behavioural responses
from him or her which do not accord with his or her own state of mind. The
alien sense of his or her identity becomes installed in the child's psyche and
is experienced as an alien self (Fonagy et al. 2002; Rotmann 2002).
The child
therefore experiences his mother as attacking any development if she rejects him
when he begins to separate and so is no longer totally in tune with her.
Separateness and indeed individuation itself comes to be experienced as being
bad and this has a quality of absolute certainty—there is no as-if element. The
child comes to believe that his/her task is to please the parent because there
is only one mind—the parent's—and her needs and desires are always paramount.
For Alan, the fear of loving and being loved originated in his experience that
his mother expected him to be exactly in tune with her own desires. He could
not have thoughts, desires, needs, emotions or sexual identity of his own.
I suggest
that it is the unconscious experience of self-as-object which determines and
maintains this kind of state, as a defence against the unconscious belief that
the parents' sense of self depends on the child's total compliance. But why
would a child collude in his or her own obliteration of self-agency? Perhaps to
avoid becoming Prometheus, with parents parasitically devouring one's aliveness
to feed themselves. Parents who cannot find their own vitality in themselves
appropriate all the child's vitality as their own; any sign of the child's own
separate identity, whether in the form of emotional need or increasing
autonomy, will be met with an envious attack of the kind I described in the
supermarket.
The
analytic task
The adult
patient brings this childhood experience into the analytic process which
becomes subverted—it is no longer in the service of the patient gaining
understanding but rather of being understood by the analyst and then of
complying with that understanding. The analyst's communications are not
experienced as being addressed to an independent mind, which can use them for
its own purposes, but are experienced as instructions to the patient to comply
with the therapist's needs. The patient believes that the analyst is
functioning like the parent, through coercion or manipulation, operating at the
indexical level. This leads to the kind of blandness I experienced with Alan—he
simply did not allow himself to need anything from me, to make any demands on
me. I frequently interpreted that for him to do so would be to risk putting
himself in the power of a controlling mother again who needed to dominate him
and who would humiliate him if he showed need, desire or love.
In the
analysis with me, he adopted a bland neutrality with emotional expression
always subdued. There was no emotional intensity, except brief outbursts of
narcissistic anger when he felt humiliated by others or by his own body's
illnesses. At these times, he felt stirred up but also confused, as though his
mind was in a fog, which I understood as a form of dissociation, a defensive
avoidance of the emotional meaning of his experience. All his emotion remained
secret, as it was from his mother. I think he secretly triumphed in the
recognition that very little I said could penetrate his total emotional
shutdown. He mostly successfully concealed both his love and his hate from me.
And I gradually came to realize that much of his emotional investment in the
analysis went into trying to ensure, often successfully, that he had no
emotional impact on me whatsoever. To arouse my interest in him would risk my
becoming the controlling, an intrusive mother endlessly picking at the inside
of his mind as the eagle did to Prometheus.
Alan had
learned early in life to avoid giving his internal ‘Nazi’ mother anything of
himself for her to feed on and he recreated this in the analysis with me, which
often made me feel at a loss about how to respond to him. I often seemed to
have no thoughts or feelings of my own about him, as though I had become as
bland and mindless as he was. As I became more aware of this, I began to point
out the various ways in which I felt that he diverted my attention away from
his internal world, such as the frequent occasions when he would seem to invite
me to join him in critical comments about other people, a pattern which
replicated his collusion with his mother's criticism of other people in order
to divert her negativity away from himself. As a result, he began to
acknowledge his terror of being vulnerable; for example he almost always
arrived about 10 minutes before the session and would sit in his car in the
drive thinking about what he would talk about. I said that he seemed to need to
bring me only material which he had prepared in advance and so could present to
me in a way that kept it under his control. When he brought dreams to his
sessions, he would describe the dream and then immediately offer his own interpretation
of it, pre-empting any interpretation I might wish to offer, as though afraid
that I would become a penetrating intrusive Nazi-mother, taking over and
controlling his symbolic products. No symbolic process could therefore be
allowed to come alive in the room between us—there could be no intercourse, no coniunctio, and so no living experience
created between us.
His fear was
that any spontaneous emotion or thought would place him at the mercy of the
meaning that I would make of it. For a person whose unconscious belief is that
the analyst/parent cannot tolerate any evidence of the patient's independent
psychic existence, there is a very real danger that the analyst's
interpretations will be experienced as coercive or manipulative. The harder the
analyst tries to offer them as factual objective observations, the more the
patient feels annihilated by the perceived demand to become the object the
analyst seems to be describing, rather than the subject he or she so
desperately needs to allow to exist.
In Jungian
theory, the route out of this deadness is through the activation of the shadow.
However, Alan had learned from an early age to suppress any expression of his
shadow; resisting the impulse to throw the glass of water at his mother was an
early example. In the analysis, he was adept at avoiding any conflict with me,
by negating my interpretations with a variety of responses, such as
bewilderment, incomprehension or a kind of amused tolerance at the strange
things that analysts sometimes say. Initially, his avoidance of separateness
was successful in reducing me to a position of masochistic, analytic silence,
in that I could not find a way to speak about the deadness in the analytic
relationship. Attempts to offer interpretations, which might penetrate his
blandness, felt coercive, as though I was forcing him to respond and be changed
by them. It seemed impossible to establish a dialogue in which the patient and
analyst are separate, each with minds of their own, and in which words are open
communications, which the analyst offers for the patient's own mind to use as
he wishes. We remained stuck in an indexical level of relationship, in which
Alan's communications, as well as mine, were controlling and manipulative
actions.
What I
needed to do to change this situation was to become more aware of the extent to
which I had identified with the projection of the Nazi mother and so that any
attempt to penetrate his defensive system was actually a sadistic assault,
which would expose his weakness and humiliate him, just as his mother did with
her remarks ‘this is Mrs Smith—she's got cancer’. As I became more aware of the
real power this projection had held and the degree to which I had sometimes
felt patronizing towards him, it became possible to speak about his experience
of humiliation without enacting the sadism.
It was the
repeated experience of the symbolic, rather than the indexical, level of
communication which needed to be allowed to develop in the analysis. The first
place this work needed to be done was in my own countertransference, on my
unconscious identification with the coercive indexical communications of his
mother. I needed to become free to speak from my own self, without feeling that
I was torturing and penetrating him with my words. Only then could we begin to
engage with his fear that I would parasitically feed off his aliveness,
devouring him for my own purposes and destroying him in the process.
Conclusion
In this
paper, I have explored the consequences when the development of a fully mature
and reflective sense of self-agency is inhibited and how this gives rise to a fear of love and relationship. I have
suggested that these linked problems emerge when parents are fearful of their infant's separation-individuation
process—and need the infant to
remain as a psychic mirror for themselves. As the infant grows, he or she
then both fears all subsequent
relationships as potentially destructive of his or her subjectivity and also
that his or her own individuation process will threaten his or her objects.
The
underlying fear of allowing oneself to exist as a subject rather than as an
object can contribute to any of the patterns of insecure attachment-avoidance,
ambivalence or disorganization and to a whole range of clinical problems.
Impenetrable defences of the self can be expressed
in bland non-relationship or in cycles of intense attempts at merger and
fusion with the analyst, followed by violent attempts at separation, often
fuelled by self-harm in the form of alcohol or drug abuse or self-injury. What
I have attempted to show with this particular clinical example is the developmental inhibition of
self-agency which underpins the fear of love. It is rooted in the person's experience that relationship is always
coercive, that one person is directly controlling and dominating another.
This experience is maintained by the predominance of an indexical form of
communication, in which words are controlling actions, not truly symbolic
communications.
In analytic
work, it is therefore vital for the analyst to be demonstrably open to the
possibility of alternative meanings in any exchange between analyst and
patient, rather than trying to impose a particular view of the patient's
unconscious intentions on him. Otherwise an analytic impasse is inevitable, in
which analytic work deteriorates into a battle in which both analyst and
patient are fighting for survival, the analyst for survival of his or her
analytic function and the patient for his or her very psychic existence. Indeed,
the analyst's countertransference feeling that his or her own survival as an
analyst is at stake can alert him or her to the fact that, for the patient, the analyst is another parental figure who requires
total subjugation to his or her needs and the annihilation of the patient's own
self-agency.
In spite of
the fact that some degree of enactment
of this impasse may be inevitable, an analyst who is open to explore multiple
symbolic meanings and to understand the material from the patient's
perspective, rather than impose his or her own, offers a new experience within
which the patient can gradually relinquish his or her defensive mindlessness. The projection of the controlling devouring
parent can gradually be withdrawn as the analyst demonstrates again and again
his or her own reflective function, the awareness of the patient as a separate
psychological and emotional being. This experience is gradually internalized,
activating the ‘compare and contrast’ process of the transcendent function,
allowing the patient to begin to relate to his own mind as a separate and
symbolic psychic space which can integrate conscious experience, unconscious
symbolism and the sense of self.
