Constructing Realities: Transformations Through Myth and Metaphor (Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies 3)

Constructing Realities

Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies 3

Editor Jon Mills Associate Editors Roger Frie Gerald J. Gargiulo Editorial Advisory Board Neil Altman Howard Bacal Alan Bass John Beebe Martin Bergmann Christopher Bollas Mark Bracher Marcia Cavell Nancy J. Chodorow Walter A. Davis Peter Dews Muriel Dimen Michael Eigen Irene Fast Bruce Fink Peter Fonagy Peter L. Giovacchini Leo Goldberger James Grotstein

Otto F. Kernberg Robert Langs Joseph Lichtenberg Nancy McWilliams Jean Baker Miller Thomas Ogden Owen Renik Joseph Reppen William J. Richardson Peter L. Rudnytsky Martin A. Schulman David Livingstone Smith Donnel Stern Frank Summers M. Guy Thompson Wilfried Ver Eecke Robert S. Wallerstein Otto Weininger Brent Willock Robert Maxwell Young

Constructing Realities Transformations Through Myth and Metaphor

Marilyn Charles

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2004

Cover Design: Studio Pollmann The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’. ISBN: 90-420-1871-2 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2004 Printed in The Netherlands

~For my mother

Ensnared in a web, meeting only vestiges of old selves you cast in my path like snake skins discarded long before half-remembered yet alien somehow. They fit painfully as blithely, blind to me, you weave life strands of me I would love to jump the chasm and stand with you at the edge of the abyss. Tell me stories of now, mother. Stories edged in pain shrouded in fear and laced in unseen tears of standing naked in our grief At reaching out for the mirrored gaze and touching only empty shards as wisps of ghosts crumble into echoes of the past.

This page intentionally left blank

Contents Foreword- James S. Grotstein

ix

Preface

xi

Introduction 1.

On Wondering: Creating Openings Into the Analytic Space

xiii 1

2.

Ambivalence: The Hope and Fear of Recognition

23

3.

Creative Myth-Making: The Importance of Play

39

4.

Playing in an Empty Room

57

5.

Myths of Father and Son

73

6.

Myths of Mother and Daughter

85

7.

A Beautiful Mind: Narcissism and Creativity

95

8.

Transformations

119

References

137

Index

143

About the Author

148

This page intentionally left blank

Foreword By James S. Grotstein

Marilyn Charles treats us once again to a highly readable, articulate, erudite, work in which she seamlessly glides between fascinating, poignant, and “alive” clinical material and current, broadly-based psychoanalytic theory. She has already introduced us to her unique way of working in her most recent work, Patterns, in which she explored and applied the technique of detecting patterns that analysands subtly reveal over time. Extending on Bion’s work in this area, she showed there how the revelation and detection of patterns of behavior belong to the intuitive as well as the observational mode and can be traced all the way back to early infancy where the infant relates to the object world by revealing its contours, shapes, and patterns – and likewise, the mother must be sensitive to this primitive form of communication from her infant. In this present work Charles is concerned with the task of how to engage the difficult-to-engage analysand. The first step is “wondering,” the title of her first chapter; wondering how to create a “psychoanalytic space,” a joint therapeutic venture in which the analysand can be made to feel safe enough to participate and free enough to explore. She is concerned with how the analyst might create an effective and workable opening so that the unplayful analysand can feel free enough to play with his/her emotions, be able to have feelings about them, and be able to transcend the anxiety of being the plaything of persecutors in the internal and external worlds. The psychoanalytic points on her compass are many, but she seems to veer closely to Bion and Winnicott in the main. One of the many high points in this book is her keen ability to juxtapose the works of these two giants and show how they are congruent, overlap, or are complementary with each other. An example of this integration is showing how Winnicott’s playing corresponds to Bion’s use of myths in the clinical situation. Myths are Bion’s way of playing - and encouraging the analysand to play - with his/her deeper anxieties. Playing with unknown anxieties, after the atmosphere has first been made safe to play in, offers the analysand the opportunity to down-regulate and to master anxieties that originate in infinity and chaos. Playing with them reduces them to “life-size.” Myths similarly are preformed patterns of interactions (of playing) that allow for a safe, well-known vehicle of containment to detoxify the brunt of terror. They are models of reality that help to organize our understanding. John Dryden once wrote, “It is the cleverest achievement of art to keep itself undiscovered.” This is true of Charles’ work. She is very artistic and even poetic in her prose and freely borrows from many psychoanalytic sources beyond Winnicott and Bion but skillfully avoids becoming cast as belonging to any particular school. If anything, it would seem that her analysands are her muse and that she is the inspired scribe who jots down all that they inspire her to think when she is with

x

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

them. Utmostly, Patterns and Constructing Realities comprise a refreshing reintroduction to psychoanalytic technique in the new current age of intersubjectivity, complexity, and uncertainty. In the past, “left-brain” psychoanalysts psychoanalyzed “right-brain” emotions. Today, the psychoanalyst must abandon the comfort and sense of safety that that perspective insured and surrender instead to the not-knowingness, the uncertainty of the right-brain (emotions) and wait along with the analysand for the gradual emergence of a pattern that finally can shed light on the unknown. That is the consummate artistry of this work. It is a textbook on psychoanalytic technique without ever appearing to be. There are many unique clinical nuances in this work. I shall cite but a few. Charles focuses on the development in the clinical situation of the experience of keeping oneself present and alive in the analytic moment, with the emphasis placed on being fully in the moment - all this so that the analysand may become a fully experienced self. Further, Charles believes that the analytic task is to enlist the “magical self” in bringing a “hidden self” to life. These have become ontological sine qua nons but had escaped our attention not too long ago. Another theme is her focus on the many ways the analysand can demonstrate splitting of his/her personality, not only the magical versus the hidden self, but also the devalued or disavowed self versus the surface self or the constructed self versus the underlying self. One is reminded here of Winnicott’s theory of the trueself/false-self dichotomy, which he in turn borrowed from Fairbairn. Charles reworks the dichotomy in a number of rich harmonics. What fundamentally informs Charles’ work can be summarized in her citations from Bion and Winnicott. Bion states that interventions of the psychoanalyst consist of the interplay of intuition and reason. Winnicott states, “Even the right explanation is ineffectual. The person we are trying to help needs a new experience.” This book helps the analyst to have a new experience in being an analyst.

Preface This book has its foundation in the struggles in which my patients and I have engaged, trying to wrestle understanding from the jaws of uncertainty and incomprehension. To all those who have invited me into this difficult journey and tolerated the often arduous process of meaning-making, I offer my profound and abiding appreciation. My deep appreciation goes to Devon Charles, who has supported me at every turn, and who took time from her own busy schedule to painstakingly proof this text. Her thoughtful and insightful readings of the manuscript greatly enhanced the final work. Grateful acknowledgement is also due the publishers and professional societies who have provided forums within which this work has evolved. An earlier version of Chapter 1 was previously published in The Journal of Melanie Klein and Object Relations. Chapter 3 is an extended and revised version of a presentation titled “Creative Myth-Making: The Importance of Play” given at the annual meeting of the Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association in New York City, April, 2002. Chapter 7 is a revised version of a paper previously published in 2003 in The American Journal of Psychoanalysis. Chapter 8 is a revised and extended version of a paper titled: “Transformations in O,” presented at the conference titled: “Transformations in O: The Furthest Reaches of the Work of Wilfred Bion,” jointly hosted by the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology & the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California in San Francisco, September 21, 2002.

Other titles by Marilyn Charles Patterns: Building Blocks of Experience (2002) Learning From Experience: A Clinician’s Guide (2004)

Introduction

“Why, [said the Queen] sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” - Lewis Carroll; Through the Looking Glass

There are times when this work is very difficult, when we are offered very few openings for interchange with this other being who presents before us. Over the years, I have puzzled over how to enlarge the space in which two minds might meet and engage together. My first mentor always said that the essential problem for the analyst was “staying alive.” This statement has had many meanings for me over the years, but still seems to represent the essential dilemma with which we are faced. How do we keep ourselves alive within the moment, within the hour, and how do we facilitate aliveness in our patients, as well? In this struggle, two beacons along the way have been Bion and Winnicott, who each pointed to the importance of being as an essential precondition for any creative activity. Along with this notion of being, Winnicott adds his conception of play and Bion his ideas about myth, each providing an important rubric from which to imagine how we might enliven the analytic space. In this volume, I consider ways in which the space might become enlivened when working with individuals with little capacity for play. Often, this incapacity signals a split between the devalued self that has been disowned, and thereby protected from further abuse, versus the surface self that has been constructed as a way of making one’s way in the world. For example, David (described in Chapters 3 and 5) created a delightful persona in order to hide from view those aspects that were deemed inferior and unworthy. To the extent that the constructed self can help to bring the underlying self to life, this becomes a workable solution. However, to the extent that the surface self depends on denying the underlying self, whatever aspects are being devalued become inaccessible. This diminishes the quality of life and impedes any real growth. This is the dilemma in which the individuals described in this book each found themselves; neither relationships nor accomplishments could quite infuse and detoxify the sense of inherent defectiveness and unworthiness around which the public persona had been constructed. The construction was experienced as a fantasy, which made it into a wall between the self and the other, rather than a bridge between the two. Paradoxically, the very edifice that had been built as a way of being found acceptable, kept acceptance at bay.

xiv

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

As we attempt to find a path through which these disparate aspects of self might be elaborated and integrated, Bion’s (1977a) distinction between evasion and growth is a useful guidepost along our way. This is one of those simple and profound rubrics that helps us to discriminate between forward motion and defensive forces. Fears are particularly unwieldy because they tend to preclude contact with the very realities we need to be able to see in order to understand where we are caught. Our task then becomes to create conditions under which growth might occur. As Boris (1994) puts it: “If psychoanalysis ‘works’ at all, it works by bringing into experience experiences distorted, forgotten or never before fully experienced. The more fully the experience comes into being, the more helpfully the encounter can be realized or re-realized” (p. xxii). For the patient whose self-esteem depends on hiding those aspects of self that have been devalued, our path can become quite perilous as we try to navigate between the equally deadly courses of intrusion and neglect. The task then becomes to build a space in which truth might be confronted without recapitulating the trauma. We need to be able to provide an interim space within which impossible realities might be constructed at a safe enough reserve that we might be able to consider them. This is the distance provided in the metaphoric regions of “myth” and of “play.” In the following pages, I will explore these divergent paths by looking at the lives of various individuals whose struggles to elude the devalued self have brought them each to their own private precipice.

One

On Wondering

Creating Openings Into the Analytic Space

“I can’t believe that!” said Alice. “Ca’n’t you?” the Queen said in pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.” Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One ca’n’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. - Lewis Carroll; Through the Looking Glass

I find some people very difficult to sit with. The work becomes a laborious and intractable process, as time moves slowly through effortful silences that feel interminable. In these moments, it is often difficult to know for whom I speak. Is it to ease some burden for them or more primarily for myself? Still, I speak. I wonder into the silences, hoping to open some venue for play - for curiosity: some space within which we might move more freely. For some individuals, rigidity has become a form of safety, sitting precariously within a shell become prison. In the initial hours, I sit with them, absorbing some sense of their experience of being in the world. These worlds are empty and barren and often intolerable to bear. They have the kind of aridity described so compellingly by Wrye (1993) as an absence of conductive contact, in which “objects do not link, and fragmentation and isolation prevail” (p. 104). My patients1 are dying in an arid, airless wasteland. They want relief, yet also find safety there and stave off contact at any cost. It is difficult to not respond to the continuing call to save them and thereby become the purveyor of redemption for us both. And yet, salvation does not come so easily for either one. At these times, I find myself struggling to keep engaged: to tolerate the awfulness of being there and yet to also find a way to create some vital space through which w e might be able to explore the experience.

We do not have a good word for referring respectfully to the people with whom we work. With this caveat, I will use the somewhat unfortunate term “patient.”

1

2

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

CREATING A SPACE These moments in which there is little space to work have provided an impetus for trying to understand how space collapses within the analytic process and also to consider factors that might work towards and against its renewal. With some people, I find myself recurrently closed down, needing to move once again towards opening. As I consider how this process manifests with two individuals in particular, with whom there has been a continual struggle to create a space in which to work, my writing seems to follow a similar pattern. I find myself following one or another line of thought in my attempts to amplify my understanding of the meaning of the space or its absence, as well as the interplay between them. I view this creation of space as an opening: a door into the process. Without it, the work itself becomes dry, arid, and empty. One opening into this space is our curiosity, our desire for understanding. To the extent that our world has been “good enough,” our curiosity invites us to explore and imbibe, thereby developing our internal capacities for making sense of self and other (Trevarthen, 1995). When curiosity has not been facilitated, however, this deficit forms a major impediment to our ability to be interested in self-discovery without undue guilt and inhibition (Nersessian, 1995). For those whose realities have become so entrenched that they are literally imponderable, the analyst’s nonjudgmental curiosity becomes a vehicle, through identification, for the emergence of the patient’s own. I bring forward my own curiosity, hoping to engage theirs, in an attempt to create a space in which something novel might occur: something might become known. Winnicott (1971) describes this opening as “potential space,” in which the mother and infant are, paradoxically, both joined and separated. The absence of space between mother and child provides a secure framework from which meaning can be created. However, it is only with the introduction of space that we can attain perspective. This vantage affords us the type of creative space needed to take in and digest the world and make it our own. It also provides a life-giving dimensionality (Matte-Blanco, 1975) to spaces that otherwise might be too restrictive to enable the playfulness of creative thinking: The differentiation of symbol, symbolized, and interpreting subject creates the possibility of triangularity within which space is created. That space between symbol and symbolized, mediated by an interpreting self, is the space in which creativity becomes possible and is the space in which we are alive as human beings as opposed to being simply reflexively reactive beings (Ogden, 1985, p. 133).

In pointing to the crucial need within the analytic process for this opening, Ogden highlights the importance of maintaining a dialectic between

On Wondering

3

phantasy2 and reality. This dialectic becomes the space in which symbols are formed and ideas considered. With the collapse of the distinction between symbol and symbolized, there is no room in which to ‘entertain’ ideas and feelings. Transference takes on a deadly serious quality; illusion becomes delusion; thoughts become plans; feelings become impending actions; transference projections become projective identifications; play becomes compulsion (p. 134).

At the extreme, meaning itself is lost, for it is precisely in this realm of subjective/intersubjective space that meanings are created and negotiated: “The establishment of the distinction between the symbol and the symbolized is inseparable from the establishment of subjectivity” (Ogden, 1985, p. 137). Some authors have likened this third perspective to the resolution of the Oedipal dilemma, from which point one can reflect upon oneself as object as well as subject. “This provides us with a capacity for seeing ourselves in interaction with others and for entertaining another point of view whilst retaining our own, for reflecting on ourselves while being ourselves” (Britton, 1997, p. 246). It is the capacity to reflect - to think about - that is crucial here. Reflection depends on the ability to distinguish “between concrete symbolism, in which the symbol is equated with the symbolized (symbolic equation), and a more evolved form in which the symbol represents the object but is not confused and identified with it and does not lose its own characteristics” (Segal, 1997, p. 86). Patients, at times, come in with their realities so entrenched that there is little room for change, movement, or growth. That is perhaps the whole point: to allay the anxiety associated with stepping out into the unknown. However, in this fashion, the known becomes a prison, foreclosing any movement; any knowledge beyond what is ostensibly known. For example, I have been working for some time with a forty-year-old woman who is notably thin. Grace was perturbed when her physician referred to her as “anorexic.” She acknowledges that she is underweight and often finds it difficult to eat. However, from her perspective she merely tends to experience discomfort when food is inside her and therefore prefers to not acknowledge her hunger, much as she spends her days not feeling her sadness, anger, and despair. To Grace, these experiences are concrete and factual, leaving no room to think about them at all. To the contrary, she is annoyed at the physician's introduction of that possibility and makes it clear that the analyst, as well, would be disdained for doing so. In this fashion, I am asked to not think about this issue nor to speak of my curiosity about this purported lack of feeling. I am asked I am using the spelling “ph-” for unconscious phantasy and “f-” for conscious fantasy in accordance with the distinction articulated by Segal (1981).

2

4

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

to not wonder what has made it so vital for her to not-feel; what it might mean to her or for her; or how it keeps her frozen in her current impasse between living and dying. In this way, I am also closed off from empathic connection, which requires a dialectic between subject and object - between being and not-being the other. The development of empathy requires two subjects, so that one is able to play with the idea of being the other precisely because one knows that one is not. This allows us to identify with the other without the fear of being engulfed or trapped within. For example, as analysts we are called upon to enter into uncomfortable places with our patients, but we go knowing that the hour will end. In this way, it is not the same place. The illusion of understanding the other is just that: We can only understand ourselves within this context, and yet, this is as close as we can come. The capacity to be with another, and yet maintain some protective distance, enables us to enter into these precarious realms with some assurance of safety. Without this protective distance, the other becomes dangerous and must be kept at bay. For example, Grace indicates that her birth was perceived by her mother as a threat to the mother's dominion. Grace experienced herself as inherently “bad,” as though she could never please her mother as long as she continued to survive as a separate entity. After numerous unsuccessful attempts at rebellion that left her increasingly depleted, Grace finally accepted her fate and began to act out, quite explicitly, her experience of feeling annihilated in the face of her mother. She would lay down in her glass coffin, much like Sleeping Beauty, injecting herself with her chosen poisons, that she might keep at bay whatever parts of self so offended her mother. In the early years of our work together, I seemed to become most dangerous when my empathy towards Grace became critical of her mother, thereby endangering Grace’s gift of atonement. I would then become the siren luring her towards even greater evil, beyond hope of redemption. At those times she would cut herself off from me, literally cutting out the poison of my words by letting her blood. This ritualized act of abnegation seemed to soothe her enough to enable her to reappear for the subsequent session and also admonished me to remember the price of forgetting my place. As in the preceding example, the absence of vital space within which to entertain ideas often leads to enactments. The lack of protective distance from the other may also lead to what has been called “projective identification.” Ogden (1985) refers to projective identification as “the negative of playing” (p. 138), in which a sense of concrete reality and inevitability are interposed upon the interpersonal field, thereby impeding the ability of the other to experience his or her own subjectivity. When I find myself caught in this way, I struggle to find enough distance from what feels profoundly immobile and inevitable, that I might be able to entertain some sense of hope or alternative possibility. In much the same way

On Wondering

5

as my patients describe, I find myself not-knowing what I know I had known. Even as I search for it, it crumbles, and I can only hold the pieces and trust that they have some substance, some coherence. NOT-KNOWING: DEFENSIVE OCCLUSION This not-knowing has been particularly problematic in my work with one young man, whom I will call Aron after a young boy in a story who spent his childhood reappearing before his parents, hoping to finally catch the sparkle in their gaze that would truly hold him in the world and thereby enable him to finally grow (Grossman, 1991). My Aron is terribly isolated and alone. A recent change in jobs had left him with no domain of his life in which he experienced any sense of satisfaction or pleasure. Even in his previous position, in which he had taken some pleasure in performing well, that pleasure was constantly threatened by his sense of isolation and alienation, leaving him feeling unappreciated and at risk of impending attack by forces beyond his control. What fantasy Aron appeared able to generate always carried within it the seeds of doom and destruction. Interpersonal interchanges, in particular, were far too fraught with danger to be actively pursued. At times he was able to laugh at his dilemma, knowing that in many ways he kept himself caught. However, even his humor was dry and offered him no range of motion within which to play with alternative possibilities. As those moments waned, Aron would be caught once again by the seeming inevitability of his fate. Once more entered the sense of total despondency and futility that held me palpably in its sway, denuding my own fantasy life and leaving me with nothing to offer him. At those times, I became the affirmation of doom that left him no hope, thereby saving him from the awful possibility of imagining moving into some space in which he might have to entertain thoughts of confronting his fears. This dilemma appears to be a factor in cases we might see more explicitly as “acting out,” in which the individual is living in the realm of doing rather than thinking. As thinking becomes too painful, the pain of being in the pain becomes its own relief. The antidote to or expression of the pain becomes the focus of living and thereby precludes the possibility of working it through. Action then becomes a reassurance that meaning cannot be found. As Bion (1967a) notes, this is one way of unlinking potentially painful meanings as a means of not-thinking about them. The distinction between elaborated and unelaborated thought is useful in our attempt to understand the origins of acting out. Chasseguet-Smirgel (1990) suggests that the homogenization of meaning that renders all things undifferentiated and therefore meaning-less represents a yearning for a return to the inside of the mother’s body. This lack of differentiation is enhanced by a lack of dimensionality (Matte-Blanco, 1975). Enlarging the conceptual arena to include a third dimension

6

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

creates the vital opening that Winnicott (1971) terms potential space, in which thoughts might be actively considered, elaborated, and expanded. Meaningfulness in the dyadic mode would seem to depend upon what Langer (1951) terms “non-discursive” thought and Matte-Blanco (1975) describes as “symmetrical thinking”: “a mode of thinking where facts are equivalent, interchangeable” (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1990, p. 82). For example, Grace is often unable to distinguish between her own thoughts and mine in any meaningful fashion: Her internal self-vilifications are experienced as accurate representations of my thoughts. In the moment, the space collapses and the two minds become condensed into one; there is no difference. This closely parallels Bion’s (1967a) depiction of digested versus undigested elements, in which extreme deprivation precludes thinking-about. Bion suggests that if tolerance for frustration is adequate, deprivation may provide the impetus for thought. If not, the movement is more likely to be towards getting rid of what has become a bad internal object. Evasive efforts then preclude growth. With individuals for whom the primary impetus is towards ridding the self of bad feelings, it is often difficult to maintain a focus on whatever is perceived as bad. In the realm of primary process, the part becomes the whole. The impetus to rid the self of the badness, while at the same time equating the self with the badness, creates an impossible dilemma in which considerable sleight of hand may be utilized. Whatever is rejected may be neutralized through some form of addiction, or externalized through somatization, projective identification or some other form of acting out. In this way, the self becomes neutralized: not-known. In this process, the analyst, too, becomes neutralized. An impasse is created in which the analyst’s efforts towards creating conditions for knowing are experienced by the patient as dangerous (Rosenfeld, 1987). When anything given by the other is inherently suspect, the analyst’s attempts to create a space in which what is not-seen might be glimpsed, differentiated, or elaborated are counterbalanced by the patient's opposing efforts. This conflict had posed an ongoing dilemma in my work with Grace, and parallels the condensation of meaning in her personal relationships as well, in which being-with becomes dangerous. As she moves towards any dyadic relationship, it is as though one person or the other must certainly be annihilated. For example, Grace often feels threatened by her husband’s attempts to comfort her. She reacts physically in the sessions as she talks about it, as if to ward off painful contact with the raising of her hands. Control and comfort appear to have become confused as a result of experiences in which her mother tried to control Grace’s behavior by humiliating her. The price of comfort in that relationship was the abdication of her own sense of agency. Now, receiving comfort from her husband when she is feeling vulnerable (and also angry) feels extremely threatening and demeaning, as though something vital is being taken from her. It is only when she sees herself as the taker and feels his vulnerability

On Wondering

7

that she is able to feel close to him without pushing him away. However, this, too, leaves her feeling “bad” and worthless. Although Grace can talk about these things, my impression is that at a very fundamental level she is knowing about, rather than knowing them. There is an important interplay between knowing about and knowing. Either one alone is insufficient for real understanding. We must be able to experience our own reality and to also articulate it in some fashion in order to be able to play with alternative possibilities that, in turn, might impact on the reality of our experience. Without some foundation of internal knowing (what Bion might call a “resonance with ‘O’”: his term for “ultimate reality”), knowing-about becomes a defense against knowing rather than an opportunity for understanding. The “imponderable” is that which cannot be known; often what must be left unknown. The not-knowing may be what keeps the shame at bay and thereby from touching the self. One woman, Sophia, kept her self safe by leaving it behind in the presence of dangerous others. Keeping herself in close contiguity to the space of the other served her vigilance, giving her a sense of safety. The price was the denial of the self, thereby kept safe but devalued. The self could not be valued (or even known) in the presence of the other but was preserved, as if in suspended animation, until the danger had passed. CONCEIVING THE SELF For other individuals, the danger has been so omnipresent that the “true self,” as Winnicott (1960) calls it, has been lost. I find myself looking for some external representation of it at times: the self that could have been loved but was never cherished. At those moments, it is my hope that I can discover the visage of the other self from within the face being presented to me. In this way, perhaps my patient can also discover the self that could be loved: the self that might somehow, conceivably, be cherished. That conception, to my mind, is crucial. It is in the ability to conceive of the other as worthy, as capable, as lovable, as “entitled to their very existence on the planet” (as Sophia put it), that those images are literally conceived. Once conceived, we can work towards giving birth to them as more full, vital, and fundamental aspects of self. These patients were often stillbirths: people who at some level should never have been born. They were betrayals of the parent's intent to either conceive some more perfect rendition of self or to not conceive at all. These are children who stand accused of stealing from the mother her own life or, alternatively, carry upon their eyelids the imprint of the mother’s image of them as fatally flawed (Blos, 1991). This type of scenario leaves the child unable to hold on to the mother and to also survive intact. That inherent impossibility becomes what cannot be known. To know the self as whole destroys the mother, whereas to

8

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

move towards the mother destroys the self. In this way, the intact self is split off from the self that may be known by the outside world and, most often, from that which may be known by the self in the presence of an other. For example, Aron was born with plainly visible birth defects that affect his manual and locomotor dexterity. He was noticeably disappointed and hurt the first time I acknowledged these and wondered about their impact on his development. He told me that people “didn't usually seem to notice,” thereby suggesting that if anyone really cared, they wouldn't even be aware of these aspects of his being. This was the perspective through which Aron had been taught by his parents to pretend. He was given no solace when these very real impediments to boyhood play became troublesome and hurtful for him, but rather was supposed to be able to move beyond any care or awareness of these obstacles. Any failure to do so became a sign of insufficiency. This inability to know in the face of the other creates a sense of artificiality or unreality about the real self, further emphasizing its inherent unworthiness and inability to be valued or “known.” In the treatment, this often takes the form of vacant, dry spaces, in which nothing may be known with any assurance. There is no conductive medium (Wrye, 1993) through which connective links might be made towards mutual understanding, no opening through which to jointly consider possibilities. Ultimately, there is no self available with which to join. Connection itself becomes beyond reach, in atonement for the act of destruction or in a sadomasochistic loop that preserves the omnipotent self at the price of any real connection to self or to other (Novick & Novick, 1991; Rosenfeld, 1987). How then might we move towards knowing that which must not be known, without doing further violence to the self? We find ourselves in the midst of unlinked aspects of the patient’s self, with no permission to move towards linking. Winnicott (1971) suggests that we must first be able to tolerate the chaos before we can hope to move beyond it. The patient sets the original parameters for what may be known and when. The timetable may be quite slow and painstaking for individuals who present us with this type of arid space, with little room for being amongst others and an impeded ability to be with the self. Our task is then to create an environment in which the person might be able to be in our presence in a manner in which they have never before been allowed to be, that they might be able to entertain the notion of being at all in anyone’s presence, even their own. Only then can we move towards trying to understand more specific impediments to that experience of being. The movement must flow from being towards understanding. PLAY SPACE: SURVIVAL OF THE OBJECT Winnicott (1971) suggests that it is the play space that allows us to bring between us the whole issue of being, as such. It is only within this potential space that the

On Wondering

9

other can be destroyed and yet survive. Only here can we test fears and fantasies of impending annihilation, to think whatever could not be thought. This capacity is built upon what Winnicott (1971) describes as “the survival of the object,” which he defines as the ability to destroy the other without retaliation. From this perspective, attention is drawn to the deficit in the caretaker that precludes the child’s ability to act upon the other with relative safety and to thereby come to know the self as both competent and contained. From Winnicott’s (1971) framework, the object is destroyed when it fails to survive the inevitable attacks upon it. It is not some impulse to destroy, but rather the failure of the object to maintain constancy, that is the destructive force. There is no anger in this type of destruction, only joy at survival. In much the same fashion, it would seem to be the analytic attitude that must survive any and all attacks upon it. That, and perhaps only that, is the crucial life-giving force to the work. As long as we can maintain the interest, curiosity, and capacity for surprise that accompanies our not-knowing, we remain safely within a position from which we might come to know more (cf. Parsons, 1986; Stern, 1990; Nersessian, 1995). There is an inevitable tension between our desires for growth and regressive urges towards evasion. The capacity for destruction creates a shared reality in which the object can be used with some freedom (Winnicott, 1971). At this point, we can begin to distinguish the self from the not-self with some safety. However, once we can co-inhabit space together, moving away from merger towards autonomy may be experienced as dangerous. To moderate the danger, w e need to be able to move from one position to the other, by way of reassuring ourselves that this might even be possible. The capacity for play allows for this multiplicity of possibilities: of being together separately or apart, surviving being alone, and then coming back together. This is the fundamental magic through which one might be “found” as a real and separate self. Witness the child’s delight in the various permutations of “peekaboo” and “hide and seek” and the devastations and deadly preoccupations of the child who cannot be found (see, for example, Grossman, 1991). This negotiation is one of the cornerstones of our work. Winnicott (1971), for example, suggests that the analyst’s most important function may be to be able to reflect back to the patient his or her own self in such a way that it enhances the person’s capacity “to be able to exist and to feel real. Feeling real is more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself, and to relate to objects as oneself, and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation” (p. 117). For people for whom being-with has meant impending annihilation, coming to be in the presence of another is a monumental task. At some level, truly being-with is a major task of any dynamic therapy, that we might learn to sit with whatever feels unacceptable, imponderable, and unknowable at our very core. It may only be after this very basic level of being and being-with has been addressed that the work may proceed to the level of knowing. Stern (1990)

10

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

paraphrases Heidegger in speaking to this issue of knowing within the analytic dyad: “for something to be unconscious is for it to be so much present that w e live in it instead of seeing it. To describe something as unconscious is to say that it is outside the range of explicit reflection” (p. 460). This is the realm of what Bollas (1987) has called the “unthought known.” Therapy cannot take place in an environment devoid of play, an essential prerequisite for any creative enterprise. In Winnicott’s (1971) view, play is so essential because “it is in playing that the patient is being creative . . . . It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self” (p. 54). This self-discovery can only occur in relation to an other. Without the capacity for play, the work becomes arid and dead and interpretations are not useful. The patient sets the parameters for what might be known and when. The interpretation, in turn, allows the patient to gauge the extent to which the analyst is able to understand. Whereas the interpretation that is indoctrinary forecloses on the creative process, whatever moves towards playing facilitates it. “Analysis to be useful must be an experience, in contrast, for example, to the giving of understanding or explaining” (Joseph, 1997, p. 304). If the therapist is willing to refrain from imposing his knowledge, the patient may come to his own understanding. It may be in the very act of searching that we come to exist more fully, more vitally. This searching for - or wondering towards – one’s self also becomes a forum for creativity, within which the self may be seen, reflected back, deconstructed, and re-created. From this framework, the work is enlivened by the mystery of notknowing. What is not known becomes an enticement or challenge towards discovery, rather than an end in itself. It is the movement towards understanding that is the work, in which both the known and the not-known must stand ready to give way to some newer “truth” seen from a novel perspective. Even when we open ourselves to what has not been known, and are able to push past the not-knowing towards something new, there is often the sense that we have been waylaid on our journey. For example, Parsons (1986) notes that as he struggled to understand a patient’s dream, “there was something I thought I saw pretty clearly, but . . . I sensed it was less important than what I had not seen” (p. 482). How often do we move towards the known for security and thereby foreclose on that which is not yet known and yet might be, if w e were only to look towards it and wonder about it? With individuals such as I have been describing, my attempts towards empathy almost inevitably fail. I look for the other, but they will not be found. In very profound ways, I do not exist for them: I have no substance. When the primary object has been too awful - when it has not been present in a way that

On Wondering

11

affirms the child’s perceptions in any positive sense - its absence may become the greater reality. Only in its absence can one hope for the good object, the healed object, the repaired object. In these cases, the very presence of the object signals danger, not only to the self but also to the internalized good object (Winnicott, 1953). The internalized symbol of the good mother becomes an attempt to provide the self with that which is needed. It is an attempt towards reparation that is doomed in the face of the real object, as both cannot be real simultaneously. Hence the feeling, with some individuals, that they come to us in great anticipation, only to be disappointed at the beginning of every hour by the reality of our presence. With Aron, in particular, I have the sense that each time he enters my office and slumps into a despondent silence, I am experienced as hopelessly unhelpful: all is lost. At the time, I am sure he has given up; he will end this charade. And yet he returns, week after week, hour after hour. Perhaps he does receive some bit of sustenance in this arid wasteland in which we sit and struggle, or perhaps it is that very struggle that has come to hold for him the possibility of life. It is difficult at moments such as these to maintain what Coltart (1992) has described as our “faith in ourselves, in the process, and faith in the secret, unknown, unthinkable things in our patients which, in the space which is the analysis, are slouching towards the time when their hour comes round at last” (p. 3). Yet, it may be that very capacity to tolerate the unknown that creates an opening within the process wherein something real - something vital - might emerge. FANTASYING: COLLAPSING THE SPACE In an attempt to understand this paradox, in which the reality is destroyed as the symbol is embraced, Winnicott (1971) distinguishes between what he terms “fantasy,” which takes the place of living and does not get incorporated into the object world, versus dreams, which do have a place in the object world. He notes that “fantasying interferes with action and with life in the real or external world, but much more so it interferes with dreams and with the personal or inner psychic reality, the living core of the individual personality” (p. 31). In this way, the fantasy plays much the same role as do certain symbols that negate reality and therefore cannot coexist with the reality overtly represented. At the level of the unconscious, this negation is not problematic; it only becomes problematic in the world of secondary process where contradictions of this sort are not easily accepted (Matte-Blanco, 1959). In many ways, the function of the fantasy would appear to be to serve the unconscious directly, in the form of maintaining and sustaining a lack of awareness of the painful reality. In this sense, it may be a more primitive defense, unlike the dream that better serves the process

12

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

of working through. In fantasying, thinking about the idealized object interferes with object relations rather than facilitating development. At times, our attempts towards “making sense” are in direct opposition to the patient’s attempts to collapse relationships between objects, in movements towards primary process thinking. Interpretations fall flat. There is no room to think about the material, to consider possibilities. Meaning is condensed into simple equations between unlike things. Individuality dies; distinctions between good and bad lose their meaning. With Grace, for example, closeness carries the aura of danger. Although this makes sense in terms of her mother’s apparent need to annihilate the daughter in profound and enduring ways, knowing about this has not produced any particularly meaningful changes for this patient. To the contrary, most of my interpretations tend to fall flat or are rejected outright. Even as I speak, I find myself bracing for the inevitable “no” or “I don’t know” that will surely follow. This happens even when her subsequent comments are largely an affirmation of what I had just said. In these moments, it is the distinction between our views, not their similarity, that is important. At times such as these, similarity seems to be experienced by Grace as a dangerous sameness, in which the space between us collapses, and her autonomy and individuality are dissipated. Grace’s negations may be seen as an attempt to define her own boundaries within the context of a relationship that she feels to be impinging and potentially annihilating. As Grace decries my lack of helpfulness and rejects most of my efforts towards that end, I become, in counterpoint, unhelpful, uncaring, and demanding. I am to serve my needs rather than her own. Ultimately, I am to be her mother, leaving Grace free to recoil from the feared reality and yearn towards the idealized fantasy, each at the price of living her life. The fantasy, as depicted by Winnicott (1971), appears to be one way of collapsing the potential space. It has no depth, “no poetic value.” whereas the dream has “poetry in it, that is to say, layer upon layer of meaning related to past, present, and future, and to inner and outer, and always fundamentally about [the] self” (p. 35). The fantasy, in this sense, would appear to be similar in function to what McDougall (1982) calls the “transitory object,” which tends to preclude growth, rather than the transitional object, which tends to promote further development. Fantasying becomes a means for annihilation of both self and other. It is a way of not existing, described compellingly by a patient of Winnicott: “’'I have been playing patience for hours in my empty room and the room is really empty because while I am playing patience I do not exist’” (1971, p. 36). In these moments with Grace, as we reenact the interpersonal fantasy within which she becomes caught, it can be very difficult to keep my bearings as both the bad object and the observing ego. However, it is just at these times when the work has become dry and arid and feels imponderable - when it

On Wondering

13

becomes known in a way that does not invite further inquiry – that we need to be able to wonder anew about the person with whom we sit. At these times, I wonder what my knowing about the other obscures from knowing them. How do my attempts to keep my bearings keep me from being able to more truly, more vividly encounter the other from his or her own perspective? In many ways, this facile, flat knowing would seem to be in response to an invitation to know only so far, referred to variously by Racker (1972) as complementary identification; by Sandler (1976) as role-responsiveness; and by Klein (1946) as projective identification. Whatever we term it, it is often our boredom or impatience that becomes the cue that we have lost touch with the reality and the vitality of the person before us, in much the same fashion as have they. At those times, it is often helpful to be able to move back from what w e believe in order to be able to look towards what we may not yet know. My “understanding” of Grace has often been an impediment to our ability to work together in a meaningful fashion. In our hours together, most of my words are pushed away. “No,” she says, and then searches for her own. Even when her words are similar to mine, they are still hers, as opposed to the not-hers, which cannot be digested. The taking in of my words is experienced as an invasion, proof of her weakness, whereas taking in nothing is like death. There is no enduring safety. My words often have no meaning to Grace, but rather are as empty as she experiences herself to be and as malevolent as she experiences her husband’s arms, outstretched in intended comfort. Food is also seen as revolting - another proof of her lack of strength. What is taken in becomes bad, uncomfortable. It is not-her and thus indigestible, taking away more than it gives, much as my words become bad or dangerous and cannot be taken in. My attempts to give Grace hope also become twisted. It has been remarkable the extent to which she can annihilate the meaning of my words. Non-existence becomes an end in itself, as she moves towards not-knowing as a relief from painful awareness. Alternatively, self-loathing also becomes an important means for collapsing awareness. Grace loses hours and days in her drug sheltered “womb/tomb.” It is enormously difficult for her to rouse herself to view herself from the outside. The outer perspective too readily becomes that of the internalized mother who vilifies her until the space collapses once again. Grace’s grandmother had been her primary source of nurturance and soothing. However, this was available only to the extent that the mother was given the favored position. In this way, Grace’s attempts to separate from the harsh, critical, and hateful mother were seen as proof of her own inner unworthiness. She could not find herself without losing the other. This dilemma finally culminated in Grace’s collapse after the death of her grandmother. There was no longer any hope of finding the good mother in this life. She must, rather, scourge the evil from herself in the hope of meeting her in the next life.

14

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

From this vertex, the grandmother became one with the critical god, perpetually condemning Grace’s actions and inactions and virtually immobilizing her. Grace finally sought treatment when this metaphor had become actualized in the form of an avenging angel, tantalizing her from outside her bedroom window, luring her towards death. Grace is still uncertain as to whether it is this angel or myself who lures her to the gates of hell. I imagine that the angel represents hell on earth with the hope of ultimate salvation, whereas I often represent the illusion of salvation on earth that will doom her to an eternity of damnation. Our patients’ metaphors often become so saturated with meaning that there is little room for exploration. We find ourselves in the realm of the symbolic equation (Klein, 1930; Segal, 1957), with insufficient distance from our perceptions to be able to consider alternate possibilities (Khan, 1973). However, as Stern (1990) notes, it is only when the analyst questions what he thinks he already knows about the patient, and about his reactions to the patient, [that] uncertainty is preserved. It becomes harder to feel convinced of any single answer. These conditions constitute the climate in which unbidden perceptions flourish (p. 470).

Stern (1990) suggests that it is our ability to maintain some distance between the anticipation and the experience that enables us to experience something novel: “patient and analyst create expectations in interaction with each other, and responses to these expectations, and it is then the most significant task of the analysis to discover them” (pp. 462-463). In this way, what have been termed “enactments” become important vehicles for moving towards what may become known. Although the term “enactment” has come to express a pejorative in much the same way as “acting out,” we are coming to see these as essential aspects of the treatment. This is particularly the case with individuals with histories of early or severe trauma, such that verbal encoding of experience was inhibited. Enactments then become an important source of clinical material (Charles, 2002a). It is often in the disentangling of the analyst’s and patient’s enactments that the treatment is able to progress, for just as there is a kernel of truth in every transference, so there is an enactment by the analyst in every enactment by the patient (E. Gibeau, personal communication, 1997). With Grace, enactments have been an important means of understanding our miscommunications. Words that have held one meaning for me have held contrary meanings for her. In consequence, we have engaged in dialogues in which each has been reassured of her own diametrically opposed reality. With no shared meaning, there was no possibility of dialogue: no space within which to engage. The confrontation with the profoundness of the collapsed space can be brutal for both patient and analyst. However, there are times when the failure to confront perpetuates a perverse relationship in which patient, analyst, and analytic

On Wondering

15

space are continually annihilated. For both Grace and Aron, hopelessness and despair appear to be a relief against the terror of the unknown. In this realm, there is no reason to think about the alternative possibilities that give rise to such terror. My need to hold on to hope works in counterpart to the other’s need to destroy it. This balance is only held to the extent that we hold firm to our respective sides. The point where I tipped the balance with Grace was, ironically, when I lost my ability to play, after a grueling period during which she had been even more hopeless and self-destructive than usual and had been lamenting the loss of a previous therapist in whose reflection she had felt enlivened. I began to wonder whether, indeed, she might be better off with someone else; whether someone else could hold her in a better fashion than could I; whether my holding on to our work had become destructive for her. However, when I enquired into this, it was as though I had shot her right out of the room. She felt rejected and abandoned. It seemed as though there was nothing I could say that she would not hear as a sign of ultimate rejection: manifest testimony to her ultimate unworthiness. In Winnicott's (1971) terms, I had destroyed her and she had destroyed me. This interchange occurred in the wake of my having reaffirmed the boundaries of our time together. Grace tends to come late and to stay late; she has said that she only has any sense that I might actually care about her in the moments after the hour has ended, when she is no longer paying me to listen. In confronting her notions of care and reaffirming the limits of our relationship, w e have been able to move out of the impasse in which we had been stuck. In the subsequent hours, I became more acutely aware of how strikingly my words could have one meaning for me and yet carry the opposite meaning for her. As this became a focus of scrutiny for both of us, the space opened and the work deepened. Grace described going home and looking at the mess that has grown around her during the many months of not-seeing the external world (much as she was “not-seeing” the very real limits in our relationship). She was distressed by the wreckage in her physical environment and relationships but was also struggling with greater determination to mobilize her resources towards living. By not colluding with Grace in believing that what I can give is not enough, I helped to bring us back into the analytic space, that we might assess both the “damage” and the potential that lies therein. SYMMETRICAL RELATIONSHIPS: CONDENSATIONS OF MEANING Even if we are willing to know, there are impediments towards sharing that awareness. Both Bion (1967a) and Matte-Blanco (1975) have attempted to articulate processes whereby internal awareness is translated into thoughts that might be communicated and thereby become shared knowledge. Matte Blanco

16

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

(1975) uses the mathematical concept of “infinite sets” to give form to some of the paradoxes of unconscious logic. Unconscious thought is multi-dimensional and therefore subject to complexities not associated with conscious thought, in which one can only see what one knows, never what is coming next. In an attempt to clarify the order inherent in unconscious thought, he notes that whereas symmetrical thinking marks similarities across individuals, asymmetrical thinking discriminates between individuals. In line with Freud’s (1915) observations, Matte-Blanco (1975) distinguishes between layers of the not-known. For example, from Matte-Blanco’s perspective, the repressed unconscious is capable of being known, whereas the unrepressed unconscious is dominated by symmetrical logic and therefore is not capable of being known directly but only indirectly. These thoughts must be translated in order to be known in the traditional sense and yet at some level w e “know” the patterns that have not yet been defined (Charles, 2002a; Rosenblatt & Thickstun, 1994). Everything we know is configured at many levels by the patterns of our previous experiences, whether or not these patterns are consciously known. In a symmetrical relationship, one knows that two things are related but not how; the two are experienced as undifferentiated members of the same set (Rayner, 1981). This is much like our experiences in dreams, in which we know that two elements are related but are uncertain as to their relationship(s). In symmetrical relationships, both time and space are condensed and not meaningful. It is when we begin to try to distinguish temporality and contiguity that we move into the realm of asymmetrical relationships, in which two things may be members of the same class without being identical. Their relationships with one another therefore may be described in asymmetrical terms that augment understanding, such that knowing that A precedes B or A influences B (Matte-Blanco, 1975) facilitates thinking about relationships among the parts, more generally. An example of symmetry would be the condensation of the meaning of “care” in my work with Grace, in which caring for or about her meant vilification. This condensation of meaning condemned Grace to a life in which she felt inherently incapable of being cared for or about in any positive sense and in which there was no possibility of redemption. Intimacy in relationship meant being known; being known meant being vilified. These became equivalent – symmetrical - with no space within which to think about these relationships, nor to think about our own. In the initial stages of relationship, there comes the dilemma of beingwith, in which our similarities and differences cannot yet be taken into account. To the extent that we are as yet largely undifferentiated as separate beings, w e appear to be living more predominantly in the realm of the symmetrical. It is only when we have gained some comfort with being together that we might begin to make distinctions: to delineate ourselves in relation to one another. In contrast, to

On Wondering

17

the extent that asymmetry prevails, the task is to note similarities - points of congruence - as well as our resistances and to make sense of them. This is the realm of transference, in which what we know and how we are known are configured and foreshadowed by the forms of those who have come before and the stances we have come to take towards these patterned meanings. In moments of strong affect, distinctions may be far less conspicuous than similarities. The more extreme the emotion, the more likely that symmetrical thought will hold sway: “extreme emotional states display qualities of irradiation, maximalization and time and space tend to disappear" (Rayner, 1981, p. 409). For example, idealization dominates in love and “at its height grief irradiates (and) everything good is felt as lost for eternity” (Rayner, p. 409). In a moment of perceived harshness or rejection, we become the critical or the abandoning object; the part becomes the whole when symmetrical logic rules. This is also the arena of dichotomous thought. When symmetrical logic prevails, as, for example, when the individual’s resources are overtaxed, gradations disappear. Meanings become concrete, undistinguished by shades of grey. This is the world of disjunction: good or bad, victim or oppressor, omnipotence or defeat, omniscience or ignorance. Rayner (1981) suggests that Matte Blanco’s (1975) depiction of infinite sets and symmetrical versus asymmetrical logic leads to an investigation of the concept of infinity and of psychological infinite experiences. These can be readily detected in omnipotence, omniscience, and idealization, but they also seem to occur in extreme emotional states such as being in love, dread, and grief. If nuclei of extreme states are contained in any affect, then it is likely that all affects in their cognitive aspects contain experiences of infinity. Symmetrical logic may thus be a common background both to the characteristics of the unconscious and emotionality generally (p. 411).

Matte-Blanco’s (1975) attempts towards describing rules for relationships when traditional logic does not prevail would seem to have broad ramifications for understanding primitive object relations and elements of material heavily saturated by primary process, which may come to us, for example, in pieces of dreams, through enactments, or in free associations. This is the realm of externalization and projective identification, in which we are uncertain as to the source of a thought or feeling, and it becomes more important to experience, digest, and integrate the thought than to use more traditional logic to ascertain its origins or more pragmatic meanings. This is the realm of countertransference, in which our feelings and sensations provide useful clues towards understanding ourselves, our patients, and the interactions between us. This is also the realm of the real, in which we are offered the opportunity to accept parts of the patient that they

18

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

cannot (and we would rather not) embrace as inevitable and inextricable aspects of ourselves. CREATING ASYMMETRY At all of these levels, there are times when there is little room to explore feelings or to entertain ideas. Understanding can be highly elusive in the analytic enterprise. It is never constant but rather is bounded and configured by context, continually being displaced by some newer “truth.” There is an excitement to this, but also a kind of sadness, because every new truth becomes prejudice. Every understanding is eventually a betrayal. Analysts are always on the verge of relinquishing their proudest moments, understandings that sometimes have been hoped for and awaited over long periods of time (Stern, 1990, p. 473).

In much the same way, however, we are asking our patients to put aside what, for them, has been known: to move beyond the familiar “truth” to one that may be less restrictive but also more frightening. Stern calls this openness to what is not known “wisdom,” in that it opens the door for greater understanding by creating an environment in which new awareness is facilitated. It is only in the willingness to not know that we may happen upon something hitherto not known. Many authors have stressed the importance of being able to move into a space of new perspective from which to see what had been hidden by whatever assumptions had been held (Bion, 1967a; Stern, 1990; Nersessian, 1995). However, when Parsons (1986) stresses the importance of being able to step back from one’s own presumptions in order to be able to appreciate more fully the perspective of the patient, he describes this enterprise quite differently. In contrast to the more playful language of other authors, who speak in terms of play, curiosity, or surprise, Parsons suggests that we need to take the subjectivity of the other more seriously. In this way, he affirms the importance of taking a respectful stance towards the unique vantage point of the other, particularly important to keep in mind at those times when we feel polarized, as if the view of the other is an impediment towards their ability to see from our perspective, rather than the other way around. Moving into the unknown may be difficult for both parties. However, the ability to create sufficient space from which to gain perspective can play a vital role in the work. New awareness may be jarring for either patient or analyst: “Each one needs to be open to the shock of discovering that something he had always known is more importantly and deeply true than he or she had appreciated” (Parsons, 1986, p. 479). Parsons notes the element of loss that is inherent in

On Wondering

19

discovering that something matters in a more profound way than was previously realized. We often lose some carefully guarded sense of ourselves that has been important to our sense of who we are and how we may be experienced by others. The irony, for Parsons, is that what is given up is not something false but something true: something that had been true from our previous frame of reference and yet is so no longer. The point is that to achieve a new depth of understanding and penetrate further into what something means, we have to sacrifice the way we have understood it up to now. That understanding does not have to become false, but it can no longer be the truth. It is not disproved, but in order to advance beyond it we have to let it go (Parsons, 1986, p. 480).

This is the challenge we set for our patients: to give up their prevailing truth for another that may be less comfortable and yet might carry greater potential. Many of the works cited here represent attempts to move beyond our own blindness towards something that is not seen. Paradoxically, we need our theories to organize our understanding of the world and yet these very theories also become blinders; lenses that help to bring ourselves and others into focus but also color and distort. From this point of perplexity, Parsons (1986) struggles to elucidate “an attitude towards the unconscious which will help us not to be limited only to ways of seeing which we are familiar with already” (p. 483). In this vein, he suggests that the analytic stance should be one of non-attachment, similar to the Taoist goal to “always rid yourself of desires in order to observe its secrets; but always allow yourself to have desires in order to observe its manifestations” (Tao Te Ching, quoted in Parsons, 1986, pp. 483-4). From the Zen perspective, the goal is to learn through the particular to see beyond the particular into the nature of reality itself: the truth beyond any particular manifestation, much as has been described by Bion (1967a) as the need to move from knowing towards ultimate reality. In this regard, Bion distinguishes between knowing (K: being willing to know); and not-knowing (-K: the avoidance of knowing), while acknowledging both as active stances that vitally affect what might be taken in. He also warns against attachment to past experience or the wish for future experience, either of which may impede our ability to move towards knowing whatever might be known if one is able to be more fully present in the moment. POTENTIAL SPACE With patients for whom being is the primary challenge, the analyst creates through reverie a subjective object (Grotstein, 2000a; Winnicott, 1971), or analytic space, within which thinking might occur. Without this space, the analyst’s words

20

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

become impositions upon the other rather than providing opportunities for reflection. It can be exceedingly difficult to interpose this other, more reflective reality within the collapsed and lifeless space in which we often find ourselves with extremely deprived patients. At times, this opportunity occurs when we are presented with moments in which we might be able to de-construct the collapsed reality. These moments are often occasioned by enactments that lead to confrontations with the extant reality. We are all adept at our own preferred ways of avoiding that confrontation. Aron often interposed his own narrative over my words overtly, whereas Grace, largely silently, re-interpreted most of my words through her own critical censors. With Aron, I can only continue to interpret his ambivalence over being known that keeps him destroying our relationship, even as he continues to come in ostensibly seeking one. He can now acknowledge parts of himself that keep work from happening. However, that acknowledgement also becomes a mask for his angry attacks on me for my incompetence. Neither one of us knows whether he will be able to make a move beyond his own internal stalemate. This uncertainty carries with it an almost intolerable sadness and despair and yet, our talking about it creates some hope of possible movement or growth. In contrast, the confrontations with Grace over boundary issues have forced her to confront her assumption that she could only have whatever she could steal from me, which in turn spoiled and condemned her for any good she might receive. Although she still uses me as a source of self-vilification, we are better able to look at this together. There is some space within which to think about the presumptions that have tended to preclude understanding. Concomitantly, Grace has begun to think more constructively about “the mess” her life is in and about ways in which she might begin to grapple with some of the issues that had hitherto merely been an impetus for further burrowing into what she has described as her “womb-tomb.” I do not know if the urge towards confrontation comes largely from our own impatience and intolerance for living with the enormity of the pain in which we find ourselves with patients such as these; nor do I know, in that event, whether it shows a deplorable or laudable lack of restraint. In retrospect, however, it feels as though Grace needed me to confront what had become an intolerable, imponderable reality. To this end, she had leant me whatever energy she had, in order that I might help her begin to slay the dragons that had been devouring her life for these many years. However, I do not believe that we could have moved beyond that point without having learned to tolerate the awful desolation together. Grace needed me to know where we were starting from in order to have any assurance that movement might be real or meaningful: that it might truly be hers. Ogden (1995) maintains that “the sense of aliveness and deadness of the transference-countertransference is . . . perhaps the single most important measure

On Wondering

21

of the moment-to-moment status of the analytic process” (p. 695). Deadness is particularly difficult to tolerate; we may have the sense that in not rescuing the patient we are complicit in his death, whether actively or passively. We may feel inept, inadequate, humbled to the core, helpless and hopeless. However, it may be in our very willingness to sit in these spaces that hope might be found. Whatever hope we can summon is nourished by our willingness to truly see the other and not turn away. In this way, we offer the invitation to see anew: with interest, with curiosity, with compassion, and without judgment. This is the wealth of the potential space: “that area of illusion where symbolic discourse can actualize” (Khan, 1973, p. 231). It is also the promise of the potential space: that it might become the opening wherein one might find the self that had been lost in fear or buried under layers of shame. In the opening of this space there is inevitably grief for what has been lost and anger for what has been taken but there are also possibilities: the beginnings of fascination for what we might create and who w e might become.

This page intentionally left blank

Two

Ambivalence The Hope and Fear of Recognition

“the moral of that” [said the Duchess] “is – ‘Be what you would seem to be’ – or, if you’d like to put it more simply – ‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.’” - Lewis Carroll; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

The analytic journey is like a labyrinth. Each time we enter, it is never quite the same; we can never quite know “the way.” No matter how often we encounter this particular turn, that particular dragon; to some extent we are lost in a maze that it is like the air of a dream, redolent yet ineffable. We carry the illusion that we might find the path, discover the key that will leave the mystery revealed with some finality, but the further we travel, the more easily we recognize the futility and obstructive force of that particular illusion. As Bion (1967b, 1997) notes, our desire to “have the answers” is often the greatest hindrance to the process of discovery. As we find ourselves once again catapulted into the midst of a mystery, we can only move forward and trust that the fog will dim and the path’s outlines become clearer, so that even if we don’t know where we are going, we might at least recognize where we’ve been. Our courage is in some measure desperation, in some measure faith; a determination to stay the course, no matter how elusive. We derive comfort from the fact of having traveled similar paths and knowing that uncertainty is an essential aspect of the endeavor. We struggle valiantly to create openings into the space, only to encounter, standing squarely in our path, our mutual ambivalence. This is always disconcerting, albeit not unexpected. We had hoped that this time we might invite the person into the journey alongside us, rather than having to stand in opposition. And yet, inevitably, we must become the dragon to be slain, so that the dragon can stand slain and can thereby become the subject of a discussion about the nature of dragons that are both inside and out, and can become both slain and unslain simultaneously. It is in the tolerance of this uneasy simultaneity that “truth” can be sought. Whatever we cannot accept within becomes the next dragon, cunningly awaiting us at the next turn in the labyrinth. Whatever we think we see too clearly becomes the jokester, laughingly reflecting the absurdity of our pretensions.

24

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

In this archetypal journey, we are comforted by the illusion of a disjunctive world in which truth and lie - goodness and evil - can be separated clearly and completely. And yet, this would seem to be the very lie in which we become caught repeatedly, as we try to assure ourselves that we can find safety within the hidden recesses of the Absolute. In our attempts to distinguish truth from lie, Bion’s grid (1977b, 1997) provides a useful tool for tracking and deconstructing our self-deceptions. Bion devised the grid as a way of mapping out the complexities of the analytic space, within which any act or statement can represent a movement towards truth or evasion, depending on the context (see Charles, 2002b). Ironically, it was by decontextualizing thoughts that Bion was able to point to essential factors marking the line between truth and evasion. To this end, he positioned the quality of the thought (in terms of our attentiveness) across the horizontal axis, and located the complexity of the thinking (its relative abstractness) on the vertical axis. As we try to find our bearings within its conceptual space, Bion’s grid provides a vivid reminder that we ground ourselves, our perceptions, and our visions within particular vertices that inform and color all of our understandings, becoming preconceptions that ground and gird all of our constructions. This is not to say that there is no “reality” per se, only that our ability to apprehend it is inherently limited by the constraints of our physiology, experience, and imagination, as well as by the ways in which these have served to position us so that reality becomes configured as it does. Whatever we posit as truth becomes the ground on which our models of reality are built. Being able to view the beliefs themselves helps us to understand our constructions. Viewing the consequences of those beliefs helps us to make decisions about their utility. It is often our discomfort with those beliefs and constructions that helps move us towards growth. Bion’s grid is one model that usefully affirms the power of our conceptions and preconceptions. It also serves as a reminder that whatever we hold most dear can be used as means for amplifying or evading understanding; for moving towards truth or towards lie. The grid provides a tangible lexicon - a unique way of positioning ourselves with regard to our work - that helps us to disabuse ourselves of the hope that we might be able to know truth from lie in any absolute sense; that we might find a point of safety from which to rest in relative impunity from the toil and turmoil that this journey entails. This would also seem to be the hope that we might keep ourselves at safe distance from the mire, rather than having to discover whatever meanings might be made in the moment by wading through it. We long to be the God who creates the world and rests, rather than the god/human who must perpetually shape and be shaped by the reality he or she is creating. This hope, that one might keep separate the good from the bad - the loved from the despised - would seem to be at the essence of the difficulty with which many of our patients are faced. When the self has been split into good versus bad aspects, it can become very difficult to even obtain a glimpse of

Ambivalence

25

whatever is not being seen. With some individuals, such as Grace (described in chapter 1), the bad may take up so much of the picture that there is little room for anything else. For Grace, the affirmation of the bad becomes the reassurance that she need not fight and face the possibility of failure. As she externalizes her potency, she keeps the great god/mother at bay, thereby propitiating her in hope of ultimate redemption but also further foreclosing the possibility of encountering her own agency. In contrast, for many of the other individuals discussed in this volume, it has been the bad that has become unseeable in any useful kind of way. Each of these splits presents us with particular difficulties, as we try to work with whatever has been deemed unknowable. Whichever aspect is being highlighted, we are presented with a shell that has been created laboriously in the attempt to cover over the devalued self. We are then faced with the challenge of trying to heal this split when even acknowledging it can be an assaultive, seemingly annihilating intrusion. SPLITTING: TITRATING THE TERROR Splitting is most often linked to Klein’s (1935, 1946, 1952) conceptions that have their origin in a fundamental split between good and bad aspects of self and other. Klein describes processes of fragmentation and expulsion, in which the defenses are extremely primitive, aimed at protecting the self and object from destructive forces within the self. In the process of attempting to keep at bay whatever is seen as an external danger, a split occurs in the ego as well. Although the split takes place in phantasy, it is our phantasies of self and other that color and configure our object world, thereby creating “reality.” Freud (1927, 1940) had discussed splitting in terms of repression, in which there is a part of the individual that takes reality into account and a part that does not, which coexist side by side. Freud describes this as a disavowal of reality: a “detachment from reality . . . . [that] is always supplemented by an acknowledgement; two contrary and independent attitudes always arise and result in the situation of there being a splitting of the ego” (1940, p. 204). Steiner (1981) suggests that this distinction describes a perverse type of relationship in which truth is evaded and lies promulgated, as truth becomes distorted and twisted beyond recognition. In his view, this type of splitting is “intimately connected with various forms of dishonesty and perversion” (Steiner, 1985, p. 170). In these cases, the intensity of the individual’s belief that the underlying truth is too terrible to bear invites collusion on the part of the analyst to keep the patient safe from it. At the other extreme, when persecutory anxiety is quite severe, self and object may be more severely fragmented, so that the dangerous aspects of other are highlighted to the relative exclusion of any other aspects. From this place, the self is experienced as so vulnerable that there is a fear of imminent annihilation by toxic aspects of self and other. Klein (1946) suggests that this situation results when the bad object is not only kept separate, but its very existence is denied, along with whatever feelings of frustration and distress are attendant:

26

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES Omnipotent denial of the existence of the bad object and of the painful situation is in the unconscious equal to annihilation by the destructive impulse. It is, however, not only a situation and an object that are denied and annihilated – it is an object relation which suffers this fate; and therefore a part of the ego, from which the feelings towards the object emanate, is denied and annihilated as well (p. 7).

This split would seem to be more urgent, more dire, and more precarious than the type of split described by Freud, in which the resolution to the dilemma becomes entrenched and relatively stable. For many of the individuals described in this volume, the fear of being seen became a fear of utter annihilation, as the presumed recognition of their inherent unworthiness was experienced as a direct conduit through which the revulsion of the other would be taken in, in all its imagined toxicity. This toxic force derived from the rejection of the mother and the denigration of the father, taken in as proof of the abject nature of self and projected outward into infinite mirrors of denunciation. For individuals such as Mary (chapter 4) and Elena (chapter 6), for whom there has been no alternative mirror (because one dare not look into the mirror, for fear of shattering), the difficulty lies in being able to deidealize the other sufficiently to be able to begin to grapple with the co-existence of good and bad, in which neither need be annihilated by the other. MOVEMENTS TOWARDS EVASION: TURNING A “BLIND EYE” Whether the defenses are more primitive or more neurotic, the avoidance of reality, and the collusion thereby invited, become major stumbling blocks in the treatment. This reflects a conflict within the patient, in which he or she is caught quite profoundly between the desire for connection and the certainty that no real connection could be possible. This certainty tends to result in ostensible connections through which the self can remain hidden. In this way, the connection itself becomes an affirmation of the price of connection and of the impossibility of obtaining any real engagement with another without the annihilation that would seem to be inherent in the recognition of the devalued self. This fear invites the type of double bind that Joseph (1981a) refers to, in which we (as analysts) are damned whatever we do. In each moment, we must therefore decide whether to move towards growth or evasion and hope that our perceptions of these are true enough to lead us in the right direction. Joseph (1981a) notes that when avoidance is the intended aim, it is often pain that signals that what had been taken to be a satisfactory adjustment has shifted so that it fails to provide the needed relief. This is an uneasy bargain in which psychological equilibrium has been purchased at the price of emotional engagement. It emerges in patients who, though in many ways living apparently satisfactory lives, have important areas of psychotic anxieties and whose defences have been operating comparatively successfully. They have to

Ambivalence

27

some extent achieved peace and freedom from conflict by the use of particular types of relationships with objects, which protect them from realistic emotional experiences (Joseph, pp. 94-95).

This situation arises in the context of apparent relationships that are actually illusory. In the analysis, it may show as an identification with the analyst that carries the illusion of closeness or intimacy in either the present or the future, without real relating or differentiation. Psychic pain results as attempts to move towards a real relationship break into the illusion of the relationship (which is also the breaking of the illusion that one might be in the presence of another without being seen, known, or touched; see chapter 4). Joseph (1981b) notes that working within the transference requires getting to know the patient and verbalizing whatever one is getting to know. This can be positive in that it joins the patient and analyst together in the experience. However, for the patient who is protecting the devalued self, being asked to be in the moment with the analyst can be experienced as disturbing and threatening, and can evoke extreme annihilation anxieties. As we try to better understand the threads that intertwine self with other, we are pointed towards the importance of the introjective and projective forces through which identifications are created and denied. Identification can be seen as a process of assimilation, whereby attributes of the other are transformed and adapted into aspects of self, such that “it is by means of a series of identifications that the personality is constituted and specified” (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973, p. 203). Klein (1935) locates the origins of these identifications in early experiences of primal comfort and discomfort, in which survival depended on preserving the good object and keeping the bad object at bay. Klein makes an important departure from Freud in her depictions of part-objects that enforce different modes of relating and defending than those prescribed in relations with whole objects. Klein (1935) highlights the coexistence of self-protective and destructive aspects of splitting as she delineates the dilemma in which the anxiety is so intense that it is difficult to discriminate, and thereby rescue, the good object from the bad; the self from the other. Until one is able to contain within one’s mind the good and the bad (and the interpenetration of these within our selves and our objects), anxiety can be experienced as impending disintegration. “The ego then finds itself confronted with the psychic reality that its loved objects are in a state of dissolution – in bits – and the despair, remorse and anxiety deriving from this recognition are at the bottom of numerous anxiety-situations” (Klein, 1935, p. 269). From this position, we are left with the dilemma of how we might resurrect the bits into some tolerable whole. Because it is the “perfect” object that has been destroyed, there must be some renunciation of the possibility of perfection in order for the person to begin to discover the self without needing to destroy those aspects that have been devalued. Also required is some tolerance for atonement, as one faces the guilt of having amplified the bad in the other by having projected outward unacceptable aspects of self.

28

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

For example, as Grace contemplates moving forward in her life, she finds herself in a difficult bind. At each new turn, she is faced with the horror of having sacrificed her life to her fears and her inability to face them. At another layer underneath, she is also faced with her tremendous hostility that she has turned inward as a means of disavowal. As she faces her own incapacities, she is confronted with a terrible dilemma: If she finds within herself the resources she needs in order to move forward, she must face the possibility that they were there all the time, waiting in the wings. She must face all the waste, the lost time, the willful blindness through which she has turned away from her own needs as well as the needs of those she loves. As long as she can maintain the fantasy that someone else must be “in charge,” she can lament her fate and not have to face her anxieties about encountering painful realities of her existence. The catastrophic reality with which she scourges herself is but a sleight of hand through which Grace seeks atonement for the real sin that is much harder to bear – that of having turned a “blind eye” (Steiner, 1985) to her own needs and to the needs of those around her. In this way, the fragmentation of the paranoidschizoid realm both destroys and saves her. She loses the connecting links through which she might find her way through the mire but also keeps from encountering her own complicity and therefore her own power. At a deeper level, however, Grace knows of her own treachery and it is ultimately this for which she is being punished. Being an impotent child who has been vanquished by the great god/mother/monster provides a means for ostensibly accepting culpability in hope of redemption, while also denying it by virtue of her impotence. It is a very tight knot into which Grace has woven herself, leaving us at times in a false opposition in our journey through the labyrinth, as I become the holder of Grace’s desires to grow that have been disavowed and projected into me. At these times, it is particularly difficult to walk that elusive line between affirming hope and possibility, versus strengthening her allegiance to the lure of redemption that seems to further polarize her position on the cross of salvation/damnation. When encountering paranoid-schizoid realms of dichotomized realities such as these, we are pulled towards accepting the part that is being projected onto and into us. We are then confronted with the task of attempting to extricate ourselves from this confined reality without becoming engaged in a struggle that leaves us even more firmly entrenched in the role of hostile attacker. With Grace, my task becomes quite arduous, as I attempt to circumvent falling into the various holes through which she sees familiar monsters that obscure her view of new fragments that might open up the space rather than ensuring its foreclosure once again. At these times, if I can abstain from advocacy, but rather give as clear a picture as I can of where I see her caught, she is more likely to be left with her own dilemma, through which she might encounter her own agency. As aspects of self become dichotomized into good and bad, valued and devalued, our ambivalence intensifies. In our attempt to make sense of this

Ambivalence

29

profound ambivalence that can become such an impediment to the work, it is useful to look more closely at some of the destructive forces at work. NARCISSISTIC DEFENSES: THE PRICE OF ENVY The “death instinct” represents one such attempt to understand destructive resistances, particularly important in work with narcissistic individuals. Descriptions of the death instinct attempt to explicate and appreciate those forces within the self that seem to move towards inertia, entropy, and ultimate destruction. It is unclear to what extent these forces are inherent within the system and to what extent they are internalized from the destructive hostility of the other. The inevitable moments of hostility from parent to child are taken in along with moments of love and affection. These experiences become internalized as aspects of self, along with the child’s own loving and aggressive urges. It becomes particularly difficult to discriminate self from other in the presence of disowned aggressive and hostile urges. Disavowed affect may be expelled like a projectile that finds its target or, alternatively, may fragment in midair, its particles becoming lodged everywhere. Without a clear source of origin, it easily comes to seem as though whatever has been disowned by the other belongs to the self. To the extent that the external source is actively denied, the internal sense of badness is strengthened in the presence of an ostensibly benign and caring other. In this way, the split within the other fosters splits within the self: as Grace’s mother dichotomized good and bad into self versus other, Grace became the locus of the bad in any disagreement or competition with her mother. Her mother seems to have been unable to share goodness and so Grace’s ultimate gift to her mother became the acceptance of the “bad” position. Grace’s own aggression then went underground and was enacted through her increasingly passive hostility and failure to thrive. Much as we see with Grace, Abraham (1919) links a narcissistic attitude with hostility, defiance, and envy that often hide behind an ostensible willingness to cooperate. This type of opposition results in impasses within the self and within the treatment. The envy further polarizes self and other, which makes it particularly important to be able to explicate some of its complexities, so that we can actively grapple with them rather than merely becoming enmeshed in them. Etchegoyen, Lopez, and Rabih (1987) suggest that it is important to distinguish between frustration and envy. They describe envy as primary, not dependent on an object relationship. From this perspective, it is important to be able to take ownership of one’s own hostile impulses that are not a function of frustration of impulses but rather are a function of “the incapacity for tolerating the taking in of something good which the other has and is willing to give” (p. 50). In their attempt to disentangle some of the threads of envy, these authors note Rosenfeld’s (1964, 1971) distinction between libidinal and thanatical (destructive) envy:

30

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES Libidinal narcissism in some measure recognizes the presence of the object, whose place it wishes to usurp; thanatical narcissism, on the other hand, denies it radically and tends to annihilate it. These two types of narcissism can be distinguished according to the projective identification that determines them: in one case the projective identification serves to allow the subject to introduce himself into the object and to assume its characteristics, in the other it is used literally as a missile which destroys object and subject (Etchegoyen et al, 1987, p. 52).

It is not necessary to posit envy as primary in order to confront its destructive aspects. Envy can also be seen as reactive to the vulnerability of the self, particularly when the vulnerability has become too overwhelming to acknowledge. The hostile, destructive aspects may then be seen as means for denying the vulnerability and replacing it with something ostensibly more powerful. Rosenfeld (1971) suggests that when the destructive omnipotent aspects of the self are idealized in this way, they tend to be directed against the libidinal aspects that become dangerous threats to the individual’s equilibrium. The destructive aspects are often disguised or split-off, thereby obscuring their “powerful effects in preventing dependent object relations in keeping external objects permanently devalued, which accounts for the apparent indifference of the narcissistic individual towards external objects in the world” (p. 173). When we are working with destructive narcissism, whatever we are not willing to speak to becomes larger and more difficult. Interpretation may then provide a means for containing the attack, which helps us to avoid becoming embroiled in it. As Etchegoyen and his colleagues (1987) put it: “interpretation is synonymous with modulation, to a passage through another who, by introjecting the envious attack, has stripped it of its destructive omnipotence, and thus facilitates its integration in the psychic structure” (p. 53). It is this interpretive containment that helps to detoxify the envy. In interpreting the envy, we show our ability to tolerate it, which helps to denude it of its omnipotent destructiveness. It may be particularly important when working with individuals with whom there is a preponderance of destructive envy to be able to recognize the underlying disowned libidinal yearnings. Bion (1962), for example, views envy as inseparable from love. To the extent that the object is seen as inaccessible, the need for it is denied. This denial, however, entails diminishing affect more generally: “fear, hate and envy are so feared that steps are taken to destroy awareness of all feelings, although that is indistinguishable from taking life itself” (p. 10). In such a situation, need becomes the enemy, so that intolerance of envy and hate in a situation which stimulates love and gratitude leads to a splitting that differs from splitting carried out to prevent depression. It differs from splitting impelled by sadistic impulses in that its objects and effect is to enable the infant to obtain what later in life might be called material comforts without

Ambivalence

31

acknowledging the existence of a live object on which these benefits depend (Bion, 1962, p. 10).

From this framework, the need becomes an affirmation of incapacity, which makes the loved object hated by virtue of it very importance. This may lead to the type of defensive position described by Freud (1923), in which we are driven to deny the need, even to the point of annihilating the self (see chapter 4). In line with Rosenfeld’s (1964, 1971) distinction between the libidinal and destructive aspects of envy, Bion (1970) distinguishes between envy that is associated with gratitude and that which is linked to greed. Whereas the former is capable of linking and growth (in that it is amenable to the establishment of a good object relationship), the latter lends itself to de-generation; to unlinking; to the breaking into bits of whatever might have been potentially meaningful. When excessive greed and envy are present, one means for keeping the abhorred idea from awareness is not only to split it off, but also to fragment it. In this way, the envy is split into bits that tend to infiltrate all ideas, as the disowned fragment becomes a persecutor, ever lying in wait (Klein, 1946). With Grace, we can see an envious splitting into bits in the negations that inevitably followed my interpretations in our early years together. The “no” helped her to titrate her discomfort sufficiently that she might work with some of the bits left in the wake of her defensive counterattacks on my awareness. Although Grace’s counterattacks enabled her to manage her affect sufficiently to continue our work, at times this type of splitting can lead to the type of negative therapeutic reaction that Bion (1970) suggests might be “more accurately described as ‘a proliferation of fragmented envy’” (p. 128). In these cases, What is required is not the decrease of inhibition but a decrease of the impulse to inhibit; the impulse to inhibit is fundamentally envy of the growth-stimulating objects. What is to be sought is an activity that is both the restoration of god (the Mother) and the evolution of god (the formless, infinite, ineffable, nonexistent), which can be found only in the state in which there is NO memory, desire, or understanding (pp. 128-129).

When this type of envy is present, we need to be aware of the very real hazards. If we omit or ignore the aggressive and destructive aspects, we have no way of understanding the parts of ourselves that attack whatever would seem to be nurturing or growth-enhancing. We must, then, be able to find some way to recognize ostensibly caring acts as assaults upon the other, that become assaults because the other cannot provide them for him- or herself but rather must tolerate the awareness of dependency in order to be able to take it in. At these times, an active appreciation of the process can help us to maintain the relationship, as we try to understand the subtleties of how we become stuck in this type of polarization. Speaking to the process in the moment helps to titrate the intensity of these paranoid-schizoid realities in which we find ourselves caught. It also affirms the

32

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

importance of being able to speak to whatever reality might become extant in the space, rather than trying to control or evade difficult moments that might become an opportunity for growth and understanding. To the extent that need and dependency are seen as unacceptable assaults, one must either deny the offering, deny the quality of the gift, or deny the giver. Something must be spoiled in order to make the imbalance tolerable. This idea, that a part of the patient may be actively sabotaging any ostensible “goodness” we might put forward, is indispensable when we encounter an impasse in the work. At these moments, an appreciation of the extreme ambivalence with which growth and relationship might be fraught is an essential means for maintaining our own grounding in the process. Rosenfeld (1987) sees destructive envy as a defense against a recognition of separateness. Narcissistic omnipotent object relations then deny the aggression and ambivalence evoked by frustration, as well as any envious or aggressive feelings, by denying the need. As the hostile feelings are split off, projective identification provides a means for denial. However, it also becomes a means for becoming known without having to consciously acknowledge the desire. It may be that when the libidinal aspects are more prevalent, introjection of the good parts of the other are more pronounced, leading to phantasies of oneness through which goodness becomes incorporated. In contrast, when the destructive aspects prevail, this leads to an emphasis on projective processes, whereby the bad parts of self are located in the other. DESTRUCTIVE VERSUS LIBIDINAL ENVY: A SADO-MASOCHISTIC LOOP For example, in chapter 7, I discuss the disparate dilemmas of two creative individuals whose problematic relations with the interpersonal world gave rise to a great deal of envy. Mathematician John Nash’s object relations seem to have been saturated with destructive envy, which made it difficult for him to find the type of recognition for which he seems to have yearned. From this position, the other is kept at bay out of fear of being faced with the dependency and envy that is denied through ostensible detachment (Rosenfeld, 1971). The unwillingness to receive from the other that which becomes tainted because it belongs to the other can create a prison of sorts. This type of bind kept Nash from even being willing to learn from whatever had come before. For example, he spurned texts and classrooms but rather attempted to discover for himself the crucial problems and solutions within his field (Nasar, 1998). Rather than positioning himself in some fundamental way within the object world, he explicitly extricated himself, denying that anyone might have any part in his creation(s). In this way, Nash seems to have been acting out the wish to give birth to himself by himself, as though he could create of himself a divinity, immaculately conceived. The destructive aspects of the envy served to enforce the devaluation of the other on which the grandiosity of the self depended. In this type of dynamic, change tends to be seen as a sign of weakness, which perpetuates the

Ambivalence

33

need to maintain the idealization of self that manifests as grandiosity (Rosenfeld, 1971). In contrast, when the libidinal aspects are more prevalent, admiration of the valuable parts of the analysand helps to bring them into actuality, which diminishes the need for envy. This was the case with Marta (also described in chapter 7). In contrast to Nash, Marta actively desired to find a valued place for herself within the object world. As she began to be able to value herself and her own products, Marta’s anger at the withholding objects of the past receded. She could recall its surgency, but it no longer had the intensity or compelling quality with which it had once held her in a stranglehold. “You had felt as though you were banging your head against a wall,” I said, “but even more, you felt as though they had what you needed but were allowing you to bang your head against the wall trying to get it. You couldn’t see that they just did not have it to give.” As Marta learns to position herself differently in relation to her object world, she now finds herself in a world in which the dynamics have changed so profoundly that she looks with amazement at the disjunction between her previous and current realities. Nothing has changed, she notes, except her vantage point, which “changes everything.” When the destructive aspects are more powerful than the libidinal aspects, there may be a willingness to sacrifice the libidinal self in order to keep the other from being successful in saving it (Rosenfeld, 1987). Whereas with Nash, the grandiosity seemed to be the leading edge, for Mary (Chapter 4), sitting in her empty room, there seemed to be more of a quiet desperation to not need what might not be forthcoming. Within her lexicon, the good was seen as tantalizing rather than gratifying. Mary’s lack of faith that she might ever find an object whose promise did not ultimately dash her against the rocks of despair kept her adamantly needing to destroy whatever might be good. One means for doing this was to keep the relationship in the realm of fantasy, where it might be a more controllable selfproduction, less vulnerable to destruction by the other. In this way, Mary kept herself safe in relationship by not giving anyone the opportunity to spoil it by having any control over it. This tendency - to create fantasies of relationships rather than actively engaging in a relationship in which there might be actual interaction - continually intruded into our work. For example, one day Mary was a bit late, an unusual event for her. She was obviously agitated and talked about not wanting to have been late. I had the sense that there were many presumptions going into her ideas as to what it means to be late and so I enquired into them. As Mary responded, it became clear that “not being late” was ostensibly linked to “being good,” but at a deeper level it was also being used as a kind of drug by which she avoided engagement. Mary arouses herself with the idea of being late, whether or not this is an actual danger, thereby providing herself with an opportunity to vent her aggressions and also to avoid thinking about coming into this space and being with me. In this way,

34

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

she also drugs herself with her own inner chemicals, which helps to keep her out of contact with me or with any thoughts that might be too distressing. As I interpret these facets of her lateness to Mary, any potential insight they might offer is experienced as an assault: I have “seen” her, which is the equivalent to “getting” her – “nailing” her. In this way, we find ourselves caught in a sado-masochistic loop, in which her experience of assault bypasses whatever insight might have been available, had she been able to tolerate recognition rather than fragmenting it and splitting it into bits through which she assaults herself blindly. This type of sado-masochistic loop may be seen, in Steiner’s (1981) terms, as a perverse relationship between aspects of self. Steiner sees narcissism as a split between disparate aspects of the personality, which is not merely a dichotomization between good versus bad, though this notion may help to keep the split in place. For Steiner, the defining characteristic of a perverse relationship is that its purpose is to evade growth, to keep change from happening, and to keep anything from coming in that might destabilize the equilibrium thus attained. This may be experienced, in the analytic work, as a sense that one is merely going through the motions of analysis in a way that precludes any real motion. In this way, the illusion of something happening supercedes the possibility of any actual growth. We can see this type of dilemma in the stalemate in which Nick finds himself. Nick is a young writer who is completing a doctorate in literature. He has begun to affirm that his enjoyment of the victim role seems to keep it in place. “Am I trying to sabotage myself? Why do I do that?” he wonders, as though affirming his own self-doom. “You seem to be so dependent on outside assurance that, rather than avoiding the calamity you fear, you allow it to happen so that you can have proof that the calamity was indeed there all along, waiting in the wings,” I respond. Seeing one’s self as a victim keeps at bay the destructive aspects of self but also affords them dominion. We see this in Nick’s assumption that I will condemn him for being a failure, much as he sees in his current actions affirmations of his own ultimate doom. I point out to him that he seems to invite my condemnation, much as he invites that of his father, as a way of “being taken care of.” It would seem that he can only be in relation to an other if he is the hapless victim of his own destiny. Nick laments that he seems to only enjoy pleasure that provides a respite from the most recent calamity. This, however, is not entirely true. In counterpoint, I note his ability to enjoy the company of his children and, at times, that of his wife and others with whom he can discuss those subjects about which he is most passionate. Although Nick does know how to experience pleasure, he has trouble imagining that he could earn or warrant outside esteem, because of his difficulty in sustaining an internal sense of worth. Nick talks about his certainty, in spite of the feedback from his professors, that he will never complete his degree. I respond that he cannot imagine himself actually being successful because he does not believe that what he

Ambivalence

35

has is of any value. “But I was listening to an author talking about his book the other day and I was imagining myself being there,” he protested. “Were you imagining you being there or you needing to be him in order to be there?” I asked. “I think that you have trouble imagining that you might have anything to say that would really be worth anyone’s attention,” I continued. “You would have to somehow become ‘other’ in order to have value.” “Oh,” Nick replied. “I see what you mean.” “You’ve been very forceful today,” Nick said, after a silence. “Now I feel really stupid.” I sat with that one for a few moments, thinking how easily we become positioned into these disjunctive roles of accomplice or attacker. More important than my own role in this enactment, for the moment, seemed to be Nick’s complicity in becoming his own attacker. “That’s where you go,” I said, “as a way of moving back into the victim role - where you don’t have to consider your value but rather can move past the fear of holding yourself in esteem and perhaps being found wanting - to the calamity itself, where you can at least be recognized for having suffered.” In this way, Nick moves past the actual calamity that might, in fact, invite some resolution, to the ostensible calamity that precludes any insight or development (see Winnicott, 1963). Pushed to the edges of his own defenses, he moves back towards his ultimate fear, which he can invoke when he becomes too anxious about actually moving forward. As a way of closing down the space, Nick invokes the fear of becoming “just like his mother,” which is the equivalent of “knowing” that he is just like her and therefore ultimately doomed. This lament has often offered him a respite from whatever anxiety had become amplified in the moment. The lament becomes an easy sleight of hand by which he changes the subject from what he is afraid to know (which might help him to grow) to what he already believes that he knows (but knows in a way that precludes growth). The facts have been selected as a barrier against the ostensibly unknowable. I move against this evasive action by accepting the reality of his statement, but moving beyond the reality he is willing to see, towards other possibilities. “You have some similarities to your mother,” I say, “which, when you are frightened, makes you believe that you might be just like her. But that is also a way of positioning yourself into that victim role, where the calamity has already happened, by invoking the doom of your genetic heritage. But, it just isn’t true. You are not exactly like her. You see the slide she took downward and a part of you would like to take it along with her, but there is another part of you that consistently heads in the other direction. Then, when the effort seems more than you can bear, you internally eradicate your strengths by positing them as a hopeless struggle against your ultimate destiny.” As Nick and I wander through this quagmire, we are hounded by what Britton and Steiner (1994) have warned against, in distinguishing between the “selected fact” and the “overvalued idea.” Bion (1970) had brought into the literature this idea of the selected fact, pointing out how our readings of “fact” change according to the ways in which our reality has become ordered in the

36

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

moment. One of the mutative factors of psychoanalysis is this ability to foreground different readings of a given situation, thereby encouraging flexibility and adaptiveness of mind. Although our selection of facts at times facilitates movement in therapy, it may also preclude development, as our ideas about how things are or should be come to stand in the way of growth rather than facilitating it. This is one of the hazards pointed towards in Bion’s (1977b, 1997) grid, which graphically illustrates how any idea or statement can be used towards evasion or development, depending on the context. The ability to ground ourselves within the experienced moment, rather than becoming blinded by our preconceptions, is particularly important when envy and other destructive forces are at work within the treatment. At these times, it is crucial that the analyst can accept these aspects of the patient as a precondition that will profoundly affect any work that might be done. If the destructive forces are too strong, there may be little that the analyst can do that does not become toxified by these destructive forces (Oelsner, 2002), and the most that she can do is to contain the forces through her own reverie. For example, earlier in our work together, Nick would fragment my words - much as he fragmented his reality - into pieces of doom that would descend upon us in stranglehold. In this kind of interaction, the analyst has ideas about the preconceptions that are limiting the patient’s ability to encounter various aspects of the situation that are being defended against. To the extent that these preconceptions can be verbalized without fragmentation, they become thoughts that can be considered. However, the verbalization itself can be experienced as an utter and terrible assault upon the self. In the current instance, I am putting forward to Nick several interrelated ideas: that the overvaluation of the opinion of the ostensible other is a way of not knowing and not seeing; that the reliance on the critical valuation by the self keeps him in the victim mode; and that being in the victim mode relieves him of the necessity of imagining moving beyond this position (which, of course, would necessitate experiencing anxiety). As we hold the view of omitted aspects of reality before the patient, we run the risk of becoming the assaultive, critical other who serves the purpose of his internal attacker, thereby relieving him of the responsibility for the assault. This is quite a sleight of hand and presents a very difficult position from which to extricate ourselves. Perhaps we can only do this by trying to tolerate and thereby contain and metabolize the destructive forces and also to interpret these in the moment. To try to avoid the experience or its acknowledgement would be tantamount to what the patient is trying to do: to avoid having the very experience that seems too painful to tolerate and yet carries such potential for growth. Nick’s ambivalence would seem to stem from his inability to identify with either parent in a way that does not lend itself to devaluation and disintegration of his fragile self-esteem. This is in striking contrast to Conrad, described in chapter 3, in whose family there is the fantasy that one might, in actuality, attain and maintain the status of the idealized other; that one might maintain the fantasy of

Ambivalence

37

omnipotence with impunity. For most of the individuals described in this volume, however, there have been active assaults to the developing sense of self that have been too undermining to integrate without encapsulating and disowning important aspects of the self. One commonality that we find in many individuals who have split off and hidden some aspect of self in this way, is a history of having been ostracized or victimized by peers. The devaluation by the parent(s) often sets up an internal sense of devaluation that invites the same from others. Bullies tend to be devalued objects who have taken the aggressive position and project the devalued aspects of self onto an other who is open to being devalued in similar ways. In this way, the scapegoat becomes invaded by something that is both self and not-self. The invasion creates the lie that the devalued characteristic is a personal flaw rather than a common aspect of being human. In reacting against the invasion, we become caught in our own lie, as we disown the characteristic rather than merely refusing to be invaded by the negative projection. Ironically, it is only in our ability to accept, without shame, the devalued aspect in ourselves that we become relatively immune to the invasion, for it is the shame that perpetuates the dilemma by disconnecting us from both self and other. The disconnection perpetuates the lie that the trait might be a stigmata, rather than an inevitable aspect of being human. In believing that one might or might not have the quality at all, we become more vulnerable to both internal and external assault. This theme will be picked up again in chapters 4 and 7.

This page intentionally left blank

Three

Creative Myth-Making The Importance of Play

“I don’t think they’re playing at all fairly,” Alice began, in a rather complaining tone, “and they all quarrel so dreadfully one ca’n’t hear oneself speak – and they don’t seem to have any rules in particular: at least, if there are, nobody attends to them – and you’ve no idea how confusing it is all the things being alive…” - Lewis Carroll; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Ambivalence as to the extent to which aspects of self might be valued can result in stalemates so entrenched that the individual becomes immobilized. This was the dilemma posed to me by several students who presented with ostensibly the same problem: Although they were extremely bright, they were failing in their classes at university. The reasons for this failure have been various and yet seem to converge on the common theme of discomfort with reality. One young man, in particular, was dismayed by his inability to attend his classes sufficiently to even finish the term. Conrad was obviously very bright and yet had a history of failing to attend classes whenever possible. In childhood, this failure had been easier to disguise in the form of allergies and other ailments that kept him at home. In high school, he had been able to justify his behavior by making sure that his grades were sufficient to pass him on to the next level. However, college had proved more problematic in that not attending seemed to have become an end in itself. There seemed to be some crucible within which Conrad was to be tried and tested. In spite of all statements to the contrary, he seemed to be terrified lest he fail. Initially, it was difficult for me to understand Conrad’s inability to attend his classes. What obscured this even further was his affect as he spoke of his dilemma. So light hearted was he that it seemed as though his plight had no concern for him whatsoever but was merely a small annoyance on the periphery of his experience. And yet, there were also intimations of a greater distress that at times peeked from behind this seemingly unperturbed exterior. It became clear that part of Conrad’s lack of concern came from his most facile defense: He could always “change the rules” to avoid having to confront failure. In this way, he need not try anything that would expose imperfection and certainly need not be aware of imperfection. Conrad had created of himself a magical superhero with feet of concrete.

40

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

“Perhaps you need to create a new character,” I suggested. BEING AND NOTHINGNESS As I tried to understand Conrad’s dilemma and to find a way in which to engage with him, I became caught by this sleight of hand in which he engages, astonishing me with the “amazing” and “astonishing” Conrad, while attempting to hide and protect the underlying, split-off, devalued self. This becomes the desperate dilemma in which he can only lose and also poses for me my own dilemma: how to enlist the efforts of the magical self in such a way that we can better appreciate and bring to life whatever is being hidden; how to free the play from the bonds of evasiveness towards something more truly and creatively playful. In my mind, I came to think of him as “magical Conrad” and found myself in need of a suitable place in which to engage with him. I began to find it in the interstices between Bion and Winnicott, where seemed to lie a magical place in which the ability to be present with profound and simple truths encounters the capacity to play. Both Bion and Winnicott point towards the importance of being in the moment for the ultimate success of the analytic goal of facilitative selfknowledge. Each encourages a state of receptivity in which the self might become more fully known. For Winnicott (1971), this state of being forms “the only basis for self-discovery and a sense of existing” (p. 82). Bion (1977a) speaks of this state in terms of “transformations towards ‘O’,” through which the quality of being facilitates our ability to know whatever might be known in that moment. For each of these theorists, this enhanced state of being is a precondition for creative understanding. Each considered in some depth the conditions under which creativity might flourish. For Winnicott, this took the form of more direct explications, whereas Bion’s explorations took him into the processes themselves. Bion and Winnicott each seem to have realized how fundamentally the analytic enterprise is facilitated by the analyst’s capacity to play, which furthers the capacity of the analysand to do so as well. Winnicott (1971) expresses this explicitly in terms of play, saying: “only in playing is communication possible” (p. 54). Direct communication tends to flatten what might be known. It too easily becomes didactic, leading to learning facts rather than understanding. In practice, says Winnicott, “even the right explanation is ineffectual. The person we are trying to help needs a new experience” (p. 55; emphasis added). Bion (1962) agrees that we learn best through experience but posits the realm that Winnicott refers to as play as one of myth. In this distinction, we can see reflections of important differences in these two men’s histories: Winnicott’s observations were grounded in his experience and perspective as a pediatrician, whereas much of Bion’s thinking was grounded in his observations of psychotic adults. Much of our most important processing occurs in the unconscious, enabling us to take in and metabolize the “facts” of our experience. To this end, Bion (1967b) encourages us to renounce memory or desire, so that we might better observe what is actually occurring within the hour. This is similar to Winnicott’s

Creative Myth-Making

41

(1971) admonition to avoid saturating the analytic space with our ideas, so that the patient can generate his or her own. He notes that “premature interpretation . . . annihilates the creativity of the patient and is traumatic in the sense of being against the maturational process” (p. 117). When we take our theories too seriously, they come to obscure, not illuminate, what is taking place. In this way, our theories too easily become preconceptions and prejudices that may impede our ability to observe what might actually be taking place within the session (Bion, 1997a). In accord with this, Bion (1977b) notes: “As I became more able to silence my prejudices, I also became able to be aware of the evidence that was there rather than to regret the evidence that was not” (p. 22). To some extent, we need to be willing to cast ourselves adrift from our theories in order to discover when, whether, and in what ways they apply. Otherwise, it becomes too easy to merely affirm what we already believe we know rather than learning anything from our actual experiences: the very dilemma with which our patients are faced. Our defenses are such that we are continually faced with the need for and our resistance to disentangling our perceptions from our preconceptions. This is a fundamental dilemma for the two young men I discuss in this chapter. The fusion of perception with preconception becomes a paranoidschizoid reality, in which one can never see the whole out of fear of finding the fear-become-reality, lying in wait. In this realm, we have no way of joining with the whole person, for this would entail being able to acknowledge the devalued self that threatens to annihilate all that is good and valued within the person. In order to escape this deadly gridlock, we need to provide some new way of understanding that might be tolerable. This requires sufficient distance that one might be able to encounter the unknown without imminent destruction. For Bion (1965), understanding comes through transformations of experience through which meaning is deduced via the interplay of intuition and reason. It is largely in the realm of metaphor (which Bion refers to primarily as “myth” or “visual models”) that these complex meanings are most productively passed along and digested. Metaphor allows us some distance within which we might “play” with reality, by encountering truth without being annihilated by it. In Bion’s (1997) terms, a myth is a theory that lends itself to deriving meanings without prematurely closing down this process by the illusion of having found “the Meaning.” Whether these are personal myths (such as dreams) or more publicly shared myths, they provide a condensed statement of complex phenomena in a way that facilitates both understanding and communication. We use myths as models of reality that enable us to communicate with one another about essential truths in a form that facilitates our ability to keep the various facets in mind. They help us to organize our understandings, highlighting quite vividly relationships between important facets of experience (Bion, 1963; 1977a). The myth serves a particularly important function in that, if we don’t “saturate the elements” by taking them literally, the elements offer themselves up for our consideration and thereby encourage creative thinking.

42

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

To the extent that we are able to be aware of the myth, we are better able to reflect on it and to appreciate the ramifications of the various elements. The repetition facilitated by visual models, such as those provided by myth and metaphor, give us a means for playing out and thereby recognizing their fundamental forms and structures, which, as both Bion and Gadamer (1988) note, also contain an essential underlying truth. The more myths we have at our disposal, the easier it becomes to illustrate and thereby bring to our awareness the dilemmas that can be so important to think about and yet so elusive. For example, the tower of Babel story is one exemplar of a wider range of myths, including the stories of Oedipus and the Garden of Eden, that warn against the pursuit of knowledge. These myths “provide a succinct statement of psychoanalytic theories which are relevant in aiding the analyst both to perceive growth and to achieve interpretations that illuminate aspects of the patient’s problems that belong to growth” (Bion, 1963, p. 63). One developmental milestone that facilitates the use of myth is what Winnicott (1971) points to in terms of the ability to “use” an object. For Winnicott, object usage moves beyond object-relating to integrate our destructiveness as well as our separateness. According to this formulation, in order to be able to interact with the other as a separate and sentient being, one must be able to learn that the other can survive our attempts at destruction. From another perspective, it is our myths about the other that are being destroyed. As Grotstein (2000a) puts it: We can discover the truth of the real object by continuously destroying our myths about it and are thereby enabled to abandon a relationship with the object based on identification [and replace it] with one based on separateness, individuation, and acknowledged [inter]dependency (p. 245).

This is a crucial function that requires the ability to hold two disparate truths in mind: We can only afford to venture into this dangerous territory if we can keep in mind some sense of sanctuary outside. In this way, the experience of “magical control” is related to the ability to engage the other seemingly at will. Winnicott (1971) posits the achievement of object usage as a developmental milestone through which we discover that objects (and ideas) can change without being permanently destroyed. This enables us to more fully become the Subject: the author of our own imaginings. This capacity to play with self and other has profound ramifications for our ability to engage in creative thinking and creative acts and to tolerate the exhilaration of play itself. Play is immensely exciting. . . . The thing about playing is always the precariousness of the interplay of personal psychic reality and the experience of the control of actual objects. This is the precariousness of magic itself, magic that arises in intimacy, in a relationship that is being found to be reliable (Winnicott, 1971, p. 47).

Creative Myth-Making

43

This may be true magic, in which the capacity for play develops into a capacity for shared playing as we learn to accommodate to the play of an other. It also develops into the ability to play with ideas: to entertain novelty with sufficient distance that one might consider it without being enveloped by it. Gadamer (1988) notes that in order “to truly experience the play, one must be drawn into it, to forget one’s self in the moment and be in the play” (p. 102). This is only possible to the extent that one is free to be in the moment. We need the freedom afforded by our certainty of the other’s ongoing subjectivity in order to truly play freely. Play requires sufficient separateness from the other that one might be able to see the other as other. In this way, the integration of separateness and resilience lends new dimensions and possibilities to the capacity for relating. Winnicott (1971) posits as a precondition for this relative freedom, the capacity to survive attack, which in this context, means [to] ‘not retaliate’. Without the experience of maximum destructiveness (object not protected) the subject never places the analyst outside and therefore can never do more than experience a kind of self-analysis, using the analyst as a projection of a part of the self (p. 91).

Our ability to “use” the object bounds the play, softening the dire element inherent in the paranoid-schizoid dilemma of the two-dimensional reality that precludes play. As Gadamer (1998) puts it: Play obviously represents an order in which the to-and-fro motion of play follows itself. The ease of play, which naturally does not mean that there is any real absence of effort, but phenomenologically refers only to the absence of strain, is experienced subjectively as relaxation. The structure of play absorbs the player into itself, and thus takes from him the burden of the initiative, which constitutes the actual strain of existence. This is seen also in the spontaneous tendency to repetition that emerges in the player and in the constant self-renewal of play, which influences its form. (p. 94).

At times, in our tendencies to overinterpret rather than providing a context in which learning might take place, we are complicit in our patients’ fantasies regarding their insufficiencies. In this way, we collude with the evasive forces within the other. For Winnicott, our interpretations often preempt the patient’s understanding, obstructing their ability to come to know in their own way without being “instructed.” Unnecessary interpretations, from this vantage point, may be seen as destructive of the individual’s autonomy and creativity, similar to the parent who gives too much and does not leave sufficient room for the child to learn from his or her own experience.

44

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

CONRAD: THE ILLUSION OF “BEING” This would seem to be the dilemma in which Conrad finds himself. He seems to be able to play very creatively and to great effect, including having a positive impact on others. And yet he is unable, in fundamental ways, to interplay with others. For Conrad, play is private. In our work together, truth is often elusive, hidden within the elaborate series of antechambers that mark and hide the entrance to his inner world. In his home, he has created a world in which he can play safely, without fear of disruption. Complicit with Conrad’s fantasies that his interiors must remain hidden, his father has literally constructed for him a secret room, hidden behind the wall of Conrad’s closet, safe from any intrusion. There he keeps boxes of whatever is too precious to discard and yet cannot be left in view as part of the public Conrad, safe for display. Conrad has constructed a persona - a public self - that is playful and delightful. He would seem to even the keen observer to have not a care in the world. And yet he is unable, in spite of his obviously superior intellectual capacities, to meet specific developmental challenges such as attending (and passing) his classes. He is unable to test in public aspects of self that he privately assumes to be superior. In this way, we can see a split between the apparent self versus the feared self, the one that cannot be tried and tested in the real world. As we begin to explore Conrad’s dilemma, it becomes clear that he is unwilling to be tried in any way that might lead to failure. Paradoxically, however, if his failure is revealed to him in a way that invites understanding, he is intrigued and engaged and can use this information towards further growth. What he cannot tolerate is anything that feels abrupt, that surprises him with awareness of any lack or insufficiency on his part. He can see the something more, but not the something less. In this way, Conrad creates a somewhat hysterical view of reality in which his erasure is marked but cannot be processed (Lacan, 1977). Lack does not exist. Indeed, he is so unwilling to fail that he creates his own system of rules. As he encounters potential failures, the rules change so that he can redefine reality in such a way as to ensure that no failure has or can have taken place. He is facile and quick and changes rules with great agility, pantomiming these shifts in our sessions with body motions as though he were steering a car or playing a video game. At one level, he is aware of the sleight of hand and enjoys the performance. At another level, it is a deadly serious game in which survival depends, paradoxically, on killing off aspects of self and self-awareness. The sleight of hand keeps hidden the inherently destructive force of his omnipotent fantasies (see Rosenfeld, 1971). In this unwillingness to encounter his own deficits, we see a trap that has kept Conrad caught for many years. Insufficiency seems to be experienced as a horror that would misalign the universe. However, if he is able to come upon whatever information is missing without having had to anticipate its absence, he can take it in quite readily. It becomes his and therefore acceptable. This unwillingness to see anything of value as outside of himself may be viewed as a facet of Conrad’s envy. Envy would be unacceptable and therefore cannot exist.

Creative Myth-Making

45

The only things that can be of value are whatever he can take in and possess. In kind, whatever is deemed unworthy is only seen outside of self, even if projective identification is necessary in order to accomplish this end. This splitting of reality keeps Conrad safe from being consciously devalued but also provides massive obstacles to his growth and development. Conrad loves to play. His play, however, is largely autistic: He loves to encounter his own delight. Conrad enjoys noises, especially loud, surprising noises: They enchant him, particularly when he is their source. In this way, he creates a venue for tolerating surprise, finding opportunities for noise-making by destroying various objects pilfered from trash bins left lying by the road. There is something in this of the delight the young child finds in his own creations (and destructions). Conrad’s parents seem to share in his enjoyment. What they do not seem to have managed was to have helped him to develop a tolerance for failure. Failure had become hidden, safe within the layered secrecy of his internal rooms. He could always de-create it with a wave of his magic rules: As the rules changed, the failure vanished, deconstructed by the new vantage point imposed. Steiner (1985) points to the defensive position in which there is an active disavowal of reality that is inaccessible because we turn a “blind eye” towards it. This would seem to be Conrad’s solution to unpleasant truths that seem unresolvable to him. He turns a blind eye, creating a reality in which he need not be overtly troubled by inconvenient facts. In the process, however, he distorts reality to the extent that growth is evaded as well. In addition, the awareness of the lie creates a shaky foundation, and the need to cover up the lie results in further evasions and distortions of reality. Steiner notes that the cover-up works because of the collusion involved. For example, Conrad’s parents’ desired to see him as eminently capable (and as uniquely good), in line with his own desires. In order to perpetuate this myth, they, too, were willing to turn a blind eye to the very real obstacles with which their son was faced. In this way, an addictive process was set in motion, in which Conrad needed the delighted eye in order to assuage his internal anxieties. This made it particularly important for him to keep the mirrored delight of the other in view. In our work together, limits in his capacity to play seemed to have to do with whether or not he could maintain sufficient mirroring of the self he was creating. If this seemed to be in jeopardy, he would be forced to avoid the feared confrontation. Reality was manageable when it reflected his preferred views or when he could rearrange it in his mind sufficiently to fail to encounter problematic aspects. He refers to this subterfuge as “changing the rules.” This sleight of hand could occur quite rapidly, so that I could watch a rule being changed before my very eyes as he de-created some awareness that had become unsavory. In the moment, I would witness a reality being amended, as if by magic, to make it more palatable. If confronted, Conrad could freely and pleasantly acknowledge that a changing of the rules was indeed taking place and yet, unless pressed, the previous reality would remain deconstructed.

46

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

As this facet of Conrad’s functioning became more apparent, its troublesome aspects also came to the fore. His awareness of his inability to tolerate unpleasant intrusions began to coexist with his remarkable facility for playing with reality. So much of his play was avoidant that it could be quite destructive, in many ways the antithesis of play, closing down the space rather than opening up possibilities. My ability to be aware of these occurrences appeared to mark the place of erasure, so that Conrad was able to grapple with the fact of the erasure and to become troubled by it. It began to be clearer that this magical capacity for changing the rules was also an evasive defense against growth. “Ooh, that’s not good,” he would say, his face twisted in thoughtful determination at the puzzle being presented. He seems as capable of being delighted by these dilemmas he encounters as by other pleasures. Knowledge itself is rewarding to him, as long as he feels able to maintain his sense of capacity while encountering it. My conjecture is that there was too much accommodation to Conrad as he was growing up, along with very strong rules about what is acceptable or not acceptable. This has resulted in three dilemmas that seem to have collided like a train wreck, leaving him immobilized with no sense of why this occurred. It does, however, validate the inherent sense of worthlessness that appears to co-exist with his grandiose fantasies without any means for integration. The first dilemma was that Conrad was not able to attack the parent sufficiently to enable him to discover that his mother was neither omniscient nor destructible. The second dilemma seems to have been that he was so bright as a child that he never learned to tolerate failure but rather to avoid any evidence of its imminence. The third dilemma was that he was not able to accede to his mother’s exacting standards. This was complicated by his extraordinary ability to split reality, so that he was able to disavow his desire to forge his own standards. Not having been able to deidealize his mother and discover that she could survive this assault had left Conrad unable to deidealize himself and find that he, too, could survive. This left him unable to discover himself according to his own standards, as there could be no individuality of standards. Standards had already been set by an omniscient omnipotent god, whom he strove to emulate, managing only the empty though outwardly convincing parody that he presented to the world. Conrad’s dilemma is marked by the personal myth he has created of the unpacked boxes in the secret room within a room that his father has built for him. As much as he overvalues his potency in his mythical, magical self-creation, so too does he undervalue his complicity in acts he abjures, thereby creating of the other evil incarnate: in his words “the anti-Christ.” In this way, he creates a fiction in which he ostensibly absolves himself but which founders on the wreckage of his own disbelief. Conrad is caught in a terrible bind. He cannot think about the issues that most trouble him without experiencing overwhelming incapacity and shame. And so he prefers to not think about them but rather creates a myth in which he is the powerless victim of a diabolical other. This myth, in which he becomes the sailor

Creative Myth-Making

47

succumbing to the siren’s call - the helpless victim of the evil seductress - absolves him of culpability. However, it also severs him from his potency. He has no way of reconciling the powerless Conrad with the omnipotent one and so becomes lost within his own fantasies, with no way out (aside from not-thinking about it at all!). We find ourselves caught within the myth of Oedipus. Conrad is blinded for having committed the unpardonable sin of having “become a man” without having undergone the rite of passage that would have first severed him from his mother. Adult sexuality is experienced as an unforgivable trespass upon the primal scene. This was a story that Conrad almost could not tell me, much as he almost did not know that the incident had occurred or that it had affected him. As he told me the story of his first sexual encounter, it was remarkable in that he disavowed any culpability, active participation, or even ambivalence on his own part. This absence was so remarkable that it was really my own amazement that even marked the space where his active agency might have been. “You talk about it as though you had no part in it and I wonder if that is because it seems so unacceptable to you to have had any desires, much less to act upon them,” I say. Conrad seems to be immobilized by my assumption that he must have had desires, coexistent as it is with my assumption that this would be a fact that one could think about without the universe imploding. However, once this model of reality has been intruded into the extant one, it becomes something upon which we can reflect, even if our constructions might seem improbable. In this exchange, we could begin to see the outlines of a Conrad who could not meet the exigencies of life in the adult world because he was defined too clearly within the constraints of the latency aged child, who could perform a prescribed task but could not move out safely into the world of adults on his own. As Conrad continued to talk about this evil seductress who would have destroyed his innocence had he not been the immaculate victim, it became clear that she needed to be quite so evil in order to explain how he had come under her spell sufficiently to have not merely been “raped” in the first instance but then also to have this occurrence enacted repeatedly over a series of months. The extent of the energy needed to accomplish this superhuman act of denial seemed to be sapping all of his agency. Before Conrad came in for treatment, he had no way of productively addressing these issues. His upbringing had taught him that he was now irretrievably damaged unless he could undo the damage, which could only occur through denial of culpability and thereby redemption. In this way, however, the price of redemption became blindness, thereby also enforcing his impotence. His unwillingness to take responsibility for his actions leaves him feeling powerless in the real world, enforcing an abdication of developmental tasks and a retreat into the world of fantasy. Fantasy, at this point, has taken the form described by Winnicott (1971), in which it takes the place of living rather than enriching it. It becomes a dead end rather than providing a means for understanding and growth. Moving back into the Oedipal myth, blindness is used as a means of avoiding development rather than of bringing him into timely contact with his own

48

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

deeds such that he is able to integrate them (see Grotstein, 2000a). Growth depends on our ability to sacrifice the old self (the self we assume our parents had wanted us to be), which is also, at some level, the sacrifice of the parents. This is a terrifying and yet ultimately liberating act that exacts a price but not so large a one as our failure to meet this challenge. Part of what keeps the Oedipal myth in place is our willingness to be complicit with the other in “turning a blind eye” to whatever seems intolerable to know. This challenges us to find a way to put forward unseen facets of reality in such a way that they might be seen without retraumatization. With Conrad, my ability to play with him in the spaces he has created, and to help him to discover unseen truths within these environs, has helped him to integrate disowned aspects of his reality. In our work now, we are building a space in which new myths might be made, myths that might serve to link together once again the facets of reality that had become split by the force of Conrad’s prohibitions and inhibitions. Paradoxically, this entails separating from the realities of his parents sufficiently that he might be able to reflect on them. The old myths provided him no way of being a good person without being blind to various aspects of self. Ultimately, growth will necessitate renouncing some elements of the myths of childhood and building new, more facilitative myths that enable him to integrate the repudiated aspects of self and to accept himself as the active agent of his own desires. My awareness of the importance of being able to amend Conrad’s myth that he must be hidden in order to be safe, keeps me searching for ways to engage with him without undue intrusion. For me, it feels rather like a game of “double Dutch” in which I am watching the ropes turn, attempting to attune myself sufficiently to their rhythm to be able to enter into the dance without ending it. To this end, I join with him in his delight and relief in being able to retreat to the secrecy of his hidden spaces, while also lamenting the loss inherent in his lack of faith in his ability to survive being seen. I attempt to embrace the idealization of the parent that seems to be so essential to the edifice he has created to safeguard himself, while also affirming that he might be able to be different from his parents in some ways and also be valued. To some extent, he has come to believe that he must be the “darling son” in order to have value. Although this has intrinsic enjoyment for him, it also stifles his development. And so, I attempt to stand with one foot firmly planted in his reality, the other planted in a reality that I posit as only seemingly irreconcilable: one that need not destroy him or his place in the universe but rather might enlarge both. To this end, Conrad’s ability to be delighted by surprises that do not overwhelm him has been an important resource in our work together, as he learns that what he does not know need not be an affirmation of his inherent unworthiness but rather an invitation towards growth. As I have puzzled over my work with Conrad and with David (to follow), I have been struck by the split between the apparent ease with which they encounter the world and the profound underlying distress this conceals. I have

Creative Myth-Making

49

found that this type of split between the grandiose and devalued aspects of self is often linked to an unevenness of functioning in the individual’s history that was insufficiently addressed or worked through. At times this seems as though it may be linked to an undiagnosed learning disability, whereas at other times there may be a particular strength that is not sufficiently balanced to provide adequate grounding. In some families, both sides are visible, but irreconcilable. The deficits are seen as repugnant, in contrast to the talents, which may be overidealized to the point where they come to trip us as easily as the deficits (see chapter 7). DAVID: THE SHROUD OF “NOTHING” The inability of the family to contain within the bounds of self whatever has been deemed “good” and “bad” exacerbates the split, whichever side the family stands on. In Conrad’s family, he was seen as so capable and so delightful that he had little opportunity to note the incapacity, which left it lying in wait, unnoticed and unnoticeable, always ready to trip him up. He seemed to have the fantasy that if he could just ignore it sufficiently, it would somehow disappear. For David, in contrast, it was the deficit that was so salient that the person became lost within, much as he becomes lost within his silence during our hours together. David’s family seems to have been unable to mirror his obvious strengths and talents without also reflecting back their overarching disappointment at his failure to live up to their expectations. At times, he experiences himself as his parents’ selfobject, as they berate him for “hurting them” so grievously by having dreams counter to their own. For David, the capacity to play is extremely inhibited - glimpsed primarily in his extremely creative and expressive writings, which he keeps largely to himself. With both of these young men, there is the question of how we might keep play at the level of engagement rather than evasion. At some level, however, we need sufficient evasion that we might be able to work with such dangerous material and survive the experience. When the family is unable to help the child to negotiate important developmental milestones, splitting is encouraged. The split keeps the fantasy intact, leaving no firm ground on which to build a resolution, thereby perpetuating the split. Thus, even when the task is negotiated, it does not feel as though the success belongs to the self. Therefore, it never heals the split but rather the affirmation must be perpetually reenacted. The reenactment provides respite and therefore becomes inherently rewarding. In this way, avoidance can become an end in itself. This would seem to be one of the challenges we face in the many moments in which David and I sit in silence. His family’s less than benign view of him has made it particularly important to keep himself safely hidden from view. He comes in wearing his mask and exchanges pleasantries, even though I do not play my part. David acknowledges my nonparticipation with grace and humor and works it into his monologue. When the monologue is over, however, he runs into trouble. This would be the time to talk about something that matters but, in

50

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

contemplating this, David encounters an unbridgeable chasm. As he sits gazing into space, his face at times infuses with emotion and I wonder aloud what he has been thinking of. “Nothing” is his usual reply. As we have built our relationship over the past months, I have begun to enquire into the “nothing.” Is this a way of putting me off, to keep “something” from my sight? Or is it, rather, a factual statement of some sort? In that case, how do we define the edges of this nothing that he encounters? I refuse to tacitly accept the meaninglessness of David’s statements. At times this paralyzes him, as he finds himself in a trap from which he cannot escape. At these times, affirming the “nothing” seems to become a mantra or a reassurance that meaning is not being made - cannot be made - from whatever he has brought into the room. It becomes an assurance that whatever had been growing in his mind could be kept safe from intrusion, safe from annihilation. However, in the moment of making the word “nothing” a true one, David becomes the aggressor, destroying his own reality. At these times, the silence enables him to preserve his thoughts and continue his reflections. Periodically, I check in to affirm that he is not alone, acknowledging the hazards of breaking into his reverie. In this way, we are delineating a space that becomes slightly less precarious as we inhabit it together, alone. In some ways, “the nothing” is also a profound metaphor for this young man’s images of self. David’s childhood images are drawn against the outlines of a sensitive, powerless mother, who was often reduced to nothing in the gaze of the critical, assaultive father, with whom David most often felt like nothing or, alternatively, longed to become nothing, that he might escape the father’s fury or disdain. In this way, the nothing may represent a refuge from the “shit” he experiences himself to be in his father’s presence. It is also a refuge from whatever hope he might still carry, acknowledgement of which might threaten his uneasy equilibrium (see Boris, 1994). David finds it difficult to engage with me. As I enquire into his glib nonstatements, he often recedes further and becomes caught in his own silence. Recently, I related to him this observation, in reference to the beginning of that particular hour: “It seems that when I try to understand a statement that you had not meant to be understood, you feel even more self-conscious and that makes it even more difficult for you to talk. When I introduce the idea that there might be some meaning to be found, it paralyzes you.” In this way, I tried to introduce a bit of firmer ground into the quicksand in which we often find ourselves caught with one another. This quicksand is an ongoing dilemma in our work together. I repeatedly find myself searching for some ground on which we might stand together. In this endeavor, I come up against the myths created in David’s home of origin, in which one is either the god of fire and lightning, or his victim. I try to speak to David’s myths and contrast them with my own. “I feel like we’re on this virtual chessboard,” I said, one day. “You are hiding in your corner and all your ideas about yourself get in the way of being able to move. You assume that if you came

Creative Myth-Making

51

out of hiding and I saw you, I would not value what I saw. Meanwhile, I’m sitting on my side of the chessboard with a completely different perspective, wishing you could see what I see. You kind of sense that I see something of value, which keeps you coming back, but you don’t really have much faith that it could be real and so you stay hidden in your corner.” David’s eyes acknowledged our predicament, but he had no way of engaging overtly with my words. As we exchange metaphors, however, we affirm that meanings might be interchanged and valued - destroyed and built anew without having to venture into the dangerous ground of direct interplay. I said that it seemed to be difficult for him to play, an understandable dilemma given how play was structured within his family and the rules for engagement there. He had been complaining previously about these “rules,” having noted at a recent family gathering that the two motivating principles for the siblings seemed to be “being nice” and “being smart,” each of which could only be proven in combat, through vanquishing another player. There was no winning in this game: Even when David found himself positioned as the favored son, he could derive no pleasure in being lauded by his father, coming as it did in counterpoint to the humiliation of his brother. David came into the next session wanting to talk further about the idea I had thrown into the ring about playing by the rules. He said that he was envisioning in his mind concentric circles. In the innermost circle were the objectives of the game. In the next circle were the rules. He said that in his family it seemed as though they were always trying to duck below the radar: to be able to win without having the assault detected. “I’m thinking that it is very difficult for you to play, at all,” I said. “In your family, playing tends to become a war in which someone wins and someone loses rather than an opportunity to engage.” David seemed perplexed and so I elaborated: “It’s like the difference between my throwing a ball at your head as hard as I can, with the intention of hitting you, versus throwing it to you, with the hope that you would catch it and throw it back so that we might enjoy playing with it together.” “That reminds me,” said David, after a pause, “of a time when my brother kept pushing me and pushing me to buy this computer game, so that we could play back and forth. It was one of those games that works best if you could cooperate but it started out like a war. Then I made a different move that was more cooperative, and it made the game better, and it was really fun for a while.” David’s description of playing with his brother seemed to have much of the prosody of our work together. At times, we are able to engage together with a topic in a way that has a great deal of vitality to it. At other times, it is so difficult for him to speak that my hope that he will find words becomes a negative force within the space. At these times, the hope itself becomes coercive and therefore reminiscent of his father. One day, when he was having particular difficulty in bringing forth words, I said: “Sometimes it is hard for you to speak because in the moment I become your father, waiting to attack you.” “Oh no,” he demurred, “I

52

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

don’t think of you that way.” And yet,” I replied, “as you think about speaking about something that he might criticize, you cannot speak for fear of finding that same criticism here.” On this, David could agree. His aversion to encountering his father in me had precluded his ability to encounter an alternative reality that might help to fragment, and thereby make more visible, the dense web of the myths he had created. David continued to struggle with his thoughts, caught between his will to speak and his inability to actually bring forth the words. I asked what he was thinking about and he told me the general subject. He said it was something no one seemed to agree with him about. Had he discussed it with his parents, I asked. As David began to tell me what had occurred when he tried to tell his parents about his future plans, he assumed that I would take the position of his parents, even though that would not be “like me.” In the moment, the affect associated with “someone in authority knowing” was so intense that he could not make that type of distinction. However, as I continued to be interested in his parents’ responses and in his responses to his parents, we created a new scenario, one in which we could be interested together in better understanding his parents’ responses and possible meanings of their interplay. This interest protected both of us: It protected me from being symmetrized with the critical parent and it kept David from being symmetrized with the deprecated child (see Matte-Blanco, 1975). In contrast to his fears, as David related the story he was not diminished in the moment of the telling but rather was enlivened at being able to distance himself from the devalued self and to identify instead with the person who had been so painfully misunderstood. David and I sit in silence through many of our hours. He begins with his typical banter through which he has come to take my part in the conversation as well as his own, in the absence of my taking a more active role. Soon he grinds down to silence, sometimes rescuing himself by talking his way through: “So, I’m thinking about what I’m going to say here . . .” At times, this ruse is successful; more often it is not. And so, David sits in his silence and I watch his face change from the jovial surface with which he polishes it to the intense translucence of the eyes that I read as deep psychic pain. If I enquire into the pain, it disappears, leaving no ostensible memory in his mind and so, most often, I sit with it and allow it its place in the room. One day I wondered aloud whether part of his silence had to do with his thoughts’ encounters with prospective criticism. David thought that over. “No,” he said, “I don’t really expect you to be critical.” And yet, of course he must, at some level. “Perhaps it is your own criticism you fear,” I said. David’s brows knotted. “I’m not sure,” he replied. I found this statement quite remarkable in the face of his self-criticism, which is certainly loud enough for us both to hear, whether or not actual words are being spoken. Indeed, it is most forceful in its silence, which virtually consumes many of our hours. I began to suspect that David’s uncertainty was much more profound than I had been imagining. It had to do, not with whether or not there were critical

Creative Myth-Making

53

voices, but with whether they had an impact on the work. The uncertainty seemed to be, quite fundamentally, about the reality of this elusive topic about which we were trying/trying not to speak. “I wonder if part of the problem is that you’re not sure whether you’re being critical, or whether you’re just shit,” I said, with a bit less tact than is my custom. I wondered at the harshness, which I sensed was experienced by David as an assault from the outside, when, in stark contrast, I was quite sure that I was merely reflecting, albeit quite graphically, an ongoing attack from the inside. “I think that you are not sure whether you are being critical, because a part of you believes in the criticisms so absolutely that you do not think of them in terms of a belief that you have but rather a terrible fact to be accepted or rejected,“ I said, attempting to resurrect us both to some level where we might be able to reflect together on what seemed to be a very important issue, if we could just hold it in mind together. David still seemed to be reeling unsteadily at the edge of a rather stark precipice and so I tried: “I wonder if you heard me saying that you are shit, rather than that you believe you are?” I began to see signs of life. “Your belief in the ‘fact’ of it is so strong that you can’t even talk about it. This ‘reality’ is so repugnant to you that you keep it underground and skate along the surface to distract me, so I won’t see it.” A smile of recognition began to play on David’s face. We were finally struggling within the same territory; there were toeholds along the cliff face that we could find and take respite in. “What I do see,” I went on, “is your belief about yourself and unless we can talk about that, we have no way of making any inroads into the ‘factness’ of it. We have no way to think about it.” These are the moments when the paranoid-schizoid realm becomes real, and we are sitting in profound dis-ease with two disjunctive aspects of our being firmly planted in disparate, disconnected realities. Within this realm, I have no way of joining with the real, whole person, for this would necessitate also joining with the vile, “shit” person who has become anathema: the unknown, the unseen. I cannot join the two without dealing David the very lowest blow, by attacking him with his own shit self: the devalued, depreciated, empty, impotent vessel that he has been running from in horror. While I might see this as a reflection of the empty, rageful father/self or the empty victim mother/self, David has internalized it as his own ultimately empty self. In this way, any positive movement, any positive momentum, becomes sabotaged and founders on his disbelief. Unless we can hold - in mind and in heart - the dreaded, empty, shit self, we cannot integrate into it the many positive attributes that it seems to occlude. It is in containing these positive attributes, as well, that the deprecated self can become transformed into a container that might be filled by self-experiences of both mastery and disappointment in ways that would further facilitate growth rather than evasion. In this way, any positive movement, any positive momentum, becomes sabotaged and founders on his disbelief. Unless we can hold - in mind and in heart

54

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

- the dreaded, empty, shit self, we cannot integrate into it the many positive attributes that might enable it to grow and ultimately to be filled by self-experiences of both mastery and disappointment in ways that would facilitate further growth rather than evasion. This is an important nexus for us to attend to, because we all have shit selves upon which we attempt to build our lofty edifices of the self. However, to the extent that we avoid attending to our foundations, the edifice becomes shaky a greater tribute to defensive denial than to development. This type of split is often found in creative individuals who have not been able to find a facilitative path, for whatever reasons. The pull to perpetuate the split makes it particularly important for the analyst to attend to disparity – to the unevenness in functioning that signals the need to strengthen weaknesses rather than exacerbating the split by focusing solely on the strengths. What we have come to term “narcissism” is often the inability of the individual to come to terms with disparity. Optimally, as we note it in our children, students, and patients, we are alerted to the inherent call for help of the being who inevitably will find it difficult to make sense of and to integrate the soaring parts along with the shit. However, unless this is done, the soaring becomes tainted by fantasy and the shit becomes the “ultimate reality.” As we sit in silence, I watch as David’s face suffuses with emotion, his eyes becoming translucent with unshed tears. I have learned not to intrude into these moments lest the emotion disappear, replaced by the façade in which he cloaks himself to keep intruders at bay. “I was thinking last night about things being conditional,” he tells me. “Were you thinking about anything in particular?” I wonder. “I don’t remember,” he replies, upon reflection. I have the sense we are in the realm of the lie, once again: familiar territory in our work together (see Charles, 2002b). I wait, wondering, and then ask: “Is that true?” “Sure,” he replies, with measured diffidence. “I’ll take that as a no,” I respond. A smile lights across his face. We are together, once again, in this odd space we have created, speaking the language we have built, laboriously, between us. This common language allows for some communication while still leaving ample room for safety. As we sit, and I watch his face infuse once again, I think further upon this issue of conditionality. I wonder in what ways my caring seems conditional to him. Are my attempts to communicate experienced as demands that he “perform” in some way? “I’m thinking about things being conditional,” I say. “I’m won-dering if it feels that way to you in here sometimes.” “Not really,” David replies. “Not too often.” “Will you let me know when I cross the line?” I ask. “Sure,” he says, the diffidence belying his words. “Well, perhaps you can try,” I suggest. “Yeah,” he responds, with greater assurance. We can agree that this would be an acceptable course of action, if he were able to do it. “What you seem to come up against, most strongly,” I say, “are your own conditions. Reminds me of what we were talking about yesterday.” With this

Creative Myth-Making

55

allusion, I make explicit the dilemma with which we are faced. We are confronted once again with the critical self that keeps him locked inside himself and proscribes the limits of what might be said or not said - what might be known or not known - between the two of us. In this movement from the implicit to the explicit, the analytic space expands slowly. We build ground rules that ensure that one might be safe, even in the midst of such dangers. In our exchanges, we delineate the bounds of reality: what might be said, if only it were possible; what becomes possible to say in the not-saying; the extent to which I am to be allowed to say the unsayable with impunity. In these exchanges, we create our own form of play in which the conditions conceded become the groundwork for our rules of engagement. These rules have been particularly difficult to negotiate in our work together, as his safety in many ways precludes his growth. A fundamental stumbling block for David has been his fear of knowing self. He cannot conceive of himself as the hero in his own drama but is equally unable to empathize with that other (diminished) David he abjures. The things that concern him tend to be experienced as proof of his lack of value and therefore cannot be spoken of. His silence speaks eloquently of his great sorrow as he confronts the words that cannot be spoken. However, if I enquire into the sorrow, it disappears, leaving the easy smile he wears to keep the world at bay. David finds our work so difficult that at times I marvel at his persistence. There are also times, however, when he does allow me in sufficiently to see that he has been internalizing some sense of the self that I see when I look across our playing field. He sketches for me, in brief strokes, the image of a father who has become more human, even as he maintains his distance. As David begins to deidealize his father, he is able to approach him in spite of the apparent rejection implicit in his father’s rules of engagement. My willingness to play with David in our work together creates an opening through which he can begin to envision the possibility of play. From this vantage point, play becomes potentially enlivening rather than annihilating: an interchange in which we might engage with – rather than assaulting – one another. To envision this type of interaction requires an act of faith that is largely beyond David’s current capacity. And yet, he continues to place himself in this most arduous of contexts in which he is repeatedly confronted with the limits of his imagination as he struggles to catch a glimpse of himself from my side of the consulting room. PLAYING AND REALITY In some ways, Conrad and David had been stuck within the same bind, in which play became private and the self could not be tested in the world of real people. Whereas Conrad’s ideas of self created an ostensibly more “playful” stance, David’s self portrayals (depicted most clearly in his writings, in which he was better able to be present via the illusion of “fiction”) carried a more ominous tone. However, each carried an image of self as inherently defective and incapable, and both were

56

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

isolated from the type of contact that might have enabled them to move beyond fantasy (in the sense of Winnicott’s [1971] use of the term) to the type of play that is creative, fulfilling, and growth-enhancing. When the early environment has not facilitated the capacity to play – in the sense of being able to construct and deconstruct reality while holding on to the underlying “facts” of experience – play becomes precariously cut off from its roots. As the defensive element becomes more pressing, the playful element itself becomes diminished. There seem to be two quite disparate paths leading to avoidance. Conrad appears to have become caught in an ungrounded type of play that keeps him entertained but out of touch with the darker truths that lie dormant within, as well as with other essential truths that would enable real growth. David, in contrast, finds it more difficult to sustain play or to invest it with much vitality. Although he seems to have greater contact with these darker truths, he finds it difficult to play with them, aside from in solitary endeavors such as thinking or writing. The hazard in this is that these truths run aground on the shoals of the harsh self-criticism he has taken in from his father and the depreciated victim self he has internalized through his relationship with his mother. In consequence, Conrad’s actions have the feel of play, without providing the type of growth we see when play is more firmly grounded. To the contrary, it has more the feel of “fantasying”: an empty escape or “evasion,” in Bion’s terms. Conrad derives greater support from his family and environment, which makes it easier for him to maximize whatever gains he is able to make in the short run but also seems to inhibit his ability to make sustained efforts in our work together. For David, there is less of a playful feel to his reverie or actions and yet I am more hopeful for the quality of his eventual recovery. Perhaps because his avoidant defenses are less successful, he seems to have a greater willingness to persist in the more difficult parts of our work together. For each of these young men, play had become a destructive activity that took the place of living, through which their fantasies affirmed their deepest fears. Analysis has helped them to engage more directly with self, other, and world, in part through creating new myths in which they are no longer quite so imprisoned by the past but rather can begin to find within themselves the requisite tools for creative living.

Four

Playing in an Empty Room “I see nobody on the road,” said Alice. “I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!” - Lewis Carroll; Through the Looking Glass

Conrad and David were born into homes in which they were largely wanted, and their dilemmas came from the conditional nature of what could or could not be valued. For Mary, in contrast, the world never seemed to welcome her into being. She was born into a chaotic household, the last of four children. Her brothers were all quite a bit older than she, and her early life was punctuated by violent confrontations between her father and brothers in which words, fists, or household items were equally likely mediums of exchange. Mary learned to survive by walling herself away inside her room, losing herself in her books and school work as best as she was able. Being the “good girl” appeared to be the safest course of action, second only to being absent: out of reach of rage’s radar. This “good girl” resolution seems, in retrospect, to have been inherited from her mother, a rigidly godly woman who tries to steer Mary back to the path of righteousness whenever her daughter seems to have gone astray. Mary has not managed to find a path towards any real peace in this universe but does seem quite convinced that her mother’s is not the path towards salvation. Any path of her mother’s is inherently suspect, coming as it does from a woman who does not recognize Mary in any real sense, but rather pushes and pulls her towards conforming to the configuration of the “good daughter,” who will thereby affirm for Mary’s mother the status of “good mother.” Seen from a safe distance, Mary appears to be quite intact. She is an extremely bright, well-educated, articulate woman in her late thirties, with a great deal of insight and a good sense of humor. However, these are all finely polished surface features that serve to hide a very fragile and brittle interior. Mary really has virtually no sense of herself as capable or competent. Most particularly, she has no sense of herself as worthy of love or care, and has spent many years barely surviving emotionally.

58

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

As is often the case in my work, my apparent denseness has provided an interesting combustion point for us, as our disparate views of reality collide. Mary has attempted to prove to me how inherently repugnant and unworthy she really is, but I don’t seem to quite “get it,” and so she redoubles her efforts, searching for whatever proof might be sufficient to finally ease the tension caused by this unwarranted (and undoubtedly burdensome) faith I seem to have in her. Mary finds our sessions almost intolerable. She walks in heavily, as though on her way to her own execution. As she lumbers in, shoulders heavy, I feel as though my doorway becomes a guillotine, blade at ready. When I verbalize this impression to Mary, she acknowledges with a laugh that that is, indeed, how she feels. It was only her utter desperation that made her seek treatment once again after several previous go-rounds with other therapists over the years. It is only her memory of the dreadful depths to which she had sunk that has kept her returning hour after excruciating hour, particularly once the initial despondency lifted. NIGHT BLINDNESS: OCCLUDING EMPTINESS Mary’s defenses are avoidant. She has tried to titrate the emptiness in every way she could devise and has finally settled on a routine of work and sleep, with occasional sojourns into the social world. These latter are usually evoked by the entreaties of her friends, who continue to surprise Mary by remaining constant in spite of her evasive efforts. Mary appears to be quite competent at her job, which she initially found to be pleasurable and satisfying. She particularly enjoys feeling as though she is up to whatever challenge might come along. As a result, she has taken on too many responsibilities to the point where she feels overwhelmed and depleted. It has been exceedingly difficult, then, for her to give up control over whatever territories she has amassed. Control is a major issue for Mary. She likes the illusion of control and fosters this to the detriment of any actual control, particularly as regards her interpersonal world. Mary’s fears of her own dependency needs and of her intense longings for closeness keep her most often secluded in her home. She has had several longterm relationships but seems to choose women who are like her mother in that they give the appearance of being “strong” caretakers but tend to exercise their strength according to their own rules and needs, and to define Mary and her actions relative to these. Mary’s tendencies to avoid conflict and to deprecate herself and the positions she takes have made it difficult for her to sustain these relationships or to work them through towards negotiating a better equilibrium. She finds herself caught in a deadly bind in which her dependence on others becomes a trap in which she loses herself. Her tendency to idealize the other also becomes a trap into which she falls over and over, as she fails to observe deficits in the other and capacities within herself. This proscribed blindness remains a

Playing in an Empty Room

59

continuing obstacle in her often self-defeating attempts to negotiate this treacherous terrain. However, it also provides relief as she substantiates the futility of even trying. At times, Mary uses silence as a way of affirming her victim stance, thereby also affirming a sado-masochistic loop that seems to have become inherently satisfying in that it is so familiar. In this way, her denial is linked with omnipotent fantasies in which pain is taken as a sign of being special and unique. This is the type of double-bind described by Novick and Novick (1996), in which “the delusion of destructive omnipotence becomes simultaneously a defense against feelings of help-less rage and humiliation and a pathological source of self esteem” (p. 62). From this perspective, hope becomes dangerous and the old, familiar pain carries the allure of “home.” Mary seems to be capable of intense intimacy but then becomes lost within the desperate dependency needs that are evoked in her. Thus, she finds it safer to engage in fantasy relationships in which she tortures herself with longing without having to take the risk of actual rejection. She describes a series of “crushes” in which she would spend a great deal of time focused upon her desire for another woman without actually acting on those desires. She tends to wait until another engages with her rather than seeking out company of any sort. By retaining the fantasy, she keeps it safe but also amplifies her aloneness. “Playing” with Mary is hazardous, in that she so easily shows her jovial, insightful, wry side and engages me with it. This allows us to meet, but unless I can temper the encounter with acknowledgement of both the pleasure and the price for her in this ostensible meeting, the Mary lurking beneath the surface remains rejected. And so, our play often takes the form of rounds of small skirmishes in which we spar carefully, trying to make contact without undue harm. Keeping her innermost thoughts and feelings hidden deep inside is a defensive way of keeping others from devaluing them. Paradoxically, this maneuver affirms the lack of value through the lack of reality testing. Mary’s defensive occlusions keep our work in a state of tension as w e somewhat precariously redefine the rules of the game such that we might encounter what is real without imminent annihilation. In this endeavor, myth and metaphor at times offer us sufficient distance to be able to titrate the encounter with the real (Bion’s “O”). Myth provides boundaries that help to structure our play, as the strengths and weaknesses in each of us continually define and delineate the nature of the game. In some ways, it is a life and death struggle in which “the particular nature of [the] game lies in the rules and structures which prescribe the way that the area of the game is filled” (Gadamer, 1988, p. 96). Although the play enables us to encounter one another and to bring troublesome aspects of being “to the table,” where we might puzzle over them more actively, it also brings us into the realm of terror. This is the region of O, with all its awesome and deadly

60

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

imminence. At times I step out of the game as a way of titrating the tension and assuring her safety by acknowledging the threat. This, then, becomes one more boundary; one more layer within the play. NIGHT VISION: ENCOUNTERING THE UNKNOWN When the early environment has offered little positive mirroring, devaluation tends to become self-confirming, as we invite more of the same through our inability to value self. In this way, our phantasies about our inherent lack of value become perpetually reconfirmed as contact is avoided. This makes it particularly important for Mary to be able to encounter startle: to be able to discover that very novelty that might disconfirm her notions of self and other that have come to occlude actual sight. We encounter her blindness continually, and attempt to speak to it through myths and metaphors of Pandora’s boxes and distorting mirrors that seem to infinitize towards eternity. The myth, in acknowledging the enormity, also bounds it. Language gives us some relief from the symmetry, an anchor through which we might find our bearings for some brief moment and in the process perhaps anchor the moment, that it might become even a dim beacon in the darkness. Contact can be experienced by Mary as quite deadly: an assault upon the safety provided by the deep darkness of her despair. My caring seems much more difficult to bear and to recover from than any other blow. On one occasion, Mary’s encounter with my caring was particularly assaultive and threatened to reduce her to tears. This encounter came in an ostensible unlikely package: I had been talking about her hostility, which seemed to be quite palpable. This, apparently, was a quality that was inherently bad and should not be found within the bounds of self. However, it also seemed to be a reasonable response under the circumstances, and I expressed mild perplexity in response to her implicit idea that acknowledging hostility would be tantamount to vilifying her. My image of hostility as a human feeling rather than a mark of Cain provided the catalyst that brought forth the tears. This altered view seemed to catch Mary in a stranglehold. Like a deer caught in headlights, she was terrified and uncertain where to run. Her usual hiding place was foreclosed by the interpretation, which redefined escape in such a way that it no longer provided the usual relief. The tears were an additional source of injury, as they further marked her as human and therefore vulnerable. I had touched her, and her tears marked the wound. The next hour, Mary told me what a difficult time she had had in the interim. She had been very angry at “no one in particular” - a “faceless nonperson,” as she put it - and had settled into the more comfortable realm of selfberatement, characterized by fantasies of self-mutilation and crashing her car.

Playing in an Empty Room

61

I wondered aloud about these nameless, faceless, non-persons who evoked her anger. She was at first very facile in her assertions but then acknowledged that if there were some faces lurking, they had been safely locked away from view. We played with this idea of a locked room: I was looking for a key and she had carefully thrown it away long ago. I imagined keyholes through which one might be able to still see whatever was being hidden from sight. Mary warned me away from this Pandora’s box, which I seemed as determined to open as she to keep it safe from view. I suggested that the contents of locked boxes always seem more toxic as they wrestle amongst themselves within these confined spaces; that whatever haunts us tends to be much less substantial in the vastness of open spaces. “Perhaps that is one of the problems,” I suggested. “Perhaps a part of you needs to keep believing in their power.” In response, Mary smiled one of her tortured smiles that seems to hover somewhere between acknowledgment and recoil. As we sat in silence for a few moments, I was thinking about the safety provided by keeping faith with her demons. Affirming their power keeps her from having to venture out into dangerous waters, where they might strike her unaware. Encountering them anew is so much worse than carrying them with her, in hope of staving off the intrusion from outside. In these moments of meeting, as we play with our images - sharing, infiltrating, parrying and thrusting - I am aware of the desperate fight in which w e are engaged. In this dance, I too easily become the aggressor, torturing her with my intrusive understanding, assaulting her images with my own. I find myself caught between the role of aggressor and the helpless observer who watches in silence as her life slips away. It is as though Mary has no real hope of any internal positive agency that she might truly bring to bear. In moments such as these, I can only share with her my sense of the dilemma in which we are caught; how compellingly the roles of complicit bystander (Charles, 2002c) and active aggressor are evoked in me by the drama in which we are engaged. One of the impossible dilemmas for Mary seems to be how to reconcile her fantasies of symbiotic merger with those of imminent annihilation. It is difficult for her to even imagine being connected without becoming engulfed, lost within the other. Her retreat from the interpersonal world can be seen as a function of the type of narcissistic omnipotent object relations that defend against recognition of the separation that is inherent in actual relationships. This type of stance denies the aggression and ambivalence evoked by frustration and also denies envious and aggressive feelings. Aggression is particularly problematic for Mary to acknowledge, as though this would mark her as utterly vile. In this type of dangerous ground, in which the land mines are deadly and often deeply hidden, phantasy can be a domain in which the unconscious of patient and analyst play out whatever models of reality have not yet been put into

62

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

words. Symington (1985) depicts phantasy as “an active force that effects that which it imagines or represents” (p. 354). As long as the phantasy can find a willing recipient, it tends to maintain its power. In this way, we are invited quite profoundly into the patient’s phantasy and must, to some measure, be able to receive it in order to appreciate it, but we must also be able to step outside of it in order to have any way of speaking to it in a useful or growth enhancing fashion. This would seem to be the safety of the transitional space (Winnicott, 1971) in which ideas can be played with at sufficient distance that one can think about them rather than becoming engulfed by them. In this realm, projective identification and splitting provide means for both denial and for becoming known, if we can find our bearings within the other’s ambivalence and limitations, as well as our own. As Mary speaks about the importance of being able to keep her anger at bay, but also begins to attempt to explore the idea of imagining what might lie inside the locked room, I find myself thinking of her mother. “Of course, there’s my mother,” she says, which lets me know that that is not the secret that is being left unsaid. “I imagine you must be angry at me for torturing you in this way,” I suggest. Mary pantomimes her recoil, as she often does when one of my “insights” has sliced through her like an arrow. There is a level of play-acting here, as we ostensibly banter about deadly serious subjects, but there is also the underlying reality. The play of it allows some room for movement in these deadly waters in which survival is continually at stake. As we speak to the dilemma, rather than merely acting it out, we are able to consider the roles as well as the dilemma itself and thereby to see it more vividly: to see it anew. This perspective affirms our other roles: working together in this desperate struggle to build a foundation upon which Mary can more comfortably (or at least less precipitously) stand. Crucial to our ability to play in these dire moments are my willingness to overtly acknowledge the torture and Mary’s willingness to acknowledge her own complicity in this. “I don’t want to be seen,” says this woman who hides her eyes, much like the child who believes that if her eyes are covered she cannot be seen. At some level, she must know that this is not true, and yet she needs this illusion in order to begin to survive existing within someone’s gaze. “But,” she continues, reluctantly, valiantly, “there’s a part of me that wants someone to see.” And so, Mary gives me the secret of her return - part of the key to what lies locked safely within the walled off space she safeguards but also points to, thereby delineating the outlines in spite of her defiant cries to the contrary. Here lies the desperation, the ultimate terror of imagining that one might be cared for or cared about and of encountering the edges of that caring that seem to belie that caring had existed at all.

Playing in an Empty Room

63

As Mary attempts to negotiate a relationship with me, she is caught between her desperate fantasies and her equally desperate terrors. Her models of “mother” are largely of two types: absent or attacking. The notion of a non-lethal present mother has become a phantasm that lures her towards certain doom as she follows first one fantasy then another, inevitably disappointed by the failure of the fantasy to be any more than human. As Mary began to talk, once again, about her sense that her attempts are doomed (“I’ve realized that the problem is that I’m just really fucked up”), I see this as one more arc around the spiral, in which hope hurts and must be replaced by an affirmation of failure. She sees it too, but wants to describe it as a circle with no real movement. This is palpably untrue, which she acknowledges as I say it. I then interpret to her the wish to make it all meaningless so that she needn’t try, to which she responds with another embarrassed smile. This woman’s shame is so profound that she can barely engage in eye contact at all. As she attempts to move her eyes towards mine, they roll sideways or upwards: anywhere so as to avoid actual engagement. This aversion has been so noteworthy that it has made the increasing moments of actual eye contact palpable evidence of profound changes occurring within our work together. ELUSIVE MAGIC: DISAPPEARING ACTS As Mary refers back to the “locked room” of our last engagement, I suggest that it is she who is locked within the room. I speak to my sense of a barren womb within which she tried to grow with too little sustenance. Mary, in turn, talks about wanting to retreat into her barren womb with her “blanky”: that has been the safest place in which to survive. When she was younger, I affirm, she needed to survive within that space. This was the world that had been given to her, but now it did not necessarily need to be all there was. I related to Mary my impression that she seemed to keep trying to heal/delight her mother, to give her pleasure. But her mother cannot receive her gifts and so Mary winds up feeling empty. This leaves Mary perpetually trying to create something out of nothing. “Like Houdini,” I said. This image resonated for her. I went on: “It makes me think of this book about a boy who keeps trying to get the smile of delight he needs from his parents’ eyes. He keeps devising these magic tricks so that he can appear before them and finally elicit the delight he has needed to find. His tricks become more elaborate and threaten to destroy him because he’ll never be able to find that delight in their eyes. He would have to be able to find it within.” “I’m thinking about how hard you tried to get what you needed from your mother, but she didn’t have it to give. You wound up living in a barren

64

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

room because she was living in a barren room. She had nothing to give you except what had helped her to survive, and you knew that that wasn’t working. So you rejected what little she had to offer. And now you go back, hoping to be received, but she can’t really find the self you need her to see. So you wind up just setting yourself up, over and over. You’re not going to find it in her. You would have to find it in yourself.” “I can’t see it,” said Mary, darkly. “Not easily,” I conceded, “but you do get glimpses.” Mary smiled her acknowledgment. “But they disappear so quickly,” she said. “That’s what you have me for,” I replied. “I know they’re still there when you’re not seeing them.” Mary brings her metaphors to me, inviting me into the paranoid-schizoid realm she inhabits, in which the good is inevitably absent and the bad lurks at every turn. I imbibe these myths and take them in as my own, internally processing them, struggling with them, trying to find some space within them that might give us some means for escape from this locked room we have come to inhabit together. As I struggle with Mary’s metaphors, in turn I give her my own, so that we can know together the metaphors we are living with and living within. In this way, we can better define and delineate the contours of this universe in which we are caught and thereby, perhaps, find our way out - or in - to one that allows for greater growth. Playing together within our metaphors is one way of constructing realities and thereby creating possibilities. We wrestle with these images between us, trying to devise within them some scaffolding that might bear our weight. Mary’s reality is carefully constructed in such a way as to keep her from confronting her own image of herself. As she avoids eye contact with incredible alacrity, I wonder about the image she is afraid to see reflected back to her. I ask what she fears seeing reflected in the mirror. This statement precipitates a dizzying descent. “I don’t look into mirrors, if I can avoid it,” replies Mary. As we began to explore her aversion, I wondered when it had begun. “When I was around 5 or 6, I had this experience of looking into the mirror, and it wasn’t me I was seeing, and I just stopped looking,” said Mary. As I enquired into this, Mary told me that she had felt completely isolated and alienated from the child she saw staring back at her. She knew that the mirror was not reflecting herself back to her because the person she was seeing was the person whom everyone else was seeing, and she knew that they were not seeing her. “What were they missing?” I asked, already sensing the answer: the pain. “My feelings,” replied Mary, “my feelings.” Her determination to not see keeps Mary from encountering whatever seems intolerable, but also keeps her from encountering any evidence to the contrary. In this way, our preconceptions can become deadly phantasms that keep us locked within the walls of our deepest fears. As Mary talks about her need to keep any hope or desire in check, she reveals the utter desolation and desperation

Playing in an Empty Room

65

that threaten to engulf her with their urgency if she fails to keep them in check. Her compromise has been to engage in fantasy relationships in which there is no hope of any consummation in reality. In this way, the fantasy of relationship precludes any actual engagement, deepening her isolation. Moreover, it also affirms her ostensible lack of need, thereby reinforcing the circle of denial that has reduced her existence to the merest subsistence. Bion (1970) distinguishes between the envy that is associated with gratitude and that linked to greed. The former is capable of linking and growth (in that it is amenable to the establishment of a good object relationship), whereas the latter lends itself to de-generation; to unlinking; to the breaking to bits of whatever might have been potentially meaning-full. Mary tries to induce in herself a state of not-needing in order to keep herself from being vulnerable to the desperate hunger she experiences for relationship. However, as Bion (1970) notes, “what is required is not the decrease of inhibition but a decrease of the impulse to inhibit; the impulse to inhibit is fundamentally envy of the growth-stimulating objects” (pp. 128-129). Envy is an insidious force. Its denial keeps us running in ever diminishing circles of despair and desolation. Our very facility at avoidance keeps the circle in place, so that it is only the intense pain we experience that tells us that whatever adjustment had been deemed satisfactory has shifted and now fails to provide the requisite relief. Mary seems so vulnerable and frightened that it is easy to miss the destructive aspects of herself that emerge, only to be turned inward almost instantaneously. This prescribed blindness to her own aggression has made it important for me to interpret her anger, to wonder about whatever anger she might feel towards me, and to acknowledge the difficulty of acknowledging it, even as I do so. Without this affirmation, it would become one more weapon turned against herself and turned against the analysis: one more proof that one cannot truly be known and survive the encounter. In this way, the analyst’s avoidance of the destructive aspects of the envy keep it in place as a horror seemingly too hazardous to acknowledge. Etchegoyen and his colleagues (1987) note that whatever we are not willing to speak to becomes larger and more difficult: “It is only through interpretive modulation that envy can gradually be stripped of its omnipotent destructiveness” (p. 59). Although we may not be able to modify the envious response itself, by interpreting the envy we show that we can tolerate it, which denudes it of its omnipotent destructiveness and facilitates its integration. Joseph (1981a) notes that when psychological relief has been purchased at the price of emotional engagement, attempts towards contact can become a source of acute pain. According to Joseph, this type of situation arises when the individual has managed to establish apparent relationships that are actually illusory. In the treatment, this situation may manifest itself as an identification with the

66

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

analyst that carries the illusion of closeness or intimacy in either the present or the future without real relating or differentiation. Breaking into the illusion of the relationship - by moving towards actual engagement - then creates psychic pain. As we work within the transference, getting to know the patient and verbalizing our understandings, the increased contact can be experienced as disturbing and threatening to the patient, who is being asked to be in the moment with the analyst in a way that feels hazardous and potentially annihilating (Joseph, 1981b). At times, the destructive aspects of envy may be so strong that the libidinal self is sacrificed in order to keep the other from being successful in saving it. As Mary sits in her empty room, there is a fierce struggle going on between her desires for growth and her need to inhibit those desires in order to defend herself from them (see Charles, 2000a for an elaboration of this theme). She sits in the emptiness, needing to destroy whatever might be good. One means for this is to keep desire and satisfaction in the realm of fantasy rather than giving anyone the opportunity to spoil it by having any control over it. In phantasy, she keeps it controllable by keeping it safely within the realm of self-production. In the service of keeping her phantasies intact, Mary redefines various realities. For example, her preoccupation with not being late enables her ostensibly to “be good,” while acting out her self-destructive urges. The urgency of not being late is used as a kind of drug to avoid engaging with me by stimulating herself to the point where she is barely present in the room, drugging herself with her own inner chemicals to help her to avoid contact. In this way, she provides herself with an opportunity to discharge her aggressions and also avoids thinking about our work or our relationship, each of which is fraught with peril for her. She also puts me in the position of either being uncaring (should I fail to see) or assaultive (should I insist on interpreting what I see). This pulls us back into the sadomasochistic loop in which she can avoid actually engaging with what might be known by becoming assaulted by it instead. Guilt, fear, and insight can all be marshaled in the service of this frontal assault on knowing. After the very intense session in which we had engaged over Mary’s ongoing destruction of self and possibilities through her avoidant terror of engagement, she came in quite unsettled. She had had a rough time, she said. “I twisted and turned it every which way - when I wasn’t avoiding it and ignoring it - trying to just make it into something I could be angry about, but I knew it didn’t quite fit.” Her statement left me still not knowing in what shape it did fit in her mind, and so I waited. “I wound up just feeling really bad, like I had really fucked up. I felt as though, to use a biblical turn of phrase,” she said with a chillingly mirthless skeleton of a laugh, “I had been expelled from the Garden of Eden.” “What were you expelled for?” I wondered. “For not doing a better job,” was her reply. Now I was really confused. “It was what you said about not playing games,” she said. “That felt like a criticism,” I replied, finally “getting” it.

Playing in an Empty Room

67

At that point, I knew that I had not managed to keep in view what had seemed important, but rather it had become lost behind the self-critical twist with which Mary is able to turn away from whatever knowledge seems too painful to bear. In this way, the material of the session - which was about how Mary plays games with herself as a way of avoiding unpleasant awareness – was subverted and avoided as information that we might reflect on. Instead, it became ammunition by which she (and I) could be assaulted. This enactment provided a means for assaulting me with my assaultiveness, which helped us to look more clearly at the interactive assaultiveness that passes between us in the guise of seeking understanding. If truth is to be held as deadly, then its pursuit becomes self-immolation. However, Mary’s willingness to bring her ambivalence into the session also allowed us to look at her ambivalence and to accept its legitimacy. If she is going to “bang her head into a brick wall,” it’s important for us to be able to witness the occurrence and to speak to it and reflect on it. As we looked at her assumption that I would inevitably be critical of her (in being able to observe where she gets stuck), I was able to reflect back to her my appreciation of her very stuckness. In this way, as we looked back on her childhood mirrors, I could interpret them to her through my sense of how profoundly her aversion had to do with how critical and unaccepting those childhood mirrors had been and how she had internalized them as a pervasive and deeply felt sense of being inherently bad and worthless. Although Mary appears to resonate to my resonance, she still seems to prefer to lie in the abyss rather than taking the risk of falling once again. This would seem to be a safe place to rest before contemplating, once again, the climb. “Talking!” she says with a joking repugnance. “It’s right up there with people!” And so we rest on this uneasy ground where I find myself asking Mary to be with me in a way in which she would rather not be and speaking of things that Mary would rather not see. Not speaking becomes an affirmation of hopelessness. Speaking feels potentially annihilating but also brings hope along with the engagement. On this particular day Mary left in good spirits, having managed to survive the maelstrom and to affirm, in some sense, that she could use her defenses if need be, but that that would not mean that we could not see the loss inherent in this enforced blindness. Meanwhile, we had also affirmed that I could see without necessarily invoking the seemingly imminent expulsion from Eden. BENIGN REFLECTION/DISTORTING MIRROR For Mary, seeing is inherently problematic. This makes my seeing problematic as well. Reflecting the distortions in her internal mirror would seem to be one means for encouraging a glimpse into (or even imagining that one might find) an

68

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

alternative mirror in which one would not become instantly shattered by some impossible truth. This terror takes us back to Winnicott’s (1971) reminder that the original visual context within which we are found and differentiated is the mother’s face. The ultimate mirror is always the mother, so that “if the mother’s face is unresponsive, then a mirror is a thing to be looked at but not looked into” (Winnicott, p. 113). For Mary, the failure to be seen became a prohibition against seeing herself. Mary is so lost within this dilemma that she literally turns a blind eye towards me and towards self; I have never met anyone who recoils so utterly from eye contact. This “turning a blind eye” (Steiner, 1981) makes it almost impossible for Mary to encounter alternative views of self, although they do appear to be filtering through from the periphery of her horizons. Mary is beginning to acknowledge her ambivalence between urges towards evasion and those towards growth. As she presents the dilemma to me visually, weighing out the choices in her hands, her eyes slide to the side. Mary feels such shame for any representation of herself that it is painful to put herself forward in any way. Being known and being not known are equally painful poles of an impossible dilemma. “You seem to have this idea that knowing yourself would be annihilating,” I suggested. “Oh, yeah,” Mary replied, heavily, with her wry humor that is just this side of despair. Once again, we found ourselves up against this idea of a mirror that could not be looked into without revulsion, without annihilation. “It seems as though as you try to move forward you come up against these inner voices that seem to attack you and get in your way. The voice of your mother is more clear to me. The voice of your father is less clear,” I said. “The voice of my father is probably the one that’s responsible for me being here,” replied Mary, her face softening. “That’s the one that encourages me – says ‘you can do it’.” Mary’s eyes moistened. “It makes me want to cry and I don’t want to cry.” “Why not?” I enquired. “Because it’s futile; there isn’t any point to it. It’s just a waste of time.” “It seems as though it’s not just futile,” I observed, with dry humor. “You seem to struggle quite actively against the tears.” “That’s the voice of my mother, saying I’m stupid, ungrateful. ‘What you crying for? You think you got it so bad?’” Mary mimicked. “So part of the not wanting to cry is defensive and part of it is an attack,” I continued, taking note of the strength behind her determination to not cry and thinking that this was Mary’s way of asserting her own power against her mother’s attempts at domination. Mary was not able to see the attacking part; that seemed to her to suggest a hostility that she did not attach to it. I thought that it was important for Mary to be able to acknowledge and to affirm the powerful part of her that could stand up to her mother in this way. Mary, however, found it difficult to view herself from this perspective. Being powerful too easily became an invitation for attack.

Playing in an Empty Room

69

“I’m thinking that you can defend yourself by retreating or by finding your own power, but fending off the attack seems dangerous,” I ventured. Mary agreed. “And yet it is an important part of you that is determined to keep at bay your mother’s attempts to keep you in this position of retreat, where you are the bad one,” I continued. As I listened to Mary talk about her father, there was the sense that his was the voice of care, in contrast to her mother, who had been experienced as cruel and attacking. I suggested that her mother had never worked through her own fears and so her love was tainted with her fears, expressed in her attempts to destroy the parts of Mary that were seen as problematic. I also wondered to what extent the violence that characterized the relationships between Mary’s father and brothers could be traced to hostile projections emanating from the mother. It seemed important for Mary to be able to consider her tendency to retreat in context, so that it could become a preferred mode of defense rather than a sign of inherent weakness and insufficiency. “In your home, it was important for you to be able to find a retreat from all the havoc that was being played out around you. But now it’s important to be able to know that you can find safety but also stand back and see what all the havoc is about. Your mother was defending the parts of herself she didn’t want to see by attacking them in you. At one level you knew it was a lie, but at another level you believed it was true. But you also knew that she loved you, so the love and the attacks were all mixed up, just as they have been with your lovers. Your mother wasn’t willing to have you see the attack and you’ve tried to not see the attacking part of your lovers in order to keep that part at bay. But you would need to be able to see both to find any real safety in your relationships.” “I can get a glimpse of it sometimes,” said Mary. “But when I think of it, it seems so overwhelming. I don’t know how to sort through it all.” I was thinking that the task becomes impossible because she cannot use herself as a frame of reference. “Perhaps you need to be able to look in the mirror,” I said. “Oh that mirror again,” said Mary, smiling, lowering her head once again. As we were talking, I had the sense that Mary gets stuck in what seem to be paranoid-schizoid dynamics, in which she is caught within an artificially created and perpetuated either/or dichotomy from which she cannot escape. I tried to communicate this image to her. “Sometimes we get caught in an either/or kind of a bind and we wind up playing it out blindly, without being able to see outside of it. It’s like being stuck inside a television screen, and the same show keeps playing. The settings might change, or the costumes, but it’s the same drama being played out over and over again. You seem to get caught in these dramas because you are afraid of what you would see if you actually took a good look. But not looking keeps you tripping over the same things.”

70

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS The next session, Mary came in with her usual reluctance. She had been thinking, she said, about something she had not yet talked about; something that she found herself referring to amorphously but never quite bringing up. As she sat in silence that was deepening in its intensity, I noted that in bringing up the subject at all, she had left it sitting in the room, quite palpably. It was on the table, I noted aloud, even if the package remained unopened. Mary talked about her ambivalence, saying that sometimes the subject seemed catastrophic and sometimes silly. I said that I thought that she was telling me about these two sides so that I could hold on to both when she was slipping dangerously to one side or the other. At that point, she would need some reference point to help anchor her; to keep her from getting lost and rocketing out of control. At that point, I left Mary to her silence, refusing internally to have any interest in whether she told me or not, and concentrating instead on keeping my equilibrium within what had become a very taut space. I assumed that when she was ready, she would speak. Meanwhile, the tension seemed to be building to the point where she would have to either speak or leave the room. “I’m wanting to bolt,” she said. I smiled, as did she. After a long silence, Mary began, with difficulty, to talk about what had seemed unspeakable. She was concerned that her fragmented memories might not be real: that the story she had been telling herself would be discovered to be a fabrication, like the studies she had read in journals that purported to “debunk” the “myth” of repressed memories. I asked Mary what she did remember and she began to tell me. In the speaking, her experience and its meanings began to take precedence over her hopes and fears of finding her memories to be meaningless. In relating one fragment, she noted remembering having had to clean up the residue: “I needed to destroy the evidence,” she said. “That seems to reverberate at a lot of levels,” I replied into the silence. As Mary begins to recall what had had to be suppressed because it was too terrible to remember, she begins to find the veracity within her own sense of her own experience. She no longer needs so greatly to test it out before me but rather uses me as an opportunity to test it out with me, in my presence. In this way, she is no longer alone with it or in it, which gives her some anchor in reality. She begins to tell her story in a place in which knowledge is not precluded; blindness is not the price of admission. At times such as these, the invitation would seem to be to hold a place within which the story might emerge; to witness the individual holocausts of our patients - the repeated traumas that leave them disorganized, disintegrating their fragile, evolving identities (Charles, 2000b). The witness provides an opportunity to retell the narrative without the overwhelming shame, in this way affirming the inherent value of the person and the story. This helps enable the person to

Playing in an Empty Room

71

establish and maintain her own inner truth and coherency, and to thereby rescue the self from the sense of impending annihilation that is one aspect of this traumatic disremembering: "for when one's history is abolished, one's identity ceases to exist as well" (Laub, 1991, p. 82). When the narrative can be repeated without retraumatization, this creates the possibility of play. There is something that is being created in the repetition of a narrative that is being accepted, understood, and valued in a new way that is an essential characteristic of play, as Gadamer (1988) defines it. For the individual who has not had the benefit of a facilitative mirror, the analytic relationship provides a new mirror, a new spectator in whom the play can take place (see Charles, 2004a). Just as in the parent/child dyad, imitation and recognition provide fundamental tools for growth, so too in the analytic setting, imitation and repetition provide a recognition of essence and a means for playing out and bringing to life the underlying form and structure. In this way, it is our recognition that captures and offers us a glimpse of an underlying and essential truth.

This page intentionally left blank

Five

Myths of Father and Son “He’s dreaming now,” said Tweedledee: “and what do you think he’s dreaming about?” Alice said “Nobody can guess that.” “Why, about you!” Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. “And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?” “Where I am now, of course,” said Alice. “Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!” “If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out – bang! – just like a candle!” - Lewis Carroll; Through the Looking Glass

“O” is one way of referencing the powerful urges towards merger and (re)union that often occur in conjunction with equally potent urges towards transformation and transcendence. Campbell (1949) describes these urges in terms of a “hero’s journey” through a layered labyrinth, in which the self becomes discovered. In this journey, we encounter all the phantasms of myth and memory and, optimally, must come to grips with our hopes and our fears. This is a transformative process in which: where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world (Campbell, 1949, p. 25).

THE HERO’S TALE In this archetypal journey, the son must overthrow the myths of the father - and of the son - in order to encounter his own reality. In my work with David, w e have come upon this chasm of father meeting son repeatedly, as he struggles to even imagine that he might find and put forward his own voice without imminent annihilation. David had sought treatment with me after having suffered one more defeat in his attempt to extricate himself from the imago of the devalued and

74

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

defeated son. He had first tried to find a “new father,” but the idealized father image he had discovered had been found to have feet of clay. David left this new “family” not only disillusioned but also deeply ashamed by having been taken in, once again, by the fantasy of the father. The most recent blow had come in the form of a rejection by a woman who had caught his imagination in a way that still held him in stranglehold. Tantalized and rejected, he experienced himself once again as the little boy whose love had not been sufficient to save his mother from the evil seductor. One impediment in our work together has been an insufficiency of time. David is a quietly attractive young man in his mid-twenties with a James Dean look to the eyes. He is painfully self-conscious but well presented, with an engaging smile and a resolved determination to take responsibility for himself and his actions. David comes in twice a week. Occasionally he takes another hour but cannot really afford to do so: Our work is taxing him financially as it is. We have agreed that the work goes better when we meet more frequently, but until recently we seemed to be at an impasse in this regard. As the intensity of our work has increased, I have searched within my own mind for possible resolutions, as he clearly would benefit from having more time to build a space in which he could work more freely. I spent some time weighing out the possible pros and cons of offering David free time. Finally, I had reached a point where I felt that the spaces in between sessions were becoming untenable, setting up a rhythm in which he was being invited to make a home for himself each week, only to lose it once again. As a result, I told David that I felt as though the spaces in between were too long for him at this particular point in time and that I would be willing to give him a free hour if I had it, but that he would be in charge of asking for the time when he felt that it would be useful to him. In this way, I was trying to avoid setting up a situation that was overly seductive, in which he would feel as though he must accommodate to my needs as a condition of engagement. DAVID’S DREAM David accepted this arrangement with apparent equanimity. There was little change in our work, aside from a somewhat decreased sense that he was drowning in his own silence. To the contrary, there seemed to be a greater confidence on his part that there was something being worked through in his silence that might eventually be spoken about between us. Then, one day, for the first time David hazarded to bring in a dream. He detailed it with some enthusiasm, though he found it difficult to speak about it once the dream had been described. In the dream, David had been sitting in the back of a white car: “on the passenger side,” he specified, “so that you have an idea of where things were.” He

Myths of Father and Son

75

ordered the space with his hands as he spoke, in resonance with my own sense that placement and spatial orientations in dreams have profound meanings in terms of our configural worlds (Charles, 2003a). Ashley (his girlfriend) was sitting next to him and his father was driving. Sitting next to his father was Mr. N., his parents’ critical and opinionated neighbor. They were just pulling out of a parking lot and were waiting for a space in the traffic through which to enter the road, when a man knocked on the window and asked for change for a dollar. As the occupants of the car began to search through their pockets, the man pulled out a gun and began to fire, shooting at each of the occupants. The car lurched forward erratically and David reached forward, put his foot on his father’s leg to engage the accelerator, and steered while the car drove off quite rapidly. David said that he was going rather fast intentionally, in an attempt to catch the attention of a policeman, who might then be able to offer some assistance. As they drove down the street, they came to a dead end, at which point they had to turn either right or left. At this juncture, they saw a policeman, who had apparently stopped another car. David felt some relief but then the policeman sped away. David turned right and then there were two large trucks loaded with two by fours in the path. The lumber was spilling off the truck and David was trying to avoid hitting it. He steered across a bridge, which ended precipitously, and the car dropped to the roadway below. The occupants were all thrown clear of the car and David found himself lying, hurt, on the ground. Then, after having been in the hospital, David was in a hotel room and was trying to call Ashley. She did not answer, but rather appeared at the door. She seemed to have lost her left arm in the accident, which caused David some anxiety, as his left arm seemed to be hurt and a bit “weird.” After that, David found himself at his parents’ store, which was not really his parents’ store but was situated across from where the store actually stands. The store seemed to be empty but then David heard a noise upstairs. When he went up to investigate, he was surprised to encounter his mother. “You know that feeling you get when you’re a kid and you’re coming home from school and you first see your mother?” he said, with obvious pleasure. “I don’t know how to describe it, but that’s what it felt like.” David said that he was surprised to see his mother, because she had been dead, along with his father and Mr. N. He had asked her if she had come back to life, but she said “no” and he realized that she was just a hallucination. The store seemed to fill up with people who were disturbing and kind of threatening, so David and Ashley ran out of it, running down the street. As they were running, they came upon two policemen who were running towards them, shooting at someone over David and Ashley’s shoulders. I asked David what he made of the dream. He made a few preliminary attempts at speech but then lapsed into silence. I waited, hoping that he would be able to speak to his own associations to the dream. I was reluctant to superimpose my ideas or images over his own. However, as time went by and he

76

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

seemed unable to speak, I said: “I’m thinking about how, in the dream, your father was not able to drive the car and you had to take over the steering for him.” “Well, I think he was dead,” David replied. “You needed him to be dead in order to be able to take the wheel?” I wondered. “It makes me think of the dilemma you’ve been in, where it seems like your parents keep trying to decide how you should steer your life.” “Yeah,” David replied, smiling. “It does seem that way.” My ability to make conjectures about possible meanings within the dream seemed to help David to be interested in it in a way that opened up the space that had seemed closed. I asked about Mr. N. “He’s our neighbor. He’s the one who made that nasty comment about me wanting to join the military.” “So he’s kind of like your Dad, in that he’s pretty critical and thinks his ideas should prevail,” I said. “Yeah, I guess so,” David replied. At one point, I asked David if he had any associations to Ashley’s left arm being gone. Nothing came to mind. “Are either of you left handed?” I asked, wondering whose hand was being referred to and which hand was important. “Ashley is,” replied David. “Sometimes, in dreams,” I said, “a missing limb can stand for one’s sense of power or potency. So, I wonder whether Ashley missing her left arm and your concerns over the state of your own arm might have something to do with questions about your potency vis-à-vis your Dad. I wonder if it seemed as though he would need to be dead in order for you to be able to live your own life.” “I see where you’re coming from,” responded David, with a smile. There seemed to be a sense of delight in the visibility of the dream and also self-consciousness over exposure. He said that these certainly seemed to be the things that are on his mind lately. I agreed that our dreams are a useful way of reminding ourselves about whatever is troubling us, allowing us enough distance to be able to take a look, while allowing us to keep whatever is pressing “in mind.” This interpretation seemed to set off another wave of silent associations, which took us to the end of the hour. THE MINOTAUR Beneath the surface of David’s dreams lies the uneasy outlines of the minotaur, as David’s hopes become warped and distorted by his sense of his own insufficiency. At times, I break into David’s reverie, when I sense that it has become unproductive or actively destructive. Our many moments together have made me sensitive to nonverbal communications, both noticed and unnoticed, such as the light across his face that I read in terms of shades of transparency versus opacity that seem to mark the productivity of his thoughts. I enquire into his state of being, reluctant to impose my presumptions on his own and yet sensing, at times, that he can use some assistance. “Where are you?” I ask. “Nowhere,” is his reply. “Did I disrupt something?” I ask. “Not really,” he replies. “I wasn’t thinking about anything just then. I’d been going in and out and had done some thinking,

Myths of Father and Son

77

but just then I was kind of stuck. I think about talking to you about things, but then I think about you being critical and it just seems stupid anyway.” “The censors are not your friend,” I observe, wryly. David smiles, his eyes alight. We talk about his internal criticism and how it keeps him from encountering something different. “Yes,” he says, “but then, I go away and I think ‘oh, she really thought that was stupid; she just wasn’t telling me.’” “So you wind up imposing the criticism either way,” I say. “In a way, that seems to be reassuring, because it’s in line with your beliefs. There’s a part of you that’s sure that you’re really worthless. No one can really break into that because, at some level, you’re really looking for the confirmation that you’re right. Nothing else really feels true or real. If I’m reassuring, I’m useless, because I don’t really ‘get it.’ You have trouble believing in anything or anyone who might value you.” I had a sense of a deadly game David was playing with himself, in which he could never win. I tried to communicate my internal images to him, saying: “It’s like you’re hiding this part of yourself that you believe is worthless. You come in here, hoping you’re wrong but not really believing it. So you kind of hide out, peeking out periodically from under the shell. It’s like this weird shell game, where you are under the shell and you can’t get outside of the game. You kind of lift it up periodically to get a peek, but you feel like you need the sleight of hand happening so that no one will really see what’s inside, because you’re afraid that there is nothing there. So, you keep hiding under this shell, and you peek out periodically, and you do manage to take some of it in and keep it inside, because there has been growth, but you don’t really believe in it.” David smiled in recognition, his eyes meeting mine. DEADLY SELF-AWARENESS/SALVATION BY METAPHOR With David, the self-consciousness seems to become so deadly that there is little room to speak. I counter this emptiness with my metaphors, which help to provide a place where we can meet. Metaphors give us some interim space in which we can talk about these deadly serious matters without becoming overwhelmed and incapacitated. “I think about things,” he tells me, “and I know it would be good if I could talk about them, and I try to talk myself into it but then it’s like, ‘no, not today; maybe tomorrow.’ I can see that there’s some things I can talk about that I couldn’t before, like my parents . . .” “But you don’t know how you got there,” I replied. “Yeah,” affirms David. “So,” I continued, “at one level, you can see that there has been some growth, but at another level it is hard to believe in it or to know how it might happen. And, in some ways, better to not believe, because that would feel like pressure to move beyond what seems safe or possible.” As feelings become more intense, David’s sense of safety becomes precarious. He finds his own anger particularly problematic in that it makes him

78

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

feel uncomfortably like his father. David tries to disarm and disown the anger, which then becomes a persecutor, threatening to engulf him. After a particularly intense series of sessions in which we were up against the issue of whether one might be able to be angry without destroying the other and one’s self, David disappeared for a week. He neither called nor responded to my telephone message. As a result, I really did not know whether he would show up for the next session and was pleasantly surprised and somewhat relieved when he did. I was pleased to once again affirm in my own mind the strength of David’s will to persevere in this work that had become so terribly arduous for him. As David began to settle himself within the space, I waited to see whether he would bring up the issue of the gap but, not surprisingly, he did not. I found myself somewhat ironically amused by this game we find ourselves playing, in which awkward truths parade themselves before us, ostensibly unseen. When I brought up the gap, David smiled quite widely. He seemed both embarrassed and relieved to be afforded this opportunity to erase any significance either one of us might be attaching to this “innocent” and meaningless occurrence. He told me that he had been studying a lot and had been tired. I said that I thought that I had been pushing him and that he had been uncomfortable and angry and had had no way of speaking to that. He had hoped that the anger would disappear, but it had turned into tiredness that had, in turn, caused him to miss the sessions. He smiled in recognition. “I can see that,” he said. However, he had difficulty speaking about anything that he might have been thinking and there was a great deal of distress in his face. I was concerned that without words to detoxify the experience of my knowing him, the knowing might become overwhelmingly assaultive and intrusive. I asked David what he was thinking about and he responded that he wasn’t thinking about anything that seemed to go anywhere. I said that those were probably the most important things to say; that if he already knew where they went, we would have far less to learn from following them. He smiled again, in apparent acknowledgement of being caught in his own bind. He began to try to talk. “I was thinking about arguing,” he said. This seemed to be as far as he could go in the moment. I was wondering how the idea of arguing played into his feelings about sitting on the other side of an argument with me that was being acted out rather than talked about. I asked him to amplify. He explained that it was difficult because he couldn’t remember the details: It became a kind of fog. I said that I wondered if he needed the details because he expected to need ammunition with which to defend his position. I suggested that his expectation of having an argument kept him from exploring whatever was important to him about whatever he was trying to defend.

Myths of Father and Son

79

MOVING INTO MYTH: AFFIRMING THE ELEMENTS/ENLIVENING THE SPACE I talked a bit about my sense of how the anger appeared to him. In my imagination, it seemed like a dragon breathing fire. However, the fire was not merely flames but rather had the form of his father, threatening to come out from him and take him over. I said that his fear that his anger would make him like his father kept him from being able to find the form of his own anger and to bring it into play in his world. “This becomes really treacherous,” I said, “because the anger is a signal that something is wrong that needs to be attended to. As long as the anger is too dangerous to take note of, you have no way of attending to the problem and figuring out how to work it through.” “I’m just afraid that I’ll say something awful,” responded David. “You don’t want them to see the anger so they will care about you, but then no one can really care about you,” I suggested. “I hear what you’re saying,” said David, with a rueful smile. David sat in very dejected silence. “Hmm,” he said. “Hmm,” I found myself responding. There was no acknowledgement of this interplay and, as I watched him sink further into dejection, I wondered whether he had experienced my echo as ridicule. We were almost at the end of the hour. “Sometimes,” I said, “things get so heavy that there’s no room for play.” David clearly was not following me, so I related back to him my observation of the previous interchange and how I had wondered whether he had experienced me as hurtful. “No,” he responded: He had been deep in thought about the events of the session and his associations to it and had not noticed the interplay. I said that I knew that we were in a difficult place in the work and that at times my pushing was pretty hard on him, and yet there seemed to be a part of him that recognized the pushing as valuable or he would not have returned. I told him that it was difficult for me, at times, to know how to take his needs or feelings into account, because he was so silent; that it might be important for him to “cry uncle” at times when he had had enough, rather than needing to resort to telling me in a way in which he wound up losing time that he might use in other ways. David smiled, looking into my eyes, as though in recognition of this trap in which he is caught. Before David left, I asked him whether he wanted to wait until our first session the following week or would like a time in between. He took the additional hour. There is a valiancy in this young man’s willingness to face his dragons that is quite profound. Even as he hides from bringing clear the outlines of the monster from the fog within which he has encased it, David brings the monster into the room by being willing to consider it in his own mind. We struggle between his need for sufficient silence in which to bring these images to light in his own mind, versus the pain of isolation in sitting alone with his most shameful self-knowledge without the safety of a dissenting view with which to ease the pain. I tell him that as long as he keeps the images to himself, he can

80

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

maintain whatever illusion he is trying to keep in play, but in the process also destroys any hope. This is a dilemma in which we are both caught and with which we both struggle: together, alone. At times, though, we do manage to meet. I am beginning to appreciate more profoundly the importance of this being able to meet and to not meet. David needs the safety of isolation within which to consider the dilemmas that are too large to encounter without that safety net. And yet, we need to keep visible the shadow of the man behind the curtain, so that we have the assurance of the real with which to ground ourselves. In this way, we stand caught between two shadows: first, most notably, the fierce dragon of his father’s anger that threatens to overtake him from inside and swallow everything that might potentially be good. This is the shadow of the catastrophe that has already befallen (Winnicott, 1963). In contrast to this shadow of the past, there is a second shadow: The shadow of that which might - but has not yet - happened, is more dim in its outlines, being constructed from the hope and faith that I find in my images of this quite extraordinary young man. The shadow of the past is becoming clearer in its outlines. I call it “the dragon,” in general terms, but it begins to have the face of Kronos, the Greek Titan who killed and/or castrated his father, Ouranos, with the assistance of his mother, Gaia (Graves, 1959; Caldwell, 1989). It was Kronos who was said to have devoured five of his own children, believing that it was his fate to be overthrown by them and trying to stave off this destiny. Kronos’ wife (and sister) Rhea substituted a stone for the sixth child, Zeus, who ultimately fulfilled his own destiny by defeating the father and causing Kronos to vomit forth the children he had swallowed. The defeat of the father was carried out with the assistance of Rhea, the mother. In this way, these gods are exposed as neither omniscient nor omnipotent: They can be opposed and deceived by their closest kin. In this chronology, we see the uneasy lineage of fear passed along from father to son in these myths of primal, defensive urges towards omnipotence. We also see how easily the mother becomes the consort of the son in these mythic portrayals of desire, revenge, and fear of retribution (see Charles, 2001a). Each father, in turn, is faced with the dilemma of how to keep from being overthrown by his sons. Ouranos tries to imprison his children in their mother’s body, whereas Kronos attempts to use his own body towards this end. In this way, he keeps his children from having in independent existence and also from aligning with the mother as accomplice (Caldwell, 1989). This familial pattern configures in profound ways to David’s descriptions of his own family, in which the feared and rageful father holds the family hostage. The mother becomes the hapless victim of the raging father and is unable to protect her children without sacrificing child to father or father to child. David finds himself caught between wanting to save his mother and finding himself being

Myths of Father and Son

81

destroyed by the very toxicity that has threatened to devour her. So determined is he to deny any similarity between father and self, that he adamantly disavows his own rage. The repudiated rage taunts and persecutes him, threatening to swell and swallow him whole, much as Kronos swallowed his sons. David’s mother sacrifices him by sacrificing herself, then invites him to kill the persecutor they have created together through their fear. As we sit with these wraiths of childhood circling around us, it becomes unclear whether his mother’s helplessness or his father’s destructive wrath is the more terrifying phantasm haunting David’s waking dreams. As David and I sit together, there is a part of me that resides in this land of mythical monsters and terrifying assaults and counterattacks through which the Greeks personified our inner turmoil. David is aware of his ambivalence, which he expresses in the smile that acknowledges the ways in which he enacts the prescribed prelude to our work in each hour. He hopes that he will be up to the challenge, but is never quite sure. I enquire into the thoughts that I believe he might be having: that he cannot count on himself; that at times resources are accessible that completely elude him at others. I wonder what these fears mean in terms of his relation to the world, and try to invite him further into the investigation. “It seems as though you dip your toe into the water, as if to test it,” I say. “Yes, but sometimes I just jump in.” “Oh,” I reply, surprised by this response, “what makes the difference?” “I don’t know,” says David thoughtfully, his eyes drawn. “I remember one time when I was a counselor at a camp and we went to various places and at one there was this diving board and it was really high. It was really, really, really high. The kids were jumping off of it, and I went up, and it was a lot higher than I had thought, and I didn’t know if I could do it, but I couldn’t just climb back down, so finally I just started running and figured that would keep me from being able to change my mind.” “Did you do it again?” I wondered. “Fortunately, I didn’t have the chance. They closed it right after that.” I wondered about his use of the term “fortunately” and enquired into that. Had he felt impelled by the presence of the board to try it again and, if so, what might this mean about his relationship to potential challenges/persecutors? I told David that I was wondering what it meant to him to have this challenge and to what extent it became defined as a problem because he was not always up to the challenge. David said that he gets stuck with his fear, much like his anger, because he feels as though it shouldn’t be there. I suggested that his anger seems to feel like something he isn’t supposed to have, something that should be eradicated. David pondered this for a bit and then said: “But it also feels like power.” He seems to have the intuitive sense that his potency is involved here; that cutting himself off from the source of his anger also disconnects him from his power.

82

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

“I’m thinking of a sponge,” I said, “that gets filled with more water than it can absorb and winds up leaking. If the sponge believes that it shouldn’t be wet, it will die, because it will lose touch with an important part of its vitality. If it has some sense of its relationships with the water, it can, perhaps, grapple with the facts of too little and too much and negotiate with the inevitability of spills.” “I see where you’re going,” said David. “I think that the problem was not your father’s anger, but rather your father’s inability to tolerate having his anger, which made him project it out and attack those around him with it, as though it was theirs. The problem was not that you took in your father’s anger but that you took in your father’s view of the anger as something that was not acceptable or containable, as though you could not have the anger and also survive. The sponge depends on water to be able to survive. It needs to learn to make sense of a world in which water must be taken in and at times will leak around the edges. We need our emotions in order to make our way in the world. We can no more cut off our anger than cut off our left hand because it doesn’t happen to draw as well as the right.” As we sat in silence, I could see within his eyes the David who is beginning to find the source of his power, even if it remains remote and tentative. There was a powerful sense of imminence in the room, as though we had called upon all the forces that had been held at bay. I could sense still unelaborated divinities at play. Our growing acceptance allowed them to enter the space, to stand removed, at ready, configuring their particular dramas in the distance, waiting to be elaborated on the psychoanalytic stage (see McDougall, 1982). David originally came to see me because he was involved in a triangle that was configured according to that between himself and his parents. He had attempted to rescue Andromeda from the monsters, but she had chosen to remain behind, ostensibly to be devoured by the forces of darkness. In this dilemma, David is acting out his wish to save his mother/lover from the oppressor/father. Unlike the myth (in which Perseus is able to save Andromeda and ultimately fulfills destiny by unwittingly slaying his mother’s father), however, in David’s drama he is not allowed to save the maiden/mother from distress but rather is abandoned, once again. His love for this woman becomes a source of unbearable shame in the face of her rejection. The father who is not willing to cede his legacy to the son puts the son in the impossible position of needing to slay either self or father. This is the dilemma in which David finds himself, as he tries desperately to find an adult place from which to stand in his interactions with his parents. He describes going to visit them with his usual wistful optimism, hoping that the pleasure at reunion will endure until the door closes once again. Predictably, however, the pleasure wanes and becomes assaulted by what seems, for David, to become the primal scene, in which his parents act out their aggressions and he sits powerless, emasculated by

Myths of Father and Son

83

his incapacity to save his mother from his father or to save his father from himself. David winds up feeling helpless, like a small child. “I’m just his kid, you know. He’s not going to listen to me. And he never will. No matter how old I get, he’ll always see me that way.” I resonate internally to the impossibility of ever being seen or acknowledged by his father: the inevitability of being demolished as a subject in his father’s presence. David is notably nonchalant as he describes the battle of his parents the night before. This façade is belied by the threat of tears welling in eyes that have become opaque. I wonder how he understands the interaction between them. I wonder, in particular, about his mother’s place in the drama, which must be, to some extent, his own. “So your father gets caught by his need to dominate, but what catches your mother?” I ask. This seems to be difficult for David to think about. It appears that she is looking for the same thing that David is looking for, that neither can find: recognition of their right to have their own opinion, without it being seen as an assault upon the father’s dominion. And yet, they continue to act as supplicant at the father’s throne, thereby affirming, once again, his dominion. “It must be hard for you to sit there watching them fight, feeling as though you should be able to do something and yet there is nothing you can do,” I say. David reacts against the sense of helplessness: “I can hit him back. I know that won’t do any good, but at least to let him feel the sting.” I have the sense that David wants to mark the place, to have some acknowledgement that pain is happening; that people are being assaulted. Caught between being the helpless child, the complicit bystander, and the inept savior, he chooses to try to deflect his father’s anger towards himself; to inflict enough of a sting that his father will go after him and leave his mother alone. “At least I can do something with it,” he tells me. “I can give it back to him. And I can leave.” In a world in which sadism prevails and the victim can neither save herself nor be rescued, there are no easy choices. For David, the path to salvation seems to lie in disconnecting himself from his father sufficiently to be safe from his anger. Taking this stance, however, involves a lie in which the anger becomes the territory of the father that has been displaced into the son. As long as the anger is ceded to the father, the power is his as well. Sitting with his father’s anger becomes an uneasy affirmation that David is unlike him in kind rather than degree. This offers an illusion of safety, but along with it comes the entrapment of the lie. The disavowal of that which is self disempowers David and keeps him from being able to have access to his own potency. In the Greek myths, when the father becomes threatened by the potency of the son, it is often the mother or motherly goddess who sustains the young hero. David’s mother’s need for defense, along with her inability to truly value or empower him as a subject in his own right, affirms for him his lack of potency. His attempts to find a new father on whom to model himself - and to thereby

84

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

attain manhood in the absence of his father’s blessing - have failed, much as his attempts to save mother and lover have ended in defeat. Unable to act out these mythic fantasies in which he becomes the hero by slaying or saving the other, he is left with the unfathomable and ostensibly treacherous task of saving himself.

Six

Myths of Mother and Daughter “I wonder, now, what the Rules of Battle are,” . . . Alice said doubtfully. “I don’t want to be anybody’s prisoner. I want to be a Queen.” - Lewis Carroll; Through the Looking Glass

In our work, it is often through metaphor that meanings become elucidated and communicated. Metaphors provide a means for opening up new possibilities, new ways of looking at “facts” that had become rigid and inaccessible to change or moderation. We often come upon a theme or pattern whose essence eludes our efforts to name it (Charles, 2002a). At times, the pattern has an archaic, essential feel to it and our minds pull towards myth in our attempts to capture and communicate these multiple meanings. The myth, as a purveyor of essential truths in fabulous form, helps us to play with meanings without becoming lost within them (Charles, 2001a). It is to myth that I often turn in my attempts towards understanding the dramas in which my patients have become ensconced (Charles, 2002d). My conceptions are configured through immersions in my patients’ material, interwoven with the worlds of myth and metaphor that provide entry points betwixt and between. Myths are particularly useful because they are so subject to change. What at first seems to be an Arachne’s web can become pliable, less sticky. What had been an absolute wall becomes porous as the characters change and soften. As Bion (1977a) notes, as we abstract out the essential forms at play, we can begin to see the basic elements at work rather than being so blinded by the content. In this way, myth and metaphor can help us to look beyond the surface features to note the underlying structures and processes, thereby highlighting essential similarities of form or function. Bion (1977a) likens an overemphasis on content to the dilemma depicted in the Tower of Babel story, in which too many languages were being spoken for any real communication to take place. This tower is an important figure in our dramas. In its status as the symbolic carrier of meanings about miscommunication, it can be both ally and enemy. At times, we struggle valiantly to communicate in spite of the inevitability of mistranslation, whereas at other times miscommunication becomes an unwitting ally in our desires to avoid recognition of some important but uneasy “truth.”

86

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

This aversion would seem to be the “willful blindness” that Steiner (1985) alludes to and in which we at times collude in our desires to not know what seems too painful to encounter. This blindness can serve both evasive and developmental functions. When the work is moving on dangerous ground, the walls our patients create can provide important safety nets, within which new realities can be constructed until such time as they become more explicitly ponderable. At these times, being able to work in the displacement allows us to investigate some truth that might feel imminently annihilating unless we can hold it at a safe remove. The myth provides us with the safe distance of metaphor, which allows us to consider essential elements of the dilemma with which we are faced; to negotiate and retranslate proposed meanings of these elements without having to explicitly think about the dilemma itself in a way that closes down the space. TAMING THE MONSTER/TRANSFORMING THE MIRROR In my work with Elena, I have become increasingly attuned to the importance and transformative nature of myth. Elena is a musician, now in her fifties, whose career had been cut short quite early by performance inhibitions that had become completely immobilizing. Elena is a natural storyteller, insisting on rapt attention from her audience to ensure that she is being “read” correctly. In this process, we reside within the peculiar confines of the labyrinth (Grotstein, 2000b; Charles, 2002d), whose form and passages configure our journey for that hour; for that day. Elena tells her story in accord with these configurations, defined by the dictates of her inner world: her level of stress; her level of resilience; how impinged she feels by forces that threaten and impede; how nurtured she feels by those that seem to reflect her in a more positive light. In reciprocal fashion, in parallel play, I tell myself my own version of the story, writing my way through whatever twists or turns our journey has taken. For many months, Elena and I inhabited the realm of the “murderous mother,” whose envy had spoiled Elena’s own gifts and rendered them useless and pathetic (Charles, 2001a). However, just as we reached such depths of the murderous mother that her reality began to dissipate, Elena began to retreat explicitly from the images she had created, reforming them into a more integrated whole in which the murderous aspects of mother coexisted with the loving and vulnerable ones. At this point in our work, there came a sea change. The maze had twisted and the mother had revealed herself from a new vantage point. From this newly found perspective, a hitherto unseen mother was revealed. “You know, my mother is not really evil,” said Elena. “She didn’t hate me; she just didn’t understand me. And I kept pressing her, trying to make her understand something she will never understand.” I was surprised and delighted by these words, which suggested that Elena’s new story would mirror my suspicions that I would have to re-write the story of the “murderous mother.” And yet we had, at that previous turn in the maze, certainly encountered just she. Somehow, in encountering her in all her glory, we had tamed the dragon and discovered her softer side. So it is with dragons: The reality we fear is never the one we

Myths of Mother and Daughter

87

encounter. In the encountering, the dragon is diminished to its rightful size and we are left freer to discover the monster that must now stand waiting, just around the next bend. At a deeper level, these myths and monsters enable us to engage with the horror and dread that underlie the stories we tell. Grotstein (2000c) describes these chimerical1 creatures as representations of the ultimately unknowable Absolute that Bion refers to as “O.” From the Kleinian perspective, we become (through introjective identification) whatever we have done to the object through projective identification (Grotstein, 2000c). In this way, what we most fear is a composite of whatever has been projected outward as unacceptable from within the self: We dread its return. The fable helps to contain our awe and dread by cloaking it within the softened folds of the characters. For Grotstein, it is the dawning awareness that it is a subject that we have wounded by cloaking it in enemy guise that we most fear: We may properly fear the other as our natural, pro tempore enemy, but we feel persecuted by how we believe we have unconsciously altered the other with our projective attributions. One of the tasks of psychoanalysis is to help our analysands differentiate the persecutor from the enemy, and this task is accomplished by helping them recognize their lost subjectivity (p. 158).

As Elena’s fears begin to become contained within the space we are creating together, she is no longer quite so automatically persecuted by her projections. As I accept her view of reality, and thereby contain her anxiety, I am also able to suggest alternative possibilities. I can begin to reflect back to her a mother who is not malevolent but rather tragically human; a mother who tries and fails and is willing to be blind to her failures rather than responding to her daughter’s distress. As Elena’s views of mother become humanized, so, too, do her views of self. She is not reviled but abandoned; she is not despicable but rather, misunderstood. Elena begins to be able to find a viable self in the presence of a mother who cannot reflect back to her a whole and integrated self. MYTHS OF MOTHER Our myths of mother are particularly profound in that she represents, not the image of the “hero” - that lone individual setting off to create history - but rather a personification of the elements themselves. “More abstractly understood, she is the world-bounding frame: ‘space, time, and causality’” (Campbell, 1949, p. 297). The mother comes to carry the image of the container: that which gathers meaning into coherent form and holds it in place, thereby also providing a space in which it might transform. In much the same fashion, images of mother come to carry our A chimera is a fantastic or grotesque imaginary beast, composed of parts taken from various animals.

1

88

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

senses of self and other and to provide containers within which these meanings might be held, reflected upon, and understood. In our attempts to understand the transformative power of these myths and metaphors, Bion’s (1963, 1970) ideas about the recursive relationship between container and contained are crucial. Myths of mother and father portray in visual form the struggles of the self to be born. These struggles are depicted quite vividly in the Greek myths in which the gods are born in recursive trials in which father and mother are alternately creative force and deadly foe, in successive iterations in which it becomes unclear to what extent one is child or parent; being born or being eaten. Within these myths, in archetypal form, we encounter our own deadly fears regarding what it means to be in relationship: to place one’s trust in another and hope that this will become a vehicle for giving life to one’s self rather than some projected image of the other. This is our dilemma within the family; it is also our dilemma in analysis. To what extent can we provide for ourselves a safe womb within which to grow without creating a retreat in which growth is evaded? To what extent can we develop the self through the vehicle of our interactions with the other rather than creating the other in ourselves as the price of engagement? From within the paranoid-schizoid realm, the world is a dangerous place in which survival seems to depend on eating the other (or one’s self) in order to avoid being eaten. This realm gives rise to the type of interpersonal dynamics described by Bion (1961), in which one feels in imminent danger and must either fight or flee or align one’s self with those in power as a means towards salvation, but also as a descent into self-abnegation. The family, like any other group, is a rich breeding ground for phantasies of exclusion and inclusion through which we attain fantasies of power that preclude actual engagement (Bion, 1970). The image of the child as interloper has a long and rich history in psychoanalytic thinking, in keeping with the profound dilemma of the child who must find a place for herself in a world in which the welcome is, at best, conditional (see, for example, Freud, 1916-1917; Charles, 1999). These themes emerge in mythology as stories of forced exclusions, as in Gaia and Ouranos, whose passion for one another did not allow for the birth of their children as separate human beings. It was only with the castration of the father by the son (with the aid of the mother) that the children were freed (Bulfinch, 1959; Graves, 1959). In this way, the mother uses the son as a means to her own freedom. This theme is replayed in many stories of death and retribution, as in the tale of Clytemnestra who kills her husband and then, in turn, is killed by her son, Orestes. Images of exclusion and inclusion also appear in stories of fabulous births, such as that of Aphrodite, who is described as emerging from the depths of the sea, having been gestated in the penis of her father, Ouranos, after his castration at the hands of her brother, Kronos. Interwoven in these myths we can see questions as to what it means to be a child whose survival has depended upon the parent and yet who must, in some sense, kill the parent in order to emerge as a

Myths of Mother and Daughter

89

whole adult person. Again, we encounter this tension, in which we are caught in the either/or dichotomy that must somehow become an also/then. Fears of the “murderous mother” must give way to the poignancy of the mother who could love her child and also, in some sense, annihilate her; a mother who is ultimately and inevitably human and cannot protect her child from herself. THE DAUGHTER’S JOURNEY: THE SEARCH FOR SELF From the perspective of the annihilated child locked in deadly battle with the murderous mother, Elena described a mother whose narcissism profoundly impeded her efforts to facilitate the daughter’s development. The narcissistic mother is experienced as unavailable - and therefore potentially deadly - by the child. Elena’s mother appears to have delighted in her daughter’s talents, which were experienced as narcissistic pleasures. The mother seemed to enjoy basking in the reflected glory of her daughter. When Elena was unsure of herself or in need of supplies, however, her mother seemed unable to offer any solace or reassurance. Instead, she distanced herself from her daughter, which was experienced by Elena as a repugnance or revulsion. Elena learned to see her own needs and weaknesses as repulsive “proof” of her inherent vileness and incapacity. Her mother’s incapacity was read as a condemnation that Elena expected to find universally reflected in the cultural mirror. In this way, “performance” became imbued with greater and greater dread. Failure became proof of Elena’s essential emptiness. She experienced herself as the vile and repulsive monster who, in the moment of being seen, became utterly empty: a void. The internal emptiness may be seen as reciprocal to the external void she encountered in her mother’s eyes when she looked to her for comfort (see Charles, 2000a). This experience of emptiness and essential unworthiness intensified over the years, as Elena struggled to master and overcome her inhibitions against performance. As performance had come to supercede playing, Elena had lost touch with the essential grounding in self and world that formed the foundation for her ability to play. Her greatest gift seems to have been the ability to improvise, which requires the ability to play with the essential elements of the material. As play became imbued with external demands, it lost its vitality and became ponderous, aversive: practicing. Along with this weight, came the intensification of Elena’s fantasies regarding how she would be perceived by her imagined audience. Her fears became so extreme that she was unable to perform. This incapacity only made her redouble her efforts, imposing a rigid regimen upon herself that made practicing even more aversive and empty. The emptiness amplified her sense of herself as empty, with nothing of any value to offer. This sense of deficit invoked the voice of her father, reviling her for being so stupid as to imagine that she or her efforts might have any value. In Elena’s family, being exposed as “stupid” was the ultimate horror, inviting disdain and ridicule. This was the legacy of the father, perpetually acted out in the abuse she experienced at the hands of her brothers.

90

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

Even their ostensible attempts at caretaking had a deprecating quality, in the presumption that the men would take care of the inherently inferior women as a matter of course. Elena’s mother seemed to be incapable of stepping in to assist her daughter, taking a similar position to the one she adopted in regard to all of Elena’s problems: blaming the victim and turning away in what was probably helplessness and self-blame, but appeared to her daughter to be repugnance and disdain. In this way, the incapacity of the mother seems to have been taken in by the daughter as her own. Elena seems to have become caught in her mother’s projective identifications of the weak and powerless and essentially empty self. As long as Elena mirrored back the grandiose aspects of self, she was reciprocated with her mother’s delight. However, this very enticement became a burden, inviting Elena to pretend that she was more than she was and therefore other than she was. The mother’s invitation was to create a false self, split off from whatever aspects seemed vulnerable or unwieldy. Elena was unwilling or unable to succeed at this endeavor: The price was too high. However, in abandoning the grandiose self, she was left with the other side of the split, attempting to create a life without any ability to reconcile the fact of her talents with the fact of her humanness. Elena has a certain dogged integrity that makes her just as unwilling to project her own reviled traits onto others as she is unwilling to be the recipient of whatever is not rightfully her own. She is so frightened of being attacked, maligned, and misunderstood that she can be very difficult to engage with. However, as she has come to understand the ways in which her fear works against engagement, Elena has learned to calm herself somewhat. “It’s like the radio was always turned on too high,” she tells me. “The volume was so high that I couldn’t really hear anything. I was just distressed all the time and trying frantically to make some contact, but I couldn’t really hear what anyone was saying without getting even more frantic. Now, it’s like the volume has eased enough that I can start to hear what people are saying. It’s not that what I’m hearing is so different; I think my readings were pretty correct. It’s just that it doesn’t disturb me so much. I think that what’s different is that I really used to need someone to “get it” and no one did. So it became really important that whomever I was talking to at the moment “got” whatever I was trying to tell them. It was so urgent that it was really hard for them to hear me at all. But having one person who knows what I’m talking about just makes it less urgent to have any particular person understand something they are just not going to get.” For Elena, my attempts at understanding have become the container that enables her to contain her own anxiety in the face of the other’s lack of comprehension. This containment has been wrestled out of our interactions, as Elena fought against this high volumed snarl towards some sense that she might be understood through all the din. “It’s a problem,” she would say, with intense and compelling urgency: “You need to understand.”

Myths of Mother and Daughter

91

Over time, this urgency became transformed from an energied attack upon my ostensible incomprehension to a less frantic, apologetic smile, with a quizzical twist: “I know that this is probably not necessary, but I just want to make sure that you really get it, so please bear with me,” she would say. Elena would then proceed with her story, reassuring herself in the process that I was, indeed, still the person who seemed to be capable of getting the point. This fact – that contained within it the possibility that one might actually be understood by another - reorganized Elena’s universe. It grounded her in her own reality. If it was possible for one person to make sense of her communications and to have a conversation with her in which both sides could be recognized and acknowledged, then whatever noncommunications or miscommunications she found herself engaged in could be considered from alternate viewpoints, including those that considered the possibility that the fault might lie, in part, with the other person. As time went by, Elena would come in and relate to me miscommunications that had not thrown her so far nor so wildly out of kilter. She would lead me through the experience, including each moment of frustration and incomprehension. It was important that I experience each nuanced twist and turn in the labyrinthian path through which potential annihilation had been faced and averted, exposed and comprehended. She would then chronicle having become mired in trying to engage potential partners in celebrating the miraculousness of her recovery. Too often, however, they seemed to be disinterested in this part of the journey. “Perhaps,” I suggested, “they just don’t see you as deficient and therefore can’t really appreciate your delight at having taken such an important step.” In this way, we are faced, once again, with the substantiality of the walls of the maze and the veritable impossibility of seeing from one bend around another. It is Elena who believes in her own stupidity when she is not understood. It is Elena who believes that her failure to achieve what she had hoped she might achieve in life makes her capacities less real. It is Elena who finds it difficult to appreciate her own very real achievements when her mother cannot hold them in esteem. Elena’s inability to see beyond the reflection in her mother’s eyes blinds her to her self. Her shame at having failed to find the mother’s reflected delight keeps her from taking measure of the path on which she stands: of its perils, pitfalls, and possibilities. Unfortunately, the shame and self-deprecation were compounded when she failed to find in her previous analyst a true enough reflection to have provided an alternative mirror through which to more adaptively perceive self and world. As I think back on Elena’s descriptions of the impasse she encountered in this previous analytic journey, I remember her saying that she had been told, quite insistently, that she had to deal with “the real relationship.” I’m not sure what this meant in actuality, only that Elena experienced this demand as an impossible one. She was being asked to walk past the edge of a precipice with no rope on which to cling. As Elena is not one to run away from a challenge, if given any ground on which to stand, I understand this impasse as one in which the analyst, for whatever

92

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

reason, needed Elena to move beyond whatever point at which she/they were trapped, without being able to offer a path. This seems to be an impossible point in an analysis, in which the rules have changed and the analyst becomes the patient, requiring that the patient create an environment in which the analyst can better function. Although there is always some of this type of negotiation occurring in any analysis, the point of impasse tells us that we have overstepped our bounds; the balance has shifted beyond containable limits. At these times, the patient’s unwillingness/inability to move beyond the constraints set by the analyst may be a sign of strength and resiliency. For Elena, this impasse seems to recapitulate the dilemma in which she was faced in her relationship with her mother, in which the roles were reversed and the price of relationship became to barter her reality for that of the other. In my conjectures, I think I understand what might have created this impasse. In our early months together, I experienced Elena as an unstoppable barrage, assaulting me with her reality with no respite in sight. However, Elena also earnestly desired to be given some insight as to the nature of the impasse she experienced within herself and that which she had experienced in her previous treatments. She was willing to hear another point of view as long as she could reassure herself that it took her into account. Without this essential grounding, she might be carried away precipitously and lose herself entirely. Very few analysts have discussed this type of impasse (Rosenfeld, 1987, is a notable exception; see also Charles, 1997), and yet it occurs. If we are unwilling or unable to move beyond our comfortable limits, we find ourselves in these types of impasses and must either jump across the precipice or accept our limitations and acknowledge them to the patient. In the regularities of our failures – or lack of success, if you prefer – we can see the twists and turns of our own labyrinths, where the as yet unknown bids us either to enter or to accept our retreat. The psychoanalytic journey is at essence a leap into the unknown. No matter how many times we take this journey, we are never quite certain where it will lead. At some level, we merely have our hope and our faith in which to ground ourselves. Elena initially came to me saying that she had been trying to make this journey for several decades and had finally given up. Her doctor, however, had convinced her to make one last attempt and had sent her to me. “Can you help me?” asked Elena, quite legitimately but ultimately indeterminably. She didn’t want to “feel better,” she told me: She felt fine. That was part of the problem: that she could lose sight of the problem and never resolve it; never re-find what she had lost, the very thing that gave her life meaning. This put me in somewhat of a dilemma. I could not promise her what she was ostensibly asking for: that she would find, once again, her ability to play and to work creatively in the way she hoped. However, I did believe that what she really wanted, but could not imagine, was possible to find: a way of coming to inhabit and value her self. We could conceivably arrive at a point at which she would be pleased with her own growth and her own being and would be able to make her

Myths of Mother and Daughter

93

peace with herself and her life: to find her self. Ironically, this endeavor would require us both to believe in what her previous analyst had seemed to experience as a grandiose self that must be given up. In contrast, I sensed that the grandiose aspects of Elena were as real as her vulnerabilities. They were merely less appreciated and had not been sufficiently integrated into the whole. As Elena has become better able to use me as an alternative image of mother, her images of Mother have altered remarkably. She no longer sees her mother as the murderous mother of old, but rather as someone who loved her children but also failed them in notable ways. As Elena begins to paint a word portrait of this new image of mother, it brings to mind the story of Demeter, who can accept the darkness and the light within her child and within the world. Demeter was forced to accept the inevitability of separation from the daughter, who was not only taken from her, but also had accepted the gifts of this other, nether world (Graves, 1959). In this story, we can see the inevitability of separation and loss in the search for self, and also the importance of finding the mother who is able to separate sufficiently to enable the child to find her own self. As Demeter stands to the side, the daughter is better able to explore her own internal resources and to discover within the capacities of an adult and sensual self. In making her own journey through these nether regions, Persephone is able to be embraced by the mother as a whole and separate, sentient being.

This page intentionally left blank

Seven

A Beautiful Mind

Narcissism and Creativity

“What – is – this?” [said the Unicorn] “This is a child! . . . We only found it to-day. It’s as large as life, and twice as natural!” “I always thought they were fabulous monsters!” said the Unicorn. “Is it alive?” “It can talk,” said Haigha solemnly. The Unicorn looked dreamily at Alice, and said “Talk, child.” Alice could not help her lips curling up into a smile as she began: “Do you know, I always thought Unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!” “Well, now that we have seen each other,” said the Unicorn, “if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you.” - Lewis Carroll; Through the Looking Glass

Reality is inevitably constrained by our ability to encounter and to believe in it. To the extent that the external world fails to mirror ourselves back to us in recognizable fashion, we lose our grounding. This poses particular problems for the extraordinary individual, for whom questions arise as to how one might ground one’s self in a world in which the other’s view may well not correspond to one’s own. In the absence of this type of consensual validation, it becomes difficult to be sure that what is taken in is valid or true, unless it can be grounded in one’s own experience. This grounding is an essential precondition for creative work, which by its very nature extends beyond the bounds of the consensual. In this chapter, I will consider the plight of individuals who feel as though their relations with others put at risk their creativity. For both of the individuals described, the split between valued and devalued aspects of self seems to mark a division between the relational self and the creative self. What at first glance appears to be an entrenched narcissism can, in fact, mask an impoverished ego in need of repair, which is coexisting uncomfortably with considerable capacity. I have puzzled over this dilemma at some length in my work with talented but poorly integrated individuals (cf. Charles, 2001a,b). It came to my attention, once again, when I viewed the remarkable film A Beautiful Mind. Thinking about this film and comparing and contrasting the highly fictionalized

96

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

portrayal of Nobel Prize winning mathematician John Nash with my observations of Marta, an extremely talented dancer and choreographer, proved to be quite fruitful. It has helped me in teasing apart some meaningful distinctions between the type of narcissistic vulnerability that desperately hides from self-awareness and integration, versus the type of split I have observed in Marta, who desperately strives for greater self- and other awareness, albeit from within the constraints of her quite considerable terrors. NARCISSISM AND ENVY: DEFENSIVE RESOLUTIONS TO SPLITS WITHIN THE SELF Narcissism is inextricably linked to envy of whatever seems inaccessible because it is in the possession of the other. The narcissism may be acted out through introjection of valued parts of others or through projection of devalued parts of self (Rosenfeld, 1987). Conrad and David, referred to in chapter 3, were each able to be relatively unaware of the split-off parts of self, though this required sufficient use of resources that they found themselves quite depleted. For Conrad, the depletion was denied and split off, whereas for David, there was less grandiosity; the depressive aspects were more prevalent. Anxiety seems to be the marker for whatever is not known and also seems to mark more effective (and thereby potentially more destructive) defenses. These two qualities - destructiveness and effectiveness – interplay to make analysis more difficult. Marta, in contrast, seems to have projected outward valued parts of self as a defense against her mother’s envy. At first encounter, Marta seems to be a slight and somewhat timid woman in her late forties. As she begins to try to communicate, however, Marta’s passions enliven her speech, making her alternately extremely engaging or quite off-putting, depending on her relative ease or distress in the moment. For Marta (much like Elena; see chapter 6), the search for perfection seems to have been an attempt to align with what she perceived to be her mother’s narcissistic investment in the daughter’s achievements. There was another part of Marta, however, that could not be content in maintaining a split in which the achievement mattered more than self or relationship. As a result, she seems to have spoiled the achievement and also, in the process, to have lost her grounding in the work itself. As her achievements diminished, Marta found herself increasingly subject to the ridicule of her father and to the withdrawal of her mother. As the family relationships became further attenuated, Marta lost her ability to play and, with this, she lost herself. Unlike Marta’s dilemma, for John Nash envy seems to have been such a powerful internal force that he was unable to acknowledge the value of what he might have taken in or even the fact of having received. Envy can be an insidious force, affirming the relative power of the other in counterpoint to our own internal

Narcissism and Creativity

97

sense of lack. Optimally, the parent is sufficiently responsive to the child’s needs to titrate the sense of lack, so that it becomes a force motivating growth and achievement. Too little responsiveness leaves the child at the mercy of overwhelming negative affect, whereas the over-responsive parent fails to allow the child to discover and build upon his or her own internal resources. In either case, challenge tends to become an opportunity for failure rather than for growth. This dilemma leads to a split in the self between an inherent sense of capacity that cannot be tested and realized versus a sense of inner deficiency that must be protected from view. This type of split creates a narcissistic vulnerability that can be very difficult to address in therapy without retraumatization jeopardizing the treatment. If the conditions can be created in which the split can be uncovered and understood from a more positive or endurable perspective, this creates a containing environment in which the self - that has become atrophied by virtue of the very protection that has been invoked - can begin to be tested and thereby to grow. In this regard, it is useful to distinguish between two types of narcissism, one of which facilitates the treatment and the other of which obstructs it (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1989). This distinction can, perhaps, be seen in Marta’s willingness to idealize an other, versus Nash’s need to diminish the other in the service of his own aggrandizement. Viewing this difference through the lens of Rosenfeld’s distinction between libidinal and destructive envy, we might link Marta’s defensive position with the urge for reunion with the mother, which must be renounced because it is unattainable. In contrast, we might link Nash’s rejection of the other to a wish to have no needs: to spring from the mother fully born or perhaps to be self-created. Perhaps it is when the mother is ostensibly more available, but engulfing, that the defenses against her must be more virulent. The absent mother, on the other hand, may evoke a more benign defense against the libidinal desires for union/reunion. From this perspective, Marta’s narcissism seems to take the form that Chasseguet-Smirgel (1989) describes in terms of being able to invest an other with one’s narcissism as a means for ultimately being able to reincorporate it. This may be seen as a reenactment of Marta’s mother’s desire to create of Marta a self-object through which to enact her own narcissistic desires. However, in a more positive sense, it may also occur through psychoanalysis; through being in love; or through acts of creation. Chasseguet-Smirgel describes the wish for reunion with the mother as a “primary wish to rediscover a universe devoid of obstacles, without roughness or differences, identified with the maternal womb stripped of its contents, an interior to which one has free access” (p. 719). Chasseguet-Smirgel (1989) opposes this wish for reunion with the willingness to encounter conflict and difficulty and to work it through. This willingness depends on one’s sense that one has some potency, some capacity

98

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

with which to actually succeed. In this way, she points to the recursive dilemma between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions in noting how, inevitably, human development is lodged between the archaic form of the Oedipus complex, which involves expulsion, destruction, and an absence of temporality, and the ‘classic’ Oedipus complex involving integration, liaison, and development (p. 720).

In this dilemma, it is the affiliative, libidinal desires that help us to avoid becoming entrapped by our own evasions. The more pathological and destructive forces would seem to represent attempts to attain potency while avoiding conflict, relationship, and growth (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1989). For example, one may wonder to what extent, for Nash, the more fundamental search was for Father, having had, in many ways, too much Mother. Nash’s mother was an educator who was forced to retire when she married, because of the prohibitions at that time (Nasar, 1998). Like Marta’s mother, she seems to have used her child as a vehicle for her own self-affirmation. Unlike Marta’s mother, however, Nash’s mother seems to have amplified her son’s sense of worth through achievement, without having been able to help him to solve the enigmas of the relational world. Nash’s pressured seeking of recognition in a world in which it was the affirmation of the Father that was the true prize, suggests an alternate route than the maternal one described by Chasseguet-Smirgel: one that is affirmed by Nash’s refusal to utilize the wisdom of the past in ostensible attempts at immaculate self-conception. I have seen this type of dilemma before, in cases in which there is an intrusive and engulfing mother who attempts to create of the child a selfrepresentation. If we view Nash’s family structure through the lens of those myths that describe the son as consort, such as that of Cybele and Attis (see Charles, 2001a), we can see how both autonomy and relationship become interwoven with destructive urges and persecutory anxieties. In this myth, the father is eradicated from the equation entirely. The son dies but is also reborn. Cybele is the Phrygian representation of the Great Mother (known as Rhea by the Greeks). According to one version, the goddess is said to have fallen in love with the mortal Attis, who was driven so mad by the intensity of her love that he castrated himself and died. In other versions, Attis was conceived of the blood of Cybele, who later fell in love with him and caused him to castrate himself so that no one else could have him. In many renditions, Attis dies and is resurrected. In some versions, the mother kills the son in order to save him from the father, who is then resurrected and becomes all things to the mother/consort (Roller, 1999). This myth is part of a wide array in which the son is elevated (but also castrated) by the mother, and the father’s role is denied. In these myths, the son may “rule,” but only at the whim and mercy of the mother.

Narcissism and Creativity

99

This configuration gives rise to tales of castrated fathers and omnipotent mothers and of sons who are distorted into impotent wraiths of hero/monsters, fighting their way through a fragmented reality in which the other becomes a dangerous force that must be opposed actively. From this type of paranoidschizoid position, the other is potentially destructive and must be held at bay. This imminent lethality invites fantasies of what Grotstein (2000d) has termed “autochthony” - the fantasy of self-creation - in which phantasies of omnipotence color both internal and external realities and affirm that one might, indeed, survive in a world in which one dare not trust an other. In a universe in which the other’s intention is experienced as dangerous, narcissistic omnipotence becomes an important defense against annihilation and despair. However, this position lends itself to the type of destructive narcissism in which even the awareness of the subjectivity of the other can become a potentially lethal hazard. When the destructive aspects of narcissism come to the fore, they pose particular difficulties with regard to the reluctance to give up the feelings of value that are tied to the illusion of omnipotence. This would seem to be an element in Nash’s personality that was not so apparent in Marta. Rosenfeld (1987) suggests that when destructive narcissism is a salient element of the individual’s character “any wish on the part of the self to experience the need for an object and to depend on it are devalued, attacked, and destroyed with pleasure” (p. 22). The destructive aspects may be particularly difficult to discern because “the patient unconsciously experiences them as protective and even benevolent, but very secretly. Secrecy is part of feeling omnipotent destructive superiority” (p. 22). Rosenfeld’s characterization of individuals such as these reads somewhat like a description of Nash, as Nasar (1998) has described him: Because the existence of omnipotent destructive wishes on the part of the self is obscured, patients dominated by destructive narcissism give the impression that they have no relationship to the external world. They appear not to care a jot. In fact, of course, they depend on constantly attacking anything and everything which might be likely to satisfy their libidinal needs, and their state can never be stable (Rosenfeld, 1987, p. 22).

This defensive posture is often a result of very real assaults upon the self that could neither be resolved nor integrated. In individuals with an entrenched split between inflated versus devalued hidden aspects of self, there is often a history of having been ostracized and/or bullied by other children, in line with the devaluation by the parent that seems to invite this type of assault from others. Experiences of being devalued and publicly humiliated can be devastating to the developing self, creating the sense that one is “other”; one is alone in an alien and hostile universe. Shame becomes a curtain demarcating a tangible line between self and other, and between those who can be valued versus those who cannot.

100

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

In this way, it also creates divisions within the self, demarcating that which can be valued from that which cannot. Attempts to attain equilibrium can focus on trying to repair the interpersonal bond, thereby affirming that one can, indeed, be valued. Alternatively, attempts to regain equilibrium may be enacted as hostile, reactive defensive moves in which the other must be devalued in order to elevate the self from its debased position. Both of the individuals considered in this chapter were rejected by peers as children. Their reactions to this, however, were quite different. In mathematician John Nash, we see a defensive structure in which there was active hostility towards others. He was described by peers as a “brat,” prone to fits of temper when bested, and playing the role of the “spoiler” through his derisive comments and, at times, cruel and dangerous practical jokes (in Nasar, 1998). Nash’s mother, an educator who was barred from teaching at the point at which she married, seems to have invested her considerable energies in nurturing her son’s intellectual development (Nasar, 1998). As a child, Nash was not a high achiever but did begin to come to the attention of his teachers as someone who found his own ways of solving problems. Nash was described as socially awkward and immature as a child. He did not have close friends, but did enjoy “performing” for his peers, devising experiments and elaborate practical jokes, some of which were potentially quite destructive. When he was fifteen, he and two other boys began to experiment with creating explosives. These endeavors ultimately resulted in the death of one of the boys. Practical jokes and games seem to have been part of the camaraderie among mathematicians at Princeton and at the RAND Institute, where Nash worked in the summer of 1950. Games provided a means for testing one’s mettle in a universe in which the competition was at times quite fierce. Similarly, the jokes provided a means for utilizing and displaying one’s ingenuity and also for expressing one’s hostility in a relatively benign fashion. Nash, however, was seen, even amongst his peers, as extremely childish and boastful. “He wanted to be noticed more than anything,” recalled one student (in Nasar, 1998, p. 67). Nash was continually questioning people as to what constituted the really “important” unsolved problems in mathematics. He needed a challenge suitable to his grandiosity. In contrast to Nash’s fierce hostility and aloofness, Marta seemed to find the interpersonal world appealing but somehow inevitably out of reach. When Marta was quite young, her family had moved from the only home she had known, in which she had felt part of the community, to a small town in which she felt quite alien. Marta found herself ostracized and ridiculed. She was unable to fit in. Her parents seemed unable to help her to accommodate to this challenge but rather her father ridiculed her, and her mother seemed to find her daughter’s dilemma repugnant. Marta was left with the sense that she was inherently

Narcissism and Creativity

101

repulsive, which is confirmed for her whenever she is unable to make herself known in a way that invites receptive appreciation. For both Nash and Marta, separateness from others had represented an isolation that also assaulted the viability and value of the self. Rosenfeld (1987) suggests that narcissistic omnipotent object relations defend against a recognition of separateness. In this way, these object relations deny the aggression and ambivalence evoked by frustration and also deny envious or aggressive feelings. In spite of the differences between these two individuals’ ways of locating themselves within the social world - the one seemingly uncaring, the other looking on with longing – each experienced the relational self as inherently defective in some fundamental way and therefore as a source of great vulnerability. At the other extreme, each had come upon strengths within the self that belied the sense of unworthiness and, to the contrary, evoked grand fantasies of being special and being recognized for that uniqueness. Whereas Nash’s fantasies seemed to embody a reactive hostility to the rejection he experienced, Marta’s fantasies seemed to reflect more directly her desire to find a valued place within the social world. For Marta, her mother’s alliance with the grandiose aspects of Marta (the lauded performer), while turning away from the more vulnerable aspects, made Marta see grandiosity as a source of vulnerability. She had the sense that the path towards fulfillment lay in being able to immerse herself, once again, in her art, without the grandiose trap her mother had laid. Rosenfeld’s (1971) distinction between libidinal and destructive envy is a useful guidepost in exploring these two disparate paths through which Marta and Nash struggled towards finding a place in the universe. This terminology helps us distinguish between the type of narcissism that “in some measure recognizes the presence of the object, whose place it wishes to usurp,” versus the more destructive narcissism that tends to deny and annihilate the other (Etchegoyen, Lopez, & Rabih, 1987, p. 52). In Marta, one sees a longing for reunion with the object through validation of the self. Her apparent narcissism and selfpreoccupation came from the need to restore her own place among others who were valued; to overcome her sense of being inherently devalued. In contrast, one might see Nash’s unwillingness to learn from the experiences and teachings of others as an envious wish to give birth to himself by himself and to thereby deny that anyone had had any part in his creation(s). This need to deny the other becomes what Steiner (1985) has described as turning a blind eye towards the reality that one’s existence does, in fact, depend upon others. In this way, the other is kept at bay out of fear of being faced with one’s inherent dependency, which is denied through the pretense of detachment. The splitting involved in projective identification becomes a means for both denial and for becoming known, depending on whether the libidinal or destructive aspects are more powerful. When the destructive aspects are more prevalent, the narcissism becomes a prison that is difficult to escape from, as the

102

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

destructive aspects of the envy serve to enforce the devaluation of the other on which the grandiosity of the self depends. From this framework, change is seen as threatening to the grandiose aspects of self that depend on maintaining the idealization through blindness to any evidence to the contrary. In this type of situation, the willingness to sacrifice the libidinal self, in order to keep the other from being successful in saving it, can preclude any effective treatment. This type of instrumental blindness, invoked as a means for not seeing one’s own vulnerabilities, may become so proficient that the lines become blurred to the point of invisibility. There can be a fine line between the adaptive creativity of the artist and maladaptive illusions created in the service of obscuring important truths. We have all encountered products of mind that have left us in awe. As analysts, we are in a position to encounter the incredible beauty of the mind itself, as we follow our patients’ associations from conception to conception, across disparate points to an unanticipated end. At times, we find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of being unable to discriminate between truth and fiction, reality and distortion, a dilemma that can be particularly problematic with highly creative individuals. The difficulty of discriminating this line between truth and fiction is the focus of Ron Howard’s film that is very roughly based on the contours of the life of John Nash. The film A Beautiful Mind portrays Nash’s struggle to maintain his sanity while also testing the limits of his mind and imagination. One hallmark of creativity is the ability to discern complex patterns, for which Nash seems to have had a truly extraordinary talent. This facility enabled him to come up with theories of far-reaching consequence. However, his thirst for opportunities to apply his unique abilities often seems to have led him into misapplications of his talents. Somewhat like finding that one has been typing on the wrong keys, we may know the format and yet discover that we have been working in the wrong register; believing we have been making sense and yet producing gibberish, cryptically encoded by the persistence of our errors. One factor that made Nash so intensely vulnerable in this way seems to have been his narcissism, which required him to produce something grand enough to win recognition and admiration at a very high level but also made him disdainful of the types of experiences that might have provided greater reality testing. At university, for example, Nash did not attend classes. He was not interested in building a foundation but rather was awaiting inspiration. When inspiration finally struck, however, it did not strike in a vacuum but was grounded in his observations of events in the social world. Nash’s narcissism may be seen as the other side of his intense interpersonal isolation. Extreme giftedness often goes hand in hand with an idiosyncratic way of viewing the universe that can impede the individual’s ability to find a home in the interpersonal world (see, for example, Gedo, 1996). Nash

Narcissism and Creativity

103

seems to have found it very difficult to engage with others and from an early age had learned first hand how cruel peers could be (Nasar, 1998). The resulting solitude and isolation probably exacerbated his desire for recognition and also served as an impetus for the illusory “companions” he devised as he became further and further divorced from reality. Isolation is a two-edged sword: Innovation requires the ability to tolerate isolation, but it is also important to be able to be recognized by one’s peers. Nash’s reactive hostility made it difficult for him to receive this recognition, whereas for Marta it was shame that made her unable to receive acknowledgement even when it might be present. At times, the idiosyncratic nature of an individual’s perceptions may interfere with the normalizing and containing functions of caretakers, thereby further attenuating the fine line between self and other and inhibiting the ability to take the perspective of the other. In this way, empathic attunement is obstructed, not built, thereby reinforcing a paranoid-schizoid mode of being in the world, characterized by difficulties in interpersonal relating that too easily become self-perpetuating. ABSORPTION AND IDENTIFICATION As we encounter John Nash within the images projected on the cinema screen, w e are confronted quite graphically with the dilemma of the line between reality and fiction. It is the artistry of the filmmakers that enables us to vicariously experience Nash’s world through their creation of a newly composed reality that configures itself in form to their fantasy of the actuality of Nash’s experience. However, it is our willingness to believe in the reality so constructed that amplifies the illusion of truth in this type of film, which structures itself around a real life without necessarily following the facts of it. As a tool for the elucidation of psychic realities, the cinema can be both dream and nightmare. It provides an opportunity to project complex realities upon the screen, through which they might be considered, reflected upon, and better understood. It also, however, provides a means for promoting distortions and misperceptions on a wide scale. At the very core of our love affair with the cinema is our ability to identify and disidentify with the characters upon the screen. In psychoanalytic terms, identification is defined as a process of assimilation, whereby attributes of the other are transformed and adapted into aspects of self, such that “it is by means of a series of identifications that the personality is constituted and specified” (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973, p. 203). Within the film, identification is structured as “a movement, a subject-process, a relation: the identification (of oneself) with something other (than oneself)” (de Lauretis, 1984, p. 141), such that absorption into the film provides a means for self-development through the intertwining processes of identification and disidentification.

104

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

Within the reality defined by the cinematic space, the film invites us in: it “absorbs” us into itself. Absorption is a term used by Diderot (1751) to describe a process in which “one gives oneself up to it with all one’s thought without allowing oneself the least distraction” (in Fried, 1980, p. 184), so that one is enveloped, swept away, and even disappears through incorporation into something else. This is a very apt description of the identificatory process within the world of film, in which the viewer is invited in as spectator/participant within the drama unfolding. Through this process, the beholder is both inside and outside the film, through identifications with the camera/director and with the characters being represented. The successful film absorbs us: it holds us in its thrall. We are captured by whatever is being depicted. The process of absorption, however, also entails our disappearance: As we “suspend disbelief” and are carried into the drama, we disappear, to some extent, as a critical eye. As this happens, we are more susceptible to absorbing whatever “realities” are being depicted within the film (Charles, 2004b). This process of absorption is an apt metaphor for the dilemma in which John Nash (as portrayed in the film) finds himself, as the very factors that lend fire to his creativity also endanger his being. It is also an apt metaphor for Nash’s creative genius, which is of the intuitive variety. Nash saw the vision first, constructing the laborious proofs long afterward. But even after he’d try to explain some astonishing result, the actual route he had taken remained a mystery to others who tried to follow his reasoning (Nasar, 1998, p. 12).

In order to make use of his genius, Nash needed to believe in his own visions, which enabled him to make his great contributions but also entrapped him. When asked by Harvard Professor George Mackey how a man of science could have believed in such fantasies as extraterrestrial messengers, Nash replied quite simply: “Because . . . the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously” (in Nasar, 1998, p. 11). GENIUS AND MADNESS: NARCISSISM OR INTERPERSONAL ISOLATION From the beginning of the film, Nash’s psychological difficulties are linked to his narcissism and to his interpersonal isolation. Within the portrayal of Nash in the film, one may see classic elements of what Kernberg (1974) has described as a narcissistic personality structure, including intense ambitiousness, grandiose fantasies, feelings of inferiority, and an overreliance on external acclaim and admiration. Because of the primitiveness of the defenses, such as splitting and defensive denial, the grandiose fantasies may coexist with feelings of inferiority without apparently conflicting with one another.

Narcissism and Creativity

105

Kernberg’s characterization reads somewhat like a description of Nash, himself: “Along with feelings of boredom and emptiness, and continuous search for brilliance, wealth, power and beauty, there are serious deficiencies in their capacity to love and be concerned about others” (p. 215). This characterization, however, tends to pathologize an essential dilemma of the gifted individual: the tension between the need for sufficient isolation within which to manifest one’s visions and the need for sufficient external support and recognition to sustain one’s self and efforts (Gedo, 1996). For some creative individuals, the lack of attachment in the interpersonal domain leads them further into creative activities as a defense against acute isolation (Storr, 1972). For example, Nash’s fantasies may have initially provided him with some relief of the tension between his intense isolation and yearnings for recognition. Peopling the universe with figments of one’s imagination merely compounds the dilemma, however, as yearnings for companionship become diverted into autistic pursuits rather than being directed towards building actual relationships. In addition, there is a protective part of the self that shields the fantasies (and thereby the madness) from view, further attenuating the lines between self and other and, with them, between fantasy and reality. In a theme that is to be repeated throughout the film, an early conversation with his “roommate,” Charlie, shows Nash jokingly linking his brilliance in math to his avoidance of the interpersonal world: “People don’t like me,” he says, with apparent equanimity. At another level, however, the isolation itself is a dilemma for the creative individual, who must negotiate between protecting his or her vision and time, versus fulfilling interpersonal needs (Gedo, 1996). In spite of his desperate efforts to remain unaware of his dependence on others and of his yearnings for closeness, Nash ultimately does come to appreciate his deep need for others: “Away from contact with a few special sorts of individuals I am lost, lost completely in the wilderness . . . so, it’s been a hard life in many ways” (in Nasar, 1998, p. 169). Nash links his eventual remission not only to the people who enabled him to work his way back to reality, but also to his own determination. As Nasar puts it: “His overriding interest was in patterns, not people, and his greatest need was making sense of the chaos within and without by employing, to the largest possible extent, the resources of his own powerful, fearless, fertile mind” (p. 167). Ironically, what had begun as a defensive determination to remain in his own head - away from the difficulties he encountered in human interactions - ultimately served him well in his fight to remain firmly planted in both internal and external realities. The road back from madness was a particularly treacherous one for Nash because of his desire to preserve what he could of his mental faculties. Being “well” did not consist of merely being grounded once again in consensual reality. As Nash described the precariousness of the “cure”:

106

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES Suppose you have an artist. He’s rational. But suppose he cannot paint. He cannot function normally. Is it really a cure? Is it really salvation? . . . I feel I am not a good example of a person who recovered unless I can do some good work (in Nasar, 1998, p. 382).

For Nash, work seems to have been the great passion that makes life worthwhile. In this, he is not alone: There is a state of absolute absorption into one’s activities that is intrinsically satisfying. Csikszentmihalyi (1990) has described this as “flow,” whereas Eigen (2001) describes it as “ecstasy.” This level of engagement is not easy to give up, even if the price is one’s sanity. Nash’s profound need to be able to become absorbed in his activities fueled his ultimate recovery. For some time after his breakdown, Princeton provided a kind of halfway house within which Nash was able to continue to communicate with others, while traversing the line back to reality (Nasar, 1998). His obsession with patterns brought him into intimate relationship with numerology and codes, in which insanity and brilliance rubbed shoulders with no clear dividing line between the two. Nash’s brilliance was such that, at times, it was difficult for his colleagues to follow his reasoning: Their incapacity was at times an indicator of his madness and at others an indicator of his genius. By intention, he seemed always to be working at the edge of the impossible. In the containing environment that had been created for him at Princeton, Nash was able to indulge in his passions while also attempting to communicate with the world by leaving messages on blackboards. His love of pattern, along with his incredible facility for numbers, resulted in his use of numbers to create codes and epigrams, which were then left as secret messages for any who might be able to decode them. During this time, the line between brilliance and craziness rested on his grounding in reality. As one of his colleagues put it, at times “he was doing the arithmetic correctly, but the reasoning for it was crazy” (in Nasar, 1998, p. 334), whereas at other times, he was able to come up with ideas of astonishing brilliance and clarity. Nash’s facility with numbers seems to have been quite amazing. One noted mathematician called Nash “the greatest numerologist the world has ever seen” (in Nasar, 1998, p. 335), whereas another described him as “the kind of mathematician for whom the geometric, visual insight was the strongest part of his talent. He would see a mathematical situation as a picture in his mind” (in Nasar, 1998, p. 129). Many of Nash’s insights came from his intuitive sense that a complex, seemingly unsolvable problem could be solved by reference to a more simple problem with the same pattern. Williams, the head of the RAND think tank, said that Nash had greater insight into mathematical structure than any mathematician he had ever known. . . . [He was able to] come into an office, stare at a blackboard dense with equations, and stand there

Narcissism and Creativity

107

silently, meditating. . . . “ Then . . . he’d solve the whole thing. He could see the structure” (in Nasar, 1998, p. 114).

Many noted mathematicians were impressed by Nash’s audacity and also by the sheer beauty and simple elegance of some of his solutions. Mikhail Gromov, a noted geometer, put it: “Many of us have the power to develop existing ideas. We follow paths prepared by others. But most of us could never produce anything comparable to what Nash produced. It’s like lightning striking” (in Nasar, 1998, p. 158). These same gifts also fueled Nash’s madness, as the patterns he envisioned became further and further divorced from consensual realities. Although Nash was ultimately able to move outside of his immersion in the world of fantasy, he never entirely left the fantasies behind. In the film, Nash describes having learned to suppress or titrate his “appetite for patterns” in order to survive: “like a diet for the mind.” When asked if he finds the fantasies difficult to live with, he responds: “I think that’s what it’s like with all our dreams and all our nightmares. You’ve got to feed them for them to stay alive.” “Don’t they haunt you?” he is asked. “They’re part of my past,” Nash responds. “The past always haunts you.” Later, Nash says: “I still see things that aren’t there. I just choose not to acknowledge them.” THE NEED FOR RECOGNITION We all have our demons. Our equilibrium depends on the extent to which we can recognize them and put them to the side, where we might learn from them but also keep them from taking over. In the absence of interpersonal acknowledgement, tensions between the will to create and define the self versus the need to soothe and comfort the self can create schisms in our reality. In our struggles to protect the self, defensive measures such as projective identification can result in distortions or can reach a point of actual personification, “peopling” the universe, as depicted quite graphically in A Beautiful Mind. In projective identification, we see as “other” that which cannot be accepted within the bounds of self. In this way, Nash’s imaginary companions may be seen as aspects of self, projected out into his environment. As is often the case at this level of fantasy, the initial projections seem to have been relatively benign but over time began to control and turn on him. Klein (1946) notes how repudiated aspects of self become persecutors, terrorizing us by their very existence. We project unwanted aspects of self outwards and identify them as other rather than self. This relieves us to some measure: We are spared the pain of acknowledge-ment of the despised characteristic. However, in perpetrating this lie we tax our resources, which are strained in the maintenance of the deception. The lie continually yearns to right

108

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

itself, and more and more energy is required in order to keep the lie in place. In this way, our growth is severely impeded by this repudiation, as we trip over our own distortions, leaving us no firm ground on which to walk. The only real resolution comes from some acknowledgement of reality. Within the reality created in the film, the opportunity to anchor himself within consensual reality came for Nash through his own favorite medium - that of the pattern - when he noted that the child with whom he had been interacting for so many years had never grown. This fact became a cornerstone upon which he could begin to ground his discriminations between consensual and idiosyncratic realities. There was always a difficult balance between Nash’s need for accomplishment - depicted in the film as an even stronger need for recognition and his tendency to retreat from the very world from which he sought acknowledgement. Avoidant defenses and interpersonal difficulties can keep the individual from working through needs for recognition at the level of actual relationships. They then may be worked out intrapsychically or enacted via one’s vocation or other creative acts. The creative act represents an affirmation of self. Without some acknowledgement from outside, it may be difficult to believe in the value of one’s products. When the self has been both highly valued (leading to somewhat grandiose expectations) and de-valued, there may result a split, given that these two opposing poles cannot be easily integrated. For example, Marta had received accolades early on for her accomplishments but had fallen into a morass between her perceptions of others’ expectations versus her own capacities. As a result, her creativity had been lost to her for many years. Marta describes how, previous to our work together, she had been unable to even integrate information she received regarding her “talent” because of the opposing awareness of her lack thereof. She had had the presumption that everyone else must have whatever she had: These became the givens. For Marta, it was only whatever she lacked that came under review. At some level, Marta has a sense of her own value. However, her mother’s aversion has made it difficult for Marta to truly encounter and thereby real-ize her own quite extraordinarily beautiful mind. As we continued to work together and my acceptance of her began to give her some grounding, Marta began to be able to truly hear some of the affirmations she received regarding her own unique value as a person and as an artist. One colleague, who had hitherto been experienced as rejecting and condemning, was finally heard to say: “Not everyone can do that, you know,” in response to Marta’s unique and creative resolution of a dilemma. For Marta, being faced with the dilemma at all had been an essential affirmation of her own incapacities, which completely discounted for her the rather ingenious solution she had found. As she begins to more fully see herself in all her complexity, she is able to ground herself in her talents as well as her weaknesses

Narcissism and Creativity

109

and to enjoy working with and within them. Much like the experience of Elena (described in chapter 6) what had been terrible, unendurable, annihilating steps towards doom (practicing) now became, for Marta, more truly playing, with attendant growth, creativity, and pleasure. Marta was beginning to find what she had lost, and this was experienced as a miraculous and delightful discovery. As Gadamer (1988) describes it, “the joy of recognition is . . . that more becomes known than is already known” (p. 102). In order to make this discovery, we must have some sense that we can be valued. The secure container (the “relationship that is being found to be reliable” [Winnicott, 1971, p. 47]) provides a space within which we can become more than we had been because we are invited to play out our potential self-representations and thereby become more fully known to both self and other. In this way, we can come to be in the moment in a way that facilitates development and creativity. Marta’s desires for recognition had been thwarted by her inability to use her talents out of fear that they might be seen as pathetic or repugnant. Her rediscovery of her creative abilities proceeded slowly, in arenas that were initially quite remote from her medium of choice. This titrated her anxiety and thereby allowed her greater freedom of movement than had she attempted to attack the problem more directly. Marta’s capacities were such that she was able to excel in each of the successive arenas she chose and to derive satisfaction from the experience itself. This helped her to value her experience more profoundly rather than becoming lost in her desires for recognition. Paradoxically, as the external recognition became less important, it became more apparent. In contrast, the excessiveness of Nash’s needs for recognition (along with the hostility that tended to keep others at bay) ultimately seems to have weighted the precarious balance he had found. As the end product became more and more important, there were fewer rewards in the process itself. This seems to have made it difficult for him to persist in his work without receding further into fantasy, ultimately making the desired recognition even less likely. Without firm grounding in a medium that provides a vehicle by which one can receive some acknowledgement, actual perceptual abilities may be enacted without apparent purpose or meaning, a sad loss of creative potential. This makes it important to find a viable means for using one’s abilities (an appropriate medium), rather than allowing ourselves to perpetuate this type of split, whereby the affirmation is provided in illusory realms and therefore concomitantly discounted. In the film A Beautiful Mind we are invited into the moment of inspiration, as patterns begin to emerge for Nash from the complexity of the world around him. As we watch, the pattern begins to emerge from the mass of numbers or letters and becomes illuminated. We are transfixed by this miraculous accomplishment. This achievement would seem to become the “fix” that Nash is fed by. As the internal world comes to supersede the external one, however, “reality” becomes a more and more potent persecutor, infiltrating the internal

110

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

world, as well. Any defense has its good and its bad aspects. What begins as a way of saving the self becomes a prison of sorts, constraining further growth. For Nash, the characters he created began as allies, offering companionship and affirming his value, but then began to turn on him as the tension between inner and outer worlds increased. The absence of external recognition creates a difficult dilemma for the artist, whose unrecognized genius may be seen as madness and thereby may come to be experienced as such. Many creative individuals experience a deep split between the grandiose and vilified aspects of self: There is a sense of great capacity but a failure to enact it in a satisfactory manner. The line between genius and madness, for some, may be a matter of finding a safe enough haven via a “holding environment” (for Nash, his wife Alicia and Princeton; for Marta, psychoanalysis), to enable the gifts to emerge. There is something so poignant in visioning the fine line between genius and that edge too far. In A Beautiful Mind we are brought up to that line, where we might consider the importance of learning what we can and cannot do with our gifts; what we can and cannot survive. This issue has been prominent in my work with Marta, who had spent many years trying to find some responsive other who might understand her dilemma. It was not that she was depressed or could not function. To the contrary, that in itself represented a danger: that she would continue through life without successfully grappling with the fact that what was most important to her had become inaccessible. Another potent hazard was found in those well-intentioned professionals who encouraged trials of medications that distanced her from her inner world, thereby further obstructing her path back towards her creativity rather than facilitating it. In one session, Marta began to play on a thread regarding the importance of self-disclosure, having read a headline in the New York Times touting the importance of this in the success of therapy. As she spoke of this, I wondered where she was going with it, because I tell her nothing about myself and she does not ask. She was speaking, however, about something much more profound. She was telling me that she reads me in my face and knows that I am “with” her. This is what allows her to tolerate the not-seeing of her that she encounters daily. She can come back to the consulting room and look into my eyes and know that she exists. What I disclose is recognition in the form of my own internal aliveness and responsiveness as she recounts to me her thoughts and experiences. What she might also read is my pained perplexity that this should be so extraordinary a thing to find in one’s analyst. The stories of women like Marta and Elena bring us up sharply against the limits of our own profession. We are invited to wonder to what extent our failures to appreciate the capacities of our patients leaves them wandering alone in a kind of no man’s (or woman’s) land, caught between an inherent, but uncertain, sense of value and a failure to find sufficient affirmation to thrive.

Narcissism and Creativity

111

One of the things that had kept Marta seeking out therapy, in spite of the interactive failures she had encountered, was this need for recognition of important aspects of self that had found insufficient expression in the external world. She had experienced tremendous enjoyment in her creative endeavors as an adolescent but had lost this capacity as she began to win awards. What had been produced in play could not be accomplished by intention. As the work of it superseded the play of it, her relationship with her art had attenuated, until what had been her dearest love and deepest joy became the nightmare that haunted her waking life. Complicating this was the hostility and deprecation in her family towards the “loser”: Marta could not win without destroying the Other. Marta finally divorced herself from this nightmare by divorcing herself from her creative desires. In this way, she made her peace with existence but at a huge price to self. As Marta talks about what is missing in her life, it is difficult to follow her, for we are on the track of something that is truly and profoundly missing. In many ways it does not exist: As she gets closer to her desire to create, the desire itself slips away and she finds herself absorbed in something anything - else. It has been perplexing to listen to Marta talk about her complete lack of distress or desire in relation to her art, alongside her insistence that this is the only thing that really matters to her in life. She described how her previous therapists had urged her to turn her interests in other directions: They had not taken seriously her urgency to be able to create once again, but rather had treated her as though she was “crazy,” even urging her to stop working at all and go on disability as a way of surviving. This suggestion affirmed for Marta her utter intangibility to the other, reinforcing her terror of discovering that she might, indeed, be as insubstantial as she was being seen. This suggestion also represented a profound annihilation of Marta herself: dancing, and the love of music that infused it, were not only the source of her vitality and creative drive, they also seemed to be the organizing principles that had made her life worthwhile. PATTERNS AS UNITS OF MEANING For many gifted individuals, there is a heightened capacity to “see,” utilize, and integrate pattern (see Charles, 2002a; Ehrenzweig, 1967). Just as mathematics is fundamentally about patterns, so, too, is dance, as well as the music that underlies it. In each of these, the patterning of the elements comes to carry meanings that may be highly nuanced and subtle and yet profoundly communicative to one who is absorbed in that particular language. Marta’s inability to come to terms with her performance problems made the worlds of dance and music highly inaccessible to her. Her aversion to both self and product had made even the act of listening to music an abhorrent reminder of the inaccessibility of her art. In the meantime, Marta has spent many of the years in which the play of it had been out of reach,

112

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

studying both dance and music as patterned phenomena. Her understanding and appreciation of the nuance and subtleties inherent in the structure and formal elements of these is quite profound. Nash, too, seems to have been drawn to patterned forms. At Princeton, he was often seen riding a bicycle in ever-narrowing concentric circles and figure eights (Nasar, 1998). He is also said to have spent many hours at the music library at Princeton listening to Bach and Mozart, and to have been continually whistling passages from Bach’s fugues (Nasar, 1998). It may be his basic affinity for patterns that drew Nash to Bach, a composer whose work is highly and elaborately structured. Bach’s fugues and canons may be seen as derivations of basic themes, in accordance with rules requiring great complexity of thought. Bach’s permutations of fundamental patterns of pure tone seem to have had particular appeal for Nash (Nasar, 1998). Hofstadter’s (1979) description of Bach’s extraordinary mental capacity (in regard to Bach’s having improvised a six-part fugue for Frederick the Great) bears some resemblance to descriptions of Nash: “One could probably liken the task of improvising a six-part fugue to the playing of sixty simultaneous blindfold games of chess, and winning them all” (p. 7). Bach must have appealed to Nash’s love of “the game” as well as his love of pattern, in that one finds in Bach’s use of counterpoint that “many ideas and forms have been woven together, and . . . playful double meanings and subtle allusions are commonplace” (Hofstadter, 1979, p. 10). Nash’s ability to “read” pattern appears to have been quite exceptional. However, as we develop, we all learn to read pattern above and beyond the content of a given communication (Charles, 2002a). One way of trying to understand this mode of understanding is to look at amodal communication processes, in which it is the patterning of the elements (rather than the mode of delivery) that comes to carry meaning. This type of communication is seen in interactions between infants and their caregivers, as information is passed back and forth in varying modalities. For example, the infant’s cry of distress may be imitated and attenuated by the mother in the initial firmness and then increasingly more soothing manner of her touch. We can also see in this example an implicit act of recognition, as the mother acknowledges the infant’s distress before moving towards containment. Amodal processing would seem to be a rudimentary form of symbol manipulation, in which there is a displacement from one sensory modality to another. This type of symbol manipulation becomes a precursor for the ability to transpose between mental modalities, as well (Kumin, 1996). As language comes to the fore, naming the elements provides a means for making explicit categorical distinctions, which facilitate the discriminations themselves as well as our ability to communicate with one another in reference to them. The use of language,

Narcissism and Creativity

113

however, may also constrain the possible meanings of these elements, thereby limiting our conceptualizations as well as our creativity. The ability to discern patterns would seem to be an innate aspect of our inheritance as human beings. Infant research documents our inherent ability to discern categories across multiple domains, through our perceptions of distinct characteristics, such as orientation, angle, hue, and form (Quinn, 1994). As development proceeds, so does the infant’s capacity to attend to and discriminate between a wider range of perceptual features (Cooper & Aslin, 1994). Development also brings greater differential responsiveness to specific patternings, such as pitch contours (Fernald, 1993; Papousek et al. 1990). At the nonverbal level, we learn to process an extensive array of perceptual stimuli and to derive meanings that may inform our understandings without necessarily being accessible to conscious awareness. Indeed, the lack of accessibility to conscious awareness seems to increase the speed and efficiency of these types of patterned connections that underlie our implicit understandings. These types of understandings seem to work on a basic, essentially simple system much like that of the computer: a system of yes versus no; same versus difference, much as Matte-Blanco (1975) describes in his expositions of the principles of symmetry and asymmetry. Symmetrical logic grounds us through the identifications based on noting similarities, whereas it is through secondary process that we make more explicit sense of our experience by establishing distinctions between like things. The tension between these two modes of perception would seem to be fundamental to the creative enterprise, which requires the ability to organize, integrate, and recontextualize information within and between these two domains (see, for example, Charles, 2002a; Ehrenzweig, 1967). These essential principles of sameness and difference also order our sense of being and of belonging in the relational world and are at times at odds with one another, as w e come to stand separate and apart from - but ever in relation to - the collective other. THE GROUP AND THE “NEW IDEA” As we move into the realm of novel productions, there is an essential dilemma in that we are provided fewer opportunities for reality testing. By definition, we have moved beyond the bounds of accepted realities. Our imaginations are taxed by the new idea and we may look for affirmation that the task is worth the effort. There seems to be an inherent dialectic between the more conservative elements that secure consensual knowledge and the growth potential that is implicit in challenges to the prevailing wisdoms. Bion (1970) describes the tensions that arise between consensual realities and novelty in terms of relationships between the Establishment and the “Mystic”: the purveyor of the new idea to the group.

114

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

Nash and Marta each seem to fit Bion’s (1970) definition of the mystic as one who could know truth without needing to think about it. This entails the capacity to believe in one’s self and one’s own vision in the face of alternate realities, obviously a precarious position for both Marta and Nash, each in their own ways. According to Bion (1970), the defining characteristic of the mystic is the ability to truly be oneself, even in the midst of a group. Arieti (1976) has described this capacity as one of the essential stimulating factors of creativity. From Bion’s perspective, there is an essential narcissism intrinsic to the role of the mystic. Whereas the group reserves for God the possibility of knowing truth for one’s self, the mystic “needs to reassert a direct experience of god of which he has been, and is, deprived by the institutionalized group” (1970, p. 77). This type of deprivation may be seen as an essential aspect of Nash’s relationship with the group, from which he elicits both envy and deprecation. It also seems to be a factor in Marta’s inability to bring forward her talents before an audience. Although the group needs the mystic for his or her essential revitalizing functions, it is also inevitably resistant to change. In spite of this inherent tension, the mystic and the group are vital to one another: “the Establishment cannot be dispensed with . . . because the institutionalized group . . . is as essential to the development of the individual, including the mystic, as he is to it” (Bion, 1970, p. 75). The mystic is both needed and feared by the group, exacerbating the tension between the two, as the mystic intrudes upon the complacency of the group, exerting a nihilistic force: “the nature of his contribution is certain to be destructive of the laws, conventions, culture, and therefore coherence, of a group” (Bion, 1970, p. 64). Without the new idea, however, the group becomes stagnant and atrophies towards its own destruction (Charles, 2001b). We use status and credentials as guideposts on our way, telling us what is worthy or unworthy of our attention. Our dilemma is amplified by our difficulty in understanding concepts that are multidimensional (Matte-Blanco, 1975, 1988). Nash, for example, taxed the imaginations of the mathematical community by attempting to link manifolds to algebraic varieties, a simpler class. Loosely speaking, Nash asserted that for any manifold it was possible to find an algebraic variety one of whose parts corresponded in some essential way to the original object. To do this, he showed, one has to go to higher dimensions (Nasar, 2002, p. xxi).

Moving into the domain of higher dimensions appears to be particularly taxing for human consciousness. One of the difficulties inherent in conceptualizing complex processes is that we become blind to important facets of reality that move beyond our purview by virtue of the limitations inherent in our frame of reference. This means that the “reality” of an exceptional mind, such as that of Nash or Marta, may be quite different in some fundamental aspects from the “reality” of one whose thinking is more highly constrained. Given this, there may

Narcissism and Creativity

115

be times when what appears at first sight to be madness might actually be the product of a higher level of consciousness. Many new ideas in the history of science have been forestalled by their incomprehensibility within the context of the prevailing wisdom. One difficulty is that we tend to remain unaware of the limitations imposed by our frame of reference until we are able to encounter the limit itself. For example, if we are shown a photograph of a common object in uncommon proportions, we may have difficulty reading the image unless we are cued by additional verbal or other contextual information that reframes the image and enables us to read it differently. The constraints imposed by limits of this nature may be particularly relevant to the understanding of the “irrational.” Some knowledge is more accessible through the nonverbal, intuitive domains than through the conscious, rational mind. Indeed, some of our greatest achievements are discovered rather than more explicitly being thought. However, much of our implicit knowledge may be inaccessible without sufficient contextual information to provide the necessary cues for retrieval. Nonverbal and unconscious processes seem to be accessible in different ways than our more rational thoughts. Matte-Blanco (1988) suggests that the reason for this is that they operate “in a space of a higher number of dimensions than that of our perceptions and conscious thinking” (p. 91) and thereby lend themselves to greater complexity of thought than that which might be derived through more rational means. As a result, inspiration often comes in the form of a pattern, leaving us with the dilemma of discovering the words that might best characterize and communicate the meanings denoted by that pattern (Charles, 2002a). For example, Einstein is quoted as saying: “I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes and I may try to express it in words afterwards . . . All our thinking is in the nature of a free play of concepts” (in Opatow, 1997, p. 292). Nash, himself, was aware of the dilemma imposed by the conflicting needs to stay within and outside the bounds of “reason.” After having lost several decades of his productivity, he was determined to stay within the bounds of the rational, but also aware of the cost: One aspect of this is that rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person’s conception of his relation to the cosmos. For example, a non-Zoroastrian could think of Zarathustra as simply a madman who led millions of naive followers to adopt a cult of ritual fire worship. But without his “madness” Zarathustra would necessarily have been only another of the millions or billions of human individuals who would have lived and then been forgotten (Nash, 2002, p. 10).

Nash’s genius seems to have made the road to acceptance within the group a particularly precarious one. One of the difficulties for the novel thinker is to find a place for himself within the group without destroying his creativity.

116

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

Nash’s narcissism complicated this endeavor, as he continually set himself aside and apart from others. He seems to have had a great deal of difficulty allowing anyone else to be the focus of attention in any positive way, which greatly impoverished his relationships. From another perspective, many of Marta’s interpersonal frustrations can be linked to her inability to value and even to sustain her sense of self in the presence of uncomprehending others. This dilemma so disrupted her equilibrium that most of her energies were lost in efforts that became more impossible as she invested in relationships that were increasingly strained and unattainable. Without the ability to value herself and the products of her own mind and being, she became profoundly lost and utterly desolate in the face of the lack of comprehension of the other. Marta tells me that even though, in some part of herself, she was able to maintain a sense of her own reality when it was thus challenged, it had no value for her in the moment of being unable to find recognition in the other. Ultimately, it would seem to be this recognition, which Nash was able to find in the profound respect of his colleagues for his gifts and talents and Marta was able to eventually find through psychoanalysis, that provided sufficient containment to enable each to find a home within the social world. This is not so different from that which we provide for all of our patients - some balance of recognition of whatever is unique along with sufficient reality testing to provide the individual with further resources with which to negotiate the edges of their own limits. We are always engaged in the process of constructing and reconstructing our realities. The artistry of Ron Howard’s film created a unique opportunity, most often found in psychoanalysis: a way of remaining both inside and outside of the constructed realities, from which perspective we might consider both the benefits and the costs and how they intertwine. This endeavor is facilitated to the extent that we can encourage sufficient acknowledgement of the underlying envy inherent in the narcissistic split to enable the split to be productively seen. This balance is particularly difficult to achieve in the case of the more destructive type of envy, in which the paranoid-schizoid defenses prevail and it seems as though someone must be annihilated in the exchange. When psychological equilibrium has been purchased at the price of emotional engagement, movements beyond this impasse can be extremely painful and disorganizing (Joseph, 1981a). At these times, attempts to join with the other can be experienced as disturbing and threatening to the individual who is being asked to actually be in the moment with the analyst (Joseph, 1981b). However, in the case of individuals such as Marta, for whom the libidinal aspects prevail, joining can be experienced as providing a facilitating environment that contains the anxieties sufficiently that growth can occur.

Narcissism and Creativity

117

Bion (1977a) distinguished between the envy that is associated with gratitude and that linked to greed. Whereas the former is capable of linking and growth (in that it is amenable to the establishment of a good object relationship), the latter lends itself to de-generation; to unlinking; to the breaking to bits of whatever might have been potentially meaningful. It is important for the analyst to be able to track these two types of defenses, so that the destructive aspects of the envy can be contained and interpreted. This type of containment stands in counterpoint to the annihilation anxieties, as the analyst accepts the destructive aspects of the envy. It is not only the patient’s envy that must be grappled with. When faced with extraordinary individuals, in particular, we must grapple with our own envy that might lead us to devalue or diminish their gifts by pathologizing or otherwise annihilating them through our own limitations. The analyst’s willingness to know what cannot be known, and her ability to contain what seems intolerable, counters the patient’s assumptions that the underlying truth is too terrible to bear, thereby keeping us moving in the direction of growth rather than evasion.

This page intentionally left blank

Eight

Transformations “Who are you?” said the Caterpillar. This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I – I hardly know, Sir, just at present – at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.” “What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar, sternly. “Explain yourself!” “I ca’n’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.” “I don’t see,” said the Caterpillar. “I’m afraid I ca’n’t put it more clearly,” Alice replied, very politely, “for I ca’n’t understand it myself, to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.” - Lewis Carroll; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Bion encouraged us to think about impossible things, like transformations and “ultimate realities.” He always seemed to be trying to step out of the way, so that his shadow might not obscure what he was trying to say. I’d like to begin this chapter with a quote that sums up, for me, what is so liberating and challenging about Bion. In one of his 1977 talks, he says that it is only in practice that: you discover that it is worth your while talking to patients in the way that you talk to them – never mind whether it is sanctified by appearing in the Collected Works. That experience convinces you that it is worth while having some respect for your Self, for what you think and imagine and speculate. There is a curious kind of conviction about these occasions where what you say has an effect which is recognizably similar to your theories. A ‘marriage’ is taking place between you and you; a marriage between your thoughts and feelings (Bion, 1980, p. 27).

This would seem to be one of those impossible things that Bion encourages us to think about: how to be ourselves and to find our own ways with as much integrity and respect as we can muster. Ultimately, this is the challenge of “O”: to attempt to be as fully as possible in the moment, without regard to one’s ideas about how or what one should or might be. In this attempt,

120

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

we offer an invitation to our patients to enter into the dance, as well, to sound and resound into their own darkness. When I think of Bion’s conception of O, what I want to think about is the wonderful side of it, which I’ll have to indulge myself in, but I’ll save that for later. At that point we can all enjoy the respite from this other side of O, which can feel pretty awful when we’re in it but also strangely energizing as we encounter its recesses. Bion (1970) speaks of O as the Ultimate Reality, the eminently unknowable. O is that which we can approach, but can never truly know. In Bion’s terms, O can only be become. In approaching O, we approach the patterned themes of experience that Bion (1965) terms “constant conjunctions”: those aspects of reality that tend to co-occur in ways that signal to us an essential relationship and meaning being portrayed. They point us to a pattern. Our ability to learn, to think, or to know in any real sense is constrained by our ability to encounter what might be known and to tolerate this encounter without un-knowing or defensively occluding it (Grotstein, 1996). In this way, we “learn from experience” (Bion, 1962) and “our knowing bears the stamp of our individuality, as well as the conviction of the personal” (Charles, 2002d, p. 83), for, in a very real sense, it is only the personal that we can truly know. Our knowing may be quite profound and yet elusive, configured according to previous experiences that have been taken in and digested but have not yet been articulated in verbal form (Charles, 2002a). As we approach this intersection of the universal and the personal, w e are always at risk of blindly occluding one aspect or another from our view. This difficulty often leads to irresolvable debates regarding the nature of reality, a dead end Bion (1963) attempts to warn us of, as he continually points us back towards the underlying simplicity that our so-called truths tend to obscure under layers of complexities. Transformations in O depend on our ability to be in the moment and to play with the moment in our minds. This is true whether we are being called upon to willfully and mindfully encounter the terror in the room and be present with it (Eigen, 1998), or to enlarge and enliven the space in the construction of the play. In order to understand Bion’s notions of transformations, we need to have a sense of the essence of play. This play literally allows us the give, the space in which movement becomes possible. It is in play or, as Bion more often terms it, the realm of myth, that we can attain sufficient distance from the ostensible reality that mires us in its seeming solidity. Opaque truths are empty truths. They serve the purpose of evasion rather than growth. Any move towards growth must also be a move towards play: towards loosening the death grip we hold on our ostensible realities, so that we might envision them anew. Bion, echoing Freud, spoke of deepening the darkness to illuminate the unseen (Grotstein, personal communication, 2002). “Unless the obscurity can be

Transformations

121

circumvented,” he says, “it will remain unobserved” (Bion, 1991, p. ix). As w e attempt to illuminate these opaque truths, it is often the perspective of the “third” that provides an opportunity to re-vision. By way of perhaps illuminating Bion’s views of transformations, I will bring in a third vantage point, through the work of the philosopher Gadamer (1998) and his insights into play: “To truly experience the play, one must be drawn into it, to forget one’s self in the moment and be in the play” (p. 102). As we build a space in which both analyst and patient can participate in the play (and thereby also become spectators of self, other, and the interactions between the two), we have greater access to our nonverbal knowings, which in turn enhances the possibility of profound transformation. As Gadamer (1988) puts it: “the absolute moment in which a spectator stands is at once selfforgetfulness and reconciliation with the self. That which detaches from everything also gives him back the whole of his being” (p. 113). At the point at which two individuals can be present in the room and engage with one another at these profound levels, “the transformation,” according to Gadamer, “is a transformation into the true” (p. 101). The transformation into the true is a transformation into the structure, which becomes revealed through absorption in the self-representation that occurs through play. These are the moments in which we encounter form and essence and, in playing with them together, affirm their value as well as their possible meanings. In line with Winnicott (1971) and Bion (1997), Gadamer distinguishes between the play that is evasive and that which moves towards growth: It is not enchantment in the sense of bewitchment that waits for the redeeming word that will transform things back to the way they were, but is itself redemption and transformation back into true being. In the representation of play, what is emerges. In it is produced and brought to the light what otherwise is constantly hidden and withdrawn. If someone knows how to perceive the comedy and tragedy of life, he is able to resist the suggestiveness of purposes which conceal the game that is played with us (p. 101).

GRACE The truths that we seek are never quite knowable in any final sense. They may be filtered through secondary structures such as the paranoid-schizoid or depressive positions, but the only real access is “by resonance in ‘O’ with it” (Grotstein, 1996, p. 129). As I sit with Grace, in particular, I am always up against the very hard edge of the paranoid-schizoid deconstruction that she has effected as a way of notseeing whatever has been deemed unseeable. I know that she will need to be able to encounter her reality as a construction in order to be able to envision any

122

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

alternate one. “Ultimately,” I tell her, trying to barter my way out of the incredible stuckness of it, “we are responsible for the moment by moment choice of living or not-living.” It is in this deadly not-living that she annihilates all hope, every spark of whatever might be if she were willing or able to breathe some life into it. As we come close to the ineffable, it becomes palpable. We find ourselves sitting in the presence of truth that is being denied or accepted; perhaps more often denied and accepted. It is ineffable because of the poverty of the instruments through which we scan and sort: receptively, deceptively, but always disjunctively, sorting into value-laden categories of what may be seen and how and whether the vision can be trusted and with whom and when. Ultimately, it is our lack of faith in our selves and in our experience that keeps us wandering in the desolation of our own personal deserts, grasping greedily for the very water of which we have, in our finite wisdom, decided to deprive ourselves. With Grace, I am always in the awkward position of inviting her to see through her own eyes a reality that is colored in shades of my own. To her lack of possibility I add hope; to her worthlessness I add value; to her emptiness I add substance. However, I also know that in engaging in this dance, I become good to her bad; value to her lack. I am perennially trying to create the possibility of hope without leaving too much of myself attached. “Do you have any magic?” she asks me. “No,” I say. “The only magic comes from whatever investment you place in whatever matters to you: the value you give it. You are so accustomed to seeing absence that that is all that exists for you. Whatever you try to build disappears in the vastness of the lack of valuing. You are creating a life: an empty life, but a life nevertheless. It’s up to you what you are going to invest in it.” At some level, it is her choice: not a free choice, certainly, configured as it is by her previous experiences. However, the reality created in her family is only one possibility among many. Grace’s view of God is fused with her images of mother, which are harsh, condemning, and critical. Her mother deplored and annihilated Grace’s constructions, finding them inevitably lacking. Grace’s view of self creates similar havoc with any proposed thought or action. She also, however, carries inside her another mother/god who found delight and wonder in her own children’s constructions. When she looks at others, it is possible to value the laborious steps that become growth in living. However, it would take a great deal of effort to view herself through those more benign eyes and to attempt to value her own development. We find ourselves up against realities currently too terrible to bear, hard aground against the reality that not bearing them only brings us deeper into the abyss. This is an almost unendurable edge of O that seeks false rescue, which becomes one more way of not living: a further descent into hell.

Transformations

123

DAVID With David, we encounter O in the silences, which become quite profound in their intensity. It is in those moments that he is most able to allow himself to be in my presence. It is then difficult for us to find words that will lead us further into the moment rather than destroying it completely. At times, we can meet in the myths we create together as I wonder into his silences, trying to find my way into his impasse, that we might, perhaps, find our way out together. On a given day, David might give me some bits and fragments of the setting of his internal drama, through which I might feel my way in the silence. On one particular day David told me, with some regret, that he had been unable to call to cancel the previous appointment because he had been essentially unable to face that task. He also spoke of having spent time with his family, who seemed to be joining forces in their attempts to convince him to follow their path rather than his own. In response to these threads, I offered up my images of being caught in a battle that is raging overhead. The intensity of the shards and fragments being lobbed was quite compelling and I could barely find words with which to bring my sense of the essential configuration of this dilemma into being. I said that I had the sense that he becomes caught when he imagines trying to explain his position because, not only is he not sure that he can put it forward in a way that will make sense to the other, but, at a deeper level, he is afraid of losing the sense himself. I suggested that this was part of a very real confusion that occurred in his family as wars were being waged over what could be thought and when. I said that I thought that this had happened because in his family the point was not what was right or true, but rather who was right, this latter being adjudicated on the basis of who could superimpose their will most forcefully upon the other. No one had been too interested in helping him to make sense of things as he was growing up, but rather in superimposing their sense over his own. In this way, he had learned to keep his thoughts to himself to avoid the continual bombardments, as they became fodder for the artillery that kept lobbing back and forth in this crazy war that no one could ever win. What seemed to keep David paralyzed was that the war was waged in the name of love, which he desperately needed and deeply valued, in spite of its costs. My sense was that in this moment in our work together David had invited me into an encounter with the ostensible forces of good and evil that keep him immobilized, that I might, perhaps, better know them for all their power and potency. It is often in our moments of silence that we summon up the forces of myth and symbol in our attempts to move further into O, rather than being annihilated by it. This seems to require our ability to meet one another within the

124

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

silence: to encounter the real in all its immanence and to attempt to negotiate that battlefield together. MARY With Mary, O has another face, which is closer to a disemboweling, as we sit with an emptiness so profound that we know at some level that it is but a defense against the real demon, pounding silently at the door. The images of emptiness that Mary imparts to me, in the moment, become revealed as a desperate defense against the assaultive intrusion; the breaking open so unspeakable that her only conscious memory is this hollowness left in its wake. It is this hollowness with which she fills the space, in defense against this other horror, too terrible to even know. “I had almost convinced myself it wasn’t true,” says Mary, mournfully. In this way, my resonance with this other reality, lying deep in the bowels of her pain, becomes the assault that tears her open once again. In the moment, I become the perpetrator, assaulting her with whatever knowledge had been deemed too intolerable to bear; assaulting her with the inevitability of the pain as a price of being. It is all we can do to sit together, for the moment, and try to tolerate the enormity of the pain and hope that whatever hope is being offered can survive in the face of this much pain. As we are invited into this untraveled territory in which we sit, quite precariously, at the edge of O, it is often our faith that helps us to survive (Charles, 2003b). It is, inevitably, faith in the unknowable and unforeseeable, in the face of which we offer a promise that has no definition, for the end is not in view. And yet, we do know that it must be possible to survive the impossible and to contain the uncontainable: to hold together all the pieces of a life without discarding any as lacking in value. With this end in mind, at some level we discard any preconceived notions of value, aside from whatever we use as guideposts to our own integrity of being: whatever index we use in our attempts to discern evasion from growth; distortion from truth; the safety of danger from the danger of safety. ALICE From another vantage, I come upon another face of O in my work with a rather extraordinary young woman in her mid thirties, who often carries me into this uncharted territory through her sheer willingness to explore. I think that I will call her Alice, as she tends to take me right through the looking glass and back again. Initially, Alice sought treatment because of insomnia, which had been a recurrent problem but was reaching uncomfortable proportions at the time. Alice was uncertain as to the extent to which the symptom was linked to her concerns over her absorption in her work and whether she might be better off giving up work entirely, so that she could have more of a life. These concerns were also

Transformations

125

linked to her desire to have a child and her questions as to what manner of mother she might be. Alice is a professor of history whose entrée into its mysteries took the form of an encounter, through an archival maze, with a young woman who had managed to extricate herself from poverty and to pass herself off as a highly educated person, from good family, in a time when this feat was quite unlikely. After having lived out several variations on this theme, the woman was caught and imprisoned. Alice had become fascinated by this person and found herself immersed in further discovering the woman through whatever documents had been left behind. This had become an adventure, of sorts, particularly exciting in that the woman would appear under one name, only to vanish and reappear in another place, in another guise. Alice was intrigued, in part, I believe, because there was a deep resonance between this woman and herself. In some important way, she found herself configured (Charles, 2002a) to fundamental aspects of this person’s being. Somehow, in bringing forth this woman and her words from obscurity, Alice was also rescuing her own. As a child, Alice had avoided going to school for some long time. She had hidden in the woods, creating her own universe through games of make believe. At one point, in an attempt to keep the world at bay, she had created an effigy of herself: an attempt to convince her parents to “bury” her and leave her be. Alice seemed to have had, not only the sense that there was something precious that needed protecting, but also an extraordinary determination to do so. It was only when her parents finally sent her to see a psychiatrist (who seemed to be a greater threat to her internal world than the school had posed) that she reluctantly returned to the world of formal education. Eventually, after her father’s death, she configured herself according to her mother’s visions. She took on her mother’s work ethic and threw her energies into becoming a model student, continuing to live out this theme by choosing the role of educator as her own career. Alice describes her mother as cold and efficient. In sharp contrast, she describes a deep affinity for her father, with whom she had spent many cherished moments in shared activity, with little actual talking. “We didn’t say a great deal,” she says to me, with an embarrassed and wistful laugh, “but it felt good to be with him, to do things together.” When Alice was in her late teens, her father had died suddenly, without warning. He and his daughters were on vacation, at the time, in a wilderness area of which he was particularly fond. He had had the idea the day before his death to surprise Alice by taking her on a day trip. This last journey had been experienced by Alice as a gift and a pleasure that she had treasured and savored through the intervening years. Alice and her father seem to have been very attuned to one another. The week before he died, Alice had been unable to sleep, without any apparent reason.

126

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

She wonders now at this symptom, which lifted after his death. She has the sense that she had somehow been in touch with the imminence of his passing: that she had, in essence, been keeping vigil; perhaps warding off the inevitability of his departure. It was after his death that she had begun to throw herself into her work. Her mother had had no patience with sadness or grieving; the only way to be with her was to be willing to set aside any notion of grief or mourning. “I don’t think I ever really grieved for him,” Alice says, with wonder. During the time we were working together, a colleague with whom she was not close, but who also had no other close ties, had asked Alice to be in charge of her estate. Edith was dying of cancer and wanted to make sure that there would be someone who would speak for her interests when she could not. This was an uncomfortable position for Alice, who took her charge very seriously. Alice struggled with Edith's ostensible invitations to intimacy that were counterbalanced by the rather solid walls she imposed between them. This predicament felt very similar to the dilemma in which she found herself with her mother and sister, in which there was the appearance of intimacy countered by the huge barricades that precluded any actual engagement. During Edith’s illness, Alice struggled with her sense of obligation, her perplexity as to what she should or might do that would actually be in line with this woman’s needs, and her own desires and resistances. After one particularly intense session, Alice felt a deep need to visit Edith, whom she had not seen for several days. When Alice returned for the next hour, she expressed gratitude that our work had helped her to experience her own urgency to visit Edith. She had driven directly to her bedside and had spent some time there. At one point, two colleagues had come to visit. Although Alice felt as though they should not be there, as they really were not close to Edith, she also felt that she did not have the right to make those decisions, and left. As it happened, Edith died later that evening, and Alice was not at her side at the time of her death. Although she felt some regret over not having been present with her friend at the actual moment of her death, Alice also experienced profound relief and appreciation that she had been able to attend to the internal call that had enabled her see Edith before she died. In the meantime, Alice had been struggling with infertility issues and had recently decided to adopt. This process entailed a succession of “mournings” of various sorts. In one session, Alice told me that she had been struggling with an imminent sense that she was going to die that was very disorganizing and frightening to her. This was not a new experience, she said. I asked her when it had first occurred, as I had the sense that it was linked to her father's death and to a wish/fear to be with him. Alice confirmed my unvoiced suspicion when she said that she wasn't sure when it had begun, only that it was after her father's death. That session focused around three deaths. Alice spoke first of the death of her grandmother (the middle, in temporal terms, of the three experiences). Alice

Transformations

127

had returned home to see her grandmother as she was dying. The grandmother was in the hospital after having been in Alice’s family home for fifteen years. Although the grandmother had become quite senile over time, Alice still felt a great deal of affection for her. During the Christmas season, as the various relatives began to return to their own homes and their own lives, Alice felt as though someone should be with her grandmother. She brought her work to the hospital and sat at her bedside. Alice was surprised when her mother, who had dropped her off and had not intended to stay, decided to join them. The grandmother was quite frail, but seemed to be hanging on to life, afraid to die. Alice’s mother began to reminisce, which seemed to ease the grandmother who, after a time, stopped breathing. Alice, however, had the strong sense that she was still there, a feeling that lingered quite palpably for some time. My impression was that it had been a very permeable moment, in which these women had commingled in such a way that Alice carried with her very strong vestiges of her grandmother, which kept her alive and present. Alice also mentioned that she had been able to put her grandmother in a “good” place, whereas her father had not been laid to rest in the place in which he had chosen to die, which was somewhat wild, but rather had been brought back to the city, which felt alien. Alice’s holding of her own body as she talked about this suggested her deep discomfort and dis-ease with this “resting” that had no rest to it. Alice then began to speak about the woman who had died of cancer. She said that one of the last things that Edith had said was that she was not ready to die; that she “felt cheated.” This statement had resonated quite profoundly for Alice. It still distresses her, even today, almost a year and a half after the event. Alice began to describe for me the tragedy of this woman's life. Edith had been a very bright daughter in an extremely poor and uneducated family. She had won a scholarship to a very prestigious university in another state. After her first year at school, she had returned home to attend a wedding and had begun crying and could not stop. She was sent to a state institution, shocked quite extensively, and then placed in various menial positions. Edith had left a diary in which she spoke of her confusion and distress, and of her intense sorrow for what had been lost. Alice feels a deep resonance for this woman, who seems to have been in many ways like her, though Alice was not struck down in the same way. As we sit with these three deaths, I think about how porous Alice is and of how strongly she resonates to women who are fragile and yet so vitally strong, so full of promise. I think of how her fears of dying are becoming stronger as she contemplates the terror and longing of motherhood and the enormity of not being able to conceive: of not being able to bear life. I think of the many ripples of this for her in terms of her sense of her own vitality, generativity, and capacity to

128

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

nurture. In contrast to her mother's desperate determination to titrate any emotion, to transform it into diligence and hard work, Alice’s father seems to have quite vitally formed her sense of being contained in love. In thinking of all these things, I was struck by the complexity of the various threads and tried to hold them in mind. I told Alice that I had the sense that, as she contemplates motherhood, it links up with her connection to her father; that the only way that she could keep him with her was either to undo his death or to die herself. Thus, her phantasies of the parent-child bond are informed by a profound sense of apocalyptic merger and loss. As she faces the possibility of being so profoundly connected with another being once again, Alice also faces the enormity of catastrophic loss, so that moving forward towards being a mother is also like moving forward towards the imminence of her own death. As I sat with Alice on this occasion, the intensity was completely captivating. At its most profound, our resonance with O is an acknowledgement that we are in the presence of profound and simple truths that are inherently unspeakable and yet, we try. In these moments of almost intolerable symmetry with another being, the intimacy can be almost overwhelming. The sense of immediacy and import can have the ineffable power of finding one’s self in the presence of a great work of art, in which the greatness comes from the artist having captured the basic structure that is also its essence (Gadamer, 1988; Charles, 2002a). We are captured by these moments in which we recognize something essential in the other and in one’s self in a way that reverberates with what seems to be an underlying and essential truth. And so, Alice brings me to the edge of the abyss and over, towards some interim space in which she finds herself located, between all that has been and might be. In this way, her current symptoms invite us to see further into whatever truths they might reveal. “I don’t know how you do your work,” she tells me: It seems to her that I would need to be in the same place as she, and she does not know how one might choose to move into those spaces; the intensity is so deep, survival so precarious. However, it is in these very moments of being-with that we can most profoundly resonate with the other’s being and, in this way, be able to offer forth a vision that enlivens and revitalizes; that opens up the space and enables us to see more than had been seen. In those moments of being together, I was struck by how profoundly Alice had led me into this whole question of how death, as life, would seem to be inherent in our very being; that as we are living we are dying and as we are dying we are living. The two are intimately and integrally connected, and we have only the illusion that we know the dividing line between the two. There is so much that we cannot see, cannot know: can only sense, believe, or disbelieve, as we sit in these moments together, being willing to be.

Transformations

129

MARTA With Marta, in contrast, O has a completely different feel. We encounter it frequently, because she requires from me a quality of being-in-the-moment that pulls us into intimate proximity. Marta has been struggling to create an environment in which she might finally be “received.” This process of ensuring my own assimilation of, and accommodation to, her reality took us through what Marta describes as the “dark years” in which I felt continually barraged by those essential truths I believed I already knew. This terrible disequilibrium began to be contained as I became able to affirm Marta’s truths by taking them in sufficiently to break the stalemate. I was then able to reflect to Marta the idea that the other is variable, rather than absolute, and so it matters whether we can acknowledge what we can or cannot see. It was only when I suggested to Marta that her failure to be received might result from a failure on the part of the other, rather than her own, that she began to be able to envision a world in which an other could hold her in mind with ongoing care and value. As Marta encounters the idea of the incapacity of the other, she begins to be able to distinguish between evasion and presence. This enables her to begin to make choices as to what to say, to whom, and when, rather than being barraged, herself, by this storm of words waiting to be told. Marta’s mother had been unable to accept her as a whole, tempestuous human being, which had left Marta struggling with an ultimate sense of worthlessness. As she has attempted to “find” herself in the world of her peers, she has encountered strong acknowledgements, which formerly could not be taken in but more recently have become invitations to see herself through a more benign mirror. A choreographer by inclination, Marta had decided that her merit depended on her ability to perform, which was not her greatest strength and so became the abyss through which she ultimately lost herself in her twenties. So certain was she of her inherent unacceptability, that she encountered it in any face she deemed to be of value. As Marta comes to appreciate those gifts she does have, and to bring them into fruition in the world, she encounters greater and greater approbation, and it has become difficult to discount it. Still, she tells me, she sees a really good teacher who can also perform and wonders if her own performance threshold becomes an Achilles’ heel for her students. At one level, she knows that what she has to offer is of great value but at another she worries lest her vulnerabilities poison whatever might have been of value, much as her pain seemed to have become a poison her mother found quite toxic. Marta is, in essence, a dancer. She lives most vitally within her body, within the present moment. In this way, she demands an intensity of engagement

130

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

that is quite compelling. She needs to know that I am with her, that I can see what she is seeing, hear what she is saying, feel what she is feeling. My resonance is the acknowledgment she needs in order to be present in the moment of the telling of her story. In this telling, she is finding the self that became lost in the blindness of the mother’s gaze. In my eyes, she reads acceptance, along with appreciation of herself as a whole and unique human being. The intimacy in this engagement is profound: both taxing and vitalizing in its intensity. Marta recounts to me a story of a “good” teacher, who is also an admirable human being. Her eyes are riveted to mine, as she follows me following her. We are always sitting amidst the layers, as the intensity of the affect symmetrizes, pulling us towards infinity (Rayner, 1981). We find ourselves reverberating between the now and the then, the us and the them. Nothing is merely what it seems in these regions and yet, the underlying pattern of the complexity lends to it an essential simplicity that is at times painful to register, much less tolerate sitting with the awareness and allowing it to reverberate. In this story she is telling me, there is deep appreciation and gratitude for what Marta might learn, as well as some concern about her own capacities and some lamentation for the time that has been lost in her own personal nightmare that enveloped her for so many years. In counterpoint, Marta begins to tell a story of having discovered that an old and dear friend, with whom she had lost touch, is now dying. Her initial impulse had been to go to see this friend, but she did not know what she had to offer nor how she would be received. She was due at a rehearsal and so let the matter rest for the moment, but once she arrived at the rehearsal, she found herself breaking down when the director looked into her eyes and expressed concern. Two of the women from the production came to her side. Feeling their silent support enabled Marta to eventually take part in the rehearsal. The ability of these women to be present with her, without making any demands on her, became a profound invitation to be present with herself in the moment and within the larger group as well. This being-with, for Marta, was quite profound and carried with it a sense of grace. When Marta went home that evening, she needed to fine-tune a few of the scenes for the performance she was arranging for the following day. She found herself searching for a sequence that would evoke a cheerful mood but was repeatedly drawn to movements with the same emotional tone: a deep sadness. She said that she knew that when she tries to override her own sensibilities in favor of whatever seems ostensibly to be “right,” it is invariably wrong. Eventually, she gave up fighting and created a passage that was in harmony with her mood. The next day, Marta found that having selected these renderings that were so highly resonant with her emotional state, she was able to truly be in the work during the actual production in a profound way that carried through to the entire

Transformations

131

audience, who were very expressively, respectfully appreciative. In contrast to her usual tendency to subvert praise, Marta was able to experience the appreciation of those who were able to share in these moments with her, through her. Marta explained how she still made the same types of errors that had always plagued her, but this time they did not bother her. Instead, she was intensely aware of the beauty of the music and the movements and their interplay, and it was this beauty that was received. This was the essence of what Marta had attempted to expunge from her work, which had led her to give up dancing altogether: this intense immersion in the moment. She had taken in, through her mother’s rejection, a sense of her own intensity as repugnant. She then had no way of really being in the moment in the presence of others, necessitating, as it did, giving herself up to the music and allowing it to flow through her. Through watching her students, she has begun to love the absorption that is expressed through their faces and gestures. In this way, she begins to make peace with her own fear of appearing awkward as she becomes lost in her art. Throughout this session, we are in contact with O. I am riveted to Marta as she brings me through this labyrinth she has encountered. I have no other way of finding my way through: My task is to be sufficiently present in the experience that I can appreciate it, insofar as I am able, from her perspective as it aligns with my own. It is only when we reach the part where the tears hit - with the enormity of the pain of it all - that I can remark inwardly at the absence hitherto. How could they have been missing and yet so imminent, I wonder silently. “It was the human contact,” Marta tells me, quite intently, referring to the moment when the tears had hit, as the director had seen Marta’s pain. “It was looking into her eyes.” “I could never have told this to my mother,” says Marta. “She would never have gotten it. It’s just way out of her radar. It would have seemed weird; repugnant; something to be pushed aside.” At that moment, Marta’s face echoed achingly her mother’s revulsion. I could only acknowledge with my eyes: words seemed redundant to the intensity of being present with Marta in this maelstrom of past and present, there and here. Marta then spoke of the enormity of there being nothing anyone can do in the face of the imminence of fate. Her friend is going to die. There is nothing anyone can do. In that moment, I was acutely aware that one source of sustenance in the face of O comes through knowing that there are truths about which one can do nothing aside from accept and bear witness. Bion talks about transformations in O as movements towards being; towards becoming. In my work with Marta, I am asked, more than anything else, to be quite profoundly in the moment, that I might witness her becoming as a real

132

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

and viable transformation, grounded in her own internal reality. It can only be grounded to the extent that it can be received sufficiently intact to be contained within the mind of another. Without this resonance, she loses her moorings in the moment. Our sessions are like compositions: Marta brings in the pieces and begins to weave a melody, with point, counterpoint, echo, and harmonies in many layers. Within it all is the dance, in which Marta attempts to once more find her own bearings in this production that is becoming a life worth living. I appreciate as best I can the flow of the drama; the subtlety and nuance of gesture through which she invites me into her reality. The invitation is fed by my appreciation of her appreciation of whatever reality she is attempting to convey. It is, at times, an infinite hall of mirrors, requiring a certain tolerance of lack of grounding from moment to moment. “It’s a beautiful day,” she says, with a smile well lit by her appreciation. “I’ve been listening to that ‘salsa’ again: that song I told you about, where the singer begins by telling you about his pain – puro dolor – ‘pure pain,’ but that doesn’t really do it justice – it should be something like ‘pungent pain’: that captures it better.” In Marta’s stories, each element must be delineated clearly and carefully, so as to evoke exactly the right image in the listener. “He tells you about his pain at being separated from his love: he’s telling her he misses her breath: su respiracion and then the chorus echoes ‘su respiracion’.” There is such delight in the telling that I understand that we are talking about a dance beginning, in this prelude that introduces the actual dance to come. “And he needs her to be there, not just to ease his pain, but because he wants to do this dance with her. It’s not some heavy dire thing, like the British, or the French - Oh, God, the French! - It’s this Latin thing.” And as she talks, the “Latin thing” is vitally present in the prosody of her tone. It has come upon her like a costume she is wearing: in her smile, in her gestures, in the way it lights up her face. “You hear that music and the hips start to sway and it’s not a sexual thing: it’s just the dance.” Marta segues into a story about the healing power of music. She has read that music is processed in a distinct part of the brain that keeps it safe from decay or disturbance. She illustrates this with an image she has seen of an autistic child with arms outstretched, belting out a song with every fiber of her being. Marta knows this power. She is enawed by it and in dire need of its healing, which is beginning to occur. Marta then begins to speak, with disdain, about the people she knew at school who were studying music therapy. “They were so incredibly disrespectful,” she says. “I had this nightmare image of being locked up and having to listen to their horrible prattle, as though to be disturbed meant that one was a child or an imbecile.” The real power of music, she is telling me, is deep. It communicates at

Transformations

133

a whole different level. “I think about that kid – the one I told you about, who is so intense and so talented. He’s not a nice kid. He’s kind of unpleasant, really. But we have had some moments of real communication. In the music,” she says, smiling somewhat beatifically, “in the dance.” “When I tried to kill myself – my mother never asked why. She didn’t want to know. It was about the music – because it was gone. One day it just wasn’t there. And then another, and another. And I missed it. And I didn’t know if it would ever return.” The pain is so intensely present in Marta’s eyes that it telescopes us back over and through all the lost years. The intensity of the pain at this point is almost unbearable. “She didn’t want to see the pain,” I say. Marta affirms my words, but whether with her eyes or her voice, at this point I cannot say. “I still fuck things up. I fumble through at times. I think I never cared enough to really get some of the hard moves right. But that last performance,” she said, somewhat reverently, “I danced the hell out of it. There weren’t any nerves. There wasn’t any anything. There was just this music and this body and these movements and I wanted to be there in it. Right then. Right there. And I was. I danced the hell out of it. And people saw. They felt it. They really got it. They were really moved. It was all right there” “. . . I just always made these dumb mistakes,” I hear her say, through the silence, as the light shifts and transfuses, and her face becomes translucent with the weight of the years shifting, like a palimpsest left revealed. The child self shines through shyly from behind the lines of care, the graying of years of pain that have coalesced into waves around her eyes, irradiated. “I don’t need to be admired,” she says. “It’s not about me. It’s this movement,” she says, drawing it out with her hand and holding her head to the side, as though it was so palpable, she could almost taste it. “It’s incredible and I want them to feel it, too,” she says. “It’s the salsa,” I say, “you’re inviting them into the dance.” That is what she has been reaching for. That contact. That communication. To make the invitation and to see it accepted and to be able to reciprocate in turn; to finally begin to have that conversation. The one she could never have with her mother and so had thought was ultimately out of reach. She had thought that the failure was a function of her own inherent incapacity, but that wasn’t it at all. “She couldn’t be there,” I say. In the silence is the tension of all that was not and will never be, along with this new reality that is slowly forming its way into being. “I’m doing it,” she says, her eyes on mine. “You certainly are,” I agree. Marta and I continue to explore our odd entanglement in being self and being other, through which Marta has been able to discover aspects of herself that

134

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

had remained hidden from view. It was as though there were certain parts of herself that had become so tainted that it was only the poisoned image that could be seen, somewhat like viewing a tinted cell through a microscope, in which the brilliance of the color might mask the underlying reality to eyes not trained to see beyond the surface appearance. In kind, Marta’s mother’s view had become the dye that had so highlighted Marta’s imperfections that her strengths had been hidden from view. “I want to tell you a good thing and then a not so good thing and then a really extraordinary thing,” Marta tells me, in her very exacting way. She is smiling broadly and making absolute eye contact through which she tracks my tracking of her. She turns no blind eye in our work together, unwilling to lose the least bit of information that might be gleaned in these precious exchanges. Marta tells me about a student, her most gifted student. She has been afraid that this student will leave her to go study with another teacher, whom Marta fears is her superior. The student’s friend is studying with this other teacher and seems to be moving ahead quite rapidly. The child comes in and begins talk about watching her friend perform. “She really doesn’t do it very well,” the child confides in Marta. “I tried to show her what you taught me, but she didn’t want to see.” In her teaching, Marta tries to impart her deep and intense appreciation of form and subtlety. She listens to music along with her students, to try to help them learn to hear the nuances of tone and phrasing, so that they can begin to move in resonance with these. She shows them videos, so that they can learn to attend to the subtleties of gesture, form, and motion that are the lifeblood of Marta’s art. This child takes in these intricacies, which is delightful for teacher and child, alike. I begin to understand what I am being told: that the child has come to appreciate what the teacher has to offer; that Marta is no longer so worried about losing this student to someone who pushes her students to advance beyond their capacity to find their way. This child is telling her that Marta helps her to preserve and nurture what is valuable to her, in her, and for her. In the knowing it from one to another, there is the affirmation that it can be held by both together. This student isn’t very warm, Marta tells me: “She’s all business; she’ll never bring flowers or tell me I’m wonderful.” This resonates with Marta's experience of me, and I rescue ourselves a bit, not quite unconsciously: “And yet, she tells you,” I say, “in telling you that she values what you have to offer and that she trusts you to know what matters; to help her find her way.” “You keep telling me that the slips don’t matter,” says Marta with a smile, “and I keep believing you, but let me tell you . . .” With that, Marta launches into another story of a very advanced student who had come to her for fine-tuning of a performance for an upcoming competition. Marta is beginning to finally feel up to the challenge and to discover

Transformations

135

that what she has to offer is really quite valuable. Although the session went very well, the student was not pleased. To Marta, it seemed as though the student must be looking for something other than what Marta was offering. Her immediate assumption was that the problem was in her. However, she was also able to see how these assumptions about herself got in the way of assuaging the student’s concerns, which became less visible against Marta’s own, vividly highlighted Problems. This led to the wonderful, truly extraordinary thing that Marta had to tell me: that even though she had assumed that the poverty of her talents were to blame, this had not destroyed her. It had not brought her to the depths of the abyss that had engulfed her at every turn throughout those long hard years. She had merely doubted herself and was distressed about it, but had maintained her grounding. This was the truly extraordinary cause for jubilation: that she can encounter her flaws and not feel annihilated. She was able to hold on to her self. In the telling, Marta is telling me, in recursive circles, like ripples in still water, that there is a holding happening in our universe that has spread out from me to her, from the analytic space into her studio; that it ripples and flows and eddies and grows into wondrous and yet inherently recognizable configurations of this containment that has been occurring in our work together. “And I’m giving it to you,” she says, with her eyes bright and intently engaged with my own, “because it’s nice to know that what we have to give can be taken.” Marta tells me of the enormity of being able to be received that has made the ostensibly impossible possible. “I heard people talk about going back and ‘rebuilding,’ and that never seemed like anything that could really happen,” she says. “It didn’t really seem possible, but that’s a part of it. You know, I come in, and I tell you about these things that have happened, and those other people, they used to say ‘come on, talk about something important,’ because they didn’t want to hear all these little details, but that’s how you can see what’s happening. So, I tell you how I had this experience or another, because I know that you will see what I’m telling you: that there’s a difference; that I’ve changed. I still have some ways to go, but what used to be completely impossible and made me feel like I should just crawl into a hole and give up: it’s just not the same any more. So, now I can tell you, and you see it, and I can see that you see it and that you’re pleased for me. So I get from you what I was supposed to get from my mother, and it matters. It changes things.” Marta has been able to show me both sides: the horror of how she had come to see herself in her mother’s eyes and all the incredible potential that she has been trying, valiantly, to bring to fruition throughout these long years. My observations regarding the aversiveness of encountering one’s own failings have helped her to contextualize her mother’s (and various therapists’) responses to her.

136

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

The more they pushed her away, the more desperate and aversive she became. Marta is now able to tolerate this non-seeing: she can encounter another’s subjectivity and attempt to make sense of it in light of her own understandings rather than becoming annihilated by it. As we engage in these discussions, Marta brings me so intensely into the moment that there is no room for lie or evasion. This, to me, is O: this profound encounter with another being in the abjectness of our utter humanity. This, along with our integrity, good will, and every experience - every piece of knowledge and training we can muster - allows for very real and profound transformations. Marta brings me right to the edge of my tolerance for meeting. The intimacy can be so acute that I can barely contain it. It is wonderful and awe-ful. My sense is that this experience - of standing in the center of the maelstrom and refusing to close one’s eyes or become lost in it, but rather willing one’s self to continue to be present with it, wherever it might be – that this is what Bion (1970) was referring to, in speaking of “transformations in O.” When Bion describes O as the “psychoanalytic vertex,” he seems to be pointing towards this position: this way of being in the moment in which one is being receptive to whatever might be, including one’s intricate attunement to the being of the other. This stance includes everything that one has known or might have known, without pre-selecting any of these bits but rather, insofar as possible, allowing them to swirl and settle like the snow in a child’s glass landscape. In the continuing swirling and resettling emerge meanings. If we can tolerate this process, possibilities are created that further each of us in this process of becoming. And so, as Marta holds my eyes in her gaze, she insists on seeing my seeing of her seeing, in infinite regression and progression, for the truth is held in just such a moment, when the pattern emerges and it is both implicit and explicit; in the moment and beyond; defying all containment, like one snowflake among the many, melting on the tongue.

References Abraham, K. (1919). A particular form of neurotic resistance against the psychoanalytic method. In Selected Papers. London: Hogarth, 1942. Arieti, S. (1976). Creativity: The Magic Synthesis. New York: Basic Books. Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in Groups. London and New York: Routledge. Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann. Bion, W. R. (1963). Elements of Psycho-Analysis. London: Heinemann. Bion, W. R. (1965). Transformations. London: Heinemann. Bion, W. R. (1967a). Second Thoughts. London: Heinemann. Bion, W. R. (1967b). Notes on memory and desire. Psychoanalytic Forum, 2, 271280. Bion, W. R. (1970). Attention and Interpretation. London: Heinemann. Bion, W. R. (1977a). Seven Servants. New York, NY: Aronson. Bion, W. R. (1977b). The grid. In Two Papers: The Grid and Caesura. London: Karnac Books, 1989. Bion, W. R. (1980). Bion in New York and São Paulo, F. Bion (Ed.). Perthshire: Clunie Press. Bion, W. R. (1991). A Memoir of the Future. London: Karnac Books. Bion, W. R. (1997). Taming Wild Thoughts. London: Karnac Books. Blos, P., Jr. (1991). Sadomasochism and the defense against recall of painful affect. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 39, 417-430. Bollas, C. (1987). The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. London: Free Association Books. Boris, H. N. (1994). Envy. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Britton, R. (1997). The missing link: Parental sexuality in the Oedipus complex. In The Contemporary Kleinians of London, R. Schafer (Ed.), 242-258. Madison, WI: International Universities Press. Britton, R & Steiner, J. (1994). Interpretation: Selected fact or overvalued idea? International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 75, 1069-1078. Bullfinch, T. (1959). Bulfinch’s Mythology. New York: Random House. Caldwell, R. (1989). The Origin of the Gods: A Psychoanalytic Study of Greek Theogonic Myth. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Carroll, L. (1971). Alice in Wonderland. D. J. Gray (Ed.), New York: W. W. Norton. Charles, M. (1997). Betrayal. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 33, 109-122.

138

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

Charles, M. (1999). Sibling mysteries: Enactments of unconscious fears and fantasies. Psychoanalytic Review, 86, 877-901. Charles, M. (2000a). Convex and concave, part I: Images of emptiness in women. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 60, 5-27. Charles, M. (2000b). The intergenerational transmission of unresolved mourning: Personal, familial, and cultural factors. Samiksa, 54, 65-80. Charles, M. (2001a). Stealing beauty: An exploration of maternal narcissism. Psychoanalytic Review, 88, 601-622. Charles, M. (2001b). Reflections on creativity: The ‘intruder’ as mystic or Reconciliation with the mother self. Free Associations, 9(1:49), 119-151. Charles, M. (2002a). Patterns: Building Blocks of Experience. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press. Charles, M. (2002b). Bion’s grid: A tool for transformation. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 30, 429-445. Also published in French in Le Mouvement Psychanalytique. 4, 121-133. Charles, M. (2002c). Assimilating difference: Traumatic effects of prejudice. Samiksa, 55, 15-27. Charles, M. (2002d). Through the unknown, remembered gate: Journeys into the labyrinth. Psychoanalytic Review, 89, 79-99. Charles, M. (2003a). Dreamscapes: Portrayals of rectangular spaces in Doris Lessing’s “Memoirs of a Survivor” and in dreams. Psychoanalytic Review, 90, 1-23. Charles, M. (2003b). On faith, hope, and possibility. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry, 31, 687-704. Charles, M. (2004a). Mirroring from the perspective of the theories of MatteBlanco. Psychoanalytic Review, 90, 792-809. Also published in French in Le Mouvement Psychanalytique. 4, 121-133. Charles, M. (2004b). Women in psychotherapy on film: Shades of Scarlett conquering. In Celluloid Couches, Cinematic Clients: Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in the Movies, J. R. Brandell (Ed.). Albany: SUNY Press. Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1989). The bright face of narcissism and its shadowy depths: A few reflections. Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 12(3), 709722. Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1990). On acting out. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 71, 77-86. Coltart, N. (1992). Slouching towards Bethlehem . . . or thinking the unthinkable in psychoanalysis. In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1-14. New York and London: Guilford Press. Cooper, R. P. & Aslin, R. N. (1994). Developmental differences in infant attention to the spectral properties of infant-directed speech. Child Development, 65, 1663-1667.

References

139

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row. de Lauretis, T. (1984). Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ehrenzweig, A. (1967). The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination. London: Weidenfield & Nicolson. Eigen, M. (1998). Empty and violent nourishment. Journal of Melanie Klein and Object Relations, 16, 349-365. Eigen, M. (2001). Ecstasy. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Etchegoyen, R. H., Lopez, B. M., & Rabih, M. (1987). On envy and how to interpret it. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 68, 49-61. Fernald, A. (1993). Approval and disapproval: Infant responsiveness to vocal affect in familiar and unfamiliar languages. Child Development, 64, 657-674. Fried, M. (1980). Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Berkeley: University of California Press. Freud, S. (1915). The unconscious. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 14, 159-215. London: Hogarth Press, 1971. Freud, S. (1916-1917). Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Standard Edition, 15/16. Freud, S. (1923). The ego and the id. Standard Edition, 19, 13-66. Freud, S. (1927). Fetishism. Standard Edition, 21, 152-157. Freud, S. (1940). An outline of psychoanalysis. Standard Edition, 23, 144-207. Gadamer, H.-G. (1988). The ontology of the work of art and its hermeneutical significance. 1. Play as the clue to ontological explanation. In Truth and Method, 91-119. New York: Crossroads. Gedo, J. E. (1996). The Artist and the Emotional World: Creativity and Personality. New York: Columbia University Press. Graves, R. (1959). The Greek Myths: Volume One. New York: George Braziller. Grossman, D. (1991). The Book of Intimate Grammar. New York: Riverhead Books. Grotstein, J. S. (1996). Bion’s “transformations in ‘O’,” the “thing-in-itself,” and the “Real”: Toward the concept of the “transcendent position.” Journal of Melanie Klein and Object Relations, 14, 109-141. Grotstein, J. S. (2000a). Why Oedipus and not Christ? Part 1: A psychoanalytic inquiry into innocence, human sacrifice, spirituality, and the sacred. In Who is the Dreamer who Dreams the Dream? A Study of Psychic Presences, 219-253. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press. Grotstein, J. S. (2000b). The myth of the labyrinth. In Who is the Dreamer who Dreams the Dream? A Study of Psychic Presences, 189-218. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press. Grotstein, J. S. (2000c). Internal objects: The chimerical monsters, rogue subjective objects, and demonic “third forms” of the internal world. In Who is the

140

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

Dreamer who Dreams the Dream? A Study of Psychic Presences, 143-188. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press. Grotstein, J. S. (2000d). Autochthony (self-creation) and alterity (cocreation): Psychic reality in counterpoint. In Who is the Dreamer who Dreams the Dream? A Study of Psychic Presences, 37-58. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press. Hofstadter, D. R. (1979). Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Random House. Joseph, B. (1981a). Toward the experiencing of psychic pain. In Do I Dare Disturb the Universe: A Memorial to Wilfred R. Bion, J. S. Grotstein (Ed.), 94-12. Beverly Hills: Caesura Press. Joseph, B. (1981b). Psychic change: Some perspectives. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 73, 237-243 Joseph, B. (1997). On understanding and not understanding. In The Contemporary Kleinians of London, R. Schafer (Ed.), 299-315. Madison, WI: International Universities Press. Kernberg, O. F. (1974). Further contributions to the treatment of narcissistic personalities. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 55, 215-247. Khan, M. M. R. (1973). The role of illusion in the analytic space and process. Annual of Psychoanalysis, 1, 231-246. Klein, M. (1930). The importance of symbol-formation in the development of the ego. In Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works, 1921-1945, 219-232. London: Hogarth Press, 1975. Klein, M. (1935). A contribution to the psychogenesis of manic-depressive states. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 16, 145-174. Klein, M. (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. In Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946-1963, 1-24. London: Hogarth Press, 1975. Klein, M. (1952). Some theoretical conclusions regarding the emotional life of the infant. In Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946-1963, 61-93. London: Hogarth Press, 1975. Kumin, I. (1996). Pre-Object Relatedness: Early Attachment and the Psychoanalytic Situation. New York & London: Guilford. Lacan, J. (1977). Ecrits: A Selection, J.-A. Miller (Ed.), A. Sheridan (Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton, first published, 1966. Langer, S. K. (1951). Philosophy in a New Key. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Laplanche, J. & Pontalis, J.-B. (1973). The Language of Psycho-Analysis, D. Nicholson-Smith (Trans.). New York: Norton. Laub, D. (1991). Truth and testimony: The process and the struggle. American Imago, 48, 75-91.

References

141

Matte-Blanco, I. (1959). Expression in symbolic logic of the characteristics of the system Ucs or the logic of the system Ucs. International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 40, 1-5. Matte-Blanco, I. (1975). The Unconscious as Infinite Sets: An Essay in Bi-Logic. London: Duckworth. Matte-Blanco, I. (1988). Thinking, Feeling, and Being: Clinical Reflections on the Fundamental Antinomy of Human Beings and World. London and New York: Routledge. McDougall, J. (1982). Theaters of the Mind: Illusion and Truth on the Psychoanalytic Stage. New York: Basic Books. Nash, J. F., Jr. (2002). Autobiography. In The Essential John Nash, H. W. Kuhn & S. Nasar (Eds.), 5-11. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Nasar, S. (1998). A Beautiful Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster. Nasar, S. (2002). Introduction. In The Essential John Nash, H. W. Kuhn & S. Nasar (Eds.), xi-xxv. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Nersessian, E. (1995). Some reflections on curiosity and psychoanalytic technique. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 54, 113-135. Novick, J., & Novick, K. K. (1991). Some comments on masochism and the defusion of omnipotence from a developmental perspective. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 39, 307-331. Novick, J., & Novick, K. K. (1996). Fearful Symmetry: The Development and Treatment of Sadomasochism. Northvale, NJ: Aronson Oelsner, R. (2002). Anatomy of an analysis. Fort Da, 8, 29-45. Ogden, T. (1985). On potential space. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 66, 129-141. Ogden, T. (1995). Analyzing forms of aliveness and deadness of the transferencecountertransference. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 76, 695-709 Opatow, B. (1997). Observation and insight in the science of experience. American Imago, 54, 289-306. Papousek, M., Bornstein, M. H., Nuzzo, C., Papousek, H., & Symmes, D. (1990). Infant responses to prototypical melodic contours in parental speech. Infant Behavior & Development, 13, 539-545. Parsons, M. (1986). Suddenly finding it really matters: The paradox of the analyst's non-attachment. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 67, 475-488. Quinn, P. C. (1994). The categorization of above and below spatial relations by young infants. Child Development, 65, 58-69. Racker, H. (1972). The meanings and uses of countertransference. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 41, 487-506. Rayner, E. (1981). Infinite experiences, affects and the characteristics of the unconscious. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 62, 403-412. Roller, L. E. (1999). In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatolian Cybele. Berkeley, Los Angeles, & London: University of California Press.

142

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

Rosenblatt, A. D., & Thickstun, J. T. (1994). Intuition and consciousness. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 43, 696-714. Rosenfeld, H. A. (1964). A contribution to the analysis of the negative therapeutic reaction. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 17, 304-320. Rosenfeld, H. A. (1971). A clinical approach to the psychoanalytic theory of the life and death instincts: An investigation into the aggressive aspects of narcissism. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 52, 169-178. Rosenfeld, H. A. (1987). Impasse and Interpretation: Therapeutic and Anti-Therapeutic Factors in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Psychotic, Borderline, and Neurotic Patients. London and New York: Tavistock Publications. Sandler, J. (1976). Countertransference and role-responsiveness. International Review of Psycho-Analysis. 3, 43-47. Segal, H. (1957). Notes on symbol formation. International Journal of PsychoAnalysis. 38, 391-397. Segal, H. (1981). The Work of Hanna Segal: A Kleinian Approach to Clinical Practice, New York and London: Jason Aronson. Segal, H. (1997). Phantasy and reality. In The Contemporary Kleinians of London, R. Schafer (Ed.), 75-95. Madison, WI: International Universities Press. Steiner, J. (1981). Perverse relationships between parts of the self: A clinical illustration. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 62, 214-250. Steiner, J. (1985). Turning a blind eye: the cover up for Oedipus. International Review of Psycho-Analysis. 12, 161-172. Stern, D. B. (1990). Courting surprise: Unbidden perceptions in clinical practice. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 26, 452-478. Storr, A. (1972). The Dynamics of Creation. New York: Atheneum. Symington, N. (1985). Phantasy effects that which it represents. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 66, 349-357. Trevarthen, C. (1995). Mother and baby - Seeing artfully eye to eye. In The Artful Eye, R. Gregory, J. Harris, P. Heard, & D. Rose (Eds.), 157-200. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winnicott, D. W. (1953). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena: A study of the first not-me possession. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. 34, 87-97. Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 140-152. New York: International Universities Press, 1965. Winnicott, D. W. (1963). Fear of breakdown. In Psycho-Analytic Explorations, C. Winnicott, R. Shepherd, & M Davis (Eds.), 87-95. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality. New York: Basic Books. Wrye, H. K. (1993). Hello, the hollow: Deadspace or playspace? Psychoanalytic Review, 80, 101-121.

Index Abraham, K., 29 absorption and identification, 103–4 acting out, 5 action, 5 addiction, 6 aliveness vs. deadness, 20–21 ambivalence, 23, 28–29, 39. See also splitting amodal processing and communication, 112 analytic space. See space annihilation, 12. See also splitting anorexia. See cases, Grace Aslin, R. N., 113 asymmetrical relationships, 16–17 asymmetry, 113 creating, 17–19 atonement, 27–28 avoidance. See evasion Beautiful Mind, A (film), 95–96, 102–5, 107–10. See also Nash, John being, xiii, 8, 19 and being-with, 9 illusion of, 44–49 and nothingness, 40–43 Bion, W. R., ix, x, 15, 18, 35, 41, 42, 113–14, 119–21 on being in the moment, 40 on container and contained, 88 on desire to "have the answers," 23 on digested vs. undigested elements, 6 on envy, 30–31, 65, 117 on evasion vs. growth, xiv on family dynamics, 88 grid, 24, 36 on knowing vs. not-knowing, 19 on "O," 40, 119–21, 136

on play, 40, 85, 120, 121 blindness, "willful," 86. See also under evasion Blos, P., 7 Bollas, C. J., 10 Boris, H. N., xiv, 50 Bornstein, M. H., 113 Britton, R., 3, 35 Bulfinch, T., 88 Caldwell, R. ., 80 Campbell, J., 73, 87 Carroll, Lewis, xiii, 1, 23, 39, 57, 73, 85, 95, 119 cases. See also Nash, John Alice, 124–28 Aron, 5, 8, 11, 15, 20 Conrad, 36, 39–41, 44–49, 55–57, 96 David, 41, 49–57, 73–74, 96, 123–24 affirming the elements/enlivening the space, 79–84 deadly self-awareness/salvation by metaphor, 77–78 dream, 74–76 the minotaur, 76–77 Elena daughter's journey, 89–93 taming the monster/transforming the mirror, 86–87 Grace, 3–4, 6–7, 12–16, 20, 25, 28, 29, 121–22 Marta, 33, 129–36 compared with John Nash, 96–101, 103, 108–11, 114, 116 Mary, 33–34, 57–58, 124

144

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

benign reflection/distorting mirror, 67–69 elusive magic (disappearing acts), 63–67 night blindness (occluding emptiness), 58–60 night vision (encountering the unknown), 60–63 through the looking glass, 70–71 Nick, 34–36 Sophia, 7 Charles, M., 14, 16, 24, 54, 61, 66, 70, 71, 75, 80, 85, 86, 88, 89, 92, 95, 111–15, 120, 125 Chasseguet-Smirgel, J., 5, 6, 97–98 confrontation, 20 constant conjunctions (Bion), 120 container and contained, 88, 90, 117. See also holding environment Cooper, R. P., 113 corrective emotional experience. See new experience creativity, 10, 40, 95, 108. See also narcissism; Nash, John; space, creating Csikszentmihalyi, M., 106 de Lauretis, T., 103 deadness vs. aliveness, 20–21 death instinct, 29 defenses, 56 narcissistic, 29–32 neurotic, 26 defensive occlusion. See knowing depressive position, 98 destruction of object. See envy, destructive; object, survival of the Diderot, 104 digested vs. undigested elements, 6 disavowal, 25, 29, 45 dreams, 11, 74–76 Dryden, J., ix

Ehrenzweig, A., 111, 113 Eigen, M., 106, 120 empathy, 4, 10 emptiness. See also deadness occluding, 58–60 enactments, 4, 14, 20, 35, 67 envy, 44, 65, 66, 116 Bion on, 30–31, 65, 117 destructive vs. libidinal, 97, 101 sado-masochistic loop of, 32–37 narcissism and, 29–32, 96–103 Etchegoyen, R. H., 29–30, 65, 101 evasion, xiv, 9, 34. See also knowing vs. not-knowing movements toward, 26–29 turning a "blind eye," 28, 45, 47–48. See also cases, Mary externalization, 6 Fairbairn, W. R. D., x false vs. true self, 7. See also self, underlying family, phantasies and the, 88 fantasy. See also phantasy(ies) Winnicott on, 11, 12, 47 fantasying, 11–12 Fernald, A., 113 frame. See space Freud, S., 16, 25, 88 Gadamer, H.-G., 42, 43, 59, 71, 109, 121 Gedo, J. E., 102, 105 Gibeau, E., 14 grandiosity. See narcissism Graves, R. ., 80, 88, 93 greed, 31, 65 Greek mythology, 80–83, 88, 98 grid, Bion's, 24, 36 Grossman, D., 5, 9 Grotstein, J. S., 19, 42, 48, 86, 87, 99, 120, 121

Index

145

group and the "new idea," the, 113–17

Lopez, B. M., 29–30, 65, 101

hero's tale, 73–74 Hofstadter, D. R., 112 holding environment, 110. See also container

Matte-Blanco, I., 2, 5, 11, 15–16, 113–15 McDougall, J. M., 12, 82 meaning, 41 metaphor(s), 14, 41, 85 salvation by, 77–78 mirror. See under cases mother myths of, 87–89 wish for reunion with, 97 mystics, 113–14 mythology, Greek, 80–83, 88, 98 myth(s), xiii, 40–42. See also being of father and son. See cases, David; Oedipus myth

identification, 27 absorption and, 103–4 complementary, 13 defined, 103 illusion, 21, 23, 24, 27, 65–66 of being, 44–49 infinite sets (Matte-Blanco), 16, 17 interpretation, 10 overuse, 41, 43 isolation, interpersonal narcissism and, 102–7 Joseph, B., 10, 26–27, 65–66, 116 Kernberg, O. F., 104 Khan, M. M. R., 14, 21 Klein, M., 13, 14, 31, 107 on splitting, 25–27 knowing, 3, 10, 23, 114, 115. See also truth about not knowing, 7, 10, 13 knowing vs. not-knowing (K & -K), 3, 5–8, 16, 19 encountering the unknown, 60–63 Kronos, 80–81, 88 Kumin, I., 112 Lacan, J., 44 Laplanche, J., 27, 103 Laub, D., 71 lies, 24, 37 linking, 1

narcissism, 34, 54, 95 interpersonal isolation and, 102–7 types of, 97 narcissistic defenses, 29–32 Nasar, S., 32, 98–100, 102–7, 112, 114 Nash, John, 32–33, 96–110, 112, 114–16. See also Beautiful Mind, A genius and madness, 104–7 need, envy, and greed, 30–32 negative therapeutic reaction, 31 Nersessian, E., 2, 9, 18 new experience, x, 40 not-knowing. See knowing; unknown "nothing," shroud of. See cases, David nothingness, being and, 40–43 Novick, J., 8, 59 Novick, K. K., 8, 59 Nuzzo, C., 113 "O" (Bion), 7, 40, 73, 119–20, 136 case material, 59–60, 87, 121–24, 128, 129, 131, 136

146

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES

object survival of the, 8–11, 43 use of an, 42 object constancy, 9 occlusion, defensive. See knowing Oedipus myth, 47–48 Oelsner, R., 36 Ogden, T. H., 2–4, 20–21 omnipotence. See narcissism Opatow, B., 115 Papousek, H., 113 Papousek, M., 113 paranoid-schizoid position, 98 paranoid-schizoid realm, 28, 31, 43, 53, 69, 88, 121. See also splitting Parsons, M., 9, 10, 18–19 patterns, 107, 120 as units of meaning, 111–13 performance, 89 persecutory anxiety, 25, 107 perverse relationship, 14–15, 25, 34 phantasy(ies), 61–62, 66. See also fantasy dialectic between reality and, 2–3 in exclusion and inclusion, 61–62, 66 play, xiii, 120, 121. See also being Bion on, 40, 120, 121 capacity for, 9–10, 42–43 Winnicott on, 8–10, 40, 42, 121 play space, 8–11 playing, 89, 109 in an empty room. See cases, Mary projective identification as the negative of, 4 and reality, 55–56 Pontalis, J.-B., 27, 103 potential space. See space, potential practicing, 89 presence. See being primary process, 6 projective identification, 4, 13, 87, 101, 107–8

psychoanalytic treatment, 23. See also specific topics mutative factors, 36 Quinn, P. C., 113 Rabih, M., 29–30, 65, 101 Racker, H., 13 Rayner, E., 17, 130 real, the. See "O" reality dialectic between phantasy and, 2–3 playing and, 55–56 recognition, need for, 107–11 reflection, 3 benign, 67–69 rigidity, 1 role-responsiveness, 13 Roller, L. E., 98 Rosenblatt, A. D., 16 Rosenfeld, H., 6, 29–33, 44, 96, 99, 101 sado-masochistic loops, 32–37, 59 Sandler, J., 13 Segal, H., 3, 14 selected fact, 35 self conceiving the, 7–8 devalued, xiii, xiv, 7 neutralization, 6 search for, 89–93 underlying constructed self vs., xiii denying the, xiii self-awareness shared knowledge, shared awareness, and, 15–16 self-disclosure, 110 separateness, 43 shame. See self silences, 1

Index

somatization, 6 space collapsing the, 11–15 creating (openings into the), 1–5, 23 enlivening the, 79–84 potential, 2, 6, 8–9, 19–21 transitional, 62 splits within the self, 7–8, 24–25, 29, 37, 53–54. See also cases, Conrad defensive resolutions to, 96–103 splitting, 27, 29, 30, 45, 101, 116 titrating the terror, 25–26 Steiner, J., 25, 28, 34, 35, 45, 68, 86, 101 Stern, D. B., 9–10, 14, 18 Storr, A., 105 symbolic equation, 3, 14 symbolization, 3 Symington, N., 62 Symmes, D., 113 symmetrical relationships, 15–18 and condensations of meaning, 16 symmetrical thinking, 6, 16, 17, 113 therapeutic impasses, 6, 92 Thickstun, J. T., 16 thought(s) decontextualizing, 24 elaborated vs. unelaborated, 5–6 Tower of Babel story, 85 transformations, 40, 86–87, 119–21, 136 transitional space, 62 transitory object, 12 trauma, 14 truth, 10, 18, 23–24, 114. See also knowing turning a blind eye. See under evasion unconscious, 10 unconscious thought, 16

147

understanding, 8, 13, 19 unknown. See also knowing encountering the, 60–63 unthought known, 10 use of an object. See object, use of an Winnicott, D. W., ix, x, 7, 12, 15, 19, 35, 40–41, 68, 80, 109 on fantasy, 11, 12, 47 on interpretation, 41, 43 on play, 8–10, 40, 42, 56, 121 on potential space, 2, 6, 8–9 on presence in the moment, 40 on survival of the object, 9, 43 on transitional space, 62 on use of object, 42 Wrye, H. K., 1, 8

About the Author

Marilyn Charles is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice. She is also a Training, Teaching, and Supervising Analyst with the Michigan Psychoanalytic Council and Adjunct Professor of Clinical Psychology at Michigan State University. Dr. Charles is committed to mentoring the next generation of clinicians, for whom issues of creativity and generativity are of particular importance. She has been an active advocate for younger clinicians, trying to help them to find their own voices in this difficult work. A poet and an artist, Dr. Charles has had a special interest in the creative process and in facilitating creativity in patients and in clinicians. She has worked extensively with artists, writers, and musicians and has also explored the creative process by looking at the lives and works of creative individuals such as Virginia Woolf and John Nash. She has a particular interest in the role of film as a tool of mythmaking in contemporary culture and has published widely on this theme. Dr. Charles has presented her work internationally and has published extensively in psychoanalytic journals. She is the author of Patterns: Building Blocks of Creativity (2002) and Learning From Experience: A Clinician’s Guide (2004), both published by The Analytic Press. Dr. Charles maintains her practice in East Lansing, Michigan, where she lives with her husband, Bruce, and her son, Jonathan. Her daughter, Devon, is a clinical psychologist in practice in Philadelphia.