Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The Psychoanalytic Study of de Child V60 Robert A. King, Peter B. Neubauer, Samuel Abrams
The Psychoanalytic Study of de Child V60 Robert A. King, Peter B. Neubauer, Samuel Abrams
Psychoanalytic
Study
of the Child
VOLUME SIXTY
Founding Editors
ANNA FREUD, LL.D., D.SC.
HEINZ HARTMANN, M.D.
ERNST KRIS, Ph.D.
Managing Editor
ROBERT A. KING, M.D.
Editors
PETER B. NEUBAUER, M.D.
SAMUEL ABRAMS, M.D.
A. SCOTT DOWLING, M.D.
ROBERT A. KING, M.D.
Editorial Board
Samuel Abrams, M.D.
Paul M. Brinich, Ph.D.
A. Scott Dowling, M.D.
Robert A. King, M.D.
Anton O. Kris, M.D.
Steven Marans, Ph.D.
Linda C. Mayes, M.D.
The
Psychoanalytic
Study
of the Child
VOLUME SIXTY
Contents
47
74
101
128
PSYCHOANALYTIC RESEARCH
Nick Midgley and Mary Target
Recollections of Being in Child Psychoanalysis: A
Qualitative Study of a Long-Term Follow-Up Project
Rona Knight
The Process of Attachment and Autonomy in Latency:
A Longitudinal Study of Ten Children
157
178
vi
Contents
CLINICAL STUDIES
Karen Gilmore
Play in the Psychoanalytic Setting: Ego Capacity,
Ego State, and Vehicle for Intersubjective Exchange
Lissa Weinstein and Laurence Saul
Psychoanalysis As Cognitive Remediation: Dynamic
and Vygotskian Perspectives in the Analysis of
an Early Adolescent Dyslexic Girl
Silvia M. Bell
A Girls Experience of Congenital Trauma: The
Healing Function of Psychoanalysis in the Adolescent Years
213
239
263
PSYCHOANALYTIC PERSPECTIVES ON
THE FUTURE AND THE PAST
Harold P. Blum
Psychoanalytic Reconstruction and Reintegration
Cornelis Heijn
On Foresight
312
Index
335
295
INFANT-PARENT RESEARCH
AND INTERVENTION
Introduction
the following five papers are presented as a group to emphasize the unity of purpose of their authors in furthering parent
young child research and clinical practice and to highlight the variety
of routes they have devised to provide creative and effective interventions.
When Peter Wolff (1959) described infant states, the stage was set
for the burgeoning field of infancy research. At about the same time,
the important work of Chess and Thomas (1986) on temperament
spelled out more explicitly the notions of Anna Freud and others
that infants differed constitutionally in their regulatory and reactive
stylesand that these differences had important, fateful consequences for the reactions they elicited in their caretakers. The findings of this research gradually made it possible to move beyond wellmeant but fundamentally authoritarian recommendations for infant
care. This work thus set the stage for research that supports suggestions for care based on deepened developmental insight and on an
appreciation of individual parent-infant differences.
There seems to be no end to the fruitfulness of infant research as it
provides descriptions of ever more complex competencies and innate capacities of infants and details the moment-to-moment interactions of infants with others with ever greater precision. There is universal agreement that such studies yield a goldmine of data; there is
less agreement about the interpretation of the data and their significance for development and functioning in later childhood and adulthood. One area in which these data might be applied is that of parent-infant intervention.
Many of the pioneers in advocating such intervention, including
The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 60, ed. Robert A. King, Peter B. Neubauer,
Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling (Yale University Press, copyright 2005 by
Robert A. King, Peter B. Neubauer, Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling).
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A brief mother-infant treatment approach using video feedback is described. This approach is informed both by psychoanalysis and by research on mother-infant face-to-face interaction using video microanalysis. Two cases are presented. In the first, descriptions of the
Beatrice Beebe
videotaped interactions which informed the interventions are presented. In the second, knowledge of mother-infant microanalysis research informed the treatment, even though videotaping was not an
option. The respective stories of the presenting complaints, the video
interaction, and the parents own upbringing are linked. Specific representations of the baby that may interfere with the parents ability to
observe and process her nonverbal interaction with her infant are
identified. The mother has a powerful experience during the video feedback of watching herself and her baby interact. Our attempts together
to translate the action-sequences into words facilitates the mothers
ability to see and to remember, fostering a rapid integration of implicit and explicit modes of processing.
Introduction
10
Beatrice Beebe
11
12
Beatrice Beebe
13
14
Beatrice Beebe
to 100 seconds during periods of positive affect. These are the moments, of course, that every parent loves.
Maternal difficulty in tolerating momentary infant gaze aversion is
one of the most common pictures observed in mothers and infants
who present for treatment. If the mother feels that her infant does
not like her or is not interested in her, she may pursue the infant, increasing rather than decreasing the amount of stimulation. In her
pursuit or chase, mother may call the infants name, pull the infants hand, or in rare instances actually attempt to force the infants
head to get the infant to look. Maternal chase behavior is counterproductive; the infant then requires more time to regulate arousal
down sufficiently to return to gazing at mother. Instead, if the
mother can be helped to give the baby a time-out to re-regulate,
cooling it when the infant looks away, trusting her infant to return
to her, the infant will rapidly re-engage.
head orientation
We next observe infant head orientation to the mother: is the head
oriented vis--vis, or displaced in the horizontal plane approximately
30, 60, or 90 degrees away? In the 90-degree aversion, first described
by Stern (1971), the infants head is tucked into the chin, which takes
considerable energy. Are head aversion movements in the horizontal
plane complicated by oblique angles of the head down (or up) as
well? These increasing degrees of head aversion are described by
ethologists as degrees of severity of cut-off acts (Chance, 1962; McGrew, 1972). They are read by the partner as active initiations of
disengagement. As the infant turns away up to about 60 degrees, he
can still monitor the mother with his peripheral vision (tracking
presence, direction, and intensity of movement); by 90 degrees away,
or arching, however, he may lose peripheral visual monitoring of her
movements. More usual gaze aversions retain head orientation
within an approximately 30-degree angle from the vis--vis, retaining
access to rapid visual re-engagement with minimal effort.
In relation to the maternal chase behaviors above, the infant may
dodge with increasing degrees of head aversion, as well as arching
back, freezing (described by Fraiberg, 1982), or going limp and giving up tonus. Beebe and Stern (1977) described split-second sequences of chase and dodge in which maternal chase movements
predicted infant dodges, as the infant monitored her every movement through peripheral vision; but infant dodges also predicted
maternal chase behaviors, a reciprocal, bi-lateral interactive regula-
15
16
Beatrice Beebe
vocalization
17
Main & Hesse, 1990). In contrast, secure attachment at 1 year is associated with better peer relations, school performance, and capacity
to regulate emotions, as well as less psychopathology in childhood
and adolescence (Sroufe, 1983).
Disorganized attachment at 1 to 2 years is associated with oppositional, hostile-aggressive, fearful and disorganized behavior, low selfesteem, and cognitive difficulties in childhood (Lyons-Ruth, Bronfman & Parsons, 1999; Jacobson, Edelstein, & Hofmann, 1994).
Over 50 studies have shown that the security of the childs attachment to the parent is dependent on the emotional availability of the
parent, using global assessments and clinical ratings (see van Ijzendorn, 1997 for a review). Nevertheless, we still lack a full understanding of the origins of attachment, its modes of transmission, and the
role of the infant (and infant temperament) in this process. Fewer
than a dozen studies have used microanalysis of videotape to predict
attachment outcomes.
Although infants typically vocalize only about 10% of the time at 4
months, vocalization is such a central means of communication that
the way mothers and infants coordinate their vocal rhythms predicts
infant attachment. Jaffe, Beebe, Feldstein, Crown, and Jasnow (2001;
Beebe et al., 2000) predicted 12-month attachment outcomes from 4month vocal rhythm coordination, assessed with a technique that
samples behavior every quarter of a second. As each individual shortens or elongates the durations of sounds and silences, how tightly or
loosely does the partner coordinate with adjustments in his or her
own sound and silence durations? Midrange degrees of mother-infant and stranger-infant coordination at 4 months predicted secure
attachment; very high and very low degrees of coordination predicted insecure attachment classifications.
This work led us to conceptualize interactive regulation on a continuum, with an optimal midrange, and two poles defined by very
high (excessive) or very low (withdrawn) monitoring of the partner.
High coordination increases the predictability of the interaction,
construed as a coping strategy elicited by the uncertainty or threat
experienced by both mother and infant. At the very low pole of coordination, both partners are behaving relatively independently of the
other, interpreted as a withdrawal or inhibition of interpersonal
monitoring. Although much research literature concentrates on the
concept that lowered interactive coordination is a risk condition for
infant development, a substantial body of work examining both high
and low poles is now converging on an optimum midrange model
18
Beatrice Beebe
as well (see Belsky et al., 1984; Cohn & Elmore, 1988; Lewis & Feiring, 1989; Malatesta et al., 1989; Sander, 1995; Roe, Roe, Drivas, &
Bronstein, 1990; Leyendecker et al., 1997).
In our vocal rhythm study, very high mother-infant bi-directional
coordination predicted insecure-disorganized attachment, the most
problematic of attachment classifications. We interpreted the high
coordination on the part of both partners as vigilance, arousal, or hyper reactivity. Our research film of Clara at 4 months dramatically illustrates a very disturbing mother-infant pair with very high vocal
rhythm coordination; subsequently, at one year, Clara was classified
as showing disorganized attachment. In the research film, Clara is
crying and flailing as the interaction begins. Mother excitedly repeats her name. Claras crying rhythm and mothers rhythmic repetition of her name synchronize. Mother flashes big smiles at Clara as
she synchronizes with the cry rhythm, as if attempting to ride high
negative arousal into a more positive state. Both escalate, Clara
screaming more loudly, mother now frantically vocalizing and moving Claras arms. Although most mothers would back off, this mother
just keeps going, and each partner continues to top the other. By
the end Clara has thrown up, sobbing and writhing. In addition to
vigilant vocal rhythm coordination, this interaction illustrates mutually escalating over-arousal, a disturbance of the ability of the dyad
to manage the infants distress.
The optimum midrange model has direct clinical relevance. Vocal
rhythm coordination is an important means of attachment formation and transmission. Whereas the midrange dyad retains more variability and flexibility, the tightly coordinated dyad is less flexible and
variable. Too much predictability in the system may compromise flexibility and openness to change; too little may index a loss of coherence (Beebe et al., 2000). These concepts can be used in mother-infant treatments as a framework with which to evaluate interactive
difficulties and the process of change, in any modality (not just vocal
rhythm), as we do in the first case described below.
The Key Role of the Face-to-Face Interaction
An ongoing NIMH-funded study in our lab has examined maternal
self-report depression and anxiety at 6 weeks and 4 months, motherinfant face-to-face interaction at 4 months, and infant attachment at
12 months, in a community sample of 132 families (Beebe, Jaffe,
Chen, Cohen, Buck, Feldstein, et al., 2003). Maternal depression and
anxiety at infant age 6 weeks or 4 months did robustly affect patterns
19
of self- and interactive regulation at 4 months, but did not predict infant attachment outcomes at 1 year. Instead, it was the quality of the
4-month mother-infant face-to-face interaction itself that predicted
infant attachment outcomes. The implication is that, in a community
sample, distressed maternal states of mind at 6 weeks or 4 months do
not necessarily lead to insecure infant attachment outcomes unless
there is also difficulty in the face-to-face interaction. This study provides a further rationale for therapeutically supporting the quality of
the mother-infant face-to-face interaction when mothers are distressed, which may then prevent later insecure infant attachment
outcomes. Such an effort is currently underway with the 9/11 widowed mothers and their infants, using brief videotape-assisted clinical interventions (Beebe et al., 2002).
self-regulation
From birth onward, self-regulation refers to the management of
arousal, the maintenance of alertness, the ability to dampen positive
or negative arousal in the face of over-stimulation, and the capacity
to inhibit behavior (Beebe & Lachmann, 2002). Neonates differ in
their ability to regulate state (see for example Korner and Grobstein,
1977; Brazelton, 1994). Infant temperament patterns, including
sleep, feeding, arousal difficulties, or special sensitivities to sound,
smell, or touch, are an important area of inquiry in the treatment
(see DeGangi, Di Pietro, Greenspan, & Porges, 1991; Greenspan,
1981; Korner & Grobstein, 1977; van den Boom, 1995). Disturbances
of infant self-regulation can be noted in patterns of autonomic distress (hiccupping; vomiting) and disorganized visual scanning, as
well as pulling the hair or ear, or a history of head-banging (Tronick,
1989). Although maternal touch is a primary means of soothing a
distressed infant, and extra handling is associated with diminished irritability (Korner & Thoman, 1972), some infants with difficult temperaments do not tolerate a great deal of touch (see DiGangi et al.,
1991).
By the time infants are assessed in the face-to-face situation, typically at 3 to 6 months of age, state regulation has stabilized and fluctuations in the management of an alert state have receded with maturation of the nervous system. At this point it is difficult to distinguish
between infant constitutional processing difficulties that may have
existed at birth from problematic interactive patterns. Infant temperament and self-regulation are already intertwined with interactive
regulation difficulties (see also Hofacker & Papousek, 1998). For this
20
Beatrice Beebe
21
22
Beatrice Beebe
23
the parent new eyes to see the infants remarkable nonverbal language, and the infants ability to respond to minute, but nevertheless
identifiable, behaviors. Together we try to describe what we see, finding a new language for their exchange as well. I encourage the parent to put into words what he or she is feeling, and what the infant
may be feeling. Very likely I will play this positive portion several
times, at least once in slow-motion.
As we proceed I illustrate how evocative minute infant facial expressions can be, moments when the parent matches the infants vocal contours, how the parent paces and pauses, facilitating the infant
taking a turn. I note infant self-regulation and self-soothing behaviors, and ways the pair manage moments of infant distress, as they occur in the interaction. Having studied the videotape in detail in advance, I will also have selected one or two central difficult interaction
patterns that I would like the parent to be able to see. Together we
try to observe the effects of each partners behaviors on the other in
these difficult moments. I again inquire into what the parent felt,
what the parent thinks the infant felt, and the meaning these moments have for the parent. It is here that the parent is likely to have a
spontaneous insight into the problem. Being confronted with the implicit action-dialogue in the videotape often triggers the parents
associations to aspects of his or her history that the parent always
knew but could not productively use in the current context with
the infant.
Wherever possible I like to use research findings, illustrating with a
drawing, to help parents understand the infants behavior, shifting
attention away from the right way to do it to infants remarkable capacities. I emphasize what this particular infant needs to stay optimally engaged. My role is often to give permission to do less, to slow
down, to wait. For example, with an infant who easily becomes overaroused and irritable, I suggest slower rhythms, more repetition,
longer pauses, and more waiting when the infant looks away.
I attempt to link the stories of the presenting complaint, the
video drama, and the parents childhood history, in an effort to understand what may interfere with the parents ability to see the infant and the interaction. When specific representations of the infant
(or transferences) seem to interfere with the parents ability to
see the infant and how each partner affects the other, they are
identified. At the end of the session the parent is encouraged to trust
what has been learned, and to try not to be too self-conscious. Another videotaped assessment is scheduled in another month or two.
24
Beatrice Beebe
The Case of Cecil
may: first contact
In my first contact with Mrs. C. over the phone she told me that she
had an eight-year-old son and a 9-month-old baby boy, Cecil. The
older son had always been easier and had seemed to match the
mothers temperament. This second baby had been different from
the beginning. He is a friendly baby, but he is not focused on me
when I play with him. Cecil looks past me, unless I energetically try to
engage him. He seems happier by himself. He seems more connected to the babysitter than to me. Mrs. C. thought that perhaps
Cecil needed a higher level of stimulation. Or perhaps she herself
had disturbed the relationship initially, she wondered, by talking to
her older son while nursing Cecil. Or maybe she had never given Cecil sufficient eye-contact and intimate engagement during nursing.
The first consultation occurred in my office. Mrs. C. was warm,
friendly, and seemed quite relaxed. Cecil made very good eye contact
with me, with excited positive affect, and even had moments of a
gape smile. The mother then took Cecil, tried to play with him
face-to-face, and could not get Cecil to engage. Cecil never even
looked at her. Mrs. C. said this was typical. Mrs. C. then tried a peek-aboo game, putting the blanket over Cecils head. As the blanket came
off, there was a moment of brief eye contact, but Cecil emerged from
the blanket momentarily dazed, with a sober look. He then smiled at
his mother briefly, and looked away.
My suggestion in this initial meeting was that although the peek-aboo game did have a moment of built-in eye contact, it did not
seem to engage Cecil. Instead of trying to force more contact
through high arousal games, I suspected she would have more success if she followed Cecils lead for eye-contact, letting him go when
he looked away, and waiting until he initiated gaze before trying to
engage him. I explained that looking away is the babys natural
method of re-regulating his arousal when it has become a little too
high. We agreed to do a split-screen lab videotaping, so that I could
try to see more of the details of the interaction. From what I could
observe in the office, I had difficulty understanding in more detail
why the infant was so avoidant with his mother.
june: first lab videotaping, cecil 10 months
In the lab mother and infant were asked to sit face-to-face, with the
infant in a high chair. The standard instructions to the mother are to
25
play with the infant as she would at home. One camera is focused on
the mothers face, and one on the infants face, producing a splitscreen view, in which both partners can be simultaneously observed.
In my microanalysis of the face-to-face play interaction, I observed
that the mother continuously gave Cecil toy after toy.
Microanalysis of First Two Minutes of Mother-Infant Interaction
In the opening moments of the interaction, mother shook the toy toward Cecil, with abrupt, rapid movements, each accompanied by a
strong sound, gheh! At each maternal movement, Cecil blinked,
with mild startles. Mother then moved into, Whats that! showing
the toy, making a series of ooooh sounds, and Cecils face showed a
hint of a smile. As mother continued with, Say hello, dolly, hello, Cecil, hi, baby, Cecils face showed a hint of a slight mouth opening,
and then receded into his more characteristic neutral expression, as
if the stimulation was just a bit too much for him.
After a brief interruption to get the seating and the camera angles
right, Cecil briefly glanced at his mother with a neutral face, and
then looked down. While he was still looking down, mother asked
Cecil to look at the toy, but Cecil stayed with his head down. Then
mother made an interesting noise, gurooom! and got Cecils attention. Cecil responded with his own ghum!
There was then a repetition of the earlier series of mothers rapid
movements shaking the toy toward Cecil, each accompanied by a
strong sound. At each Cecil blinked. Cecil then looked down and
away, then shifted his body and hung over the side of the chair, limp.
We have come to view such loss of postural tonus as a coping strategy
in the face of overstimulation.
While Cecil was still hanging over the side of the chair, not looking,
mother found a new toy, and offered it with a sinusoidal shaped vocal
contour (the contour of approval and flirtation): Hello, Cecil; and do
you know what else? This vocal contour is usually reserved for greeting, once eye contact has already been made. It was successful in getting
Cecil to look at mother, and to pay attention to the new toy, as mother
continued, Look whats here, the dolly, look at her, look at her.
However, just at this moment, Cecils face took on a negative frown
expression, and he looked down, moved his head down, then
averted, moved his head farther down, and then uttered a fussy
sound. Finally he gave up body tonus and collapsed his head into his
stomach. Simultaneously with the collapsing tonus mother said,
Hello, Cecil and gently tapped Cecil on the head with the toy. Cecils head collapsed further into his stomach.
26
Beatrice Beebe
This is a detailed description of approximately the first two minutes of the interaction. At a more global level of description, in the
rest of the ten-minute session there were nice moments of mutual
gaze, and some interest on Cecils part in the toys mother offered.
However, often without pausing in her movements, or sounds,
mother offered Cecil another toy, and yet another. Periodically Cecil
continued to collapse, into his stomach, or over the side of the chair,
and mother gently tapped him on the head with the toy. When the
play was more successful, there were nice long strings of vocal exchanges, and the mother beautifully matched the contours of Cecils
sounds. Several times Cecil showed intense interest and vocal excitement in a toy, and mother joined the excited sounds. However, Cecil
did not smile. When Cecil became fussy, started to cry and shake his
body, mother offered more toys.
Overall, Cecil was low-key, with his face mostly neutral. Occasionally there were some moments of eye contact, and some nice low positive moments. Mother showed excellent capacity for vocal rhythm
matching, facial mirroring, and following the infants line of regard
to an object of interest. But she did not give the baby a chance to respond, or to organize an interest in the toys on his own, and thus she
disrupted the babys initiative. She also disrupted the babys arousal
regulation, over-arousing the baby by never pausing, offering one toy
after another, and then chasing the baby when he averted gaze. I
understood Cecils difficulty with eye contact and the restriction of
his facial expressiveness toward neutral as the babys attempt to reduce his arousal toward a more comfortable range, but at the expense of the social engagement.
Toward the end of the ten-minute interaction, Cecil began to get
fussy. Mother took a rattle and began to shake it, further increasing
the intensity of the stimulation. Cecil got even fussier, orienting away,
averting gaze. Mother then called to Cecil in the sinusoidal vocal
contour usually reserved for greeting. Cecil did not respond. By the
end Cecil was openly protesting the level of stimulation, very fussy,
throwing to the floor all the toys that mother handed him, while
mother never paused.
stranger-infant interaction
Following the interaction with mother, I played with Cecil for three
minutes, while the mother watched the interaction over a TV monitor from another room. The infants ability to engage with a trained
novel partner is a critical aspect of the assessment. Those babies who
27
can repair the engagement with a novel partner are generally more
resilient, whereas those who generalize the difficulty to a novel partner are in more difficulty (see Field et al., 1988). In evaluating this interaction, I noted that my tempo was noticeably slower than that of
the mother. I waited for Cecil to look at me before I attempted to engage him. When he did look, he quickly smiled broadly. But then Cecil became fussy. When I handed Cecil a toy, he quickly threw it on
the floor, and this was repeated over and over. In the process, Cecil
was very physically active, turning around in his chair a lot.
Eventually Cecil began to bang his own body gently against the
seat, as if to both self-stimulate and self-soothe. There were then a few
moments of eye contact with me, with midrange positive affect, but
these were very brief. Each brief gaze encounter was followed by a sequence of immediate averting, mild negative facial expression, looking down on the floor at an object, and then hanging limp, sideways
over the chair, body tonus collapsed. Each time I waited, and he
came back into the engagement on his own. Once he looked, he became slightly excited, with a positive expression, and then immediately became negative and averted, looking down. My overall impression was that he easily over-aroused. On the other hand, he had the
capacity to re-engage on his own when I waited.
july: video-assisted intervention
A two-and-a-half-hour period was set aside to meet with the mother to
discuss how things were going and to review the videotape. The
mother had already watched the tape and she felt bad. She realized
that she was trying too hard and it was not working. She saw me as
smoother, quieter. I suggested that as we watched the tape, we could
try to make quite specific just what she was doing when she felt she
was trying too hard. My own goal was to help the mother notice exactly what she did, and exactly what the infant did, as each responded
to the other. In essence, I wanted to give her new eyes, a new ability
to observe the details of interaction.
In this process my goal was to help her confirm what she did quite
beautifully, which elicited the response from the baby that she
wanted, as well as to notice what did not work for her baby. I admired
her facial empathy, her vocal responsiveness, and her well-modulated
vocal contouring (see McDonough, 1993). She was quite surprised
when I pointed out the infants blinks and startles at the beginning of
the interaction, in response to her abrupt movements with the toys.
She was also surprised to see me point out very subtle facial expres-
28
Beatrice Beebe
29
30
Beatrice Beebe
and mother joined Cecils vocal distress with similar sounds, and
held him close.
Describing the rest of the session, at a more global level, after a few
minutes mother did a peek-a-boo game, covering Cecils face with
her hands and saying, where is Cecil? This time the quality was totally different: slower and very successful. Cecil emerged smiling, and
sustained the positive affect. Then Cecil was briefly quiet, and
mother waited. Cecil then heard the noise of the camera again, and
mother joined his line of regard, and waited. Now Cecil wanted to
get out again, and this time I stopped the filming after seven minutes. There was nothing the mother did in this second filming that
seemed to interfere with the infants capacity to play and to respond.
stranger-infant interaction
We then attempted a stranger-infant filming, but Cecil would have
none of it. He cried loudly, angrily, and threw any toys on the floor.
Three different attempts by me to play with Cecil had to be aborted,
since he was crying hard. Finally we organized a set-up in which Cecil
sat in mothers lap, and mother was instructed to be the chair, not
to help or respond.
For the first five minutes of the interaction, Cecil was disengaged.
He was silent, made no eye contact, and every toy that I tried to engage him with was immediately thrown on the floor. However, at
some point he finally made a vocalization, a spit sound. Immediately I matched this sound. And right away he looked at me and
made another, similar one. All of a sudden the whole tenor of the interaction had changed, and we were engaged in a fascinating vocal
dialogue. As we continued to match and elaborate on each others
sounds, at some point Cecil began to move his tongue as he made the
sounds, and it came out as la-ler, la-ler. He was intensely visually engaged. I tried making the la-ler sound, and we both burst into big
smiles, and giggled. Variations on this rich vocal dialogue continued
for the next four minutes. Cecil had been enormously responsive to
my matching his vocalization. Since this form of engagement does
not require the child to be visually engaged, it can potentially provide a less intrusive or demanding means of making contact. His own
willingness to elaborate on the jointly formed patterns was critical to
the success of the dialogue.
Toward the end of the interaction Cecil began to be tired. Although he had been having a spirited, at times elated, turn taking di-
31
alogue with me (as he sat in his mothers lap), when he began to get
tired, he arched away into his mothers body, and avoided me. But
then he was able to keep coming back to me, and to continue the
rhythm of the vocal exchange. These movements away from me were
his own self-regulatory efforts to manage his arousal within a comfortable range. The success of his self-regulation efforts could be
seen in his continuing ability to re-engage me, in cycles of vocal dialogue, disruption, and then repair (see Tronick, 1989; Beebe & Lachmann, 1994). This aspect of the interaction with me was used as part
of the therapy. It was a demonstration of a way to make contact without forcing, intruding, or chasing. It also vividly showed the power of
vocal rhythm matching in making contact, since the child does not
have to make eye contact.
This laboratory filming ended with a brief discussion with the
mother that her interaction with Cecil was going extremely well now.
We made a decision not to pursue the attachment test since the visit
had already been too long. Cecil was doing well, and all we needed to
do was to watch to be sure he continued to be fine.
follow-up contacts
September
A telephone conversation: Things are just great. We were on vacation for three weeks and we had a lot of time to spend . . . I totally relaxed with Cecil. I got to know him better. I stopped my agendas,
stopped comparing him to his brother. He is a delightful baby; we are
just charmed by him, he is now so social. I had seen this side of him
from time to time, but now it has really come out. He is more bonded
with me too, he wants mommy only. He seems terrific. Im enjoying
how different he is from his brother.
November
A letter: You have played an absolutely pivotal role in my life. . . . To
begin with, Cecil; our connection is deep and easy and full of joy. He
is an absolutely delicious, funny, charming, very loving little person. . . . you helped me relax and see him; I stopped focusing on who
he was not and on how he and I were not. . . . So, having discovered
Cecil, I fell in love with Cecil. No surprise. . . . In retrospect, my feeling of self-reproach was based on some accurately sensed stuff. I intuitively knew that I was not being with him or being emotionally re-
32
Beatrice Beebe
sponsive to him anywhere near as much as I can be. Now I am, and let
me tell you, the difference is not minor.
discussion of the c. case
We return here to the theme that parent-infant treatment occurs at a
unique intersection of implicit and explicit modes of processing and
fosters a greater integration between the two.
Our three orienting questions provide a framework for conceptualizing the treatment: (1) In the implicit mode of action-sequences,
how does each partner affect the other? (2) In the explicit narrative
mode, can the parent verbalize the nature of either partners effect
on the other? (3) And does the parents representation of the infant
interfere with the ability to perceive the nonverbal action dialogue?
From the presenting complaints it is clear that parents are aware of
some aspect of the infants behaviors, and particularly ways in which
the infant affects the parent, such as, my baby does not smile at me,
or my baby does not look at me. But it is harder to observe ones
own behaviors which affect the infant. Often various representations
of the infant disturb this process further.
Addressing the infants impact on the mother, Mrs. C. could observe as well as verbalize that her infant often did not look at her, or
smile at her. When asked how she would respond to this, however,
Mrs. C. was vague: I try harder, or He needs more stimulation.
Addressing the mothers impact on her infant, Mrs. C. had not been
aware of the specific behaviors that we were able to describe together,
for example, rapidly moving into the face, not pausing, continually
offering toys. Identifying these specific behaviors enabled Mrs. C. to
observe the moments in which they influenced the infant to disengage, for example, to startle, look away, collapse into the stomach, or
inhibit initiation with toys.
We were able to identify some of the transferences to the infant
that seemed to disturb Mrs. C.s ability to observe and verbalize both
sides of the bilateral effects of each partner on the other. She acted
like her own mother, who had set the pace, and her infant seemed
to act like Mrs. C. had as a little girl, that is, to withdraw. Her own
setting the pace behaviors (not pausing, continually offering toys)
were out of her awareness. Mrs. C. was aware that her infant was withdrawing from her, but she was not aware of how similar her infants
behavior was to that of her own in childhood. Thus she and her infant had re-enacted an aspect of her own history, the mother who
sets the pace and the child who withdraws.
33
Similarly, the infant seemed to act like Mrs. C.s own mother, since
the infant had an impassive face, neutral, impossible to read, which
reminded Mrs. C. vividly of her own mothers face. Mrs. C.s response
to her own infants impassive face was very similar to her response to
her mothers face when she had been a little girl, that is, to become
anxious and to try harder. Presumably the similarity of this interaction with ones in her childhood interfered with Mrs. C.s ability to see
that her trying harder was just pushing her infant farther away
from her.
These transferences were identified in the process of watching the
videotape. Being presented with the procedural level of action sequences which are out of the mothers awareness, presumably because they are connected to painful childhood experiences, facilitates the mothers ability to see, and to remember. The mother is being
asked to make a unique integration of procedural and declarative information, in an arena that has been out of awareness due to some
kind of unresolved pain. This work allows the mother to shift her representation, for example, from the baby rejecting her, to the baby as
over-stimulated and attempting to dampen his arousal.
The optimum midrange model of regulation described above is
useful as a framework for evaluating the progress of the treatment. At
the outset of the treatment, Cecil could be described as preoccupied
with self-regulation (looking away, showing lowered level of arousal,
constricting the range of the face), with lowered levels of contingent
coordination with mothers behaviors through facial, visual, and vocal behaviors, and with his initiative shut down, body collapsed.
Mother could be described as a high coordinator, very contingently
responsive to the infants every move, with excellent facial-mirroring
and vocal rhythm matching, but interacting with levels of stimulation
that were too high, with patterns that were spatially intrusive, that disturbed the infants initiative.
Following the videotape intervention, the mother was able to move
from high- to more midrange coordination, less vigilantly responsive to every infant move. She was able to pause more, do less, wait,
tolerate the infants disengagement without chasing, tolerate the
infants distress, and give the infant space to initiate play. Moments of
matching were interspersed with waiting for the infants own moves
(of self-regulation, or initiative), so that they did not seem excessive, or imposed. The infant for his part shifted from a low-coordinator and became more midrange in his level of contingent tracking of the mother, more midrange in facial responsivity with both
positive and negative expressions rather than a predominance of
34
Beatrice Beebe
35
36
Beatrice Beebe
Nicole then needed her diaper changed. She had a large bowel
movement. Mrs. N. was gentle, solicitous, and managed it well. Now
Mother and Nicole were together on the couch, and Mrs. N. showed
me a pull-to-sit game that she plays with Nicole, a game that her
friend had taught her. The baby clearly knew the game, anticipating
the moves with her body, but she did not look at her mother, her face
showed no animation, and at the last moment before attaining the
sitting position, her head oriented up and 30 degrees away from the
vis--vis. Mrs. N. then held Nicole lying across her lap on the infants
back. This was the nicest connection they made, slow, both bodies relaxed, both looking at the other, but without smiling. Mrs. N. then
began to talk about how terrible she felt: Have I hurt her, what will
be the effect, will she know her own mother, should I stop working?
She cried during most of this discussion.
After about an hour, I suggested that we start to see how we could
help her engage Nicole more. I said that I did not think the issue was
the amount of time that she worked, as much as finding a way to
make a connection with Nicole. I explained that first I needed to play
with her to try to see her range of responsiveness. Nicole chortled,
with high positive affect, sustaining long gazes with me. She was marvelously socially engaged. From this interaction it was clear that the
difficulty was not an incapacity on the part of the infant. Evidently,
the social engagements with her Nanny and her father were going
well.
I then set about trying to teach Mrs. N. how to engage Nicole. The
first thing I taught her was vocal rhythm matching, making sounds
contingent on the babys sounds, both matching and elaborating on
the intonation, pitch, and rhythm. I chose this first because the child
does not have to make eye contact in this mode of relating. Mrs. N.s
sounds were thin and squeaky. She did not give the sounds a robust
prosody, she could not elaborate on them, and she did not put any
words to the sounds. She did not seem to know how to play. I
coached the sounds from the sidelines. Eventually the sounds she
made were adequate to make some contact with the baby. Nicole oriented to her a bit more, and returned some of Mrs. N.s sounds with
her own, beginning a rudimentary vocal dialogue. But Nicole did not
look at her mother.
Noting how flat her face was as she interacted with Nicole, I then
tried to teach Mrs. N. facial mirroring, by having her roughly match
some of my faces (gape smile, mock surprise). I tried to get her to
move her face in ways similar to the ways I moved mine (small increments of open mouth, open a little more, then a little more; moving
37
the upper lip in and out of a purse etc.). She was unable to play with
her face; her face was tight, flat, and unvarying. I then had the idea of
showing her how to unlock her jaw, and how to massage her face. I
asked her if she would be interested in trying this. She agreed. In this
process she had an association to her mothers angry, tight face, and
she became a little teary. I suggested that her reaction to her
mothers angry face was expressed in her own facial tightness and
constriction. She was receptive and felt sobered by this idea. The attention to the behavioral details of the procedural level, particularly
the constriction, seemed to trigger her representation, which we
could then address and elaborate at the symbolic level.
We then moved to an attempt at face-to-face interaction between
mother and baby. At first Nicole was very gaze avoidant and her
whole body arched away from her mother. The infant made absolutely no eye contact. Gradually I taught Mrs. N. to slow down and
to make some slow rhythmic sounds, and to do vocal rhythm matching if Nicole made any sound. When the infant would give her a
darting glance, I taught her to give an exaggerated mock surprise
greeting. The instant the infant looked away, I taught her to cool it.
Nicole began looking a bit more. We spent quite a while at this.
By the end of the three-hour session Nicole showed some brief partial smiles to her mother. The gazes were not sustained. But Mrs. N.
had a direct, powerful experience of getting some more response
from her baby. She could see that she was getting somewhere. She expressed relief and gratitude that I had validated that something was
wrong. I reminded her of the many things that were right as well: she
had a very gentle and affectionate capacity to hold Nicole and to
feed her, she did have some games she played with the infant, and
most of all, she wanted more contact with her.
Ten days later we had a telephone session. Now I make it totally
Nicoles time when I get home. If I can slow down, we can connect
better. By the end of the week I feel totally disconnected from her.
When the Nanny leaves, she is used to her. I have to be careful: I expect her to demonstrate affection and attachment. When I dont get
it, I get worried. Sometimes she does not make any sounds, so I cant
mimic her. I asked her if she could start it with occasional sounds of
her own. My husband can walk in the room and connect with her
right away. He is like the Pied Piper. It is hard for me. I feel bad that I
dont connect the way he does. If I dont get a lot of feedback, I feel
unliked. I asked if there was then a danger that she would feel rejected and withdraw. She agreed, yes, very much. She then reported
that Nicole is not as avoidant as she was: She looks at me, she
38
Beatrice Beebe
watches, though she does not smile. She can concentrate on my face
though, thats new. She told me that Nicole was right there with her,
looking at her face right now. I suggested she try a mock surprise expression right now, and she did. I waited a moment while Mrs. N.
played with her. She reported that Nicole looks but she does not
smile. She will watch me now if I do interesting things with my face.
But I noticed that if Im tense I close my face up. I said that it was
wonderful that she was trying to engage her child with her face, and
that Nicole was clearly beginning to respond. I congratulated her on
becoming so aware of her own face, and able to notice when she
closes it up.
When Nicole looks at my husband, she gets this glow; will it always
be this way? In the morning I am terrible with her. Im trying to get
ready, Im in a hurry, and I do a dancing conversation in front of her
face, all speeded up. I commented on Mrs. N.s increasing ability to
notice what she does and to see if it is disturbing Nicoles ability to
connect with her. She then asked, Have I lost my chance? When I
left you, I felt so bad, and angry; I missed my chance. I should have
stayed home and not worked. Without waiting for me to respond,
she immediately told me that Nicole was looking at her right now,
and Mrs. N. began to make sounds. We practiced the sinusoidalshaped hello, she and I saying it to each other, and she reported
that Nicole was looking constantly at her while she made the sinusoidal sounds.
Then I asked her about feeling angry. She said that she was angry
her husband wasnt encouraging her to quit work, and she was angry
that no one had been agreeing with her that something was wrong.
She felt that finally I had validated her. I would be devastated if I do
not have a good relationship with Nicole. She lights up for my husband. She is so responsive to the Nanny. But what you are saying to
me is, its not too late for me to connect. Ive never felt so insecure in
my life. I empathized with her fear and distress. Then I told her how
terrific it was that she was holding on to her hope to connect with
Nicole, and that she and I could both see progress.
A telephone message two weeks after the initial three-hour session
in person: Mrs. N. was canceling our tentative appointment to see
each other in person because she and Nicole were doing so well: I
am getting so much feedback from her, I am relaxing a little. She
smiles more, looks more. I dont feel crazy anymore. All of a sudden
she has started really vocalizing. The biggest thing you said was, focus
on her. When Im with her, Im just giving her all my attention.
A telephone session one month after the initial three hour session
39
in person: Shes wonderful, shes happy, shes more vocal, more expressive, shes really relating to me. Occasionally we have a bad
evening. But Im more comfortable around her. I may be doing more
of her language. I try to slow it down for her. If Im rushing, I notice
it. Then I just hand her to the Nanny, because I dont want her to
sense it. I imitate her sounds, but not all the time. If she initiates, and
I respond, and make it even bigger, then she laughs. I tell her how
wonderful all this is, how thrilled I am that things are so much better.
I think were doing a lot better. When I come home, I get a greeting.
She looks, she smiles, she kicks. Then she asked me if it was a mistake not to come for a second consultation in person, and I said no, I
didnt think so, because things were going so much better. We agreed
that she would call me if she had any more concerns. She thanked
me profusely. I told her that it was so remarkable how quickly she and
Nicole were able to turn things around.
discussion of the n. case
This pair illustrates an absence of maternal provision of the usual infantized facial and vocal behaviors that engage infants in face-to-face
play. Presumably the more adequate provision of the Nanny and
the father had to this point safeguarded the overall social development of Nicole. The mothers frozen face and inhibition of maternal
play behavior required me to figure out how to get the actionsequences going, how to prime the pump.
Mrs. N.s immediate transference to me in the first telephone contact as having a beautiful voice set the stage for me to provide something that seemed to have been absent for her. By teaching her specific ways of engaging the infant, that is, vocal rhythm matching,
vocal contouring, facial mirroring, and cooling it when the baby
looked away, it is possible that she experienced a provision from
me. I was also admiring of her willingness to try these new behaviors,
and of her increasing ability to engage Nicole, as she tried it, over the
phone.
The key to unlocking Mrs. N.s capacity to mother Nicole was the
discovery of her traumatic reaction to her own mothers face, which
was then carried in a procedural form through her inhibition of
her own face with Nicole. In retrospect, the vocal modality proved to
be easier for Mrs. N. to develop with Nicole. Since the vocal modality
did not require Nicole to look, it was initially easier to reach Nicole
this way. But Mrs. N. had also been so responsive to my voice, from
the very first contact, and she carried on most of her relationship
40
Beatrice Beebe
with me over the telephone. It may be that the voice was a non-traumatized mode for Mrs. N., compared to the face (M.S. Moore, personal communication, August 18, 1999).
Discussion
Many different approaches to mother-infant treatment yield dramatic progress (see for example Cramer et al., 1990; Fraiberg, 1980;
Seligman, 1994; Stern, 1995) (but note that controlled clinical trials
are rare). Although the use of video feedback is growing, three
decades of microanalysis research on the mother-infant face-to-face
exchange is surprisingly under-utilized in current treatment approaches. Microanalysis of behavior allows us to perceive the details
of interactions which are usually too rapid to grasp with the naked
eye. These details provide the clinician with the ability to translate
the parents presenting complaints into specific behaviors which can
then be understood as an unfolding story of the relationship. With
the additional perspective of the dyadic systems view of communication (despite the mothers obviously greater ability and range of resources) the clinician can continually attempt to understand how
each partner contributes to the exchange, how each affects the
other. And the clinician can notice how the self-regulation strategies
and styles of both partners affect and are affected by the nature of
the interactive exchange. With this perspective, for example, negative interactions such as chase and dodge or mutually escalating
over-arousal can be seen as reciprocally responsive co-constructed
forms of engagement. This systems view helps us remain empathic to
how each partner is affected by the other.
However, video microanalysis of the interaction from a systems
view can only richly set the stage for the treatment. A clinicians sensitive ability to construct jointly with the parent a description of the exchange, to help the parent use the behavioral details of the video
drama as a springboard for memories and associations, and to link
the stories of the presenting complaints and the parents own history
to the video drama, form the core of the treatment. The clinicians
careful attention to the parents self-esteem, particularly feelings of
shame and humiliation, is essential.
The video feedback method does not disturb the dyad while they interact. Later, when the parent and I view the videotape, it is simultaneously immediate and visually concrete, as well as somewhat distant and safer, in that it is not happening right now (Lefcourt,
personal communication, July 7, 1998). In the video replay we can
41
Both parents in the two cases presented felt that the treatment validated their sense that something was wrong. Mrs. N. was able to
persist in trusting her discomfort even though her husband did not
think there was a problem. This vague discomfort is the parents ability to sense the impact of the implicit procedural mode and enables
the parent to seek treatment. But the meaning of this discomfort is
not usually recognizable without help (Tabin, personal communication, September 10, 1998). Procedurally organized interactive memories that are unrecognized and unsymbolized often come to play a
role in shaping the action-language of our intimate interactions as
well as the representations of our intimate partners. The psychoanalytically oriented video feedback method goes directly to the core interactional dynamic that is out of awareness and provides a safe format in which this dynamic can be verbalized and reflected on. The
parent can become more aware of the infants mind as well as her
own (Fonagy et al., 2002). In this process implicit, procedural aspects
of the parents mode of relating to the infant which have remained
out of awareness can be translated into explicit, narrative forms of
understanding.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ainsworth, M., Blehar, M., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Press.
Bakermans-Kranenburg, M., Juffer, F., van Ijzendoorn, M. (1998). Interventions with video feedback and attachment discussions: Does type of
42
Beatrice Beebe
43
Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss (Vol.1: Attachment). London: Hogarth Press.
Brazelton, T. B. (1994). Touchpoints: Opportunities for preventing problems in the parent-child relationship. Acta Paediatrica, 394 (Suppl.), 3539.
Brazelton, T. B., Koslowski, B., & Main, M. (1974). The origins of reciprocity. In M. Lewis & L. Rosenblum (Eds.), The effect of the infant on its caregiver (pp. 49 70). New York: Wiley-Interscience.
Call, J. (1963). Prevention of autism in a young infant in a well-child conference. Journal of the American. Academy of Child Psychiatry, 2, 451 459.
Chance, M. (1962). An interpretation of some agonistic postures. Symposium of the Zoological Society of London, 8, 71 89.
Chance, M. & Larsen, R. (Eds.) (1996). The social structure of attention. New
York: Wiley.
Cohen, P., & Beebe, B. (2002). Video feedback with a depressed mother and
her infant: A collaborative individual psychoanalytic and mother-infant
treatment. Journal of Infant, Child & Adolescent Psychotherapy 2 (3), 1 55.
Cohn, J., & Beebe, B. (1990). Sampling interval affects time-series regression estimates of mother-infant influence. Abstracts, ICIS. Infant Behavior
and Development [Abstracts], 13, 317.
Cramer, B. (1995). Short-term dynamic psychotherapy for infants and their
parents. Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 4, 649 659.
Cramer, B. (1998). Mother-infant psychotherapies: A widening scope in
technique. Infant Mental Health Journal, 19 (2), 151167.
Cramer, B., Robert-Tissot, C., Stern, D., Serpa-Rusconi, S., De Muralt,
M., Besson, G., et al. (1990). Outcome evaluation in brief mother-infant
psychotherapy: A preliminary report. Infant Mental Health Journal, 11 (3),
278 300.
Cramer, B., & Stern, D. (1988). Evaluation of changes in mother-infant
brief psychotherapy: A single case study. Infant Mental Health Journal, 9 (1),
20 45.
DeGangi, G., Di Pietro, J., Greenspan, S., & Porges, S. (1991). Psychophysiological characteristics of the regulatory disordered infant. Infant Behavior and Development, 14, 3750.
Downing, G. (2004). Emotion, body and parent-infant interaction. In: J.
Nadel & Muir D, editors. Emotional development: Recent research advances. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. (1970). Ethology: The biology of behavior. New York: Holt,
Rhinehart & Winston.
Fernald, A. (1993). Approval and disapproval: Infant responsiveness to vocal affect in familiar and unfamiliar languages. Child Development, 64 (3),
657 674.
Field, T. (1981). Infant gaze aversion and heart rate during face-to-face interactions. Infant Behavior and Development, 4, 307 315.
Field, T., Healy, B., Goldstein, S., Perry, D., Bendell, D., Schanberg, S.,
et al. (1988). Infants of depressed mothers show depressed behavior
even with nondepressed adults. Child Development, 59, 1569 1579.
44
Beatrice Beebe
45
46
Beatrice Beebe
What Is Genuine
Maternal Love?
Clinical Considerations and Technique
in Psychoanalytic
Parent-Infant Psychotherapy
TESSA BARADON
Trained in child analysis and psychotherapy at The Anna Freud Centre, London.
Developed and manages the Parent Infant Project (clinical services, training, and research) at the Centre; practicing therapist and supervisor, and writes and lectures on
applied psychoanalysis and parent-infant psychotherapy. Member of the Association
of Child Psychotherapists and the Association of Child Psychoanalysis, Inc.
The Parent Infant Project teamCarol Broughton, Jessica James, Angela Joyce,
and Judith Woodheadhave provided valued collegial consultation during the
course of this work and on the paper. I also want to thank Dilys Daws for her interesting comments.
The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 60, ed. Robert A. King, Peter B. Neubauer,
Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling (Yale University Press, copyright 2005 by
Robert A. King, Peter B. Neubauer, Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling).
47
48
Tessa Baradon
49
50
Tessa Baradon
ance of emotional engagement with the mother, freezing and disassociation (Fraiberg 1982, Perry 1997, Schore 1994) put them in a
state of unrailed/derailed development. I suggest that this was the
predicament of the baby in the case to be discussed.
Parent-infant psychotherapy intervenes in the parent-infant system
to achieve the best accommodations that can be made between a parent and baby for the babys development. As an applied technique
within the psychoanalytic framework it has its roots in the groundbreaking work of Selma Fraiberg and her colleagues (Fraiberg 1980,
Lieberman and Pawl 1999). In recent years a model has been developed at the Anna Freud Centre (Baradon 2002, Baradon et al 2005,
James 2003, Woodhead 2004), the defining feature of which is the
use of the analytic mind to scaffold the affective experiences and representations of parent and infant in relation to each other. Intervening at the procedural as well as declarative levels of self organization,
the aim is to create meaning through validating and cohering the
parents experience and responding to the babys requirement for
an attentive, adult mind to meet his developmental and attachment
needs.
In our model, the therapist straddles numerous roles in relation to
her patients, both individually and collectively. She is a clinical observer (Rustin 1989), using observation as a mental stance and a
technique to inform her understanding of the parents and babys
(emergent) mental models of attachment relationships. She is, in
parallel, an analytic therapist, employing psychoanalytic frames of
reference and techniques in the work with what is manifest and conscious in the room and with the hypothesised unconscious fantasies
and defenses underpinning these. Inevitably, she is a transference
figure for the parent, sometimes benign but also at times perceived
as hostile and/or persecutory. The therapist is a new object (Hurry
1998), offering a revitalizing attachment experience to parent and
infant. As a new object for the baby, the therapist is also a developmentalist, supporting the infants development through providing
contingent responses, stimulation, and regulation where the parent,
at least temporarily, is unable to. In cases of severe maternal depression and withdrawal the therapist may also be the only live company (Alvarez 1992) for the child, providing the functions of enlivening, alerting, claiming and reclaiming (p. 197). Having the
therapist to love, until the mother is able to receive and scaffold his
love, may be pivotal for the babys psychic survival. And finally, the
therapist is an external affect regulator of the patients disregulated
51
states, particularly crucial in light of research suggesting that external regulation of the infants immature developing emotional systems during critical periods may influence the experience-dependent structuralization of the brain (Panskepp 2001, Cirulli et al.
2003).
Parent-infant psychotherapy poses countertransference dilemmas
particular to this method of intervention.
Primitive emotions and projections are the fabric of infancy and
parenting and invariably resonate with the therapists past and present attachments. The actual presence of an infant in the room intensifies the sense of immediacy and clinical (and of course legal) responsibility toward the baby. With at least two, and often three,
patients presentinfant, mother, and fatherthe therapists attention and receptivity are often pulled in different directions and her
identifications may shift between the infant and parent, challenging
the analytic stance. As always, the therapists countertransference is
used and must be watchedher own hopes and despair, riven identifications between mother and baby, and her rescue fantasies. Above
all, the therapist needs to maintain sufficient emotional resonance
with the mother, in the face of the acute emotional pain and helplessness of her infant. Without this there is no way for mother to empathically recognize the real infant as opposed to the infant within her
whom she often treats with cruelty.
In the case under discussion, where the babys early attachment
needs were thwarted by his mothers failure to embrace him with
genuine love, considerations of clinical process and technique
were particularly charged. On the one hand, mother sought the ascetic and altruistic (A. Freud 1937) virtue of genuine love, devoid
of all narcissistic investment and reward, and her severe depression
was compounded by a sense of failing her own standards. On the
other hand, her infant son was starved for the maternal appetite of
ownership and adoration, and his experiences of going-on-being
were distorted by her projections and hostility. These experiences of
trauma for both baby and mother required ongoing scaffolding and
regulation from me, the therapist, and I needed to be alert to the
challenge to my capacities for reverie in my various roles and from
within.
Thus the matrix of intersubjectivity, transference, and countertransference was extremely complex. It raised minute-by-minute
questions of technique. Which patient/what material should be privileged at any given time, and in what domain of relational knowing
52
Tessa Baradon
53
She had felt that the fetus was a parasite. She felt very guilty about
this. I asked whether these kinds of thoughts were continuing. At this
question Ms G became distressed, saying that she feels that she is
forced by him into an artificial position . . . of trying to be a good
mother, who loves her child and takes care of him. Ms G said she
does not feel like that much of the time. She added that she would
not harm him physically.
Somewhere early in this conversation Ethan fretted a bit. Ms G immediately picked him up with extreme care and held him to her, his
little body slumped against the palm of her hand. She checked with
me whether she could feed him. She snuck him under her shirt, careful to keep her breast hidden. The feed was quickly over and Ethan
went on sleeping. Ms G removed him from the breast and covered
herself up.
We spoke about attending parent-infant psychotherapy. I wondered what she was hoping to get. She replied that she wanted a filter so that her feelings dont all come out on Ethan. I noted that I
would not have been able to tell from her facial expressions and tone
of voice when disturbing thoughts toward Ethan intruded during the
session, and that from this I could tell that she was really trying to
keep a tight grip on her feelings. Ms G reiterated her fear of damaging him through her depression as her mother, too, had been depressed and unavailable. I suggested that we would attend to both
the good things that happen between her and Ethan, such as her
gentle stroking of him that I had observed even when she was upset,
and to her bad feelings and thoughts. Ms G hugged Ethan to her.
54
Tessa Baradon
process of projective identification I assumed the omnipotence attributed to the caregiver in relation to the infantile self. At the
same time I was acutely aware of the danger-in-contact ricocheting
between us during the session, manifested in her whispers and cautious handling of Ethan. My association was to a sea of shards in
which any movement could be calamitous. Only later did I realize
how her history of self-cutting had penetrated my subconscious.
Thus, from the beginning this was a dyad with whom I engaged in an
intense and worried way, responding perhaps to her unconscious invitation to assume this mantle.
In the second session Ethan, now 4 weeks old, was awake, a tiny little thing with big blue eyes and a peaky face.
Initially he slept on his mothers lap, fists tightly clenched. Ms G
stroked his hands but he did not relax his fists. A few times she pried
them open and stroked his palms. Ethans eyes flicked open when he
heard a door slam and he started crying. He seemed to move quickly
into a loud cry, with no fretting or working up toward the upset. He
cried hard. Ms G put him to the breast and he sucked, then fell
asleep. She put him on the mat and he opened his eyes. I spoke to
him about his experience being in a big room and hearing my
stranger voice and not knowing where it came from. Ethan stared
fixedly toward the ceiling lights above him. After a while he turned
his head slightly in his mothers direction, and I confirmed that that
was where his mummy was.
55
creasingly I also found my way to address the affects expressed verbally and in behaviors. Wary of the sadism of her superego and the
masochism of her submission to it, I took care to acknowledge negative affect as conflictual, and positive interactions were noted without
hollow reassurance that she was doing well. With Ethan I was relatively active, representing his mental states and communications, offering contingent responses, linking him up with his mother. I tried
to balance offering myself to him for use as live company with
awareness of Ms Gs envy of what she perceived I had to give Ethan,
and which she had never received. At times indeed I felt rich in resources, but at other times I felt dull and drained.
the meanings of dependency
When I collected Ms G and Ethan, now 12 weeks of age, from the
waiting room after the 2 week break, Ms G gave me a very quick
glance of tenuous pleasure and then turned away with an avoidance
of my gaze and bodily withdrawal. I felt I had become dangerous
again during the break, even more so as I believed from her darting
pleasure that she had missed me. Ethan woke up as she put him on
floor beside her. He looked bewildered. We settled on the carpet and
Ms G placed Ethan against her feet, facing me. I thought she was in
some way offering him as a transitional object for reengagement. I
adjusted my position so that Ethan could see my face directly. In so
doing, I was also placing myself in Ms Gs range of vision should she
chose to raise her eyes.
I spoke to Ethan: Youre not quite sure where you are, are you? . . .
you havent been here for a while . . . have you? He murmured. I
asked him if it all right to wake up in this room now, and Ms G reminded me that the last time he was quite upset. I acknowledged
this. Ms G asked Ethan if he wanted to sit down and placed him on
her lap. I said, that way you are with mummy and can still see me . . .
and still give these gorgeous little smiles. Ms G whispered, yeh.
Ethan relaxed into her lap and looked back to me and made a gurgling noise. He gave a big smile and looked into my eyes for a few seconds, then looked away. Then he looked back, pursing his lips, and
eventually produced a rolling sound. In a lilting voice (motherese)
I to him, Its a little conversation, isnt it? His face opened and he
smiled again, then looked away. I waited. After a few seconds he
turned back to me. I said, Are you ready to chat again? Hey . . .
yes . . . yes . . . and when youve had enough you look away for a
while, dont you? Ethan gurgled again. Ms G looked down at Ethan
and said, He can be quite coquettish, sometimes he turns his head
56
Tessa Baradon
and looks from the corners of his eyes. I replied to Ethan, mmm
. . . hmm . . . I guess youre taking a breather then, arent you, we
adults do the same. Yah . . . Take a little break in a conversation, ah,
otherwise it gets too much, doesnt it?
57
fore, chose not to follow the route of interpretation and simply commented that he had been looking at her. Ms G was able to make use
of my validation of Ethans desire for her to express her conundrumcan she allow personalization: Should he be smiling at me
more? This offered an opportunity to explore what Ethan might be
avoiding. I learned that Ms G habitually scanned the object for their
affective communications/demands and that, since Ethans needs
and wants evoked her hatred, it felt dangerous for him to look into
her face/mind as he may see those emotions in it.
I was aware that she had not related to Ethan for some length of time
and asked whether she was feeling ambivalent about Ethan there and
then in the session? Ms G said she was not sure . . . perhaps her instinct was to touch him but she did not want him to feel smothered
by her. She wondered if she is not perhaps too disengaged with him. I
suggested that, on the contrary, I thought she was very engaged with
him but that she is protecting him from the toxicity that she felt was
passed to her by her mother and which she fears she may pass to
Ethan. Ms G nodded. She said she wanted to make it clear that her
mother did the best she could at the time and added that of course
she feels that it wasnt good enough. I rushed in too quickly at this
point, saying that perhaps in her attempts to protect Ethan she was
keeping a distance between them that prevented them from spontaneous exchanges, such as laughing and playing together. Ms G
replied that Ethan may in years to come experience her as in a state
of severe depression or absent from him. Almost under her breath
she murmured that if she were to leave through dying she would not
come back. Ms G was quite tearful and picked Ethan up, caressing
him. Then she said that she is not sure whether shes holding Ethan
because he is a soft, comforting thing . . . and she put him down on
the floor, on his side facing away from her, and at a distance. He
sucked hard on his hand and just lay there, looking into space.
58
Tessa Baradon
she suffered. In this way, distancing him was an act of love as well as
cruelty. Ethan, to my concern, veered between disintegration and
precocious defense.
I felt caught in the middle and responsible for the devastation, as
though during the break the therapy had replicated the hollow maternal stancethe offer of dependency withdrawn. Thus my maternal best was in fact toxic also for Ethan via the impact it had on his
mother. Certainly my too quick response contained a veiled criticism (also reversing the attack on me): in protecting Ethan from
damage you are in fact killing off a live relationship. Obviously, I may
have responded from the countertransferential reserves of my own
tetchy narcissism. We also know from clinical experience that past relational trauma can be reproduced in the present therapeutic situation, in the transference-countertransference transactions. Yet I
think I was also nudged into the patients unconscious wish-gratifying role (Sandler 1976), as Ms G went on to speak of Ethans (and of
course my) possible future loss of herself. The habitual solution to
overwhelming dependency and inevitable disappointment was destruction of self and object.
With my therapeutic goods thus spoilt, resonating her emptied
state, I was unable to protect Ethan, who was put down and away
from us. As he lay rigidly on his side looking into space, I felt I was
witnessing his emergent identification with the dead mother (Bollas
1999)a kind of dying in situ.
good enough loving and impingements
I am trying to understand, said Ms G two months into treatment,
what is genuine maternal love? She feared that when she did experience maternal feelings it was because of her delight in his need
(for her) and that, therefore, her motives are suspect. She
weighed her gratification about his complete dependency on her
against her wish to walk away. I have to keep asking myself what is
this about? Is it about me? About Ethan? She dismissed my suggestion that it may be about both of them, and I commented on her fantasy that the ideal mother is selfless. Ms G confirmed this ascetic representation of the genuinely loving mother and said that the ideal
mother could understand all the babys needs, thus rearing emotionally, mentally and physically strong children. She said she was
humbled now when she saw others managing to do this.
Ms Gs repudiation of gratification as a constituent of the maternal
bond could be traced to her grievance with her mother, past and pre-
59
sent, in which she felt used by her mother for her own narcissistic
needs. Moreover, she held her parents responsible for her damaged
mental state and, even as an adult, had no real sense of volition to
modify the childhood feelings of helplessness.
Yet, despite the relentless grip of the past, I observed her handling
of Ethan extend to more animated exchanges. Ethan responded to
these tentative protoconversations with widened eyes, excited kicking, and large smiles. He seemed to gain efficacy as a partner; for example when he lost her attention he would call her back by looking
at her and cooing. When I pointed this out, Ms G said that friends visiting had commented that Ethans eyes followed her wherever she
istracking her voice when he could not see her.
As the months progressed the sessions felt safer, more predictable,
encompassing a broader range of feelings, allowing Ms G to offer less
ambivalent parenting and Ethan aspects of good enough relatedness, and thus also development. Indeed, during this period in the
therapy, there were times in the sessions in which Ethan was a contented little baby.
However, these quiet periods of regulated positive affect were also
the backdrop to rapid transition into states of inconsolable crying. I
noted that sometimes Ms G reached out to Ethan, and he, in the process of being attended to, became distressed. His tiny body became
rigid and he clawed at his mothers body. At such times Ms G moved
through a repertoire of feeding, winding, rocking, walkingseeming to act promptly and contingently to effect interactive repair
(Tronick and Weinberg, 1997).
Four months into treatment. Ms G raised the question: Why is it so
hard to soothe Ethan? Was he damaged at birth, would another
mother get it right? I tried to explore with her what happens to her
when he cries. Ms G confirmed that she gets very upset. I suggested
that sometimes Ethans cries feel like her own. Ms G became tearful
and then reprimanded herself for not always acting the adult with
him. I said that when they are both crying she no longer feels the
mother. I also spoke about the rage that she feels when he triggers
her pain. Ms G whispered that she feels so guilty and ashamed.
Thus, it was becoming clearer the extent to which Ethan was the
barometer of her own emotional state. When his needs did not resonate with her own conflicts, Ms G was able to respond. Unpredictably, however, his ordinary infantile needs could trigger or link in
with her own volatility. This is another aspect of relational trauma
where the quality of affective communication with the baby imparts
trauma from the mothers internal world to that of the baby.
60
Tessa Baradon
61
62
Tessa Baradon
tions as she waited for dawn so as to escape from the bed to a strong
coffee and cigarette.
With Ethan waking hourly, sleep disturbances became woven into
the conflicts around feeding and weaning. Ms G repeatedly expressed her feelings that feeding was the sole good thing she could
give him and admitted her gratification that only she could provide
this. However, these feelings also came into conflict with her experience of his dependency as depleting. In the sessions I observed feeding encompass many regulatory functions, so that Ethan was put to
the breast when he cried, when he was tired, when they were both at
a loss as to play. With feeding used to meet such a variety of situations, it became difficult to tell when he was hungry.
At around 5 months of age, Ethans weight began to drop and professional concerns about failure to thrive emerged. Medical opinion
moved toward supplementary feeds, with a bottle also offering a possibility of respite from the hourly feeds at night. Ms G came under increasing pressure to achieve some measure of weaning. Her internal
split was thus effectively externalized, with the medical network and
her partner now carrying for her the thrust for forced separation,
while she maintained the ubiquitous place of breast-feeding. It
seemed important that at that point I did not know what would be
best, and held neither a wish for Ms G to wean nor for her to continue feeding.
During this period, Ethan 6 9 months, many threads in the therapy seemed to coalesce around the question of closeness versus distance and the losses implied in each.
Week by week Ms G described her dread of the long days with
Ethan while D was at work. She felt mired by his wish for her presence, for example crying when she left the room, and her inability to
let him cry. She said that before Ethan was born she spent much of
the time alone. I wondered if that was her way of keeping her emotions on an even keel and she confirmed this. I suggested that having
Ethan with her all the time meant that she has no means of regaining
her emotional balance (her words). Thus the closeness was experienced as loss of self, provoking rage. Getting away was a relief at that
level, but it also brought with it the fear that she could disappear
from their lives and it would not matter.
As Ethan became more mobile he could initiate movement toward
and away from his mother.
7 months into treatment. I noted how Ethan seemed to want to be
close to her today. Ms G said she did not know if she wanted him
close or not. She said her guilt at not really wanting his relentless
63
It is interesting that at age 8 months, when biting could be considered as a normal expression of desire (incorporation) and/or exploration, I attributed destructiveness to Ethans biting of his mother.
Was I taking on Ms Gs attributions? In which case Ethan was subject
to my projections as well as his mothers. Was I picking up on an aggressive quality of relating in Ethan that indeed would be a pointer to
derailed development at this age? If so, why did I not follow this
through with an explication of his aggression as reactive to his
mothers unresolved ambivalence? Certainly, addressing his predicament would then need to have been privileged. In retrospect, I think
that my shifting identifications with mother and with baby were enacted here through muddled, partial interpretations.
Just as imaging the babys ordinary movement toward separateness
was not available to Ms G, she was also not able to manage a normal
loss through establishing the triad of mother, father and baby (Daws
1999). I noticed in the sessions that I felt increasingly forced to relate
to Ethan, with Ms G watching and withdrawn, or to Ms Gwith
Ethan either observing or dis-engaged. Thus, the father/therapist
was seen not as a gain but as a threat to the symbiotic tie. In the issue
of weaning, the bottle symbolically represented the competent, third
object, and there was a concrete idea that the bottle would deliver
Ethan to his father. With this came powerful statements from Ms G
that D and Ethan were doing so well together. There was affective undertone of not being needed anymore, and I was left with a concern
that intense pressure on her to wean could precipitate a crisis, primarily in terms of her desire to stay alive. My anxiety about a possible
suicide attempt was high, and I checked that the network was in
place. In retrospect, I believe I was also caught up in powerful projections around loss of myself, as we were approaching another break (9
months into treatment).
64
Tessa Baradon
Anticipating this loss Ms G thought she and Ethan would miss their
sessions with me, but she continued to insist that the solution was disengagement and self-sufficiency. Separation, as an intrapsychic process leading to growth, still felt beyond our reach.
enacting rupture
On their return after the holiday, Ms G appeared terribly thin and
wan, while Ethan seemed to have gained bulk and weight. My first
thought was hes feeding off her! He also looked strikingly like his
father, as though fulfilling her fears of losing him to D. They each responded to me with a measure of reserve.
Ethan took his time before he approached me: gazing at me from a
distance and looking worried. After a while he gave me a smile and I
smiled back and asked whether he was beginning to forgive me for
the summer break. Ms G told me that on their holiday everyone had
adored Ethan and that he had gone easily to the men but not to the
women who wanted to pick him up. I wondered whether she was linking Ethans reserve with me to this. She shrugged. I asked her what
she made of her observation. She said, Its like being run over by a
red car and then not liking red cars afterwards. I said it seems to
have reinforced her fear that she was not a good mother and as a result all women were like red cars to Ethan. Again she shrugged, this
time seemingly in agreement. Ethan was crawling aboutinitially
energetically but then looking lost. A number of times he headed toward his mother and then veered away. When he absolutely ran out
of resources he crawled to her and tried to clamber onto her lap. Ms
G held him loosely, pulling away a bit and getting her hair out of his
clasp. She then abruptly stood up muttering that he needs a climbing
frame, carried him over to one of the chairs and stood him there.
Ethan looked tiny and forlorn across the room. I felt shocked. She
came back to her place on the cushion. I said she was equating herself with the chair, as though it was not herhis mother specificallythat he needed. She replied that she does not want him to depend on her for his happiness. Feeling very anxious about what I was
about to say, I asked whether she wanted him to be independent of
her so that she could do away with herself if she felt she needed to.
Ms G looked pale. She whispered that this was very selfish. I said perhaps she thought that in order to continue living she needed to feel
that she could kill herself. Ms G said everybody had their escape
routes.
Ethan had crawled back to our vicinity and was searching Ms Gs
bag. He pulled out a plastic container with food. We watched as he
struggled to get an apple out. I accompanied him with words: is he
wanting the apple, can he get to it? He managed to extract the apple
65
and tried to bite into it. I asked him if he can eat it, is it too big? I said
maybe Ms G thought I was fussing too much. She moved closer to
him and asked him if he needed her to cut it for him, but Ethan had
in the meantime made indentations with his teeth. He chewed on
the apple for a while and then tried to get the bottle of baby food
out. Ms G watched him closely and I found it agonizing that she did
not capitalize on his interest. When she finally, tentatively offered
him some food, he spat it out. She immediately put the bottle of food
away. Shortly after this he began to cry.
Ms G told me that at Ds insistence she had taken Ethan to a nursery that morning. I asked how they had felt about it. She said Ethan
had choked on a brick during his visit. She conveyed immense sadness. I said she seemed torn between loving Ethan and wanting his
love for her, and her fear that this dependency in both of them
would take away her escape route. I suggested that the long break
had probably also brought up these feelings in relation to me. Ethan
was getting more upset and when picked up by Ms G he clung to her
strongly. I said to him that he was showing his mummy how much he
needed her and how frightened he gets when she thinks about leaving him. Ms G carried him over to the windowsill and sat him on it so
he could look out. Ethan calmed, and soon after this it was time to
end. Ms G fled the room clutching Ethan in her arms.
The story of the holiday could have been taken entirely as a transference communication: I had run over her dependence on me
and left her, prematurely, to feed herself. Thus forsaken, she felt driven toward her habitual escape routes of self-denigration and selfharming, both to rid herself of her shaming infantile needs and as a
retaliatory attack on me. Her rage with me was communicated in the
narrative of the red car and enacted in substitution of climbing
frame/chair for self, that is, in her refusal to embrace Ethanagain,
an identification with the aggressor.
A central dilemma in parent-infant psychotherapy is when to take
up the transference to the therapist? Certainly the negative transference was in the forefront and needed addressing. However, my initial
attempt to relate to my perceived dangerousness (via Ethans avoidance of me) was shrugged off. I reckoned that to pursue the transference and/or her defenses could be experienced by Ms G as retaliation on my part (Steiner 1994). In retrospect, it is the displacements
that perhaps could have been taken up for it is there that the experience of cruelty lay. Addressing her rage with me may have relieved
Ethan from the burden of carrying it.
With the rupture (break) with me unsufficiently reflected upon,
what followed was Ethans performing a transference enactment of
66
Tessa Baradon
67
monitored his endeavors and encouraged him. Ethan then ate his
fruit, swallowing some and spitting some out. Gradually eating and
playing/exploring became somewhat more integrated, and he
moved between the activities and us.
He approached his 1st birthday and this preoccupied Ms G.
She said she still had not found the perfect present. She mentioned a
cloth shed had as a comforter which had worn awayshe wished
she still had it to give to Ethan. I said it sounded that she was wanting
to protect and comfort him for the years to come. She replied that
she had a lot to make up. I said this made me think of the perfect
present as representing a wish to make good their very difficult early
beginning. Ms G spoke of reparation and I thought she was also repairing something for herself. Her emphasis was on her wish to protect Ethans trust and expectations that people will respond to him
kindly. I suggested she may have felt unprotected and that cruelty hit
her abruptly as a child. Ms G spoke about her mother doing her best,
but that it was not good enough. She added that her mother does a
lot of charitable work but she wishes she could have given the same
to her children. I said that perhaps she feels that sometimes both her
parents didnt really do their best and that some of the cruelty she experienced came from themand this is what is so hard for her. Ms G
struggled with this, though she did not deny it.
Ethan had finished eating and messing and was exploring under
the table where he discovered the telephone wire and plug. Ms G initially asked him not to play with the cord and then went over and
picked him up. Ethan gleefully crawled back to the table and Ms G
became firmer in her tone of voice. I spoke about what was happening between them, reflecting that he really enjoyed being gathered
up by his mother and had found a hide and seek game which he
could play with her.
This session was characterized by a sense of calmness and reflection between Ms G and myself, the adults, and playful exploration
on Ethans part. It felt that I was allowed to hold a position of the benign third, and this was perceived to be containing to both baby
and mother.
The quest for the perfect present seemed to capture Ms Gs regrets
about the lacks of their beginning together, and her wish to celebrate
their coming together through the love she had discovered within
herself for her child. In wishing to extend the comforter from her
childhood to him, she also had begun to mourn the lonely childhood she had, and to relinquish some of the envy of her child for the
maternal comfort he could still have in his. Ethans play with the tele-
68
Tessa Baradon
phone cord seemed to represent hope for more genuine, encompassing communication between them through which he could be
gathered up and contained.
Discussion
Ethans first birthday also heralded the end of our first year of work
togethera good time to take stock. The wish, and failure as yet, to
find a perfect present seemed symbolic of what had been achieved
and of that which still needed to be addressed.
Ms G had approached parent-infant psychotherapy with the wish
for a filter to protect her baby from the transmission of damage she
felt had been done to her by the parenting she had received. In equal
measure, although more hidden, was the fear of being damaged by
her baby. This mutual threat was created through their very existences in relation to each other. As Ms G said, Can one damage
ones baby just by being available? In the transference I was also often a source of danger, most spectacularly around breaks when my
unavailability confronted Ms G with her the extent of her dependency on me and my maternal failure to hold it. Ethans post-natal
vulnerabilityhis smallness, sensitivity to lights and noise, seemingly
low threshold to unpleasurable experiences and the difficulties in
comforting himintensified the sense of fragility and risk. My countertransference fantasy that we were constructing the therapeutic
space within a sea of shards highlighted the power of the emotions,
projections and enactments.
In the course of the first year of the therapy there were some
changes in the quality of the relationship between Ms G and Ethan.
The most significant was the expanding sense of maternal love for
Ethan. In the early months Ms Gs fear of, and guilty hatred for, her
babys dependency overrode her ability to accept more benign feelings in herself. She defensively adopted an ideal of altruism that
negated not only her passions but also his. Ethan was forced into precocious inhibition of attachment behaviors toward his mother. His
turning from her, and her failure to meet her ascetic standards, compounded her depression. In the course of the first year of therapy
there was a lessening of Ms Gs preoccupation with the question of
genuine maternal love and a move toward more ordinary, at times
good enough, mothering. She seemed more able to acknowledge
and tolerate her wish to be central to Ethan and, albeit less consistently, her importance to him. Her gaze and facial expressions conveyed growing adoration of him. What facilitated these changes?
69
Perhaps falling in love could start to take root only after there
was some measure of surviving the destruction and despair brought
from her past primary relationships into her present ones. By the
third quarter of the year Ethan, although delayed, was making up the
early impingements and developmental tests confirmed he was on
track. Thus Ms Gs psychic reality of the inevitability of damage
could, sometimes, be challenged by a different, external voice.
Ethan, for his part, seemed to capitalize on the openings in their relationship and became more forward in expressing his desire for her.
This, too, was a positive reinforcement which Ms G could at times
perceive.
In the transference relationship with me I, too, was surviving her
destructiveness and was not retaliating with narcissistic demands of
my own. Thus Ms G was meeting with a different motherhood constellation (Stern 1995) from the persecutory internal one, one in
which the intergenerational mother could be experienced as containing and repairing of the damaged child.
The clinical process, as the sessional material indicates, took place
in the procedural and symbolic domains. Interpretationsusing
words as a means of giving meaningwere important to this mother,
as were verbal (vocal, tonal) representations of his mind to Ethan.
The procedural processes seemed to cohere more slowly. At first, the
misattuned emotional dance between mother and baby was repeated in the interactions between the three of us. In time, I became
better at matching and repair of the spontaneous gestures and affects that constitute authentic person-to-person connection (Stern
et al. 1998, p. 904) and this then framed the developing relationships
between mother and baby and myself.
Because so much in the earliest transactions between Ms G and
Ethan was driven by her negative transference to him, offering myself
as someone who could simply be with mother and baby and could reflect on them in relation to each other without fear of damage, seems
to have been important. For quite some time it seemed that only in
my mind could their survival as a dyad be contemplated. This raised
the question of which patient should be privileged from moment to
momentEthan, mother, father (present or absent), the relationships? At times I left a session feeling that more work should have
been done with Ethan, for example to enhance his efficacy in engaging his mother. At other times I felt that the focus should stay with Ms
G, to address her depression and the defenses and distortions that
constituted her zone of safety but also derailed the relationship with
Ethan. Despite the compelling nature of Ms Gs narrative, it was cru-
70
Tessa Baradon
cial to keep Ethan in my mind at all times, so as not to slip into individual therapy in the presence of the baby. These issues were all the
more urgent given Ethans young age and the chronicity of Ms Gs
difficulties, spanning critical periods in his development.
Alongside the changes that marked the achievements of our first
year together there remained areas of great vulnerability in their relationship. It seemed that the quality of love Ms G was able to offer
Ethan was contingent on her emotional state at any given time and
the extent of preoccupation with herself. Often Ethan had to make
do with the crumbs of emotional availability that penetrated her depression and withdrawal. Not able to love herself in her baby, or to allow his appeallingness to reflect on her, Ms G could not really entertain exuberant passion and appetite in her relationship with Ethan.
Moreover, to be consumed by the other was only too real a threat
and to be avoided at all costs. Thus Ethan was not able to safely experience himself as an object of hatred as well as of love. His own actions directed at separation-individuation were still, at times, subject
to transferential attributions that frightened Ms G and evoked her rejection of him. In turn, Ms Gs fluctuating emotional state, and particularly when she became extremely depressed, could be frightening for Ethan, betrayed initially in disintegrative crying, and later in
occasional veering away in the midst of approach or a momentary
freezing when mother seemed annoyed.
These thoughts about clinical process are relevant to the question
of whether genuine maternal love exists.
It seems to me that what Ms G captured in this term was the affective quality of her love for her baby as described above. In presenting
the question she was disclosing her knowledge that something was
going very wrong for them. At the same time, bringing the question
into the therapy also underlined Ms Gs commitment to do better by
her baby: whatever her state of mind, however conflicted she was
about the therapy, Ms G and Ethan attended their sessions without
fail. In using the therapeutic space to risk intimacy, Ms G and Ethan
were constructing their particular version of genuine lovesomewhat more measured and a little more vibrant at the end of the year
than at the beginning.
For myselfI was intrigued by this question in the context of my
work with attachment disorders. It seems an important concept to
hold in mind in the course of the therapy with mothers and babies.
In the face of conscientious maternal care, it provides a framework
for understanding a particular quality of maternal failure and ensuing relational trauma for the baby. It also suggests an outline of the
71
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alvarez, A. (1992) Live Company. London: Tavistock/Routledge.
Balint, E. (1992) Before I Was I. New York: Guilford Press.
Baradon, T. (2002) Psychotherapeutic work with parents and infants. In V.
Green (ed), Emotional Development in Psychoanalysis, Attachment Theory and
Neuroscience. London: Brunner-Routledge (2003), pp. 129143.
Baradon, T. with Broughton, C., Gibbs, I., James, J., Joyce, A. & Woodhead, J. (2005) The Practice of Psychoanalytic Parent-Infant Psychotherapy. London: Routledge (in press).
Beebe, B., Rustin, J., Sorter, D., & Knoblauch, S. (2003) An expanded
view on intersubjectivity in infancy and its application to psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 13, 805 841.
Bettes, B. A. (1988) Maternal depression and motherese: Temporal and intonational features. Child Development, 59, 1089 1096.
Bion, W. (1962) A theory of thinking. Int. J. of Psycho-Anal. 43, 306 310.
Bollas, C. (1999) Dead mother, dead child. In C. Bollas, The Mystery of
Things. London: Routledge, pp 106126.
Cirulli, F., Berry, A., & Alleva, E. (2003) Early disruption of the motherinfant relationship: Effects on brain plasticity and implications for psychopathology. Neuroscience and Behavioural Reviews, 27, 73 82.
Daws, D. (1999) Parent-infant psychotherapy: Remembering the Oedipus
complex. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 19, 267278.
Fonagy, P. (2001) Attachment Theory and Psychoanalysis. New York: Other
Press.
Fonagy, P. & Target, M. (1996) Playing with reality: I. Theory of mind and
the normal development of psychic reality. Int. J. Psycho-Anal. 77, 217233.
Fraiberg, S. (1980) Clinical Studies in Infant Mental Health: The First Year of
Life. New York: Basic Books.
Fraiberg, S. (1982) Pathological defences in infancy. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1(1): 612635.
Freud, A. (1937, reprinted 1942) The Ego and Mechanisms of Defence. London:
Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Freud, A. (1981)see J. Sandler with A. Freud.
Freud, S. (1914) On narcissism: An introduction. Standard Edition, 14, 69
102 (1957).
Green, A. (1986) The dead mother. In A. Green, On Private Madness. London: Hogarth, pp 142173.
Hurry, A. (1998) Psychoanalysis and Developmental Therapy. London: Karnac
Books.
72
Tessa Baradon
James, J. (2002) Developing a culture for change in group analytic psychotherapy for mothers and babies. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 19(1),
77 91.
Khan, M. M. R. (1963) The concept of cumulative trauma. Psychoanalytic
Study of the Child, 18, 286 306.
King, P. (1978) Affective response of the analyst to the patients communications. Int. J. Psycho-Anal. 59, 329 334.
Lieberman, A. & Pawl, J. H. (1993) Infant-parent psychotherapy. In C.
Zeannah (ed), Handbook of Infant Mental Health. New York: Guilford Press.
Lyons-Ruth, K. & Jacobvitz, D. (1999) Attachment disorganisation, unresolved loss, relational violence, and lapses in behavioural and attentional
strategies. In J. Cassidy and P. Shaver (eds), Handbook of Attachment: Theory,
Research and Clinical Implications. New York: Guilford Press, pp 520 554.
Mahler, M. S., Pine, F., & Bergman, A. (1975) The Psychological Birth of the
Human Infant. London: Hutchinson & Co.
Main, M., & Hesse, E. (1990) Parents unresolved traumatic experiences are
related to infant disorganised status: Is frightened and/or frightening
parental behaviour the linking mechanism? In M. Greenberg, D. Cicchetti, and M. Cummings (eds), Attachment in the Preschool Years. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, pp 161182.
Panskepp, J. (2001) The long-term psychobiological consequences of infant
emotions: prescriptions for the twenty-first century. Neuro-Psychoanalysis,
3(2) 149178.
Perry, B. (1997) Incubated in terror: Neurodevelopmental factors in the
cycle of violence. In J. Osofsky (ed), Children in a Violent Society. New
York: Guilford Press, pp 124 149.
Perry, B., Pollard, R. A., Blakely, T. L., Baker, W. L., & Vigilante, D.
(1995) Childhood trauma, the neurobiology of adaptation, and usedependent development of the brain: How states become traits. Infant Mental Health Journal, 16(4), 271291.
Rustin, M. (1989) Observing infants: Reflections on methods. In L. Miller,
M. Rustin, M. Rustin and J. Shuttleworth (eds), Closely Observed Infants.
London: Duckworth, pp 5275.
Sandler, J. (1976) Countertransference and role-responsiveness. Int. Rev.
Psycho-Anal. 3, 43 47
Sandler, J. (1993) On communication from patient to analyst: Not everything is projective identification. Int. J. Psycho-Anal. 74, 10971107.
Sandler, J., with Freud, A. (1981) Discussions in the Hampstead Index on
The Ego and Mechanisms of Defence: ll. The application of analytic
technique to the study of the psychic institutions. Bulletin of the Hampstead Clinic, 4(5), 530.
Schore, A. N. (1994) Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self. New Jersey:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Schore, A. N. (2001) The effects of early relational trauma on right brain
development, affect regulation, and infant mental health. Infant Mental
Health Journal, 22(12), 201269.
73
Silverman, R. C., & Lieberman, A. F. (1999) Negative maternal attributions, projective identification, and the intergenerational transmission of
violent relational patterns. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 9(2), 161186.
Steiner, J. (1994) Patient-centred and analyst-centred interpretations:
Some implications of containment and counter-transference. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 14, 406 422.
Stern, D. N. (1985) The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic
Books.
Stern, D. N. (1995) The Motherhood Constellation. New York: Basic Books.
Stern, D. N., Sander, L. W., Nahum, J. P., Harrison, A. M., Lyons-Ruth,
K., Morgan, A. C., Bruschweiler-Stern, N., & Tronick, E. Z. (1998)
Non-interpretative mechanisms in psychoanalytic therapy. Int. J. PsychoAnal. 79, 903 921.
Target, M. & Fonagy, P. (1996) Playing with reality II: The development of
psychic reality from a theoretical perspective. Int. J. Psycho-Anal. 77, 459
479.
Trevarthen, C. (2001) Intrinsic motives for companionship in understanding: Their origin, development, and significance for infant mental health.
Infant Mental Health Journal, 22(12), 95 131.
Tronick, E. Z., & Gianino, A. F. (1986) The transmission of maternal disturbance to the infant. In E. Z.Tronick and T. Field (eds). Maternal Depression
and Infant Disturbance. New Directions for Child Development, no 34. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Tronick, E. Z., & Weinberg, M. K. (1997) Depressed mothers and infants:
Failure to form dyadic states of consciousness. In L. Murray and P. J.
Cooper et al. (eds), Postpartum Depression and Child Development, New York:
Guilford Press, pp. 5481.
Winnicott, D. W. (1949) Hate in the countertransference. Int. J. of PsychoAnal. 30, 69 74.
Winnicot, D. W. (1956) Primary maternal preoccupation. In D. W. Winnicott, Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis. London: Tavistock Publications Ltd.
Winnicott, D. W. (1962) Ego integration in child development. In D. W.
Winnocott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, London: IPA Library, pp 56 63.
Winnicott, D. W. (1969) Use of an object and relating through identifications. Int. J. of Psycho-Anal. 50, 711716.
Woodhead, J. (2004) Shifting triangles: Images of father in sequences from
parent-infant psychotherapy. The International Journal of Infant Observation, 7 (2&3), pp. 76 90.
Minding the Baby, an interdisciplinary, relationship based home visiting program, was initiated to help young, at-risk new mothers keep
their babies (and themselves) in mind in a variety of ways. The interventiondelivered by a team that includes a nurse practitioner
and clinical social workeruses a mentalization based approach;
Arietta Slade, City University of New York, Yale Child Study Center; Lois Sadler,
Yale University School of Medicine; Cheryl de Dios-Kenn, Yale Child Study Center;
Denise Webb, Yale Child Study Center; Janice Currier-Ezepchick, Connecticut Department of Children and Families; and Linda Mayes, Yale Child Study Center.
This work was supported by a generous grant from the Irving B. Harris Foundation, and grew out of a collaborative effort between the Yale Child Study Center, the
Yale School of Nursing, and the Fair Haven Community Health Center. Other members of the research team who have been essential to our progress are Michelle Patterson, Betsy Houser, Megan Lyons, and Alex Meier-Tomkins. We would also like to
thank Jean Adnopoz, the Director of Family Support Services at the Yale Child Study
Center, as well as Sean Truman, both of whom were instrumental in getting the program off the ground. Finally, we wish to thank the administration and staff at Fair
Haven Community Health Center, particularly Katrina Clark, Kate Mitcheom, Karen
Klein, and Laurel Shader, who along with many other members of the pediatric and
obstetric services gave Minding the Baby a home.
The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 60, ed. Robert A. King, Peter B. Neubauer,
Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling (Yale University Press, copyright 2005 by
Robert A. King, Peter B. Neubauer, Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling).
74
75
that is, we work with mothers and babies in a variety of ways to develop mothers reflective capacities. This approachwhich is an
adaptation of both nurse home visiting and infant-parent psychotherapy modelsseems particularly well suited to highly traumatized
mothers and their families, as it is aimed at addressing the particular
relationship disruptions that stem from mothers early trauma and derailed attachment history. We discuss the history of psychoanalytically
oriented and attachment based mother-infant intervention, the theoretical assumptions of mentalization theory, and provide an overview
of the Minding the Baby program. The treatments of two teenage mothers and their infants are described.
Sometimes my daughter is just really nice and generous, and she likes giving me hugs and stuff . . . sometimes, just for nothing, shell walk up to me and hug me
so tight in my neck and it feels so good . . . cause I
never had that when I was little . . .
She probably doesnt understand why shes getting
me mad. Cause shes so tiny she probably doesnt understand. But, thats kind of what I think about, you
know, you cant compare your capacity to hers, cause
shes still so small, she doesnt understand what shes
doing wrong.
I usually try to hide my anger. I try not to let anyone
see those feelings. I did that for a long time before
Denise and Cheryl came along. Thats when I started
opening up and talking to them. Because I had so much
built in I couldnt hold it anymore.
Iliana, 19, mother of Lucia, age 13 months
I look at this tape of me and Noni, and shes so little . . .
I cant believe shes so big now . . . Its so hard to watch
this . . . I see now that maybe her crying was to tell me
shed had enough . . . here I can see her face sad trying
to tell me what I didnt know, that she may have been
hungry or sleepy. The whole time she cried, I had no
idea what she wanted.
Mia, age 19, mother of Noni, age 14 months
these young mothers are struggling to find words for the inner lifetheir babys and their own; tentatively, poignantly, they
glimpse the other, and themselves. They look for ways to describe
what is inside, what can be known, what can be held in mind, and
what can be contained. They hold the past next to the present, the
76
self next to the other. And as they discover their babies, they are discovering themselves for the first time.
Mia and Iliana joined Minding the Babya relationship based
mother-infant intervention programin their third trimester of
pregnancy. Both had been in different ways abandoned and betrayed
by their own mothers when they were but babies themselves. They
had lived their whole lives against the backdrop of trauma, within
their own families and within the culture of their violent, impoverished, and chaotic communities. Knowing others and their minds
had been fraught with terror, disappointment, and rage. And now
they were faced with the enormous challenge of holding their own
children in mind, children who had been born at a time when they
were still children themselves.
The crucial human capacity to understand the mind of the other,
to make meaning of behaviorones own and othersin light of underlying mental states and intentions, is essential to the development of
social relationships, and most particularly intimate relationships
(Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, & Target, 2002). Fonagy and his colleagues
have referred to this interpersonal and intrapersonal capacity as the
reflective function, and they suggest that it is essential to affect modulation and regulation; experiences that can be known and understood, held in mind without defensive distortion, can be integrated
and contained.
The capacity to mentalize, or envision mental states in the self and
other, emerges out of early interpersonal experience, particularly the
experience of being known and understood by ones caregivers. The
child discovers himself in the eyes and mind of his caregivers, and derives a sense of security and wholeness from that understanding
(Fonagy et al., 2002; Fonagy, Steele, Steele, Leigh, Kennedy, Mattoon, & Target, 1995; Fonagy & Target, 1998). The childs discovery
of himself depends largely upon the caregivers capacity to hold, tolerate, and re-present the range of his diverse and contradictory mental states. Thus, a parents reflective awareness is inherently regulating and containing for the child. Importantly, though, it is also
regulating and containing for his caregiver. Parenting is a fraught
and complex enterprise, and without developed capacities for reflective functioning, parents are vastly more prone to impulsivity, disorganization, and dysregulation in relation to their child (Slade,
2002, in press, 2005).
Trauma interferes in a number of profound ways with the development of reflective capacities (Fonagy et al., 1995, 2002). Parents who
have been traumatized find their childrens needs and fears over-
77
whelming and profoundly evocative, and as a result often find it difficult to read the most basic cues without distortion or misattribution
(Fraiberg, 1981; Lieberman, 1997). At a most basic level, the defensive processes enlisted in the face of trauma fragment the development of stable, coherent representations of the self and other. What
we see in the words of the mothers quoted above are tentative efforts
to form such representations, and allow themselves moments of
knowing the self and the other. Mias evaluation of her own failure to
understand what her 4 month old infant was feeling provides a clear
example of how difficult this can be.
Minding the Baby, a relationship based home visiting program developed out of an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Yale
Child Study Center and the Yale University School of Nursing, was
initiated in 2002 to help young, at-risk new mothers keep their babies
(and themselves) in mind in a variety of ways. We began with the assumption thatin addition to being relationship based and interdisciplinaryour program would focus on the development of mothers mentalizing capacities. Based on Fonagy and his colleagues
work of the last decade (see Fonagy et al., 2002, for a review), we
knew thatby virtue of early relationship histories that were universally characterized by attachment disruption and traumathe reflective capacities of these women would be compromised. Furthermore, we believed that addressing the deficits and defenses that had
led to such disrupted functioning would be vital to the development
of healthy mother-child relationships. Obviously, while parenting is
not the only factor contributing to the regularity and evenness of infant development (temperament and biology being but two of the
myriad endogenous and exogenous factors that can affect development), we believed that enhancing parental reflective functioning
would help mothers facilitate their childrens development in crucial
ways.
This approach is in line with what Fonagy and his colleagues have
termed mentalization based therapies (Bateman & Fonagy, 2004);
this term refers to treatments that directly address and target the development of reflective functioning or mentalizing capacities. In
essence, these approacheswhich Fonagy and Bateman have most
extensively developed for work with borderline patientsare designed to very explicitly help patients make sense of mental states. It
is this model that has informed the development of Minding the
Baby.
We also began with the assumption that when working with infants,
containment and regulation take place not just at a mental level, but
78
In other words, the child comes to know his body through the hands of his
mother. As we can see from Mias reflections on her inability to acknowledge her babys most essential needs for sleep or food, even
the recognition of physical states can be compromised in traumatized mothers whose own bodies have in a variety of ways often been a
source of trauma. Thus, we wanted to help our mothers come to feel
safe and confident in knowing their babies bodies as well as their
minds, to feel that they could contain and regulate their babies physical states, and then slowly, with time, come to know their babies
mental states.
In the sections below, we will begin by briefly describing the essential principles and methods of Minding the Baby, as the program has
evolved from its original inception three years ago. We will then present two cases in an effort to exemplify the approach intrinsic to our
reflective parenting program.
Mother-Infant Intervention: A Brief Overview
Thanks to the remarkable and groundbreaking work of Selma
Fraiberg, clinicians have been working in a psychoanalytic way with
mothers and babies for more than 30 years (Heinicke, Fineman,
Ponce, & Guthrie, 1999; Heinicke, Fineman, Ruth, Recchia, Guthrie,
& Rodning, 1999; Lieberman, Silverman, & Pawl, 1999; Lieberman,
Weston, & Pawl, 1991; Seligman, 1994; Stern, 1995). Infant-parent
psychotherapy is today a highly valued and legitimate mode of psy-
79
choanalytically based treatment, and the infant mental health movementreflected in the emergence of organizations such Zero to
Three, The National Center for Infants, Toddlers, and Families, and
the World Association of Infant Mental Healthis well established
both in the United States and abroad. And, as attested to by all of the
papers in this section, neither the fact of the childs age, nor the fact
that the dyad presents for treatment are considered in any way impediments to analytic intervention. Indeed, the age of the child and
the mothers active participation in the work are seen as crucial to
progress and early structural change (Fraiberg, 1981). And, in contrast to traditional notions of psychoanalytic work, infant-parent psychotherapists routinely work in situations of risk and trauma, where
little about the environment can be contained or easily modulated.
Circumstances once considered unconventional (Seligman, 1994)
are now considered normative, albeit challenging, opportunities for
analytically oriented work.
Essential to the infant-parent psychotherapy model is the notion
that in a disrupted mother-baby relationship there is some basic distortion of the mothers capacity to represent the baby in a coherent
and positive way. Fraiberg introduced an idea that now underlies virtually all infant-parent work, namely that in troubled dyads the
mothers representation of the baby has been distorted by unmetabolized and unintegrated affects stemming from her own early and
usually traumatic relationship experiences. The goal of infant-parent
psychotherapy is to disentangle these affects from the relationship
with the baby. And, as in all psychoanalytic treatments, it is the relationship with the therapist that leads to shifts in the mothers representational world, and the ultimate freeing of the baby from the
mothers traumatic projections. The parent-therapist relationship in
an infant-parent psychotherapy isfrom a traditional psychoanalytic
perspectivesomewhat unusual, primarily because of the concrete
supports and guidance that are offered by the clinician within this
setting. At the same time, the notion of transference is crucial to understanding how this relationship unfolds, and in anticipating the
pitfalls inherent in the mothers coming to trust and rely upon the
clinician. Ultimately, and optimally, the therapist provides a crucial
and transforming alternative to the mothers previous relationships
with caregivers; the experience of being heard and valued by the clinician frees her and the baby as well.
Fraibergs work was to have an enormous impact outside of psychoanalysis as well. Beginning with the publication of her seminal papers, home visitingalthough widely practiced in Great Britain and
80
other Western countries since World War II, and in the tenements of
New York in the early 1900s by public health nurses (Wald, 1915)
has become one of the most common approaches to improving psychological and developmental outcomes in high-risk mothers and
babies across most of the United States. Certainly David Olds and his
colleagues Nurse Home Visitation program is the most effective and
valid of the many home visiting programs described in the literature
(Kitzman, Olds, Henderson, et al., 1997; Kitzman, Olds, Sidora, et
al., 2000; Olds, 2002; Olds, Hill, Robinson, Song, & Little, 2000). In
Olds model, experienced public health nurses conduct frequent
home visits to first-time high-risk mothers and their infants beginning in the end of the second trimester of pregnancy and proceeding to the childs second birthday. Like Fraiberg and her colleagues,
Olds emphasized that the development of a therapeutic relationship
with the home visitor is key to a number of positive mother and child
outcomes. Olds chose to use nurses rather than mental health professionals for a variety of reasons, the most central being his belief
that they are perceived by families as highly informed and helpful,
and are free of the stigma of mental health service providers. When
Olds first began his work, nurse home visitors did not receive any
training specific to mental health concerns; however, as the program
has evolved over the past twenty years, and the mental health needs
of families have emerged with great clarity, nurses have received
increasingly specific training regarding what might be called psychoanalytic concerns, namely how to think about and work with
the sequelae of severe trauma and relationship disruptions (Robinson, Emde, & Korfmacher, 1997; Boris, Nagle, Larrieu, Zeanah, &
Zeanah, 2002).
While the infant-parent psychotherapy and NHV approaches differ in emphasis, they are nevertheless rooted in the fundamental notion that changing the quality of the mother-child relationship
through a transforming relationship with a clinician is key to improving
outcomes for child and mother. In addition, both approaches provide a range of ego supports for the mother, so as to improve the
chances thatby completing her education, delaying further childbearing, and gaining secure employmentshe will be in the best position to surmount the multiple stresses associated with urban
poverty, and she will be able to serve as a secure base and facilitating
environment for her child. What the NHV program adds to the psychoanalytic model of parent-infant work, however, is the emphasis on
the body and on physical care; despite the fact that the issues of the
body played a central role in classical psychoanalytic theory, this is an
81
82
83
2003; Grienenberger, Popek, Stein, Solow, Morrow, Levine, Alexander, Ibarra, Wilson, Thompson, & Lehman, 2004; Slade, 2002). Our
ultimate goal is to help mothers acknowledge that the baby has a
body and a mind of his own, and to learnas a function of this
awarenessto tolerate and regulate the childs internal states. The
work almost always begins in the therapeutic relationship, with the
clinician holding the mother in mind so that she can begin to know
herself, only then slowly coming to know the child. We have found
that it is our clinicians willingness to witness the mothers world, to
witness her emotions and her body, to hold these in a safe way in the
here and now, that makes the mother feel heard and ready to know
the baby in all his complexity. This processand its various permutationsis manifest in the cases below.
Fonagy and his colleagues have described reflective functioning or
mentalization as occurring along a continuum, from an absence or
denial of mental states, to a simple capacity to recognize basic feelings and thoughts, to the emergence of true reflective awareness,
namely the capacity to understand behavior in terms of mental
states, and to understand both the nature and dynamic interplay of
mental states (Fonagy, Target, Steele, & Steele, 1998; Slade, Grienenberger, Bernbach, Levy, & Locker, 2004). Minding the Baby tries to
help mothers develop this capacity, with each of the clinicians doing
so in distinct, but complementary ways. The nurse provides ongoing
help in relation to physical health and caregiving, while the social
worker provides infant and parent mental health services and social
service support. At the same time, however, their roles overlap in a
number of ways, with both providing developmental guidance, crisis
intervention, parenting support, and a range of concrete supports
such as rides to work, emergency food, medical supplies, and the
like. As has been described again and again in the infant-parent psychotherapy literature, the very real needs of high-risk families require that they be helped at many levels at the same time; this demands constant flexibility and collaboration on the part of the
treatment team (Lieberman, 2003; Seligman, 1994).
As is true of all analytically based work, the development of a therapeutic relationship is at the heart of all parent-infant interventions.
However, establishing productive alliances with abandoned and traumatized women and their families is not easy. These alliances are regularly disrupted by powerful and elemental transferential reactions
on the part of mothers who have been betrayed and hurt by those
who cared for them. The home visitors are repeatedly inundated
with demands and crises (eviction, food shortage, domestic violence)
84
that require immediate action. So often clinicians struggle with rescue fantasies as well as feelings of futility and helplessness; often they
are intensely dysregulated by reports of violence to mothers and babies alike. The clinical teams ability to keep the infant in mind is
often challenged by the chaos, maternal pathology, and levels of extreme deprivation experienced by the family. Consistencythe
bedrock of any therapeutic workis difficult to achieve even at the
level of maintaining regularly scheduled visits. Add to all these complexities the fact that the multidisciplinary teamwhile sharing
common beliefs and valuesdoes not always share a common language. Although the construct of reflective functioning provides
common ground for discussion, as do the guiding principles of our
model, there are nevertheless crucial differences in approach that
must be managed against the backdrop of families prone to splitting
and disorganization.
The supervisory relationshipwhich sets the tone and parallels
developing therapeutic relationshipsbecomes critical to managing
these multiple levels of complexity. In Minding the Baby, the pediatric nursing specialist and clinical social worker are supervised
jointly; we see this approach as crucial to exploring the myriad diversions that threaten the clinical work. As a team, supervision is used to
set priorities, identify barriers, and explore alternative routes to enhance reflective capacities while addressing the concrete and physical needs of the family. Without supervision that is both clinically focused and personally validating, the teams own reflective capacities
are challenged and even diminished.
In the following sections, we will describe our work with Mia,
Iliana, and their babies. In some ways, theirs are similar stories: both
had babies as teenagers, and both of their childhoods were characterized by loss, trauma, and abandonment. At the same time, their
stories are different in important ways: they began the program with
different strengths and resources, and with very different openness
to internal experience. They differed in the degree to which they
had developed capacities for reflective functioning, in levels of ego
and self organization, and they struggled with different kinds and
depths of vulnerabilities; equally important, they had different levels
of support within their families and communities. Unsurprisingly,
their progress in a number of areas can be charted quite differently;
most important for our purposes in this paper are differences in the
development of mentalizing capacities in these two women. Both have
maderelative to their status at the beginning of the program
enormous progress. And yet both stories convey how complex and
85
86
and overwhelmed. The depth and quality of her language, and her
capacity to vividly describe her pain led us to feel that as little as she
was able to imagine the baby, and keep any kind of a representation
of a relationship in mind as she prepared for motherhood, she was
able to give voice to her own anxieties and sense of confusion. This
proved to be a resource that was of great value to her once the baby
was born.
Both of our home visitors worked hard during the third trimester
to help the mother make room for the baby (Mayes & Cohen,
2001): preparing the room, planning for childcare, thinking through
labor and delivery. Mia had little conception of the childs concrete,
physical needs, and when encouraged, for instance, to wash a baby
doll in preparation for caring for her own child, she giggled uncomfortably and abandoned the activity, embarrassed. Signs of depressionwhich were to become far more pronounced after she gave
birthwere evident.
Mia gave birth to a healthy girl, Noni. While she had begun to
make amends with her own mother toward the end of her pregnancy,
she was still living with her boyfriends family. The home was dirty
and crowded with multiple relatives. The adults in the home were intrusive and often inappropriate; Mia had to guard her and the babys
food carefully. TVs blared and there was the din of the distant conversation. The progress that she had begun to make in pregnancy
reconciling a bit with her mother, beginning to give voice to her
fearsbegan to slip away, as Jay became disinterested in being with
the new mother and baby.
Her baby appeared well-cared for but Mia did not touch her readily, and Noni remained alone in her crib. Mia muttered, Shut up,
under her breath when Noni cried. Her movements were perfunctory and task-based. She admitted to crying daily, bathing less, and
not bothering to get dressed unless she had to go out. Mia was often
pale, her eyes puffy from crying. She spoke with eyes downcast, disgusted with her isolation and feeling of uselessness. Within one
month post-partum, the team felt that her depression had reached a
critical level (likely as a function of biological as well as other factors). As is very typical of the mothers we are working with, Mia was
averse to seeking psychiatric treatment, leaving us with little choice
but to address her severe depression in a way that respected her pace,
needs, and expressed wishes, but at the same time kept clearly in focus the very real possible risks to the baby. We decided that the social
worker should see Mia weekly, so as to provide the level of mental
87
88
did not push, but instead remained gently present, watching for
Mias glazing over, the sign that she had remembered and described
all that she could.
At four months of age, Noni was an attractive and communicative
baby, who in many ways managed to ignite Mias maternal capacities.
On occasion, she could elicit maternal traits in Mia such as affection,
playfulness, and pride. Mias competence and efforts to attend to the
routine care, if not the emotional care, of the infant, were highlighted and validated. Theres no one else that can comfort her like
you. Look how shes gazing right at you as if to say thanks. This
kind of comment, repeated multiple times over multiple home visits,
fed Mia on many levels, and acknowledged her importance to the
baby in ways that she herself could not yet recognize. Despite being
unable to recognize her babys experience, she was, however, able to
express complex feelings about her: I dont regret the baby, but I
wish I didnt have her so young.
At the same time that Mia could care for Noni competently and
sometimes lovingly, she could also be quite aggressive and harsh with
her. She had at this point no capacity to recognize or tolerate fear or
distress in her baby (having not yet been able to articulate her own
fears and need for comfort), especially fear and distress that she herself generated. Mias game of choice was to startle her infant, which
she would do in a variety of ways. She would loom into the babys face
quickly, smiling in a threatening way as she approached menacingly,
or she would shove a shrill squeaking toy intrusively in her face. Mia
delighted in this game, oblivious to Nonis startled grimace and
frozen expression. Noni would attempt a false, scared smile, as if she
needed to placate Mia and keep her at bay. Repeatedly, Mia raised
the threshold for tension, but did little to soothe the frightened baby,
re-enacting her own helplessness as a child. This scary experience
was repeated again and again, with the other adults finding similar
pleasure in startling and overwhelming Noni.
Equally disturbing was the fact that not only did Mia fail to recognize Nonis fear, but that she viewed Nonis response as false and manipulative. Whenever Noni would become distressednot only with
the startle game, but at times when she took a tumble or hurt
herselfMia would respond indignantly with some version of the
following: Faker! Big fake-crier! You dont fool anyone. Thus,
Nonis self-experience was both disavowed and distorted within the
context of her mothers response; it is these kinds of early relational
experiences that Fonagy and his colleagues (2002) so richly describe
as fundamental to a childs developing an abiding feeling of alien-
89
ation and emptiness. Even in these early months we could see Noni
dissociated and frightened in interaction with her mother.
The next task was clearly to help Mia recognize her babys fear and
distress, feelings that were at this juncture too threatening for Mia to
see, even in her own history. We began by trying to elicit curiosity
about the babys intent, Why is she fake-crying? What could she
want by calling out to you? Focusing on the babys intentions helped
Mia slowly attend to the cues or events that led up to the babys distress. It also served as a chance to allow Mia to reflect upon her own
experience of the crying. How does it feel when you think Noni is
trying to trick you into paying attention to her? Her responses
opened up a discussion about the streets code of emanating fearlessness, denying needs, and feeling excited by fear. After revisiting
these themes many times over, Mia began to explore the times in
which she felt afraid, alone and/or felt like no one was taking her
needs seriously. Mia admitted that indeed her own obvious cries for
help in dealing with the overwhelming demands of straddling adolescence and motherhood were not being heard.
As the intervention proceeded, we did not approach these deficits
in Mias mentalizing capacities directly, of course, but rather began
by using the therapeutic relationship with the home visitors to give
voice to her own experiences of fear and distress. These therapeutic
relationships then became the platform from which she could view
the babys experienceher intentions and affectswith increasing
accuracy and clarity, without needing to distort or misinterpret as a
means of protecting her own fragile sense of self. Mias willingness to
hold the baby in mind was quite tenuous and fleeting at first, and
had to be nurtured in a variety of ways at all times, because her tendency to slip out of reflective awareness was so strong. Slowly, she began to be able to step out of automatic reactions and timidly observe
her childs feelings. Noni began to be able to express a more extended range of emotions toward her now more available mother.
When the baby was thirteen months old, Mia moved back into her
mothers home. She made the choice to move away from the father
of the baby because she believed it was a better environment for a
baby. When asked, Why now? she replied, Shes much happier. In the
other home, shed hold her hands over her ears, it was too much for her . . . I
wanted to for her. It was an easy decision. Mia was making links between the babys behavior (holding her hands over her ears) and internal dysregulation (too much for her), and she saw herself as instrumental in protecting the baby and providing her with a more
regulating and containing environment.
91
tachment (Main & Solomon, 1986), but showed many signs of a secure attachment; this is a crucial marker of developmental and relational consolidation. Mia is still an adolescent, one who has suffered
a range of traumas in her short life. And yet, over the course of home
visits, we see the effects of these traumas diminishing in her day-today interactions with Noni. She finds pleasure in her, she plays with
her, she inhibits her own instincts to frighten and overwhelm. She
comforts her child and tolerates her distress. For the most part, Mia
can hold Noni in mind.
Despite Mias continuing struggles, when we contrast her behavior
with Noni at 4 months with the responsive and good enough
mother we see now, it seems evident that the slow effort to help Mia
keep Noni in mind has been successful, and we can feel somewhat
confident that there are protective factors in place for both Mia and
Noni that will make a big difference in both of their developments.
This in sharp contrast to Iliana, whose case we turn to next.
iliana
We met Iliana, 19 years old, at a group prenatal class in the second
trimester of her pregnancy. She was accompanied by the father of
her baby, a 20-year-old man with a previous history of substance
abuse and incarceration. During the two-hour class Iliana remained
attentive but maintained a skeptical distance from others in the
group. Indeed, distance and anger were to characterize Ilianas central struggles, both as they were manifested internally and in relation
to the team. In contrast to Mia, who from the beginning had some capacity to hold complex mental states in mind, Iliana was overtly more
angry, more defended, and much less able to tolerate and describe
her internal world. She had survived a childhood deeply marred by
chaos, poverty, and violence. Her mother had left the family when Iliana was five. Her father, deeply involved in drugs and alcohol, erratic and sometimes violent, had been her sole caregiver. She was sexually abused by her grandfather. However, the abandonment by her
motherof whom she spoke with bitterness and ragewas a defining moment for Iliana, a scar that would not heal. Ilianas defense
against pain was to threaten and push away anyone who got close to
her. She was proud of her toughness, her readiness to fight and establish her dominance on the street. She readily described herself as the
kind of person who would act before she thought, and was clearly
pleased at her capacity to frighten and intimidate people. At the
same time, though, impending motherhood had stimulatedas it so
92
93
tle baby. They are so small they look like they can break. And when
the baby criesI might get mad or nervous and just walk away! Embedded in these comments were signs of another set of difficulties
that were to recur throughout all phases of the treatment, namely Ilianas profoundly disrupted sense of her body. The new and frightening bodily sensations and discomforts of pregnancy made her feel
out of control and angry. She was terrified of labor, and particularly
frightened of the feelings of powerlessness and vulnerability that it
would engender; these feelings can be especially poignant in women
who have been sexually abused and who find labor retraumatizing.
As might be expected, Ilianas feelings about her own body were to
later define her feelings about and insensitivity to her babys body.
Giving birth was an empowering experience for Iliana. Anticipating the terror she would feel giving birth, the nurse practitioner developed a labor plan with Iliana that allowed her to make choices
ahead of time about medication, restraint, and other aspects of the
delivery (Simkins, 2002). The labor was difficult, but the labor
planwhich was supported fully by the midwifery teamallowed Iliana to feel in control of her experience. She was extremely proud of
herself, and her daughter was easy to feed and console. The new
mother held the babya girl named Luciaclosely, gazing warmly
into her eyes and imitating her facial expressions. We pointed out
how she was able to make the baby feel safe by holding her close and
how she was learning to read the infants cues to comfort her. Iliana
was enormously pleased that she could regulate the babys states to
reduce her crying episodes without becoming overwhelmed herself.
Given Ilianas tough veneer, and her enormous resistance to treatment, we had not allowed ourselves to hope for such an auspicious
beginning. But as so often happens, Iliana got an important developmental nudge from her easy little girl.
This positive beginning helped Iliana become more open to developing a relationship with the Minding the Baby team; however, unlike Miawho was able to form a relationship that allowed her to
move toward reflective understanding in relation to her babyIliana
and her relationship to us was defined by her concrete needs and demands on the one hand and by her angry resistance on the other. On
the one hand, there were moments when she could be tender toward
her daughter. At these times, however, Iliana was also reminded of
her own loss, of not having been nurtured and protected by her own
mother. Iliana said she longed to be a little girl all over again. Not to
have the childhood I did have, but to have someone take care of me.
As a consequence, she often could not tolerate the babys need for
94
95
Unlike Mia, who from the start couldat least in a limited way
engage in the struggle to understand her history, her relationships,
and her emotional experience, we had to approach Iliana through
her body, and through her concrete needs. She could not work at a
metaphoric or abstract level. When we tried to talk to her about her
feelings about her life experience, she would become enormously
sleepy and actually appear to doze off. Mentalization could only take
place at a very concrete, protosymbolic level (Werner & Kaplan,
1963). But as we did this, she began to involve us more directly in
helping her. It turned out that Lucias father had been abusing Iliana
throughout the pregnancy, and he was now continuing to physically
threaten her. This was the other side of Ilianas toughness: the paralyzed victim. Once she disclosed his abuse to us, she was able to use us
to help her obtain an order of protection, and to support her desire
to protect her baby. At this time she became more overtly dependent
upon the home visitors, and in particular needed a great deal of social service help to obtain a place to live as well as a variety of social
service benefits. Her extreme neediness was experienced by the
home visitors as a continuing volley of demands, within the context
of which they had to continuously work to keep the baby in mind
for Iliana. These demands only increased when we decreased the
number of regular home visits when Lucia turned one (a standard
transition in the Minding the Baby protocol). She responded with
overt indifference and appeared to pull sharply away, but she began
to call us nearly daily with minor and major crises. Iliana the tough
and defended young woman who needed no one could not get
enough of us.
Over time Iliana has slowly become more aware of her babys experience. When Lucia was 15 months old, Iliana, her new boyfriend,
and the baby moved into a tiny apartment of their own. Iliana complained that the toddler was always in the way. Always trying to do
what I am doing. It makes me crazy! The nurse practitioner brought
over a small plastic tub and a few containers for the little girl to play
in, and asked the mother to follow the babys lead while she herself
washed the dishes. Imitating her childs actions, Iliana suddenly
saw what the child was doing. In imitating her daughters splashes
and play with soap bubbles, she laughed and exclaimed, Oh! This is
fun! She had a sense of the childs internal experience at that moment and recognized that the sharing of the experience brought
them closer together. She was able to express this feeling to her child
by having a short conversation about what they were doing. This realization has sometimes spilled over into other parts of their life together. Recently Iliana laughingly described her daughter as being
96
her own little self. Iliana had been outside watering the flowers in
the garden, andanticipating her childs desire to be included
had dressed her in a swimsuit. She had understood and accepted her
babys desire to be nearby and involved with her, as well as to explore
her expanding world. The childs jubilant response served to reinforce and build on her mothers new capacities.
These moments of seeing the baby and taking pleasure in her have
been accompanied by other shifts as well. Iliana now uses her community health center for routine medical care instead of going to the
ER. She has a relationship with her primary care providers, facilitated by the nurse practitioner, who has served as a bridge between
clinic and mother in an ongoing way. For Iliana, who has in the past
tried to control her body and that of her babys as a means of regulating her fragile sense of self, the willingness to allow others to care for
her and her body is crucial.
As is captured in Ilianas own words at the opening of this paper,
we also began to see signs of limited reflective functioning across a
number of domains. While significantly less widespread and deeply
held than Mias capacity to understand and hold her baby in mind,
there were signs that she had begun to understand that there was a
baby to be known. She tentatively acknowledged that she had begun
to allow the home visitors to get to know her, and to witness her experience. She has acknowledged the power of her mothers abandonment and her own unrequited longings for love and simple care. She
began to talk about her childs needs and understanding as being different from her own. Thus, even though these reflective capacities
can easily disappear in an instant when she becomes angry or threatened, it is nevertheless becoming more natural to her to think about
the baby in this way.
At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that there are
profound limitations to Ilianas reflective capacities, even after nearly
two years of treatment. Unlike Mia, Iliana has not been able to develop and rely upon a narrativea story of herselfthat helps her
to contain and make sense of her complex emotional experience.
The understanding she does have often fragments under the intensity of her feelings. These kinds of phenomena have been described
by Fonagy (2000) as typical of individuals who have suffered extensive trauma and who would be diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder. This is certainly a meaningful way to describe Iliana. She
can still be openly neglectful of Lucia, and very harsh with her, although now she yells instead of slaps. Nevertheless, we worry that we
will have to get child protective services involved, as there continue
97
98
services, again needing this kind of very concrete help to support any
reflective capacity whatsoever.
We think that the progress made by the mothers and babies in our
program has comefinallyfrom our home visitors capacity to
hold their bodies and feelings in mind, to witness their pain and
their anger without dysregulation and retribution, and to keep the
baby alive for the mother in the face of relentless chaos and uncertainty. As we hope we have been able to convey in our description of a
mentalization based, multidisciplinary mother-infant intervention
program, this is complex work indeed.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of
attachment: A psychological study of the Strange Situation. Hillsdale, N.J.:
Lawrence Erlbaum.
Bateman, A. W. & Fonagy, P. (2004). Psychotherapy for borderline personality
disorders: Mentalization based treatment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Boris, N., Nagle, G., Larrieu, J. A., Zeanah, P. D., & Zeanah, C. H. (2002).
An innovative approach to addressing mental health issues in a nurse home visiting program. Paper presented at the Tulane University Health Sciences
Center, New Orleans.
Fonagy, P. (2000). Attachment and borderline personality disorder. Journal
of the American Psychoanalytic Association 48:1129 1146.
Fonagy P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E., & Target, M. (2002). Affect regulation,
mentalization,and the development of the self. New York: Other Books.
Fonagy, P., Steele, M., Moran, G., Steele, H., & Higgitt, A. (1991). The
capacity for understanding mental states: The reflective self in parent and
child and its significance for security of attachment. Infant Mental Health
Journal, 13, 200 217.
Fonagy, P., Steele, M., & Steele, H. (1991). Maternal representations of attachment during pregnancy predict the organization of infant-mother attachment at one year of age. Child Development, 62, 891 905.
Fonagy, P., Steele, M., Steele, H., Leigh, T., Kennedy, R., Mattoon, G., &
Target, M. (1995). Attachment, the reflective self, and borderline states:
The predictive specificity of the Adult Attachment Interview and pathological emotional development. In Attachment Theory: Social, Developmental
and Clinical Perspectives, ed. S. Goldberg, R. Muir, & J. Kerr. Hillsdale, N.J.:
Analytic Press, pp. 223 279.
Fonagy, P., & Target, M. (1998). Mentalization and the changing aims of
child psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 8:87114.
Fonagy, P., Target, M., Steele, H., & Steele, M. (1998). Reflective functioning manual, version 5.0, for application to adult attachment interviews. London:
University College London.
90
When Noni was 14 months old, 17 months after Mias entry into
the program, the social worker reviewed a videotape that had been
made of Noni and Mia interacting when Noni was 4 months old. Mia
was obviously troubled in watching the tape, and noted readily how
insensitive she had been to Nonis cuesI had no idea what she
wanted, I couldnt read her . . . I see now that her crying was to tell
me shed had enough . . . here I can see her face sad telling me what
I didnt know, that she may have been hungry or sleepy . . . Shes trying to tell me shes scared, and Im just in her face, scaring her.
While Mia tried throughout the sessions to minimize and deflect
some of the guilt she felt in recognizing her failure to hold Noni in
mind, she was nevertheless fully cognizant of the fact that she was ignoring signs of distress that she was readily able to identify in retrospect. This
reaction signified crucial progress to the treatment team.
The central focus of the work of both home visitors was to make
Noni and her internal world real to Mia, slowly and in a way she
could tolerate. At the same time, it is important to highlight the fact
that the work was taking place on many other levels as well. Mia was
overwhelmed by her living situation, and we worked in a variety of
ways to help her make Jays family home safer for the baby. This
meant she first had to recognize that the baby required safety and
that she could participate in providing that. Filters were provided
that protected the baby from the smoke in an environment where
everyone smoked cigarettes. She needed help with travel to and from
school, with birth control, with obtaining food for the baby, and with
basic caretaking skills. We brought toys and baby books, and taught
her how to play with the baby. She had several frightening blow ups
with Jay (who had a history of violence), which required our help in
sorting out. All reflective work took place against this backdrop of
concrete support and education: help in stress reduction, vocational
planning, safety procedures, medical care, and the like. Without
these levels of support, the therapeutic work would have been utterly
impossible.
Noni is now 20 months old, and Mia is living in her mothers clean
and orderly home. Jay is still firmly in the picture; indeed, he is often
present at home visits, and is proud of his understanding of development, as well as the mutual feelings of love and attachment that he
and Noni obviously have for each other. Noni is clearly a loved child,
cherished by the extended family on both sides. When seen in the
Strange Situation (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978), a laboratory based separation procedure that is used to assess infant attachment status, Noni was not classified as disorganized in relation to at-
100
home visiting for pregnant women and parents of young children. Current
Problems in Pediatrics, 30,109 141.
Olds, D., Robinson, J., OBrien, R., Luckey, D., Pettitt, L., Henderson,
C., Ng, R., Sheff, K., Korfmacher, J., Hiatt, S., & Talmi, A. (2002).
Home visiting by paraprofessionals and by nurses: A randomized controlled trial. Pediatrics, 110, 486 496.
Robinson, J., Emde, R., & Korfmacher, J. (1997). Integrating an emotional
regulation perspective in a program of prenatal and early childhood
home visitation. Journal of Community Psychology, 25, 59 75.
Sadler, L. S., Anderson, S. A., & Sabatelli, R. M. (2001). Parental competence among African American adolescent mothers and grandmothers.
Journal of Pediatric Nursing, 16, 217233.
Sadler, L. S., & Cowlin, A. (2003). Moving into parenthood: A program for
new adolescent mothers combining parent education with creative physical activity. Journal of Specialists in Pediatric Nursing, 8, 6270.
Seligman, S. (1994). Applying psychoanalysis in an unconventional context:
Adapting infant-parent psychotherapy to a changing population. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 49, 481 500.
Simkin, P. (1992). Overcoming the legacy of childhood sexual abuse: The
role of caregivers and childbirth educators. Birth, 19, 224 225.
Slade, A. (2002). Keeping the baby in mind: A critical factor in perinatal
mental health. In a Special Issue on Perinatal Mental Health, A. Slade, L.
Mayes, & N. Epperson, Eds. Zero to Three, June/July 2002, 10 16.
Slade, A. (in press 2005). Parental reflective functioning: An introduction.
Attachment and Human Development.
Slade, A., Grienenberger, J., Bernbach, E., Levy, D., & Locker, A.
(2003). Addendum to the reflective functioning scoring manual for use with the
Parent Development Interview. New York: City University of New York.
Slade, A., Sadler, L. S., & Mayes, L. (2005). Minding the Baby: Enhancing
reflective functioning in a nursing/mental health home visiting program.
In L. Berlin, M. Cummings, & Y. Ziv, Eds. Enhancing early attachments,
pp. 152177. New York: Guilford Publications.
Slade, A., Sadler, L. Mayes, L., Ezepchick, J., Webb, D., De Dios-Kenn, C.,
Klein, K., Mitcheom, K. & Shader, L. (2004). Minding the baby: A working
manual. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Child Study Center.
Stern, D. N. (1995). The motherhood constellation: A unified view of parent-infant psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books.
Wald, L. (1915). The house on Henry Street. New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc.
Werner, H., & Kaplan, B. (1963). Symbol formation. New York: Wiley.
Winnicott, D. W. (1965). Maturational processes and the facilitating environment. New York: International Universities Press.
This paper offers fragments from the first year of a home-based motherbaby psychotherapy, in which I attempted to help a traumatized and
dissociated mother to emotionally engage with her infant son. The
treatment was organized in part around certain developmental objectives common to both attachment and psychoanalytic theory. These include: The ability to name and metabolize feelings, to evoke a soothing
maternal introject, and to relate to the partners mind as a separate,
understandable center of initiative and intention. In addition, attachment theory, with its emphasis on the critical psychobiological role of
containing fear and distress in infancy, was a useful guide in formulating the treatment. The paper reviews research findings on motherSenior faculty member of the Infant-Parent Training Institute at Jewish Family and
Childrens Service of Waltham, Massachusetts, and a lecturer at Simmons Graduate
School of Social Work, and member of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis.
I gratefully acknowledge Karlen Lyons-Ruth, Ph.D., for her invaluable clinical and
editorial input, George Ganick Fishman, M.D., for his untiring support, Sarah Birss,
M.D., and Ann Epstein, M.D., for teaching me so well, the Center for Early Relationship Support at the Jewish Family and Childrens Service of Waltham Massachusetts,
for making it possible, and Mary and John for showing me the way.
The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 60, ed. Robert A. King, Peter B. Neubauer,
Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling (Yale University Press, copyright 2005 by
Robert A. King, Peter B. Neubauer, Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling).
101
102
Judith Arons
In a Black Hole
103
ened/disorganized dyads, mother-infant psychotherapy may interrupt the intergenerational transmission of disorganized attachment
by working within the couple to name, metabolize, and flexibly respond to painful, dissociated or frightening affective experiences.
The resulting increase in mother and babys affective competence
(Russell, 1998) paves the way for further growth of intersubjective relating between them.
The Infants Experience of Disorganized Attachment:
Research Findings
Disorganized attachment in infants is defined as the childs inability
under stress to maintain a consistent strategy that engages the primary caregiver in the service of regulating arousal and receiving
comfort and protection (Main and Hesse, 1990a). The babys relational strategy breaks down or cannot form, due to an irreconcilable
emotional paradox within the caregiving dyad: his primary attachment figure is at once the source of his fear and his refuge from it
(Main and Hesse, 1990a). In the research lab, stressful separationreunion experiences of the Strange Situation highlight the contradictory behaviors indicative of disorganized attachment. Despite upset
during her absence, the infant, upon reunion with mother, appears
to be dysphoric, apprehensive, or helpless, and he exhibits conflicted
behaviors that include wandering in a disoriented state, making slowmotion underwater movements, and approach-avoidance or stilling/
freezing in a dissociative-like response (Lyons-Ruth, Bronfman and
Atwood, 1999b, Lyons-Ruth and Jacobvitz, 1999a, Main and Hesse,
1990a, Main and Solomon, 1990b). Sometimes the infant exhibits an
unusual combination of attempts at approach coupled with odd or
inexplicable gestures (Lyons-Ruth and Jacobvitz, 1999a).
Frightened Mothers of Disorganized Infants:
Research Findings
Mothers who struggle with unresolved trauma and loss are at high
risk for unwittingly engendering attachment pathology in their infants. Researchers have categorized these mothers as hostile/helpless or frightened/frightening, and link mothers unresolved state
of mind with regard to trauma and loss to the formation of disorganized attachment in her infant (Main and Hesse, 1990a, Lyons-Ruth,
Bronfman, and Atwood 1999b). While researchers agree that there is
a correlation between mothers unresolved state and her ability to
104
Judith Arons
In a Black Hole
105
fends herself against the threat of her babys fearful expressions and
his need for comfort by restricting her awareness of his state (LyonsRuth, and Jacobvitz et al., 1999a). She is hindered in providing the
adequately attuned affective envelope that would instill an experience of felt security in her baby. Mother also shows impairment in
self-reflective functioning and in her ability to reflect upon her child
as a separate individual with a unique inner life. Self-reflective capacities are thought to be among the key mediators in the transmission
of secure attachment (Fonagy, 2001, Fonagy and Target, 1997, Fonagy and Steele, et al., 1991).
Frightened/disorganized mother-infant dyads teach us of the profound impact of attachment disturbance and chronic fear upon the
development of psychological processes and psychic integration. Disorganized attachment places infants at serious risk for impaired affect regulation and right brain development (Siegel, 1999, Schore,
2001a&b), the onset of dissociation in adolescence and adulthood
(Lyons-Ruth and Jacobvitz, 1999a, Lyons-Ruth, Bronfman and Atwood et al., 1999b, Liotti, 1999 & 1992, Bleiberg, 2002), excessively
caretaking, controling, or frankly aggressive behaviors (Lyons-Ruth
and Jacobvitz, 1999a, Lyons-Ruth, Bronfman and Atwood, 1999b,
Lyons-Ruth, Alpern and Rapacholi, 1993, Jacobvitz and Hazen, 1999,
Solomon, George, and DeJong, 1995), chaotic internal representations (Fonagy and Gergely, et al., 2002, Fonagy and Target, 1997, Liotti, 1999 & 1992, Main, 1991), impairment of mastery motivation,
autonomous exploration, and problem-solving (Bretherton and Waters, 1985), poor self-reflective functioning (Fonagy and Target,
1997, Fonagy and Steele, et al., 1991) and compromised cognitive
functioning (Moss and St. Laurent, et al., 1999).
Chronic and unresolved fear leaves its indelible imprint upon neurological and psychological functioning. The impact of chronic fear
on brain development and functioning, stress arousal systems, and
physical and mental health has been well documented. Negative sequelae of Type Two (chronic) trauma in childhood include relational disturbances, dissociation, profound affect dysregulation, inner fragmentation and compromised cognitive functioning, and
living with sickening dread or unremitting sorrow (Terr, 1991).
Some Challenges Encountered in
Mother-Infant Psychotherapy
Before discussing the specifics of therapeutic work with frightened/
disorganized dyads, I will broadly describe some of the challenges en-
106
Judith Arons
countered in mother-infant work. Home-based mother-infant psychotherapy provides a living laboratory in which to substantiate or
to disprove the rich data generated in the infant research lab. Unlike
the relatively controlled conditions of the infant lab, mother-infant
intervention takes place in the freewheeling realm of the home. It
makes therapeutic use of improvisation and surprise. The work requires a holistic, versatile, and dialectical approach buttressed by all
that we have learned from relational, developmental, neurological,
and biological systems theories.
This is couples treatment in which one member is wordless and
communicates through the language of body and affect. Babys nonverbal communication drives the therapeutic triad deeply into the
affective, implicit domains of experience, while also stimulating exploration within the reflective, symbolized domains. Home-based
mother-infant treatment parallels the work that parents do daily in
raising their children: We attempt to feel what it is that baby is expressing, as we also try to name it, give it meaning, and hold it in
mind. Of course we also attempt to feel what the baby stimulates in
his mother, name it and hold it in mind, but this is a more familiar aspect of psychoanalytic work with adults.
The therapists experience is one of joining a constantly shifting
relational system that moves between poles of repetition and transformation (Lachmann, 2001). This system and the treatment are
filled with paradox. There is the infants press to develop, to accommodate, and to emerge as an individual within the mothers more
fixed psychic system. There is mothers need to be recognized as the
individual she is. She struggles with this need in the midst of her own
negative representations and in face of her babys real and constant
demands. Mothers childhood experiences tie her to the past, even
as she struggles to break these ties and move into the future with her
child. Her relationship with baby lays bare her difficulty in developing those processes that would help to contain painful feelings and
maintain consistent and sympathetic attachments. She longs to give
her child a better life, but is mired in chronic difficulties that take
time to recognize and to rework.
For the therapist, the responsibility of intervening in the life of a
very small child is great. She must live within the paradoxes of acting
versus waiting, proscribing behaviors versus enabling them to
emerge, moving into the future while honoring the past. Babys
needs are such that he cannot wait for his mother to change. His
presence in the session coupled with his developmental dynamism
and very real dependency exert tremendous pressure upon both
In a Black Hole
107
mother and therapist. This pressure stimulates intense transferencecountertransference responses, and lends transformative power to
mother-infant work.
The Frightened/Disorganized Dyad: A Clinical Perspective
Frightened/disorganized mother-infant pairs can present a confusing clinical picture and each dyad is unique. The pathogenic interactions that occur are more difficult to see than the easily observed hostile-coercive behaviors found in other disorganized couples. One
observes a number of positive mother-baby interactions and few
overt fear-inducing behaviors. In many cases one initially senses a
subtle climate of misattunement. The extent to which this climate reflects disorganization takes time to assess.
The frightened mothers eagerness for professional help can inflate assessment of her capacity for relatedness. In the home one begins to notice mother-baby interactions that are shaped according to
which emotions mother can tolerate. It is often the infant who is responsible for approaching her. Careful observation reveals a mixed
picture of maternal gentleness and sensitivity combined with affective miscommunications, or sudden loss of affect and attention.
When mother struggles with dissociative states or impaired relatedness, she will be unable to consistently keep her baby in mind. Emotional blank spaces or black holes may exist within the dyad. These
pockets of emptiness can be hard to observe in a rapidly moving relational scenario that also contains positive mother-baby relating. Unlike hostile mothers who may overwhelm baby with their intrusive
and undifferentiated responses to his distress, frightened mothers
may miss the distressed babys cues altogether, or respond in a contradictory, deferential, or helpless manner. This failure to provide
consistent affect regulation can send the infant into emotional freefall. During these moments he may be overwhelmed by uncontained
or unmirrored experience.
Mother and baby interact differently in the various domains of
care, which take time to observe and to assess. Negative or dysphoric
exchanges may stress mothers capacity to remain sensitively engaged
more than interactions that are positive or neutral. The distressed
baby who makes an intense emotional bid for his mothers comfort
and protection arouses different emotions in her than the baby who
rubs dinner in his hair or joyfully shares a toy. When difficult emotions or painful memories are aroused, mother may appear passive,
preoccupied, and unable to scaffold her babys experiences.
108
Judith Arons
In a Black Hole
109
son. I dont know who I am or what Im doing here. Mary was unable to claim her son or to acknowledge her motherhood, I cant
call myself his mother, I dont deserve him. Sometimes I think he
hates me and would be better off with someone else. Mary had been
sober for only twenty-eight days.
My visits to the home revealed Mary to be a sweet and tentative
mother who was struggling to stay sober and to care for her child.
John was a beautiful twelve-month-old with a shock of curly blond
hair and ice-blue eyes. He was cheerful, curious, and engaging. He
approached his mother for help and to share his toys, and they would
laugh or be silly together at his prompting. I observed Mary and
John sharing moments of pleasure, joy, and hilarity. Mary responded
well to the structure afforded by particular aspects of Johns daily
care. She showed sensitivity to his cues around eating and being diapered. In these domains John was never made to feel passive, ignored, or intruded upon by his mothers agenda. Mary would wait
patiently for John to signal the next spoonful or when it was time to
continue diapering or dressing him. These interactions included
much mutual gazing, turn-taking, and playful physical contact. Mary
could also be attentive and natural in her responses to Johns ebullient expressions, and he regularly looked at her and reached for her
to help him. As John interjected himself into the adults conversation
Mary would encourage him proudly and speak of what a good and
beautiful boy he was.
But coupled with these positive behaviors were more ominous interactions. John often crawled around the house with the pet dog,
dangerously unsupervised. He had difficulty focusing in on toys or
play, but could spend an hour amusing himself alone in his crib. In
these early home visits John would sometimes cry from the other
room in the middle of some mishap, as Mary, in a world of her own,
spoke to me of her terrible childhood experiences, her guilt, and her
urge to drink. Mary asked, Is it o.k. for him to play alone so much? I
dont want him to grow up with a black hole in the middle of him like
I have. Marys eyes spoke volumes of her fearful inner world, but her
narrative tone was one of disorienting cheer. In our first interview
she revealed the depth of her alienation, I wake up in the morning
and I wonder, whose baby is this, whose house is this, whose life is
this?
Throughout our initial meetings Mary revealed her painful story.
Her narrative was filled with contradictions, lapses in reasoning, and
affective incongruence. Sequencing of events was so confused that I
was unclear exactly what had happened to her and when.
Marys intense self-absorption and dissociated states initially placed
110
Judith Arons
John on the periphery of our conjoint work. I observed that she did
not seek John out as an emotional companion; it was he who initiated this type of contact. From time to time he could successfully engage her but I wondered how much work he had to do to make this
possible. Mary could not consistently help John transform his negative states to positive or neutral ones. When he was distressed she
would pick him up, but then put him down before he was sufficiently
calmed. Toys were often offered as comfort instead of her body or
voice. Mary often allowed John to get into highly charged emotional
states that were on the verge of decompensation. She was unable to
play with him; there were few spontaneous gestures of affection, and
she often asked if he would like to go up to bed.
I was uncomfortable with how little we included John in our initial
sessions. He was continuing to do all the reaching out for contact,
and I was caught between the imperative need to include him and
my concern that doing so would cause Mary to feel ashamed or overwhelmed.
History
After Johns traumatic birth (a mishandled forceps delivery resulting
in a subdural hematoma and seizures), Mary plunged into a post-partum psychosis, started to hear voices, and began to drink heavily.
Some months into the treatment I learned that for the first eight
months of his life, John was neglected and left alone for long periods
of time in his crib without food or diaper change. Mary would drink
and go to bed, covering my head so that I couldnt hear his cries.
For these first eight months Mary was living with her husband Peter
and his parents, all of whom were at work during the day. Peter was
unable to offer adequate protection or containment for his wife and
son. He was aware of Marys drinking, but desperate to keep his job
and needed to deny a drinking problem of his own. Then when John
was about three months, Peter demanded that Mary enter a detox
program, which she did. There were two unsuccessful hospitalizations during this time. A year into our treatment Mary shared that
she often cared for John in drunken blackout states, and lived in terror that she had physically injured him. During his first eight
months, John responded well to the evening return of his father and
grandparents, but there was tension between Mary and her parentsin law. When John was nine months Mary and Peter moved with him
into a home of their own. The move allowed Mary to be closer to her
father (a twenty years sober alcoholic), and enabled Mary to attend
99
Fraiberg, S. (1980). Clinical studies in infant mental health. New York: Basic
Books.
Freud, S. (1923). The ego and the id. S.E., v. XIX, p. 26.
Goyette-Ewing, M., Slade, A., Knoebber, K., Gilliam, W., Truman, S. &
Mayes, L. (2002) Parents first: A developmental parenting program. Unpublished Manuscript, Yale Child Study Center.
Grienenberger, J., Popek, P., Stein, S., Solow, J., Morrow, M., Levine, N.,
Alexandre, D., Ibarra, M., Wilson, A., Thompson, J. & Lehman, J.
(2004). The Wright Institute Reflective Parenting Program workshop training
manual. Unpublished manual, The Wright Institute, Los Angeles.
Heinicke, C., Fineman, N., Ruth, G., Recchia, L, Guthrie, D., & Rodning, C. (1999). Relationship-based intervention with at-risk first time
mothers: Outcome in the first year of life. Infant Mental Health Journal, 20,
349 374.
Heinicke, C., Fineman, N. R., Ponce, V. A., & Guthrie, D. (2001). Relation
based intervention with at-risk mothers: Outcomes in the second year of
life. Infant Mental Health Journal, 22, 431 462.
Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery. New York: Basic Books.
Kitzman, H., Olds, D., Henderson, C., Hanks, C., Cole, R., Tatelbaum,
R., et al. (1997). Effect of prenatal and infancy home visitation by nurses
on pregnancy outcomes, childhood injuries and repeated childbearing.
JAMA, 278, 644 652.
Kitzman, H., Olds, D., Sidora, K., Henderson, C. R., Hanks, C., Cole, R.,
Luckey, D. W., Bondy, J., Cole, K., & Glazner, J. (2000). Enduring effects of nurse home visitation on maternal life course. JAMA, 283, 1983
1989.
Korfmacher, J., OBrien, R., Hiatt, S., & Olds, D. (1999). Differences in
program implementation between nurses and paraprofessionals providing home visits during pregnancy and infancy: A randomized trial. American Journal of Public Health, 89, 18471851.
Lieberman, A. F. (1997). Toddlers internalizations of maternal attributions
as a factor in quality of attachment. In Attachment and Psychopathology, eds.,
K. Zucker & L. Atkinson. New York: Guilford, pp. 277290.
Lieberman, A. F. (2003). Starting early: Prenatal and infant intervention. Paper
presented at Irving B. Harris Festschrift, Chicago, May 12, 2003.
Lieberman, A. F., Weston, D., & Pawl, J. (1991). Preventive intervention
and outcome with anxiously attached dyads. Child Development, 62, 199
209.
Lieberman, A., Silverman, R., & Pawl, J. (1999). Infant-parent psychotherapy: Core concepts and current approaches. In Zeanah, C. H. (Ed.) Handbook of Infant Mental Health, pp. 472485. New York: Guilford Press.
Mayes, L. C., & Cohen, D. (2002). The Yale Child Study Center guide to understanding your child. New York: Little Brown.
Olds, D. (2002). Prenatal and infancy home visiting by nurses: From randomized trials to community replication. Prevention Science, 3, 153 172.
Olds, D., Hill, P., Robinson, J., Song, N., & Little, C. (2000). Update on
In a Black Hole
111
twice daily AA meetings. At that time Mary was frantic and depressed
about Johns behavior toward her. Until he was eleven months, John
rejected his mothers attempts to connect. He screamed when she
held him, would not gaze into her eyes, and would not smile at or
reach for her. One month into Marys sobriety John began to reach
out to her for comfort and to track her visually, but at thirteen
months he developed a strange rolling eye movement in her presence. John had been followed neurologically since birth and there
had been no sequelae from his early seizures or hematoma. The
strange eye movement was determined to be non-organic in nature.
Marys own childhood had been devastating. When she was a one
year old her schizophrenic mother attempted to drown her in the
bath and she required resuscitation. Mother then abandoned the
family and was in and out of young Marys life. For a time Mary was
passed among relatives so that her father could work. When father
remarried three years later (Mary was four) she lived through cruel
and degrading neglect at the hands of her stepmother, who locked
her in her room each day, refusing to feed her or allow her to use the
toilet. She was often locked outside of the house while her stepsiblings had after-school snack. In winter the kindness of an elderly
neighbor sheltered Mary from the cold.
Mary began to drink at age fourteen. But despite the depth of her
difficulties, during adolescence Mary felt she had the love of her paternal grandparents and recently sober father. She lost her fear of
her evil stepmother and became provocative and oppositional. She
successfully completed high school and college and went on to have
several interesting and responsible jobs. She fell in love with a gentle
if troubled young man, and married into a large family.
Formulating the Treatment
The initial treatment plan was to offer weekly mother-infant sessions
in the home in conjunction with twice daily AA meetings. But two
months into our work Mary began to reveal the depth of Johns neglect and the severity of her childhood trauma. Our mother-baby
work was heightening Marys affective numbing and flooding, and
she was struggling to stay sober. It became clear that weekly conjoint
sessions would not provide adequate containment to safely explore
Marys issues. With some concern about the complexity of combining therapeutic modalities, I offered her additional weekly individual
meetings in my office and telephone sessions as needed.
Mary and John each needed to feel held, known, and remem-
112
Judith Arons
bered. But how to provide a relationship in which this would be possible? How to untie this Gordian knot of longing and dread? Mary
had been brutalized and overlooked in childhood. Her subsequent
difficulties establishing evocative constancy, affect regulation, and reflective capacity meant that she would not have attained the level of
symbolic thought, verbal self-awareness, or affect tolerance necessary
to fully engage in a conventional interpretive psychotherapy.
I envisioned the individual work and mother-infant sessions as existing in a figure-ground relationship. My objective was to develop a
therapeutic relationship that would provide mother and son with the
experience of containment and safety. I hypothesized that as her fear
and distress diminished in her relationship to me, Mary would become more capable of recognizing and naming her own feelings and
of evoking a calming maternal introject to soothe herself and her
son. I hoped that Marys growing attachment to me (and my holistic
vision for her) would take integrative hold and help bridge the gap
between her current level of functioning and her emerging potential. The gains we made in individual and conjoint sessions informed
and reinforced one another and were articulated within the context
of mothers and sons developmental strivings.
In his book The Motherhood Constellation (1995), Stern describes the
dynamic interplay between representation and behavior: change in
one area affects change in the other. I hoped that in this urgent situation the combination of individual with conjoint sessions would maximize impact in both representational and behavioral domains and
modify the pathogenic enactive representations that crippled Marys
psychic functioning. Home-based mother-infant work offers a rich
tableau of implicit interaction and a profound sense of intimacy. It
integrates traditional psychoanalytic approaches with interventions
designed to have immediate impact upon mother and childs relating. Combining immediacy with enactment would afford us the opportunity to hold painful experiences in the moment, even as we
practiced new forms of relating. Within individual and conjoint sessions we could unpack those interactions in which older and more
troubled patterns held sway. In addition, Marys developmental
strides within our dyadic relationship could be transferred to the immediate interactive realm of mother and son.
But the developmental pathway we traveled was rocky and uncharted. Initially we did not know that the journey would require our
living through repeated painful and overwhelming states of desperation and danger.
In a Black Hole
113
114
Judith Arons
In a Black Hole
115
116
Judith Arons
Mother: Maybe I can help him . . . Maybe I dont have to dread being
with him if there are things that I can do to help him to be happy and
grow.
In a Black Hole
117
118
Judith Arons
to comfort John in his distress, but I believe that this would have
shamed his mother.
Feeling for Marys and Johns affective states and developmental
capacities within each interaction provided direction for the improvisation of new relational moves (Stern and Sander, et al., 1998). Improvisation addresses experience and change within the procedural
domain, and it provides an interactive format in which to modify
compulsive role assignments and to model containment. It is enhanced by the babys natural dynamism. It makes use of mothers
open sharing of feelings and fantasies, along with the babys emotional expressions, as they are experienced in the moment.
Marys softening of tone and defensive stance (He doesnt know
how to let me comfort him. I dont know how to do it . . .) signaled her
readiness to let me into her confusion around how to interact with
John. I began to wonder if something new could happen between us.
I believe that it was the lending of my physical presence (moving
back and forth between them) that offered the following unspoken
response to Mary: I can empathize with and hold both of your emotional states. I am free to move within your compulsive and confused
enactment. You can use me to bridge the gap between your current
level of interacting and something that will be more complex and
new. As I sat close to Mary and John on the couch, Mary continued
to relax her defended stance. Tentatively she mused, I dont know if
I should say something to him. At this point in the interaction a new
developmental level of relating was about to emerge.
Combining Individual Adult Work with Mother-Baby Sessions
Marys suicidal crisis lent great urgency to our top priority: To establish a therapeutic relationship that would offer open and responsive
emotional contact and modulation of fear. Marys suicidal gesture
had delivered into our relationship all the uncontained emotions of
her childhood. I believed that we were going to have to feel our way
through the therapy and live through the unnamed terrors, giving
narrative voice to the process when we could. In the words of
Phillips, sometimes, stories are lived before they are told (quoted
in Holmes, 1996, p. 167).
giving voice
Mary struggled to put words to feelings and experiences. In the
mother-baby sessions at home I had began to gently draw her into my
In a Black Hole
119
curiosity about Johns behavior and motivations. In individual sessions I expressed a similar curiosity about Mary. Together we created
a lexicon that captured the unique experiences of mother and baby.
It has been hypothesized that within the adult narrative lies the blueprint of early attachment experiences (Slade, 2001). The linguistic
structure of adult narrative traces the range of affective communication permitted within the earliest relationship and the childs need
to adapt to the attachment figures defensive constraints upon relating. Factual and affective incongruencies, unmonitored lapses in reason and logic, paucity of affectively charged descriptions and defensive idealizations, or minimization of cruelty and neglect indicate an
insecure and emotionally constricted attachment relationship (Main
and Hesse, 1990a, Slade, 2001, Holmes, 1996). I believe that the act
of creating a lexicon, coupled with capturing the specific experiences of mother and baby, helped to expand Marys emotional communication and her reflective functioning. Our widening conversation implied an increasing ability to express and to hold deep
feelings. Over time our shared language offered Mary a way to name
her own complex internal states and to feel more in control. It enabled her to speculate about and to feel for the inner life of her
child. During intense emotional exchanges between mother and son
our familiar phrases were a source of comfort and orientation for
Mary. We found it particularly helpful at such times to use expressions that conveyed active containment, such as getting your arms
around a feeling, gathering in a disorganized baby, or finding the
way back to a quiet and connected state.
metabolizing fear
Mary was afraid of everything. Her terrors had derailed her efforts after mastery and psychic wholeness. Toxic levels of fear occluded her
ability to create and to synthesize (inter)personal meaning. Fear had
interrupted her ability to attend or even to maintain a consistent
state of consciousness. Abuse and neglect had taught Mary to expect
that her feelings would be forgotten or obliterated. Frequently slipping into dissociated or empty states, Mary often did not know what
she felt.
We set out to explore the black hole left by Marys trauma, and
the overwhelming feelings and contradictory inner representations
it had spawned. With each frightening memory or state delivered
into the treatment we entered a new interpersonal negotiation. We
asked, how could Mary contain her upset around John? What feel-
120
Judith Arons
ings did he arouse in her? How could she use her relationships (with
me, her husband, and her AA sponsors) for soothing and containment?
Mary and I paid careful attention to how we made contact, and related this to patterns of emotional communication between mother
and son. Her initial requests to connect were subtle, often overridden by an expectation that she did not matter and could not be
known or contained by another. Mary had covered her childhood
devastation with an avoidant style and disorienting cheer, punctuated
by states of panic and emptiness. Her affective cues were as confusing
to me as they must have been to John. But eventually we were able to
frame our miscommunications within the context of Marys longing
to have her attachment needs met and her dread that I would rebuff
her. Gianino and Tronick, (1988) link the ability to repair affective
mismatches in infancy to the establishment of the attachment figure
as reliable and trustworthy. Experiences of disruption and repair also
contribute to the infants sense of mastery and control and to the development of a positive emotional core. I believe that within the
transference Marys increasingly secure attachment to me offered
her similar gains. Her diminishing fear led to an increased sense of
agency and inner cohesion and to a budding capacity to make reparation to her son.
Mary and I were able to name her intense feeling states (or absence of feeling), and give voice and shape to her chaotic inner representations. We observed the ways in which she dissociated during
powerful emotional eruptions around John, her confusing responses
to his need for comfort, and his disorganization in response. Consistent inquiry into Marys inner states introduced the notion that I
could know and remember her. At the same time we observed the
ways in which Marys intense and confusing experiences impeded
her ability to keep John in mind and to represent him as a separate
being. As her affect tolerance and self-reflective abilities increased,
Mary and I could more deeply explore the relational context in
which powerful feelings or defenses against them emerged. She
struggled to share her private terror, anger, and emptiness with me,
while valiantly attempting to make loving contact with her son.
Our conversations signaled to Mary that she could use our relationship to hold and metabolize her confusion and fear and to
gather in the disavowed parts of herself. As demonstrated in the vignette, genetic material was used to promote compassionate understanding and personal perspective. Within the first year of our work,
Mary minimized or dismissed transference interpretations, and they
In a Black Hole
121
did little to enhance our relating. But each new aspect of Marys experience, no matter how disturbing, was offered a place in our conversation. She began to send me e-mail messages about fantasies that
scared her. These messages I saved for her until she felt safe enough
to address them in person. We then began to anticipate the emergence of the evil stepmothers cruel and degrading voice within
Mary. We called this frightening figure out of the shadows, stared her
down, and told her that her days as a saboteur were numbered.
Marys need to defend against the feelings John aroused coupled
with her cognitive dysregulation (dissociation and transient thought
disorder) had rendered her unable to consistently attend to their relationship. In mother-baby sessions we worked to enhance responsive
relating by containing the fear and anger aroused by Johns need for
comfort. In individual sessions we explored how Marys attachment
needs within the transference paralleled those of her son. Mary was
the mother of a child she could not comfort and a child herself in
need of comfort.
Over time, as we co-constructed the scope and pace of what
emerged between us, Marys inner representations (terrifying mother
and terrified/enraged child, idealized rescuer and cruel saboteur)
existed side by side with a budding new way of our being together:
We became a collaborative therapeutic team. Less constricted by her
own defensive exclusion of painful affects, Mary developed freer access to her own inner world and to the emotional world of her son.
As she began to release John from her malevolent projections and
her need to control the fear he aroused, he emerged as a positive
force of nature, a baby to be loved and understood.
Conclusion
In cases of frightened/disorganized mother-infant couples, the combination of individual adult work along with mother-infant sessions
can significantly enhance the development of responsive emotional
communication and intersubjective sharing within the dyad.
During the first year of our work, Mary was able to transfer her
growing security of attachment to me onto her relationship with
John. The process has been slow and painful however. During our
first year of treatment there were several bouts of drinking, psychosis,
and suicidality, stimulated each time by my taking a vacation. But
Mary has been increasingly able to remain connected to me during
our interruptions, with fewer overwhelming states of abandonment
or deadly nothingness. She is feeling more at home in the fluid psy-
122
Judith Arons
chic space that encircles attachment and separation. With the help of
psychotherapy, pharmacotherapy, and AA, she has not had a drink in
fourteen months.
Mary continues to use our relationship to hold her fear and her
rage. The frightening inner representations and emotions that inhabit her psychic landscape have emerged in full force. She has addressed violent fantasies of throwing her son out the window or
slashing his face with a knife. She has been able to use me as a secure
base around disorienting and psychotic flashbacks. Having partly
freed the mother-child relationship from the toxic intrusion of intolerable affects, we continue to address the need to name and to
metabolize such feelings in all areas of Marys life. We continue to
explore the emotional impact of mother and son upon one another
and their patterns of communication. Sometimes I am rocked by
Marys vacillating experiences of flooding and deadness. I continue
to worry and wonder about the impact of Johns early life upon his
future development. But the projections, dissociation, and affective
misattunements, so prevalent in Marys early relationship with John,
have abated.
Although prone to regression around his mothers psychic upsets,
John has responded beautifully to her increasing sensitivity and reliability. Much work remains to be done, but John now looks consistently to his mother for soothing and protection. His requests for
care and protection are not conflicted; they are the expressions of a
child who anticipates that comfort and aid will be forthcoming. Mary
feels more connected to herself and to her son. She takes great pride
in how John is developing as an individual, and the important role
she has played in this.
While an in-depth analysis of the multiple transferences of trauma
survivors is extremely relevant to this case, it exceeds the scope of my
discussion. Several authors have written about the fluid and unintegrated inner representations and discontinuous transferences of victim, victimizer, and rescuer in trauma survivors (Davies and Frawley,
1991, Liotti, 1999). It remains unclear whether Mary will be able to
analyze her murderous maternal transference toward me, or if this is
even advisable. It may be that in cases of severe early loss and trauma,
rage in the transference represents too great a threat to the therapeutic relationship and requires metabolizing and repair in displacement. To date, Mary has very much needed to keep me as a good
enough mother.
The difficulties in depicting mother-infant psychotherapy are similar to those one faces in describing human relating and development
In a Black Hole
123
124
Judith Arons
regulating her babys affect, her own capacity to evoke a compassionate and soothing maternal introject, and her ability to reflect upon
babys experience, to keep him continuously in mind. While these
concepts are not new to psychoanalysis, they nest nicely within attachment theory, which operationalizes them and grounds them in
empirical research.
Post Script
Recently, Mary and I were reviewing the progress that she and John
have made (John is now two and a half). She related that while packing up some of his infant clothes she had been overwhelmed with
how vulnerable John had been as a small baby, how he had needed
her, and she wasnt there. She remembered with great sorrow and remorse leaving him for long spells alone in his crib. Then she related
this story:
After school yesterday John and I were playing together in his room,
like I am trying to do more with him these days. He began a new
game: he put me in his big boy bed, covered me with his favorite
blanket, kissed me goodnight and went out of the room, closing the
door. Without thinking about it I began to cry, Mama! Mama, I am
scared, Mama! He rushed into the room, snuggled me with the
blanket, and kissed me softy, whispering, o.k. baby, dont cry baby,
dont cry, and went out. We repeated this game several times; each
time he came in and comforted me. Then it was his turn. He wanted
to be in his bed with the covers. I kissed him, said goodnight, and left
the room. He pretended to cry, Mama, come, Mama! I rushed in as
he had done, kissed him, and cozied him up with the blankets,
telling him that everything was all right. After doing this several
times he became quite relaxed and quiet. He looked so peaceful lying snugly in his blankets. And then, as I sat there on the edge of his
bed, I experienced a moment of grace. I realized that I can comfort
my child!
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beebe, B. & Lachmann, F. M. (2002). Infant research and adult treatment. Hillsdale, N.J.: Analytic Press.
Bleiberg, E. (2002). Attachment, trauma and self-reflection: Implications
for later psychopathology. In J. Martin Maldonado-Duran (Ed.), Infant
In a Black Hole
125
and toddler mental health (pp. 33 56), Washington D.C.: American Psychiatric Publishing.
Bretherton, I. & Waters, E. (1985). Growing points of attachment theory
and research. Monographs for the Society for Research in Child Development,
50(12).
Davies, J. M. & Frawley, G. F. (1991). Dissociative processes and transference-countertransference paradigms in the psychoanalytically oriented
treatment of adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2 (1), 536.
Fonagy P. (2001). Attachment and psychoanalysis. New York: Other Press.
Fonagy, P. & Target, M. (1997). Attachment and reflective function: Their
role in self-organization. Development and Psychopathology, 9, 679 700.
Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E. L., & Target, M. (2002). The roots of
borderline personality disorder in disorganized attachment. In P. Fonagy,
G. Gergely, E. L. Jurist, & M. Target (Eds.), Affect regulation, mentalization
and the development of the self (pp. 343 372). New York: Other Press.
Fonagy, P., Steele, H., Moran, G., Steele, M., & Higgitt, A. (1991). The
capacity for understanding mental states: The reflective self in parent and
child and its significance for security of attachment. Infant Mental Health
Journal, 13, 200 217.
Fraiberg, S. & Shapiro, V. (1975). Ghosts in the nursery. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 14, 387 421.
Furman, E. (1992). On feeling and being felt with. Psychoanalytic Study of the
Child, 47, 6784.
Gianino, A., and Tronick, E. (1988). The mutual regulation model: The infants self and interactive regulation. In T. Field, P. McCabe & N. Schneiderman (Eds.), Stress and coping across development (pp. 47 68), Hillsdale,
N.J.: Erlbaum.
Holmes, J. (1996). Attachment, intimacy and autonomy: Using attachment theory
in adult psychotherapy. Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson.
Jacobvitz, D., & Hazen, N. (1999). Developmental pathways from infant
disorganization to childhood peer relationships. In J. Solomon & C.
George (Eds.), Attachment disorganization (pp. 127159). New York: Guilford Press.
Lachmann, F. M. (2001). Some contributions of empirical infant research
to adult psychoanalysis: What have we learned? Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 11
(2), 167186.
Ledoux, J. E. (1996). The emotional brain: The mysterious underpinning of emotional life. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Liotti, G. (1999). Disorganization of attachment as a model for understanding dissociative pathology. In J. Solomon & C. George (Eds.), Attachment disorganization (pp. 291317). New York: Guilford Press.
Liotti, G. (1992). Disorganized/disoriented attachment in the etiology of
dissociative disorders. Dissociation, 5, 196 204.
Lyons-Ruth, K. (2001). Hostile-helpless relationships and disorganized attachment. Division 39 Newsletter.
126
Judith Arons
Lyons-Ruth, K. (1999). The two-person unconscious: Intersubjective dialogue, enactive relational representation, and the emergence of new
forms of relational organization. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 19 (4), 577 617.
Lyons-Ruth, K. (1998). Implicit relational knowing: Its role in development and in psychoanalytic process. Infant Mental Health Journal, 19 (3),
282289.
Lyons-Ruth, K. & Jacobvitz, D. (1999a). Attachment disorganization: Unresolved loss, relational violence, and lapses in behavioral and attentional
strategies. In J. Cassidy & P. Shaver (Eds.), Handbook of attachment
(pp. 520 554). New York: Guilford Press.
Lyons-Ruth, K., Bronfman, E. & Atwood, G. (1999b). A relational diathesis model of hostile-helpless states of mind: Expressions in mother-infant
interaction. In J. Solomon & C. George (Eds.), Attachment disorganization
(pp. 33 70). New York: Guilford Press.
Lyons-Ruth, K. Alpern, L., & Rapacholi, B. (1993). Disorganized infant
attachment classification and maternal psychosocial problems as predictors of hostile-aggressive behavior in the pre-school classroom. Child Development, 64, 572585.
Main, M. (1991). Metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive monitoring and
singular (coherent) vs. multiple (incoherent) models of attachment:
Findings and directions for future research. In J. Stevenson-Hinde & P.
Marris (Eds.), Attachment across the life cycle (pp. 127157). London: Routledge.
Main, M. & Hesse, E. (1990a). Parents unresolved traumatic experiences
are related to infant disorganized attachment status: Is frightened and/or
frightening parental behavior the linking mechanism? In M. Greenberg,
D. Cicchetti & E. M. Cummings (Eds.), Attachment in the preschool years: Theory, research and intervention (pp. 161184). Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Main, M. & Solomon, J. (1990b). Procedures for identifying infants as disorganized/disoriented during the Ainsworth Strange Situation. In M.
Greenberg, D. Cicchetti & E. M. Cummings (Eds.), Attachment in the preschool years: Theory, research and intervention (pp. 121160). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Moss, E., St. Laurent, D., & Parent, S. (1999). Disorganized attachment
and developmental risk at school age. In J. Solomon & C. George (Eds.),
Attachment disorganization (pp. 160 186). New York: Guilford Press.
Phillips, A. (1987). Winnicott. London: Fontana.
Russell, P. L. (1998). Trauma and the cognitive function of affects. In J. G.
Teicholz & D. Kriegman (Eds.), Trauma, repetition and affect regulation: The
work of Paul Russell (pp. 23 47). New York: Other Press.
Schore, A. (2001a). Effects of a secure attachment relationship on right
brain development, affect regulation, and infant mental health. Infant
Mental Health Journal, 22 (1), 766.
Schore, A. (2001b). The effects of early relational trauma on right brain de-
In a Black Hole
127
Initial assessments of children with psychological problems are important both to develop appropriate diagnoses and to provide the basis for
productive discussions with parents on treatment alternatives. This
paper develops an assessment method referred to as the Parent Consultation Model (PCM) that emphasizes the use of videotape micro-analysis and developmental theory to provide critical information to parents
as well as to the clinician in this important initial stage. The paper
provides a description of the PCM and an expanded example of the use
of the PCM, including illustrations of how these methods can be used
to organize information and engage parents in the initial consultation. The paper concludes with some observations on the role of new
techniques and ideas in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.
Introduction
I receive a telephone call from a mother who sounds distressed. She says, We have a problem and we hope you can help.
Training and Supervising Analyst, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.
I owe substantial debts to the following individuals for their insights and comments
on previous drafts of this paper: E. Z. Tronick, Elisabeth Fivaz-Depeursinge, George
Downing, Louis Sander, Beatrice Beebe, and Dawn Skorcewski. I also would like to express my appreciation to the Boston Process of Change Study Group; my years of participation in the Group inspired the development of many ideas in this paper.
The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 60, ed. Robert A. King, Peter B. Neubauer,
Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling (Yale University Press, copyright 2005 by
Robert A. King, Peter B. Neubauer, Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling).
128
129
She explains that her 4-year-old son is disruptive at school and does
not follow directions. At home he is fearful, demanding of her attention, and constantly picking on his little brother. In the past, my initial interactions with the mother and father would have been relatively brief, primarily designed to provide background on the
problem as a prelude to seeing the child in individual sessionsfirst
in a diagnostic session and then, if therapy appeared warranted, as a
patient in psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. I would of course discuss
my initial observations and recommendations with the parents, and
get information from them about major constitutional and environmental factors that affect their son; but the tools I had to obtain that
important information would be limited to my own observations of
the child and parents in the initial sessions and the parents own descriptions of key events and circumstances.
I describe my past interactions with parents and potential child patients in this initial diagnostic stage, because over the past ten years I
have changed my approach to the initial evaluation of children with
psychological problems. This shift in approach is the result of learning from key techniques used by infant researchers and developmental psychologistsparticularly their use of micro-analysis of videotapes and certain organizing ideasand parallels a shift in the tools I
use in the evaluation of potential cases for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.
Micro-analysis of videotapes of family meetings or of therapeutic
sessions allows one to uncover key verbal and non-verbal interactions
that simply could not be discovered without the benefit of detailed
ex post analysis. Developmental theories provide a means of organizing these detailed observations into coherent patterns. Colleagues
and I have recently discussed the ways in which these techniques can
be useful in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis (Harrison 2003, Harrison and Tronick, forthcoming). This paper discusses the ways in
which these same tools of videotape micro-analysis and developmental theory can be used in the initial assessment and discussions with
parents regarding therapeutic interventions. Indeed, I refer to this
method as a Parent Consultation Model (PCM), to emphasize the
importance of providing critical information to the parents as well as
to the clinician in this key initial stage. Moreover, this collaborative
or interactive model can usefully be continued beyond the initial diagnostic stage and become part of the ongoing process of engaging
parents in their childs psychological development.
The next section of this paper provides an overview of the PCM, including contrasts to more standard child psychiatric or psychoana-
130
lytic evaluations. The following section provides an overview of several methods that have been developed by developmental researchers to organize the information that can be developed from
detailed observation of videotaped sessions. The next section then
provides an expanded example of the use of the PCM, including illustrations of how these methods can be used to organize information and engage parents in the initial consultation. The final section
provides some concluding observations on the role of new techniques and ideas in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.
The Parent Consultation Model
It is useful to begin a description of the PCM by considering the traditional child clinical evaluation and two elements that seem relatively poorly handled in the traditional approachthe clarity of the
role of the clinician in relation to the parents in the evaluation, and
the observation of family patterns. These elements set the stage for a
description of the PCM and some of the key conceptual frameworks I
have found useful in organizing diagnostic information.
what i did then: the traditional child clinical evaluation
Ten years ago, when I began to use videotape and other tools of infant researchers, I was already an experienced child psychiatrist and
psychoanalyst in private practice, and a teacher of child psychiatry
fellows and analytic candidates. My methods for the evaluation of
child cases were typical of most child therapists. I would first see the
parents to hear their concerns about their child and to obtain some
of the developmental and family history, and I would then see the
child at least twice in individual sessions. I believe this general
approach is still typical among many child psychiatrists and child analystsand other cliniciansbut I have come to appreciate its limitations in the light of the relatively new tool of videotape micro-analysis. In particular, although present in the traditional approach, two
elements come to the fore when one begins to use videotape microanalysis and the observational techniques it makes possible.
The first element is adopting the role as consultant to the parents, a
role that provides a clearer structure for interactions with the family
and for developingthat is, obtaining and transforming into a usable
forminformation to address parents concerns. The second element is the use of micro-analysis of family interactive patterns as the
basis for formulations concerning the childs psychological problems.
131
132
133
134
hard for him (Sean) to have his problems discussed in front of his
brother. He is easily shamed. I tell her that the play session is intended to be a pleasant experience. Usually I would not discuss
Seans problems directly. The information I need to answer Mr. and
Mrs. Rs questions will show up in the play. I say that I will direct the
session and take care not to let anyone be put on the spot. At the beginning of the session, I will explain that we are going to play in
partners, that Sean will begin as Dads partner, and his brother as
Moms partner. After five to ten minutes, I will tell everybody to
switch partners. Then after a similar time period, I will tell everybody
to play altogether. After another ten minutes of playing together, I
will tell everybody that Mom and Dad are going to sit in the two
chairs and have a conversation with each other while Sean and his
brother continue to play. This section is the last part of the play session. After this, I announce the end of the playtime, and we all pick
up the toys and say goodbye. The entire family play session takes
about 45 minutes.
Mrs. R says that she thinks this approach is just what she and her
husband are looking for. She then notes that she and her husband
are also concerned about the toll the family situation is taking on
Seans little brother, Mattie, and considering the whole family will
give them an opportunity to take Matties needs into account. I suggest that she talk to her husband about the approach I have described and get back to me about whether they would like to move
forward with the consultation. If they choose to carry on, we will
schedule the meetings. In suggesting that Mrs. and Mr. R talk about
the consultation together, I am putting the emphasis of the decisionmaking back on the parental couple. I am also giving them a chance
to reflect on the approach. The next day, Mrs. R calls and says that
she and her husband have decided they would like the consultation.
We schedule the first meeting.
conceptual framework
I have found it to be critical to have some conceptual framework for
evaluating the wealth of information available in the videotaped sessions used in the evaluation. Indeed, without some framework, the
material tends to be overwhelming. I have found conceptual frameworks developed by two developmental psychologists particularly
helpfulElisabeth Fivaz-Depeursinge and George Downingboth
of whom I have studied for some time. Although these conceptual
135
136
137
ing the child or by moving the childs play objects without an invitation? Do the family members respect the play space presented to
them, or does the child stray into the part of the room where the
computer and the video equipment is? Does the parent make a clear
boundary between playtime and time to stop and pick up the toys?
(5) Apropos language, how is language used in the play sessionto
promote the play, to comfort, to criticize, or to control? What kind of
language does the parent useprimarily descriptive language such as,
Oh, you are putting that there or prescriptive language such as, Put
that there.
Downings model is based on developmental theory but is designed primarily as a clinical theory. In that sense, particularly, it has
been an important influence on my work on the PCM. I also owe
much of my skill in making observations about families and analyzing them to the consultations and discussions I have had with Downing during the past five years.
Other Theoretical Influences
The PCM as I have developed it derives from other aspects of developmental research, including the mini-reunion experience created
by the order of the partner play, in which the identified problem
child plays with the father first. This order offers the opportunity to
observe a mini reunion of the child with the mother. The PCM
does not, of course, replicate the experimental conditions related to
the strange situation of Attachment Theory. Nonetheless, my experience suggests that this design can elicit interesting observations
about the mother-child relationship corresponding in some way to
the findings of the strange situation test (Lyons-Ruth, 1991). Finally,
because it is a play session designed for preschool and early school
age children, the PCM also offers the opportunity to evaluate the
quality of the childs play and uses psychoanalytic theory to identify
and make sense of symbolic representations in the play. Psychoanalytic theory and developmental theory are thus both instrumental in
informing the observations obtained from the PCM.
In sum, the PCM draws primarily from developmental theory
particularly the observational research of Fivaz and colleagues and
the clinical model of Downingto make a number of important assessments. It offers a quick clinical assessment of the father-child relationship, the mother-child relationship, the sibling relationship,
and the marital relationship. The PCM also offers an assessment of
the way the family functions as a unit, the way the family makes transitions, the impact of the children on the marital relationship, and fea-
138
tures of the childs play. The time spent in the family session is short,
but videotape transcription makes possible the recognition of repeated patterns on a micro level, contributing to the larger level behaviors that constitute an adaptation.
clinical case illustration of pcm:
first stepfirst parent meeting
Mr. and Mrs. R come in for the first parent meeting. They are an attractive couple in their late 30s. Mrs. R in particular looks tired and
stressed. Mr. R works in a demanding professional job. Mrs. R had a
comparable job before Seans two-year younger brother, Mattie, was
born but left her job at that point to become a full-time mother. They
explain that Sean was high maintenance from the beginning, but
that they didnt recognize it as a problem because they didnt know
what to expect from their first baby. They could tell that he was very
bright. They first realized that he had a problem when he was rejected from all the private elementary schools they applied to for 4year-old pre-kindergarten. The teachers in his preschool confirmed
that he had trouble paying attention and was disruptive during circle
time, but said that he was sweet, enthusiastic, and loved to learn. At
home, he was very dependent on his mother and anxious about being separated from her. He insisted on following her from one floor
of the house to another. He envied Matties possessions and competed fiercely with him for his parents attention, but he also played
happily with him for long periods. Play usually ended with Seans
teasing Mattie, or with his aggressive physical attacks on him. Sean
also complained about lumpy food, tags on the back of his shirts,
strong smells, and loud noises. Both parents agree that they are
noticing Seans immature behavior more now than they had even a
year ago. As Sean gets older, the discrepancy between his behavior
and that of his peers, and even that of his little brother, becomes
more apparent.
I ask about family stressors, and the Rs respond that the main
stresses are Seans behavior and the pressure of Mr. Rs job, which often keeps him at the office until the children are in bed. Family
neuro-psychiatric and developmental history is positive for mild to
moderate learning disabilities on the paternal side, acting out in adolescence and depression in one of Mrs. Rs siblings, and anxiety both
in maternal grandmother and in Mrs. R.
The generation of consultation questions is the crucial part of the
first meeting. Although Mr. R tends to defer to Mrs. R, I insist that
139
both give me at least two questions. I write the questions down verbatim and put the paper where I can retrieve it for the final meeting.
Mrs. R asks, How to relieve his anxietyhe is fearful and anxious,
and how to develop strategies to deal with his behavior problems, e.g.
constant picking on his little brother. Mr. R asks, How to deal with
his negative effect on the familyhe wears his mother down. Mrs. R
adds, How do I get this kid motivated to do the things he needs to
do, like get himself dressed in the morning or go to the bathroom by
himself? Mr. R concludes, How do we help him with his confidence, self-esteem? Although sometimes I find I am able to answer
some of the parents questions immediately, in this case I think that a
family meeting is essential, and I tell the Rs that a family meeting will
help me answer their questions.
We discuss the family meeting. I repeat the description of the family meeting to Mr. and Mrs. R, concluding with a discussion of what to
tell the children about the meeting. After hearing Mr. and Mrs. Rs
ideas about how to best present the idea to their children, I suggest
that they refer to me by my first name rather than as doctor, so as
not to unnecessarily alarm the children, and suggest that they refer
to me as a lady who knows a lot about children and families and who
gives families ideas about how they can get along better together.
Then I suggest adding, And the way she does that is to have families
come and play at her house, and then go home again. She also uses a
camera to take a film so that she can remember what happened after
the meeting. We schedule a meeting time.
second stepfamily meeting
At the time of the family meeting, I arrange the room with toys appropriate for children of Seans and Matties agesa barn with farm
animals, a garage with cars and people, building blocks, and puzzles.
I meet the family in the waiting room and show them into the office.
Mr. R coaches the children to greet me politely, and they do. The
boys are very attractive children. Sean leads the way into the office.
He is excited and eager to see my toys. Mattie holds his mothers
hand. In the office I remind the family of the plan for the meeting. I
repeat the different parts of the meeting including the parents conversation and the camera. The camera is a small video camera that I
place on my lap; the monitor can be viewed in a brief downward
glance. I point out the camera to the family. Openness about the
filming of the meeting is particularly important from the point of
view of modeling trustworthy behavior in the family consultation. I
140
tell them that in the beginning, Sean will be Dads partner and Mattie will be Moms partner.
Child and Father Play
Sean chooses the barn with farm animals, and he and Mr. R establish
themselves in front of the barn. Sean says to Mr. R, Lets herd them
into the barn, because there is a big storm coming! Mr. R asks,
Which ones? Which ones? and starts to pick up the animals. The
two of them are smiling and obviously happy to be together. They are
picking up the animals and talking about them. Interestingly, the animals do not get herded into the barn by the time of my call to
change partners, about five minutes later.
The next transition goes smoothly, with Mrs. R calling out to Sean,
Change buddies! Youre my buddy, Sean! and walking over to him,
while she helps Mattie and Mr. R find the toy garage. Sean calls out to
Mrs. R, Were going to herd the animals into the barn. Mrs. R says,
O.K., sits down beside the barn, and listens to Sean explain again
about herding the animals. Sean and Mrs. R also play together well,
though they both look somewhat uncomfortable and constrained.
Mrs. R does not look as if she is enjoying herself and is sitting back
with her hands folded most of the time. Again, in this seven-minute
play sequence, despite much talking about it, the animals do not get
herded into the barn.
When I call for the family to play together, the family makes another smooth transition, with Mrs. R making suggestions about how
they might combine the two types of play. They begin to play with the
garage and some of the farm animals. Mattie, Mr. R, and Mrs. R cluster around the garage and play with it for the entire period. Sean
plays on the periphery, connecting vehicles with their trailers, periodically joining the others and then removing himself again from the
central family play.
Finally, I ask for the family to make the transition of Mr. and Mrs. R
to the two chairs, so that they might have a conversation with each
other. Mr. and Mrs. R move to the chairs, and the boys continue their
play. Mattie goes to play with the barn, and Sean continues playing
with the cars and trailers. The parents are able to have a conversation
with each other, though now and then they are distracted and turn
their attention to the boys. They seem to anticipate a problem that
they must be ready to manage.
Then Mattie says, We have to herd the animals into the barn.
Theres a big storm coming. He begins to put the animals into the
barn. Sean comes over to the barn and starts to help him, but he is
141
more erratic in his attention and his movements than his little
brother. Numerous times he grabs a toy away from Mattie; sometimes
Mattie objects, sometimes he does not. At one point, Sean declares,
The storm is over now, but Mattie responds, No, its not, and continues his work of herding. Sean moves back and forth from the
barn, to the activity of hooking up the cars and trailers. Finally, Mattie declares, Now theyre all insidesafe and sound. In a dramatic
conclusion to the course of events, Seans little brother is able to implement Seans stated agenda more effectively than either parent is
able to do alone with Sean.
How can we understand this interesting eventuality? As I consider
this question, I am thinking of the powerful metaphor of herding the
animals into the barn to find protection from the impending storm,
which I take to signify Seans dysregulated behavior and its effect on
the family. The whole family seems to resonate with this symbolic
theme. The conclusion of the family play is to find a safe place for all
the animals inside the barn, yet this is accomplished in an unexpected way. It is only when the constraining behavior patterns Sean
and his parents have created together are relegated to the background, and the parents allow the children to exercise their own
agency, that Seans agenda can be constructively engaged.3 Yet, a full
answer to the question must wait until later, since we must first return
to the model as a practical way of answering the parents questions.
third stepinterviewer viewing the tape
In this step, I view the tape alone. Initially I transcribed small tapes
from my digital video camera onto a VHS tape and viewed them on
my television monitor. I used my remote control to look at certain sequences in slow motion. Now, I capture clips from the digital videotape on my computer, using the program of final cut express. While
time consuming on my part, it makes the showing of the film to the
parents more efficient, since it isolates small sequences of the tape
that are immediately available for viewing. Also, the computer program allows for frame (about one thirtieth of a second) by frame
viewing easily. As I observe the tape, I look for patterns of behavior in
3. Sanders work has been extremely influential to my thinking and clinical work.
Both in his writings and in our discussions, Sanders conceptualization of agency as
emerging from the mutual regulatory competency of the dyadic system has been central to my understanding of children like Sean (Sander, 1985, 1995, personal communication, 2004).
142
143
144
When I announce the transition to the whole family playing together, Mrs. R, Sean, and Mattie look up at me. Mrs. R immediately
says, O.K., and begins to assist in the transition. Sean says, Yeah!
Daddy can play with the farm!, Mrs. R repeats that they are going to
look for a group activity, something they can all do together, and
Mr. R suggests that Sean can bring some of his animals to the garage
if they cant all fit in the barn. Sean initially rejects this idea, but
when Mattie moves over to the barn, Sean grabs it away from Mattie
and declares it locked, saying, Lets use the garage for another
barn. He again grabs the barn from Matties grasp and pushes Matties arm away from the barn. Just after Seans aggressive moves toward Mattie, Mr. and Mrs. R both simultaneously turn their faces
away from Sean and begin to orient their bodies toward the garage.
At the same time, Mattie turns away from the barn and also moves toward the garage. It seems clear that the family is attempting to avoid
conflict by complying with Seans demands. Yet, as they comply, they
in unison move away from him, leaving him alone.
Family Play Sequence
1. ConnectionMr. and Mrs. R and Mattie begin arranging the animals on the different floors of the garage. They communicate positive affect with their facial expressions and tone of voice. Sean plays
on the outskirts of the group. He has found several vehicle-trailer
pairs, and he occupies himself with trying to connect them. Now and
then, he joins the family group for a brief period, but then he returns
145
146
of Seans intrusive behavior toward him, and Sean, because of his difficulty maintaining a focus of joint attention and other regulatory
difficulties and because of the familys response to his controlling behavior.
147
practical answers that lend themselves to recommendations for action. First, however, I am going to give them my impressions of the
family meeting. I get out the tape.
I show Mr. and Mrs. R the transition into the playroom. I acknowledge the attractiveness of the family and the expression of their family values in the polite greeting. I point out the friendliness of Sean
and his interest and eagerness to engage in this new situation. Then I
show the clip of Mr. R and Sean. Again, I first address the positive features of the obvious pleasure the two of them take in playing together
and the affectionate and supportive attitude of Mr. R toward Sean. I
note Seans significant strengths in being able to create and express
such a compelling metaphor as herding the animals into the barn
to avoid an impending storm. I also point out Seans difficulties in
coordination, including the way he drops the animals, and his tendency to get distracted. Next, I note the multiple statements of Sean
indicating his agenda to herd the animals into the barn and Mr. Rs
inattentiveness to them. This is a powerful moment in the meeting.
Mr. R is deeply moved. He is astonished to appreciate this observation and wonders how he could have failed to attend to Sean in this
way.
The next clip I show them is that of Mother and Sean. I first point
out the evidence of Mrs. Rs devotion and sensitivity to her children,
including her helpful preparation of Sean and Mattie for the transition and her attentiveness as Sean is explaining his agenda to her.
Then, however, I note her obvious anticipation of failure in this activity with Sean. I suggest that this sad, discouraged reaction of hers may
not be an uncommon one. Mrs. R is also very moved. In contrast to
her husband, she is not at all surprised by my observation and agrees
that with Sean she often expects to fail.
I explain to Mr. and Mrs. R a little about self-regulation, especially
in the domains of motor activity, attention, and affect. I remind them
of what they have told me about Seans sensitivity to loud noises, irregular textures in his food, and scratchy things against his skin and
point out that these sensitivities are associated with regulatory difficulties such as the ones demonstrated in the film. I tell them that it is
clear that Sean is a child challenged by problems regulating himself,
but that I think the film gives us some ideas about how to help him
learn to regulate himself better and how to support him in his development. These ideas include learning ways of attending to him more
carefully and finding cause for hope in his getting better and developing in a healthy way. Toward the goal of elaborating these ideas
about how to help, we turn to their original consultation questions.
148
149
150
151
152
153
Recollections of Being in
Child Psychoanalysis
A Qualitative Study of a Long-Term
Follow-Up Project
NICK MIDGLEY, PsychD, and
MARY TARGET, PhD
To date there has been very little research looking at how former child
analytic patients have made sense of the experience of being in psychoanalytic treatment as children. Based on semi-structured interviews
with twenty-seven people who, as children, had been in intensive psychoanalysis at the Anna Freud Centre, London, between 1952 and
1980, this study uses a qualitative methodology to explore two central
themes: attitudes toward being in therapy and memories of therapy
and the therapist. This report presents the findings of the study in
narrative form, and argues that the recollections of former child analytic patients are an important, but under-used, source of knowledge
for an understanding of the psychoanalytic process.
In 1922, thirteen years after he published his first account of
the psychoanalytic treatment of a child, the case study of Little
Hans, Freud added a short postscript. In it he described a strapping
youth of nineteen who approached him and introduced himself as
the same person whom Freud had met when he was only five. He told
Nick Midgley, Anna Freud Centre, London, and Mary Target, Anna Freud Centre
and University College London.
The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 60, ed. Robert A. King, Peter B. Neubauer,
Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling (Yale University Press, copyright 2005 by
Robert A. King, Peter B. Neubauer, Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling).
157
158
159
man also reports his memory of an incident when his analyst told
him it was unacceptable to put his feet or chocolate-smeared hands
on [the therapists] desk (117).
Although she gives no other examples, Beiser observes that many
of the memories of therapy that these former patients retain were related to experiences of limit-setting by the analyst, and she wonders
whether the experience of gratification and frustration, inherent to
the analytic experience itself, encourages the process of internalization. She also notes that several of her former patients had entered
professions involving the care of children, and that they often retained an attitude of inquiry as to the meaning of behavior and feelings which the analyst had herself promoted (119).
The psychoanalytic literature also contains several case studies of
former child patients who have returned to analysis as adults (e.g.
Adatto 1966, Ritvo 1966, Ritvo and Rosenbaum 1983, Ostow 1993,
Babatzanis 1997, McDevitt 1995, Colarusso 2000, Parsons 2000,
Rosenbaum 2000). Most of these studies have been attempts to show
how core aspects of character seem to be continuous from childhood to adulthood (Cohen and Cohler 2000:9), so they have not focused primarily on the former child patients memories of therapy.
Nevertheless, a number of these case reports do remark on the place
the child analyst appears to have retained in the former patients
mind. In a review of several cases, Ritvo suggests that many of these
adults have maintained an internal representation of the child analyst as a source of self-awareness and self-understanding to which
they turned at times of internal crisis (1996:375), as well as an awareness that understanding the workings of the mind was the way to resolve their difficulties, and that the analyst was someone who knows
how to help them (2000:344).
While the focus of much of this follow-up literature is elsewhere,
the few glimpses we are given of the former patients memories of
their analyses are tantalizing: Ms B, who recalled many aspects of
her first analysis, especially in connection with her analysts interpretation of wishes to have a baby (Ritvo and Rosenbaum 1983:686);
Richard, in analysis with Melanie Klein as a young child, who almost forty years later remembers her as dear old Melanie, short,
dumpy, with big floppy feet, and with a strong interest in genitalia
(Grosskurth 1987:27273); the young woman who felt that, as an
adolescent in analysis, she had been able to get better because [the
analyst] was kind like her father, and who recalled particularly a
painting on the wall of the analysts office (Adatto 1966:500); and
Evelyne, who, in a follow-up interview at the age of thirty-four, re-
160
ported that she learned the art of good listening and communicating from her former analyst (Ritvo 1996:374).
To our knowledge, the only description of a child analysis written
by a former child patient her or himself is Peter Hellers A Child
Analysis with Anna Freud (1990). The book includes a reproduction of
the very sketchy process notes made by Anna Freud on Hellers childhood analysis in Vienna, which she sent to him a few years before her
own death. Heller chose to publish these, together with an account
of his own memories of his childhood in Vienna and his free associations to reading Anna Freuds notes.
In his introductory chapter, where Heller writes of his family and
his childhood, Heller expresses with great force his deep but ambivalent feelings toward Anna Freud and his analysis with her, which was
carried out in quite unusual circumstances. (Heller also attended a
special school run by Anna Freud and his later life was closely tied
up with that of Anna Freud and her circle). He describes his memories of Anna Freuds kindly severity (xxii) as she sat behind the
couch on which he lay (between the ages of nine and twelve), knitting or crocheting. He remembers that his analysis focused on the
loss of his mother and his problematic relationship to his father
(xlvi), and he describes how as a child he loved and revered [Anna
Freud] above all other humans (xxvii). Yet Heller is deeply ambivalent about the experience: he explains how, in analysis I wanted to
be loved . . . and like so many patients, I did not think I was loved
enough (xxvii).
Hellers account of his child analysis hints at the depth of feeling
he still retains about this period in his early life, and suggests that former child analytic patients can provide us with another point of view
on the psychoanalytic process, one which would complement the
many accounts of child treatments from the analysts point of view.
More particularly, they could provide us with the opportunity to discover how former analysands felt about being in therapy as children,
what they understood about why they were taken to see someone,
and what specific memories of the experience they have retained.
The desire to know more about this remarkably unexplored area was
what led us to carry out the current study.
Rationale and Aims of the Study
The research reported here is part of a larger project on the longterm outcome of child psychoanalysis (Target and Fonagy 2002),
which attempted to follow up all adults who were referred as chil-
161
dren to the Anna Freud Centre between 1952 and 1980. In total,
twenty-seven adults who had been in intensive psychoanalysis as children were interviewed as part of this project (see Appendix One). These
interviews were extremely wide-ranging and in-depth, exploring all
aspects of adult life and functioning as well as memories of childhood generally and the child analysis more specifically.
Out of this huge amount of data, this study makes use of only one
small partthe interviews which focused specifically on memories of
being in child analysis (Barth 1999). The approach chosen to analyze
these interviews was broadly-speaking qualitative. The relatively
small sample (twenty-seven participants), the nature of the data (verbatim transcripts of semi-structured interviews focusing on the subjective accounts of personal experience), and the topic itself (a relatively unexplored area where an exploratory approach is probably
more appropriate than a hypothesis-testing one) are all features that
have been widely recognized as appropriate for qualitative studies
(McLeod 1999).
Inevitably the detail and depth of memory retained by the participants of their child analyses varies enormously. Some of those interviewed had been as young as three and a half when they had been referred to the Centre; others were in late adolescence. Likewise the
period of time since the analysis had ended varied a great deal
from eighteen years to forty-two years, with the average length of
time being twenty-seven years. Some people refer to specific, but
quite major gaps in their memory, like being unable to remember
anything about starting or ending therapy, or whether they saw one
or two different therapists, or how often or for how long a period
they came. Only two people (aged four and a half and five at the time
of their respective referrals) claimed to have no memory at all of the
experience. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those whose memories were less
clear tended to be the ones who had been referred for therapy when
they were six or under, although this was not always the case. For example, one person who had been in therapy at the age of three and a
half for about two years, had quite clear memories of his therapy and
his therapist.
Results
In the course of the analysis of the data, a wide range of analytic
themes were generated (see Midgley 2003; Midgley, Target and
Smith, in press), and this paper will present only part of the
findingsthose which were related to the participants attitudes to-
162
About half of the interviewees (evenly spread across the age range)
commented that they did not really understand why they were taken
to therapy as children, and they described feeling that nobody had
really explained this to them. I was never really told why I was going
there (Susannah, 12.3) is a comment that recurs several times in different interviews, although the way different interviewees feel about
this varies.
In some cases the interviewees indicate that nobody had explained
to them why they were going, but this does not seem to have been a
difficulty for them, as they were able to make sense of it for themselves (e.g. Anna, 8.11). In several other cases, however, especially
163
among those who had been in therapy as adolescents, the fact that
they did not feel they understood why they were coming to the Anna
Freud Centre was a more serious obstacle, and made it harder for
them to make use of the therapy itself. In one womans case, her difficulty in understanding why she had been referred for therapy led to
a more negative attitude toward being in therapy:
I think that it would have been very helpful if it had been all explained to me if everything, the whole treatment was explained to
me . . . why I was there, the necessity of her to react to me in the way
she did . . . as I say at eleven I didnt have any choice about going. I
didnt choose to go and it was never explainedor as far as I remember it was never explained. (Tamsin, 12.6)
Commentary
From her earliest writings Anna Freud recognized that one of the
greatest differences between child and adult psychoanalysis was the
164
childs attitude toward being in therapy. Adults who have an emotional difficulty may sometimes decide to see a therapist; children
rarely do. If they do see a therapist, it is probably because they have
been asked (or told) to go by a teacher, a doctor, or a parent. Children may not be as troubled by their symptom as the adults around
them are; they may lack the same motivation to engage with the analytic process, and they are more likely to seek an external solution to
their difficulties (A. Freud 1965). All of these issues raise very specific
questionsperhaps even concernsabout what the childs attitude
toward being in therapy will be.
To a considerable degree, these concerns are confirmed by the
findings of this study. While there were a small number of participants in this study who described a sense that they needed to be in
therapy, and spoke of the relief they felt when their difficulties
were finally being addressed, very few referred to specific difficulties
or worries that led them to be in analysis; a large number of participants (about half) in retrospect described some feeling of not knowing why they were taken to therapy as children.
It is interesting that of those who expressed this feeling, a greater
proportion had either been under six or adolescent at the time of
their referral. It may be that for those who were referred at a very
young age their lack of understanding about why they had been in
therapy was more related to lack of memory or lack of understanding
at the time, whereas for those who were in adolescence the meaning
of these statements was different. This might seem to be confirmed
by the fact that it was predominantly the adolescent group for whom
this lack of understanding was seen (retrospectively) as having been
an obstacle to their engagement in therapy.
Of course the problem of engaging adolescents in psychotherapy
is a notorious one (Meeks 1971), and in general outpatient psychotherapy, it is generally accepted that there is a 40 to 60 percent
drop-out rate for this age group (Kazdin 1995, Wierzbicki and
Pekarik 1993). What comes across very powerfully from this data,
however, is a sense that these participants did not feel as if they had
been given enough information about why they were in therapy,
what was expected of them, and how the process workeda finding
that replicates recent studies into adolescents experiences of therapeutic inpatient units (Street and Svanberg 2003).
Although we have no objective data about what information
these young people had actually received at the time, this finding
seems to confirm some research suggesting that lack of preparation
can be an obstacle to children engaging in psychotherapy (Holmes
165
and Urie 1975) and that helping adolescents to understand why they
are coming, and how therapy is supposed to help them, is of great importance (Griffiths 2003). The need to attend to the childs understanding of why they are in therapynot just at the beginning, but as
an on-going processis perhaps one of the most important findings
of this study, given the degree to which these former child analytic
patients report a lack of understanding in this respect.
memories of therapy and the therapist
Among the twenty-seven people who took part in this study, there was
a fairly even spread between those who remember feeling predominantly positive about going to therapy, those who felt mixed, and
those who felt largely negative.
Interestingly, of those who spoke about coming for therapy at the
Anna Freud Centre in the most positive terms, the largest number
tended to come from the adults who had been in therapy as very young
or latency-age children, rather than as adolescents. This group spoke
about how it was fun, it was brilliant (Angela, 7.10), that it was a good
feeling to go (Phil, 9.3), or that they enjoyed spending time with [the
therapist] (Rupert, 3.9). For these people the emphasis is often on the
enjoyment they got from having this quite unique experience.
When describing the experience of being in therapy itself, most
people described it in terms of two main activities: playing and talking. Not surprisingly, those who describe the therapy in terms of
talking tended to be those who were referred at an older age,
whereas those who spoke in terms of playing were younger when
they had been referred for therapy.
Of those who remember coming to therapy in terms of playing,
the memories tend to be rather vague and generalized: painting,
playing with dolls or bricks, bits of plasticine or a book kept in a special cupboard. Several people describe some uncertainty about what
the purpose of the play was, and only in one case is the play described
in very positive terms as characterizing the essence of the experience
of being in analysis as a young child:
I saw it, you know, as my time to be with someone who was there to
play with me and sort of do whatever I wanted to do, and that was
hugely enjoyable. (Rupert, 3.9)
For several of the participants, the feeling that they could talk
aboutor dowhatever they wanted was what characterized being
in therapy, and this opportunity is described several times with a
sense of surprise and pleasure:
166
I think, initially, I think I liked the fact that it was one to one and
theI could do things here like art and craft that I couldnt do at
home or at school, and that seemingly you could do anything you
wanted. So it was like fun, it was brilliant, it was so, you know, whatever I wanted to do, I wanted to talk about, that was what I could do.
(Angela, 7.10)
While the quotation above describes the therapists attentive listening as helpful in its own right, others talk about things that the therapist did more actively. Although they do not use the word itself, several interviewees refer to something their therapist did which we
might understand as making an interpretation. In some cases, this
is a rather general comment about how the therapist would comment or mould what the child had said or done in their play (e.g.
Eva, 9.8) or would offer solutions to possible problems (Anthony,
167
10.10). One man talks about the way his therapist would mould
things and talks about things Id been talking about, like dreams or
whatever (Mark, 16) and goes on to describe what this felt like:
Sometimes, sometimes he came out with, Im pretty sure he would
come out with some very interesting sort of links, you know with what
I was saying, like, and Id say hey hang on a minute, thats absolutely right, you know. (Mark, 16)
This man indicates that his own behavior was a kind of testing of
boundaries, and that his experience of the therapist setting limits was
an important one, and leads directly into his comment about his
fond feelings for the therapist.
When asked explicitly, about two thirds of those interviewed described some kind of positive feelings toward their therapist, and this
was especially true of those who came into therapy as young children.
A large number said simply that they liked their therapist, without
elaborating greatly on this. Others spoke about their therapist being
warm and friendly (Elaine, 6.4), or being a sympathetic person
(Jason, 7.1) and of themselves having real feelings of warmth toward the therapist (Neil, 10.4).
Among those who spoke about their therapist in these positive
terms, a few people expressed a more specific sense that they felt accepted, looked after, and listened to by their therapist. One man
168
In a similar way, another man describes his relationship to his therapist with the following words:
I felt I could be more relaxed, if you know what I mean, I mean open,
where I was not able to be relaxed with people in general. It was almost like I could feel, like, comfortable with her, like at ease with [my
therapist] yes, and, and also she wasnt in a positionyou see in a lot
of, especially with teachers . . . they tend to judge the children so, so I
was safe from judgement. (Phil, 9.3)
While this man describes different feelings toward his therapist depending on what was happening in the therapy at the time, others
describe the way their feelings toward the therapist changed over
time. In some cases, an initial dislike gave way to more positive feelings:
169
I didnt like him at first, or I was scared of a man, [the therapist] was
strict and wouldnt do what I asked [. . .] And later I was very fond of
him, I remember later saying to him I think I might, I think I might
want do what you do for a living, some real feeling of warmth toward
him toward the end. (Neil, 10.4)
For two others, one of whom will be described further in the next
section, they felt the central issue that their therapist did not understand was the question of am I mad? As one of them puts it:
I felt, I think she said something like, well I think she said something
likeyoure coming here, isnt there something wrong? or something. I think that maybe we were at cross-purposes or something. Because I suppose on some level I was talking about whether I was completely bats and maybe she didnt realise that. (Daniella, 13.9)
170
171
For this woman, as for some others, her negative feelings about the
therapy eventually led her to end her treatment prematurely.
172
It appears from this study that those who remembered their child
analyses in the most positive way were often in analysis as quite young
children, although they may have had only a vague idea of what the
analysis was about. In The Technique of Child Psychoanalysis, Sandler et
al. acknowledge that for the young child the positive tie to the therapist probably forms the main basis for the therapeutic work
(1980:47), and the fact that those who were in analysis as small children almost all described it in terms of fun and as an opportunity
to play with an interested adult figure seems to confirm this. The
view of Sandler et al. seems to be confirmed by the findings of this
study:
To a child, analysis probably seems simply to be another one of those
strange activities that grown-ups enter into with children, responding
to whatever is put to them. The childs experience in treatment gradually enables him to sort out the meaningful differences [. . .] even if
he speaks of treatment as play. (1980:156)
But this study also tells us something more specific about what aspects of the experience of being in analysis as children were felt to be
important. For some participants in this research, there is a powerful
sense that the experience of being able to talk about whatever they
wanted to, in the presence of a sympathetic, non-judgmental listener,
was the essence of the therapeutic experience. The emphasis on the
experience of being accepted, listened to, and looked after by a therapist who is warm and non-judgmental appears to confirm once
again what Sandler et al. have written:
The child in analysis has a novel experience in that the therapist is an
adult who takes his feelings and expressions seriously over a significant period of time. This has the result that the therapist raises the
self-esteem of the child by saying, in effect, I regard you as someone
to be considered important, and I am not going to dismiss you out of
hand. I will listen to what you have to say. (1980:112/13)
173
174
175
NAME
Bobby
Daniella
Elsa
Richard
Tracy
Angela
Rupert
Marigold
Nathan
Sarah
Neil
Jason
Peter
Elaine
Heather
Phil
Eva
Anna
Anthony
Sheila
Dominique
Susannah
Mark
Lillian
Kevin
Joanne
Tamsin
AGE AT
REFERRAL
(Years, months)
LENGTH OF
ANALYSIS
(Years, months)
AGE AT
FOLLOW-UP
14.11
13. 9
5.2
10.10
6.11
7.10
3.9
11.8
4.8
9.1
10.4
7.1
7.8
6.4
17.5
9.3
9.8
8.11
10.10
4.0
7.6
12.3
16
5.10
11.11
7.9
12.6
3.8
4.2
2.2
4.6
1.2
1.10
2.0
3.1
1.5
3.3
3.1
3.9
2 .10
2 .0
0.9
4 .6
1.6
2.10
2.9
1.9
3.9
Missing data
3.10
3.4
5.3
1.6
1.8
42
36
36
29
29
32
34
31
41
29
33
45
32
39
42
33
29
34
37
46
41
39
40
36
39
35
35
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adatto, C. (1966). On the metamorphosis from adolescence into adulthood. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assoc. 14:485 509.
Babatzanis, G. (1997). The analysis of a pre-homosexual child with a
twelve-year developmental follow-up. Psychoanal. St. Child 52:159 189.
Beiser, H. (1995). A follow-up of child analysis. Psychoanal. St. Child 50:106
121.
176
177
Child, Adolescent, and Adult Psychoanalyst; Founding Member and Senior Faculty
at the Berkshire Psychoanalytic Institute; Faculty at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute; Supervising Analyst at the Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis.
I want to express my gratitude to the children and parents who participated in this
study. I am indebted to Lillian Schwartz, Ph.D., who volunteered her time and considerable knowledge to help me score and evaluate all the psychological testing and for
her thoughtful contributions to this paper. I would like to thank Dr. Anna Wolff for
her many thoughtful readings of this paper, the IPA Research Program (1998) for
their advice and encouragement, and Drs. A. Scott Dowling, Anton Kris, Samuel
Abrams, Peter Neubauer, and Paul Brinich for their helpful suggestions.
The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 60, ed. Robert A. King, Peter B. Neubauer,
Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling (Yale University Press, copyright 2005 by
Robert A. King, Peter B. Neubauer, Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling).
178
179
180
Rona Knight
181
This research is an attempt to understand the complexity of development as applied to the six- to eleven-year-old child. This contribution is the first in a series of papers that will report and discuss the
findings of a clinical, hypothesis generating, longitudinal study of ten
normal children who were evaluated yearly from the ages six through
eleven. The purpose of this study was to begin to better understand
the development of the inner world of the normal latency age child,
informed by psychoanalytic concepts and theories. The present paper focuses on attachment and the separation process that leads to
autonomy in latency, thus the selection of data intentionally highlights this theme, although other aspects of development are entwined with it. While there are research advantages of focusing on a
single element of development, as I have done with attachment and
autonomy, a comprehensive understanding and integration of all aspects of development is essential to achieve a balanced view. I hope
to be able to provide that as I continue to analyze all the data from
this study.
Method
Subjects: Four boys and six girls participated in this study. Each child
was followed from age six through age eleven, for a total of six years
for each child. Only children who fell within the normal range of psychological functioning at age six were chosen. A determination of
normal psychological functioning was made using the following criteria: 1) a normal six-year-old profile on psychological testing (WISCR, Rorschach, TAT, Bender Gestalt, Figure Drawings); 2) chronological age and phase behavior of a six-year-old based on a clinical
interview with the child. The initial diagnostic clinical interview followed the framework outlined by Greenspan (1981) as well as his formulations for normal six-year-old psychological development.
Children were selected from the suburban Boston area and were in
the middle to upper-middle, white socioeconomic class. To be in the
study a child must have had an intact family unit at age six, no history
of severe or moderate psychological problems requiring professional
help, no physical abnormalities, chronic illness, or significant learning disability. Only children whose families could be expected to stay
in the Boston area and whose parents had no chronic illness, physical
disabilities, or moderate to severe psychological problems were selected. All the families remained intact throughout the study.
The children who participated in the study were extremely bright
and very verbally expressive. Their average I.Q. was 134 at age six. A
182
Rona Knight
183
lytic researchers who have documented reliability and validity for the
systematic investigation of these Rorschach measures. Both the Rorschach and TAT were also evaluated using Schafers sequence analysis (1954). Projective testing has traditionally been used in psychoanalytic research and has been proven to be a very effective clinical
measure (Holt & Luborsky, 1955).
One aspect of the Rorschach testing presented in this paper evaluated the childrens level and quality of object relationships. On the
Rorschach, the level of object relatedness was based on the subjects
ability to differentiate boundaries between objects, ranging from
merged to separate (Table I). Rating is based on the degree to which
an objects boundaries are described as distinct or separate from
one another. Merged responses indicate that the subject does not
feel himself as separate from the other, or yearns for an undifferentiated closeness. Separated responses indicate that the subject
experiences herself as separate and distinct from the other. Ledwith (1960) and Ames et al. (1974) have published many similar
TABLE I
Psychoanalytic Rorschach Profile
SCALE
LEVELS
SAMPLE RESPONSE
Object Relations
Differentiation
1. Merged
2. Merged to
Separating
3. Separate but
Connected
Connecting chairs.
Two crabs stuck together.
4. Separating/
Touching But
Distinct
5. Separate
Rona Knight
184
TABLE II
Psychoanalytic Rorschach Profile
SCALE
LEVELS
SAMPLE RESPONSE
EGO
STABILITY
1. Death
2. Fragmentation
Crumbled rocks
A cup broken in pieces
Example of One
Boys Sequence:
Age 5People
Age 6Two shoes, two knees, two chins
Age 7Two ladies smashing pumpkins
Age 8People
THOUGHT
PROCESSES
3. Incipient
Fragmentation
Decaying leaf
Humpty-Dumpty falling
4. Enduring
and Solid
Contamination
185
mentation as indicative of a severe problem with self and object integrity. Its presence in these normal children during certain phases
of development suggests a normal, temporary break-down in the
antecedent mode of object-connection and the concomitant establishment of self-coherence, indicative of a change from an enduring
state to one that is experienced as not yet integrated. Fragmentation in normal latency childrens protocols also appears in Ledwith
(1960).1
Clinical Interview: Each child was administered a semi-structured clinical interview, developed for this research to gather information
about the following: 1) self-esteem, 2) ego ideal, 3) body image, 4)
quality of interpersonal relatedness, 5) narcissism, 6) conscious and
unconscious feelings and their discharge, and 7) coping mechanisms
and their functioning. The principal investigator administered the
clinical interview. Each interview was tape recorded and transcribed.
The clinical interviews were not scored for this research paper; the
childrens responses were used to confirm and deepen the understanding of the test data.
Parent Questionnaire: Every four to six months the parents of each
child were asked to complete a 16-page parent questionnaire developed for this research. The questionnaire elicited information about
the childs ongoing feelings and attitudes about him/herself, fantasy
and dream material, general mood, relationships with family and
friends, behavior and performance in school, parents feelings and
behavior toward the child, and information about the parents feelings about themselves. The childs mother was asked to fill out the
entire questionnaire. The childs father was encouraged to contribute information for this questionnaire, and he was required to fill
out the part of the questionnaire that concerned his feelings and attitudes about the child and himself. Responses from the questionnaire
have not been scored as yet but were used anecdotally to further our
understanding of the test data.
Observation of Child in Play with Peers: Each child was observed annually and videotaped for 12 hours in free play with a friend in the
childs house. This information was not used in the present study.
Teacher Questionnaire: Two thirds of the way through the school year,
each childs teacher was asked to complete a questionnaire about the
1. Bibring (1959) also found a dramatic difference between the disturbed Rorschach responses of pregnant women and their everyday good functioning in the real
world.
186
Rona Knight
187
TABLE III
Rorschach Fragmentation and Separation Responses
For Five- to Eight-Year-Old Children
BOYS
AGE FIVE
AGE SIX
AGE SEVEN
AGE EIGHT
Solid
All Fragmented
Some Fragmentation
Solid
Not Separated
Separated
Separated
Separated
GIRLS
AGE SIX
AGE SEVEN
AGE EIGHT
Solid
Fragmented
early 8:
some fragmentation
late 8: Solid
Not Separated
Separated
Separated
188
Rona Knight
often increased their worries. One boys dream at age six illustrates
this conflict: There is a monster coming to the house and I run out.
I worry about what will happen to the family when I run away from
the house.
Oedipal defeat and the resulting narcissistic injury added to the
six-year-old boys feeling rejected by their mother and not nurtured
by her. Mothers were often pictured as dead or hurt. The boys were
sad and angry about their loss and unconsciously expressed their depression in explosive discharge. The main defenses they used to cope
with all these affects were intellectual and obsessive-compulsive defenses. Their ego control, judging from their teachers high ratings
of their concentration and behavior, was good enough to hold these
feelings at bay during school hours; however, parents reported that
the boys behavior at home was often aggressive and difficult to manage.
At age seven, the boys sense of oedipal defeat and their concommitant oedipal feelings continued. Most of the boys still made the connection between separation and the death of their parents. The boys
felt a push to be independent but were scared about being lost or in
danger on their own. They found two ways to cope with their anxiety
about still feeling little and being able to manage on their own in the
world. The boys started to see their fathers as very human, capable of
making mistakes, but also able to help and/or protect their sons
from danger. They also began to use the defense of magic to help
them cope with their fears of getting lost in this new, larger, more
dangerous world. One boys TAT story at age seven describes his faith
in his father: A boy is sitting there with nothing to do. . . . He goes
bird watching and gets lost. Then his father was coming home and he
found him and brang him home. The boy felt scared when he was
lost and good when his father found him. His story to a TAT card
with no picture on it shows his use of magic: Theres a boy right here
and hes lost in the woods so the forest animals lead him home. He
feels relieved that the forest animals know where his home is. The
mother and father thank the forest animals.
The boys developmental push for independence at age seven led
to their feeling much more independent at age eight. The boys experienced a conflict over feeling more independent because they still
had the same worries and needs they felt the year before. Separation
was still experienced as getting lost in a big world and still included
the total loss of parental objects. One boy showed some regression
back to more typical six-year-old responses on the Rorschach after
the death of his uncle, which increased his anxiety over parental loss.
189
Girls: While the six-year-old girls were all beginning to feel pushed
out into the big world by both their parents and their own drive toward separation, they were not yet as separated as the boys were at
this age. Their Rorschach protocols included responses like animals
and monsters with two heads, and a wall that split open but is still attached at the ground. Separating was associated with parents dying.
The following TAT story told at age six is representative of their separation concerns: The girl is going to school and shes staring at some
Indians coming. So shes going to run back to her family and tell her
family to run. Shes worried about the Indians killing her. Her parents are going to run but they get killed and she survives. None of
the girls had any fragmentation responses on a Rorschach at age six.
They were all still in the throes of the Oedipus complex, with the attendant concerns about body damage and death related to the oedipal struggle.
By age seven, five girls were feeling a lack of cohesion, with many
fragmentation responses in their Rorschach protocols. Five of the
seven-year-old girls showed evidence of having made a separation
based on their Rorschach responses and their TAT stories. They had
fantasies about going out into the world alone and having their own
houses. Their dreams and their conscious worries were about being
forcibly taken away from their homes by ghosts, monsters, and kidnappers, and separation often was associated with parental death.
The following TAT story told at age seven illustrates the girls feelings
of loss, sadness, and conflict around separating: This is a person crying cause her parents just died. And she came back to the house and
she dropped the keys on the floor and she started crying. She feels
sad, and shes thinking she wished she never moved away from her
parents home. At the end she finds out that this is a time that people
have to die. One girl had not achieved a sense of separation and also
had no fragmentation responses on the Rorschach. The absence of
unconscious feelings of a lack of integration and separation was paradoxical; for this girl separation meant total abandonment that led to
her own death, making her too anxious to tolerate a complete separation. While she was able to achieve appropriate separation in her
day-to-day life (based on teacher and parent questionnaires and clinical interviews), her responses on the projective testing indicated persistent unconscious difficulty in this area.
The seven-year-old girls were frequently preoccupied with pervasive loss, deprivation, and a need for nurturance. Like the boys, they
felt little in a big world. Oedipal defeat added to the girls sense of
loss. Stories in which men were perceived as dead, hurt, or deni-
190
Rona Knight
grated were frequent. The anger that the girls felt about their loss
took the forms of oppositional behavior and aggression turned
against the self and siblings. The girls defended against these feelings
by denying and avoiding strong aggressive and libidinal feelings.
Some girls used repression and/or intellectual and obsessive-compulsive defenses to close off or constrict their feelings and impulses.
Their increased anxiety around aggressive impulses led them to a
conflict over good and bad behavior, exemplified by the following
TAT story told at this age: The girl is sad. Her mother sent her to her
room because she had been bad. I have been a nasty little girl, she
thought. And she went to her room and fell asleep on the bed. (What
had she done?) She hurt her little brother. She hit him. Despite
strong aggressive feelings, they do not have the sense of these impulses getting as out of control that the eight-year-old boys experience.
By age eight, the girls who had separated felt psychically impoverished and felt they had to work hard to perform, leaving all of them
feeling tired but hopeful of becoming more competent as they got
older. Like the boys at seven, the eight-year-old girls use benevolent
magic to manage their anxiety about their separation and scary independence in the big world. Nurturance needs continued to increase
at age eight, which added to their conflict between wanting to stay little and wanting to grow up. One girls TAT story nicely describes the
need and the conflict: This is a little boy, and hes sitting on the step
of a barn door sucking his fingers watching his father feed the animals. And hes thinking that he doesnt want to grow up. He wants to
stay little cause his mother just read him Peter Pan. . . .
Table IV outlines the findings for the six- to eight-year-old girls and
boys.
middle latencyage nine years
By age nine, the latency separation process converges for both the
boys and the girls. They felt both an external push to grow up from
their parents and an internal push to grow up. Both the boys and the
girls were made extremely anxious by their newfound separateness.
Projective tests at this age showed a breakdown of defenses. Contamination and anthropomorphic responses appear frequently on the
Rorschach as well as a reporting of visual and/or auditory responses
not actually present on the Rorschach or TAT cards. For example,
one girl saw talking and hearing vibrations on the Rorschach. The
high degree of anxiety and emotional disturbance seen on the
191
TABLE IV
Summary of Findings for Ages Six to Eight Years
BOYS
AGE 6
AGE 7
1. Push to be independent
2. Concern about danger or getting
lost in the big world
3. Separation equated with the death
of both parents
4. Sense of damage
5. Oedipal defeat; mother experienced as dead
6. Sad and mad about loss of mother
7. Fear of explosive discharge;
oppositional behavior at home
8. Nurturance needs
GIRLS
1. Not separated
2. Feeling pushed out into
the world
3. Separation equated with
the death of both parents
4. Concern about body damage and death
5. Strong Oedipus Complex
Rona Knight
192
TABLE IV
Summary of Findings for Ages Six to Eight Years
BOYS
9. Magic used as defense
GIRLS
9. Aggressive feelings defended against with denial,
avoidance, repression, intellectual and obsessivecompulsive defenses
10. Conflict over good and
bad behavior
1. Conflict over growing up
2. Feeling small and damaged
3. Nurturance needs continue to increase
4. Feeling psychically impoverished; having to work
hard to perform
5. Oedipal concerns; denigrating men
6. Fear of parental loss
7. Magic used as a defense
193
much younger child. The external pressure to grow up that they experienced made them very angry and anxious about their ability to
function on their own and resulted in lowered self-esteem. One girls
dream illustrates the anxiety at this age: I am on a bridge with my
friends. I have just left my mother on one side, and me and my
friends are going to the other side. As I am crossing the bridge it begins to unsnap, and I am terrified me and my friends will fall. My
friends parents are on the other side, and they snap the bridge back
together again, and we can safely get across. Their concern about
not getting enough nurturance and their yearning for it can be seen
in the following TAT story: This boy is sitting here waiting cause his
mother is out shopping, and hes really hungry. Theyre poor. He
feels really hungry cause his mother is taking so long. (What is going
to happen?) His mother is going to come home with a lot of food,
and he is going to eat lots.
Boys: The nine-year-old boys responses tended to have a more separate, alone quality. They made a point of noting that the people they
saw on the Rorschach were separating or separate. This more developed sense of separation and autonomy often made them feel a
sense of isolation and disconnection from people. This TAT story exemplifies the cold, isolating quality of the boys sense of separateness:
One day there was a blizzard. And a man got locked out of his house
in the blizzard. By the time someone found him he was in a coma.
The person that found him took him to the hospital. Then his father
came and tried to wake him up, but he couldnt. The next day he
came out of his coma and lived happily ever after. (How did he get to
be so alone outside?) He was locked out in the wilderness and he
didnt live near anyone. Someone going down a road saw him.
While they expressed an unconscious sense of separateness and isolation, they were able to maintain very caring relationships with their
peers.
The boys at age nine responded to their sense of separateness with
either a constriction that held their affects at bay but kept them isolated, or maintained a connection at the expense of feeling anxious.
Two boys were able to stay connected while feeling separate, although they were both disturbed sufficiently to see and hear things
that werent there during times when they were experiencing separation. This could be seen in the flow of associations through several
TAT cards. For example, one boys response to TAT Card 4 was a
story about a wife and husband who separate and divorce. When the
next card (TAT Card 3BM) was presented to him, he told a story
about a boy who has amnesia and a case of seeing things that arent
194
Rona Knight
there. The boy is scared by what is happening to him. His story to the
next card presented (TAT Card 7BM) was about a boy who is separating from his father to go off to college. Responses on the Rorschach
also show the boys disturbance around separating: It looks like two
Chinese dancers or people of some kind. They are separate. Maybe
two big dogs playing patty cake with their back feet and their front
feet. Maybe two big Chinese dog dancers. They just finished clapping
and are about to separate and then it looks like they are about to collide. They are slapping so hard the red stuff is the noise. The red and
the sharpness look like noise. Concurrent with the boys feelings of
separation, projective testing showed that their aggressive and sexual
feelings can feel intense and out of control because their autonomous defenses do not hold as well as before. At times these feelings actually got out of control. Parents reported an increase in the
boys fighting with their siblings at this age.
Table V shows the findings for the nine-year-old girls and boys.
TABLE V
Summary of Findings for Age Nine Years
BOYS
1. Intense feelings of separation
2. Sense of aloneness and isolation in the separateness
3. Weakened defenses
3. Anxiety about separation
4. Constriction of affect in alonenesstwo boys
Anxiety in connectednesstwo boys
5. Aggressive and sexual feelings that can feel out of control; increased fighting
with siblings
6. Caring relationships with friends
GIRLS
1. Intense feelings of separation
2. Push toward peers
3. Weakened defenses
4. Anger about being pushed to grow up
5. Anxiety about being able to function independently
6. Lowered self esteem
7. Increased nurturance needs
8. Conflict over growing up
195
late latencypreadolescence
At ages ten and eleven another phase of separation and autonomy
begins to develop. This sense of separation is related to the hormonal/biological and cognitive changes occurring in preadolescence as well as attributable to the continued development of the
childrens feelings and experiences of attachment and separation experienced with their family and their peers. In this next phase, the
boys and girls diverge significantly, with the girls taking the lead in
the developmental process this time.
Girls Ages 10 and 11: The early latency phase of attachment and autonomy was revived and incorporated into this next phase of separation. At ages ten through eleven, concerns about connection and
separation re-occurred as the now late latency/preadolescent girls
began to experience the beginning of the adolescent separation-individuation phase described by Blos (1967). Typical responses on the
Rorschach were: two horseshoe crabs stuck together, two boys as the
same person going out on Halloween, and two animals back to back
about to go away from each other. This is a response that Ames et al.
(1974) also reported with their population of normal ten-year-olds.
Once again, fragmentation responses on the Rorschach appeared as
frequently as they did at age seven. This sense of a lack of integration
appeared in four out of the six girls Rorschach protocols at age ten,
and in five of the six girls protocols at age eleven. The one girl who
had no fragmentation responses at age seven, once again did not
have any. The variation of timing in this next separation phase suggests that this is a process that may occur over a longer period for
some children, and one that depends on the psychological, cognitive, hormonal, and physiological development of the individual
child. Based on mothers reports, five of the six girls were at Stage
Two of Tanners pubertal staging (1962) by age eleven, and one girl
had reached menarche at age ten years.
For the ten-and eleven-year-old girls, attachment and autonomy
meant a moving away from home base to create a life and world of
their own, with a knowledge that they could still return when they
wanted to or were needed at home. This is a very different scenario
from that of the seven-year-olds picture of separation, which entails
parental death. The following TAT story is an example of the different tone of this next phase: The ladys just thinking about her
friends and family, cause she just moved here, and she misses them.
She needs to find a job, but she doesnt know what kind of job she is
good at. Finally she decides shes going to be a shopkeeper. She
196
Rona Knight
thought she was old enough to move away so she moved. She will
start her own store and it will be okay. Frequently teachers were seen
as helping the girls achieve their goals, replacing parents, and friends
also filled in for family. The importance of the peer group for the
girls is demonstrated by the following story to the blank TAT card:
Gabrielle, age eleven, was starting to go to a new camp this year. She
was nervous. As she rode in the bus, she almost cried. But then she
thought of all her friends from school and cheered up. As it turned
out, it was the best summer of her lifefor friends, creativity, and
happiness. It was one of the best summers of her life, and she
couldnt wait til next summer.
This next phase of separation was not entirely free of fears and
conflicts. Three of the six girls had very real concerns about death,
which they applied to themselves and their loved ones. One girl had
the following dream about the possibility of death following separation: A week or two after we got our kitten, I had this dream that she
drowned. My friend dropped Lizzy [in the water] and we cried,
Shes drowned! I started diving underneath the water, and she was
at the bottom. I brought it up and started squeezing all the water out.
My friend appeared with the mother cat, and that made her feel better cause she was missing her mother.
Conflicts fused with anxiety about growing up were exceptionally
strong at ages ten and eleven. Contamination and anthropomorphic
responses were present in all of the girls Rorschach protocols, while
at the same time they were telling TAT stories about going off to college and being on their own. While change and separation were experienced as scary, these girls had a sense that they would survive it
and even fare well in the world. They didnt defend against these
feelings but tolerated the anxiety and sadness that comes with the
separation, bolstering themselves with a hope for a wonderful outcome. The one girl whose concern about separation was problematic
when she was seven was still concerned that she would not fare well
and described visions of homelessness, drudgery, and neglect, which
may be why she did not experience the more intense disconnection
that the other girls showed.
Along with this newfound sense of autonomy and its concomitant
feelings, oedipal concerns were more present again, and the girls experienced a surge of aggressive and sexual feelings that at times
would break through their defenses and overwhelm them. The girls
conflict about growing up at this point was also a response to their
anxiety about their intense sexual and aggressive feelings at this age.
They felt a need to be taken care of and nurtured by their mothers,
197
Rona Knight
198
TABLE VI
Summary of findings for Ages Ten and Eleven Years
GIRLS
BOYS
this age. While this appears related to their sexual and aggressive
feelings, there is also a quality of a wish to return to lost oedipal objects. The following TAT story expresses this wish: This lady was the
wife of the guy who got in the car accident. He died and so did her
kid and then she lost her job. So she got really depressed and she
committed suicide cause thats a gun right there.
Table VI summarizes the findings for the ten- and eleven-year-old
boys and girls.
Discussion
Analysis of the responses of these ten children outlines a process of
attachment and autonomy that occurred in two waves, one during
early latency and another in preadolescence. In both waves there is
evidence of a change in the antecedent mode of object connection
and the concomitant breakdown of self-coherence. The developmental task of negotiating dyadic and triadic relationshipsattachment as well as separation and autonomyis an ongoing process
that starts in infancy and continues throughout the life cycle. It is emphasized in latency when children must negotiate another level of internal separation and independence from their family as they join
the world of their peers.
200
Rona Knight
201
202
Rona Knight
203
fears of managing on their own as they felt more separated and alone
in the larger, challenging world. This supports Anna Freuds (1936)
and Sarnoffs (1976) finding that fantasy is used as a major defense
in the latency period, and the use of magic within that defense is significant. The boys in this study also felt they could rely on their fathers to help them manage difficulties in the world outside the family. One interesting finding was that the girls in the study did not feel
they could rely on their parents in the same way as the boys, and
demonstrated an oral neediness that grows in intensity throughout
the latency period as well as a sense of being tired at times by the task
of growing up. These findings are illustrated in the Harry Potter
stories (Rowling, 19982003). Harry has his god-father, his friend
Rons father and brothers, and several male teachers to help him
avoid dangers as he grows up in the magical world of Hogwarts.
Hermione, by contrast, has parents that are of no help to her, and
she has to study magic very hard (sometimes taking two classes at the
same time), relying on her wits to help her and Harry along the way
(Harry relies on her ).
The cultural and psychological implications that allow boys to see
their fathers as helping figures while girls cannot use their mothers
(or fathers) in a similar way during this phase of identification with
the same sex parent must be considered. All of the girls mothers
worked part-time in professional positions, yet the girls could not
imagine their mothers as helping figures in the world outside of the
home in their fantasy.
One possible explanation for the different reactions of the boys
and girls has to do with gender identification processes in early latency. Mahler (1981) addressed the gender difference in the first
separation phase, noting that the boy has his father to support and
maintain his personal and gender identity, while the girl, in her separation from the post-infancy mother, has a much more difficult and
complicated task to attain and maintain her sense of self because her
relationship with her mother carries the burden of threatening regressions.
In latency, boys identify with their fathers and their sense of their
fathers more competent position in the outside world. The girls
TAT stories often expressed a sense of tiredness related to independent functioning in the world. The girls in this study may have identified with their mothers tiredness from having to maintain two jobs
work and family care, and/or their mothers overriding maternal
function of being the main caretaker of the basic needs of the home
and children. Stephen King (1983) nicely expressed this male-female
204
Rona Knight
role dichotomy: What your mother leaves you is mostly good hardheaded practical adviceif you cut your toenails twice a month you
wont get so many holes in your socks; put that down you dont know
where its been . . . but its from your father that you get the magic,
the talismans, the words of power (p. 36). This component of the
girls identification with their mothers, when combined with their
lowered self-esteem, may sometimes leave them feeling that they are
not competent enough to be completely out in the world.
Another explanation for this gender difference may be found in
the remains of the late oedipal phase conflict. In this study, the early
latency boys unconsciously experienced their mothers as dead to
them, while the girls unconsciously experienced their fathers in this
same way. In their effort to break their oedipal tie to their fathers, the
girls need to distance themselves internally from their fathers, and
therefore do not have them as available as the boys do to help them
in their fantasy working through of the present stage of separation.
This might make the girls feel they have to bank on their own resources, which would increase nurturance needs in the face of moving out in the world without the internal reliance on their fathers.
Their increased need to rely more on their own resources may add to
their feelings of lowered self-esteem by the age of nine.
Two of the boys felt an intense sense of disconnection at age nine
that the girls didnt have. It is interesting to note that the two boys
who retained a sense of connection at age nine both had mild learning difficulties, requiring them to remain more dependent on their
mothers for help with their school work and the structuralization of
their environment. Chodorow (1989) suggested that the masculine
personality is founded on the denial of relational needs out of the
difference in social attachments that evolve out of the oedipal configuration, requiring the boy to more fully repress his primary relationship and, consequently, the degree of dependency attached to it.
While this finding supports her theoretical position, the relational
picture is more complicated.
The nine- to eleven-year-old boys in this study, while feeling internally disconnected and isolated, maintained caring peer relationships. Their unconscious feelings of disconnection seemed to be a response to their internal experience of separation, but did not
necessarily lead to a denial of relational needs in their peer relationships. Their attachment and loyalty to a primary, close male friend
was much more constant than the girls friendships were during
these years. However, the quality of the connection did seem to be dif-
199
205
206
Rona Knight
207
age nine, when both boys and girls consolidate their more independent and autonomous functioning. Late latency/preadolescence
would begin at age ten in girls and ten/twelve years in boys, when
another phase of separation and autonomy begins. If this theoretical
hypothesis holds true, then girls have a much shorter period of latency development than most boys do, and consequently dont have
as much time to consolidate their growth during this developmental
phase before they have to cope with another major developmental
shift to preadolescence.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abrams, S., & Solnit, A. (1998). Development and analytic technique. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 46:85:104.
(2003). Looking forwards and backwards. Psychoanalytic Study of the
Child, 58:172186.
Ames, L., Metraux, R., Rodell, J., & Walker, R. (1974). Child Rorschach Responses. New York: Bruner Mazel.
Bibring, G. (1959). Some considerations of the psychological processes in
pregnancy. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 14:113 121.
Blatt, S. (1988). The assessment of change during the intensive treatment
of borderline and schizophrenic young adults. Psychoanalytic Psychology,
5:127158.
Blatt, S. et al. (1976). Normal development and psychopathological impairment of the concept of the object on the Rorschach. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 85:364 373.
Blos, P. (1967). The second individuation process of adolescence. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 22:162186.
Bornstein, B. (1951). On latency. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 6:279
285.
Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment. New York: Basic Books.
Burke, W., Friedman, G., & Gorlitz, P. (1988). The psychoanalytic Rorschach profile: An integration of drive, ego, and object relations. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 5:194 212.
Buxbaum, E. (1980). Between the Oedipus complex and adolescence: The
quiet time. In The Course of Life. Volume II: Latency, Adolescence and Youth,
Eds. S. I. Greenspan & G. H. Pollock. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government
Printing Office, pp. 121135.
Chodorow, N. J. (1989). Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
Cramer, B. (1975). Outstanding developmental progression in three boys:
A longitudinal study. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 30:15 48.
Emde, R. N. (1988). Development terminable and interminable. Considera-
208
Rona Knight
209
210
Rona Knight
hood. Eds. S. I. Greenspan & G. H. Pollock. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, pp. 177202.
Sarnoff, C. (1976). Latency. New York: Aronson.
Schafer, R. (1954). Psychoanalytic Interpretation in Rorschach Testing. New
York: Grune & Stratton.
Shapiro, T., & Perry, R. (1976). Latency revisited: The age 7 plus or minus
1. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 31:79 106.
Simon, B. (1991). Is the Oedipus complex still the cornerstone of psychoanalysis? Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 39:641 668.
Stern, D. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic Books.
Tanner, J. M. (1962). Growth at Adolescence, 2nd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell
Scientific Publications.
Tyson, P., & Tyson, R. (1990). Psychoanalytic Theories of Development: An Integration. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Williams, M. (1972). Problems of technique during latency. Psychoanalytic
Study of the Child, 27:598 620.
CLINICAL STUDIES
Training and supervising analyst and Head of Child Division, Columbia University
Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.
Presented as the Robert Kabcenell Memorial Lecture, New York Psychoanalytic Institute, March 9 2004.
The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 60, ed. Robert A. King, Peter B. Neubauer,
Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling (Yale University Press, copyright 2005 by
Robert A. King, Peter B. Neubauer, Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling).
213
214
Karen Gilmore
I can laugh whatever I like to laugh,
Theres nobody here but me.
From In the Dark, by A. A. Milne
215
Child analysts are very well acquainted with the coercive as well as
the generative effects (Ogden 2004) that accompany playing out a
child patients narrative. Like enactments, i.e. symbolic interactions
between analyst and patient which have unconscious meaning to
both (Chused 1991), play typically reveals that the analyst is both
playing a role in, and serving as author of, someone elses unconscious fantasy (Ogden 2004) that inevitably reverberates with her
own.
However, play differs from enactments in that it is, either implicitly
or explicitly, make-believe. Playing in the analytic setting establishes a space without real consequences (Freud 1917) where communication between the child and analyst can occur at the developmental level of the child in a state that is demarcated as meaningful
and yet not real. While both action and verbalization are involved,
what is optimally achieved is an intersubjective exchange in the mutual state of playing where transformation of the childs anxieties and
defenses can be accomplished by the analysts clarifications, reciprocal engagement, and interpretive work. This phenomenon is comparable to the analytic third as conceptualized by Ogden (2003) or by
Bromberg as space for thinking between and about the patient and
the analyst (1999) in adult work. In child analysis, this state is concretely anchored to favored play objects endowed with layers of
meaning, both explicit and unconscious (Abrams 1988), and it is
represented in the idiosyncratic play themes that emerge and evolve
as a product of the child and the analysts conscious and unconscious
communication in the course of an analysis.
But more fundamental than these tangible artifacts is the intersubjective mutual state of playing that characterizes each patient/analyst relationship and that sustains and is in turn transformed through
the metaphors of the evolving play narratives and props. Because the
playing analyst, to be truly effective, must fully engage in playing
(Birch 1997, Yanof 1996, Cohen and Cohen 1993), the play is inevitably co-created and contains elements from the unconscious of
both patient and analyst, although the patients contribution is privileged by the nature of the endeavor. Beyond mastering the typical
countertransference anxieties around regression and instinctual discharge, child analysts ideally have remastered the capacity to play
without condescension or self-consciousness and to maintain a consciousness divided between the analytic and the playing function
wherein the analyst is tuned into that particular childs inner life.
In child work where playing is prominent, there are layers of diagnostic, dynamic, and transference meanings within the play, as well as
216
Karen Gilmore
in the freedom with which the child reveals his personal state of
playing and in the manner with which the child draws the analyst
into the play and allows the emergence of an intimate dialogue. I believe that the child analyst, more than any other professional who
works with children, most consistently attempts to enter the childs
inner world and go beyond the typical array of self-protective barriers that children present to grown-ups. Both child patient and analyst
must be willing to engage wholeheartedly (Birch 1999, Yanof 1996)
in the conceptual world (Cohen and Cohen 1993) that the childwith-the-analyst creates. Over time, the analyst readily launches herself into the singular world of her patients state of playing, a world
whose rhythms, rules, and rituals as well as opportunities for therapeutic work are unique and to some extent idiosyncratic to the particular individual and the dyad; among these are the pathological
adaptations that can be addressed best by being in that world with
the child. This state includes unconscious communication and intuitive leaps that can result in dramatic shifts in the childs tolerance
for affects and rejected self-representations.
As for the child patient, even young children know, within a short
time, that playing with an analyst is a very different business from
playing alone or even with another child or adult. Playing with the
analyst is all at once revealing the self, drawing the other into a private world, and tolerating an openness to a dialogue which now subjects his psychic experience to modification and mentalization
here used to mean the establishment of links between drive-affect
and mental representation that are gradually identified and elaborated verbally (Lecours and Bouchard 1997). Of course, children differ a great deal in their guardedness around this threshold, but
bridging it is a crucial moment in the treatment. This is the moment
where the child admits the analyst into his private world, by no
means without its own resistances and defensive organizations, but
the juncture marks a point where the treatment relationship reaches,
to borrow a favorite video game metaphor, the next level.
Insights from Developmental Studies
Before describing the work with Andy, I will frame the discussion
against a backdrop of a selective review of some pertinent formulations of how early experience within the mother-baby relationship
serves as the birthplace for shared intersubjectivity which in turn
stimulates the interrelated set of ego-capacities that are at question
here, allowing a more informed speculation about how Andys par-
217
218
Karen Gilmore
potential of the infant cannot become an infant without the maternal care, which in infancy is guided predominantly by maternal empathy. This maternal matrix facilitates the tolerance of anxiety,
structured integration of the personality, the dawn of intelligence
and the beginning of the mind (p. 45). Winnicotts ideas also underscore the fact that neurotic conflict as it emerges in childhood occurs
in a mind already stamped by its interaction with its particular environment, the product of a complex transaction that begins within
the first days of life.
As the study of the self began to eclipse the ego in the literature,
the emergence of the self as a developmental accomplishment increasingly occupied infant observers and researchers (Mahler and
McDevitt 1982, Stern and Sander 1980, Emde 1983, Pine 1982). In
1985, Stern drew upon his infant observational studies to posit that a
very early existential sense of self, or rather a number of senses of
self, predate language development and self-reflective capacities
and are both revealed by subsequent development and transformed
by it. Among the senses he identified are the senses of agency, of
physical cohesion, of continuity in time, of having intentions in
mind . . . the sense of a subjective self that can achieve intersubjectivity with another, the senses of creating organization and the sense of
transmitting meaning (pp. 67). The presence of the other is crucial for self-regulation of affect and somatic experience and indeed
has a central role in defining the infants primary self-state. Between
seven and nine months, the human infant discovers that the other
has a mind of her own and that that mind can be engaged in sharing
subjective experience. Indeed, infancy research offers a series of elegantly simple paradigms, such as Tronicks still face, the visual cliff,
and theory of mind studies, that underscore the parallel strands of
the infants and young childs expectation of mutuality and engagement with the significant other even as he is increasingly able to realize the fundamental separateness of the others mental state, ranging
from beliefs and desires to available mental contents that inform him
about the world.
The notion that the same interpersonal process that produces
emotional recognition and regulation, reflective function, and self
and object constancy also is central for the birth of symbolic capacity
and imaginary play began with Anna Freuds Normality and Pathology
in Childhood (1965). The very young infant neither distinguishes self
from object nor is able to manipulate symbols and . . . the emergence
of each process is importantly interrelated with that of the other
(Drucker 1979). For example, social referencing referred to above,
219
i.e. looking at the mothers face for affective guidance, is a developmental milestone that highlights the presence of self-other differentiation. Moreover, it shows that the infant is available to receive the
attribution of meanings to objects and circumstances from the
mother, an essential step in the development of symbolic capacity
and imagination. The infant relates not only to the world as perceptually specified, but also to someone elses psychological relation to
that same world . . . [More important than mere information about
the world], this configuration of experience affords an infant the opportunity to learn that given objects and events can have multiple,
person-related meanings. The meaning-for-me is not necessarily the
meaning-for-her (Hobson 1993). This remarkably rich developmental moment captures as in a freeze-frame the complex process
whereby the infant learns to use the mothers affective signal to
guide both his own affect and his actions, a process which, when internalized, provides a key component of future self-regulation of affect. In addition, this same moment illuminates the infants recognition of separateness, the intersubjectivity of his mental state as he
obtains the required affective guidance from his mothers expression, and the process through which meanings of things are conferred by minds. With these developments comes the possibility that
objects and their meaning can be assigned and transformed by creative invention on a personal, interpersonal, or cultural level. Thus,
the child achieves the developmental level required for symbolic
play.
Another tradition within infant observational studies underscores
the crucial role of contingency detection, an infant capacity that is
demonstrable within the first months of life. Interestingly, this capacity has also been shown to figure as a key component in the development of narcissistic integrity and the capacity for make-believe.
Broucek, reviewing the relevant research prior to 1979, observes that
the infants discovery that a contingency exists between his own activity and the occurrence of external events is a fundamental building
block in the infants development of self-feeling and narcissistic integrity; violations of contingency expectation early in life can instigate withdrawal and avoidance, infantile defenses against traumatic
helplessness and impotence. This is beautifully demonstrated in
Tronicks still-face experiment where violation of the infants expectations that his mothers facial expression will vary in response to his
own communicative expressiveness results in disorganization and
withdrawal (Gergely and Watson 1996).
In more recent studies, Gergely (1996) calls upon the infants sen-
220
Karen Gilmore
221
ego organization and adaptations and are rarely called upon to perform in as many diverse arenas as the average school child. The adult
will presumably manifest less distress and symptomatology around
chronic exposure to impossible environmental demands and can
avoid confrontation with areas of relative weakness by his choice of
profession and pastimes. The child analyst thus faces a diagnostic
and clinical challenge where the multiple transactions among nature, nurture, history, on-going development, and environmental expectations and demands are all intermingled and clearly contribute
to the childs suffering.
In the following, I will tell you more about Andy who, despite early
indications to the contrary, fell within what I consider to be the usual
contemporary range of analyzable childhood psychopathology, i.e.
he fell within the spectrum of neurotic/developmentally uneven/
dysregulated patients who are the staple of contemporary child analytic practice. The degree to which his psychology was influenced by
a documented developmental strain due to markedly uneven cognitive and physical maturation is, I believe, both considerable and commonplace. Elsewhere, I and others (Gilmore 2000, Greenspan 1989,
Cohen 1991) have suggested that our current thinking, enhanced by
our greatly improved assessment techniques, allows us to take into account the impact of developmental idiosyncrasy on the evolving
structure of the mind; that is, we are able to identify and consider the
way that the unique individual developmental profile shapes and organizes the evolving personality and defines its potential. I would
speculate that Andys extraordinary degree of uneven ego endowment, with marked delays in coordination, visuo-spatial integration,
and sustained alert attentiveness, and his low thresholds for frustration and stimulation tolerance impacted his sense of efficacy and his
availability for easy interpersonal exchange from the outset. His vulnerabilities diminished his opportunities for the early repeated experience of joy, self-satisfaction, and parental admiration in the routine
fine and gross motor accomplishments of early childhood. These
considerations, plus the report of maternal depression in the first
year of life and his parents orientation toward emotionality in general, support hypotheses about the complex bio-psycho-social underpinnings of this boys particular difficulties when he presented in
early latency, which included the absence of unstructured play, intolerance of affect, impulsivity, and a markedly constricted inner life.
The working hypotheses which thus guided Andys treatment accumulated over the course of my work with him. I offer them here in
advance to show the interweaving of the developmental, diagnostic,
222
Karen Gilmore
and dynamic issues as they served to light the way in what sometimes
seemed a discouraging darkness. To my way of thinking, they represent a complex series of interacting influences which determined,
exacerbated, triggered, and were recruited by each other:
1. Andy did not play because innate constitutional factors, especially
his limited capacity to sustain quiet alertness and focus (ADHD) and
his reduced proclivity toward object relatedness (non-verbal learning
disability), diminished his availability for early engagement with his
mother, where affect regulation and imaginary play find their origins.
2. Andy did not play because his mother was depressed during the crucial first year of life and was unable to engage her hard-to-engage
child.
3. Andy did not play because his sense of personal agency and his
pleasure in his own productions were compromised by his motor and
visuo-motor deficits.
4. Andy did not play because ego weaknesses, interference in maternal attunement, and, possibly, constitutional factors, heightened his
fear of his affects and his difficulty developing signal function.
5. Andy did not play because his narcissistic fragility and sense of internal impoverishment inhibited the development of fantasy and the
expression of creativity.
6. Andy did not play because affective expression was devalued in his
family and precocious intellectuality was strongly prized. Obsessional
defenses against his constitutionally determined impulsivity were reinforced by his intellectual, workaholic parents; coupled with his
perfectionism and his fear of his own affects, these defenses further
squelched his freedom to play creatively.
223
224
Karen Gilmore
one night and ran several blocks, across busy intersections, before being apprehended by a policeman.
What was most striking in my conversation with his concerned parents was their lack of awareness of Andys mental life or, for that matter, of subjective or interpersonal experience in general. Well educated, well intentioned, and exceedingly busy professionals, they
conveyed bewildered sympathy for their sons situation, reacting with
dismay tinged with a kind of abashed perplexity and frustration, but
at the same time suggesting that everyone was exaggerating the seriousness of his disturbance. They complied with the schools insistence on a shadow teacher but viewed it as alarmist. This posture
previewed their reaction to the recommendation for analysis. Later
in the first year of treatment, Andys mother, who was herself in an
on-going treatment, acknowledged her own significant depression
during Andys first year of life precipitated by her fathers death. She
also articulated a tension between herself and her husband and indeed his entire extended family. She had come to recognize that as
she increasingly gave voice to her feelings, she felt peripheralized as
an excessive worrier, a mother hen, in a culture characterized by a
casual but somewhat implacable denial of danger and distress and a
humorous disregard for anyone who was frightened or who visibly
emoted. The mother seemed unable to sustain her position in the
face of this attitude, lapsing into a kind of hapless posture, as if,
Woody Allen-like, she was just being neurotic.
This quality in Andys parents highlighted to me how much we as
analysts rely on parents to provide a context for our growing understanding of their child. The idiosyncrasies of their own dynamics and
the dynamics of their relationship as it emerges willy-nilly in the consulting room, their reflections on their own psychologies and their
personal histories, their complaints about each other or their child,
their blind spots, kindnesses, and cruelties accrue in our experience
of the parents and facilitate our capacity to understand our patients
experience. In meeting with parents, I am often aware of a process of
identification with my child patient, which emerges as a reverie about
what it feels like to be both the present-day child and the very young
infant of these people: what are the rituals of interaction, the shared
assumptions, the unspoken expectations about engagement, the
ease and continuity of on-going experience (Pine 1982)?
Parents transparency in terms of their representation of themselves, their relationship, and the portrait of their child that develops
in the course of the work reflects their willingness to openly engage
with the analyst in helping their child; to some extent this corre-
225
sponds to their own self-reflective capacity, as well as to the particularities of their individual dynamics and psychopathology. As suggested above, the parents own reflective function has been robustly linked to secure attachment (Main and Hesse 2000) and to the
childs capacity to experience his drives and affects as mental contents (Lecours and Brouchard 1997) and to maintain a theory of
mind. Andys parents opacity adumbrated the powerful interference within the analysis, that is, the absence of the medium of play.
Work with the parents over the course of Andys treatment involved a
process of establishing an arena of communication which capitalized
on their considerable intellect and investment in his cognitive development. For example, at one point, his mother observed that she was
able to reinvigorate his fathers commitment to the treatment by reminding him of how much Andys fine motor skills had improved,
presumably because we drew together.
Early in our relationship, Andy announced: Im an oxymoron,
proof of which, he suggested, was his wish to die, while everyone
wanted just the opposite for him. He then proceeded to demonstrate his global determination to do the opposite; for example, he
insisted that any activity he agreed to participate in must be done lefthanded and claimed to be left-handed, which he is not. He did not
play and he seemed most emphatically unwilling to talk, even about
the mundane facts of his life. When I tried to explore any topic, especially one that bore on him and his mind, he would silence me by saying, Stop talking, Im trying to think . . . and then, after multiple
false starts that seemed to lack specific content, he insisted that he
couldnt explain what he was thinking and besides, you wouldnt understand. He spat surreptitiously into the garbage can. He attempted some drawing and coloring, but in such microscopic dimensions that he became agitated and inconsolable as his attempts
proved unsatisfactory. On other occasions he would simply stand
stock-still and stare at the clock. Even after Andy settled into the routine of treatment, he consistently began our sessions by flopping himself upside down on a chair or floor cushion with his buttocks in the
air facing me, a posture I have suggested is his opposite way of declaring that Im the butt-face. While this behavior ultimately yielded
to interpretation, there is no doubt that Andy relied on oppositionality as a defense against the variety of encroachments that beset him
when he first presented and which continued to threaten his tenuous
narcissistic balance, among which I include myself. But as his oppositionality alternated with a worrisome potential for compliance, also
expressed in presenting his butt submissively to me, I recognized the
226
Karen Gilmore
227
228
Karen Gilmore
229
day. In fact it was the rare exception that a motif generated one day
was taken up the next; there was none of the often preemptory drivenness of the child patient who is playing out important thematic
conflicts in displacement, who comes in knowing just where the play
left off and easily reestablishes continuity.
Andy returned to school without any medication and when 4
months later, Strattera, a new non-stimulant ADHD medication, was
finally introduced, his parents and I agreed to try it. I hoped that
Andy would accept this medicine because it had an initial sedative
effect and could provide relief for his chronic sleep onset insomnia. Overall, on a relatively low dose of Strattera, Andys insomnia,
marked hyperkinesis, and restlessness improved; moreover, the Strattera seemed to have little effect on Andys conscious experience, and
therefore did not generate the same resistant response that he was
able to mount to the stimulants. Nonetheless he told me some time
later that while he appreciated the improved sleep, he didnt like the
idea of medicine, whether he actually noticed it or not.
Andys progress in the past two years of treatment has been considerable, with a dramatic cessation of disruptive meltdowns, improvement in frustration tolerance and in overall functioning. But the analytic relationship continues to feel to him like a judgment of
abnormality and a deprivation because I do not provide ideas for
play and do not assert my personal agenda beyond the attempt to
know him.
I began to think about Andys quality of relatedness, his transference in the broad sense, and to consider how rarely I experienced intersubjectivity (Birch 1997) or even a sense of his desire for joint visual attention (Scaife and Bruner 1975), that typical developmental
marker of the infant who is just beginning to appreciate the idea that
mothers mind differs from his own and must be actively engaged. In
the assessment period, he frequently responded to my interest in
what was on his mind as if I were, like the intrusive medication, trying
to disrupt his control of his thoughts. While this seemed to improve
to the extent that he did not forcibly attempt to silence me, he was
unable to generate any activity where we engaged in mutual discovery and elaboration of meaning. Often, when he engaged in some
motor task like tracing a picture, I would realize that he had gradually turned his back to me. Other activities he proposed, often in response to my observation of his disengagement, were attempts to
trick me, by definition an avoidance of a shared mental state. Without my intervention, Andy most readily lapsed into his default position, his tuning out state of mind, a state as closed to introspection
230
Karen Gilmore
as it was to my inspection, but which protected him from any experience of interpersonal desire or vulnerability. I regularly observed
Andys use of this tuning out to slip into an ego-state unavailable
for communication and intersubjectivity; at times this appeared as a
visible shift in his attention which in some children marks the intrusion of inner fantasy or preoccupation. While I initially approached
these disappearances with the confidence that he was internally occupied, I came to realize that Andys access to his inner life was also
compromised; he described a frustrated, stymied feeling, a sense of
pressure, and an absence of specific content. Andy certainly was not
eager to engage in an open communication with me, but this was at
least in part because he simply did not have the tools to do so. In order to even establish contact I had to break through his self-absorbed
inwardness with my increasingly plaintive refrain, Play with me!
Over time, I was able to show Andy how he made me the left-out little
one in this passive to active enactment where I was yearning to make
contact with someone so withdrawn or preoccupied that I was quite
unnoticed. I could also sample the frustration and anger that this neglect engendered. While Andy concurred with the fact of this connection by saying, My parents never play with me; thats why I dont
know how to play with you, he demurred about the associated affect,
once again denying his loneliness and distress.
It was clear that for Andy, emotional expression was fraught with
potentially catastrophic narcissistic consequences. As mentioned earlier, he interpreted any sign of intensity in me with alarm and did his
best to neutralize his own emotions. Only unmodulated disruptive affects (Lecours and Bouchard 1997) could force themselves into full
expression, as in his so-called melt-downs, those inarticulate chaotic tantrums, which at this point were rare events and hardly ever occurred in my view. Affects that were better contained and potentially
verbalizable were apparently experienced as intolerably demeaning,
and were vigorously disavowed. I was struck over and over again by
Andys effort to be objective and to eschew the range of emotion that
most people experience. In fact, in the treatment relationship, his
mirroring my neutrality was far more successful than my capacity to
maintain it! In one session, I recalled his apparent willingness to be
wildly out of control in the opening months of our acquaintance;
but, when the dust settled, he admitted to almost no emotions at all.
To this he replied, maybe other people have more, but I just have
two big emotions: frustration and embarrassment.
Andys stance was clearly an identification with and an attempt to
please his father, but this identification had a far-reaching impact on
231
232
Karen Gilmore
233
sue him. The transference meanings of his complaint, i.e. its history
in his relationship to his father, was less available than its defensive
function in the here and now. I had ample opportunity to see that
this posture protected him against the frightening feeling that he
couldnt think of anything, that his thoughts and intentions seemed
to drift out of his mind, that his attempts at creativity were strained
and empty, and that he was just an ordinary sad and lonely kid, and
therefore unlovable. Not unexpectedly, these rare moments of openly
expressed resentment toward me, which of course were at once displacements of painful states experienced in relation to others, expressions of on-going transference themes, and a way to engage with
me and keep me at a distance all at once, were typically followed by a
rapprochement which was certainly motivated in part by guilt and
anxiety. When I observed once more how difficult it was for him to
talk about feelings with me and to feel comfortable having feelings
about me, he said with great poignancy,
One is the loneliest number that youll ever do
(But) Two can be as bad as one,
Its the loneliest number since the number one.
(From One, by Three Dog Night)
234
Karen Gilmore
235
ration of a dream with a less exacting requirement for logic and reality, even in latency-age children fully capable of concrete operational
thought. Moreover, this state is more or less porous to the analysts
playing participation, as the child dictates how much input the analyst is permitted, and the analyst assumes a playing state informed by
her growing knowledge of the patient and her appreciation of the
boundaries of play in its interface with direct expression of drive derivatives and consequential action. Inevitably, the analysts play state
is also informed by her own unconscious mentation and her countertransference toward the particular patient. The resilience and stability of the playing state are unique to the individual child and his relationship to the specific analyst, because once the state of playing is
produced in the treatment it becomes an intersubjective medium
with its own conventions and its objects, whose historical meanings
are gradually transformed as they become incorporated into the history of this new relationship, just as transference paradigms and historical memories show plasticity and evolution in the course of adult
analysis (Rizzuto 2003).
In regard to this evolution, I believe that despite the considerable
controversy about the therapeutic value of playing in and of itself
(Mayes and Cohen 1993, Scott 1998, Cohen and Solnit 1993), the
transformation that child analysis facilitates and which the child patient anticipates, is achieved primarily through verbalization while in the
state of playing. Child analytic literature certainly abounds with clinical reports where a significant therapeutic benefit is gained by the facilitation of previously inhibited or chaotic playing without explicit
interpretation of conflict (Birch 1997, Mayes and Cohen 1993, Slade
1994). Nonetheless, in all such instances, the analysts verbalizations
are a central, transforming element, much like the mothers transformation of the infants chaotic experience into discrete affects, recognizable self-states, and familiar interpersonal exchange by her naming and dialogical prosody. As Rizzuto (2003) declared in a recent
paper on the transformation of self-experience in adult treatment,
Analysis is the second instance in life in which another person tries persistently to ascertain the internal experiences and needs of the subject by naming, describing and interpreting them with his or her own
speech. (p. 293)
I believe that the same process occurs in the play dialogue of child
analysis; in a comparable way, narratives about the self are made coherent, disavowed self-representations are clarified and modified to
permit reintegration, nameless and disorganizing anxieties are named
and organized, and dissociated self-states are open to contact both
236
Karen Gilmore
intrapsychically and interpersonally through the analysts participation and verbalizations within the state of playing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abrams, S. 1988. The Psychoanalytic Process in Adults and Children. Psychoanal. St. Child, 43:245 261.
1993. The Developmental Dimensions of Play during Treatment:
Conceptual Overview. In, The Many Meanings of Play, ed. Solnit et al., New
Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 221228.
Birch, Marian. 1997. In the Land of Counterpane: Travels in the Realm of
Play. Psychoanal. St. Child, 52:5775.
Bromberg, P. 1996. Standing in the Spaces: The Multiplicity of Self and the
Psychoanalytic Relationship. Contemp. Psychoanal., 32:509 535.
Broucek, F. (1979) Efficacy in Infancy: A Review of Some Experimental
Studies and Their Possible Implications for Clinical Theory. Int. J. PsychoAnal., 60:311316.
Chused, J. F. 1991. The Evocative Power of Enactments. J. Amer. Psychoanal.
Assn., 39:615 639.
2000. Discussion: A Clinicians View of Attachment Theory. J. Amer.
Psychoanal. Assn., 48, pp. 1175 1188.
Clyman, R. 1991. The Procedural Organization of Emotions: A Contribution from Cognitive Science to the Psychoanalytic Theory of Therapeutic
Action.J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 39S:349 382.
Cohen, D. 1991. Tourettes Syndrome: A Model Disorder for Integrating Psychoanalysis and Biological Perspectives. Int. R. Psycho-Anal., 18:195208.
Cohen, P. & Cohen, M. 1993. Conceptual Worlds: Play, Theatre, and Child
Psychoanalysis. In, The Many Meanings of Play, ed. A. J. Solnit, D. J. Cohen,
P. B. Neubauer. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 75 98.
Cohen, P. & Solnit, A. 1993. Play and Therapeutic Action. Psychoanal. St.
Child, 48:49 63.
Drucker, J. 1979. The Affective Context and Psychodynamics of First Symbolization. In, Symbolic Functioning in Childhood, ed. N. Smith and M. Franklin. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers, pp. 27 40.
Emde, R. 1983. The Prerepresentational Self and Its Affective Core. Psychoanal. St. Child 38:165 182.
Fonagy, P. & Moran, G. 1991. Understanding Psychic Change in Child Psychoanalysis. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 72:15 22
Fonagy, P., Moran, G., & Target, M. 1998. An Interpersonal View of the Infant. In Psychoanalysis and Developmental Therapy, ed. Anne Hurry. Psychoanalytic Monograph No, 3, Madison, Conn.: IUP, pp. 3 31.
Freud, A. 1965. Normality and Pathology in Childhood: Assessments of Development. The Writings of Anna Freud Volume VI. New York: Int. Univ. Press
(1970).
237
238
Karen Gilmore
Meaning and Representation, ed. A. Slade and D. Wolf. New York: Oxford
University Press, pp. 81110.
Solnit, A. 1987. A Psychoanalytic View of Play. Psychoanal. Study Child, 42:205
219.
Sorce, J. & Emde, R. N. 1981. Mothers Presence Is Not Enough: Effect of
Emotional Availability on Infant Exploration. Developmental Psychol., 17:737
745.
1985. Maternal Emotional Signaling: Its Effect on the Visual Cliff Behavior of 1-year-olds. Devel. Psychol., 21:195 200.
Stern, D. & Sander, L. (1980) New Knowledge about the Infant from Current Research: Implications for Psychoanalysis. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn.,
28:181198.
Sugarman, A. 2003. A New Model for Conceptualizing Insightfulness in the
Psychoanalysis of Young Children. Psychoan. Q., LXXII, pp. 325 354.
Tronick, E., Als, H., Adamson, L., Wise, S., & Brazelton, T. B. 1978. The
Infants Response to Entrapment between Contradictory Messages in
Face-to-Face Interaction. J. Amer. Acad. Child Psychiat. 7:113.
Weil, A. 1970. The Basic Core. Psychoanal. Study Child, 25:442 460.
Winnicott, D. 1960. The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship. Int. J.
Psycho-Anal., 41:585 595.
1965. The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment. London:
Hogarth Press.
Yanof, J. 1996. Language, Communication, and Transference in Child Analysis I. Selective Mutism: The Medium Is the Message II. Is Child Analysis
Really Analysis? J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 44:79 116.
Psychoanalysis As
Cognitive Remediation
Dynamic and Vygotskian Perspectives
in the Analysis of an
Early Adolescent Dyslexic Girl
LISSA WEINSTEIN, Ph.D., and
LAURENCE SAUL, M.D.
239
240
with learning. As the act of learning becomes separate from the personal and affective context in which it took place, the child gains access to other, more normative, functions of play. These functions include the development of the capacity to separate meaning from action
and the ability to understand words as generalized categories which
represent objects, rather than being part of the specific object named.
These two capacities, fundamental to the development of abstract
thought, will support reflective awareness and help modulate affective
states. The abilities furthered in play also act to remediate one component of dyslexiathe difficulty separating context from more abstract
bits of knowledge. Finally, the child learns to play at reality, often
trying on the new role of student. As Vygotsky notes, play is essential
in allowing the child to become aware of what she knows. For a dyslexic
child, for whom reading may never become completely a part of procedural memory, becoming conscious of what he knows may also enhance mastery of the skills of phonological processing, albeit more
slowly than normally developing readers. The pleasure in play and the
repetition it generates aids the internalization of the task and the development of automaticity.
Introduction
the emotional problems of learning disabled children often
bring them to psychoanalytic treatment, and in recent years the view
that analysis is not the treatment of choice for children with neurocognitive difficulties (Giffin, 1968) has gradually shifted (Arkowitz,
2000; Garber, 1988, 1989; Migden, 1998; Rothstein & Glenn, 1998).
The existing clinical papers often fail to precisely delineate the nature of the neurocogntive problems, eventuating in a hodgepodge of
diagnoses lumped under the rubric of learning disabilities, even
though the factors that make analysis helpful to children with language based learning problems may be quite different from the
mechanisms that are mutative for children whose problems in processing perceptual stimuli form the core of their difficulties (Rourke,
1985). Lacking a clear rationale for why analysis might be helpful, it
becomes impossible to evaluate the necessity for any changes in technique. With few exceptions (e.g. Cohen & Solnit, 1993), papers focus
on the affective difficulties rather than the manner in which analysis
alters or enhances ego functions which support learning.
The current paper examines the interface of neurocognitive problems and dynamic concerns in the analysis of an early adolescent
dyslexic girl and tries to specify those aspects in the analytic context
241
242
relatively brief period of time than the immature ego can handle,
suggested that children, being passive, must suffer experiences that
they cannot absorb and which they attempt to master through repetition. In addition to the disappointments of reality, play also helps the
child cope with trauma generated internally, either by the upsurges
of the drives or via the heightened pressures of the superego. Play
aids mastery by turning passive to active. It allows the child to alter
the outcome of the experience or to change his role. Rather than a
suffering victim or an anxious onlooker, the child can instead be a
world creator. In addition, the reenactment of an experience in itself
constitutes a switch from passive to active. The observed repetitions
in play allow for the fact that the childs weak ego can master reality
only a little bit at a time and are necessitated by the childs limited capacity for verbalization and his inability to link thoughts together
through cognitive work. The actual play is a compromise formation.
By offering the most satisfying solution between the desire for pleasure, the demands of reality, and the conscience, play strives to make
up for anxieties and deficiencies at a minimum risk of danger. Although popular notions oppose play and reality, from Freud (1918)
onward (e.g. Plaut, 1979; Oremland, 1997, 1998; Ostow, 1998; Solnit,
1987) analytic writers have recognized the role of reality in shaping
play. Winnicotts (1974) notion of transitional space also suggests a
role for play in the structuring of external and internal reality in addition to the interpretation of play which focuses on meaning. More
recently, theorists have noted the contribution of play in the creation
of new representations, suggesting that play in itself acts as a force in
getting development back on track (Mayes & Cohen, 1993; Neubauer, 1993; Scott, 1998; Slade, 1994). Although this structuring role
of play has been noted particularly in children with ego deficits (Cohen & Solnit, 1993), cognition and its relationship to play has been
largely ignored in the psychoanalytic literature with only a few exceptions (e.g. Santstefano, 1978)
Case Presentation
presenting problem
Natalies mother sought psychological testing at age 12 years and two
months because of Natalies worsening irritable, withdrawn, and aggressive behavior both at home and at school. Natalie frequently
screamed, cried, hit, and kicked. She directed these outbursts mainly
at her sister, who was 3 years her junior, but also at her parents and
243
244
When Natalie was 11 years old, her mother had the police remove
Natalies intoxicated father and placed an order of protection
against him because of verbal threats. Natalie never asked to see him.
Visitations were started 6 months later because Natalies sister requested to see him, and visitations continued sporadically. A few
months after Natalies father was removed from the home, Natalies
paternal grandmother died. Therefore, she suffered two major losses
simultaneously. These apparent precipitants closely preceded Natalies increasingly withdrawn, intermittently violent, and hypersensitive behavior which led to her mother seeking help.
psychological testing
Several evaluations provided ample evidence for the diagnosis of developmental dyslexia. An educational evaluation completed at age 8
demonstrated receptive and expressive linguistic difficulties rather
than oromotor problems. Natalie failed to initiate a lot of language,
had trouble sequencing her thoughts, and had difficulty with word
retrieval and naming. Phonological processing was impaired. This
skill (the ability to hear and sequence the sounds within words) is the
central deficit found in reading disorders (Morris et al., 1998; Shaywitz, 2003). Natalie had poor auditory discrimination, could not
identify medial vowel sounds, and had poor memory for phonemes.
While she needed the scaffolding provided by a listener in order to
organize her thoughts, the more object related and para-verbal aspects of communicative language (prosody, eye contact, and turn
taking) were intact. In sum, Natalie met the criteria for double deficit
dyslexia (Wolfe, 1999), a term used to identify children who show
problems in both rapid automatized naming and phonological processing, and who, typically, are very difficult to remediate.
A second evaluation, completed at age 12 years, 2 months when
Natalie was in 7th grade, supported the earlier impression of a
dyslexic child of average to high average intelligence, with a fairly focalized language disorder. The WISC III yielded a Full Scale IQ of
103, with a Verbal IQ of 106, and a Performance IQ of 99.
The subtest scores were as follows:
Verbal Scale
Information
Similarities
Arithmetic
Vocabulary
Comprehension
Digit Span
11
10
12
12
10
7
Performance Scale
Picture Completion
Picture Arrangement
Block Design
Object Assembly
Coding
10
14
11
9
5
245
246
247
agreed that she preferred to blend into a crowd and did not like to
be closely observed, alluding to her fears of being seen in the analytic
encounter. During sessions, turning passive to active, she would pull
her hat over her head, turn away from the analyst, or even sleep. Natalie alternated between attempts at contact and a need to lessen the
amount of experienced stimulation through physical distance. She
chose to sit in the analysts swivel chair which allowed her to sit very
close by him and quickly turn away when necessary. She alternated
between talking engagingly and playing catch or being by herself, remaining silent for entire sessions during which she would refuse to
respond, even to direct questions. Often, silent sessions followed
ones in which she had been particularly talkative. The analysts countertransference responses illuminated the nature of the conflicts
aroused. He felt relieved when Natalie talked and careful not to confront her or her anger, as well as worried that he had caused her periods of retreat by being too aggressive with his interpretations.
That the highly charged feelings emerging in the treatment contained sexual fantasies of seduction and pursuit was made clear when
after 6 months in treatment, an analogous situation surfaced in Natalies school life. She excitedly reported being stalked by two boys
in her class. When the analyst wondered out loud whether the incident might be flattering as well as scary, Natalie threw a ball harder
and harder toward the analyst until it was impossible to catch. The
analysts premature interpretation of Natalies underlying sexual
wishes led to the fortification of her defensive strategies and a regression to action where violent, castrating wishes were expressed directly. In the following session, Natalie found a spare tie in the analysts closet and put it around her own neck. Gleaming with pleasure,
Natalie threatened to cut the tie in a highly condensed metaphorical statement which included elements of castration as well as her efforts to defend against her dependency. It is also noteworthy that in
moments of high affective intensity, words did not hold her and she
quickly moved to highly symbolic and expressive actions to regulate
her feelings. In addition to action, Natalie would also remove herself
from the more passionate arena of verbal interaction and seek solace
in a calmer visual perceptual world, painting vivid scenes of serene,
inanimate content.
Usually ill at ease with her desires to be seen, Natalie began to express an interest in acting. She performed Shakespeare soliloquies
for her analyst and simultaneously blushed and smiled with pride at
the applause he would give. At this point, Natalies exhibitionistic desires were not interpreted. Rather, the analyst allowed Natalie to ex-
248
perience that wishes could be expressed and contained in the analytic situation without dire consequences. This stance seemed to support Natalies ability to tolerate previously disavowed affects.
Several months later, at her beach club, Natalie began taking photographs of a 15-year-old boy she had a crush on. She then sold the
prints for $5 each to girls at the art school where she was taking
classes during the week. The analyst, exclaimed, Now, youre doing
the stalking! She brought in prints of this boy, drooled over them,
and drew portrait after portrait of him. She was frustrated with this
boys lack of enthusiasm with her but was determined not to let this
fact get in the way of her talking and thinking about him incessantly.
The analyst pointed out that it appeared as if it didnt matter what
this boy thought of Natalie. You are the stalker. You are in control.
Natalie replied jokingly, Hey, dont spoil my fun. While Natalie felt
freer to express her sexual and voyeuristic interest in a peer, she remained defended against recognition of any excitement about her
analyst.
The reasons for this became obvious as Natalies experience of herself in relation to her father in particular and men in general continued to be further elaborated in the analysis in the transference.
Upon returning from a vacation, the analyst was asked by Natalie to
go back to Iraq where she imagined he had been playing pool and
drinking beers with your good friend Haddam Hussein . . . Youre
buddies. The analyst said, I guess you want to keep a safe distance
from a dangerous, beer guzzling, take over the world kind of guy like
me. In later sessions, she imagined the analyst was plotting with Hussein to blow up some countries. The analyst noted how untrustworthy and dangerous he seemed to her. Natalie responded. Youre not
Hussein, youre Barney, referring to the goofy pre-school TV character who teaches the letters of the alphabet. He was too adorable and
clearly inept: Do you see purple dinosaurs on Wall Street or at a
desk getting a fax? Natalie quipped. It was at this juncture that
Natalies conflict around men being either dangerously abusive and
exciting, or harmlessly castrated and ineffective crystallized in the
transference.
In another variation upon this same theme, over a year into the
analysis, Natalie complained of being stuck with Mr. Tingle, a
male version of a comedy movie character, Mrs. Tingle, a sadistic
high school teacher. Natalie went on to say that she felt Youre poking at me. Looking at me under a microscope. The analyst said, So
Im the teacher from hell. Forcing you to talk about things you dont
want to. Natalie retorted, Yeah, Mr. Tingle, and I dont want to!
249
Natalies excitement became intolerable to her and she swiftly emasculated the therapist, turning him back into the ineffectual dinosaur:
Or you could be Barney, just add a tail.
A few months later, Natalie began to describe how she had always
been scared of her current 8th grade male teacher because of his
reputation as strict and demanding. The analyst noted that when he
thought of a scary man for Natalie, her father came to mind. Natalie
remarked, I hate my father! But hes not scary. Hes just a moron . . . The analyst replied, In the same way that you call your father names, youve called me a few. Natalie said, Yea, Mr. Tingle
and yea, Barney. The analyst remarked, There seems to be two
sides to me for you, this scary teacher or this wimpy dinosaur. Natalie retorted, Youre not scary, youre just chubby. Youre a chubby,
chubby man. The analyst became acutely aware of feeling emasculated and pointed out, So now youre having more funat my expense, of coursewith me being chubbythe wimpy Barney side of
me. Natalie laughed. The analyst further mused, Perhaps you feel
safer around my possible scary side by turning me into a chubby and
bumbling dinosaur. Natalie grinned.
A year and a half into the analysis, in the context of angrily calling
the analyst names, Natalie began to articulately reveal how her
mother degraded her father. For example, while mother and daughters went to a beach spot during summer weekends, mother had father do menial jobs for her like walk the dogs and clean the bathtub
to earn money so that he could take out his daughters with the
money. Natalie got worked up thinking about how her jackass father
cant even work at Barnes and Noble to help us out. Hes a goodfor-nothing drunk.
As the historical roots of her bivalent attitudes toward her father
were becoming more conscious, Natalies mother reported that Natalie was expressing a new desire for physical contact, affection, and
comfort. This contrasted sharply with her lifelong pattern of physical
avoidance, withdrawal, and difficulty being soothed. In school as
well, Natalies teacher reported that she was blossoming, with decreasing moodiness and impulsivity, and a lessening tendency to provoke attacks from peers. Even more curious was her teachers report
that Natalie was beginning to absorb academic material in a new way,
given that scholastic performance had not been a focus of treatment
to date.
As her fear and excitement about being with a man continued to
be evoked, tolerated, and addressed in the relatively calm context of
the therapeutic relationship, a new aspect of Natalies relationship to
250
251
those feelings into words. When her analyst made the analogy between herself and Clover, she was able to say that problems learning
really suck. While Natalie was able to voice these feelings after having some academic success, clearly her analysis had been instrumental in making her educational interventions increasingly assessable.
Natalie was accepted to several mainstream private schools and ultimately attended a competitive public school specialized for the arts.
Natalie was very proud that she was one of the few students with
learning disabilities admitted. Because of financial difficulty, Natalies mother requested that treatment be terminated after 2
years. Natalie was thriving at school both academically and with
peers. Although there was certainly more analytic work to be done
around her conflicts with her mother and father, Natalie was developmentally back on track. In the final weeks of analysis, Natalie requested that the analyst teach her how to play poker. This was pleasurable for both analysand and analyst as Natalie had become a
model student. She anticipated missing our homework sessions.
Particularly determined to learn to shuffle, before the last session
Natalie was an expert.
At 12 years of age, Natalie presented as a young adolescent with
affective symptomatology, an oppositional defiant disorder, learning
problems and a history of traumatic overstimulation. Her symptoms
resulted from three interweaving factors: a biologically based learning disorder and alterations in the timing of the maturation of her
speech and language, her chronically traumatic home life, and her
entrance into adolescence. Exposed to a greater than normal degree
of aggressive stimulation, these traumatic experiences shaped the
way she perceived herself and interacted in relationships, for example via identification with the aggressor, and placed considerable
strain on defenses already compromised by processing difficulties. Finally adolescence, with its heightened drive pressure further increased the demands on her stressed ego resources.
Natalies language difficulties affected her not only in school, but
throughout her development, making it harder for her to access
words as a mediating force during critical periods (Migden, 1998).
Offering new gratifications and connections, speech usually helps
the child to master the waning symbiotic ties and the loss of the accompanying feelings of omnipotence and safety. Conceptualized
thus, language is a central aspect of the separation process. For Natalie, early separation from her mother resulted both in object loss as
well as the loss of an optimal linguistic environment because her English exposure was curtailed when she was cared for by a non-English
252
253
254
about which she wished to remain blind. The defensive efforts that
interfered with retrieving memories of her fathers frightening violence and the painful affects they would arouse also interfered with
other information that for associative reasons shared the same address (Westen & Gabbard, 2002). Although unconscious, the memories remained in a state of activation that accounted for their continuing effects. In Natalies case these events, associated with the
process of learning, affected her motivation to learn. Natalies dyslexia came to function as an anlage, a model based on constitution
around which the defenses can crystallize. Not knowing became a defense; in choosing it as a defense, she also turned passive to active.
These dynamics were revealed when they were re-externalized in
the transference which, because of its connection to affect, functions
as a powerful anamnestic tool. In the analysis, Natalie was thrilled
and repulsed by sexuality and furious at being reminded of her interest. The Janus faces of Mr. Tingle and Barney explicate Natalies repeated experience of intense excited attachment coupled with
fears/desires of being attacked/attacking. Natalie experienced pleasure both as the terrorized girl and as the emasculating female. Of
significance is that both Barney and Mr. Tingle were teachers, one
sadistically drilling facts into her, the other an emasculated and useless wimp. Becoming a student and learning was either dangerously exciting or doomed to devastating disappointment. Natalies
fusion of sexuality and aggression is determined by her age, but also
by her history. I dont love you, she says, as she kicks her male analyst. I dont love you, she says to her father as she fails to learn to
read.
It was harder for Natalie to use language as a tool to abstract and
distance herself from her experience. She alternated between excitement, talkativeness, and silence. When she could not talk, she withdrew into a world of art work. Natalies neurophysiological weakness
left her with a tendency to focus on the non-linguistic aspects of the
environment; she had a strong reaction to tone and prosody in language and maintained a strong attachment to the visual world where
she could retreat when her affective stability was disrupted. She also
regressed to action as a mode of expression.
The analysis allowed Natalie to access language for what had been
inchoate and in so doing to connect a variety of associated, previously unconscious memories into cognitive structures. When her
conflicts with the father were repeated in the transference and interpreted, Natalie was able to look and to learn, to spell and to remember. She was helped, through the mechanism of the transfer-
255
256
old object in a new way acts as a pivot to disentangle perceptual qualities or action done on the object from the meaning of the object. At
first, the play object must share some similarities with the represented object (i.e. the mop is Black Beauty because you can ride it
between your legs), but gradually, semantic qualities come to override perceptual ones and the word horse, which bears no similarity
at all, even to the Black Beauty mop, can be used to represent horse
in the creation of stories about horses. These shifts can be described
at any one time as the product of a ratio between object/ meaning
and action/ meaning. As the meaning of the object and its place in
the play narrative becomes central and the perceptual qualities of
the object become subordinate, the child becomes able to exist
above the field for a moment, capable of stepping back. Vygotsky parallels this shift to the change in the childs ability to observe his oral
language after acquiring grammatical forms and written language.
A vital transitional stage toward operating with meanings occurs
when a child first acts with meanings as with objects (as when he acts
with the stick as though it was a horse). Later, he carries out these
acts consciously. This change is seen too, in the fact that before a
child has acquired grammatical and written language, he knows how
to do things, but does not know that he knows. . . . Thus, through
play the child achieves a functional definition of concepts or objects
and words become parts of a thing. (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 99)
257
258
259
abled children, a play very close in nature to reality (Cohen & Solnit,
1993). It has been suggested that in addition to functioning as an object in the service of transference repetition, the analyst also functions in a role as a new object which has some overlap with teaching
(Freud, 1974; Wilson & Weinstein, 1996; Weinstein, 2002). This
teaching role allows for the internalization of insight. Both aspects of
the analytic role are heightened and intertwined for the dyslexic
child. As the analyst functions as an object in the service of repetition, conflicts around learning will be re-evoked as the traumatic situations accompanying learning come closer to consciousness. Once
these conflicts are interpreted, as they were with Natalie, then the
child can begin to use the analyst as a partner (new object) in
play/learning. During this phase, interpretation is probably less required, as the child is finally able to make use of play for cognitive
structuring and for developing a decontextualized abstract attitude.
These skills are notably essential for learning to read as well as other
modes of symbolization.
Beyond the mutative aspects of interpretation, by allowing Natalie
to titrate the level of stimulation, the analytic context also supported
her ability to access knowledge she already possessed. Thus the analyst acted neither exclusively as a developmental new/real object nor
as transference object, but as both depending on the context of the
treatment at any one point.
Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to offer technical prescriptions, some differences in the way play and the analytic context
may function for learning disabled children should be highlighted.
First, learning disabled children may need to play beyond the usual
age than that of other children, both inside and outside of the analytic context. In the context of the analysis, play that might traditionally be considered resistance (i.e. doing homework in the sessions)
may, in fact, be a sign of progress in the treatment and essential in
the remediation of the learning problems. Third, although it would
be impossible to judge whether the nonverbal aspects of the interaction are more salient than the interpretive ones, a possibility suggested by the Boston Change Process Study Group (2002), it is clear
that the regulation of a tolerable state of affective stimulation becomes necessary before the analytic work can take place. Finally, interpretation is most successful if geared to the childs cognitive abilities, either by adjusting ones use of syntax, using shorter words, or
even allowing for an enhanced role for action in the treatment. The
necessity for factoring in the childs level of cognitive development in
the formulation of interpretations as well as the interrelationship be-
260
261
Krauss, R. & Sendak, M. (1952). A Hole Is to Dig: A First Book of First Definitions. New York: Harper and Brothers.
Lewis, M. (1977). Language, cognitive development and personality. J.
Amer. Acad. Child Psychiatr., 16:646 658.
Luria, A. R. (1979) The Making of Mind: A Personal Account of Soviet Psychology.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Mayes, L. C. & Cohen, D. J. (1993). Playing and the therapeutic action in
child analysis. Int. J. Psychoanal., 74:1235 1244
McCandliss, B. & Noble, K. (2003). The development of reading impairment: A cognitive neuroscience model. Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews, 9:196 204.
Migden, S. (1998). Dyslexia and self control: An ego psychoanalytic perspective. Psychoanal. Study Child, 53:283 289.
Migden, S. (2002). Self-esteem and depression in adolescents with specific
learning disability. Journal of Infant, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy, 2:145
160.
Morris, R., Stuebing, K., Fletcher, J., Shaywitz, S., Lyon, R. G., Shankweiler, D., Katz, L., Francis, D., & Shaywitz, B. (1998). Subtypes of
reading disability: Variability around a phonological core. Journal of Educational Psychology, 90:347373.
Neubauer, P. B. (1993). Playing: Technical implications. In The Many Meanings of Play. A. J. Solnit, D. J. Cohen, & P. B. Neubauer, eds. New Haven:
Yale University Press, pp. 44 53.
Oremland, J. (1997). The Origins and Psychodyanmics of Creativity: A Psychoanalytic Perspective. Madison, Conn.: IUP.
Oremland, J. (1998). Play, dreams, and creativity. Psychoanal Study Child,
53:84 93.
Plaut, A. (1979). Play and adaptation. Psychoanal Study Child, 34:217231.
Rappaport, D. (1951). The Organization and Pathology of Thought. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Ross, H. (1965). The teacher game. Psychoanal Study Child, 20:288 297.
Rothstein, A. & Glenn, J. (1998). Learning Disabilities and Psychoanalysis.
New York: IUP.
Rourke, B. P. (Ed.) (1985). Neuropsychology of Learning Disabilities: Advances
in Subtype Analysis. New York: Guilford.
Santostefano, S. (1978). A Biodevelopmental Approach to Clinical Child Psychology. New York: Wiley.
Scott, M. (1998). Play and the therapeutic action: Multiple perspectives.
Psychoanal Study Child. 53:94 101.
Shaywitz, S. (2003). Overcoming Dyslexia: A New and Complete Science-based
Program for Reading Problems at Any Level. New York: Knopf.
Slade, A. (1994). Making meaning and making believe: Their role in the
clinical process. In Children at Play: Clinical and Developmental Approaches to
Meaning and Representation. A. Slade and D. P. Wolf, eds. New York: Oxford
University Press.
262
A Girls Experience of
Congenital Trauma
The Healing Function of Psychoanalysis
in the Adolescent Years
SILVIA M. BELL, Ph.D.
This paper addresses the centrality of conflict in psychic trauma, as evidenced in the psychoanalytic treatment of an adolescent girl with a
congenital life-threatening and disfiguring condition that necessitated
multiple surgical procedures in early childhood. The focus is twofold:
to elucidate certain characteristics of analysis in the adolescent phase
that promote the integration of early trauma; and to shed light on the
modes of therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. Case material is presented indicative of the psychic consequences of early medical traumata, including the impairment of the egos capacity to utilize anxiety
as a signal function that mobilizes defense, the failure of repetition to
effect mastery of the trauma, the predominant use of aggression in the
interest of defense, and distortions in self and object representations.
The author offers evidence to show that conflicts over aggression and
oedipal desires, characteristic of adolescent girls who have not been
subject to trauma, were involved in the defensive function of her paTraining and Supervising Analyst, and Associate Supervisor in Child and Adolescent Analysis, Baltimore-Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis; Clinical Assistant
Professor of Psychiatry, University of Maryland School of Medicine.
I gratefully acknowledge the invaluable contribution of my discussions with Dr.
Alan B. Zients, whose insight and support were instrumental in my treatment of this
patient. I thank also Drs. Boyd Burris and Charles Brenner for their thoughtful critique of an earlier version of this manuscript.
The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 60, ed. Robert A. King, Peter B. Neubauer,
Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling (Yale University Press, copyright 2005 by
Robert A. King, Peter B. Neubauer, Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling).
263
264
Silvia M. Bell
tients pervasive sense of defectiveness. She postulates that the interpretation of conflict and defense is the analysts attuned response to the
mind of the patient, and points to the resulting increase in the capacity to observe and to exercise volitional control over heretofore unconscious, automatic mental processes as evidence of the mutative function of dynamic interpretation.
in a recent publication, harold blum (2003c) reminds us that
psychoanalysis began with the concept of psychic trauma. The classic
definition (Freud, 1926) emphasizes a psychic state that results when
the ego has been flooded and overwhelmed by stimulation emanating from danger, be it internal or external. Psychic trauma, then,
refers to the experience of the ego which is helpless to cope with a
state of excitation that has annihilating power. Trauma can be caused
by an exceptional event, taking place at a particular point in time, or
it can be an ongoing life circumstance. In either case, it has an organizing effect. Memory of the trauma is registered both consciously
and unconsciously. Blum states that it has both verbal and non-verbal elements, the latter reflected in sensory, affective, motor, actingout, and somatic phenomena (p. 418). When the trauma is imposed
by congenital conditions, it inherently marks the development of the
ego and of object relations. It is important, cautions Blum, to differentiate the traumatic event, the internal traumatic situation, and
posttraumatic sequelae (p. 416). This speaks to the central role of
the childs internal experience of the trauma, which is represented
in unconscious fantasy, as it marks subsequent development and affects adaptation.
While the benefit of psychoanalytic treatment for patients with a
history of trauma is unquestionable, the nature of therapeutic action
in psychoanalysis has been the focus of active controversy. One aspect of disagreement that surfaced in a recent publication (IJP,
2003), centers around whether the mutative function is inherent in
the analysis of transference and in genetic interpretation and reconstruction of the unconscious conflicts and trauma of childhood
(Blum, 2003a, p. 500), or whether change results from the experience of self with other, where the crucial component is the provision of a perspective or a frame for interpreting subjectivity (Fonagy,
2003, p. 506). In the first, or traditional conceptualization, interpretation and reconstruction, though inexact, play a crucial role in the
process of addressing the best possible approximation to the patients unconscious fantasies and the traumatic realities of life
(Blum, 2003a, p. 512). While not excluding the therapeutic effect of
265
266
Silvia M. Bell
history of many surgical interventions aimed at repairing and reconstructing her features as a result of disfiguring birth defects. Her initial, rather provocative take charge attitude, clearly a reaction to
defend against the anxiety that our meeting stirred up in her, turned
into a description of experiences of early trauma, that impressed me
for its balance and forthrightness. She reflected on her fear of pain
and hospitalizations (Ive had to weather it for my own good.); on
her endurance of rejection (Its amazing how much Ive changed,
and I still remember how it feels being looked at funny.); and on the
difficult relationship with her parents (My parents dont know how
to work things out. My mother cries about me, and all I want is for
her to feel proud of me). She spoke, with embarrassment, about her
concern that she does not know how to handle boys, and described
her conflict about an intense neediness for attention that rendered
her vulnerable (I know that I need to please, especially boys, because its so important that they like me. So maybe if someone were
to force himself on me, I might not be able to stop him.)
This rather dramatic first meeting, revealed key elements of Beccahs adaptation that remained central considerations for the duration of our work. Beccah presented as an attractively built, vivacious
adolescent whose pretty eyes and bright expression diverted attention away from the minor remnants of her previous deformities, now
confined to relatively unobtrusive facial scarring and skin discoloration that she ameliorated with the skillful application of make-up.
She behaved as an action-oriented young lady, who took charge of
the session; in particular, of the impact she wanted her appearance to
make on me. While there were no obvious physical signs of what had
been, for much of her childhood, a salient appearance, now it was
her manner and style that cut a striking figure.
In this session, she gave a coherent autobiographical account that
included the consciously stored aspects of her painful childhood,
and she was self-reflecting enough to include observations about her
feeling states and motivationshe had experienced fear and pain
for her own good. She expressed a wish to confide in, even seek
nurturing from me, as she spoke of her compromised sense of confidence in light of her early experiences of rejection. As feelings of defectiveness and hopelessness surfaced, she turned to chastising
thoughts about her mother, who was not able to express a sense of
pride in her, in a defensive maneuver that helped to regulate affect.
In these respects, she was responding like a well-functioning adolescent. However, the exposure in her manner of dress and her confrontational style evinced a deeper struggle marked by self-conscious-
267
268
Silvia M. Bell
invasive as she grew older but represented, nevertheless, an inescapable specter in her childhood experience.
Infancy was a highly stressful period for mother and infant; Beccah
had projectile vomiting, cried excessively and had poorly regulated
sleep-wake cycles. As her rhythms stabilized in her second year, the
relative respite from anxious concern over her status was periodically
broken by emergency hospitalizations for various complications in vital organ systems. Despite Beccahs medical history, the parents reported an otherwise normal accomplishment of developmental milestones. Beccah was a charming, active little girl in early childhooda
stoic patient who seemed to find the strength to maintain a sense of
relatedness toward others, and the resilience to tolerate her hospitalizations. Periodically, however, she had angry outbursts, was demanding, and not easily soothed. A maternal aunt, who lived in close proximity, provided daytime care for her since infancy, given the mothers
decision to pursue her career. Beccah turned to her aunt for comfort, and experienced her as a refuge when she felt embattled with
her parents. Beccahs developmental history would have been considered unremarkable, were it not for the enormous achievement it
represented for this little girl to function competently, academically,
and socially, through the grammar school years.
Beccah was the older of two children. Her brother, four years her
junior, was described as healthy, aggressive, and irreverent like his father. Beccah took pride in being the smart one, whose academic accomplishments far surpassed his. The children shared an interest in
sports, in identification with the father, and there were no obvious
conflicts between them. The father was a self-acknowledged no-nonsense person, who wanted his children to be strong and active.
Threatened by Beccahs history of damage and suffering, he focused
on his daughters present status and denied the psychological impact
of her early appearance and medical vulnerability. His affirmation
that there was nothing the matter with Beccah now, obviated what
comfort this conflicted girl might have garnered from his seemingly
supportive comment, since it was delivered by way of a complaint:
What is her problem? She looks fine! He railed at his wife for making too many excuses for her, and it was clear that Beccah was at the
center of marital conflict.
The mother, more attuned to her daughters emotional distress,
was the one seeking psychological help for her. She had the competent demeanor of one experienced in the handling of emergencies,
but she could verbalize her awareness of underlying anxiety and conflicted feelings about this child who had brought so much trauma
269
270
Silvia M. Bell
271
272
Silvia M. Bell
done with me on our first appointment, she defended against feelings of vulnerability and helplessness that surfaced with his attention.
She recognized that she felt attractive some times, but then doubted
that anyone could find her attractive. With sadness, she added, Ive
had such bad luck, born with all these birth defects I have to live with
the rest of my life. I have this need to get attention from guys and
then I let them abuse me. Im so angry inside. I noted to myself that
she had turned to thoughts of pain and damage after she had allowed herself to acknowledge her new, attractive body, and her exciting, seductive behavior.
Beccahs traumatic history predisposed her to repetition, in an attempt at mastery where she had felt the helpless victim. When confronted with a situation that called up a sense of defectiveness, as in
meeting someone new, she called attention to herself. She projected
her sense of defectiveness and became provocative and aggressive to
defend against the disappointment of not being lovable. She invited
hurt through teasing, thus enacting her sadistic wishes, and then isolated the affective content of the interaction. Often, her behavior
elicited the rejecting response she had dreaded in response to her
appearance. Our work gradually elucidated the complex meaning of
her feelings of defectiveness. On the one hand, the implicit record of
painful experiences in face-to-face interaction now mobilized anxiety
and depressive affect around looking at her self and being looked at.
We learned, however, that feelings of defectiveness also surfaced as a
defensive turning against the self in the service of maintaining equilibrium when sexual feelings, which she experienced as dangerous,
came to the fore.
As our work progressed, Beccah verbalized feelings more directly,
and her tendency to enact became less ubiquitous. Sadness and despair, affects kept in abeyance by her aggressive stance, surfaced. She
commented: Only dirtballs are interested in me; Im the one they
abuse, but they choose somebody else for a girlfriend. She told me
of her recent encounter with her first grade teacher who, not having
seen her in the intervening years, asked unfelicitously, What happened to you? In the safety of the analytic work, we explored Beccahs painful experience of looking and being looked at. We reconstructed that she had learned from the look of others that her
appearance could inflict an emotional response that elicited a reaction that was incongruous with what she was feeling, and caused her
pain. While her provocative actions seemed to cry out look at me!,
her manner was a defensive maneuver that startled and interfered
with close scrutiny. Her salient behavior deflected the onlookers
273
gaze away from her face. Looking and being looked at were highly
charged affective moments, which mobilized fantasy and conflict.
She began to recognize that her own looking was compromisedshe
looked to others as mirrors of herself, because she could not see the
young woman in the mirror as herself. As our work progressed, we
considered the meaning of her searching in my eyes, as she had done
on our first meeting; a search that repeated her experience with her
mothers eyes.
Beccah had enrolled in a course to make porcelain dolls, and she
brought them to her sessions. She was critical of her work, and
showed me that she could not get the face quite right. The connection with her wish to have the perfect face with a flawless complexion
was unconscious. She did not recognize that her newfound interest
represented her experience of remaking her own face. After sharing
in her interest in porcelain dollsthat is, keeping our work in the
displacementI noted the unremitting quality of her concern about
not getting the dolls face quite right, and I asked her whether she
was curious about it. She asked my opinion, what did I think about
the face? I replied that her checking now how I felt about the dolls
face reminded me of her question, can you tell? We addressed her
externalization; her checking what others felt kept her confusing
feelings about herself temporarily out of mind. She connected with
her anxiety upon meeting people, I have this constant knot in the
pit of my stomach; so much, that I dont even know its there. At our
next appointment, she brought a porcelain baby doll. Now aware
that her behavior had meaning beyond an interest in the hobby, she
said, I like babies. I worry about having babies in the future. We explored her worry that she could not have a normal babya worry
which, although connected to her pervasive sense of being damaged,
was also an expression of normal conflicts about the dangers of growing up and being female. This work was also a harbinger of conflicted
feelings about her mother, who had not passed on a normal body to
her.
The transference deepened, and Beccahs response to the treatment setting gave us an added, unexpected opportunity to reconstruct the genetic aspects of her pervasive feelings of vulnerability.
My office was located at the end of a U-shaped corridor in a suite
with four other offices. After several months of treatment, I still often
found her roaming the hallway. She seemed momentarily surprised,
even startled at my presence, and then responded by assuming a casual, distracted demeanor that resolved into a broad smile denying
deeper feeling. As I wondered with her whether she experienced a
274
Silvia M. Bell
275
she lived with a pervasive fear that she might die. We noted that she
was worried about whether I would or could protect her from harm.
Gradually, the fantasy that I might assault her, which was emerging in
the transference, became amenable to interpretation.
Beccah spoke of the comforting feeling of hearing the sound of
voices from the TV at night; they helped her to feel safe. I had registered that her memories, which depicted her mothers unavailability
and her aunts helplessness, had triggered a fantasy of assault that
elaborated on her feelings in the waiting room. I said: Perhaps the
sound of voices from the TV may even feel safer than a voice up
close. I interpreted that fearing that someone might come through
the window to attack us had something to do with a fear about being
alone with me. She reflected thoughtfully: I tell you so much. You
could do something that would hurt me. In the months that followed, Beccah explored her confusion about her mother, who
seemed to be in charge of her well-being and yet so helpless to protect her, and whose interventions she experienced both as life-saving
and as murderous assaults. Her awareness of feeling vulnerable with
me gave us an entry to explore her aggressive feelings. The fantasy of
the intruder who would attack us, was a compromise that included
the projected aspects of her rage at me, the powerful doctor-mother
who, by providing treatment, exacerbated her feelings of being damaged. It was also a harbinger of the deepening paternal transference.
As the treatment progressed, Beccah focused more actively in
sports, and she brought evidence of her success, indeed her stellar
performance, as recognized in newspaper clippings, ribbons, and citations. We noted, however, that she felt a great pressure to maintain
an unblemished record. Every event was a new challenge, as if her
previous success did not serve to ameliorate her blemished self-concept. She reported a worry that people out there wanted her to
lose, a projection of her enviousness that also reflected her expectation of punishment. Winning was of paramount importance, yet
fraught with conflict. Noting her anxiety prior to a particular equestrian competition, I wondered if these events recalled her experience
of her cosmetic surgeries, so fraught with promise and risk. The exploration of her exaggerated sense that so much was riding on the
outcome, led Beccah to recognize that she dreaded failure as evidence that it was all her fault. This insight allowed her to connect
with her sadness about needing reconstructive surgery, and to recognize that, although her body had undergone a process of change, her
old feelings of being faulty and at fault remained unchanged. She expressed anger at her mother who, in contrast to her athletic, aggres-
276
Silvia M. Bell
sive father who did not see anything wrong with her, was felt as the
mirror reflecting her defectiveness.
Beccah accessed her conflicted feelings about her father before
she could fully address the complexity of her reactions to her
mother. Her bisexual conflict was openly manifest in this period in
her analysis, as she focused on sports in an effort to identify with her
father and disavow her dangerous, defective femininity. The identification with him did not offer lasting comfort, however. She reported
shouting matches between them; he was insensitive and didnt care
about her feelings. He is an angry person ready for a fight. Beccahs wishes for closeness with her father stimulated oedipal conflict
and called forth the dual threats of rejection from father and abandonment from mother. We recognized that anger maintained closeness between them, and defended against intimacy and disappointment. She added, Im afraid that Im just like him, and nobody will
be able to set limits on me. The identification with his intact image
seemed to bolster a sense of hope about her own strength, also experienced in her horseback riding, and was a relief from the complex
feelings in relation to her mother. However, it also promoted fantasies of unbridled impulse, which increased her sense of vulnerability.
The intensification of Beccahs feelings towards her father led to
an increase in her nighttime fears. She revealed that she had asked
her mother to sleep with her, as when she was a little girl. In the
course of our exploration of her regressive response to oedipal pressures, she painfully uncovered her confusing feelings toward her
mother. Sometimes she felt reassured of the much-needed mothers
love and approval. Often, she experienced mother as abandoning,
helpless to create a haven of safety where she would feel protected.
She developed a concern about her mothers health and well-being.
Her sense of defectiveness seemed to intensify with her fear of her
destructive wishes toward her mother. How can I be so angry with
my mother when I have been the cause of so much pain? she
protested, and proceeded to turn against herself as the defective one.
Being the damaged one also defended against the frightening wishes
to surpass her mother by becoming the young woman with the beautiful body who would bear the healthy, porcelain-skin child.
As our work progressed, Beccahs appearance and demeanor
changed. She began wearing age-appropriate, stylish outfits and
joined the preppy crowd. There was a shift in the transference, and
wishes for me as the oedipal father surfaced. She talked about being
glad that I was not a male doctor. I would worry what he might do to
277
me; there are movies about this. I commented that thinking about
things that happened in the movies kept her from considering her
thoughts about me, right here. Her fantasy of my sexual feelings toward her, manifested in sadomasochistic wishes, condensed oedipal
components and a developmentally expectable erotic interest in me.
I interpreted that the excitement of thinking about an abusive relationship between us distracted her from considering other feelings
that surfaced as we worked together. I spoke to her excitement as a
defense against her worry about feeling unloved, if I did not reciprocate her interest and longing for me.
In conjunction with the process of object removal, which had been
delayed by conflict, Beccah developed an idealized view of me that
promoted her capacity to relinquish her mother. She became curious
about my interests, my salary, my education, and admired that I had
become my own boss. She imitated me in her manner of dress, identified with me in considering career choices; she felt that I was smart,
reliable, and interested in her: You never forget anything I say. At a
time when development required that she relinquish mother in order to attain a separate and independent sense of herself as female, I
provided the necessary unblemished female substitute.
Noticing an adult female patient who had left the office, Beccah
pondered whether she used the couch, and asked to try it. The
couch was weird but, as if it were a test of her readiness to face her
growing up, she was determined to use it. She reacted against the relative restraining quality of it, as adolescents are prone to do, but I was
aware of her unconscious association to a sick bed, and to her fears of
dying, that led her mostly to sit in the middle of the couch with her
back leaning against the wall. She told me about having set appropriate limits on a boy: Youll be proud of me when I tell you this! I responded to the identification (you are very pleased too, thinking
that we share in that feeling), while mindful of the defensive aspects
of her remark. She came to one of her appointments dressed like a
hippie and asked whether I had been one, thus revealing her burgeoning interest in my body and my sexuality as she tried to reconstruct and imitate me in my adolescence. She replied to herself,
Nah, youre too conservative. I dont think so. You go too much by
the rules. I wondered with her whether she thought of me in that
way to feel safe from a worry that I might do something surprising
and scary. She said: Its a relief. She mentioned getting a learners
permit, and jokingly added that we could go driving together. I commented that she was thinking about things we might do together outside of the office. She mused that it was good that it was just the two
278
Silvia M. Bell
279
about the worry that her menstrual flow would not stop, and of her
fear of dying in sexual intercourse, or in childbirth. Her past history
of defectiveness accentuated the developmentally expectable concerns about her changing body, and stimulated the certainty of future trauma. As a little girl she had relied on her mother or her
grandmother to take over her body in order to feel safe; becoming a
woman meant giving up that tie to them, and taking charge of her
own bodya body that had felt unreliable as a child, and was undergoing a risky process of change.
Beccahs behavior toward me became more erratic. She reported
that her mother had commented on her progresswe dont fight
any morebut now she was angry with me. I was weird and out of
touch with kids her age. She told me that she spoke on the phone
with her boyfriends mother every day; Ive never met her. I dont
care what she thinks. I pointed to the worry about letting her self
tell me more because she might care too much about what I think.
She became more resistant. I dont have the maturity for this analysis. Youre trying to connect things up. I dont want to do that. I dont
want to remember. Then she told me that there are pictures of her
back then all over the house, and upsetting stories from her
mother about how people used to react to her. Letting herself experience with me her wishes and worries about her femaleness had mobilized in the transference the manifestation of a fantasy that I, like her
mother, wished to ensnare her in the past in order to keep her from
moving forward.
The work in this period gave us further access to the defensive
function of the defective view of her self. Beccah was aware of still
looking at other peoples reactions to her in order to get a clearer
sense of her self, as if what she saw in the mirror was not convincing.
She expressed despair about whether she would ever feel good
enough. I ventured that she seemed aware that, no matter what image was reflected back, something was interfering with letting herself
change the old picture in her mind. Maybe being her new, grown up
self felt scary and she kept herself looking back. She brought an album of photographs of a recent family event and used each photograph to evaluate herselfher expression was weird in this one,
there she looked deformed, her hair was not right on the next one.
Then she found a good one and said, gleefully; Look at my face
there, clearly taking pleasure and pride in her image. I clarified her
ambivalent feelings: Sometimes you cant stand looking at yourself,
and sometimes you like what you see. As if my words had touched on
something that brought up discomfort, she dismissed her pleasure
280
Silvia M. Bell
and remarked: Theres only one good one. We were thus able to
observe that expressing to me the feeling that she liked what she saw
had mobilized a need to take the good feeling away.
Beccah developed a relationship with a boy. Her boyfriend was a
nice guy, but he is adopted. His adopted status fascinated her; she
saw it as his secret defectiveness. In that sense, he was more defective
than sheher parents had not given her up, she was valuable to
them.
The threat of abandonment and loss, so prominent in her thoughts
about her boyfriends history, was also a central aspect in her conflict
about growing up. Her relationship with this boy stimulated heterosexual feelings that signaled the potential disruption of her childhood tie to her mother, and resulted in an exacerbation of her anxiety. The impulse to call him repeatedly resurfaced; she felt miserable
and sought his constant reassurance. One day she broke out in great
anger at me: Despite all this work, I still feel so insecure! What good
is this analysis anyway? And how can I trust that you really like me
when you didnt know me back then? I said, You worry that something about my seeing you back then would change what I feel about
you now.
Beccah came to her next session carrying the framed pictures of
herself as a child that her mother displayed in the home. She
propped them in front of me, all the while scrutinizing my face. Can
you understand, she asked, why its hard for me to make sense of
how I look now? Its like, to me, Im the same, Im me then and now.
I felt the poignancy of this moment. She had brought the childhood
pictures to the office as if reclaiming ownership of her experience. I
understood intuitively at that moment the importance of my role as
trusted observer of her struggle, a struggle she was proclaiming and
was determined to work through, albeit in the context of the analytic
experience that granted me a vital role. She pointed to the many defects of old, and commented on the few vestiges that remained, symbols of past and present. I said, You wonder whether I see an old you
thats not right, or a changed you that makes you acceptable, and
how that makes me feel about you, the 16-year-old girl in front of
me. I still dont believe anyone could find me attractive, she said.
This session was powerful for both of us. Beccah exposed her vulnerability in the wish that she would feel undamaged as she displayed
her defects, a gesture no longer masked and distorted by the defensive provocative stance she had displayed in our first meeting. I was
moved by her presence, aware of feeling sorrow and pain for the little girl who had been subject to the experiences betrayed in the pic-
281
tures. But, I was also responding to the strength and courage of the
young person before me. I do not doubt that Beccah was impacted by
the affective tenor of that session, in which I served as witness to her
increasing appreciation and acceptance of her struggle (Poland,
2000). Beccah was now telling herself. However, in order to understand the psychic meaning of her action, it is necessary to place it
in the rich context within which it manifested, and consider what
compelled Beccah to bring the pictures to me at this point in her
treatment.
Beccah had been expressing openly her experience of being lovable in the context of the growing relationship with a boy. As those
feelings, harbingers of her developing femininity, deepened, the
threat of the loss of the childhood experience with mother mobilized
intense conflict. Testing my response to her as a child at this time, a
move which could be regarded to serve in the interest of acquiring a
new way of seeing herself with me, was in effect a maneuver that
put a halt, albeit temporarily, to dangerous developmental wishes to
experience herself as a young woman in my presence. A stormy period ensued during which Beccah enacted the sadomasochistic fantasies pertaining to her early relationship with her mother. Fears
about her vulnerability to illness became prominent. She worried
that her immune system was down, and that her body could not
fight infection. A simple cold triggered fears that she would not be
able to breathe. She put down our work; talking was not doing anything. I was helpless and ineffectual. Her agitation switched to cool
withdrawal. She came to the office barefoot. My mother made a
comment, Do you think its dangerous to walk around barefoot? I
can decide what to do. I said that maybe she wanted for me to worry
about the danger, and then she wouldnt have to worry about her decision. She reported that she had eaten her lunch during her biology
lab. We were dissecting a rat. The teacher said there was a possibility
of bacterial contamination. If I get sick, I could pass it along. Like
the rat on the dissecting table, Beccah felt dangerous to herself and
to others. While, on the one hand, she felt that her mother was responsible for her defectiveness, she also struggled with the fantasy
that she was the one at fault, who hurt her mother with her defectiveness. She wanted me/mother to rescue her from herself because,
without maternal controls, she could not trust that she could be safe.
She assaulted me with my helplessness while exacerbating her own
sense of vulnerability; she was thus enacting with me in the transference the sadomasochistic symbiotic fantasy that kept her locked in a
sense of defectiveness.
282
Silvia M. Bell
283
284
Silvia M. Bell
as the parental figures are relinquished. Both Blos (1962) and Winnicott (1971) state that, because of the centrality of regression, adolescence is a phase that facilitates the opportunity to undo developmental arrests and promotes restructuralization. Earlier conflicts and
fantasies that interfere with successful individuation, and can become further structuralized in pathological outcomes, now are
uniquely available for observation. The data from Beccahs analysis
attests to the importance of the adolescent period as one that provides a propitious opportunity for psychoanalytic intervention. Experiences involving her new female body, and the intensification of drives that safeguard individuation, provided a context that promoted
our exploration of the crippling conflicts that were interfering with
the process of psychic differentiation. Given the mental capacities of
adolescencethe ability to think beyond the concrete aspects of the
present, to consider past, future, and the possibleBeccah was able
to rework the governing childhood adaptations, and effectively utilize the forces that promote development.
Accounts of female adolescent development (Dahl, 1995; Ritvo,
1984, 1989) attest to the vicissitudes of this phase, which were much
exacerbated for Beccah given her past conflicts. The girls entry into
adolescence is characterized by a resurgence of the preoedipal object tie to the mother; she responds to the major shifts in physical,
and mental, functioning, as well as to the intensification of drive impulses, by seeking emotional closeness with the protective mother of
early childhood. With the onset of menarche, there is a heightening
of anxiety over the inability to control the body that intensifies the
girls neediness of mothers help with bodily care. These longings
stimulate fears of passive submission to the mother, and reactivate
earlier conflicts about merger with/engulfment by her. Beccahs experience of life-death dependency on mothers ministrations and
protection was reactivated in this phase of development, and it
threatened to keep her locked in a pervasive posture of defectiveness
that defended against separateness. The immediacy of these feelings
in the context of the concomitant drive toward separateness made
the reworking of separation-individuation issues more accessible to
analytic intervention
The girls awareness that she is beginning to possess a body like the
mothers may further stimulate fantasies of merging with her (Ritvo,
1989). A replay of the struggles of the anal period can ensue, and oppositional feelings, aversion, and estrangement from the mother
take over. When the resurgence of sadism is too powerful, the girl
may defensively externalize the sadism onto her mother. Rather than
285
286
Silvia M. Bell
fered from phimosis requiring surgery at age two, detailed how the
perception of the mother as a vicious attacker, whose longed-for attention and concern could be attained only by suffering and pain
and by relinquishing his penis, absorbed, restructured and organized
a whole range of earlier experiences and conflicts (p. 217218).
Beccahs affect storms, which she enacted in her relationships with
others, can be conceptualized as expressions of her internal representation of self and objectsa systematic repetition of the relationship between a persecutory, scolding, and derogatory object, and a
rejected, depressed, and impotent self (Kernberg, 2003, p. 520).
However, as Goldberger (1995) points out in her account of the
analysis of a five-year-old-girl who suffered medical trauma, the picture is more complex. The child who, out of medical necessity, has
experienced painful maternal ministrations, develops an attachment
to being handled in painful ways; in fact, the gratification obtained
from such relationships is something which is feared, but also looked
to have repeated (p. 268) so as to prevent object-loss. The analytic
work with Beccah revealed that sadistic fantasies around her early experience (that her mother caused/wished her trauma; that she damaged her mother through her defectiveness), and conflict (rooted in
oedipal and pre-oedipal wishes wishes that mandated punishment)
interfered with the appropriate restructuring of her internal representations, and kept her locked in a regressive posture of being the
defective child. The excitement of her sadomasochistic entanglements, as well as the unconscious connections between healthloss
of motherabandonment/death, that interfered with the development of an adequate view of herself, required careful interpretation
and working through.
Hoffman (2003) comments on the prominent role of aggression in
enactment and defense in the traumatized person, in particular the
predominant use of identification with the aggressor and turning
passive into active. A posture of nonchalant bravado is a characterologic defense in traumatized youngsters, serving to obscure intense object hunger, and passive libidinal object longings, as well as
to ward off expectations of repeated rejection and loss (Steven
Marans, as reported in Mazza, 2003). Goldberger (1995) comments
that the incessant need to repeat the traumatic experience is a hallmark behavior of the victimized child. The data from Beccahs analysis gives evidence of the pervasive nature, and complex function, of
repetition.
Repetition, which is a function we observe in play, provides normally a much-needed opportunity to re-experience a situation, this
287
time as the active agent rather than helpless victim. This experience
promotes the gradual assimilation and mastery of anxiety. When
trauma is involved, however, the capacity to utilize anxiety as signal
function is impaired. The ego is, once again, overwhelmed and cannot mobilize defense in response to the affect generated in the process of repetition. Loewald (1971) regards the revival of the experience in the analysis as an active recreation on a higher organizing
level which makes resolution of conflict possible (Moore and Fine,
1990). Hence, one of the functions of the analytic intervention is the
restoration of the egos capacity to utilize anxiety for adaptation
(Yorke, 1986). Beccahs treatment created an opportunity for contained repetition, where she was able to take an affective sample of
these basic danger situations, to experience them in miniature (Yorke,
1986). Blum (2003c), underscoring the importance of genetic reconstruction, states that re-experiencing a trauma in the context of the
safety of the analytic situation effects changes in adaptive capacity
that are more congruous with present reality. As the record of Beccahs treatment elucidates, reconstruction did not refer to the accurate recall of past events, nor to a simplistic ascription of causation
between early factors and later pathology, but to the recovery of affective experiences which, when understood in light of what was
known of the relevant dimensions of her childhood (i.e., within a
genetic context), facilitated the capacity to distinguish between reality and fantasy, past and present, cause and effect (Blum, 2003a,
p. 500).
Certain authors who write about the impact of early trauma (cf.
Mazza, 2003) stress that it interrupts the development of healthy omnipotence, prevents the establishment of self-soothing and self-regulating capacities, and disrupts the capacity to recognize mental states
and to find meaning in ones own and others behavior. Referring to
Fonagys concept of mentalization (Fonagy et al., 2002), many assert that the major goal of treatment is to facilitate the development
of the capacity to conceptualize and make sense of situations, affect
and behavior. The clinical material elucidates that Beccahs capacity
for affect regulation was seriously compromised, and it had a disorganizing impact on her ability to comprehend her internal and external experience. In the early phase of our work, she experienced a
resurgence of the traumatizing childhood feelings that accompanied
her many overwhelming experiences pertaining to her medical
needs. The affective impact of these experiences, which were recorded at a procedural (i.e., non-verbal) level, were actualized in the
transference as she felt disoriented in my physical space, and she ex-
288
Silvia M. Bell
289
which represented the affective experience of her early years and her
adaptation to it.
In the course of the analysis, Beccah came to appreciate that she
experienced her developmentally appropriate wishes in a context of
danger that reflected her earlier adaptation to her painful past. We
uncovered that she adhered to a devalued view of herself for complex reasons intended to restrict her functioning. Because the meaning of this experience became accessible to interpretation in the context of our work, she was able to achieve a new integration that
reworked the heretofore sadomasochistic aspects of her relationship
with her mother, and relinquished the defensive use of defectiveness
that interfered with adolescent development. As a result, her affect,
her behavior, and the quality of her thought processes increasingly
reflected changes indicative of a modification in the constellation of
intrapsychic factors that determines adaptation. By the time treatment discontinued, she gave eloquent testimony about the differences she experienced in herself.
The interpretive work functioned to promote insight, and permitted her to achieve conscious solutions to those conflicts that, when
they were unconscious, threatened to mobilize anxiety (Gray, 1988,
p. 44). Specifically, Beccahs attention was directed to the defensive
function of her sense of defectiveness, which could be observed by
her as we noted her tendency to turn to disparaging images of herself
in order to inhibit strivings that felt dangerous. While, as Gray emphasizes, profound unconscious changes take place as a result of the
influence of the experience of the analyst-patient dyad, the therapeutic aim of a focus on the analysis of resistance, to quote Gray, is to reduce the patients potential for anxiety, as differentiated from an aim
that merely seeks to reduce the patients anxiety (Gray, 1988, p. 41).
In Beccahs case, depressive affect was also a target, as it became involved in compromise formations that relied on turning aggression
against her self in a depressive response intended to relieve anxiety
(Brenner, 1982).
Each instance when the patient can confirm the connection between their sense of danger and the activities of the mind intended
to relieve that feeling strengthens the capacity to exercise volitional
control over internal forces (Busch, 1999). For example, when Beccah recognized that her aggressiveness protected her from the worry
about being overwhelmed by fear, she was better able to evaluate her
anxiety and could establish more satisfying relationships with others;
when she realized that she experienced being healthy as a harbinger
of loss, and understood that thoughts of defectiveness kept her safe
290
Silvia M. Bell
291
PSYCHOANALY TIC
PERSPECTIVES ON THE
FUTURE AND THE PAST
Psychoanalytic Reconstruction
and Reintegration
HAROLD P. BLUM, M.D.
295
296
Harold P. Blum
297
specific and focal, and it traces, for example adult obesity, to childhood conflicts concerning feeding and object loss. Genetic interpretations are fostered by the regressive character of free association
and transference. Reconstruction would encompass broader considerations, e.g. of dependent relationships, concurrent parental regression, inability to mourn and accept loss, identification with the
lost object, etc.
Reduction of the transference to its childhood roots and the accumulated analytic data converge in a reconstruction, which in turn
furthers the analytic process. Contrary to the current position in
some analytic quarters, that such genetic data are co-determined by
the analysts suggestion or countertransference, the childish character of the transference, the patients childish traits, features, fixations, and irrational childish fantasies point to the childhood locus of
pathogenesis and the patients psychopathology. Although analytic
work requires the reconstruction of childhood (Freud, 1937), this
does not mean that any two reconstructions by two different analysts
will be identical. Each analyst will select, organize, and interpret the
data with some degree of theoretical and personal preference. The
analysts countertransference may make it difficult to analyze the
transference, or from another point of view, it may provide further
insight into the patients conflicts, the transference, and the patients
resistance in the analytic process. The analysts analytic attitude, self
analysis, education, and experience should contain and limit the analysts human subjectivity, retaining good enough objectivity.
Analytic theory does not derive entirely from adult regressive
states, which do not reproduce earlier states unaltered, but has long
been complemented by infant observational research and child
analysis. The reconstruction of childhood takes into account affective, cognitive, and moral development. Reconstruction considers
the overlap and sequence of developmental phases, and the unique
quality of individual endowment and experience. Because of the theoretical implications of reconstruction, it has been used from the beginnings of psychoanalysis to propose, confirm, or challenge a theoretical or developmental hypothesis.
As analysis proceeds, the wealth of associations, memories, transference reactions, etc. provide a foundation for the process of reconstruction. Usually there are a number and variety of reconstructions
rather than one grand encompassing reconstruction. Like interpretation, reconstruction is neither arbitrary nor capricious nor dogmatic. All too often what is depicted as analysis in popular distortions
and misconceptions is a parody of the psychoanalytic process. A cari-
298
Harold P. Blum
cature of the psychoanalyst as insensitive, insistent, robotic, and selfserving is deployed to defend against the authentic yet disturbing
nature of analytic insights. Self-protection is preferred to self-knowledge. When a reconstruction is offered to the patient, it is a product
of prior analytic work, tentative and always an approximation. Psychoanalysis and the process of reconstruction are not based on faith,
dogma, or conjecture, but on evidence, inference, and further confirmation or alteration with new data. Fragmented, dissociated, and
repressed memories emerge and have to be differentiated from
screen memories and pseudo-memories. Screen memories are often
similar to the patients constructions.
Our knowledge of memory has significantly advanced in the recent decade. Bridges are under construction between psychoanalysis
and neuroscience, and both disciplines should benefit. Several memory systems are now recognized. These systems appear to have their
respective modes of registration, storage, and retrieval with interrelated functions and controls. Autobiographical memory is closely
connected to declarative, explicit, usually conscious verbal memory
for persons and places and general knowledge. Procedural, implicit
memory for skills, e.g. riding a bicycle, playing the piano, is not conscious, though not repressed, and is not modified as a consequence
of psychoanalysis. At this time the dynamic unconscious has not been
definitely delineated within any specific memory system or configuration. Traumatic memory is an exception, however, and appears to
be processed differently from other memory. Severe trauma alters
the structure and the memory function of the hippocampus. Unconscious traumatic memory is essentially formed in the amygdala (Le
Doux, 2002), which appears to instigate automatic fight-flight reactions to stress. These findings illuminate the complexity of memory
and the necessity of reconstruction superseding the limitations of
discrete memory.
Patients sometimes offer reconstructions before the analyst. In any
case, reconstruction will be invoked in analysis unless the past continues to be resisted and avoided. If the past and present have not been
meaningfully interconnected, then the patients defenses have not
been sufficiently diminished. The past will continue to influence the
present, but the past may also defend against the present. A patient,
for example, preferred to reconstruct her childhood strife with her
mother, rather than scrutinize her derivative overprotection and
over-indulgence of her daughter. Any confrontation with her daughter was to be strenuously avoided. The present as well as the childhood past may be viewed through a glass darkly.
Before the reconstruction is verbalized and offered to the patient,
299
the psychoanalyst has been building a mental construction of the patients childhood. Based on the patients presenting symptoms and
character, the life history described by the patient, and the initial
transference reactions of the patient along with the analysts countertransference responses, construction evolves. Construction is an initial preliminary formulation, which goes on silently in the analysts
mind, particularly concerning the nature of the patients psychopathology and its relationship to pathogenesis. Construction is thus
an initial set of hypotheses about the patients unconscious conflicts
and character structure which is not shared with the patient and
which develops during the opening phase of psychoanalysis (Greenacre, 1975; Blum, 1994). Differentiated here from construction, reconstruction is generally formulated after the opening phase of analysis and is shared and shaped with the patient.
In the material that follows I shall focus primarily on reconstruction. This will allow a deeper understanding of the significance of the
child that lives on within the adult, the persistence of childish features and fixations within the adult personality, and the revival of
childhood in the patients regressive responses. This is not to say that
the child in the adult is ever revived as he/she actually existed in
childhood. Childish reactions in the adult may or may not serve their
original defensive and adaptive functions, and there may have been
developmental transformation of meaning and function. The adults
present personality and life situation influences the form and content of childhood revivals. Reconstruction of the patients past is necessary to demonstrate the persistent influence of the childhood past
in the present, but contemporary reconstruction also demonstrates
the influence of the present in the way the past is revived, re-experienced, and understood. The archeological metaphor which Freud
originally used in his description of reconstruction as reclaiming the
buried past is still apt in many respects. His work of construction, or
if it is preferred, of reconstruction, resembles to a great extent an
archeologists excavation of some dwelling-place that has been destroyed and buried or of some ancient edifice. . . . except that the analyst works under better conditions and has more material at his
command to assist him, since what he is dealing with is not something destroyed but something that is still alive . . . (Freud, 1937,
p. 259). Patient and analyst develop rational conviction about a reconstruction based upon analytic knowledge, observations, inferences and their cohesive integration. Reconstructions have transference and counter-transference meaning, however, so a patients
reaction to reconstruction becomes part of the analytic process.
Some of the main features of clinical reconstruction will be illus-
300
Harold P. Blum
301
and loyalties, and his guilt toward these women, were major reasons
for his seeking psychoanalysis.
When his girlfriend learned about his affair with his former fiancee, she repeatedly told the patient that had hurt her deeply, and
then she broke off all contact with him. Separation reactions activated in the transference. He was reluctant to leave sessions, and on
Friday would cheerfully state, have a nice weekend.
The intrigues in his personal life entered the analytic situation. He
confessed guilt about reading a magazine report about a mass murder in the waiting room. Although he was afraid of getting caught, he
had somehow left the magazine open to that page. He then recalled
that in adolescence he had found his fathers pornographic pictures.
Disgusted, but excited, he masturbated with these pictures. He was so
afraid of being discovered that he replaced them exactly as he found
them. He thought his parents were shameful hypocrites. When he
had asked for the analysts card, he was unconsciously referring to his
fathers pornography, wondering if the analyst were trustworthy or a
lascivious hypocrite.
This led to feelings about morality and specifically religion. He
wondered if the analyst were Jewish. He had grown up in an antiSemitic milieu with contempt of Jews. In a Catholic college he had
told a fellow that he had no use for any Jews and this person declared, Im Jewish. The patient was stunned and mortified. In his
view, though weaklings, Jews could be ruthless and they did the dirty
work (like servants). Later he began to examine the many stereotypes of his childhood. He was unconsciously afraid that the possibly
Jewish psychoanalyst would encourage immoral thoughts and acts.
On the couch he was vulnerable; he felt feminine and was homophobic. The patient was dimly aware of his fear of all women and preferred to think of them as asexual Madonnas. As a child he had wondered about sounds coming from the thin partition of his parents
bedroom, and as an adolescent he audited their sexual relations and
was sexually aroused. His adolescence was burdened by guilt and
fears of punishment.
At this point the analyst could reconstruct the patients reactivated
primal scene fantasy and sibling experience during his childhood
and adolescence, which reflected in all his current relationships. He
had slept in the same room as a sister until puberty, undressing together. His removal from their bedroom at puberty convinced him of
his sinfulness and motivated his urge to confession in church and
later in analysis. His masturbation while looking at the parental
pornography was unconsciously incestuous, and he was fearful of the
302
Harold P. Blum
303
guage and dress. He identified with his parents of the servant class
and also with the aristocratic parents. He had not been aware of his
dual identifications, languages, and ambivalent attachments. He had
lived in two worlds which were dissociated; ego integration was possible only after reconstruction of his childhood.
Reconstruction elaborated how he and his family were filled with
awe, envy, and resentment of the aristocrats. The have-nots attempted to devalue what they did not have. He should have been
rich, and what a better life he would have if he were the son or
adopted son of the nobility. Yet his identification with the cultivated,
educated, refined aristocrats proved to be a very important factor in
the patient seeking higher education and developing many cultural
interests. He displayed the superficial accoutrements of affluence,
and elegance but he knew that deep inside he had a servant mentality. Secrecy had also referred to the social devaluation of servants,
which he regarded with shame and humiliation. Moreover, servants
knew some of their employers secrets, and could know too much.
Acting servile and submissive was unconsciously associated with being feminine, with being Jewish. Anything that reminded him, or was
suggestive of being submissive or subjugated, enraged and frightened the patient. He transiently thought of quitting analysis rather
than lying compliantly on the couch. He needed to be clean and
neat, not only because of his guilt, but because of the dirty work of
his parents. His father had done manual labor, and his mother probably served as a maid. He felt compassion and pity, but also contempt, for manual laborers and for the lower class. He identified not
only with the values of the aristocracy but also with their condescending, haughty superiority toward their servants. He admired and idealized their prestige and power. He wanted to realize grandiose omnipotent fantasies and to never again be subjected to being humble
and humiliated.
A flood of painful memories returned, integrated in the reconstruction of the patients childhood as the son of servants. The
wealthy estate owners had referred to his parents by their first names
or without a name. The patient saw this as a lack of respect, treating
his belittled parents as if they were children. He thought that one of
the reasons they worked on different estates was that his parents had
been summarily dismissed from some of their jobs. Apparently some
of the estates were owned by descendents of the Robber Barons, influential individuals who inherited great wealth from the financial
manipulations of their forebears. The estate owners, partially through
projection, feared that their servants would engage in theft. The pa-
304
Harold P. Blum
305
no status. Were they actually fired because they committed robberies? Frequently paid in cash, they avoided income tax. Did they
deserve punishment? Were they without self-respect, and/or secretly
enjoying humiliation? What had led to their becoming servants? Did
his parents also idealize and identify with the aristocracy, basking in
their reflected glory, while denying their own devaluation? Did they
wish to be adopted as he did by the estate owners and analyst in a familial family romance just as he had, now manifest in wishes to be
adopted by the analyst (Freud, 1909; Frosch, 1959)? The reconstruction gave him insight into his thoughts and feelings about the past
and his plans for the future. It allowed greater access to the negative
feelings of guilt, shame, and humiliation, his low self-esteem, his fear
of failure, and his drive for success.
The reconstruction elucidated to the patients intrapsychic fantasies and responses to his pre-adult experiences. He was less confused by his pendulum-like swings between his feeling affluent and
indigent, aristocrat and servant, master and slave. The reconstruction did not compete with nor defend against transference interpretation, but advanced understanding of both transference and genetic
interpretation. The recovery of dissociated, forgotten, and repressed
memories reciprocally facilitated reconstruction.
Although Freud noted that reconstruction may serve as a convincing surrogate for a memory that could not be retrieved from repression, his basic premise was developmental and dealt with a forgotten
piece of childhood. Freud reconstructed a part of the analysands development, with pathogenic or progressive ramifications. Freuds
(1937) formulation went far beyond a single memory or element:
What we are in search of is a picture of the patients forgotten years
that shall be alike trustworthy and in all essential respects complete
(p. 258). Freud added that the task of the analyst is to make out what
has been forgotten from the traces which it has left behind, or more
correctly, to construct it. Freud (1920) anticipated the contemporary developmental issues in reconstruction, and early differentiated
between genetic and developmental perspectives.
So long as we trace the development from its final outcome backwards, the chain of events appears continuous and we feel we have
gained in insight, which is completely satisfactory or even exhaustive.
But if we proceed the reverse way, if we start from the premises inferred from the analysis and try to follow these up to the final result,
then we no longer get the impression of an inevitable sequence of
events, which could not have been otherwise determined. We notice
at once that there might have been another result, and that we might
306
Harold P. Blum
have been just as well able to understand and explain the latter. The
synthesis is thus not so satisfactory as the analysis. (p. 167)
The problem of reconstructing developmental steps and sequences, of tracing the over-determined numerous factors of pathogenesis both evokes and challenges reconstruction. The issues of genetic fallacy and adultomorphic myth are further complicated by the
possible confusion of pathological regression, normal development,
and deviant development; by the number of factors and varied
strength of forces involved; and by the discontinuities which have to
be bridged. Reconstruction is made possible by the wealth of information provided by the analysis. But it is never a singular, veridical
red thread of connections. The reconstructive inferences depend
upon the totality of analytic data, and not just the transference alone,
on the elaboration and remodeling of the reconstruction in the crucible of the analytic process. How could this patient understand his
master-slave fantasies, his feelings of emasculation and inferiority, his
overall preoccupation with narcissistic injury and self-aggrandizement without the affective reconstruction of his childhood?
Some of the unresolved analytic issues in this case are of great interest. The genetic interpretations, and the reconstruction to which
they were attached, did not fully explain the patients psychopathology. So far the classical explanation of the patients disorder was in
terms of oedipal conflict. Were there not also primary narcissistic
and pre-oedipal issues, which were important antecedents of later
conflict? Of course the further back into the pre-oedipal period a reconstruction is attempted, the more speculative it inevitably becomes. The earlier the level of reconstruction, the greater the level
of conjecture. What was his early experience with his mother? She
was stoic in her menial work of cleaning and laundering. Some of the
ambivalence toward his father may have been transferred and displaced from his mother. She was not described in warm terms and
was regarded as rigid and unempathic. She was quite possibly depressed during his early childhood, hardly playful. It is likely that his
feeding, sleeping, and toilet training were rigidly controlled. Was his
mother the prototype of the rigid, insensitive, callous nun? Mother
could be a Madonna-like figure who protected him from his own impulses, but also an exciting and emasculating prostitute. He stated,
Im uncomfortable with cracks in the edifice I have created.
Women were cracked, tempting, and dangerous; they were split into
degraded pairs of prostitutes and nuns. Only after more analysis
could he admit that some of the clergy were dedicated and effective
307
educators. There were few if any parties in his childhood, and holidays were not celebrated. He had never had a birthday party, though
the patient was aware that the aristocrats children on the estate had
such parties. His father was not sure about his sons birthday.
The atmosphere of home was somber. His parents relationship
was not marked by overt affection and friendship, and they were little
interested in their childrens feelings. If he did not like the food he
was offered, he was expected to eat it without complaint, so that his
preferences were largely ignored. In later childhood he was painfully
ashamed of his parents and strenuously defended against feelings of
shame. His parents conveyed their feelings of denigration to their
son, but they and the aristocrats encouraged both his later achievement and entitlement.
Transference analysis and reconstruction were synergistic rather
than competitive or adversarial. The reconstruction was regarded as
mutative, making a decisive difference in clinical analysis . . . the
past within the present is transformed forging a new vision of reality
(Blum, 1994, p. 150). In the process of reconstruction, self-representations as well as object representations from various phases of life
are re-evaluated and reintegrated into new and more realistic representations. Not only were the defenses modified, but also the patients apperception of his/her inner and outer world.
In clinical situations where there has been massive psychic trauma,
there may be ego regression and damage to cognitive and affective
processes. What the patient cannot remember and articulate has to
be laboriously reconstructed. Somatization reactions and non-verbal
communication may be at least initially of great importance. Reconstruction may contribute to the retrieval and reorganization of fragmented, distorted, memories, as well as filling in memory gaps.
Without the reconstruction of memory what is indescribable and ineffable may be somatized, enacted, or acted-out through the children, the next generation. To avoid a collusion of silent avoidance,
reconstruction is required of the trauma, terror, and panic, of the
feelings of helplessness, and of the void of protecting or rescuing objects (Grubrich-Simitis, 1981; Krystal, 1991; Blum, 1994). An attempt
is made to clarify the details of the traumatic situations, and when
necessary, to uncover the intergenerational transmission of trauma,
with analytic awareness of inevitable unknowns and ambiguities.
Only then can traumatic reality and its fantasy elaboration be integrated into the relatively intact personality. The verbal reconstruction coalesces with step-by-step working-through of trauma and
terror. This permits the massive trauma of the past, recalled and re-
308
Harold P. Blum
constructed, to belong to the past rather than the ever present. Further analytic reconstruction may encompass prior and subsequent
traumatic experience, telescoped into the maelstrom of massive
trauma.
I shall now turn to the early facilitating value and integrative
effects of reconstruction psychoanalysis and in insight oriented psychoanalytic psychotherapy. While it is true that reconstruction is not
necessarily a part of psychotherapy as it is in psychoanalysis, reconstruction is often utilized to help the patient become aware of the
power and persistence of childhood fantasy and experience into
their adult lives. Transference and current reality may take precedence, but at the same time, reconstruction may be necessary to illuminate the transference and the current reality situation, which the
patient has helped to create. A borderline patient, who is bitterly critical and contemptuous of the analyst, may not respond to the analysts attempts to show the patient that the attacks on the analyst are
irrational and unjustified. The psychoanalyst regards the patients
criticism as part of transference fantasy, whereas the patient believes
that the analyst truly merits criticism. The analyst has a negative
counter-transference, about which he is inwardly conflicted. The patient has succeeded in eliciting the psychotherapists hostility, justifying in his mind his criticism of the analyst. A transference-countertransference stalemate might ensue.
There are different approaches to such thorny problems, but early
reconstruction can be very helpful, to the psychoanalyst as well as to
the patient. This is a departure from the general use of reconstruction after the initial phase of therapy. The exception here is not
meant to detract from Freuds (1940) counsel, we never fail to make
a distinction between our knowledge and his knowledge. We avoid
telling him at once things we have often discovered at an early stage,
and we avoid telling him the whole of what we think we have discovered. We reflect carefully over when we shall impart the knowledge
of one of our constructions to him . . . which is not always easy to decide (p. 178).
Where the patient has experienced a pathogenic relationship with
a parent involving regular overdoses of criticism, contempt, and disparagement, the therapist could point out that the patient had experienced withering criticism long before his treatment. His feelings of
mistreatment derived not from the present, but predominantly from
the past with his parent. The patient has identified with the aggressor
and was treating the therapist to the same disparagement to which he
was subjected. The patient had become the critical parent and the
309
310
Harold P. Blum
311
eyes with the refraction of an adult lens. Though the analytic autobiography is further illuminated and integrated by a particular reconstruction, there are no guarantees in analysis of valid reconstruction
or interpretation. Psychoanalysis requires tolerance and evaluation
of alternative considerations. Ambiguity and perplexity are part of
psychoanalytic work and the quest for greater insight. In addition to
Freuds (1911) two principles of mental function, the pleasure and
reality principles, we live and work with the uncertainty principle
(Heisenberg, 1958).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blum, H. (1980). The value of reconstruction in adult psychoanalysis. Internat. Psychoanal., 61:39 54.
(1994). Reconstruction in Psychoanalysis. Childhood Revisited and Recreated. New York: International Universities Press.
(2000). The reconstruction of reminiscence. J. Amer. Psychoanal.
Assn., 47:1125 1144.
Freud, S. (1909). Family romances. S.E., 9.
(1919). A child is being beaten. S.E., 17.
(1920). The psychogenesis of a case of homosexuality in a woman.
S.E., 18.
(1926). The problem of lay analysis. S.E., 20.
(1937). Constructions in analysis. S.E., 23.
(1940). An outline of psychoanalysis. S.E., 23.
Frosch, J. (1959). Transference derivatives of the family romance. J. Amer.
Psychoanal. Assn., 7:503 520.
Good, M. (1998). Screen reconstructions: Traumatic memory, conviction,
and the problem of verification. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 46:149 183.
Greenacre, P. (1975). On reconstruction. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 23:693
771.
Grubrich-Simitis, I. (1981). Extreme traumatization as cumulative trauma:
Psychoanalytic investigations of the effects of concentration camp experiences on survivors and their children. Psychoanal. Study Child, 36:415 450.
Heisenberg, W. (1958). Physics and Philosophy. New York: Harper.
Krystal, H. (1991). Integration and self-healing in post-traumatic states: A
ten year retrospective. Amer. Imago, 48:93 118.
Laub, D. (1998). The empty circle: Children of survivors and the limits of reconstruction. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 46:508 529.
LeDoux, J. (2002). Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are. New
York: Viking.
Novey, S. (1968). The Second Look. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
On Foresight
313
If a man carefully examines his thoughts he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future. His well
being is always ahead.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
it seems that only man imagines the winter of his discontent, or the glorious summer. No other living being can hold an
imagined future before the mind, and has the responsibility of its opportunities and dangers. But we who have this comforting and tormenting companion of inner thought extending beyond the moment are never long distracted from glancing toward our horizon,
whether in anxiety or hope, impassioned thought or quiet reverie.
Even when not pondering in this vein with full deliberation, we often
discover weve been quietly including the future anyway. The psychology of the future is less developed in psychoanalytic thought,
however, than that of past.1
Although there are studies on related topics such as judgment and
anticipation, and although attention to the future is implicit in much
analytic writing, I found no papers on the specific concept of foresight in the analytic literature.
Loewald states that it is the fear of molding the patient in our own
image that has prevented analysts from coming to grips with the future. In addition, reconstruction of the past, and recovery of repressed, has been so useful a focus of clinical work. The neurotic part
of us is in the grip of the past. In fact, one way to view neurosis is as a
truncation of realistic foresight, as the past is repeated over and over
again, which validates our imagined fears over and over again.
The fact that foresight has often been the province of astrologers,
seers, psychics, etc., may also have discouraged serious scientists from
attention to the subject.
This paper is an introductory effort to explore our concern about
the future and to consider what might be reasonable possibilities and
limitations of our attempts at foresight. It is not about knowing
events in advance, about prediction of specifics, about foreknowledge. It is about forms of anticipation that do not transcend our
senses, experience, and judgment. A mature imagination has much
to contribute when its limitations are recognized.
1. Emde (1995) notes, It is only very recently that our contemporary behavioral
sciences have become aware that a future orientation in our psychology has been
grossly neglected in the twentieth century. A multitude of studies have been done
concerning the influence of present and past events on behavior, but we have neglected the influence of the future.
314
Cornelis Heijn
Freud observes the difficulties of prediction during the flow of analytic work:
So long as we trace the development from its final outcome backwards, the chain of events appears continuous, and we feel we have
gained insight which is completely satisfactory and even exhaustive.
But if we proceed to reverse the way, if we start from the premises inferred from the analysis and try to follow these up to the final result,
then we no longer have the impression of an inevitable sequence of
events which could not have been otherwise determined . . . the
chain of events can always be recognized with certainty if we follow
the line of analysis, whereas to predict along the lines of synthesis is
impossible. (Freud 1920)
However, in analysis we do often sense a direction, envision a horizon, and feel that some possibilities exist more than others. These
delicate impressions, however, dont elbow their way in to focused attention, often dont come in verbal language, and are easily overlooked. They are more like a quiet breath, or a passing fantasy or
fleeting image, but may be of surprising value when noted. Sometimes we have a fantasy or image, on the edge of awareness2 that
later appears in the patients associations.3
Often, however, we pay little attention to such impressions. We feel
that conscious, secondary process, deliberate thought is the locus of
higher mental functions such as insight. The characteristics of conscious, secondary process thought work toward differentiating, separating, categorizing, analyzing, and focus, all processes that restrict
the breadth of gaze while also removing us from full involvement.
They objectify and detach us from what we study. Primary process
thought blends and synthesizes, makes ideas collide, spill over, intermingle, come together, and influence each other over a wide field in
a manner in which we remain immersed. One isolates, the other
unites, one narrows, the other broadens. In one we step back and observe, in the other we find ourselves involved.
Primary process, however, is in practice still viewed with more skepticism among us, and also is not as easily studied since it goes on in a
silent realm, revealing its manifestations more than its workings. Secondary process, on the other hand, makes greater use of the lan2. Robert Gardners phrase suggests psychic events that one may easily attend to or
not. This often depends on delicate circumstances of the moment, such as the state of
the therapeutic alliance or the tactfulness of the analysts wonderings.
3. Bennett Simon, M.D., has made such an event the subject of an interesting article in Psychoanalytic Inquiry. See Bibliography.
On Foresight
315
316
Cornelis Heijn
On Foresight
317
seems a good example of our concerns about the future as well as the
use of tools we would think of as belonging to the primary process:
images, symbolization, condensation, displacement. Images carry affect in a way that other symbols cannot do.4
You will probably have imagined by now that I have been trying to
suggest some of the ways that images and primary process modes of
thought may be important in how we process information consciously and unconsciously. The emergence of images and primary
process in regression of thought and for purposes of disguise has
been emphasized and well developed in analytic thought, but this
may be only an aspect of their importance. Perhaps a way to welcome
primary process mechanisms that is more comprehensive and less
tentative than regression in the service of the ego would extend
our reach as analysts.
In Keats, Frost, Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare we repeatedly feel
the search for the eternal moment, the timelessness of the primary
process, in the continually perishing beauty of the world. Paul Ricoeur writes:
because history is tied to the contingent it misses the essential,
whereas poetry, not being the slave of the real event, can address itself directly to the universal, ie: to what a certain kind of person
would likely or necessarily say or do. (Ricoeur 1995)
Poetry has a truth arising from its ability to reach beyond the welter of daily events into the essence of things and the timelessness of
the truth it finds seems to include some concern to help us bear the
unbearable aspect of the future. As poetry leaps into what is timeless
it includes essences of past, present, and future. The Wasteland, by
T. S. Eliot had a profound impact not only as a statement of the present day but of ominous trends leading into the future.
A Brief Diversion into History
While the contingent events of history in themselves may miss the
essential, or draw us away into details, we also do infer from these
events some important truths. Machiavelli, in The Prince, discusses
the disadvantages of using auxiliaries and mercenaries in warfare,
and writes:
4. Pinchas Noy has written about the need to concretize in order to carry affect.
The intellectualization of the obsessional bores us because of its distance from the
moment of real experience.
318
Cornelis Heijn
But mans little foresight will initiate a project which at the start
seems good, but it does not notice the poison that is underlying
it: . . .
And so whoever does not recognize evils when they arise in a principality is not truly wise, and this ability is given to few.
[He goes on to describe causes leading to the overthrow of the Roman Empirea principal one being the employment of Gothic mercenaries.] (Machiavelli, p. 177)
History provides many examples of the success and failure of foresight. We owe much to James Madison in the design of our Constitution. His profound knowledge of good and evil in human affairs, and
his awareness that greed and power would be avidly sought unless
contained, along with intensive study of the various structures of government that attempt to channel such motives, enabled him more
than anyone to see the long-range implications of the various plans
put forward at the Convention.
Early in his career Napoleon had shown a high degree of foresight.
Later, in the Russian campaign, when his army of 433,000 was destroyed and only 10,000 half-frozen and starving men escaped, we see
many examples of the deterioration of this faculty, of valuable foresight ignored or rejected, and of foresight used to ultimate victory by
the opposing General Kutuzov. This is described in the remarkable
journal of General Caulaincourt, one of Napoleons closest aides.
Once he had an idea implanted in his head, the Emperor was carried
away by his own illusion. He cherished it, caressed it, became obsessed with it, one might say he exuded it from all his pores. . . .
Never have a mans reason and judgment been more misguided,
more led astray, more the victim of his imagination and passion, than
the reasoned judgment of the Emperor on certain questions. (Caulaincourt 1935, p. 28)
On Foresight
319
hubris that may flower with success. Its loss was revealed in many ways
in the months to come.
. . . the Emperor could not or would not show a trace of foresight.
There is no doubt that we should have preserved much more undamaged if we had made the necessary sacrifices in time. But to two
or three unfortunate horses we allotted guns and waggons that
needed six, and by not abandoning one or two guns and waggons at
the proper time, we lost four or five a few days later. We planned for
the day only; and because we refused, as the saying is, to give the devil
his due, we paid heavily in the end to the enemy. (Caulaincourt,
p. 208)
Although the focus of this paper is the concept and process of foresight, Napoleons campaigns suggest another subject of importance,
that of the factors that influence its adaptational use. In one of her
last books, The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman describes how great
events are often determined by people who cling, through vanity or
what she calls wooden-headedness, to plans seen by others at the
time to be unworkable. Britains loss of the American Colonies, the
intransigence and corruption of the Renaissance Popes that led to
the Reformation, the Vietnam war, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which someone described as destined only to awaken a sleeping
giant, all took place when those in power would not listen to reasonable foresight. Her meticulous gathering of evidence is compelling,
and one senses that she was doing what she could to awaken a world
moving mindlessly toward great dangers.5
Toynbee emphasizes the need for a currently felt challenge to
evoke creative response. Apparently he feels our imagination mostly
slumbers when long-range adaptation is concerned, and this contributes to the rise and fall of civilizations.
5. Such problems envelop us today, as science and technology grow in power, controlled by an economic system that feeds on the demand for constant growth and
ever increasing private profit, with little consideration of long range consequences to
a finite and fragile world. So we see the problems of global warming, environmental
destruction, genetic engineering, rapid transmission of world diseases, enormous inequality of wealth, loss of species, changes in family structure brought on by economic forces, all with little effective consideration of risks until they appear as crises.
Science has been so triumphant that we may have lost perspective about its limitations, some of which lie particularly in the difficulty of applying the scientific method
to highly complex interdependent systems in which small changes may have massive
but often slowly developing effects. Yet in idealizing science we have also given up
much of our reliance upon expert experience, and upon the foresight of wisdom.
Thus we run great dangers with calmness.
320
Cornelis Heijn
On Foresight
321
the childs future and mediating this vision to the child in his dealings with him . . .
The child, by internalizing aspects of the parent, also internalizes
the parents image of the child . . . (Loewald 1960, p. 20)
322
Cornelis Heijn
in part expressions of what we know from the past and what we see today. To approach a vision of the future is to embrace in thought and
feeling many variables that differ in weight and quality, to have easy
access to different contexts, and to weigh facts that are constantly
changing. What form may this take? As with so many human issues,
Shakespeare provides a rich example. In Richard II, the King has neither consolidated his power nor gained the confidence of his subjects. His decisions vacillate. He has just banished a powerful Lord,
and then gone to quell a rebellion in Ireland. The Queen feels disaster approaching, without being able to specify why, or what form it
might take.
Lord Bushy urges her to lay aside life-harming heaviness.
Queen: I cannot do it, yet I know no cause
Why I should welcome such a guest as grief, . . .
Some unborn sorrow, ripe in fortunes womb,
Is coming towards me; and my inward soul
With nothing trembles; at something it grieves.
After some time news comes that the exiled Lord Bolingbroke has
landed with an army and the other Lords are flocking to him. The
Kings power is quickly evaporating.
Queen: Now hath my soul brought forth her prodigy;7
And I, a gasping new-delivered mother,
Have woe to woe, sorrow to sorrow joind.
Lord Bushy: Despair not, Madam.
Queen: Who shall hinder me?
I will despair, and be at enmity
With cozening hope, he is a flatterer,
A parasite, a keeper back of death. (Shakespeare, p. 44)
On Foresight
323
people would call it intuition but that tells us little about the processes involved. Inward soul suggests its central place, one that concerns us deeply.
How can one approach thinking of this kind, and learn how it operates in our inward soul? It is elusive, and emerges from and recedes into silence. We often seem in awe of it, cautious, fascinated at
times, aware of its power, skeptical of its reliability. We are sometimes
glad in our uncertainty to defer to someone else, and astrologers, oracles, psychics, pundits, authorities of all stripe abound and play
upon the irreducible doubt that is realistically part of such an assessment.8 We also yearn to dismiss such ominous intimations as the
Queen describes, or to welcome hopes unreasonably when they are
pleasant, and are helped in both directions by well-meaning friends.
Perhaps we trust such thinking less in our scientific age, when conscious reasoning is valued most highly, and some incline to believe
that everything should either be certain and scientifically proven or
not entertained at all.
Serious consideration of such thinking must ultimately involve
some wager of faith, yet it is not blind faith, but faith in our reality
sense and judgment. We can never remove all doubt, however, since
we are often led astray by hopes and fears, hubris or timidity, and
since contingencies that impinge on future events can never be eliminated.
In analysis, I felt more grounded when I thought I was working like
a Maine guide, or a coastal fisherman. A Maine guide is in a wilderness situation but still knows we may soon see a bear in the region,
although he might not be able to give reasons. Perhaps it is the unusual quiet, or the nervousness of other animals, but through an absorption of multiple perceptions he has knowledge worth taking seriously. In analysis we sometimes have a similar sense of what may
emerge. Perhaps our level of comfort is changing, or we become
aware that a determined clock-watcher hasnt mentioned time for
several weeks, and realize that the middle phase is upon us with all its
increased trust and greater terrors, or we notice that a patient occasionally talks about how things were earlier in analysis, using the past
tense, and sense that the sadness and rebuke of termination is soon
to come. These changes in analysis, small in all but significance, are
like the snow-drop, the first tiny flower of late winter, coming up of8. American analysis has a long history of concern with what is referred to as wild
analysis, and the ready association of foresight with unscientific modes of thought
may have contributed to the lack of attention to this subject.
On Foresight
CORNELIS HEIJN, M.D.
Examples of our interest in the future are drawn from poetry, religion,
general medicine, and from the aims of psychoanalysis. The concept of
foresight is taken as a focus for questions regarding the relative inattention to a psychology of the future in psychoanalytic thought. This
inquiry leads to consideration of the varying constraints and potentials that are determined by the formal properties of verbal language
and mental images, which are briefly compared and contrasted in regard to their usefulness in understanding complex dynamic systems
such as psychoanalysis. The paper concludes with questions regarding
the qualities of conscious and unconscious, and secondary and primary process thought, and with comments on technique.
I stopped short in the woods today to admire how the
trees grow up without forethought, regardless of the
time and circumstances. They do not wait, as men do.
Now is the golden age of the sapling: earth, air, sun, and
rain are occasion enough.
They were no better in primeval centuries. The winter of their discontent never comes. Witness the buds
of the native poplar, standing gaily out to the frost, on
the sides of its bare switches. They express a native confidence.
Thoreaus Journal, January 2, 1841
312
324
Cornelis Heijn
ten unnoticed through the snow itself, the harbinger of spring long
before the great explosion of life in May. I find that I noticed these
subtle changes more explicitly when hearing about a case in supervision than when involved as analyst, but I must have been potentially
aware of them then as well, and were there time again would want to
cultivate this delicate function of the analyzing instrument.9
These intimations may be compared with creative activity in other
fields such as painting, poetry, or scientific discovery. All involve the
arrival of new meaning before it is obvious and forced upon us. German Expressionist painting, for example, seems to embody forces
and directions at work between the wars. Its dark and brooding quality, the inexorable sense of brutality and violence close at hand,
seems to foreshadow the cruelty to come. Or Van Goghs late painting of crows over the wheatfields, with the road leading into emptiness, conveys, to this viewer at least, an aloneness beyond loneliness
that makes his suicide seem understandable if not predictable.10
A few scientists have recognized the limitations of the scientific
method, which at least apparently is dominated by the secondary
process, for the study of complex dynamic living systems.
convenient characteristics of physical nature bring it about that vast
ranges of phenomena can be satisfactorily handled by linear algebraic or differential equations, often involving only one or two dependent variables; they also make the handling safe in the sense that
small errors are unlikely to propagate, go wild and prove disastrous.
Animate nature, on the other hand, presents highly complex and
highly coupled systemsthese are, in fact, dominant characteristics
of what we call organisms. It takes a lot of variables to describe a man,
or, for that matter, a virus; and you cannot often study these variables
two at a time. Animate nature also exhibits very confusing instabilities, as students of history or the stock market, or genetics are well
aware. (Weaver 1955, p. 1256)
On Foresight
325
Mathematics has begun to approach elucidation of dynamic systems through the development of catastrophe theory, and chaos and
complexity theory, and may be coming closer to providing methods
congenial to the study of psychoanalysis. It is interesting that each of
these new theories makes extensive use of images to convey the
essence of their concepts.11
Abstract Symbols and Images
What might be some differences between the functional possibilities
of various symbolic forms? For instance, if we compare and contrast
mathematical symbols, words, and images, what tasks are best approached with which medium?
Mathematical symbols have beautiful clarity and precision, and purity of form and meaning. A number, or a constant such as pi, or a
function seem to mean precisely one thing and nothing else. It therefore has a universal, lifeless, and timeless meaning that seems to approach Platos ideal forms. It is, however, detached from the unique
thing it is used to describe, and is impersonal. It deals with the relations between things rather than with the things themselves. Where
what is being studied moves around and wont sit still to be measured, mathematics has developed probability theory and statistics,
so that without giving up the exactness of its tools it recognizes that
unique things may differ, and so provides us with levels of confidence. While mathematics can help us predict and control many aspects of our surroundings and thus seems most closely allied with science as it has developed so far, it loses touch with the teeming activity
of life. For most of us it resides in an ethereal world, and we cannot
swear or make love mathematically, and rarely communicate with our
friends by equations.
With words we let in our passions, and our wish to communicate
or mislead. They are the bridge to friend and enemy. Words have a
relatively consensual meaning, although even dictionaries differ
some, but their meaning can often change gradually, so a word once
rich with meaning can become empty over time. The meaning of
words is often highly dependent on context. Words also mean something different to each of us as our individual experiences get at11. If one considers the essence of science not only as it is embodies in the scientific
method, but in the scientific conscience, with the ideal of putting aside wishes, fears,
and pride in the search for truth, psychoanalysts systematically cultivate this scientific
ideal, with more or less effect, in the analysis of counter-transference.
326
Cornelis Heijn
12. A valuable study of the limitations of words in grasping reality, in reflecting our
inner thought processes, and in communicating with others, is found in the book by
Ben-Ami Scharfstein (1993).
On Foresight
327
328
Cornelis Heijn
the latent content, which the manifest content was, according to this
theory, structured to conceal. The value of these mechanisms for
other purposes has rarely been explored, and sometimes disavowed.
Greenberg and Pearlman, using as an example information from
the Freud-Fleiss letters about the Irma dream, show that Freud was
wrestling with the same issues in the manifest as in the latent content
without recognizing that fact himself. They conclude that the distinction between manifest and latent in the formation of dreams
should be reconsidered and the concepts of dream censor and of
drive discharge no longer seem necessary to our understanding of
dream formation. An implication seems to be that the image is a different way of placing our concerns before the mind but that the
function of disguise is overdrawn (Greenberg and Pearlman 1978).
The analytic literature emphasizes the primacy of conscious thought
as a prerequisite to insight. (I am assuming a relationship between
foresight and insight, an aspect of foresight being insight into hypothetical situations cast into the future.) Freud writes:
It is misleading to say that dreams are concerned with the tasks of life
before us or seek to find a solution for the problems of our daily
work. Useful work of this sort is as remote from dreams as is any intention of conveying information to another person. When a dream
deals with a problem of actual life, it solves it in the manner of an irrational wish and not in the manner of a reasonable reflection.
The dream work is not simply more careless, more irrational, more
forgetful and more incomplete than waking thought; it is completely
different from it qualitatively and for that reason not comparable
with it. It does not think, calculate or judge in anyway at all; it restricts itself to giving things a new form. (Freud 1931)
Many still accept this sharp parceling out of our mental functions as
in this statement by Edward Joseph in his Presidential Plenary address at the American Psychoanalytic Association. becoming conscious of a particular mental product is always a prerequisite to insight. The unanimity of psychoanalytic writers on this score was
impressive (Joseph 1987). Other authors: Rangell, Dorpat, Weiss express contrasting views, however, and include perception, reason,
judgment, insight, realism in unconscious thought. Rangell (1989)
writes, While there is a widespread resistance to the idea of secondary process functioning in the unconscious, I am astonished and
perplexed as to how a practicing psychoanalyst can do without it
(p. 197). And Insight does not always, or promptly, or even eventually become conscious (p. 198). He would extend our understanding of the workings of the unconscious to include evaluating, planning, problem solving, and executing action.
On Foresight
329
Dorpat states that most often reception, registration, and response to stimulation occur outside conscious awareness. His cognitive arrest theory postulates arrest of perceptual and cognitive
processes before the stage of conscious awareness but the earlier
phases of the transformations of the sensory information remain intact and unaffected by the action of denial, and contradicts Freuds
idea that the denier first forms a normal, conscious percept and later
disavows and distorts the percept. Evaluation, judgment, development of implications are going on in a pre-verbal mode of thinking
out of consciousness (Dorpat 1985, p. 28).
Joseph Weiss (1993) finds the unconscious control hypothesis
most consistent with clinical experience. This assumes that a person
is unconsciously able to use his higher mental functions and brings
repressed contents to consciousness when he unconsciously decides
he may safely experience them. This points away from emphasis of
correct interpretation to emphasis on unconscious judgments of
safety for release of repressed and clinical progress. These authors all
seem convinced that higher mental functions operate in the unconscious.
Although our age considers the scientist as the highest form of rational man, and the scientific method as the surest way to truth, scientific discovery, as distinct from method, appears often to rely on
processes that are not conscious and deliberate, and that involve
thinking with images. There are many anecdotes about this in biographies of scientists, sometimes told with embarrassment because
dreaming is not always recognized by a serious scientist as an honorable way to think.
One morning, as Einstein got out of bed, he imagined a man
falling off the roof past his window, and realized that he could not
tell from the percept alone whether the man was falling or the house
was rising, an image including the concept of relativity. In response
to an inquiry about his thought processes, he said, The words of the
language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role
in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to
serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear
images which can be voluntarily reproduced and combined. . . .
Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously
only in a secondary stage (1974, pp. 25 26).
Edison, ever the inventor, invented a way to capture his hypnagogic hallucinations because he found they often contained the solution to a problem he had been pondering. He took frequent cat-naps
in his chair, holding steel balls in his hands over metal plates on the
floor. At the moment of sleep onset, when all the muscles relax, they
330
Cornelis Heijn
would make a great clatter and wake him up while the hallucination
was still vivid.
Our thought when expressed in words is more open to our examination than is our thinking in images. How often do we inquire
about the formal qualities of dreams, their skill and accuracy? Perhaps some of us dream with the fidelity of Vermeer, others with the
skill of a Sunday painter.
Books by Arthur Koestler and Harold Rugg outline steps in the creative process. This usually begins with intense study and conscious efforts to solve a problem, then follows a continuing sense of puzzlement, a feeling that things do not fit. Eventually there is a turning
away from the problem, and at an unpredictable point what Rugg
calls a flash of insight and Koestler the Eureka phenomenon ensues, usually during some not fully alert focused state, one that Rugg
calls trans-liminal. 14 While there are many descriptions of the phenomenon, it is very difficult to study the underlying process.
When we dwell in the secondary process we are aware that past and
future exist and feel the affects of grief and hope that accompany
awareness of time. When our experience is connected to primary
process we feel no past or future in the same reflective sense, and
people long gone may appear as they were. We dwell then outside of
time or, as Loewald says, in eternity, the absence of time. Remote aspects from the full granary of related past experience may enter the
present.
The potentials of having at our aid all the related experience of
our lives, fresh and vital in the immediate moment, to be felt and
worked with in a plastic medium capable of an infinite variety of
shades, forms, and intensities, all with deep involvement but without
the distraction of troubling feelings of loss, disappointment, ambition, or the limitations of time, such as we feel when awake, would
seem a great advantage for some issues, allowing integration of related experience, help from past experience. Perhaps wisdom, beyond intelligence and knowledge, depends upon such thinking involving the primary process.
In the dream as in a good play we have this intense absorption in
what is happening and the relevant events from all our life experience seem to be effortlessly before us, drawn together as by a magnet, in a fluid medium capable of infinite variation and great preci14. This immediacy of insight may have contributed to the belief that some people
of genius seem to work effortlessly. In fact, while talent is needed, hard work and
much preparation are essential preparation for creative work.
On Foresight
331
332
Cornelis Heijn
ceptions, imperfect judgment, revision of memory, skill at self-deception, tendency to leap to theory or preconceived explanation, etc.,
the gaining of insight is full of difficulty and must always be tentative.
Much understanding of life escapes our best efforts and remains a
mystery. We know this well in analytic work but it is equally true of
human behavior on the larger scale. Historical events are not only
difficult to foresee but explanations after the fact often seem simplistic and inadequate, often following the personal predilections of the
historian.
Imagine then the added difficulty achieving reliable foresight,
where the problem is still developing in a constantly changing world
and some relevant facts have yet to be born. Here we sense the need
for abilities and qualities of character in a new dimension of realism
and imagination.
I have gradually come to feel that some of the distinctions between
consciousness and the unconscious, and between primary and secondary process lie more in the nature of the medium of thought
than in the quality and validity of thought. It has been more useful
clinically to work as if we can be as sane, honest, and integrated in
our imagery as in our wordiness. The idea of the dream as a normal
psychosis or as lacking in judgment leads us away from the positive
value of the dream and other mental images. I think I worked better
when I saw us all struggling to find meaning, and to reveal and conceal from others and ourselves in any of the modes we have available.
I worked best when I thought of analysis not as a science of suspicion but as a science of discovery. To view the patient as split into
such different portions as to require a science of suspicion leads to
such notions as resistance, pleasure principle vs. reality principle,
censor, dream work as disguise, and analyst as general, surgeon,
hunter or trapper. To experience it as a science of discovery, while
still with ample difficulty, leads to notions of acceptance rather than
hard earned neutrality, to mutuality in the process of inquiry, to curiosity and wonder, and to the analyst as good traveling companion,
gardener, wilderness guide, or assistant analyst to the patient who is
the true analyst.15 One of my last patients said that her analysis had
been like a treasure hunt. While pain, sorrow, and chance of
tragedy cannot be eliminated, analysis can also be a joyous adventure.
15. The concept of analyst as assistant-analyst to the patient originated with Robert
Gardner.
On Foresight
333
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Austen, J. (1933). Persuasion. Macmillan and Co. Limited.
Caulaincourt. (1935). Ed. George Libaire. With Napoleon in Russia. William
Morrow and Co. Inc.
Dorpat, T. (1985). Denial and Defense in the Therapeutic Situation. Jason Aronson.
Einstein, A. (1974). Ideas and Opinions. Bonanza Books.
Emde, Robert N. (1995). Fantasy and Beyond. On Freuds Creative Writers
and Day Dreaming. Yale University Press.
Engell, J. (1981). The Creative Imagination. Harvard University Press.
Freud, S. (1920). A Case of Homosexuality in a Woman. S.E. 15:182.
(1933). The Interpretation of Dreams. Third English Revision, Basic
Books, Avon Edition 1963.
Greenberg, R. & Pearlman, C. (1978). If Freud Only Knew: A Reconsideration of Psychoanalytic Dream Theory. Int. Rev. Psychoanalysis. 5:7176.
James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology. Henry Holt and Co.
Joseph, E. (1987). The Consciousness of Being Conscious. J.A.P.A. 35:5 22.
Koestler, A. (1964). The Act of Creation. Arkana Press.
Kosslyn, S. (1994). Image and Brain. M.I.T. Press.
Loewald, H. (1960). On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis. Int. Journal Psychoanalysis. XLI: 16 33.
Machiavelli, N. (1964). The Prince, translated and edited by Mark Musa. St.
Martins Press.
MacLeish, A. (1961). Poetry and Experience. Riverside Press, Houghton-Mifflin.
Marvell, A. (1902). The Oxford Book of English Verse, chosen and edited by
A. T. Quiller-Couch. Clarendon Press.
Noy, P. (1978). Insight and Creativity. J.A.P.A. 26:717748.
Rangell, L. (1989). Action Theory within the Structural View. Int. J. Psychoanalysis, vol. 70:189 203.
Ricoeur, P. (1978). Image and Language in Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis
and the Humanities. Ed. by J. H. Smith. Yale University Press.
(1995). Figuring the Sacred. Fortress Press.
Rugg, H. (1963). Imagination. Harper and Row.
Scharfstein, B. (1993). Ineffability: The Failure of Words in Philosophy and Religion. State University of New York Press.
Selye, H. (1964). From Dream to Discovery: On Being a Scientist. McGraw Hill.
Shakespeare, W. (1921). The Tragedy of King Richard the Second. Yale University Press.
Simon, B. (1987). Confluence of Visual Image between Patient and Analyst;
Communication or Failed Communication. Psychoanalytic Inquiry. 1:471
488.
Stevens, W. (1982). Study of Images I. The Collected Poems. Vintage Books
Edition. Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1954.
Tuchman, B. (1984). The March of Folly. Knopf.
Waelder, R. (1960). Basic Theory of Psychoanalysis. International Universities
Press.
334
Cornelis Heijn
Weaver, W. (1955). Science and People. Science. 122:1256. Charles Scribners Sons.
Weiss, J. (1988). Testing Hypotheses about Unconscious Mental Functioning. Int. J. Psa. 69:8795.
(1993). Empirical Studies of the Psychoanalytic Process. J.A.P.A.
41:730.
West, T. (1997). In the Minds Eye: Visual Thinkers, Gifted People with Dyslexia
and Other Learning Difficulties. Prometheus Books.
Index
335
336
Index
Index
Fragmentation, 184 187, 189, 191192,
195, 200, 205 206
Fraiberg, S., 4, 50, 7880
Freedman, S., 180
Freud, A.: attitudes toward therapy, 163
164; fantasy formation, 203; and Heller,
P., 160; infant psychoanalysis, 3, 9, 48; latency development, 179, 180, 203; parent-infant interactions, 217, 218
Freud, S.: ego, 78; imagery symbolism,
327328; latency development, 178
179; prediction difficulties, 314; reconstruction process, 296 297, 299, 305
306, 308 311; repetitive activities, 241;
repression barrier, 157158, 305; state of
playing, 214 215, 242
Friedman, G., 182
Frightened caregiving, 102108, 113 117.
See also Fear
Future, influence of, 312 332
Gaze, 1314, 135
Genuine maternal love, 4771
Gergely, G., 219 220. See also Fonagy, P.
Gianino, A., 120
Gilligan, C., 202
Goldberger, M., 286
Gorlitz, P., 182
Green, A., 49
Greenberg, R., 328
Greenspan, S., 181
Harry Potter stories (Rowling), 203
Head orientation, 1415
Heller, P., 160
Helpless caregiving. See Frightened caregiving
Hesse, E., 104
Hoffman, L., 286
Hole Is to Dig, A (Krauss and Sendak), 255
Home-based mother-infant psychotherapy,
101124
Homer, T., 201
Home visits, 7982
House-Tree-Person Drawings, 182
Hume, D., 327
Hypersensitivity, 53 54
Images, impact of, 316 317, 326 331
Imaginary play. See Fantasy formation;
Make-believe; Play
Improvisation, 117118
Interactive regulation, 11, 19, 56
Internalization, 159, 267, 274, 285, 287
288
337
338
Index
Index
Play: lack of play, 221233; learning disabled children, 239 241, 258 260; object relationships, 255 256; regulation
patterns, 257258; state of playing, 213
236; therapeutic value, 233 236, 241
242, 258 260
Play sessions, 133 137, 139 141
Poetry, 315, 316 317
Preadolescence, 195 198, 202, 205 206
Primary process thought, 314, 316 317,
330, 332
Prince, The (Machiavelli), 317 318
Provence, S., 4
Psychic trauma, 76 77, 263 290, 298 311
Psychological testing, 181, 182185, 244
246
Puberty, 195, 197, 206
Rangell, L., 328
Rappaport, D., 255
Reconstruction process, 295 311
Reflective awareness function: frightened/
disorganized attachment, 105; Iliana
(case study), 9598; Mary and John
(case study), 119; Mia (case study), 87
90; Minding the Baby program, 81 85;
parent-infant interactions, 76 77; psychic trauma, 7677; state of playing, 216,
218, 225
Regression, 179, 215, 254, 269, 282, 283
286
Rejection, 266 267, 274. See also Abandonment
Relational trauma: Beccah (case study),
270; Ethan (case study), 59 60; Iliana
(case study), 9197; Mary and John
(case study), 110 123; Natalie (case
study), 242244, 249, 251, 253 254;
parent-infant interactions, 48 49, 51,
7681, 104 105
Reparation, 6668, 120
Repetitive behavior, 269, 272, 286 287
Representational/behavioral domains, 112
Repressed memories. See Reconstruction
process
Repression barrier, 158
Richard II (Shakespeare), 322
Ricoeur, P., 317, 326
Ritvo, S., 159
Rizzuto, A., 235
Rodell, J. See Ames, L.
Rorschach tests, 182190, 192197, 205,
245 246
Rowling, J. K., 203
Rugg, H., 330
339
340
Index