Carved by Experience

Vipassana, Psychoanalysis, and the Mind Investigating Itself

Michal Barnea-Astrog

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367104061
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429911712
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

How does the tendency to crave pleasure and reject pain shape our lives? How does it affect the way we perceive reality, and how is it related to the emergence of suffering and the way it is experienced and transmitted? Can we live free of this tendency, beyond the pleasure principle? This book approaches these questions through an examination of the psychoanalytic concepts of projection and projective identification in the light of early Buddhist thought. It looks at the personal and the interpersonal, at theory, meta-theory, and everyday life. It observes how the mind's habits mould the human condition, and investigates its ability to free itself from their domination. It examines the potential of this liberation: to be in touch with reality as it is and live a less reactive, more ethical life.

CHAPTER ONE
Projection and projective identification: on the impulse to expel

When you scream
My inside screams out at me, too
Along with you.

The whole world crashes loud,
A crash continuous, flooding the arteries of thought.
Anger-bricks scatter, insufferable, into space, explode
As you explode in me.

When you grow calm
The world comes back together.
Once more we can admire
A praying mantis.
The bits of mud a pair of split-tailed birds solicitously stuck
Somehow having chosen us,
To build their nest with.

(Barnea-Astrog)

The me in you, the you in me

When she first mentioned projective identification, Melanie Klein cast a heavy stone into the waters of clinical thinking. Even today, seventy years on, the ripples can still be felt. What is projective identification and why is it still so perplexing? It is, I believe, because it touches on a very tender core buried deep in the primal, uncharted (or partially charted) layers of our psyche. Moreover, it questions some very basic assumptions, underlying our perceptions of ourselves and the world, whose feeble grip on reality and internal contradiction we are unaware of. About the first question—what is projective identification?—Meltzer wrote this: “We are still in the process of discovering what projective identification ‘means’, not that Mrs. Klein meant all that in 1946, consciously or otherwise” (2008[1978], p. 309). It is not my intention to try and cover all of the concept’s various nuances here: I do not claim to have fully grasped them myself nor would I want to unnecessarily strain the reader. Still, I hope that the illustrations and examples I offer, as well as my theoretical discussions, will gradually illuminate the phenomenon and its fascinating implications on the life of the psyche. For now, though, some preliminary clarifications are in order.

When an infant is born she encounters a world far more demanding than the one in the womb in which she dwelled until then. In terms of the body, she now must breathe independently, take in air. She faces the reality of hunger and must suck milk and digest it. She must cope with attacks from the outside, such as viruses and bacteria, from which she was mostly protected inside the womb. No longer is she held in a watery ambience, tightly enfolded. Moving the body or just holding it is an effort and the possibilities are limited. In this exacting environment, in which the infant, being severed—at least to some extent—from her mother’s body, must find herself anew, she will naturally experience suffering, mental as well as physical. Of course, she has experienced suffering before birth, but this change— some call it traumatic—brings along more complexities and suffering. This, in part, is related to the fact that in this new environment she meets the person inside of whom she lived until now: her mother. And this mother, who no longer continuously nourishes her through placenta and umbilicus, transforms into a not always satisfying object. The baby’s needs are no longer met immediately or fully, and negative feelings (not exclusively) develop towards this object whom she perceives to be responsible. And for the mind, being as it is, right from the very start sensation entails thirst and thirst entails sensation. The infant’s negative feelings arouse powerful anxiety, which grows even more intense when she imagines the punishment and revenge that will follow. Together with the initial anxiety associated with the trauma of birth and her frustrated needs, all this now faces the infant (Hinshelwood, 1991; Klein, 1946).

So, the infant suffers forms of distress evoked by outside sources and distress that originates within, body pain and mental pain, none of which she can process independently in the absence of the yet-to-evolve ability to hold them in consciousness or think (about) them. How does the infant’s immature psyche cope with this bewildering reality? Where can she take the pains that visit her at random, indistinct as yet? The assumption is that the infantile psyche tries to simplify the complex reality while also exporting its pains to a place where they may be digested and clarified. This, according to Klein and her successors, is achieved when the psyche splits (in fantasy) internal and external reality into “good” and “bad” parts (Mitchell & Black, 1995). While in early reality there is one maternal object—or breast—which at times nourishes and generates pleasant sensations by appea sing hunger or other types of suffering, and at other times is absent and causes frustration, the infant, instead of perceiving one alternatingly satisfying and frustrating object, perceives a “good breast” and a “bad breast”. Here is the prototype of the splitting mode, which is subsequently applied to all components of experience. On the same lines, the infant also splits her own mental components, with the positive feelings directed at the good breast, and the negative feelings becoming attached to the bad breast. Splitting makes order in chaos, but it lacks mental coherence without the act of projection which takes care of redistributing the components of reality so that bad goes with bad and good with good.

Let us take a step back and consider projection as a defence mechanism, as it was conceived prior to Klein. For Freud, though its defensive function is only one part of the story (see Chapter Three), projection originates in the psyche’s way of fending off inner excitation that causes excessive displeasure. Instead of perceiving it as internal—which it is—the psyche “chooses” to experience the excitation as coming from outside, and hence as something against which it might raise the same barrier it usually puts up against excess external stimuli (Freud, 1920g). The psyche, acting on an unconscious assumption that this will allow it to escape them, thus renders a painful stimulus or danger coming from within as though they came from outside. It then projects its own materials on to an object, thereby attributing information coming from the unconscious to the mechanism of conscious perception in a way that confuses between inner process and outer reality (Freud, 1912–1913). A person, for instance, might be utterly convinced that his brother or colleague envies him though it is he himself who, unconsciously, envies them. Another person might blame someone of undermining her efforts or trying to destroy something, while the destructive, sabotaging forces actually arise from within herself.

For Klein, too, the infant who feels hate against what she perceives as the bad breast (absent, frustrating), projects the bad feeling on to it, and then experiences the breast—which has absorbed the projected hate—as even more bad. The infant does this to protect the ideal image of the good breast on to which she projects the loving parts of herself. These latter parts, then, remain pure in fantasy, uncontaminated and unthreatened by hate and frustration. At this point, however, as Klein describes the first three months of the infant’s mental life, the notion of “projective identification” emerges, presenting clinical thought with another possible projective dynamics. Here, in addition to projection on to an object—of internal materials onto something external—there is the possibility to project into it. In addition to Freud’s fantasmatic expulsion of unwanted impulses, Klein posits the projection, as well, of parts of the self whose presence, due to the primitive anxieties the infant suffers at the first stages of life, she cannot tolerate. The discussion about this possibility has become one of the most productive ones in contemporary psychoanalytic discourse (Bell, 2001), leaving its marks on many construals of intra- and interpersonal processes.

Klein (1946) defined projective identification (a term Weiss used in 1925 without perusing it much (Spillius et al., 2011)) as the unconscious act of disposing of split off parts of the self into another person, in analogy to biological processes of bodily discharge. She believed that along with actual excrements, experienced as harmful and expelled in hatred, split-off, bad parts of the self are projected into the mother. Consequently,

In so far as the mother comes to contain the bad parts of the self, she is not felt to be a separate individual but is felt to be the bad self. Much of the hatred against parts of the self is now directed towards the mother. This leads to a particular form of identification which establishes the prototype of an aggressive object-relation. (p. 102)

Expressed not only in the form of hate, aggression is also reflected in the fact that the bad self-parts projected into the mother, are meant to hurt her and take control over her from within (Klein, 1946). Once projected, these bits of badness can generate a sense of persecution and danger that seem to originate outside, and when they are subsequently re-internalised they trigger a sense of threat from internal destructiveness (Klein, 1946). Thus, a vicious circle comes into being: her internal anxieties drive the infant to use splitting and projection, and once she deploys the latter they feed further into the anxieties. The other side of splitting is that the infant also projects good aspects of herself into her mother. When this happens, rather than being experienced as toxic, the discharge takes on the meaning of a gift, resulting in a good object that entertains loving relations with a good self.

This is how the infant’s unconsolidated mind copes when confronting difficulties: it uses splitting, projection, denial, and idealisation. It splits bad from good, within itself and in the object; it expels the bad in order to keep safe from it, or it projects the good into the object so as to turn it into an ideal, all-good object which is carefully isolated from all evil; it clings to the ideal object to deny the bad object, the frustrating situation, and the part of itself that maintains relations with the bad object (Klein, 1946). Facing reality, the infantile mind uses a strategy based on the reorganisation of self-parts and object-parts, whose logic is that good and bad must be separated by means of splitting, that it is easier to have control over something that has been internalised, and that what has been projected will never return (Ogden, 1986). While, according to Klein, splitting and projection are necessary to healthy development, they must keep in balance: in the early stages of life, splitting is responsible for keeping the good object, whose internalisation is crucial to the consolidation of the self and the development of the ability to love (excessive envy will not allow internalisation of the good object) (Klein, 1975c), but when there is too much splitting the self is bound to grow weak and depleted (Klein, 1946). Similarly, the mutualities between internalisation and projection constitute object relations (Klein, 1946), but this is true only for as long as they are in balance: overemphasis on one of them results in pathology, as for instance excessive projection of a hostile inner world, in the grip of persecutory anxieties, will issue in the internalisation of such a world.

Klein called this mental reality, with its characteristic primitive anxieties, its defence mechanisms, and object relations, “the paranoid– schizoid position”: “paranoid” for the persecutory anxiety it involves; “schizoid” for the act of splitting from which it emanates, “position” because while first manifesting itself in the first three months of life, it remains active as a form of mental organisation which one enters and leaves, alternately. When, around her fourth month, the infant starts to process the “depressive position” (with its more complex perception of reality and its reduced deployment of splitting and projection), the paranoid–schizoid position remains an active layer of her mental life. And, to some extent and in varying degrees, it will be present throughout the rest of her—that is, our—life: all of our life.

We all shift, internally, between this position and others (that is, the depressive position and the autistic–contiguous position, which is a third, even more primative, mode of experience defined by Ogden (2004a), than the paranoid–schizoid position). But some of us resort to the paranoid–schizoid position more than others. Take a woman, for instance, who, whenever she meets a man she finds attractive, tends to be totally captivated. Projecting all that is good on to him, she turns him into her ideal man: she exalts his brightness, denies his downsides, and ignores the frustration and pain he is likely to cause her just because he is in the world and happens to interact with her. Splitting him, she also splits herself, so that when she is with him or thinks of him, she is also in the company of her own loving and loved aspects, and that makes her feel good about herself. She loves and is being loved. She “loves him”, that is, she “loves herself”; he is “the perfect man”, that is, so far, his image has not brushed against reality.

However, the real, complex world is very unlike the fantasised split one, and interactions in the real world do not, at the best of times, compare with the always satisfying fantasised interactions. Sooner or later, the man will say something, will do or fail to do something, and it will clash head on with the woman’s splitting–projective– idealising–denying fantasy. At that very moment, the man will change from white to black, from an angel into a devil, from blessing to catastrophe: the splitting–projective–idealising–denying bubble is doomed to burst, and usually it happens with a big bang, leaving casualties in its wake. We encounter this dynamic in a variety of interpersonal situations: between two adolescent girlfriends, between patient and therapist, between student and teacher, between a member of the group and the group leader, between a person and an idea, religion, or institution. It is the direct outcome of the internal organisation of those who participate in it, and the huge gaps inherent in the situation: between the black-and-white perspective typical of this position and actual reality, and between reality as it is and subjects’ ability to absorb and digest it. This should not imply that this internal organisation and digesting ability are static things: fluctuations of degree occur from time to time, and more comprehensive changes might take place during adolescence, as a result of therapy, or as the outcome of deep meditative processes—as I will show.

Even though projective identification largely originates in the paranoid–schizoid position, which is based on processes of splitting, the envy, greed, and denial typical of the manic defences of the depressive position are also important factors in its emergence (Klein, 1975b). When we quickly mumble a spell against the evil eye, or say something like “touch wood”, it is against this envy and greed that we (magically) try to defend ourselves. They are experienced as mysterious forces, looking at all that is good in us through an evil eye, trying to rob us of it—or simply destroy it. These same forces, which are none other than self-parts or mental components, use projective identification in order to achieve this from within by invading, that is, the object, which is none other than ourselves or our fellow human.

Container for projections

There is a natural continuity between the concept of projection before the notion of “projective identification” and after it, but the latter opened the way to a new idea. This is the notion that projection is not only directed at an internal representation of an object—the infant’s image of the breast; the woman’s image of the man—but can also involve a real movement of mental materials from infant to mother, from the projecting subject to its object, from one person to another. (I will further explore and elaborate this notion in Chapter Five.) Even though Klein, here, explicitly referred only to the infant’s fantasy life, her very formulations, describing the process as a projection “into”, already hold the seeds for understanding it as an interpersonal process par excellence.

Bion (1962b) took this and developed it into a sophisticated model of container and contained: with the latter referring to the projected mental materials, and the former to the mother or the object, the mental locus of their projection. By means of this model, he showed the fundamental nature of the process of exchange which projective identification constitutes in the formation and development of the psyche—whether healthy or pathological—and the extent to which it also expresses a form of communication: direct, raw, unmediated com munication in which one person passes his mental contents into another and causes the latter to feel with him. Like Klein, Bion (1962b) believed that infants have an omnipotent fantasy of being able, temporarily, to split off unwanted parts of their personality and to deposit them in an object. Whereas Klein explicitly related to the infant’s fantasies, Bion conceived of the subject, from the earliest stages of life, as having the ability to evoke in the mother feelings he himself does not want, or feelings he would want her to experience either with or instead of him (1962b). That is, Bion showed how the one who projects, by means of complex processes, can trigger in the object of projection feelings that accord with what was projected in the fantasy (Bell, 2001). If projection is an actual act, an interpersonal event in which mental processes of exchange really take place, then the mother, as “container” into which self-parts or experiences are projected, plays a fundamental role in the process.

At birth, the human infant’s dependence on her surroundings is so great that it would be hard to claim they are autonomous. “Mother– infant” is how Winnicott referred to these two, tied together in this form of dependence, thus referring to them as one inseparable entity. To briefly revert to the environment into which an infant is born, it seems she has the basic physical equipment to begin life within it: if born healthy and at full-term, the infant’s lungs will be ready for breathing, her digestive system will be able to cope with breast milk or its substitutes, and her immune system will be working reasonably well, as suits her relatively sheltered situation. Yet, she is immature. Take, for instance, the immune system. Since her immune system is far from mature, the infant is under constant threat of microscopic enemies from without. In the modern world, medical science helps to reduce this risk greatly and to camouflage it. Still, antibodies and other nutrients that the infant receives through the breast milk play an important role in her body’s struggle with illness and its ability to grow strong (Horta et al., 2007; Sadeharju et al., 2007).

Let us for a moment set aside the sustaining components of breast milk and the psychological aspects of body contact and holding it involves (which, we know, improve the infant’s general health in the long term), and just consider what happens to an infant who is fighting a present illness by means of the antibodies his body generates. (It does not seem realistic for research to isolate the effects of the mental vs. the physical factors of breastfeeding. Research, anyhow, has found a positive correlation between breastfeeding (in general) and mental health, intelligence, and cognitive achievement (see, for instance, Horta et al., 2007; Kramer et al., 2008; Oddy et al., 2010.)) When the infant is ill, or is exposed to some virus, the mother, who is nearby, is likely to catch the virus herself. She might also stay healthy thanks to her immune system, but, either way, her body, if it functions well, will produce the appropriate antibodies and pass them on to her baby via her breast milk. Better equipped to cope with the environment, the mother breathes in (or otherwise absorbs) the harmful factor and subsequently passes to her infant, as best as she can, the elements that will help his body to cope with it. Unwittingly, the infant thus infects the mother with his bodily afflictions many times over. The baby puts the source of illness into her and she gives back what it takes to deal with it. The infant’s digestive system is not fully grown either at the start of life. This is why he often suffers from belly-aches. Interestingly this phenomenon occurs mainly in the first three or four months of life, a period that parallels the phase Klein associated with the paranoid– schizoid position, a time during which the infant’s ability to “digest” reality is only beginning to evolve. In this period, the baby is unable to bite, chew, and digest the common foods of his surroundings. One might say that the mother eats that food for him, digests it, extracting whatever the body needs, then presents it to her child in the form of the breast milk that he is able to take in.

Like these physical systems, the infant’s emotional digestive system is nowhere near being complete. His ability, therefore, to cope with the reality ingested—presently and in the future—is largely dependent on how the mother processes it inside herself before passing it back to her baby in a manageable form, and with the added resources requi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND PERMISSIONS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• Dedication1
• ABBREVIATIONS FOR REFERENCED WORKS
• Dedication2
• FOREWORD
• CHAPTER ONE Projection and projective identification: on the impulse to expel
• CHAPTER TWO Vipassanā meditation as the investigation of mental action
• CHAPTER THREE Perceiving reality through the experience of self
• CHAPTER FOUR Karma and the nature of boundaries between minds
• CHAPTER FIVE One mind constituting another: the network paradigm and non-dualistic thought
• CHAPTER SIX Projection as mental action that induces suffering
• CHAPTER SEVEN Transference and samsāra
• CHAPTER EIGHT The alternative to projection
• CHAPTER NINE Is there mental life free from projection?
• EPILOGUE Islands of regression
• NOTES
• REFERENCES
• INDEX