Shame and Humiliation

A Dialogue between Psychoanalytic and Systemic Approaches

Carlos Guillermo Bigliani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781782200291
• eBook ISBN: 9780429919091
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book is organised in a way of listening to a dialogue between theoretical approaches. It represents an effort to build bridges between the different ways, both psychoanalytical and systemic, of thinking about the shame and humiliation and its context, which can cross-fertilise each other.

Chapter One
Humiliation and shame: dynamics and destinies

Carlos Guillermo Bigliani

By way of an introduction: psychoanalytical and systemic approaches

This book and the meeting from which it originated represent an effort to build bridges between the different ways, both psychoanalytical and systemic, of thinking about the subject and its context, which can cross-fertilise each other. This requires an approach that does not treat the models as if they were religious dogma.

Freud had a mature relationship with his theories, going so far as to call his metapsychology (a name given to his theorisations over clinics) "our mythology". Freud suggested to Ferenczi, a brilliant Hungarian analyst, that "you should not theorize. Theories should come to you unexpectedly, like an uninvited stranger" (Gribinski, 1994, p. 1013). But once the stranger comes in, he reorganises our perception. Winnicott says, "when I do my clinical work, I produce theories for my own good, and they have an influence on what I see and hear, as well as on what I do" (Winnicott, 1971, p. 20).

Blum remembers that in the 1930s, the mainstream of psychoanalytical thinking had taken refuge in the theorisation of the intrapsychic and held the opinion that "any menace which threatened the (theoretical) importance of psychic reality was risking the soundness and security of the psychoanalytical movement" (Blum, 1994, p. 872). Even though Freud himself had already proposed that, in order to overcome the obstacles he had had to face owing to his limitations in the treatment of psychoses, the explanatory theory should be expanded and the technique should be changed (Freud, 1916-1917).

Some authors argue that taking refuge in the intrapsychic was an effect of the self-limitation that appeared in the theory owing to the repressive atmosphere of Nazism in the culture. Several authors describe the way in which this climate was infiltrating the life of German and Austrian psychoanalytical institutions, often with the alleged pretext of saving those institutions: the psychoanalyst candidates were reprimanded if they developed social or political activities opposed to the regime, and Jewish analysts were asked to resign their membership of certain professional societies whose directors were non-Jewish. (In fact, a psychiatrist who was a relative of Field-Marshal Goering was appointed president of the Psychoanalytical Association in Berlin, in order to protect the future of the institution (Bigliani, 2003, p. 180).) This oppressive climate weighing on the German analysts, many of them socialist-minded (and who, soon after migrating to the USA, would face the repressive atmosphere of McCarthyism) might have contributed, according to these interpretations, to a "pasteurisation" of the theory, proposing "conflict-free areas" with no contact with external reality, in the developments of ego psychology (Langer, 1981, p. 64).

With this in mind, Blum reminds us that the publication of Ferenczi's famous article, "The confusion of tongues between adults and the child", in which he anticipated concepts about accumulative trauma and the notion of a child's self-censorship, guilt, and shame resulting from child abuse, was banned until Balint, his former patient and admirer, authorised publication almost twenty years later (Blum, 1994, p. 874). As Blum points out in his article, the ban was related to the requirement of the psychoanalytic mainstream to approach the search for the causes of pathologies in the interior of the mind. As Freud had already done some time before, when he abandoned the seduction theory,¹ a chapter in this return to the interior, denying interpersonal causality, was being rewritten. This attitude towards theory favoured the appearance—about fifty years ago and in various places—of a feeling of dissatisfaction towards the predominant tendencies in schools of psychodynamic psychology which were especially interested in the intrapsychic, and whose results were considered by many to be unsatisfactory. Perhaps also as a reaction against this excessive appreciation of the intrapsychic, in the early 1950s there was a strengthening of a pragmatic and creative conception that emphasised analysis of interactions and the systems of which subjects were parts as principal determinants of psychopathology, leaving aside intrapsychical determinations. The latter remained as if in a "black box", whose mechanisms were not unknown to most of the original authors, but who, nevertheless, chose to exclude them from their theorisation. Don D. jackson, as well as Salvador Minuchin, Nathan Ackerman, Lyman C. Wynne, Theodore Lidz, Israel Zwerling, Ivan Boszormengi-Nagy, Carl Whittaker, Carlos Sluzki, and many of the other first family therapists who participated in this movement in the USA came from psychoanalytical training, whereupon their roads diverged (Nichols & Schwartz, 2007, p. 213). They considered that many reflections about the intrapsychic were paralysing and unproductive, and they thought that freedom from the hindrance of psychodynamisms and their interpretation lent consistency to their crusade in favour of a new theory and therapeutic practice.

That movement caused many therapists to cast aside "the interior of the mind" and devote themselves to the study of the systems of relationships in which patients are immersed, and of the mechanisms that made the system sick and would, in turn, make the patients sick. They also studied those relationships from an interactive perspective, proposing models such as the "double bind" (Bateson, Jackson, Haley, & Weakland, 1956; Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson, 1967) and forms of paradoxical communication as "efficient ways" to cause illness (Sluzki & Ransom, 1976). These constitute the basic explorations of systemic thinking and inform the understanding of most therapists in their clinical work with families.

This movement broadened and enriched our critical outlook as therapists on intrapsychic reductionism, and some of its authors produced wonderful articles about what constitutes the worst of psychoanalysis and its transferential abuses (e.g., Haley, 1969). But some of them threw away the intrapsychic baby together with the bathwater of poor-quality psychoanalysis.

Several psychoanalytical authors also pointed out the importance of culture, society, family, and the "Other" in creating the subject and his pathology, in a way distancing themselves from what is strictly intrapsychic to enter the field of what was being developed by the theoretical movement described above. In addition to Freud, with his profound reflections on the masses, culture, and history, other noted authors followed that path. It is worth mentioning among them Lacan, who took up the Freudian concept with regard to the construction of a subject in which the presence of the "Other" was essential, his theorisations about the family, and his descriptions of the functions or places of the characters that make up its whole, Bion, when theorising on the capacity of maternal reverie as a foundation for the production of symbols, and Aulagnier with her thinking about subjectivity based on the anticipated meeting of a mother with her unborn child.²

Research into the use of the concept of paradox, frequent during the period when the systemic movement was being developed, especially by the team formed by Selvini Palazzoli, Boscolo, Cecchin, and Prata (1974), also found significant developments, but in an intrapsychic dimension among psychoanalysts who treated serious pathologies. Rousillon (1995, p. 11) goes so far as to consider that just as the conflict would be the axis along which the field of neuroses lines up, the paradox would be the axis illuminating the comprehension of narcissistic affections. He describes how several authors, for example Winnicott and Bion, showed the existence of defences he calls "paradoxical", destined to fight against traumas wrongly symbolised in the past, that would come to be expressed as a paradoxical fear that what had happened in the past might really happen in the future. Thus, suicide would be a paradoxical defence in the face of a psychic death that had previously occurred, and anorexia a paradoxical defence in the face of an existing ailment produced by an internal emptiness, or an attack on the link would be a paradoxical defence in the face of a lost link. Rousillon suggests that the task of the analyst would be to transform these experiences (which have not reached the symbolic level) into thoughts.

I believe that when therapists work in this zone of psychopathology, given its clinical implications, they must bear in mind both intrapsychic paradoxality and communicational paradoxes of the family system. "Paradoxality", then, circumscribes an area of confluences where psychoanalytical and systemic contributions complement each other.

Other areas of development and of approximation/confrontation between systemic and psychoanalytical thinking should include a reflection on "actuality" (and history) of the determinant phenomena of pathology and on the "widening scope" of the field from which the theoretical approach explains the phenomena to be analysed, that is, a discussion that would include an analysis of the determinant "sets" in the production of subjects and/or pathologies.

In other words, if what is dominant for each discipline in this production would be foetal relationships, the mother's unconscious, early relationships with both parents, the current dynamics of the family, if the subject (or his pathology) reflects his times and his culture more than his family, etc.

In recent decades, systemic therapists' effort to focus on the actuality of the system has found a parallel in the psychoanalytical field. Some theorisers came to reassess—within the whole of determinants of mental pathology (complementary series)—the variables linked to current determinants, thus expanding the field of determination.

Berenstein, for instance, questions the therapeutic efficacy of interpreting "the repetition of the past in transference" in some cases of negative therapeutic reaction. According to classic psychoanalytical theory, that past would be represented in the present of the relationship with the therapist (transference) and this relationship should always be the axis of intervention. This author suggests that this kind of interpretation in some of those cases can be not only useless, but even iatrogenic, and contribute to stereotyping the patient in his repetition. He proposes, instead, an understanding of the importance of the fact, of what is current, what is new, and of the effect of the presence of the other to stimulate change and build the bond.

According to psychoanalysis, symptoms became intelligible when they were set in the context of the mental structure of the person suffering; if they are considered within the family structure they will acquire a greater degree of intelligibility and even more if they are included in their social background ... Every sign acquires a qualitatively greater degree of intelligibility when it is included in a wider context. (Berenstein, 2007, p. 39, translated for this edition)

Several authors, including Berenstein, Puget, and Kaës, propose a mental apparatus arranged in terms of a linking structure that would unfold in the intrasubjective, intersubjective, and trans-subjective spaces, with the corresponding unconscious of each space. "The three spaces—internal world, world of links, and socio-cultural world—are distinct, differentiated, and are linked in the subject, who, in turn, is their product. Each one of these spaces produces an unconscious" (Berenstein, 2004, p. 142, translated for this edition).

The unconscious of the intrasubjective world is made up of the articulation of repressed representations and affects according to current classic topology.

The relational or intersubjective world produces its unconscious with what both subjects will have to suppress or leave out, that which is not compatible with the relationship or what appears to them as alien.

In the work of subjectivation, always pertinent to the relationship with another or with others, a new sense can be produced, since the link creates its own unconscious. A new sense corresponds to a new subjectivity. It will be said that the subject is "another" for others and "another" for himself. (Berenstein, 2004, p. 142, translated for this edition)

Finally, the unconscious of the social-cultural world, or transsubjective space, will be instituted starting from that which ought to be suppressed or excluded from what is determined by the belonging of the subjects to the social group, including "the feelings of uncertainty in the face of the threats presented by the dissolution of the group" (Berenstein, 2004, p. 142, translated for this edition).

Kaës, along the same lines, says,

The development of research on the transmission of psychic life through the new psychoanalytical devices implies a new model of intelligibility of the formation of the mental apparatus and of its articulation between the subjects of the unconscious. This research criticises the strictly intradetermined conceptions of the formation of the mental apparatus and the solipsistic formations of the individual. (Kaës, 1998b, p. 18, translated for this edition)

This allows us to imagine a subject who is not only constructed by his established identifications, but also by the acts of imposition permanently performed on him by others, with whom there will be mutual inducements, a multiple subject (different with each of the different others) who would participate in unconscious alliances, in denial pacts.

In this world of links, resistances due to complementary repetitions might appear that may be reciprocally strengthened in a bond that might be pathogenic (which would add up, in their overdetermination, to the intrapsychic resistances classically described by psychoanalysis), bonding structures of segregative or melancholic repetitions. In the same theoretical space, several authors have also worked on the question of the transmission of psychism between generations (see Abraham & Torok, 1978; Eiguer, 1983).

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• PSYCHOANALYTIC IDEAS AND APPLICATIONS SERIES
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS
• PROLOGUE
• CHAPTER ONE Humiliation and shame: dynamics and destinies
• CHAPTER TWO Comment I
• CHAPTER THREE Comment II
• CHAPTER FOUR Humiliation, shame, and associated social emotions: a systemic approach and a guide for its transformation
• CHAPTER FIVE Comment III
• CHAPTER SIX Comment IV
• CHAPTER SEVEN Shame, humiliation, and the hero
• CHAPTER EIGHT Comment V
• CHAPTER NINE Comment VI
• Epilogue
• REFERENCES
• INDEX