Enduring Migration through the Life Cycle

Eileen McGinley, Arturo Varchevker, Eileen McGinley, Arturo Varchevker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367324322
• eBook ISBN: 9780429913259
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this book, the authors share an interest in and experience of migration in relation to stressed or traumatised patients whom they have treated or through their areas of expertise through the developmental life cycle.

Part I
Childhood

Chapter One
Internal and external migration in infancy and childhood: the re-presentation of absence in a mother—baby couple—a case study in psychoanalytic parent—infant psychotherapy

Angela Joyce

“Home is where we start from” is the title of one of D. W. Winnicott’s posthumously published collections, capturing, I think, the very fundamental requirement of living: that we cannot start to go anywhere unless we have a home. If we have a home to start from, we can begin, we can find ourselves, we can move on, explore, experiment, reach out, risk, and find creatively what the world has to offer us; and come back to a place inside us that is home. In the place that is home, we can feel familiar, at ease, excited, disgruntled, cross, accepted, known for who we are, curious, challenged; the whole panoply of possibility that makes life worth living. Although I am keenly aware that home is a geographical place full of relational and sensory experience of sight, sound, smell, and so on, home ultimately is inside us, so that wherever we are, it is where we live.

But to arrive at a place inside us that feels it is home is a long and hazardous journey, beginning in the place we have in the minds of our parents as we are conceived of consciously and unconsciously by them. So even before we are infants, the external setting of our being is preparing the kind of home that we will inhabit, which will profoundly affect the home that we create inside ourselves. Winnicott was especially concerned with how infants move on from the initial state of being conceived of in the parental mind to their own capacity to conceive of and live in the world creatively.

The later normal processes of separation and individuation, one might say the first migration, is predicated upon the foundations laid in the earliest relational beginning of mental life. Those foundations necessarily involve the mind-full adaptations that parents make to the particularity of this baby, so that this baby can come to feel itself alive and existing in a way that has meaning. Winnicott’s emphasis is repeatedly on the place of being: in arguing that love is either good-enough or else variously interrupted, he puts the emphasis entirely on the location of the self. Steven Groarke has written extensively about Winnicott’s contribution. He observes that, for Winnicott, ontology, on the one hand, and pathology, on the other, tend towards a common topological, spatial ground.

“Inter-corporeity”, the infant–environment setup that Winnicott posits as the first infantile state, is a place. The good-enough mother locates the infant by putting herself in his place. Love is seen as a kind of spatial substitution. Whereas, on the other hand, the mother who fails her infant does so precisely by failing to provide good-enough support; in Winnicottian terms, she cannot hold up or bear the infant, nor grounds his needs in the world. And in so far as his being is fragmented, the infant who hasn’t been given the particular support specifically adapted to him- or herself and thus located (placed in space) at the beginning, fails to come truly alive.

(Groarke, 2000, p. 77)

Indeed, for Winnicott, the infant who doesn’t experience the ontological reliability of the environment isn’t a true self at all. Groarke says that it makes no sense to speak in terms of the self of dislocation (or, to use Winnicott’s words, of “unintegration”, of “disintegration”, of “dissociation”). In his account, the true Winnicottian self works only against dislocation and fragmentation; the self is located or else it is somehow “false”, the disordered outcome of a defective ego support at the beginning. There is no “going-on-being”, for Winnicott in a state of dislocation, one’s sense of self simply falls apart.

Weaning, perhaps, after birth itself, is the process that indicates and institutes separateness. Is weaning always possible, achievable? Not practically, although the hows and wherefores of how it happens are of tremendous importance. No, I mean internally: how does a baby come to be able to make this first migration satisfactorily?

In a talk given not long before he died (Winnicott, 1986, p. 47), Winnicott spoke of what he meant by living creatively, and he said something that is seemingly obvious but so full of uncommon sense: that if one has been happy, one can bear distress; that the baby can only be weaned if it has had the breast. He was talking about the emotional experience of the baby at the breast who has or has not been able to possess it with passion and appetite; a baby whose mother has been able to give herself over to being gobbled up. Such a baby can be helped to bear the distress of the loss of the breast and to experience and use the possibility and gain from that loss. This is a very helpful paradigm for understanding the phenomena we are invited to think about in this series: what are the factors that contribute to migration being a creative potential and what might make it a very different kind of experience; do we have a home inside us where we can live creatively with familiarity (I use that word deliberately to link this with family) and from which we can go out, migrate, because we are fundamentally sure of that home; or is this place a place of deadness, absence, futility such that migration is just another chapter in a life of such character? I polarise these deliberately to make my point but recognise that lived reality can be some mixture of these possibilities.

I am going to present some ongoing clinical work with a mother and her infant that highlights the complexity of this intergenerational, across-time-and-place phenomenon of home and its meanings and which forms the basis of how migration from any perspective is experienced. This mother is amongst millions all over the world who suffer the experience of enforced migration because of political persecution. This is only one kind of external migration but perhaps the one that is most often associated with violence, helplessness, trauma. This kind of migration has usually happened in circumstances of sudden rupture following a period, sometimes of some length, of fear and persecution where the social bonds of community have been attacked through random and targeted acts of violence. Often, the targets of these acts are family members of people involved in turbulent political and economic processes. After arriving in the new country, the ability to work through the vicissitudes of pre-migratory and migratory trauma is connected with the internal strengths of the individual concerned, themselves predicated upon sufficient good experiences in their history.

In these circumstances, the birth of a baby can carry the potential hope that the trauma can be healed, that life can be worth living, and that the future can be good. The migration implicit in growing up (from babyhood to adulthood) may have involved sufficient integration of the inevitable variety of good and bad experiences so that they have enriched the personality and are a source of resilience when that person becomes a parent, even in such difficult circumstances. Or it may be that the child has not been fortunate enough to have had parents and a family and social setting where the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune have been manageable. Such a child entering adulthood and then becoming a parent, especially although not uniquely following migration, inevitably is faced with immense challenges. The disruption of this new phase (of parenting) in their life will involve the arousal of unconscious constellations of memories, fantasies, defences, and so on that are rooted in personal history and which press for re-presentation in this new situation.

Maria was referred to me in a perinatal psychiatry setting.¹ Her baby girl, Anna, was six weeks old, the younger of her two children, the older being a boy of three years. In this kind of psychotherapy, we sit on cushions on the floor, at the baby’s level, with the baby mat and suitable toys available. Maria was very young-looking, and her face was immobile as she spoke in a low voice that I could hardly hear. She placed her baby on the mat and moved away out of touch. I felt that baby Anna was there marooned, stranded, and possibly rendered unreachable. Maria was silent unless I asked her something, and there was a sense of there being no connection between mother and baby: no gaze; no words; just absence, a gulf. I was filled with immense pessimism and hopelessness. Anna was restless on the mat, her body indicating her irritability, but she was silent; she did not cry or cry out for anything. I spoke to her as she writhed on the mat of her feeling uncomfortable and lost, but I felt no connection with her as she was unresponsive. Her mother picked her up and silently fed her her breast, and both rocked restlessly in this profoundly uncomfortable scene. I was to get to know this silence and discomfort intimately over the next several months.

Maria told me the bare bones of her story, but I was aware that to press for too much could be overwhelming, as she let me know that the previous talking help she’d had had left her feeling worse afterwards. I had to be attentive to the consequences for three people of whatever might transpire in our sessions. I learned that she was twenty-two years old and had arrived in London not long after her sixteenth birthday, knowing no-one and not speaking the language. She had no family, having nursed her mother until her death when she was thirteen years old, and her father was also now dead. This was told slowly and painfully and with great reluctance. I gathered that she had no experience of being cared for, except, surprisingly, by a woman who had talked to her in the park where she was dropped off by the vehicle that brought her to this country illegally. This woman was also from her homeland, spoke her language, and helped her. It was this woman who was that day taking care of her son. This light in an otherwise totally bleak story was heartening with its intimations of home, the familiar language, and welcome.

However, there were other things that made sense of why she had come and in that way, as such a young person, alone. I already knew from the referral something of the background, and so when I made a comment about her not having intended to have two children, she told me that she had been raped; but the story she told was not the one about Anna’s conception but about what happened on her sixteenth birthday at home. She said that her father was a member of the political opposition in her country and she had been abducted by a group of policemen and raped by them on her birthday. Her father had quickly arranged for her to get out of the country, and so she had arrived as an asylum-seeker. I learned later that her father was subsequently murdered. Now, six years later, the Home Office had still to decide whether she could stay or had to return. She lived in dread of being sent back.

The rape on her sixteenth birthday (linked in my mind with the age of consent and the move towards adult sexuality) seemed unconsciously connected in her mind to the rape five years after arriving here that led to Anna’s conception. I want to suggest that it was one of a number of factors that determined the way Anna was conceived of in her mind. This condensation of the two rapes indicated to me that, for Maria, baby Anna was unconsciously linked to her migration and the loss of her homeland in that traumatic way. She was linked to the loss of the father, and I was to learn that the “home” she had lost was not a place of joy and pleasure. Her sense of homelessness was profound, but so also was the absence of a sense of nostalgia, a yearning for the lost home. That was suffused with silence, absence, and, I felt, horror.

It fairly quickly became apparent to me that Maria had no expectation that talking to me could be of any help at all, although she did convey a glimpse of pleasure when describing her son. She also conveyed a sense of duty that she needed to protect her little girl from her brother’s jealousy. In the early sessions, I felt that Maria dearly wanted both her children to have a different life than the one she’d had, but especially in relation to Anna, she had precious few internal resources to provide this.

It seemed to me that one of the therapeutic tasks implicitly was at variance with this scenario: to establish a “home” in the therapeutic setting for mother and baby that could begin to provide Maria with some of the resources she lacked. In parent–infant psychotherapy, we work most directly with the mother’s transference to the baby and the place the baby has within the mother’s mind. Inevitably, there are transference issues towards the therapist, but in a rather classical psychoanalytic way we only work with them when they are an impediment to the progress of the work.

Establishing a therapeutic home with Maria was very difficult as her expectations were so clearly bleak. She titrated her contact with me not just by her silence in the session but also by her absences. She could not sustain weekly meetings for a long time; she might come for two and then miss. She would always let me know that she would not be coming and there was always a “reasonable” excuse. But the pattern became clear, and I learned to allow it as she worked out how close she could bear for me to be to herself and Anna. It took nearly a year for her to be able to attend fairly consistently on a weekly basis. I think this is important to understand in these times of so-called “efficiency” in the health service, that the apparent non-cooperation of the patient can actually be a finely tuned dance to see if the therapist can bear to engage with the patient.

Most painfully, she also titrated her contact with Anna, and I felt Maria’s psychic absence as an enormous wet blanket, dulling everything. She was clinically depressed and the psychiatric team and I worked in tandem, but in the early sessions the impact upon Anna was profound. She was gaze-averse, unresponsive, silent, and the only way she could be soothed to some degree from her restlessness was by close body contact with her mother or a breast-feed. The feeds were not particularly soothing, but they did afford some degree of satisfaction to both mother and baby, as we learned in hindsight later when Anna was abruptly weaned.

However, even in the early sessions it was evident that Anna was one of those babies who could take a little scrap and use it. I could feel it in my interactions with her. I would take her onto my lap and talk to her, engage her, look at and play with her. She was sometimes quite averse to me but increasingly began to do the things that young babies do: taking turns with me in vocalisations, holding my gaze, turning away and then returning to me. I had to be very careful not to set up a competitive dynamic between us, but Maria seemed interested in what I was doing and was greatly pained by her overwhelming sense of not feeling able to provide these things for Anna herself. She had done for her son, but he had a different place in her mind. He was the light of her life; her face shone when she spoke of him. She increasingly talked of Rikardo’s growing affection for his sister and her observations of his playfulness with her. Maria was the observer to that growing relationship as she was to Anna’s relationship with me.

I got a sense that Maria could provide her son with some sense of home with her, and it seemed he was able to use this with Anna in a way his mother was not. The absence of her internal home was most striking with Anna and was most powerfully communicated in her silence; the huge gulf between them was most painful and the silence had a bleak, haunting sense to it. Someone has mentioned that silence is used in horror movies to convey the sense of terror and, although the atmosphere wasn’t quite of these proportions, I think my sense of the “haunting” relates to the presence of the unmourned losses in Maria’s life, now re-presented in the conception and birth of this baby girl.

Maria was very reluctant to talk about her past, and I got the intimation of its bleak emptiness especially in the relationship with her mother. She answered a few questions that I put to her. There was a tone of resentfulness as she told me her mother had died aged thirty-three years of breast cancer. There was no sympathy for that young mother whose needs were paramount and overtook those of her young child Maria who took care of her. Maria had no early memories, and it was interesting to me that I failed to do the Adult Attachment Interview² as I would normally, as I felt that to ask all those questions about her childhood would be too cruel. It seemed to me that the absence of early memories was re-presented in the sense of emptiness and absence in Maria’s relating to her baby girl. And Anna’s gender was as important as the manner of her conception in determining this re-presentation. This was the female line down which this inheritance was passed.

So in these early sessions, there was no pleasure in this mother–baby relationship; no play, no contact; just blankness. Maria complained that all Anna wanted was to feed from her. Externally, intimations of loss brought tears and anger: Maria complained to me about the Psychiatric Specialist Registrar who was moving on; nobody could be relied upon to stay around, and then Rikardo’s nursery place was reduced by some seeming whim of the Local Authority. During our first break, because of the Easter holidays, Maria fell down the stairs on the day she would have come to see me, and indeed she had cancelled the two previous sessions as Rikardo was ill and she had too much to do. Her hostility to Anna became more apparent and could be recognised between us as I described the difference between her feelings for Rikardo as the one she had alway...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: CHILDHOOD
• PART II: ADOLESCENCE
• PART III: ADULTHOOD
• PART IV: OLD AGE
• PART V: MIGRATION IN COUPLES AND FAMILIES
• PART VI: CULTURE AND SOCIETY
• PART VII: ART AND PSYCHOANALYTIC PERSPECTIVES
• INDEX