Siblings in the Unconscious and Psychopathology

Womb Fantasies, Claustrophobias, Fear of Pregnancy, Murderous Rage, Animal Symbolism, Christmas and Easter "Neuroses", and Twinnings or Identifications with Sisters and Brothers

Gabriele Ast, Vamik D. Volkan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367102920
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429919237
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book examines adults' identifications and internal relationships with their siblings' mental representations. The authors believe that the best way to illustrate clinical formulations and psychoanalytic theoretical concepts is to provide detailed clinical data. The influence of childhood sibling experiences and associated unconscious fantasies, in their own right, in adults' personality characteristics, behaviour patterns, and symptoms are presented from seventeen case reports. Clinicians who have patients with fear of pregnancy, claustrophobia, incestuous fantasies, extreme dependency on or murderous rage against siblings, guilt due to the death of a sister or brother in childhood, replacement child syndrome, history of adoption, certain types of animal phobias and related issues will find this volume most helpful. The authors have made a rare, but needed, psychoanalytic contribution that examines mental representations of sisters and brothers in our daily lives.

1 Unconscious Fantasies

Our own experiences make us familiar with conscious fantasies or daydreams: stories in our minds that gratify our narcissistic or object-seeking and sexual or aggressive wishes. In our conscious fantasies we make ourselves princes or princesses, we take revenge on our enemies, or conquer sexually desirable partners. Other conscious fantasies are masochistic in nature; they satisfy unconscious wishes to submit to the demands of harsh superegos. Some conscious fantasies, whether they aim to temporarily increase our self-esteem or devalue or punish ourselves, end with masturbation: a bodily discharge to relieve tensions associated with closeness or distance to objects and to satisfy various aspects of infantile sexuality and infantile aggression. While it is easy to understand and explain conscious fantasies (daydreams) theoretically, the metapsychological formulations about unconscious fantasies have been rather difficult. First of all, patients do not directly report their unconscious fantasies. As Beres (1962) suggested, we surmise the existence of an unconscious fantasy "from the effects it produces, as the physicist surmises the existence of the electrical particles of atoms by the effects they produce" (p. 309). The story lines of unconscious fantasies are not presented in words and sentences. The patient, with the help of the analyst, reconstructs the story lines of unconscious fantasies during analytic treatment.

Once the story line of an unconscious fantasy is put into language, we often see that its aim resembles a conscious daydream: it may serve to restore the person's lowered self-esteem or satisfy sexual and aggressive demands, narcissistic or object-seeking wishes, or submissions to or rebellion against the superego or superego forerunners (i.e., "bad" object representations). But, as we will soon describe, before reconstructing the unconscious fantasy and putting its story line into language, we must recognize how it differs from conscious daydreams and fantasies in relation to its role in the person's mind, its level of organization, and its resistance to modification.

Conscious daydreams are influenced by the secondary process type of thinking—even the surface picture may appear illogical. For example, a child daydreams of having an imaginary companion, a "bad" twin, while in reality she is an only child. Once the symbolic meaning of the imaginary companion is understood, namely, as a displacement figure for the child's vices such as selfishness, envy, or uncleanliness or for responding to the child's feelings of emptiness, neglect, or rejection (Freiberg, 1959; Nagera, 1969), the meaning and function of the daydream is easily explainable. Unlike conscious daydreams the "stories" of unconscious fantasies are based on the primary process type of thinking: they remain illogical so far as the adult mind is concerned, even after their story lines are put into language. They are differentiated "from other varieties of unconscious content by their enduring quality and their organized, story-like quality reflecting the distortions typical of the primary process. As dynamically unconscious templates from the childhood past, they shape subsequent compromise formations and are relatively impervious to new experience" (Inderbitzin and Levy, 1990, p. 113). Furthermore, conscious daydreams differ from unconscious fantasies in that the patient realizes the involvement of his imaginative process in the former but perceives the latter as reality (Schafer, 1968).

In practice, however, once an unconscious fantasy is reconstructed in the analytic treatment, it may be difficult to make a differentiation between the story line of an unconscious fantasy and the story line of a daydream, and to differentiate their functions in the person's internal world. Furthermore, while conscious fantasies, because the patient recognizes their imaginative aspects, are relatively straightforward to analyze and treat, the modification of the "reality" of the unconscious fantasy in treatment proves to be more difficult.

Themes concerning the primal scene, incest, beating, castration, bisexuality, phallic women, rescue, oedipal urges, and family romance frequently appear in unconscious fantasies. These are common themes that, because all humans share similar psychophysiological early life experiences, are almost universal. We may assume that many elements of unconscious fantasy life, as well as daydreams, that contain these themes are shared cross-culturally (Moore and Fine, 1990). In this book we focus on pregnancy, birth, and sibling themes.

Ever since the early writings of Freud (1900, 1905a,b, 1908a, 1909a,b, 1911, 1915), the concept of unconscious fantasies has been addressed in psychoanalytic literature. During the last few decades significant papers on unconscious fantasies have been written by Beres (1962), Sandler and Nagera (1963), Arlow (1969a, b), Slap and Saykin (1983), Sandler and Sandler (1986), Sandler (1986), Apprey (1987), Blum, Kramer, Richards and Richards (1988), Abend (1990), Dowling (1990), Inderbitzin and Levy (1990), Shane and Shane (1990), and Trossman (1990). Yet in spite of the abundance of scholarly reports on the unconscious fantasy, as Sandler and Sandler (1986) and Inderbitzin and Levy (1990) state, the concept remains elastic or unclear, having "a range of meanings, incapable of precise definition" (Sandler and Sandler, 1986, p. 109). Melanie Klein and her followers (Klein, 1948; Isaacs, 1948; Segal, 1973) maintain that unconscious "phantasies" (Kleinian spelling) are inherited; they explain that they begin as psychic representations of instincts (drives) and may subsequently become elaborated into well-formed wishes or defenses against anxiety. Kleinians say that since drives are present at birth, some crude fantasy life can be assumed as existing at birth. For example, Segal (1973) states: "The first hunger and the instinctual striving to satisfy that hunger are accompanied by the phantasy of an object capable of satisfying that hunger. As phantasies derive directly from instincts on the borderline between the somatic and psychical activity, these original phantasies are experienced as somatic as well as mental phenomena" (p. 13).

Freud (1908b) stated that "Unconscious phantasies have either been unconscious all along and have been formed in the unconscious; or—as is more often the case—they were once conscious phantasies, day-dreams, and have since been purposely forgotten and have become unconscious through 'repression' " (p. 161). In this book we use the concept of unconscious fantasy in a more restricted sense, similar to Freud's second explanation of this phenomenon—that they are repressed daydreams, or more precisely, they are repressed "interpretations" of a child's experience of a traumatic event. We agree with Moore and Fine (1990) in that a description of the unconscious fantasy must incorporate experiences and memories.

A child perceives, comprehends, and "interprets a traumatic event—whether it happens once or is repeated, such as a mother's repeated inability to respond to the child's developmental needs—which, due to its psychological significance, induces a strong emotion in him. His "interpretation" depends upon his cognitive capacities, the developmental (i.e., psychosexual, aggressive) and self and object relations issues he is negotiating at the time, and the level of emotion the event initiates. The child's "interpretation" of an event or repeated events is also influenced by those intimate persons in his environment. For example, the mother's own perception and affects about an event may make the child more or less anxious in experiencing it. Furthermore, mothers and important others have their own unconscious fantasies, and under certain circumstances they pass them on to their offspring who then develop unconscious responses to them, including unconscious fantasies (Apprey, 1993). Volkan and Masri (1989) examined a teenage female transsexual and her parents. The patient's mother had traumatized her baby daughter by repeatedly physically manipulating the child's genitalia. The mother, who was depressed and sexually "hungry," unconsciously perceived her daughter as a penis and often slept with the infant between her legs, thinking of her as a "Martian" who, like a penis, should not be exhibited in public. The transsexual's father had a deformity in his mouth which was corrected by plastic surgery. In the girl's development of female transsexualism and her seeking surgical help to have a "penis" constructed for her, we see the combined effects of the mother's unconscious fantasy of a baby/penis equation, the father's conscious belief that surgery can correct one's body image, and the girl's corresponding "interpretations" of the traumatic events of her childhood.

For the child's "interpretation" to be an unconscious fantasy it has to be repressed and be influenced and distorted by the primary process thinking. When this happens, as unconscious "contents," it exerts a never-ending dynamic effect on subsequent perceptions, behavior, thinking, responses to reality, and either adaptive or maladaptive compromise formations (Arlow, 1969a,b; Inderbitzin and Levy, 1990). The child's developmental level at the time of his "interpretation" of the traumatic event influences the nature of the unconscious fantasy. For example, if he is at the oral phase and experiences an important figure as a "bad" object he may develop illogical ways of annihilating the representations of this object, such as by eating it; if he is subjected to a primal scene when at the anal phase and the experience induces strong emotions in him, his understanding of the event may include a fantasy of anal intercourse and anal impregnation. The difficulty with these examples, however, is that they depend upon the idea that a few-months-old baby can have a "formed" thought of killing someone by eating her or that a toddler can have a "formed" thought of anal impregnation, and that later they repress these structured ideations. We do not believe in the existence of well-developed thoughts, however illogical they might be, in infancy and in early childhood. Instead, the infant and the very young child experience somatic, affective, and cognitive responses to a trauma and later they are repressed. Here, we are interested in the combination of these responses having the potential to create a story line for an unconscious fantasy once such responses are re-activated. Very early in life the combination of these responses do not generate formed and sustainable thoughts until later, when they are re-activated and get connected to formed thoughts.

We must ask what happens if the somatic, affective, and cognitive responses do not lead to the formation of an unconscious fantasy. We believe that under such conditions the responses to the trauma may lead to psychosomatic expressions later in life. In other words, we are theorizing that there is an interplay between the formation and maintenance of unconscious fantasies and psychosomatic expressions. The latter relate to the most primitive channel of discharging responses to trauma, especially affects. Unconscious fantasies, on the other hand, are the first mental channels to express and master them. If later in life the mastery of the trauma via unconscious fantasies become "threatened," the individual may resort to the utilization of psychosomatic channels. The reverse is also true: if the unconscious fantasies are not blocked and thus remain effective, they may prevent the initiation of psychosomatic expressions.

The function of unconscious fantasies can be threatened by various circumstances. This might occur when events in the individual's environment suddenly match the elements of the story line in his unconscious fantasy, and the individual experiences this as though his fantasy has become "real." Now the "merging" of external reality with "psychic reality" threatens the function of the unconscious fantasy. For example, imagine a man who has an unconscious fantasy of entering his mother's belly to kill his younger sibling there. In reality, let us say, this man enacts his unconscious fantasy by becoming an explorer of caves, where the caves represent the mother's womb, and his exploration represents his search for his sibling in order to murder him. As long as he finds no one in the caves, his spelunking activities serve as a defense against his own aggression. However, after a period of time his aggression builds up and he must again explore caves. The activity of exploring but not finding anyone continues to maintain his unconscious defense against aggression. Then one day the man happens upon a dead body in a cave. Now reality too closely matches his unconscious fantasy, his unconscious strategy of defense fails, and he may regress to expressing his feelings—feelings of rejection by his mother when the sibling was born-psychosomatically.

Another circumstance that threatens the function of the unconscious fantasy occurs during psychoanalysis. Psychosomatic symptoms may appear, if only temporarily, when therapeutic progress uncovers the story line of the unconscious fantasy which the patient now recognizes as such. Thus the previous effectiveness of unconscious fantasy changes. In the description of our clinical work with patients Mira (see chapter 6) and Gisela (see chapter 10), we further illustrate the interplay between the effective maintenance of unconscious fantasies and the expression of psychosomatic symptoms when the function of the unconscious fantasy is threatened.

We must also ask another question. What happens if the infant's or very young child's initial responses to his "interpretation" of the trauma do not get repressed? In this situation the child's responses may later become elements on which a conscious fantasy can be built. The individual, however, eventually will recognize the imaginary process (Schafer, 1968) in the conscious fantasy (which includes a function to gratify one or another kind of wish). The conscious fantasy, unlike the unconscious fantasy, does not become a stubborn psychic reality.

If a traumatic event occurs later in life when the child has a better ability for perception and thinking and is better able to tame affects, he may form a structured explanation (a formal and sustainable thought) for the trauma, but even this explanation is illogical from an adult's point of view. This well-formed "interpretation" then may be repressed and become an unconscious fantasy, It is necessary for us to visualize a hierarchy in the formation of unconscious fantasies that corresponds to a child's age and ego development.

A grown-up child, furthermore, may "reinterpret" a traumatic event when a similar event occurs in reality later on. On the conscious level the child's previous understanding of the event may be modified. The new and more reality-oriented "interpretation" may become an ally to the ego function in more strongly maintaining the repression of the first "understanding," rendering the first "understanding" less influential or less harmful. However, to explain the existence of unconscious fantasies we must consider situations in which the first "interpretation" is not given up at all, is not rendered harmless, but instead stays there like an inner and alive "fossil." It absorbs sexual and aggressive wishes, object-relation issues, and either defensive or adaptive measures against anxiety, and mixes them up with primary process ideas and images. Since it resides in the unconscious, we refer to it as an unconscious fantasy. We agree with Sandler and Sandler (1986) that an unconscious fantasy, as described above, "deserves the name of fantasy only inasmuch as [it is] derived from the contents of conscious or preconscious fantasies" (p. 111). In turn, unconscious fantasies, as the Sandlers state, find expression in new conscious and preconscious daydreams.

Our description of unconscious fantasy especially echoes Arlow's (1969b) remarks. He states:

[I]n keeping with the synthetic function of the ego and the principle of multiple function, the traumatic events in the individual's life and the pathogenic conflicts that grow out of them are worked over defensively by the ego and incorporated into a scheme of memories and patterns of fantasy. In one part of the mind, the inner eye, as it were, remains focused on an inner stream of fantasy thought in which the traumatic memories are retained in disguised form.... The traumatic events of the past become part of the fantasy thinking and as such exert a never-ending dynamic effect, occasionally striking, sometimes less so, on our responses to and appreciation of reality

[pp. 43-44].

The Effect of Siblings on Unconscious Fantasies

Let us start with a child who has a younger sibling; according to his age and stage of developmental issues, the child develops images and collections of images (mental representations) of the younger sibling even before the baby is born. He collects data about the rival. The mother's remarks about her pregnancy and unborn child, the mother's affects about the same, the child's perception of his mother's morning sickness and growing belly, the child's touching his mother's abdomen and feeling the unborn child, and other related events allow the child to form images and mental representations of the new arrival and he mixes them up with expectations (i.e., the fear of losing the mother's love). Because of real deprivations (e.g., the mother's having a postpartum depression and not being available enough to the older child) and because of the older child's internal processes (e.g., identification with the depressed mother), the sibling experience may prove traumatic. The more traumatic it is the more likely the older child will contaminate his experience with complicated perceptions, thoughts, expectations, and feelings. As these get repressed they become included in an unconscious fantasy dominated by primary processes.

The most common theme of the child is unconscious sibling fantasies concerns the image of the new sibling in the mother's belly and the older child's wishes about what to do with it. The older child, for example, in his unconscious fantasy enters the mother's womb or belly in order to get rid of the rival. In his fantasy he owns his mother's belly and no one but he can occupy it.

It goes without saying that younger children also have unconscious fantasies that include the mental representations of their older siblings. However, in our experience in analyzing adults, we could not find the existence of womb fantasies among last-born children. If such unconscious fantasies among that population exist we would not be surprised, however, because the youngest child's territoriality too may be threatened—and so the younger child may wish for the safety and comfort of the womb. In our experience the youngest child's unconscious fantasies pertaining to elder siblings occur more often when the former has experienced a trauma such as being threatened or beaten by the older child, or experiencing the older child's illness or death. The death of an older sibling, for example, may occur during a time when the younger child has severe castration anxiety. In turn, the younger child unconsciously equates death with castration, and then "interprets" the loss of the older child as the loss of the penis. The younger child keeps the mental representation of the dead sibling (a penis) "alive" in his mind as a defense against castration.

The other common unconscious fantasies among younger children relate to their being replacements for dead siblings. Here, too, the mother or parents' attitude toward the newborn child plays an important role in his development of an unconscious "story" that he exists to replace a dead older child whom, often, he has never met. For a child to have an unconscious fantasy that he replaces or "is" another person (who is dead, and who may belong to the opposite sex) may induce fragmentation in his self representation and cause conflicted self and object relations and even gender conflicts. A related unconscious fantasy is that one has to die for another one to live (Apprey, 1987). When we present detailed case material in later chapters we will demonstrate how these and other unconscious fantasies related to sibling experiences can be reconstructed in psychoanalysis.

In the next chapter we begin studying the older child's reactions to a new sibling and the internalized consequences of those reactions in adulthood. We examine how the new sibling is perceived as an "intruder" in the older child's psychic and physical space. We provide examples of certain common clinical observations of adults in analysis to illustrate how their internal worlds can be understood through the examination of the "intruder's" representation associated with affects, unconscious fantasies, defenses, and adaptations.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Unconscious Fantasies
• 2 The Intruder
• 3 Insects, Fish, Birds, and Animals
• 4 Territoriality and Unconscious Womb Fantasies
• 5 The Secret Restaurant
• 6 To Kill or To Repair
• 7 Deposited Representations
• 8 Twinning
• 9 Dead Sibling Representations
• 10 Charon and Herakles: Living with a Dead Brother
• 11 Diagnosis
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index