Children's Phantasies

The Shaping of Relationships

Otto Weininger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429911903
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Otto Weininger illustrates the manifestations of unconscious phantasy in children - normal, neurotic or psychotic - in various settings such as playgroups, ordinary schools or special schools for disturbed children, the family milieu or play therapy. He uses Melanie Klein's developmental theory and shows the evolutions of phantasies in their content, in the way they are symbolizes, and their functioning in terms of the child's evolution from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position and Oedipus complex.

Part One

Good, bad and enough: some basic processes in the paranoid-schizoid position

Chapter One

Splitting and idealization

Jane, aged four years and four months, was normally a pleasant member of a playgroup in which I recently participated. One day she came up to me and called me ‘a very bad person’. In mock attack, she began to wave her fists, while at the same time opening and closing her mouth as if to devour me. While this episode was precipitated by her frustration at play, its psychic origins may be traced back to the earliest moments of life—to the ‘splitting’¹ between good and bad and the complex projection and introjection of these qualities. These defensive mechanisms characterize the child’s first responses to existence. (For an elaboration of the paranoid-schizoid position see Segal, 1973; Weininger, 1984.)

The incident started in the ‘grocery store’ centre of the playroom, an area where a pretend store had been set up with a real cash-register on a counter and shelves of tins, boxes of biscuits and baby foods. Jane wanted to take over James’s job as cashier and was very angry with me because I would not allow her to push him away and physically prevented her from doing so by placing myself between the two children. After her ‘attack’ on me she went off to another centre in the room, where one of the teachers was playing with some other children. She dropped herself down on the teacher and told her that she hated ‘him’, pointing to me across the room. Then she whispered in the teacher’s ear that she liked some of me and that some of me was good, but ‘right now he has a lot of bad’.

Jane remained with the teacher for a short time and then wandered back, this time trying not to look at me. When I asked her why she wasn’t looking at me, she replied, ‘Because I don’t want to see the bad’, and I think she meant ‘the bad in you’. Jane continued to skirt the area and then said that maybe there ‘was not more bad’ because she would wait her turn. Jane did wait for a few minutes, and then she was able to have her turn as cashier.

This playgroup outburst with its resolution shows some of the basic characteristics of the splitting process, one of the earliest mechanisms the infant uses to cope with and defend against anxiety, here acted-out by a four-year-old whose capacity to handle her feelings was still limited. When Jane felt something, she needed to have the feelings acknowledged and satisfied. If this did not happen, she became angry, but she was not able to be angry at herself, because she was too young to understand that she had to wait her turn. She projected onto me her angry impatience and the anxious feelings of persecution associated with it—that is, the feeling that someone was going to make her do something. Was I not, after all, the bad object who was literally blocking her way? As I was now the bad object, she went elsewhere to complain. However, Jane had played with me several times before and had obviously enjoyed herself; thus, even when confronted with a clear instance where I was frustrating her, Jane could not see me as entirely bad. Her reaction to this difficult and frustrating situation was to have the bad part of me stop her from doing what she wanted. But as her splitting was normal and had not led to rigidity of thought and action, she was able to preserve the earlier pleasure we had shared and to acknowledge some good in me.

By projecting her badness onto me but by also being able to recognize some good in me, Jane could then wander around the centre awaiting her turn, and, as she said shortly afterwards, there was ‘no more bad’—no more projected attacks and no anticipated retaliation. The anxiety of this persecution could diminish because while she was splitting, she could still see sufficient good within me to make me not only attractive, but also not so damaged or destroyed that I would seek revenge. Time, reflection and her essential health were combined with the calm ‘containing’ by the teacher to bring this episode to a satisfying resolution. Here, as so often happens, the easy, though by no means crisis-free, atmosphere of the playgroup allowed the processes of learning about the self and the world to reveal their essential psychic shapes.

The process of splitting is the infant’s way of dealing with the formless anxiety that originates with the very meaning of life itself, a life vulnerable to annihilation. In phantasy the infant splits the primal object, the breast, which is the source of all of his or her experiences of satisfaction and frustration, into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in order to maintain the breast’s good, nurturing, satisfying qualities. The breast has been gratifying, and this gratification is expressed as love towards the object, but the breast is also frustrating because it is not always present, nor does it flow as freely as the infant may wish. Sometimes the flow of milk is too slow, at other times too fast; at times the nipple slips out of the infant’s mouth, or it may make the baby feel as if he or she is suffocating because it closes the baby’s nostrils. The unconscious phantasies attached to such temporary frustrations within this oral phase are that the breast is ‘ungiving’, or trying to ‘smother’. In part because of the infant’s projected anger towards the breast, in part because of his or her fear of retaliation, the breast is phantasized as attacking. It thus becomes persecutory as well as gratifying as it becomes associated with both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings. However, the infant’s ego is not sufficiently stable or coherent to accept such conflicting attributes. The infant deals with such conflict by splitting the breast. As a result, there is now in the infant psyche a distinction between love and hate, which persists because of the symbolic splitting of the breast into good and bad part-objects.

As we have seen, the demand for continual gratification is the source of the infant’s anger. At first this anger is expressed as oral hostility—impulses to attack, devour, destroy and break up the breast into fragments. At times the infant will take in a bad breast—one experienced as damaging his or her insides, from which he or she needs some protection. The bad fragments make up the bad part-object breast, whereas the loving, gratifying part remains as the good part-object breast. The good part-object maintains an integration of the immature coherence of the developing ego. It is this good part-object that is introjected into the ego and maintained safe by a continuing splitting and projection process.

The infant’s ego, which is fragile at best, needs the containing capacity of the mother or the person caring for the infant. It is exceptionally important for the mothering person to be an active presence. The mother provides both psychological and physical support. She continues to reappear after leaving the infant’s presence. She interprets her infant’s crying not just as attention-seeking but as a signal that the baby needs nurturing. Rather than creating extra frustration by letting the baby ‘cry it out’, she recognizes that something is bothering him or her. I do not think that a parent will ‘spoil’ the baby with this sort of continuous care; rather, it is the lack of continuity of care that will damage the baby by creating a premature ‘independence’ (Weininger, 1982), in which infants quickly learn that they cannot count on their parents and that they have to make use of their own resources, which are, at this point, largely persecutory. Thus they begin to insulate themselves from others in an effort to avoid persecution and so reduce their dependency (Bick, 1968). In other words, ‘they try to go it alone’—and, of course, in so doing they continuously feel frustrated. The residual phantasy of being attacked simultaneously reinforces the need to be independent and adds to the sense of persecution. At best, a vicious cycle of difficult interactional behaviour will ensue; at worst, an autistic closing-down occurs.

However, at all times, and probably with all infants, feelings of frustration threaten the quality of the internal good part-object. If the mothering person is not able to be ‘continually present’ in phantasy, the good part-object may lose its strength, and the infant will feel as if everything is ‘bad’ inside. The result may be continued crying, fretful-ness, difficulty in feeding, gagging and spitting up— generally ‘colicky’ behaviour. Accompanying sleeping difficulties seem to reflect the phantasies of utter vulnerability to an attacking bad breast, which surface in nightmares. Parents describe children at about two or three months waking up with a start, crying even before they are awake, looking ‘wild-eyed’, thrashing about in their cribs and even hitting their heads on the quilted bars. When I question the parents, they say that feeding was often difficult. The infants would not want to eat, were fussy, and when the parents did get some food into them, would usually spit it out quickly and angrily. Distraction sometimes worked, but generally feeding times were very difficult, and the more distraught the parents became—because they thought that the infant was not getting enough food—the more upset the infant became. I think that these infants felt persecuted by the food—that is, food had become the symbolic equivalent of the attacking bad breast.

As splitting of the object occurs in an effort to try and maintain some freedom from attack, a corresponding split occurs within the ego:

Therefore the phantasies and feelings about the state of the internal object influence vitally the structure of the ego. The more sadism prevails in the process of incorporating the object, and the more the object is felt to be in bits, the more the ego is in danger of being split in relation to the internalized object bits. [Klein, 1946, p. 101]

This process of distortion may be reflected in children’s behaviour, but its effects may also persist into adulthood. The following two cases—one of a two-year-old with a relatively easily isolatable physical ‘flap’, the other a 30-year-old with a complex pattern of neurotic symptoms— suggest the range of problems that can emerge.

When I first met the two-year-old girl whom I had been asked to see because of her strange behaviour, I was immediately aware of her symptom: the unusual, apparently defensive waving of her hands, which began as soon as she came into the examining room. As she toddled about, seemingly unaware of the furniture in the room and bumping into it, she waved her hands in front of her face in a side-to-side motion, almost as if she were brushing away some invisible things. The action made me think of a car’s windscreen wipers as they clean the glass. I asked the mother when this motion had started, and she told me that she thought it had begun when her daughter was three months old and had accidentally been scalded by some hot milk. No physical scars remained, but since that time the girl had gradually developed this compulsive waving of her hands in front of her face, usually when she was in the presence of other people. Her mother felt that the waving increased when the little girl was tired, upset, angry, hungry or uncomfortable in some way.

The girl’s play revealed other characteristics of this apparently self-protective behavioural symptom. At first it seemed dissociated from her other movements. When she started to play, moving a doll and baby carriage, she had to stop the hand-waving, but as soon as she had moved the toys, she made a few waves across her face, went back to the play, put the doll in the doll carriage, made a pass across her face, and then went back to the toys. The movements across her face were fleeting; they probably took only a second, and play was resumed quickly. She seemed unaware of the abrupt discontinuity in her actions. At the same time, her play with the dolls and the baby carriage reflected some of the anxiety from which this symbolic defence seemed to spring. She seemed worried about the strength of the doll carriage. She pushed and poked at it, turned it over, examined it carefully, gingerly placed the doll into it and immediately took it out again. I said that it seemed to me that she was afraid that the baby would be hurt. With that she stood in front of me waving her hands and saying, ‘No, no, no, no.’ She returned to the carriage and again examined it and repeated the action.

This child was trying simultaneously to maintain and defend against split-off hostile bits that had been physically experienced in the past as persecutory, hot, attacking milk. She was unable to experience reality fully. She bumped into furniture, thereby feeling attacked; she tried either to clear away the bad or to protect herself from it by the hand-waving. At the same time she attempted to carry on play or other behaviours, which only added to her difficulties. It seemed that she continually frustrated herself, found the world dangerous, and then needed to defend herself by not acknowledging outer reality as a part of her own reality. In this process the object and the ego became split and feelings of anger, frustration and persecution were cut off from reparative interactions² and normal interpersonal relationships.

In this child the necessary splitting by which the infant normally deals with the basic fear of annihilation had been arrested and distorted in development. The child’s persecutory fear, perhaps derived from or reinforced by the hot milk, was an expression of the annihilation anxiety. The world was experienced as overwhelming and extremely powerful and dangerous, and her fear of being destroyed was prominent. Splitting off the bad parts became necessary as the fragile ego attempted to reduce danger in order to maintain some wholeness. The defensive hand movements represented an effort to ward off any threat—to separate herself from the bad and maintain some goodness. Awareness of reality was sacrificed to a pathetically misdirected attempt to preserve safety and internal stability. The emotional energy necessary to maintain this state of defensiveness reduced the child’s capacity to play effectively and also engendered a lack of interpersonal warmth in order to guard against further frustration and the resulting painful feelings. A great deal of the child’s emotional energy was compulsively directed to maintaining the splitting both of the object and the ego, and in turn less energy was available for relationships.

An example of a more complex manifestation of splitting occurred in the context of an adult’s relationship to the therapist. A young woman of 30 in treatment with me became very angry at me and accused me of not really being interested in her. She complained that I was callously ignoring her painful physical symptoms, which she had been experiencing for many months. She noted that I did not suggest that she visit her physician and she said that I did not really know whether she was suffering from a neurological problem; she was experiencing numbness in her hand and in her arm and pain that travelled up her left arm into her neck, culminating in a tightness in her jaw, which gave her headaches. She added that her stomach felt as if it was on fire and that I didn’t seem ‘the least bit worried that it might be a serious ulcer.’ I responded to her that my concern was to determine why she was experiencing all this pain. When asked whether she should go to see her physician, I told her that that was a decision she had to make, but that our work was to understand her pain. I then interpreted her pain as the pain she wished to direct against me in order to make me less of an envied object. Her response to this was tearful. She said that she did not want to hurt me and that I was the only one left who could help her. She asked ‘Why would I then want to hurt you?’

I understood her symptoms as a result of the splitting off of hostility towards me and redirecting it towards herself. Her capacity to understand that this split-off hostility was being expressed through pain was severely limited. She could not understand anything other than her pain, although her capacity to comprehend was usually considerably above average. By splitting off her hostility as well as some ego functions, she prevented herself from feeling and understanding her hostility and from becoming overwhelmed by her unconscious anxiety. She had stopped part of her ego from being effective, even though she said, ‘Whenever this happens [i.e., when she feels the physical pain and I interpret it as symbolic hostility] I feel dizzy, as if I am going to faint, and you still don’t seem to care.’ This was another indication of how the split-off function reduced her awareness. Certainly there was also an unconscious expression of a desire to be taken care of, to be examined and touched and to be nurtured. These were all feelings she said she had missed in her very early childhood, when her mother was too busy with other people, or too busy ‘doing things to herself, to make her look [physically] better.’

This woman desired care and nurturing and was very angry and felt persecuted that she had not received it in childhood. Her painful physical experiences were unconscious expressions of’please touch me and take care of me.’ At the same time she was almost saying, ‘I don’t want to know how angry I am with the object because it is not caring for me. If this pain is introjected then I will not be aware of anything other than physical pain because knowing and understanding will be erased. My thinking will be disorganized and so I will be unaware of the intensity of my anger and the object’s potential revenge and retaliation.’ As no retaliation was anticipated, no useful therapeutic regression could take place. The physical aches and real pains substituted for a genuine confrontation with her painful past. They not only reduced the expression of anger, but also diminished the possibility of knowing offered by the potentially threatening work of treatment.

The anguished distortions of cases such as these should not make us forget that, under normal circumstances, splitting is the natural beginning of a potentially rich and healthy psychic life. The process is a necessary response to the anxiety of existence in that earliest stage of experience that Klein defines as the ‘paranoid-schizoid position’. It allows the ego to ‘come through’ the terror of annihilation with a feeling that there is some order both to internal and to external reality.

By returning to the playgroup, we can trace the process of splitting through some of its more complex normal developments as the child confronts the necessary opportunities and setbacks of a life of relationships with others, in a freer form than that of the patient-therapist transference.

Both the following examples illustrate the process of ‘idealization’ by which the ego projects its good and bad aspects into an object and then identifies part of that object with the self. Idealization is where the good experiences of the infant are associated with an ideal object, which is phantasized as being very valuable, desired and well identified with. The split-off bad object contains the hostility that is feared as destructive and damaging. The infant then fears retaliation by this bad object and defends against it. As defense against these fears even stronger idealization of the good object will be felt, and then the object can be perceived as protecting the child from any danger, especially the danger of annihilation.

Three-year-old Kate was very fond of me and would sit on my lap telling me to read her a story. She would choose the book and present it to me. I was to do what she wanted, and usually this was possible. When I walked into her group activity room where she was with the other children, she would come over to me, put her hand into mine, look at me, and smile, sometimes saying nothing, at other times telling me we should paint. She usually stayed by my side for the morning. On one particular occasion, she told me, ‘We are going to paint.’ We both went over to the paint table, and she became very occupied putting thin lines of glue onto her paper. She dribbled the glue from above the paper and let it ‘wiggle’ onto the paper. She talked as she worked, telling me that she was making ‘wiggly lines’ that were ‘thin’ or ‘small’ or ‘big’ or Tat’. She made pools of glue on the paper and then said she wanted to put a ‘yellow circle’ on the glue pool. Later she added a ‘purple square’, a ‘yellow’ piece of cellophane and a ‘pink triangle’ of paper. These small pieces of paper covered the pools of glue,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE Good, bad and enough: some basic processes in the paranoid—schizoid position
• PART TWO Aggression, expression and love: development through the depressive position
• PART THREE Anxiety and independence: the Oedipal position and the emergence of the sufficient ego
• PART FOUR Feeling, thought and creativity: the interdependence of phantasy and learning
• PART FIVE Play psychotherapy: theory and practice
• References
• Index