Inside Lives

Psychoanalysis and the Growth of the Personality

Margot Waddell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429914973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This second edition of the remarkable Inside Lives (expanded with a chapter on the last years of the life cycle) provides a perspective on the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and the nature of human development. Following the major developmental phases from infancy to old age, the author lucidly explores the vital aspects of experience which promote mental and emotional growth and those which impede it. In bringing together a wide range of clinical, non-clinical and literary examples, it offers a detailed and accessible introduction to contemporary psychoanalytic thought and provides a personal and vivid approach to the elusive question of how the personality develops.

Chapter One

States of mind

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past”

T. S. Eliot

Notions of growth and development imply a linear progression, one most straightforwardly described in the chronological passage of time from birth to death. There is, however, something in this developmental aspect of human nature which simple chronology cannot lay hold of. It is what some psychoanalysts call “states of mind”.

There is no easy psychological definition for what Eliot intimates in the poem above, and yet the lines convey something that is crucial to the endeavour of understanding what is meant by the notion of “states of mind”. Any one state of mind in the present, however fleeting, is founded in the past, and at the same time it encompasses a possible future. Much rests on its nature and quality. Does it nurture the seeds of developmental possibility? Does it further confine potential growth within a static or frozen “mindset”? Does it put development back on a reverse course, binding the personality to a past self from which it is difficult again to depart? Such states may be ephemeral or they may be entrenched. They may be ones which lend encouragement to moving on, or offer temptation to look back.

Each single state of mind, however temporary, has an impact on the personality as a whole. The degree of impact varies according to the interplay between the particular developmental stage concerned and, within that stage, the attitude of mind which is dominant at any one time.

It is certainly possible to describe the physical, and even to some extent the emotional and behavioural characteristics of any particular developmental phase or stage, but each person’s experience also has its own complex specificity. His “present” is imbued with the lights and shadows of his own past, and of his parents’ past. It looks forward to his own future, to his parents’ future, even to his potential children’s future.¹

The theories of Klein and Bion have made it possible to think about the nature and meaning of human behaviour as it is affected by the changing predominance of different mental states and by the impact of those states on the developmental shifts appropriate to specific ages: for example infancy, latency, adolescence, adulthood. These mental states or attitudes Klein designated “positions”, by which she intended something like the perspective from which someone might view himself and his relationships with the world. Such are the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position.² The theory of “positions” from which life and relationships are experienced constituted a significant shift within psychoanalytic understanding, a shift away from an emphasis on the explaining and curing of discrete symptoms and towards one in which the developmental possibilities are traced in the person as a whole, in their relation with prevailing mental states.

The term “paranoid-schizoid” describes the earlier position, that of the very young infant. It encompasses both the nature of the predominant anxiety, that is the fear of persecution, and the nature of the defence against such fears. This last is the “schizoid”, or split functioning, in which both people and events are experienced in very extreme terms, either as unrealistically wonderful (good) or as unrealistically terrible (bad). This state of mind tends to be characterized by an exclusive concern with one’s own interests, by a sense of persecution in the face of pain and emotional distress, and by a focus on self-preservation at all costs. It is a natural and necessary state at this very early stage. For the infant is having to manage emotional experiences which he does not yet have the capacity psychically to digest by himself.

In the subsequent position, the “depressive”, a more considerate attitude prevails, with a somewhat balanced, though ambivalent, relationship to the other. Feelings of concern arise, and the beginnings of a capacity to experience remorse for the harm which is felt to have been done to the loved one, or loved ones, by the frustrated and angry self. Such a recognition stirs feelings of guilt and the desire to make things better, to make reparation. These responses are organized around an experience of the other as separate from the self, as being a whole person, possessing his, or her, own independent life, outside the narrow concerns of immediate personal needs. Such an experience, in turn, arouses anxiety lest the fragility of the other may also endanger the self. At the centre of this anxiety is the perennially complex problem of the relationship between egoism and altruism. Such a problem becomes focused in the deeply mixed and ambivalent feelings which Klein describes as characteristic of the depressive position.

The shift in states of mind from what psychoanalytic theory describes in terms of paranoid-schizoid to depressive—or of primarily narcissistic to object-related³—is marvellously evoked in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch. The description is of a young bride’s disillusionment both with herself and with her husband:

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier for her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling—an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects—that he had an equivalent centre of self whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference. [Middlemarch, p. 243]

This shift from one state of mind to the other is one which, though first possible in early infancy, is by no means fully achieved at that time. Rather it is a challenge to which there must be repeated response throughout life.

In Klein’s work there is a sense of life-long fluctuations between a predominantly selfish and self-serving attitude to the world and an attitude of generosity and concern, albeit one which is always inflected by a concern for the self. Even after a more depressive stance has been achieved, it may be that under the sway of intensified anxiety, of the fear of separation for example, a person may lose his ability to see things from another’s point of view and become obstinately convinced of his own. He may slip, in Klein’s terms, from a capacity for depressive concern to a more selfish set of worries about himself. Likewise he may recover his previous empathic self when the testing time is passed.

Bion (1963) tended to see the relationship between the two attitudes as a matter of a more immediate kind of to-and-fro. He schematically represented this as a continuous movement between the two poles Ps↔D (p. 102). The Ps↔D formulation further suggests a notion specific to Bion: namely, that every move forward in development entails a degree of internal disruption and anxiety which temporarily throws the personality into disarray, that is, back into a more chaotic state of mind.⁴ The turbulence stirred up by internal change is intrinsic to emotional growth, hence the two-directional emphasis in the diagram. Such a diagram also suggests a constant oscillation, moment by moment, between different temporary states of mind as well as between ones which, in a more extended way, belong to the broad developmental phases being described.

This idea of ever-shifting mental states, considered both by Klein and by Bion, offers an account of growth and development in which a number of different kinds of oscillation are always present. There is a constant interplay, for example, between the states of mind which generally characterize each developmental phase. But within each phase there is also an interplay between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. Mental attitudes which appropriately belong to different stages of development, infancy, latency adolescence, adulthood, will each, at any one moment, come under the sway of emotional forces which are characteristic of one position or the other, irrespective of the subject’s actual years. An adult’s state of mind may be found in the baby; an infant’s in the adolescent; a young child’s in the old man; a middle-aged man’s in the latency boy. These various mental states will take effect in relation to whichever emotional attitude to the self and to the self-in-the-world has precedence at the time. Present, past and future are contained in any one state of mind. Such states flicker and change with the nuances of internal and external forces and relationships, forever shifting between egoistic and altruistic tendencies.

Drawing on one of George Eliot’s metaphors, one might describe the to-and-fro as an alternation between gazing at the self in a mirror, and looking out through a window at the lives of other people. Perhaps under the impact of renewed anxiety or loss, the gaze may return again to the mirror.⁵ Trying to determine with any precision which state it is that holds sway is often hard, but necessary in order to identify those experiences which are meaningful to the growing self and how they may, as a consequence, promote development.

* * *

A couple of brief examples will help to clarify this complex relationship between states of mind and stages of development. They highlight the importance, both for the self and for the other, of registering which aspect of the personality is predominating at any one time. Only then is it possible to ascertain what might be an appropriate, or possible, response—one which may encourage understanding rather than obstruct it.

The first is a vignette. It describes how eighty-nine-year-old Mrs Brown suffered intense jealousy over her belief that her husband, Eric, ninety years old and faithful for nearly sixty years of marriage, had become attracted to their recently widowed eighty-year-old friend, Gladys. When asked, one Sunday lunch-time, why she was being uncharacteristically quiet, Mrs Brown described the “miserable time” she had had the previous evening at a dinner. Mrs Brown had set forth with her husband to try to cheer Gladys up. She said that the evening had been dreadful because it was clear that her hostess “was just waiting for me to die so that she could move in with Eric”. As Mrs Brown reported her suspicions, she looked anxiously at her husband who seemed puzzled, apparently not understanding what she was suggesting. He simply commented that he would not want to put up with “all her awful relatives”. Mrs Brown was not reassured. Only on close and explicit questioning did her husband add that the widow, too, was awful and absolutely out of the question as a potential partner. His wife relaxed and began to talk animatedly and coherently about the current political situation.

Despite her mature years and her husband’s constancy, Mrs Brown became temporarily overwhelmed by a type of anxiety which is first experienced very early in life, and which is characteristic of the Oedipal feelings of infancy, that is the longing on the part of the baby, or child, for sole possession of one parent to the exclusion of the other.⁶ She was unable to think or to function properly until her mind was put at rest. She found herself in the thrall of early insecurities which had never been completely dispelled. What looked to others like the wisdom of years concealed a storm-tossed self, one that was vulnerable, fragile and prone to anguish and irrational fears whenever she was faced with loss, whether imagined or real.

Mrs Brown was beset by a persecuted certainty of betrayal and abandonment. This certainty bore all the hall-marks of an infant or young child’s jealous belief of having been supplanted in the affections of the person who matters most. The child is forced to realize that that most beloved person also has important relationships with others, be they a partner or children. Mrs Brown was unable to hold in mind the kind of person she knew her husband to be. She ignored the real Eric and saw only a polarized and persecuting version of what she feared. It was as if she had lost her capacity for depressive concern and had become caught up in a paranoid-schizoid state, one more characteristic, in developmental terms, of a three-month-old baby than of an eighty-nine-year-old adult. In this state of mind, Mrs Brown could turn even the most loyal and caring figure into a fickle tormentor.

One witnesses, in an exchange such as this, the way in which, at any one moment, a person may be in a state of mind which is felt to be unmanageable and impossibly persecuting. These states have to battle with other forces in the personality which belong to a more stable, calm and hopeful self. An internal battle of this kind seemed to be going on in the course of a therapy session of twelve-year-old Leroy. Leroy was on the threshold of puberty and beginning to struggle with worries about his changing body and unfamiliar sexual feelings. He was also becoming increasingly preoccupied with a mixture of emotions about his absent and unreliable father, who had left home when he was a baby. Since then his father had been constantly on the move, having children by several different partners and keeping body and soul together as a jobbing musician. On one occasion, when Leroy had just been told that his father was unexpectedly coming home for a visit, he became especially confused about his feelings, both in relation to his father and more generally:

He walked around and made odd noises with snatches of melody and “rapp” music. His air was arrogant and at the same time uneasy. He looked at me [his male therapist] in a way which felt intrusive and he then threw himself into a chair. Lying back, with his feet up on the table, he said, “I need some puuusssyyy! When I asked more about what he was thinking, he replied roughly: “Oh, I’ll tell you. My mum beat me on the weekend and I’ve got seventeen slaps on my back. You can’t see them now because they’ve got better”. He spoke indistinctly but there seemed to be a link between the “slapping” and a garbled reference to drug-taking. I listened quietly. Leroy’s rather excitable state began to subside. He suddenly announced that none of what he’d just said was true. His mum had not beaten him, but he had had a fight with his friend Ziggy. “He said that he doesn’t want me to come to his birthday party. I said I didn’t care and pushed him. Then he punched me and I fell over, and I got up and gave him an uppercut and knocked him out and then I kicked him up.” Leroy paused and said, in a subdued voice, that he now felt quite guilty. He didn’t think that Ziggy was badly hurt. He [Leroy] didn’t want to hurt anyone. “I’m a good person really.”

In this short extract we can see how different states of mind and views of the world dominated Leroy’s thoughts and behaviour almost from moment to moment. His therapist knew that he was worried about his father’s visit. He was afraid that his father would be cross with him for getting into trouble and not doing well enough at school. Leroy’s sexually-charged swaggering indicated not only a denial of how little and inadequate he really felt, but also, perhaps, a partial identification with an internal picture of his father as a person whom he boasted about but also feared. At times he saw him as good, and at times as just “a punishing, sexy, drug-taking musician”.

Leroy wanted to be big, to be part of the older adolescent, macho world of drugs and raves. His tendency to dramatize and exaggerate things (“My mum beat me … seventeen slaps”) was an attempt to mask the vulnerable, frightened and guilty feelings underneath. Suddenly, from behind the swagger, his left-out-baby-self emerged (“He doesn’t want me to come to his birthday party”). Behind the strapping twelve-year-old fighter was a hurt little boy, trying to inflict pain on the other, first verbally and then physically. It was as if, in classic bully-style, these two boys sought to relieve themselves of their own hurt feelings by getting others to feel just as hurt. By his actions Leroy was communicating to Ziggy how upset he felt to have been left out of the “party”. But the timing and ferocity of the attack suggests that it bore the weight of hitherto unexpressed violent and distressed feelings about being left out of his father’s life. At this particular time, he could well have been especially aware of, and upset about, the fact that he was not part of the lives of his younger siblings (he lived alone with his mother). Figuratively, he was not invited to their birthdays either. In the company of his therapist Leroy could begin to think about his deep grievances, and about how his difficulties with feelings of guilt and loss constantly propelled him into an extremely polarized picture of the way things were. In this picture, the good side of himself was always in danger of being set aside or forgotten.

In these examples we gain some sense of how shifts may occur between states of mind in which “thinking” is taking place of a realistic kind, one which is linked to the known-self, and those in which, under the sway of anxiety, thinking becomes separated from its emotional base and irrational or rigid ideas and attitudes begin to supervene. The examples convey how complex an impact different states of mind and views of the self-in-the-world can have on personality and on behaviour. An aspect of their complexity is that they are not naturally linked to the chronology of developmental stages. And yet they have to be taken into account in order to understand the subtleties of personality development. This is of the essence of ordinary mental functioning. Difficulties arise, however, if any one mental state predominates, excessively or too rigidly, at any one age: that is, if there is a lack of the normal fluidity of movement from one state to another of a kind which may become age “inappropriate”. It is appropriate, for example, for an infant to be infantile, less so a civil servant; appropriate for a seven-year-old to be very ordered, methodical, perhaps even a bit withdrawn and self-controlled, less so for an adolescent; appropriate for a sixteen-year-old to be preoccupied with sexual identity and with challenging authority, less so for a latency child, and so on.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Series editors’ preface
• Foreword to the second edition
• Author’s note
• A historical note
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE States of mind
• CHAPTER TWO Beginnings
• CHAPTER THREE Infancy: containment and reverie
• CHAPTER FOUR Infancy: defences against pain
• CHAPTER FIVE Early childhood: weaning and separation
• CHAPTER SIX Latency
• CHAPTER SEVEN Models of learning
• CHAPTER EIGHT The family
• CHAPTER NINE Puberty and early adolescence
• CHAPTER TEN Mid-adolescence: a clinical example
• CHAPTER ELEVEN Late adolescence: fictional lives
• CHAPTER TWELVE The adult world
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN “The later years”
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN The last years
• Appendix
• Select bibliography
• Index