Damaged Bonds

Michael Eigen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429912504
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Damaged Bonds explores W. R. Bion's writings on dream-work growing within damaged bonds and concerns dramas revolving around difficulties in psychic digestion and clinical work in the trenches.

Part One
Damaged Bonds—Damaged Dreams

CHAPTER ONE
Damaged bonds

The amazing changes human beings go through moment to moment throughout a day inspire awe. It is glorious when these shifts bring variations in happiness. But many are variants of misery. I have asked people whether they think there is pain at ecstasy's centre, and many said yes. Yet, the reverse makes them uncomfortable: they do not like to think that there is ecstasy in pain. Yet pleasure/pain and agony/ecstasy ever blend, as the sensation-feeling kaleidoscope they are part of turns and turns.

When one thinks of invincibility, one thinks less of feelings and sensations than of will: invincible will. Years of clinical work have brought me face to face with the grisly fact that people who seem overwhelmed with every shift of mood and situation, who complain that they have no will of their own and are always giving in to others, are, nevertheless, gripped by an unbudgeable will that cannot let go. This will may play a role in enabling survival, but often it puts life on hold. Too often it becomes empty will, feeding its own existence without giving the individual much in the way of nourishment.

Will is generally associated with positive values. It is good to have a will of one's own, pursue one's course, stand up for oneself in the face of other wills. Will goes along with being an active agent, making one's way in life. To have free will means to have a capacity for choice. Often will is associated with power, mastery, ambition, self-esteem. In an expansive life, will adds to the colour, richness, and fullness of living.

But what of the life that undergoes successive contractions, until what is left is not much more than a strangulated knot?—a will that tightens around itself like a fist that cannot open ... and keeps tightening, trapped by its own density, becoming like a black hole, denser and darker as time goes on (for the "black hole" image in therapeutic work, see Eigen, 1999; Grotstein, 1990a, 1990b; Tustin, 1981).

"Lena"

In a recent session, Lena recognized a baffling duality. She was complaining about the way she changes, depending on the person she is with: "I can't bear being so adaptable, a regular Zellig (Woody Allen's chameleon character who changes into the person he is with). I can't hold my own. I become frightened, quivering, slavish. I go along, agree. Yet there's something unreachable in me, hidden. I'm changeable like weather, always worrying. But I know there is something unmoved, unyielding, a tiny island no one can find."

Lena described a kind of emotion-sensation swirl stained by worry around an impenetrable point. She felt that she was an aberrant instance of plasticity/persistence, both permeable and impenetrable in the extreme. Her emotional reactivity made her feel slavish, while a still, small point of will rendered her unconquerable, if not masterful. At the same time, Lena complained about being grotesque. It was not her emotional lability or diffusion that made her feel this way, but something severe, merciless, inhuman about the untouchable sliver of will. While seemingly an island of safety, this shrunken bit of will made Lena feel like a monster. Her diffuse emotionality made her feel more human. She was less afraid that God would blast her for hysterical catastrophizing than point to the grain of will that remained outside life.

For many years, this hardened point of will played a role in Lena's survival. It helped to calculate possibilities/probabilities, counselled when to hide or come out, take this or that course. Will and judgement were welded together. As suggested above, all the compliance in the world could not force will to give in. When I first began to notice it, I could not tell if it was a sane point of refuge in the storm or an all-seeing madness contracting towards invisibility.

As time went on, will seemed less interested in Lena's survival than in its own.¹ As Lena got better, the will that could get through anything seemed bent against a fuller life. Perhaps it had become used to its contracted state and felt thawing out or expansion a threat. It gripped Lena's growing self like a dying hand clutches the flesh of the living. A once indomitable will fragment feared being left behind, as if Lena no longer needed it. What would happen if she outgrew it?

States of mind serving well at one point are hindrances at another. The contracted ball of survival-will that saw Lena through kept her coiled, stopped her from opening. She let her husband and friends in only so far, then snapped shut. When she tried to let herself in, the steel ball of will closed. Cold judgement beset by panic took the place of opening, against wishes of a growing, fuller self. The contracted ball of will often had a malignant aspect. Friends were judged by faults, life was reduced to whatever was wrong with it. Will made Lena suspicious. Little escaped its evil eye, clinging beyond its time.

Can personality grow around a core of contracted will? Can will evolve with personality? Must contractions relied on in worse conditions poison development when growth is possible? Lena was tyrannized by what saved her, yet she recognized that it was time to move on, if she could.

Holes and violence: "Chris"

Some individuals try to fill the gap between will and feelings with violence—in Chris's case, with violent dreams and fantasies. Chris dreamt of a woman with a hole in her head. She was dying, blood on the floor. Chris was obsessed with rape. He avidly followed news reports of rape, he read all he could.

How did his woman get a hole in her head? From her father's violent fucking or fantasy fucking? From Chris's rape wishes? Was the dream depicting a damaged primary object, something wrong from the outset? Did the dream defend against and depreciate Woman by displacing a hole upwards and making her brain dead? Is Woman represented as dead because she is too alive? Is such extreme reversal (down ↔ up, aliveness ↔ deadness) needed to ward off aliveness, chaos, hysteria? Did the dream portray environmental deficiency that scarred Chris's upbringing? Did it depict psychological rape, his death, his brain hole, his fear of life?

Whatever the specifics may be, something is terribly wrong. Chris's dream gives voice to violent damage. Many patients say: "There is something wrong with me. I've always known it. Something was wrong from the beginning." Here the hole in life is depicted in a dying woman's head. Imagine growing up with a woman perceived in this way: a damaged parent, ever haemorrhaging, near brain-death.

"Whatever I did caused Mom pain. She bled with pain. I couldn't breathe without hurting her."

Here was a real/fantasy mother concerned more with her own pain than with her child's. The balance between sensing one's own and the other's pain is always in jeopardy, and getting stuck in either direction is always a possibility.

Rape is fury at maternal damage, an act of revenge. One damages the damaged one, tries to take control over the brutal facts. Rape, too, tries to repair the damage. One tries to rape mother into life, make her whole, fix her. Of course, there is a matter of power—one tries to get power over what made one feel powerless, rape in return for feeling raped or neglected. Opposites are equals in mad logic—in addition to Freud, I am thinking of Bion's equivalencies (1992, p. 22) and Matte-Blanco's (1975, 1988) symmetrical unconscious, as well as much else written on unconscious life.

"I thought she'd like it." Substitute me for if. One wants a response and hopes for more than one gets. In the unconscious of the rapist there is an imaginary Whole Person loving a Whole Person. The act of rape aims at love. "I feel loved"—as if love, violation, and hate were equivalent. It is difficult to concede being lost in a realm where damage begets damage. Rape fails in its Pygmalion task. It does not repair or create the object or self but for moments yields illusory wholeness that hides the grisly fact that real work one needs to do is beyond ability.

Chris is in therapy and can talk about damage and failed repair. He will not rape anyone. Rape is his fantasy only, but the damage is real. He was wounded by parental rages, chaos, neglect, and deadness when his personality was forming, and he grew as he could. Warps result from poisons one deals with.

Rape is a way to feel self, to create arid blur distinctions between self and other—part of a fantasy of repair or creation. The paradox is blood-curdling. A damaging act is, in part, connected with a wish for reparation. One repairs by inflicting damage. One heals by injuring. One tries to get what one needs from an object—but the getting is an act of partial annihilation.

Part for whole: partial annihilation substitutes for total annihilation. Rape and murder can go together. But in Chris's case, raper/rapist survive the violent act. Part of the power of the scene is that survival occurs against a background dread of total annihilation.

An irony for Chris is that relationships are pale and lost if they are not mean and harmful. He breaks up with women who are not mean enough or who cannot support his meanness. Yet he is too nice to be too mean and too sensitive to take much meanness, so he breaks with lovers if meanness mounts. Relationships do not feel real without damage and are unbearable with damage. Perhaps breaking up is the only safe way to feel damage—damage at a distance. In Chris's life, relationships break as they are forming. Something is always on the verge of breaking, beginning to break, actually breaking, and, finally, broken. The tear, the rip, the break feels real—for a time.

One might suppose that raping/breaking is what goes on in Chris's soul, with a magical sense that wounds are healed by being addicted to them. What keeps Chris riveted to this position, forever trying/failing? One factor is more primary object damage than he can repair, in a kind of "sorcerer's apprentice" situation: the more damage he tries to fix, the more he finds. The O of his life is too damaged for him to get the response he needs. Perhaps there are cases in which one can rape O into responding. [Bion's O (1965, 1970; Eigen, 1998) is a notation for "ultimate reality", including core emotional reality (realities) of a person's life.] But this does not work for Chris. The damage is too extensive from the beginning. His mind produces fantasies that go around in circles, get nowhere, reflecting and masking an impermeable emotional reality that is nearly beyond reach.

There is mad, compulsive will in Chris's rape fantasies. In reality, it makes a difference whether one is victim or perpetrator. In the mad unconscious, these differences wash out. Active/passive meld, become equivalent. Energy is more primary than evanescent forms it takes. In Chris's case, rape compresses a sense of power/ powerlessness, mastery/helplessness, wounding/ wounded. Victim and perpetrator become configurations for aggressive energy to circulate in variable keys. Rape as an image of trauma—part of what being a baby felt like. Injury/dread/fury congeal and, in Chris's case, crystallize, several times removed, as obsession with violation: his and parental power/powerlessness, his and parental damaged/damaging states.

Rape attempts to unite pleasure with injury—a warped, triumphant ecstasy of wholeness amidst abject pain. The pain of the victim is an important ingredient for the perpetrator's ecstasy of power. In the deep unconscious, the victim is oneself as well as object of revenge. The victim is an emblem of the pain of life, all that one endures, the mutilated self. It is as if, for a moment, one becomes the master of pain, master of the sense of injury. At the same time, one is the injured party once removed, one is the pain one feels in the other's body, voice, face. The inflictor is mesmerized by soul damage pirated, like a butterfly, in the skin of the other.

The image of rape gives to more generalized damage "a local habitation and a name". Chris grew up in a sea of injury—pain everywhere. The damage he suffered was disorganized, inchoate, immense. To compress it into an obsession with rape is an attempt to place boundaries on the damage. In Chris's case, the compression works only partly, as deep pain wreaks havoc in many ways, including somatic symptoms, work and relational problems, variable anxieties, depressing rigidities. Nevertheless, his obsession provides moments of imaginary triumph amidst pervasive pain, a sense of possibility in the face of soul damage. The fact that Chris clings to therapy while ever threatening to leave suggests that he is determined to give himself a chance. (He has been in therapy for four years—a long time for some, but in the face of the damage Chris works with, a bare, if significant, beginning.) Here will—a besieged, reduced, enduring will to live—points him towards help, although it remains to be seen what help is possible.

Damaged bonds: "Laura"

Recently, Laura told me that she married her husband, "Will", because they were damaged in ways that fitted together. They stayed together for their entire adult lives, and their damaged bond deepened. Now she could look back at all they had gone through and feel their bond a blessing, part of what gave life substance. It had not always been that way.

When they were young, they had bonded together to escape their families. They were freedom for each other, a way into life. Family life was mean and suffocating. Laura and Will enjoyed each other. They did everything together. But as time went on, the mean and suffocating feeling they escaped began to grow between them. Their first nourishing years turned into years of hellish nourishment—then just hell.

The damage characterizing family ties caught up with them. At this juncture, many couples flee each other to search for the free, uncontaminated feeling once more. Separation was a pressing option for Laura and Will for many years, but their attempts to break up failed. Neither knew why they stayed together, although Laura secretly sensed that they would weather it. Many years of therapy helped.

Laura felt crushed by an egocentric, rejecting mother. She found a little warmth from a more caring but distant, respectful father. Laura knew she was injured by her mother's coarse, bullying ways. The latter's petty scorn tore her down from the beginning. It took years to digest the fact that warmth hurt too. Her mother intermittently poured her whole noxious force through whatever random warmth she managed. Her father's warmth was not enough to protect Laura in daily life. It amounted to a tease of what might have been, had he been available.

It is one thing to be wounded by cruelty and neglect. It is even worse if the warmth one chances on tantalizes and poisons. For Laura, primary sources of nourishment were damaged and damaging. She did her best to live off damaged bonds and form what connection to life she could. To be wounded by nourishment can leave one shaken for life (Eigen, 1999).

Poisons in her upbringing permeated her marriage. Her husband put her down. His oblivious sense of male superiority felt like her mother's scorn. Laura would ruefully "joke" that Will combined the worst of her parents: mother's contemptuous insensitivity and father's distance. Through the worst, she knew that Will was not as poisonous as her mother. But she felt as disregarded, unseen, unheard. She did not feel that she could get through to Will, or that it would make any difference if she could. She felt he was unchangeable, thoughtless, and determined to be on top at her expense. Living with him was a disaster. He did not seem able to catch on to himself.

Years of hell began to lift somewhat when Will tried to listen to her. He began hearing her complain that he could not hear her. She kept hammering the point home that he was unable to listen, that he did not let anything in. It took years for him to notice that much, still light-years from being open to her perspective. Yet Laura noticed hints of influence. There were times he understood her for moments before the glimmer faded—a little like being frustrated by her father's hints of warmth. Now you see it, now you don't. Nothing to see you through on a daily basis.

Laura would not settle for crumbs. She kept fighting, in her stubborn way. For years, she felt she had given up. Yet something in her would not give up. Will could not make an about-face, but something happened. Laura felt that Will was beginning to notice that he was living with someone else—someone with her own mind and preferences, someone he had to take into account. Tastes of reciprocity were not as impossible as they had once seemed. The easy oneness of their early years was not possible, since it had been built on Laura's unconscious conformity with Will. But hints of new types of meeting appeared. It was more than getting past the hell of being antagonists and constantly lobbying for incompatible interests. They began to feel each other's aliveness, each other's subjectivity. Aloneness is satisfied not by oneness, but by the fact that someone else is there. Shareable moments become linked with a sense of coming through something together.

One day Laura startled me by saying that she sensed things would work from the outset: "I knew when I married Will that our getting along was based on suppressing myself. I went along with it because I knew that's the way it had to be at the time. I traded off something horrible [family life] for something that would become horrible, but was good at the time. I knew we'd have to go through hell. I knew we could break up, that I would hate him, that life would be unbearable. I could see in him a lot of what I was trying to get away from. I knew that from the beginning and hid it from myself.

"I had faith, a feeling, a sense that Will was not just like my family. Common traits, but not just the same. The thing in him I loved is still there. I don't just hate him. When I feel him, his life, I feel good inside too....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Introduction
• PART ONE Damaged bonds—damaged dreams
• PART TWO Work in the trenches
• Afterdream
• REFERENCES
• INDEX