Metapsychological Perspectives on Psychic Survival

Integration of Traumatic Helplessness in Psychoanalysis

Simo Salonen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815384083
• eBook ISBN: 9781351204897
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Metapsychological Perspectives on Psychic Survival explores the integration of traumatic helplessness in the course of psychoanalytic treatment. Based on the author's many years of experience of working with psychotic and severely traumatised patients, this book offers guidelines to approach extreme psychic trauma in the therapeutic setting.

Simo Salonen links psychic representation of the elementary drive phenomena and metaphorical thinking to primary identification understood as a mode of object finding. The collapse of this connection signifies a radical psychic trauma, the integration of which into the temporal continuity of an individual's life is an essential task for psychoanalysis. Another key element of this book is Salonen's notion of the primal representative matrix, referring to a resource of primary narcissism that an individual has been endowed with, carrying vital meanings. Also explored is the crucial work of mourning, as the result of which the impoverished ego may recover its primary narcissistic resources.

Using insights from numerous case studies, Salonen offers a new way of understanding severe trauma, which can be used to advance both psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. Metapsychological Perspectives on Psychic Survival will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

1
Outlining a conceptual space

An introduction

In his essay Life and the Dialogue, René Spitz (1963) made a crucial observation regarding the infant’s response to its confusion between a living human being and a lifeless surrogate. According to Spitz, this phenomenon, which appears during the second half of the first year of life, marks the infant’s new capability to differentiate between a living and an inanimate object. To elucidate this problem, Spitz referred to the excitement and uncanny feeling one experiences visiting a wax museum, where one of the visitors may comically pose as a wax figure and then unexpectedly turns out to be a living human being. To clarify the concept of the object in psychoanalysis, Spitz connected this state of confusion with a subtle non-verbal dialogue between the infant and its mother, where the infant’s inner movements elicit a living response and vice versa. Spitz sees human life in general unfolding as a dialogue of this kind, leading to new stages of psychic integration.

In fortunate circumstances, when all is well with the child’s early development, the dialogue may proceed smoothly, originally on the level of bodily responses, and later on the level of preconscious meanings capable of becoming conscious after been linked to words, the infant’s mother tongue conveying vital meanings. However, even in an ideal case, a child will become exposed to drive-instinctual dangers threatening his or her psychic coherence from within; in a less fortunate case, this may prove to be fateful. André Green’s (1986) essay The Dead Mother offers a profound exposition of this failure, taking the mother’s depression as its starting point. In this context, Green also considered Sigmund Freud’s early childhood, when at two years old his younger brother Julius died, causing his mother to face the greatest conceivable loss. This misfortune was also reflected in Freud’s later dualistic drive theory where the fundamental dichotomy between life and death constituted a crucial problem, coupled with the magnitude of labour Freud put into solving it (Caropreso and Simanke, 2008).

On the metapsychological starting points

The first key to my metapsychological thinking is the notion of the primal representative matrix. This refers to the resource of primary narcissism that an individual has inherently been endowed with, leaning upon vital bodily functions carrying vital meanings and contributing to the sense of being alive (Salonen, 1979). As these meanings are interwoven with subsequent psychic development, this matrix comes to vitalise and constitute both the experiential world as well as the psychic functioning from within, without itself becoming conscious as such. A radical decathexis of this matrix, on the other hand, may have fateful consequences to an individual’s psychic and somatic survival, e.g., in psychotic states and life-threatening psychosomatic conditions. Most clearly this becomes visible in schizophrenic disorders, which are the clinical starting point of my metapsychological studies.

The notion of a primal representative matrix offers the possibility of clarifying some conceptual difficulties between different psychoanalytic schools, not least the discussion about Freud’s dualistic drive theory. Also, Bion’s notion of β-elements becomes more understandable when thinking about the drive-economic collapse of this matrix, resulting in a rudimentary ego being exposed to the dismantled drive phenomena devoid of psychic representation. Through a living dialogue between the infant and its mother, these drive elements receive preconscious meanings, enabling them to become integrated into the foundations of the child’s emerging mind, i.e. Bion’s α-function.

My second key concept is Freud’s notion of primary identification, which in Mourning and Melancholia (1917) was still treated as an oral-incorporative phenomenon. Five years later, Freud (1923) connected primary identification to object-finding before ordinary object ties, which indicates a major transformation in his theoretical thinking: a structural conceptualization of psychic functioning. The reason I adopt Freud’s latter conception as my starting point was the observation that even severely disturbed psychotic patients may momentarily recover after recognising the lost primary object in the transference. This startling phenomenon helped me to understand the pivotal importance of primary identification for the capacity of metaphorical thinking. This capability cannot be derived in the first place from the oral-incorporative sphere of psychic experience. Its origins lie in the psychosensory area: the infant first finding the object and, simultaneously, himself as a metaphor of the latter (Laplanche, 1976; Gaddini, 1992). This metaphorical configuration will then constitute an inner frame of reference for the psychic representation of elementary drive phenomena. Only after inventing his structural model was Freud able to integrate the realm of psychic representations and drive-instinctual processes into a functional whole.

In confronting an unexpected fatality, the course of time and the sense of inner movement feels interrupted. Even the subliminal background noise of psychic processes falls silent. In dealing with the problem of temporality in Freud’s thinking, André Green (2008) made an essential remark related to this phenomenon, namely, the sense of movement characterising psychic processes. At this point, we can return to Spitz’s notion of life proceeding as a dialogue. I have visualised this process as a dynamic movement, progressing like an ascending spiral in space and time, attaining new stages of psychic integration in the course of individual life. In unfortunate cases this dialogue may take a negative turn. The negative therapeutic reaction then manifests itself as a descending spiral movement, resulting in disintegration and escalating destruction.

I am inclined to think that an individual’s urge for psychic survival, which Eugenio Gaddini (1982) associated with the infant’s first self-configuration, represents an affectomotor response to the threat of annihilation, containing a potential for aggression. In fortunate cases, this potential will be bound in terms of drive-instinctual dangers to the psychic organisation, first in the sphere of maternal intimacy and later as an integral part of the Oedipus complex, the solution of which finally results in a new kind of psychic autonomy. If this process fails, we are confronted with unbounded aggression and escalating destruction devoid of psychic representation.

The instinctual drives pursue two paths to attain their aim, the first being a direct discharge as actions outside the sphere of psychic representation, and the second as part of evolving psychic organisation to ensure sexual satisfaction on the genital level of psychic integration. The dilemma between these two options reflects an individual’s fundamental ambivalence, the integration of which constitutes a crucial point of my metapsychological studies.

Winnicott’s contribution

The transference in psychoanalysis with severely traumatised patients often evokes an anachronistic battlefield with such intensity that the setting itself may run the risk of losing its metaphorical significance. What is at stake is an early psychic trauma that has not been integrated as a part of an individual life history; it continues endlessly, possibly resulting in destructive consequences and a depletion of the analysand’s psychic resources.

Donald Winnicott (1971) guides us further in understanding this topic, linking an individual’s psychic survival to the mother’s survival of the infant’s unbound aggression, the failure of which may result in destructive consequences for the child’s future development. In effect, Winnicott derives destructive drive phenomena in general from this failure, as well as including the analyst’s failure to survive the analysand’s aggression in the transference:

The essential feature is the analyst’s survival and the intactness of the psychoanalytic technique. Imagine how traumatic can be the actual death of the analyst when this kind of work is in the process, although even the actual death of the analyst is not as bad as the development in the analyst of a change of attitude towards retaliation. These are risks that simply must be taken by the patient. Usually the analyst lives through these phases of movement in the transference, and after each phase there comes reward in terms of love, reinforced by the fact of the backcloth of unconscious destruction.

(p. 92)

Winnicott proceeds:

It will be seen that, although destruction is the word I am using, this actual destruction belongs to the object’s failure to survive. Without this failure, destruction remains potential. The word “destruction” is needed, not because of the baby’s impulse to destroy, but because of the object’s liability not to survive, which also means to suffer the change in quality, in attitude.

(p. 93)

Although Winnicott was perhaps overlooking the accidental misfortunes inevitable in life (Green, 2010) being nobody’s fault, his idea of the mother’s survival of the infant’s aggression is of great importance for our understanding of the child’s capacity to deal with destructive drive phenomena later in life. In fact, the mother’s survival ensures a resource of healthy aggression at the infant’s future disposal, which otherwise would be discharged freely with destructive consequences.

Winnicott’s (1975) second notion of primary unintegration offers an additional perspective for our discussion. This state of mind differs from psychic disintegration, which signifies a disruptive development. The stage of primary unintegration is characterised by an incoherent state of mind among the multitude of perceptual elements, akin to a dreaming state. During this phase, the mother is perceived as an incoherent human shape reflecting the infant’s variable affective tones and colours, which become polarised according to its vital needs. The mother’s care-taking presence holds all this together, representing an ‘environmental provision’ for the child. The mother’s failure leaves the infant’s rudimentary ego at the mercy of strange psychic elements, which signifies a desolate cosmic experience. Against this background, we can better understand the foundation of an individual’s psychic existence, and its vulnerabilities, both of which constitute the subject matter of my metapsychological interest in radical psychic trauma.

Winnicott’s (1975) third notion of primary maternal preoccupation focuses on a particular change in the mother’s personality during the last weeks of pregnancy and continuing for the first weeks after the infant’s birth. Although resembling a pathological withdrawal and sensitivity, the primary maternal preoccupation is a normal behaviour pattern, complementary to the infant’s stage of primary unintegration. What is at stake is the mother’s devotion to the child’s physical and psychical needs evolving in this special atmosphere:

There comes into existence an ego-relatedness between mother and baby, from which the mother recovers, and out of which the infant may eventually build the idea of a person in the mother. From this angle, the recognition of the mother as a person [italics mine] comes in a positive way, normally, and not out of the experience of the mother as the symbol of frustration. The mother’s failure to adapt in the earliest phase does not produce anything but an annihilation of the infant’s self.

… In the language of these considerations, the early building up of the ego is therefore silent. The first ego organisation comes from the experience of threats of annihilation which do not lead to annihilation and from which, repeatedly, there is recovery. Out of such experiences confidence in recovery begins to be something which leads to an ego and to an ego capacity for coping with frustration.

(pp. 303–304)

Winnicott’s discussion of the infant’s early recognition of its mother as a person refers to primary identification as a mode of object finding. It signifies the emergence of a metaphorical space, corresponding to Winnicott’s potential space, shared by the infant and its mother. Inside this space, the infant recognises himself as a child of this particular mother, and the mother recognises herself as the mother of this particular child. In short, primary identification does not signify fusion or sameness but likeness in the metaphorical sense. Moreover, it creates an inner frame of reference for the psychic representation of elementary drive phenomena as well as concomitant affect states evolving in the infant’s mind.

Jan Abram’s (2013, p. 311) recent research on Winnicott’s archival notes yields an essential observation regarding primary identification. At the end of his life, Winnicott concluded that the imago of the father as a presence in the mother’s mind, i.e., the fact of parental intercourse, constitutes an integrative force. In becoming transmitted and internalised as a whole object, it leads to an ego capacity without which there would not be such a thing as survival of the object, in Winnicott’s theory, according to Abrams.

Winnicott’s view is consonant with Freud’s (1923) concept of primary identification relating object finding before ordinary object ties to the father, also suggesting that both parents may be involved. Moreover, Freud associated the emergence of the ego-ideal with primary identification. With Freud’s concept as my starting point and based on Gaddini’s (1992) and Green’s (1986) contributions, I concluded that the capacity of psychic representation depends on primary identification creating a metaphorical frame for the psychic representation of elementary drive phenomena (Salonen, 1989).

Bion’s contribution

Thomas Ogden’s Creative Readings: Essays on Seminal Analytic Works (2012) has clarified my understanding not only of Winnicott’s work but especially of Bion’s contribution to psychoanalytic thinking. From these starting points, I am going to summarise my view as follows:

According to Bion (1959, 1962), threatening drive elements evacuated from the sphere of solid psychic functioning continue their dismantled existence in exclusion. Through projective identification, however, there opens an opportunity for their integration through the mother’s reverie. This notion of Bion’s refers to the mother’s dreamlike thinking which is receptive both to her infant’s projections as well as her own preconscious responses at the metaphorical level, this signifying a transformation of the psychic processes from the level of β-elements to the sphere of α-function. Thus, the mother’s concern for her infant also includes her preconscious dreaming contributing to her child’s future capability to think.

Bion’s notion provides a key not only to the emergence of the capability for thinking in general, but especially to the analyst’s thinking, transposing the psychoanalytic process from the elementary to the metaphorical level of psychic functioning:

If the infant feels it is dying it can arouse fears that it is dying in the mother. A well-balanced mother can accept these and respond therapeutically: that is to say in a manner that makes the infant feel it is receiving its frightened personality back again, but in a form that it can tolerate – the fears are manageable by the infant personality. If the mother cannot tolerate these projections the infant is reduced to continue projective identification carried out with increasing force and frequency. The increased force seems to denude the projection of its penumbra of meaning. Reintrojection is affected with similar force and frequency. Deducing the patient’s feelings from his behaviour in the consulting room and using the deductions to form a model, the infant of my model does not behave in a way that I ordinarily expect of an adult who is thinking. It behaves as if it felt that an internal object has been built up that has the characteristics of a greedy vagina-like “breast” that strips of its goodness all that the infant receives or gives, leaving only degenerate objects. This internal object starves its host of all understanding that is made available. In the analysis, such a patient seems unable to gain from his environment and therefore from his analyst. The consequences for the development of a capacity for thinking are s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Outlining a conceptual space: an introduction
• 2 On the metapsychology of schizophrenia
• 3 Facing reality: castration anxiety reconsidered
• 4 The restitution of primary identification in psychoanalysis
• 5 The reconstruction of psychic trauma
• 6 The recovery of affect and structural conflict
• 7 Understanding psychotic disorder
• 8 The vulnerable core: the unconscious wish reconsidered
• 9 On destructive drive phenomena: a study of human aggression
• 10 The body and the sense of reality
• 11 The absent father in the transference: a case study of primary identification and psychic survival
• 12 On the metapsychology of psychic survival
• 13 Reconciliation with the past
• Index