Inquiries in Psychoanalysis: Collected papers of Edna O'Shaughnessy

Edna O'Shaughnessy, Richard Rusbridger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138796447
• eBook ISBN: 9781317624189
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The papers of Edna O'Shaughnessy are among the finest to be found in psychoanalytic writing. Her work is unified not so much by its subject matter, which is diverse, but by her underlying preoccupations, including the nature of psychic reality and subjectivity, and the psychic limits of endurance and reparation.

Here a selection of her work, edited and with an introduction by Richard Rusbridger, is brought together in a collection which demonstrates the contribution that O'Shaughnessy has made to many areas of psychoanalysis, from personality organisations, the superego, psychic refuges and the Oedipus complex to the subject of whether a liar can be psychoanalysed. Inquiries in Psychoanalysis is a record of clinical work and thinking over sixty years of psychoanalytic practice with children and adults.

This wide-ranging selection of work will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and students.

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Part I

PAPERS

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1

THE ABSENT OBJECT

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The subject of this paper is the absent sustaining object. This first intrudes on the life of the baby in the form of the absent breast. The absent breast is an essential part of the breast relationship, since it is of the logical essence of a relationship that there be times when the one person is with the other and times when he is apart from that other. The unborn infant – being permanently in union with his mother – does not yet have a relationship to her, or to her parts: he enters on the condition for a relationship at birth. A relationship, moreover, needs to be distinguished from a simple association, which ends as the partners part. The feeding infant does not have a feeding association with the breast, like a strictly business association. He has a relationship to it, which spans presence and absence, which goes beyond the physical presence of the breast to the breast in its absence.

The first point of interest is that the character of the absent object is opposite to the character of the object when there. The object when present is prima facie a good object. Whatever the difficulties, the feeding breast sustains life. As against this, the absent breast is first experienced in hunger, when it is needed and is not there; that is, the absent object is a bad object which is leaving the baby to starve and die. Nevertheless, the absent object is an integral part of his life, and in the course of his development the baby must come to terms with it. It will be a major difficulty in the way of establishing the good internal object, since hatred will be mobilised against it because of its absence, making it hard to keep the good gained in its presence. However, as well as constituting a difficulty for development, the absent object is also a spur to development. By its harshness it forces reality on the child, and breaks the hold of phantasies which protect him from the realisation of his vulnerability and dependence. It makes him know reality.

In particular, the absent object is a spur to the development of thought. It is not an accident that this is so, since there is a logical connection between thought and absence. You can be asked to think of something that is absent, a painting in a gallery (say), but you cannot be asked to think of a painting you are already looking at; perception shuts out thought, in this basic and simple sense. You can think about – in the sense of reflect upon – anything, things present as well as absent, but before you can ‘think about’ you must develop the prior capacity to ‘think of’. This latter is essentially linked to things absent; developmentally speaking, to the absent breast.

Psycho-analytical theory has, indeed, always posited that frustration leads to mental development. Freud remarks on ‘the exigencies of life’ to which ‘the psychical apparatus owes the impetus to further development’, and goes on to say: ‘The exigencies of life confront it first in the form of the major somatic needs’ (Freud 1900: 565). Freud himself did not say much more about the conditions for mental development, his fundamental concern being regression rather than development. And since Freud, there has not been agreement about the way frustration acts in the psychical system. Now, the nub of the question is: How does a baby experience frustration? When he has ‘major somatic needs’ what is his state of mind? In other words, when a baby has ‘major somatic needs’ what phantasy possesses its mind?

In his book Learning from Experience W. R. Bion (1962a) has investigated this experience of need in the baby and gives the following account of it. When the infant feels hungry and in need of the breast, he is aware of a need not satisfied. This frustration, the pain of his hunger, is what is present to him, and this, initially, is felt as a bad breast present. The infant has now to make a beginning on a critical advance. For the wanted breast is in fact not a bad breast present, but a good breast absent when needed. The infant has in the course of time to come to know this fact, which is a fact of both inner reality – his need, and outer reality – the missing good breast. That is, the infant has to advance from experiencing the needed absent breast in the phantasy of a bad breast present, to being able to think of the real missing good breast. This crucial advance in his development is hard, since the bad breast, which in phantasy is present, is felt au fond to be starving him to death, and it is only by tolerating the pain and terrors of his frustration enough that he can put himself in the position of being able to think about them, to think, eventually, that what he needs is the missing good breast. Such knowledge, in thought, of the good breast will also help him to endure his state of need. Since tolerance of frustration is essential for thought to develop, the infant who predominantly avoids facing his frustrations and in phantasy simply gets rid of them, is employing methods actively antagonistic to thinking, so that the development of his mental powers will be, at the least, inhibited, and may be disturbed. Thus we may say that the absent object gives the child his first opportunity to know reality through thought, and also gives him the incentive, viz. to make frustration more tolerable.

The child in treatment re-experiences the early alternations of his objects as the presence and absence of his therapist succeed each other by turns. Therapy repeats life in this respect, and allows us to observe the child’s feelings about his objects in presence and in absence. It can be observed that, from the start, the child reacts to any break which disrupts the accepted rhythms of treatment, as the Easter, summer and Christmas holidays do. Furthermore, from the start, the child is sensible of even the ending of a session; with several sessions a week his reaction is particularly sharp at the weekends. From the start of treatment, the presence and absence of his therapist is experienced as an underlying alternation of good and bad, the current recapitulation of his early feeling of the breast when present as, prima facie, good, and the absent breast as, prima facie, bad.

Further, since according to Dr Bion’s findings, the way the infant deals with the absent breast is critical for the development of his powers of thinking, it will likewise be the case that the way in which a child deals with gaps in his treatment will be critical for its successful outcome. The question here becomes: Can he preserve, and use, under the strain of the absence of his therapist, the insight – the thoughts – he gains in her presence?

The oscillation between good and bad felt in the comings and goings, and the difficulty of bearing the pain of absence so as to be able to think about it to make it more tolerable, explain the phenomenon, familiar in treatment, of the heightened clinical picture before a longer-than-usual break. Strong defences disown strong feelings about the coming separation, and at the same time, there is increasing urgency of need, fear and hate in the infantile parts, which may burst the defences and make the child unsteady with their intensity. In more severe cases, where the child is not able to acknowledge the coming separation, he becomes increasingly impoverished as he splits off more and more of his awareness until his personality seems to dwindle away. The general nature of the primitive phantasies the child has about the absent object is well known. In phantasy the object is attacked by various methods for its hostility, neglect, or selfishness in being absent and attending on itself or enjoying itself with others who are preferred. More basic, however, than such envious and jealous perplexities, is the feeling that the absent breast has left him to die. Listen to a small boy in a session before the Easter holiday when he became frightened of me as a malignant absent object. He spoke to the frightened parts of himself to try to reassure them. ‘Listen’, he addressed himself, ‘the lady wants to say something. She says you’ll be saved: she’ll give you a drink. She’s not glad you’re dying.’ The fear of dying emerges during treatment as the basic anxiety stirred by the absence of the object.

I should like now to give a clinical illustration of a child who is unable to tolerate the impact of the absent object. It shatters his defensive phantasy that baby and breast are one, and exposes the reality of his separateness. The absent object is then experienced as a threat of death, and instantly – in phantasy – exploded away. In the course of the session which is given in detail, we see how the child stops expelling the situation. Instead, he begins to face it. He starts on the struggle to think about it, which makes him attack the absent object, as well as become aware of his own aloneness.

The session took place the day after I told John, a 12-year-old boy, about his first holiday break. He had started his analysis five weeks before Easter, four times weekly. From the first, he was frightened in the play-room, and stood in one place looking apprehensively round at the items of furniture, the walls, and the air between things. It was as if the room were filled with particles. He could not move. At moments he also looked very sad. Only in the third session did he bring himself to the open drawer, and he did so in a curious way. He placed his coat, satchel and gloves on the table to make a wall in front of the drawer, and then he bent down and crawled along behind the wall to squat by his drawer and finger something. He then crept back, and stared round the room. The impression was of crawling into something in order to get to the drawer. This impression was confirmed two days later, when, literally, he stepped out of his own shoes, left them at the door, and then entered the play-room, in phantasy stepping out of himself and entering a new medium, denser, because interior: the interior of the object, that is, which he crawls into to get at its contents. The following day he suffered an acute claustrophobic attack in the room, screaming and struggling, feeling he was suffocating in the object in which he was imprisoned. The next few sessions were concerned with his claustrophobic anxieties. This brief account brings us to his 11th session when, so that there would be a little time left, I told him that we should be stopping for a fortnight at Easter. He had been standing by the window, looking out. When I made this announcement, he swung round to stare at me, his eyes wide with disbelief.

The next day he brought with him an exercise book. Nearly filling the first page a large drawing was in progress, and he sat down to continue it. It had an inner circle, and four surrounding circles which were finely subdivided. At the top, it was as if a shaft had sunk to the centre, leaving a gap in the first ring, and a bit of each successive ring in the one below it. I asked about his drawing. In his customary halting speech he said, ‘It’s of England and France who were once joined. Then a volcano came, and they got separated. The middle bit got sunk, and now they’re like this,’ and he showed me with his pencil how each of the four rings was mismatched at the sunken bit. I said, ‘You feel you and I are like England and France, that we were once joined. You felt us to be joined till I told you we should be stopping for Easter. Those words sunk into you like a shaft in the middle. And then you simply stared at me. I think when you stared at me you were seeing me as a bad going away breast, and then, with a volcano from your eye, you felt you dispersed this bad breast out of your sight and into me.’ (‘Bad breast’ is used in this interpretation rather than ‘bad mother’ because of the nature of his relationship to me, which I understood as being on an early part-object level.) I went on: ‘Now you feel we’re separated, and we don’t fit each other.’ John was shading the centre circle. He said, ‘There’s a fire burning in the middle, because it mustn’t get out the other side.’ He inspected the other side of his page to see if his drawing showed through. He started to pass wind. I said, ‘Your drawing pictures your inside. You feel you’ve got me inside as a breast with your volcano in it – this is now burning you up in the middle. You feel you mustn’t let these burning gases get out your other side – but all the same, you feel they are leaking out in the smells from your anus.’

On a new page he drew three heads in profile: the first had a low forehead, the second a higher forehead, and the third a still higher forehead. He labelled the first head ‘–1,000’, the second head ‘Now’, and the third ‘+1,000’. He said they were just people, and that –1,000 meant a thousand years ago when they had no brains, and now, they’ve got more, and in a thousand years’ time they would have still more brains. His own long hair gives him a low forehead, and I said, ‘These people are you, really. You feel you’ve more brains now you understand what you did to me as an absent breast, and what breast you’ve got inside. This is unlike yesterday, when you didn’t see anything of it, since you exploded it out of your sight. This volcano-method seems so far from understanding, that yesterday seems like a thousand years ago. This sense of long ago comes also from the fact that the volcano-method would be how you got rid of your mother’s absent breast, when you were a baby long ago. I think, too, that your sense of having more brains now gives you hope of still more brains in the future.’

He had started another drawing. He drew a circle and said it was the moon. He drew four rockets round it. He said, ‘The rockets are dropping darts of air into the moon. Then there will be enough air to live.’ I said, ‘When you erupted the absent breast out of your eye, you felt the volcano came from your eye and travelled the space between us until it reached me, where it entered, and made me a moon breast. Now you feel you’ve got to breathe life into me and the atmosphere round me, and then there will be enough air for you to live, too. I think you feel your words to me do this – they are the darts of air which give life to the analysis.’ He turned the page over to see if his drawing was showing through. He looked worried and touched the marks that showed, and all the while he was making smells. I said, ‘You are worried your smells, which are attacking me for going away, are undoing the work of reviving the dead breast and its atmosphere; you’re afraid they are fouling it.’

He started a small drawing. He drew the earth and then a big moon. He put in the four rockets – not round the moon as before – but near the earth. In a despondent voice he said, ‘They’re going back now.’ I said, ‘The four rockets are the four days you come to me. And now, Easter, you must go back.’ On the moon he drew some irregular shapes. He said, ‘They’re what you see in the evening, if you look up at the moon.’ I asked him what these things on the moon were. After a long hesitation, he replied, ‘I know what they are now. They’re called craters,’ and he turned back to the drawing of the three heads and made the third head bigger. He was in an uneasy state. I then said, ‘You know now that you see in me the craters from yesterday’s eye-volcano and to-day’s smells. Perhaps when you speak of looking up at the moon, it’s also a memory of the baby-you looking up at the breast, and seeing how you attack it and put craters or extinct volcanoes in it to rid yourself of what will otherwise extinguish you. Knowing this brings you despair, because you feel a cratered breast can’t keep you alive. Indeed, you have become uneasy with me now as a dead moon breast giving out foul gas.’

He turned back to his first drawing. In its centre he wrote ‘Fire’. In the top sunken bit he wrote ‘Wet from Water’, saying, ‘The sea comes in.’ I said, ‘You go back to your first drawing, to yourself inside, because I, the outside breast, am felt as dead and foul, and as far away for Easter as the moon is; and you show me how you feel on fire inside with the volcanic breast, and that the baby-you feels left to get wet outside from the water of tears and urine coming in on you like a sea when I leave you.’

Much in this session is not emphasised or interpreted, because it seemed subsidiary to the content of his anxiety about the holiday and his mode of response to it. The words of the announcement had entered him concretely: they were felt to sink him in the middle. The ‘volcano’ that then came was not an attack of anger, as one might at first suppose. He did not get angry. His eyes opened wide, not in a glare, but in a shock of disbelief: he could not believe this. Then he continued staring at me vacantly for a long while. The unconscious phantasy occurring during these moments was that he could volcano this absent breast out of his sight.

He was having an experience which may lie behind the stare of a very young infant in similar circumstances. It is sometimes supposed that because an infant only stares when the breast has gone, that he does not mind its absence, but we may presume that, at times, he responds to the absent breast – which for him is a starvation breast – by staring it out of his eyes in the way John does when he hears in the session that I am going to leave him. We could put it that death stares John in the eye, and when he turns round to stare at me, he has the phantasy that he stares out the death breast, hurtling it into me. That is, he is using a primitive pre-thinking mode of response to evade the anxiety of his extinction.

We can see how difficult it is for him to think, to use his brains, rather than evade fear by ‘volcano’ methods. He manages to think a little in this session, and each step in thinking seems to him so huge that it is as if it takes a thousand years. It is of interest that twice in the session he feels he has more brains: once when he finds out something about his inner world, that it contains a volcanic object which is burning him up; and again, when he knows it is his craters he sees when he looks up at the moon, that is, when he finds out what he does to his object. This second bit of knowledge is harder for him to acquire because of the persecution and despair of being kept alive that goes with knowing the breast is cratered. We can see the coming Easter break will be an especial strain now he has, as it were, m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements and permissions
• Introduction
• Part I Papers
• Part II Reviews
• Bibliography
• Index