Progress in Self Psychology, V. 13

Conversations in Self Psychology

Arnold I. Goldberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134896776
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Volume 13 provides valuable examples of the very type of clinically grounded theorizing that represents progress in self psychology. The opening section of clinical papers encompasses compensatory structures, facilitating responsiveness, repressed memories, mature selfobject experience, shame in the analyst, and the resolution of intersubjective impasses. Two self-psychologically informed approaches to supervision are followed by a section of contemporary explorations of sexuality. Contributions to therapy address transference and countertransference issues in drama therapy, an intersubjective approach to conjoint family therapy, and the subjective worlds of profound abuse survivors. A concluding section of studies in applied self psychology round out this broad and illuminating survey of the field.

I

Clinical

Chapter 1

Compensatory Structures: Paths to the Restoration of the Self

Marian Tolpin

Revitalization of One Sector of the Self in Depth

Compensatory structures, by definition, make up for primary deficits in the self by revitalizing just one of its sectors—mirrored ambitions, idealized goals, or twinship/alterego feelings with others like ourselves.¹ For their formation, compensatory structures, like primary structures, require self-selfobject bonds, for example, our mutual attachments with “important others” whose responsiveness makes us feel confirmed, strengthened, and expanded. Our subjective experience of these bonds, particularly after primary structures have been injured by faulty responsiveness (as I discuss later), goes a long way toward repairing the injuries and reestablishing a functional self.

Restorative experiences that are consistent enough are preserved as “inside” structures, for example, in the form of capacities for increased security, confidence, and the zest and initiative to pursue goals (see Tolpin, 1971). With further strengthening (in life bonds or via selfobject transferences) the augmented capacities form a continuum with our unique endowment, skills, and talents. The result is a revitalized sector. It can improve our psychological balance just enough to firm up a path that keeps us going: pursuing ambitions or reaching for goals that hold out some promise of fulfillment and give our lives meaning.

In my discussion I illustrate the “cure”² of an unmirrored self (i.e., a changed psychological balance) by revitalization of the twinship sector. My example is Anna Freud’s twinship bond with Dorothy Burlingham. I shall also discuss a brief clinical vignette, described by Guntrip (1969), to make a crucial point: the first attempts to establish compensatory structure that eventually revitalizes the self have to be recognized for what they are. Guntrip’s vignette shows a failed attempt at analysis because the compulsive search of an enfeebled self for an idealized source of strength was mistaken for a regression to infantile wishes and “archaic” (infantile, pregenital) “part objects.” I shall come to the illustrations after outlining the three broad sectors of the self, their roots in mirroring, idealizing, and twinship (self-selfobject) bonds, and their affectively charged ideational contents that can make any one of them the chief motivating force in a restored self.

Self Sectors Established in Self—Selfobject Bonds

The mirroring, idealizing, and twinship sectors of the self begin their lengthy development in universal “wired-in” tendencies of intact human beings: tendencies to need and want and actively seek out the whole variety of mutual attachments that provide the psychological ingredients we need for growth. Any one of the sectors of the self can be revitalized over the course of life, with two provisos: that there is an other (or others) in our lives who is responsive enough and that there remains in us the inner capacity for reactivated developmental momentum that enables us to make use of selfobject functions. The crucial point to bear in mind here is that self-development is an “open system”: the task of maintaining and restoring the self is by no means limited to infancy and early childhood (most schools of analytic thought greatly restrict our view of life course development)—it is a life cycle task, and cure by compensatory structures remains a potential possibility throughout life (see, for example, Guntrip’s [1975] powerful description of the restorative effects of his analysis with Winnicott late in his life. The issues of restoration of the self by compensatory structures and transformations of narcissism [Kohut, 1966] warrant separate discussion).

Ideational Contents and Affective Motivational Force

Broadly speaking, each sector of the self is a different psychological configuration, constituted by different developmental needs and expectations, each with its characteristic ideational content and its powerful, affectively charged motivational force. There is the sector of (1) the child- self that actively seeks out and expects an alive, bright-eyed, engaged (mirroring) parent to whom he/she says, “Look at me and admire and applaud me and what I can do; I’m great and what I do is great”; (2) one that seeks out and looks up to the admired (idealized) parent, expecting to be bolstered and “uplifted” and who says, “You’re great, what you are and what you do is great; you belong to me, I belong to you, therefore, I’m great too”; and (3) the child-self that looks for and expects alikeness, belonging, and kindred spirit experiences—twinship/alterego experiences that are also self-expanding and self-enhancing—and who says, “We’re just alike, we’re in step with each other, we’re both great when we’re together.” (For example, a very intelligent, attractive, appealing woman who knew nothing of the self psychology theory of twinship told her analyst that she only felt attractive and worth something when she “doubled” with the sister she admired, looked up to, and wanted to be like. At a time of severe crisis in his life, when he was attempting to emigrate to the United States and find an internship, Kohut thanked a close friend for his help and wrote, “[Your] … great efforts … have allowed me and you to grow together into a common we” (letter to Siegmund Levarie, August 23, 1938, in Cocks, 1994, p. 39. Kohut was expressing his gratitude to Levarie, who was attempting to help him with his plans to emigrate from Paris and find an internship in Chicago).

To repeat, self sectors consist of valid needs to be enjoyed, admired, and confirmed in our naive feeling that we are the center of our world; to be supported and strengthened and helped to recover from inevitable anxieties and inevitable injuries to our pride; and to have the self-enhancing experiences of being like others who are like ourselves. Each sector undergoes expectable changes in contents and transformations as the self grows up, ages, and declines. Optimally, for example, our wired- in tendency as children to pursue the idealized, “powerful” parent who lifts us up and restores our equilibrium and well-being is transformed, in continuing self-selfobject experiences, into capacities to reach out for sustaining adult bonds of love, friendship, and collegiality and capacities to strive toward idealized goals and live up to our own beliefs and values; then we experience our own efforts to reach goals and live up to values as a source of feeling uplifted and confident. And so it is with the other transformations: the mirroring sector—“admire me and tell me I’m great,” “Look ma, no hands!”—undergoes expectable transformations into adults’ self-esteem and ambitions (including the ambition to enjoy and sustain the next generation); the pursuit of these further enhances self-esteem and provides a cohesion-fostering sense of direction and purpose. The “doubling, we’re just alike” sector is transformed into bonds of kinship, friendship, and alikeness that increase self-esteem by contributing to feeling expanded and enhanced.

Compensatory Structures and the Two-Part Developmental Sequence

The structures that compensate for serious deficits in the self and its sectors have their beginnings in a developmental sequence that we see very frequently—both in ourselves and in our patients. The sequence is part injurious to the self and its growth and part beneficial. The injurious part is deeply rooted in a self—selfobject bond with a parent who is consistently unable to respond to normal childhood needs because his or her capacities for mirroring acceptance, enthusiasm, and applause; supports, strengths, and guidance that the child can idealize; or the twin- ship experiences of being a kindred soul are seriously deficient. With an unresponsive, erratic, depressed, or negligent parent, the child experiences what the film maker François Truffaut called The 400 Blows-severe disappointments, fragmentation anxiety, depletion depression, and blows to self-esteem, often of traumatic proportions. When blows to cohesion, pride, and well-being are experienced over and over again, “primary structural deficits” in all sectors of the self are inevitable.

In spite of “400 blows” it is still possible to form self-selfobject ties that make up for the primary deficits; this is the next part of the developmental sequence. Even though their experience of themselves is seriously injured, initially healthy children and adolescents do not give up easily. “A self that had been threatened in one sector … manage[s] to survive by shifting its psychological point of gravity toward another one” (Kohut, 1977, p. 83). “Shifting the point of psychological gravity” and seeking out another who can respond to injuries and needs has great transformational potential. Drawing on their own resources—especially remaining initiative and hope—originally healthy children and adolescents attempt to turn toward the other parent (if there is one) or to another more available person, often a sibling, friend, a grandparent, other relative, or teacher. And now they look for the twofold responses they need to recover from the blows and compensate for what was missing with the parent who could not respond. (At the same time, partly, at least, they turn away psychologically from the most development-thwarting parent.) The responses they elicit can be the start of the formation of structures that may eventually, if bolstered enough, restore one of the sectors, even though it was injured and sustained primary structural deficits. And now for a poignant example of revitalization of one sector of an unmirrored self—an example from life (to a certain extent the restoration of the self that occurs in treatment but imitates life).

A Life-Saving Twinship—“there must be Someone to Confirm Me”

My glimpse into Anna Freud’s inner life and the “400 blows” from which she recovered via the twinship with Dorothy Burlingham is based on intensely personal letters, poetry, notes she kept on her dreams and free associations, and notes about her own struggles that she used for psychoanalytic papers. She left these private writings, along with the rest of her literary estate, when she died at the age of 86. (Excerpts of her personal writings can be found in Elizabeth Young-Bruehl’s [1988] biography; letters to her friend Eva Rosenfeld are published in Heller [1992].) The writings reveal that as a child, adolescent, and young adult, she suffered intense feelings of shame and chronic feelings of worthlessness and was frequently depleted and depressed; that she became addicted to sexualized defensive measures, particularly beating fantasies, masturbation, and daydreams; and that she also attempted to protect her vulnerable self by relinquishing her own wishes and living through others. The defensive measures were compulsive attempts to fill in deficits in her vitality, initiative, and feelings of pride and self-worth. To say this differently, the mirroring and idealizing sectors of her self-organization were seriously injured in her childhood and adolescence. The consequence of the injuries was that she entered adulthood with primary structural deficits in both the sector of ambitions and idealized goals—her own goals and ambitions (apart from her father’s) were insufficiently established and could not provide her with a feeling of aliveness and a reliable sense of her own worth and value or with the sustenance and sense of direction that comes from belief in ourselves and our own efforts and abilities to reach idealized goals.

The Unmirrored Adolescent Self—Addiction to Defensive Measures

Anna Freud entered her adolescence still feeling like the insatiable child (her family reputation) who was unwanted and worthless. She had experienced significant rebuffs from both parents and from her pretty sister Sophie, whose looks her father enjoyed, and was left with the feeling she was unimportant to both parents as well as to her siblings. She did not feel recognized, confirmed, strengthened, or enjoyed by anyone except Josephine, her nursemaid. (It seems to me that in her view that Anna Freud had three mothers, Young-Bruehl greatly exaggerates the significance of Josephine’s care of the unwanted child.) Suffering from extremely low self-esteem, manifested in intense shame and awkwardness about her body-mind-self, she avoided social life; suffering from the listlessness and fatigue she called “laziness,” she was a lonely exile with the feeling that there was “no circle where I am at center” (the quotation is from her favorite poem by Rilke; see Young-Bruehl [1988, p. 128]).

Her personal writings reveal, over and over again, that Anna Freud’s chief motive force, the “continuous and undisturbed thread of psychical activity” (Freud, 1909, p. 143), the “repetition compulsion” if you will, was no more or less than an originally normal developmental need: she desperately wanted to be told that she and what she did were good. She tenaciously hung on to the need for affirmation, and it persisted as a nucleus of health in spite of her feelings of the faulty responsiveness that led to her feeling unseen and unwanted, and never accepted, praised, or confirmed for who and what she was. In place of mirroring acceptance, her mother was rejecting and critical, and her father and his colleagues who befriended her accepted her idealization of them (she was always “looking way up to them”). She experienced constant pressure to be like them and what they wanted her to be. (In adolescence she attached herself to a number of older women—mostly women analysts or mates of analysts. She admired these women, and had a crush on some of them, but they were too glamorous or successful to be a genuine source of sustenance or mirroring for her. Her father found the men who showed interest in her wanting, and she dutifully agreed.) However, there was one source of recognition that was gratifying and enlivening; her age- mates, childhood girlfriends, and cousins admired her story-telling capacities and enjoyed and applauded the adventure stories she made up and told with zest. Friendships, then, a greatly underestimated source of admiration and enjoyment, gave enough support to her and her skills and talents for revitalization of the twinship sector when, much later, her true twin came into her life.

In the meantime, Anna Freud did what traumatized children and adolescents usually do if they have the chance. First, she turned away from her mother’s criticisms and lack of pleasure in her and her body (her attempts to turn to her sister Sophie as an alternative and to form an alikeness bond with her were consistently rejected). At age 12 she became depressed and anorexic after being tricked by both parents into an appendectomy with no preparation (when her mother learned the date of the surgery, she did not tell Anna). “All I knew was that I was going in [to the hospital] for an examination,” she told her friend Manna Friedmann when remembering the childhood trauma during her terminal illness (Young-Bruehl, 1988, p. 54). The betrayal, experienced as a massive blow, led her to turn to her father as she began a desperate campaign to get him interested in her. As is frequently the case, she blamed her mother for the treachery and looked to her idealized father for another chance for mirroring. His genuine acceptance and admiration of her could have begun to “make up” for her mother’s rejection and betrayal and could have acted as a seed or nucleus for later revitalization of the mirroring sector—the most damaged sector of her self. However, the mirroring from him that she hoped for, to authenticate herself, was not forthcoming.

Freud was content to be idealized; and he accepted Anna’s gross identification with him and psychoanalysis. The only one of the Freud children who evinced any interest in psychoanalysis (his son Oliver was to be his successor until his obsessional neurosis dashed his father’s hopes for him), Anna found a way of getting close to him. If she could not have his enjoyment of her, the next best thing was for her to have something of his—the books he wrote; his letters to her answering her questions about psychoanalytic concepts; and his analysis of her dreams, symptoms, and depleted, ruminative states. (Later, she derived temporary benefits from the inadvertent mirroring the actual analysis with him provided.)

In short, from age 12 on, Anna attempted to restore herself by absorbing her father by way of psychoanalysis. This turn to him and his works was crucial for the beginnings of compensatory structures—for the development of the skills and talents she was later able to integrate via the twinship into what she would call her “real self.” Freud almost literally let her sit at his feet at his Wednesday night psychoanalytic meetings. However, his letters to her are painful testimony to his inability to resonate with his daughter’s mirroring needs, either during her childhood or adolescence (for example, see Sigmund Freud to Anna Freud, February 2, 1913, in Young-Bruehl, 1988, p. 59). In fact, his letters show that he openly rejected her needs for mirroring confirmation: he exerted strenuous pressure on her to be more like other girls (i.e., more like what he thought a girl should be), chided her for looking for reassurance, urged her to be self-sufficient, and openly expressed his disapproval of what she described as being “very tired” and doing “nothing all day long when I am not sick” (Young-Bruehl, 1988, pp. 57–58). Anna’s frequent depleted (depressed) states were prompted by, and followed, her compulsive masturbation and beating fantasies which she confided to her father during an enforced separation when he admonished her to learn to enjoy herself as a girl.

Instead of eliciting mirroring and response to her naive idealizing needs, she lived more and more through defensive measures, particularly compulsive masturbation fantasies. These were sexualized efforts to preserve herself—addictive because the happy ending she made up was temporarily enlivening, repetitive because they could not make up for her injuries, which secondarily contributed to making her feel worse about herself. In her fantasy she reexperienced her injuries, shame, and humiliation over and over again, and, in her fantasy, she made up for the mirroring she missed. The first part of the fantasy involved a concretization of her injured self—a youth was tortured by the henchmen of a cruel knight. As he neared the point of death from the torture, the knight relented; he came to see the youth’s great virtues, ordered the torture to stop and did everything in his power to heal the youth’s injured body and nurse him ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgement
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• I: Clinical
• II: Supervision
• III: Sexuality
• IV: Therapy
• V: Applied
• Author Index
• Subject Index