Seeing and Being Seen

Emerging from a Psychic Retreat

John Steiner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780415575065
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136654770
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Seeing and Being Seen: Emerging from a Psychic Retreat examines the themes that surface when considering clinical situations where patients feel stuck and where a failure to develop impedes the progress of analysis.

This book analyses the anxieties and challenges confronted by patients as they begin to emerge from the protection of psychic retreats. Divided into three parts, areas of discussion include:

• embarrassment, shame, and humiliation
• helplessness, power, and dominance
• mourning, melancholia, and the repetition compulsion.

As well as offering fresh ideas, Steiner bases his creative and integrative efforts on previous contributions by psychoanalysts including Freud, Klein, Rosenfeld, and Bion. As such, this book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, clinical psychotherapists, and all those with an interest in the psychoanalytic field.

Part One

Embarrassment, Shame, and Humiliation

1

The Anxiety of Being Seen: Narcissistic Pride and Narcissistic Humiliation

Both seeing and being seen are important aspects of narcissism. Self-consciousness, which is always a feature of narcissism, becomes acute when a patient loses the protection of a narcissistic relationship and is obliged to tolerate a degree of separateness. Having felt hidden and protected, he now feels conspicuous and exposed to a gaze that makes him vulnerable to humiliation. This experience can feel devastating and unbearable, particularly if it is felt to arise in retaliation to the patient’s own use of gaze to establish a superior position from which he could look down on others. In this chapter I describe how the need to avoid or cut short such humiliation may be so acute that the patient is unable to deal with guilt and other emotions connected with loss, which might otherwise be bearable. This will impede his development unless he receives the support he needs to understand his humiliation and hence tolerate it better.

We are all familiar with the emotions aroused when we are being observed. We know that being looked at can give rise to both pleasant and unpleasant feelings. It may result in feelings of pride, pleasure at being admired, and gratification of exhibitionistic impulses. However, it can also lead to the extremely uncomfortable feelings of embarrassment, shame, and humiliation. I want to focus on these feelings in this chapter because I think they are important in clinical practice and can profoundly colour the patient’s experience of analysis. Moreover, humiliation seems to have something peculiarly unbearable about it, which demands urgent relief. It may be so dreaded that the patient becomes preoccupied with the need to avoid the experience. Some patients try to hide from view, some try to reverse the experience by attempting to elicit admiration and others try to protect themselves by inflicting humiliation on someone else. In the transference relationship, a struggle over dominance may ensue (Steiner, 1999, and Chapters 5 and 6). Here the direction of gaze is an important indicator of relative power and status. Patients feel humiliated when they feel small, dependent, and looked down on. They may defend themselves against such feelings by looking down on the analyst or by attempting to enlist the analyst to join them in looking down on someone else. Patients who have achieved a narcissistic pride through introjective or projective acquisition of superiority are particularly likely to feel that their defences will be seen through and that the objects who have been made to feel inferior will try to humiliate them in revenge.

Rosenfeld (1964) argued that the most important function of a narcissistic relationship is to prevent the experience of the separateness of subject and object. Projective and introjective identifications enable the narcissistic patient to appropriate desirable qualities belonging to the object and to evacuate undesirable qualities. This leaves him unable to develop a relationship with a truly separate object. Rather than relating to an object that is independent of himself, the narcissistic patient denies his dependence and behaves as if he has all the qualities and nourishment he needs. If the patient loses this sense of omnipotent self-sufficiency, he comes into contact with dependent needy feelings that give rise to anxiety. If the object frustrates him, he reacts with anger and disappointment, while if he recognises his love and dependence on the goodness of the object, he comes up against his envy. Rosenfeld described how the narcissistic object relationship defends the patient against these anxieties. If his omnipotence is threatened, they emerge to confront him.

These anxieties are a consequence of seeing the object more clearly as the narcissistic organisation weakens or breaks down. They have generally been well recognised as important. However, at the same time, the patient also has to deal with the consequences of being seen and the humiliation that this can give rise to. I have previously described how narcissistic organisations create psychic retreats (Steiner, 1993) where the patient can hide to avoid being seen. In this chapter I discuss the situation that the patient faces when the retreat is no longer available. In these circumstances, he may feel that he is being forced to face a hostile reality before he is ready to do so and may feel that he is being observed, judged, and disapproved of.

Vision is ineffective if the subject is too close to the object; the object can only come into view when it is observed from a distance. The same is true for being seen. It is on emerging from a psychic retreat and establishing a distance from the object that the expectation of a hostile gaze arises. Anxieties arise from being seen as well as from seeing, and both can lead to an intensification of narcissistic defences. The situation is complicated by the way that gaze can be used to re-establish a narcissistic relationship; looking can be used as a means of entering objects in order to take refuge there and to once again control and acquire the properties of the object. In this chapter the clinical material I present suggests that humiliation is particularly feared when the eyes have been used in this way.

The experience of exposure to gaze leads to more or less extreme discomfort somewhere along a spectrum of feelings which extends from embarrassment through shame to humiliation. The importance of these feelings is attested to by the large number of words associated with them in the English language. To name but a few, the patient may feel belittled, debased, defiled, degraded, demeaned, disfigured, disgraced, dishonoured, mortified, scorned, worthless, and vulnerable. While there are important and subtle distinctions along the spectrum, with discomfort generally lessening as one moves from humiliation through shame to embarrassment, even those who suffer from shyness, blushing, and modesty seem to seek relief with great urgency. The unbearable quality of the experience is illustrated by the descriptions typically given of humiliation, embarrassment, and shame. “I would rather die than face this again” or “I wished the earth would open and swallow me up!” are often cited, and at least in some cultures humiliation can be a justification for revenge as well as for suicide (Benedict, 1946).

In recent decades a number of studies have revived an interest in shame and have given rise to an extensive and significant literature, especially from the United States. Wurmser (1981, 1987) is perhaps the most influential and significant of these writers and the one most firmly rooted in a classical psychoanalytic approach. He gives a detailed definition of shame and distinguishes it clearly from guilt. He provides many clinical examples and discusses various aspects of shame in impressive detail, linking it with narcissism and with the experience of being observed.

Some of the revival of interest in shame was stimulated by Kohut’s (1971) discussions of narcissism and of the role that the object plays in validating or contradicting the child’s image of himself. Morrison (1983, 1984, 1987), in particular, expands and elaborates on Kohut’s findings and describes how shame can arise if external objects fail to confirm the patient’s sense of self. Nathanson (1987) has edited an interesting selection of papers on shame in which he also discusses the way shame is used in social relations for the purpose of creating hierarchies of power. Lansky (1996, 2001, 2005, 2005a, 2007) has given a detailed account of the importance of unconscious or hidden shame which can sometimes be hidden by guilt. He also makes an important link between shame and envy when he points out that both arise from comparisons and that envy is often provoked by a shaming sense of inferiority. Like many of the writers in this field, he provides interesting studies of characters from classical literature.

Earlier work of relevance to shame can be found in the writing of Erickson (1959) on identity and development, that of Benedict (1946) in her anthropological writing on shame and guilt cultures, and that of H. B. Lewis (1971), who applied some of the findings of developmental psychology to her clinical work.

European contributions to the study of shame, though less numerous, have sometimes also been important. Fairbairn (1944; see also Ogden, 2010) considers shame to result from a child’s experience when his love is rejected.

At the same time, it also becomes a dangerous procedure for the child to express his libidinal need, i.e. his nascent love, of his mother in face of rejection at her hands; for it is equivalent to discharging his libido into an emotional vacuum. Such a discharge is accompanied by an affective experience which is singularly devastating. In the older child this experience is one of intense humiliation over the depreciation of his love, which seems to be involved. At a somewhat deeper level (or at an earlier stage) the experience is one of shame over the display of needs which are disregarded or belittled. In virtue of these experiences of humiliation and shame he feels reduced to a state of worthlessness, destitution or beggardom. His sense of his own value is threatened; and he feels bad in the sense of “inferior”.

(Fairbairn, 1944, p. 84)

Fairbairn suggests that the affective experience is “singularly devastating”. In a rich and detailed paper, Yorke (1990) reports on observational studies made in mother–toddler groups. He and his team observed that shame can be important and disabling in some children and was particularly found to arise around issues of toilet training and cleanliness. Yorke also reviews earlier studies of shame and includes a survey of Freud’s contribution to the subject. Another British contribution by Mollon (2003) approaches the subject from a Kohutian point of view.

Wilson (1987) has reviewed French writing on shame. He states that at first sight it seems to have been rather ignored. However, a number of significant studies touch on shame, in particular that of Green (1983), who contrasts the guilt of Oedipus with the shame of Ajax in Sophocles’ plays. To these should be added the interesting paper by Donnet (2009), which explores the lifelong shame carried by the hero of Conrad’s Lord Jim. Among the Europeans, mention should also be made of a book by the German psychiatrist Seidler (1995), which gives a comprehensive overview of shame, including many philosophical aspects.

A special mention should be made of the fascinating study by Christopher Ricks entitled Keats and Embarrassment (1976), in which the poet’s sensitivity to shame is richly illustrated. Ricks surveys a wide field and discusses Goffman’s (1956) sociological studies, which link embarrassment to individual identity, as well as Darwin’s writings on blushing.

There is also a considerable literature on the role of gaze, particularly from the point of view of the development of a sense of identity, which many writers relate to the experience of being observed. The description of a mirror phase in development is important in the influential but complex writings of Lacan (1956), as well as in the more clinically based observations of Winnicott (1967), who depicts the mother’s face as the first mirror. “What does the baby see when he or she looks at the mother’s face?” he asks, and he replies that “ordinarily, what the baby sees is himself or herself” (Winnicott, 1967, p. 112). It seems clear to me that Winnicott is describing a narcissistic type of object relationship, almost referring back to Narcissus himself seeing his image in the water. However, Winnicott is concerned that narcissism should not be interpreted prematurely, and, like Kohut (1971), he emphasises the importance of the mother’s approving gaze to the child’s self-esteem. This view is endorsed by Wright, who suggests that “The image of the child that the ‘Other’ conveys back to him becomes, in this way, the form through which he grasps himself and comes to know himself” (1991, p. 270). This view differs from that of many Kleinian analysts, who believe that it is important to avoid collusion with the patient’s wish to preserve his narcissistic idealisation. While I disagree with Winnicott and Kohut on this point, I am aware that the patient may be sensitive to being looked down on and humiliated. If the propensity to humiliation is recognised, the analyst may be able to help him to face a painful reality.

If we are to recognise these states clinically, I believe that we have to find a place for them conceptually. To this end, I have found Britton’s formulation useful. Britton, building on his work on triangular space (1989), described how the child’s relationship with the primary object, or object of desire, is complicated by an awareness of a secondary object which becomes an observing object, making judgements on the child’s relationship with the primary object (Britton, personal communication in 1995). This led me to the schematic formulation that unsatisfactory experiences with the primary object predominantly lead to guilt, while those in relation to the observing object give rise to shame. Guilt has been given much attention in relation to Klein’s formulations around the depressive position (Klein, 1935, 1940; Steiner, 1990a, 1993), but the role of shame in relation to the observing object has not been widely noted. Of course, the judgemental quality of the observing object is central to Freud’s formulation of the Oedipus complex where the father is the representative of power and authority exercising judgement and threatening punishment, ultimately in the form of castration and death. Praise or blame, and reward or punishment, are functions of the observing object and come to be incorporated in the classical formulation of the superego.

As far as I can understand it, this theme is a central feature of Lacan’s view in which the father is the

… representative of the moment of rupture of the union between mother and child, the moment of entry into culture, through language, through the third person. The “loss of the phallus” is not a reference to an anatomical organ or a particular person but a metaphor which signifies the separation of human beings from their object of desire. It refers to a lack in both girl and boy.

(Birksted-Breen, 1993, p. 11)

In my view, it is this introduction of the third observing and often authoritarian object that gives the superego such persecuting qualities associated with humiliation.

The critical role of gaze becomes apparent when we recognise that humiliation is an important part of the threat coming from superego figures. This humiliating aspect of the superego is well known, but its ubiquity and importance is sometimes underestimated. Once we take note of it, I have found that it can be seen to play an important part in many clinical situations.

In my view, shame plays an important role in sustaining the power of a primitive superego and in obstructing the development of the more mature superego of the depressive position. Such formulations are, of course, schematic and serve only as a conceptual guide. In reality, the situation is much more complex. For example, the observing object is often represented by an observing part of the primary object, often, in fact, the mother’s eyes, while the observing object also frequently shifts to become the primary object so that the shame it creates is mixed with guilt. This schematic approach can also help us to conceptualise the often confusing relationship between shame and envy. Gaze plays a central role in both these feelings, and the “evil eye”, while mostly a symbol of envy, can also threaten to humiliate the subject and constitutes an important aspect of what Bion has called the ego-destructive superego (Bion, 1959; Britton, 2003).

Despite the relative neglect that I mentioned, some Kleinian work has touched on humiliation, and Rosenfeld did clearly point out its importance, especially in his later writings. He described how some patients “feel humiliated and defeated by the revelation that it is the external object which, in reality, contains the valuable qualities that they had attributed to their own creative powers” (1987, p. 105). This point had previously been made by Horney (1936), who recognised how common it is for a narcissistic patient to suffer humiliating narcissistic wounds in analysis and described how the patient then instinctively retaliates by trying to humiliate the analyst. A similar theme emerges in Kohut’s description of the narcissistic rage that follows a narcissistic injury in which “ridicule, contempt and conspicuous defeat” play a major role (Kohut, 1972, p. 380). In this context, Stoller (1975, pp. 64–91) suggests that an important function of perversion and pornography is to reverse feelings of humiliation. These discussions of humiliation recognise how unbearable it can be but do not explicitly link it with gaze.

Segal (2007), however, implicitly links gaze and humiliation in a paper that deals with the role of vision in psychosis. She describes a patient whose “healthy curiosity” became transformed into an omnipotent and omniscient voyeurism. As with the patient I describe, the voyeurism turned to exhibitionism because “the whole point of using his eyes was to enter his object, to reverse the feeling of smallness, and to become an object of admiration and envy”. Although Segal did not specifically discuss humiliation, she described her patient’s terror of being seen through. Also relevant is a paper by Riesenberg-Malcolm (1988), which gives a detailed description of a patient who seemed to protect herself from breakdown through the use of a perverse fantasy involving a mirror, in which being observed and humiliated was central. Voyeurism and exhibitionism were prominent in the fantasy, and the patient stimulated curiosity in the analyst and experienced her as an excited onlooker.

The role of gaze is the focus of Chapter 2 in this book, on the Schreber case (see also Steiner, 2003). The experience of being humiliated was a major feature of Schreber’s melancholia. The humiliation gave an urgency to his need for relief, and this, together with his failure to find an object who could support him in facing reality, meant that his own guilt could not be tolerated and hence could not function as an impetus for regret and reparation. A similar issue is raised in a later paper (Steiner, 2005, and Chapter 8), where I argue that, in some patients, a conflict exists between proceeding along the path towards mourning, on the one hand, and turning towards melancholia, on the other. Here again, if humiliation is severe and is not recognised by the analyst, it can tip the patient towards melancholia and delay or prevent the separateness that is required if object loss is to be faced.

Some patients who are particularly sensitive to humiliations seem to relive them vividly in their analysis. They may then be unable to make progress since ever...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: Embarrassment, Shame, and Humiliation
• Part Two: Helplessness, Power, and Dominance
• Part Three: Mourning, Melancholia, and the Repetition Compulsion
• References
• Index