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I
DEVELOPMENT OF THE CAPACITY
FOR SELF-ANALYSIS
EXPLORATION OF OUR āPERSONAL EQUATIONSā
The self-analytic process is complex and multifaceted. No two persons engage in self-analysis in quite the same way. And each person's self-analytic capacity varies considerably over the life cycle. This variability has important development roots. Focusing on the infant research literature, Demos describes the ācompetentā infant with inborn potentialities which, when nurtured by a responsive caretaker, grow to form a network of interrelated skills (see Demos, 1992). These skills initially support rudimentary self-observation and eventually make more sophisticated self-analysis possible.
Demos conceptually divides early competencies into three realms: the construction and representation of experience, the modulation and regulation of affect, and the sense of personal agency. The elaboration and articulation of each of these competencies require a sufficiently empathic primary caretaker.
Although competence in each realm is necessary for the development of a self-analytic capacity, Demos draws heavily on the work of Silvan Tomkins and places special emphasis on the importance of affect. Along with Tomkins, she speaks of ideoaffect complexes, which function as primary psychic organizers and which play a central role in the self-analytic process.
As is well known, tolerance of negative affect is a sine qua non of psychoanalytic inquiry in either a dyadic or self-analytic mode. Less well appreciated is the role of positive affects (see also Gardner, chap. 8). Demos comments:
The whole enterprise of attending to, elaborating on, valuing, and attempting to understand, change, or master one's inner experiences requires an affective and motivational investment. Certainly some of the motivation comes from a wish to escape from or master painful negative affective experiences. But that wish alone is not enough to produce a focus on internal psychic processes. Indeed, it often leads to strenuous efforts to control external conditions, that is, other people and events. The capacity for self-analysis requires the capacity to generate and sustain interest in one's own inner experiences and to experience excitement and enjoyment in the process of exploring and understanding oneself. This capacity for sustaining and elaborating positive affect about oneself does not just happen in the absence of intense or intrusive negative affects. It must be nurtured and fostered by the caregiver and by the analyst.
Demos explores the parallels between the infant-caretaker relationship and the analysand-analyst relationship. While not naively maintaining that they are isomorphic, she does note important similarities that influence the evolution of the capacity for self-analysis.
Consistent with Demos's description of the competent infant in a relational matrix, Ricardo Bernardi and Beatriz de LeĻn de Bernardi describe the conceptual shift from the mirror analyst to āthe idea of an interaction in which the patient is also sensitive to that which the analyst contributes to their link.ā1 They explore the influences of the self-analytic activities of the analyst on this interaction.
Of course self-analysis enhances our awareness of countertransference. Even more fundamentally, as Bernardi and de Leon point out, self-analysis leads to a more refined understanding of our own ongoing participation in the analytic process.
The disposition toward self-analysis enables us to become aware of the assumptions that emanate from within our own psychic reality and shape our representations of the analytic process. As analysts, we each introduce our own āpersonal equationā between what we listen to and what we interpret.
Bernardi and de LeĻn examine the ways in which our assumptions generate our āpersonal equation.ā We are accustomed to considering as assumptions the content of our implicit and explicit theories, and perhaps even our attitudes toward those theories. Ordinarily, however, we do not think of our Weltanschauung and our personal ways of hearing, seeing, representing our experience, communicating, and relating as part of our assumptions. (There appear to be some similarities between Bernardi's and de LeĻn's extended definition of āassumptionsā and Demosā description of āideoaffect complexes.ā)
Bernardi and de LeĻn assert that the degree to which we carefully consider these factors as assumptions determines the scope and depth of our self-analytic efforts. They support their assertions with clinical vignettes illustrating the utility of their concepts.
In their clinical examples, they demonstrate that our work with patients may challenge our most cherished assumptions about ourselves and our identities as analysts, and may precipitate a sense of loss and mourning:
In our interaction with patients, we must abandon well-known presentations (and inner representations) familiar to us and our patients. Such mourning and disidentification processes are necessary for us to be able to admit that our understanding is always only partial and possible within the parameters of our own psychic reality, which may not become a model for our patients or for our colleagues.
Loss and mourning are inevitable concomitants of the self-analytic process and simultaneously help to make it possible and contribute to its difficulty. Demos conceptualizes essential developmental antecedents of affect tolerance and related capacities necessary for self-analysis. Bernardi and de LeĻn focus on the widening scope of self-analysis, which includes our hidden assumptions and unexamined personal equations.
REFERENCES
Demos, E. V. (1992), The early organization of the psyche. In: Interface of Psychoanalysis and Psychology, ed. J. W. Barron, M. N. Eagle & D. L. Wolitzky. Washington, DC: American Psychoanalytic Association, pp. 200-232.
Hoffman, I. Z. (1983), The patient as interpreter of the analyst's experience. Contemp. Psychoanal., 19:389-422.
Schwaber, E. A. (1986), Reconstruction and perceptual experience: Further thoughts on psychoanalytic listening. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 34:911-932.
1Other contributors to this volume (e.g., Gardner, Margulies, McLaughlin, Smith) explore facets of the patient's awareness of the analyst's inner experience. For further exploration of this theme, see Hoffman (1983) and Schwaber (1986).
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1
Developmental Foundations for the Capacity for Self-Analysis
Parallels in the Roles of Caregiver and Analyst
E. Virginia Demos
My task is to provide a developmental perspective for a discussion about the capacity for self-analysis in adulthood. What can such a perspective contribute? My goal is to present a view of the early beginnings of psychic life, focusing particularly on the developmental foundations for the emergence of the capacity for self-analysis. This will involve not only suggesting when psychic life begins, but also, and perhaps more importantly, describing the psychological processes going on in the young infant and the role of the caregiver in influencing these processes. It is assumed there are some continuities in the ways in which the infant organizes psychic experiences and the ways in which the adult does so, and therefore there are some parallels between the roles of the caregiver and the therapist. A developmental framework, then, may perhaps shed some light on the processes in the analytic situation that foster the analysand's capacity for self-observation, inquiry, and analysis.
I will argue that the capacity for self-analysis is multifaceted, drawing on a variety of basic human skills, that can themselves vary in their degree of development and in the extent to which they become coordinated with other essential skills and tendencies. Thus, it is a capacity that is not so much acquired, although it does involve learning, as it is one that emerges because it is inherent in the organization of innate human adaptive functioning. Through experience with the caregiver, this capacity can either be encouraged and elaborated on, or be interfered with, discouraged, and derailed. I would like to begin by briefly describing some basic psychological capacities of the infant that provide the essential ingredients for self-observation, and then illustrate some of the ways in which transactions with caregivers can shape and influence these capacities.
The radical increase in our knowledge about early infancy in the last three decades has prompted several efforts to integrate infancy research with psychoanalytic models (Lichtenberg, 1984; Stern, 1985; Sameroff and Emde, 1989). I have recently presented my own attempt at an integration (1992), which I will summarize briefly here. It differs from other available conceptualizations of early psychic experience in arguing more strongly for early competence and against stagelike models for understanding psychic organization, and in giving affect a central motivating role in psychic organization. I believe that the data we now have suggest that infants arrive in the world with preadapted capacities for feeling, for thinking, for perceiving, for remembering, for acting, and for coordinating these capacities in consciousness to produce voluntary acts. Thus, contrary to Winnicott's statement that āthere is no such thing as a babyā (1965), I am arguing that there is indeed a baby with a functioning set of unique social, experiential, and organizational capabilities, and there is a mother with her unique history and capacities. The infant clearly needs a mother, but her role is now seen as enhancing, supporting, interfering with, discouraging, or ignoring her infant's ongoing processes and efforts. She has considerable influence, but this influence does not amount to creating de novo organization and basic capacities within the infant.
The unique characteristics of each participant are important in the relationship between the infant and the caregiver. Not all infants will be affected in the same way by a particular caregiver, and conversely, not all caregivers will be responsive in the same way to a particular infant. Each contributes something essential and unique to the transactions. Much of what goes on between an infant and a caregiver involves the complicated processes of getting to know each other and forming a relationship. Each must learn about the other's preferences, tolerances for intensity and pacing of stimuli, limitations, and distinctive modes of behaving. In other words they have to learn to live together, to understand each other's meanings, to find ways to manage clashing agendas, and to determine the balance between helping, hurting, and ignoring each other, and between enjoying, manipulating and dreading each other.
In this relationship, as in all relationships in which the participants are deeply engaged with each other, the potential for change for both participants can be great. Since much of the discussion to follow will focus on how the infant is influenced by the parent, I would like to emphasize briefly here, how the parent can be influenced and changed by the infant. Several researchers, most notably Bell (1977), have commented on how compelling and engrossing young infants are for adults, out of all proportion to their relative size and real world power. This is due in part to the nature of their stimulus qualities, for example, a large head, ācuteness,ā and preemptive affective expressions. It is also due in part to the meanings for the parents of their infant; for example, the embodiment of hope (a new beginning, a chance to ādo it right this timeā) or a burden (someone who will drain all of one's resources), or a source of gratification (someone who needs me or loves me,) or someone to ātake it out onā āto get back at.ā The infant, then, has the power to evoke within the caregiver a wide range of deeply felt meanings. These include a reexperiencing of unresolved issues and long forgotten transactional patterns of being with and feelings about one's own parents and oneself as a small child.
To the extent that the infant represents a hopeful new beginning, then the evocation in the parent of old patterns of experience and of unresolved issues will be felt as an opportunity for the parent to rework old solutions and to develop new responses, strategies, and solutions with this new transactional partner, namely, the infant and small child. Thus, while engaging in the complicated and difficult processes of empathizing with the infant or child, and becoming his or her ally and helper, the parent is also empathizing with, becoming an ally of, and helping her or himself. This process involves simultaneously experiencing oneself as a child and as a parent, and reparenting oneself. The success of these efforts, therefore, depends not only on one's capacity to empathize with the infant and small child in reality and in one's past, and not only on the qualities of the real infant, but also on the availability of good parenting models. Often the parent, in trying to avoid his or her own parentsā mistakes, overcompensates and errs in the opposite direction. An overly strict upbringing can result, for example, in too much permissiveness in the next generation; a distant parent can lead to an overly involved parent in the next generation, thereby perpetuating the problematic nature of the same issue. Nevertheless, real change is possible and might well involve the caregiver seeking help in order to break out of a repetitive cycle that has now become quite conscious and intolerable. By contrast, to the extent that the infant is experienced as a burden or as a source of gratification to the parent, and evokes merely a wish to replay old solutions, then the opportunities for change and the reworking of unresolved issues are diminished.
Although in describing the characteristics of the infant-caregiver relationship, I have thus far emphasized how each contributes to the processes involved and how the infant possesses compelling qualities for the caregiver. Nevertheless, I must now acknowledge that this is not a relationship between equals. The caregiver has many advantages in strength, knowledge, experience, instrumental effectiveness, and emotional regulation. These are all advantages that the infant and growing child will gradually attain. But the infant is not totally helpless, and is far more competent than we have been ready to acknowledge. We have been slow to embrace one of the tenets of evolutionary theory, namely, the more capable a species is in adulthood, the more capable is the newborn of that species. This is not an argument for preformed ideas. Rather it argues that because of our long evolutionary history, all of the essential human functions and capacities are already present at birth. They exist in various phases of readiness and their elaboration requires interactive experience with the real world and with more experienced human beings, namely caregivers.
Before going on to describe the basic capacities of the human infant, I would like to suggest that already in our discussion there are parallels that can be drawn between this new view of the infant-caregiver relationship and the patient-therapist relationship. I would argue that our patients come for treatment with a multiplicity of possibilities and capacities, some nearly lost to them, and that our role as therapists is to help them reorganize their inner worlds, for example to help them to recognize, to have more access to, to use more effectively that which they have within themselves; or to help them to increase their capacities to bear negative affect; or to help them to learn to trust again. The analyst's or therapist's interventions can then be understood as encouraging, articulating, and lending support to certain organizational possibilities within the analysand or patient over others. From the analysand's or patient's point of view, the experience is one of recognizing in the clinician's responses a possibility that he or she already knows about from earlier experiences, such as a possible way of constructing reality that was not very well organized or coherent before; or that had been more available in the past, but has been overridden by other, more pressing forces in the present; or that was available but simply never received much confirmation from the outside world. Thus the clinician's interventions serve to shift the balance of organizational possibilities within the patient rather than introduce something totally new. Once a shift has occurred within the patient, he or she can then construct new possibilities. Indeed if the analysand's capacity for self-analysis is to be fostered, the analyst must believe that the analysand already possesses the essential ingredients.
There are also parallels in the importance of the unique characteristics of each participant in the theraputic relationship. Not all analysands will be affected in the same way by a particular analyst, and conversely, not all analysts will be responsive in the same way to a particular analysand. Each contributes something essential and unique to the transactions. There are parallels as well in the opportunities for change in the analyst. To the extent that the analysand evokes in the analyst ...
