About Children and Children-No-Longer

Collected Papers 1942-80

Paula Heimann, Margret Tonnesmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134952946
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

About Children and Children-no-longer is the long awaited collection of Paula Heimann's published and unpublished papers.

From the published work it includes the seminal paper 'On Countertransference' (1950); 'Dynamics and Transference Interpretations' (1956); 'Some Notes on Sublimation' (1959); and 'Notes on the Anal Stage' (1962). In addition, more recent works are published here in English for the first time, describing the author's particular integration of theory and technique.

Paula Heimann's ideas on an undifferentiated early phase of infant development and its implications for analytic technique, along with her unique knowledge of both Kleinian object relations and classical theory and technique, make her work very relevant both to present-day practice and the understanding of the historical development of some central psychoanalytic ideas.

1
A contribution to the problem of
sublimation and its relation to processes of internalization (1939/42)

This paper is an expanded version of Paula Heimann’s membership paper which she read to the British Psycho- Analytical Society in July 1939. It was published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis13(1) (1942), and was her first psychoanalytic publication.

In this paper my aim is to point out and discuss certain aspects of the sublimatory processes which in my opinion have not so far been investigated or perhaps sufficiently described. They involve consideration of unconscious phantasies related to internalized objects.

I am taking the artistic productivity of a painter as an example, although I am well aware that in this type of sublimation there are some specific factors operating which are still obscure. I do not aim at dealing exhaustively with the vast subject of sublimation, and the material will illustrate only those important aspects to which I wish to draw attention.

I start from the psychoanalytical conception that sublimation is a form of discharge of the instinctual drive to creation (procreation). I will recall Freud’s original concept of sublimation as an activity in which the sexual impulse is deflected from its direct aim but does not succumb to repression, which leads to achievements serving a social or higher interest and involves an adaptation to reality, that is, the progress from the pleasure principle to the reality principle. Gratification on the part of the ego is also an essential element in sublimation; since the ego does not have recourse to repression, it is not restricted and impoverished but enriched by the sublimatory activity. This last point, the conscious gratification, bound up with the experience of expansion and development of ego, seems to me an important indication that a sublimatory activity is successful, although it may be of short duration only and give way to various forms of discontent, or even to depression and despair. Complete absence of it, however, would suggest to me that there is some serious disturbance in the sublimatory process.

When I use the term ‘ego’, I am not thinking so much of an organization which is firmly established and demarcated in contrast to other parts of the personality—indeed,

Freud has warned us against being dogmatic in this matter—but of the sum total of an individual’s feelings, emotions, impulses, wishes, capacities, talents, thoughts, and phantasies—in short, all those psychic forces and formations which a person (assuming that his consciousness reached so far as to embrace so much) would identify as his own and which would make him feel: ‘That is I’ Actually most of our patients suffer from not having achieved this experience and I think that it is one of the essential tasks of analysis to help them so to find themselves. This, if successful, goes along with widening the boundaries of the personality and increasing its capacity to tolerate the fight with the inner and outer world.

The patient I am going to describe is a painter in her early thirties, an intelligent and attractive person. She comes of a middle-class family. Her father’s profession took him about to sea-port towns and this made a stable home life difficult for the family. The patient has vivid recollections about anxieties in stormy nights on the Scottish coast and of blissful happiness in being beside her mother by a cheerful fireplace. Her one-year-older brother was until puberty her intimate companion and an object of intense feelings of love and hate, domination and jealousy, guilt and envy. Her early sexual games with him, a source of pleasure, guilt and anxiety, proved a lasting influence on her later sexual life. In the analysis her parents were for a long time divided into good and bad objects, in that her father was felt to be entirely good with admirable qualities—intelligence, humour, creativeness—and her mother entirely bad—stupid, dull, and narrow-minded. All happy experiences with her, such as that by the fireside, were denied or at least ignored.¹ Only when the anxieties and feelings of guilt, requiring such an extreme separation of love and hate, and leading by such over-simplifications to great distortions of reality, had become allayed, and when the patient became more capable of maintaining feelings of love even to a not perfectly good person, could she admit faults in her father and good qualities in her mother. She then came to see them in a less obsessionally tabulated way and more as real human beings. It turned out then that even the humour of her father, which she had valued so highly, had a very bad aspect; for he had treated her as a funny little thing and refused to take her seriously, whereas her mother, to whom she had denied any sense of humour and understanding, showed a kindly appreciation of her conflicts.

The family moved about a good deal, but the final blow to security and family unity fell in her early teens when her father left her mother. The standard of the family life changed abruptly. Her mother went to work in a factory to earn a living for herself and the two children. A most painful and dramatic event brought her father back, after he had got into serious trouble from which his wife rescued him. But he was not the same man as before; the relation between the parents was gravely disturbed, and, as it seems, never fully repaired. Her father returned a broken man and became addicted to alcohol, and his death at a comparatively early age appears to have been precipitated by his alcoholism.

The father’s desertion of the family led to striking changes in his daughter. She had been a good, though mischievous pupil, but now her achievements in school deteriorated conspicuously, and she became uninterested and restless. After school she attempted various trainings and kinds of work, none of which satisfied or stabilized her. When she came of age she broke away from the family to live independently and lived an unconventional, wild, and unhappy life. By chance she was introduced to Freud’s works and she read his books with an eager interest, which resulted in her coming for analytic treatment herself.

When she came to me she was suffering from intense depressions with suicidal tendencies, inhibitions in her work of painting, disturbances in her sexual life and an addiction to morphia, the extent and significance of the symptoms becoming apparent only in the course of analysis.

As a result of analysis all these disturbances have been to a large extent overcome. She has married a man with whom she has a satisfactory relationship in many respects although full sexual gratification has not yet developed. She is infinitely happier than she ever was before; in fact she has learned what it means to be happy. She mixes well with people of different types and has an open and keen interest in actual events. Her capacity for sympathy and helpfulness has developed. She takes a lively part in the world around her, and—what she values most of all—has attained to real creative power in her painting and has made a name for herself in the artistic world.

I shall now describe the course of this analysis with reference only to the connection between her phantasies about internalized objects and her artistic productivity.

The first period of the analysis covered the work of penetrating behind an attitude of dissimulation about the severity of her illness. Above all she tried to gloss over the morphia addiction, and some time was needed before she gained sufficient confidence in me to enable her to show more freely how much she was really suffering. Thus I did not at once realize the psychotic character of her anxieties, since on the whole she did not give the impression of being a psychotic patient. In my opinion it is one of the great gains of the new research by Melanie Klein (1932, 1935, and 1940) and her school into the processes of internalization that we have become able to discover and analyse psychotic traits in people who are classed as neurotic.

After this first phase, the analysis found access to the full depth of her depressions and her persecutory anxieties, which were intimately bound up with her morphia addiction. During this period she was mainly engaged in drawing from the model. These drawings showed strong, but rather gross and coarse lines. Without laying claim to an expert understanding of this matter I would say that they definitely showed talent, but perhaps hardly more than that.

When the analysis proceeded to deeper levels it became clear that her depressions were related to a system of phantasies in which she felt herself possessed and inhabited by devils. These devils—at the beginning of the analysis they were innumerable— persecuted her constantly and in ever-varying ways. They roamed about inside her, caused her physical pain and illnesses, inhibited her in all her activities, especially in painting, and compelled her to do things she did not want to do. When she wanted to get up in the morning they moved about violently in her stomach and made her vomit. When she wanted to paint they interfered. They would roar with laughter when she tried to achieve something. They would force her to go to the lavatory constantly, and during a certain period she had to urinate so frequently that it disturbed her work seriously. They had forks with which they prodded and attacked her in the most cruel ways. They would eat her up from inside and force her to take food for them. But she felt she could not eat because they would poison her with their excrement and thus turn the food into poison. Owing to these persecutions she was in agony, especially when painting.

All these phantasies became fully conscious during analysis, in particular through the analysis of the transference-situation, and were intensely real and vivid to the patient. No doubt the fact that she possesses the talent of a painter accounts for the richness and vividness of her phantasies and for the comparative ease with which they could become conscious. There was often not a very clear distinction between conscious and unconscious phantasies. The great drive to paint, inherent in her, in the processes constituting her talent, proved a powerful ally to the analysis and to the endeavour to reach her as yet unpainted internal scenes and situations.²

Against these persecutions by the devils she took morphia. Morphia calmed the devils down or put them to sleep or drugged or paralysed them. Morphia also fed and placated them. But they were only temporarily put out of action and with their renewed tormenting the need to take morphia again arose. Gradually the devils became reduced in number and differentiated in type, for example, ‘blue painting devils’ and ‘morphia devils’. These two types of devils represented her two parents in antagonism to each other carrying out a warlike sexual intercourse inside her, but they were also banded together in a conspiratorial alliance against her. During one period there were three devils of each type.

Phantasies like these which take parental intercourse for a persecutory act arise when the subject stands under the sway of his destructive impulses and his libido is temporarily overpowered. In order to defend himself against the aggressiveness (death instinct) set loose inside himself, the subject directs it outwards, as Freud (1920) has shown, and attributes his own aggressiveness to the object. In this particular situation (that of observing or phantasizing parental intercourse), under the impact of jealousy and anxiety the subject’s destructive drives become projected on to the parents, so that they are felt to be the agents of destruction. Since in the subject’s own processes the fight between the life and the death instinct, love and hate impulses, has entered a phase in which the hate impulses occupy the stronger position, he is unable to perceive parental intercourse as a sexual situation, but interprets, or rather misinterprets, it as a war—war by each partner against the other and against himself. Impotence and frigidity have an important root in such phantasies.

Actual events and childhood memories were interwoven in these devil phantasies and gigantically distorted; and the transference situation mirrored them. To give one example for many: in her childhood my patient often ‘dared’ her brother to do something and vice versa. Once he ‘dared’ her to prick a pin into a workman’s buttocks as he bent down, and she did so. In the devil-phantasies this small mischief became magnified and reversed into attacks by the devils’ forks upon herself. She dreaded and hated the devils and she wanted to get rid of them, but she also loved them, was proud of them (‘Aren’t they brainy to be always finding new ways of tormenting me?’) and wanted to keep them. Moreover, she needed them to punish herself for her bad impulses and actions.

Throughout this persecution by devils, however, there had also existed in her mind what she called ‘the design’, and this meant her good parents joined together in harmony with each other and with their children. The design also stood for her own love and creativeness and her capacity to undo the harm she had done to her objects.

Whenever she had some experience of the connection between things—for instance, when the interpretations in analysis joined up various fragments of her associations and made her feel that these associations were not accidental and senseless, but had a deep meaning through which she could appreciate the whole context of the processes in her mind—then she would say: ‘That fits into the design.’ After an hour, for instance, in which light had been thrown on important factors in her life, she would experience a blissful state of happiness, about which she said: ‘I saw my design. It came into me.’ This made her love me so much that she wanted to rush to me and to give me all her possessions; on that day she had no need for morphia. The design represented love and creativeness. It was the principle which binds together, and which turns chaos into cosmos. It was an ideal of perfection. When she realized, however, on one occasion that by saying that the design comprises everything, good and bad, she used it to justify her bad feelings to herself and to carry out destructive actions, the design was felt to be destroyed and lost, and a deep depression resulted from this experience. Gradually the design became more and more established, and she developed a firm faith in its existence, and was no longer dependent on getting constant visible proofs of it. The working of her design could be applied more and more to her painting, and her pictures became more and more manifestations of the design.

To return to the devil phantasies. The devils represented the objects of her instinctual drives, both libidinal and aggressive; that is to say, they stood primarily for her parents and her brother, but also for people in her actual surroundings, including myself; and all these objects could be both parts of persons and also whole persons. Moreover, the devils were a cover for her own sadistic and destructive impulses, which she disowned and personified in them.

I will now endeavour to explain how this world full of devils inside her had come about.

The memory-traces of psychical experience, past and present, are not static imprints like photographs, but moving and living dramas, like never-ending scenes on a stage. These inner dramas are composed of the subject and her instinctual impulses towards her original objects (father, mother, brother, and their later substitutes, up to and including the analyst), who are seen as they had been felt and are felt to be under the impact of her impulses; in addition, the objects also display her own impulses. Moreover, all the protagonists in the drama, herself and her objects, her own impulses and their responses, derive some features from the actual setting and events of childhood: her own physical and emotional personality during childhood and that of the persons around her, and the things, places, and events of that life. Features of the world in which and towards which her instinctual impulses were originally directed, dating from the period of time and the actual occasions on which they were originally felt (and were more or less expressed or denied), become woven into the inner drama played out by her impulses and their objects. In this way the drama of the internal world took shape originally; and it continues a ceaseless activity throughout life, all subsequent experiences after the original ones providing new scenes, mostly on the pattern of the earliest. Conversely also, the drama of the internal world colours the subject’s perception of the external world and lends features of internal phantasy and memory to experiences with present-day external objects. The sense of reality often suffers considerably from this admixture.

I said above that in the inner drama the objects also display the subject’s own impulses. This phenomenon is essentially a defence mechanism against the subject’s own evil impulses—a variety of the mechanism of projection and turning outward of aggressiveness (death instinct) discussed by Freud (1920). The object which has been internalized in hate and greed becomes the internal carrier of these very impulses. This comes about by way of many phantasies, which can be summed up as methods of divesting the subject of his own evil and aggressiveness and transferring them elsewhere, thus relieving the subject of anxiety and also of the guilt resulting from his aggressiveness towards his objects.

At this stage, therefore, the internal drama tells a story of the subject’s innocence; its purpose is achieved only when the subject arrives at a point where he no longer feels guilty. My patient’s impulses have been projected on to the objects of her internal world: hate and greed actuate them on the stage of her inner drama; they are bad, theyare devils—no blame could be attached to her. In thus disowning guilt, however, and denying all responsibility, she is adopting a passive position; she can only feel helpless and persecuted, a victim of all the evil taking place inside her—she has no say in the matter, as it were. Now she has got into a cleft stick, an impasse from which there is no way out; since she disowns responsibility, her own capacities are rendered impotent, she can do nothing. One consequence of this is that since her own efforts, the efforts of a human being, can achieve nothing, magic must be introduced, and a magic means from outside must come to her help—morphia.

Moreover, the feeling of being inhabited by persecuting creatures (people, animals, and things) necessitates energetic defences aimed at destroying these persecutors. But since these defences consist of attacking the persecutors inside the self, they are of no avail as a solution, for they involve the subject at the same time as her objects. The battlefield is in the home country, not on enemy territory. A vicious circle is thus set up and a perpetual warfare ensues which is played out in the subject’s internal world— always affecting her external life and often expressed in terms of physical symptoms.³

In this way the patient’s objects had become devils to her, because she had been a devil...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Titile Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Paula Heimann’s quest for her own identity as a psychoanalyst: an introductory memoir
• Editor’s introduction
• 1 A contribution to the problem of sublimation and its relation to processes of internalization (1939/42)
• 2 Notes on the theory of the life and death instincts (1942(3)/1952c)
• 3 Some notes on the psycho-analytic concept of introjected objects (1948/9)
• 4 On counter-transference (1949/50)
• 5 A contribution to the re-evaluation of the Oedipus complex—the early stages (1951/2a)
• 6 Preliminary notes on some defence mechanisms in paranoid states (1952b)
• 7 Dynamics of transference interpretations (1955/6)
• 8 Some notes on sublimation (1957/9)
• 9 Notes on early development (1958)
• 10 Counter-transference (1959/60)
• 11 Contribution to discussion of ‘The curative factors in psycho-analysis’ (1961/2a)
• 12 Notes on the anal stage (1961/2b)
• 13 Comment on Dr Katan’s and Dr Meltzer’s papers on ‘Fetishism—somatic delusions— hypochondria’ (1963/4)
• 14 Comments on the psychoanalytic concept of work (1964/6a)
• 15 Evolutionary leaps and the origin of cruelty (1964/9a)
• 16 Comment on Dr Kernberg’s paper on ‘Structural derivatives of object relationships’ (1965/6b)
• 17 The evaluation of applicants for psychoanalytic training (1967/8)
• 18 Postscript (1969b) to ‘Dynamics of transference interpretations’ (1955/6)
• 19 Opening and closing remarks of the Moderator to ‘Discussion of “The non-transference relationship in the psychoanalytic situation”’ (1969/70a)
• 20 The nature and function of interpretation (1970b)
• 21 Sacrificial parapraxis—failure or achievement? (1975a)
• 22 Further observations on the analyst’s cognitive process (1975/7)
• 23 On the necessity for the analyst to be natural with his patient (1978)
• 24 About children and children-no-longer (1979/80)
• Complete bibliography of Paula Heimann’s publications
• Bibliography