Difficult Identities

The Work of Identity in Human Life

Pia De Silvestris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000161014
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Every human being about to be born is loaned a provisional identity. This identity is embodied in the name they are given, as an invention, internal need, or generational obligation, parental fantasy or delusion. Both the person receiving and the person bestowing the name—and, with it, the provisional identity—are unaware of all this.

Interweaving theoretical reflections and clinical histories, Pia De Silvestris illustrates the dramatic nature, the profundity, and the cryptic complexity of the challenges posed by this difficult identity—challenges she has faced repeatedly throughout her psychoanalytic career. She sees the role of transference in psychic and relational life as a "continuous search for the origin", a force that develops continuously through a variety of exchanges and investments, which seek, on the one hand, to weaken the bond to the original object and, on the other, to preserve it until death. Throughout the book's chapters, we see how it is precisely the product of the transference experience that permits the joint work of identity construction to begin. Transference is always the outcome of an experience of fulfilment and an encounter with the other; and it is desire of the other that promotes the search for the self.

CHAPTER ONE

Difficult identity

At the origin, and as far as can be presently observed, every human being about to be born is loaned a provisional identity. This identity is embodied in the name he or she is given, as an invention, internal need, or generational obligation, parental fantasy or delusion. Both the person receiving and the person bestowing the name—and, with it, the provisional identity—are unaware of all this.

Whether this identity is a potential asset or an advance to be paid on the price of life is also unclear. What is certain, however, is that even when the latter is true, many people are able to go on to harness this potential identity as an asset and develop the potential contained therein. Indeed, perhaps the individual’s lot might hinge precisely on his ability to recognise this price to pay and, consequently, to take possession of it, as well as its potential for investment. Since this price must be paid in pain, however, any attempt to avoid such pain also prevents the recognition of what is truly at stake, and this scenario precludes any possible inheritance, whatever this might be. It is, of course, impossible to define all the scenarios that occur, and the ways they come to pass, from a psychoanalytic perspective, but the idea can be taken as a provisional stimulus for reflection and investigation, and then developed in clinical practice.

In her book, Il viaggio con i bambini nella psicoterapia [The Psychotherapeutic Journey with Children], Algini writes,

With children, psychotherapy becomes the place in which—in a shared situation and through the complex interplay of new representations and “theories” which continuously form and reform—the infant mind may establish continuity or discontinuity in the secret spaces shared with the parents.

“In other words”, she explains, “psychotherapy creates a web of internal connections that can allow us to not be engulfed by the histories of those who precede us, and to use their precedent to begin to build our own history” (2003, p. 78, translated for this edition). Since our own history can be constructed only through our experience of the other (an experience that cannot be completely verbalised, and is perceived but not conscious), all constructions that unfold as the analytic relationship progresses concern moments of identity and mourning that are, so to speak, provisional, but indicate the many intermediate stages in the transformation of human psychism.

Ultimately, the possibility of carrying out analytic work is linked to the mind’s capacity to suspend the acquisition of thought, judgement, and definition. This is a bit like repeatedly leaping into an apparent void—the void of the mind, the unknown opposed to the known. Paradoxically, however, this is only possible when the mind feels sufficiently anchored to secondary thinking; only then can it afford to question its provisional identity—that is, when this identity is rendered stable precisely by this anchoring, and, therefore, contains what Aulagnier calls symbolic “points of certainty” (2001, p. 108). I prefer to call this a “provisional identity”, however, because the process of knowledge, which makes use of this analytic capacity, continuously transforms our identity—that is, the fleeting outcome of psychic work. Understood in its Freudian sense, this work should be carried out through the transcription and mediation of reality—articulated, in turn, as both recognition of unconscious content and the needs entailed, and as realisation of forms of ego satisfaction or defence.

For these reasons, if this work of analysis, cognition, and construction of identity finds itself facing an excessive conflict and is able to fulfil a symbolic identification, this is never purely symbolic, but also contains aspects of idealising or delusional identification. This would, therefore, suggest that even Aulagnier’s “points of certainty” and identity’s solid base remain provisional, in the sense that the possibility for transformation or becoming less alienable at a different stage of life remains. Instead, I would add (in agreement with Aulagnier) that all analytic functions pertain to the ego, not only in the case of conscious operations or movements, but also when we are unaware of the psychic work being done.

I believe that identity is made up of those portions of the ego that are identified with the experience of an adequate correspondence between internal and external reality, and, therefore, do not have to be subjected to repression or splitting, but can, instead, easily be joined up by this identity. It is precisely this same portion of ego that can perform an analytic and auto-analytic function. At the same time, the analytic function surely widens the scope of identity, providing the possibility for the ego to acquire new certainties from the experience of the relationship between the self and the other. In fact, many histories of suffering are built up and coagulate around a core of infantile trauma which, real or phantasmal, ends up becoming a cornerstone of the subject’s way of being and relating to the world. Even if this core—which naturally depends on family environment and genealogy—is a source of suffering, we must not forget that it is also the only possible form of life the child can receive, and is used and transformed, as much as it can be, by the infant. In this sense, the primary object is not only given but also transformed by the relationship with the infant; in fact, each traumatic core adheres so strongly to one’s perception of oneself that in order to be transformed, a considerable processing of loss and mourning must take place.

Originating, therefore, in an initial negative image of the self, the difficulty of constructing subjectivity should be seen as a difficulty calibrating needs and desires with reality. This is what I attempt to portray through the case histories of my patients, focusing on the use these children, adolescents, or young adults are able to make of their experiences of the mother, father, or their absences or losses, to piece together a troubled path toward an intimate sense of identity. If primary identification always calls the mother or maternal stand-in into question, the development of subjectivity must necessarily also take into account a third party, separate from the mother–child relationship. This is widely considered the function of the father. For Freud, the paternal figure is decisive in psychological development due to natural rivalry with the son—a structure reconstructed through the myth of Oedipus. For Winnicott (1965[1960]), the father is prefigured by identification with the mother, with the mother as bearer of a paternal ideal, be this a husband-like, fatherly, symbolic, or ideal figure. In any case, this function still prepares the subject through an infinite series of illusory and omnipotent mediations of thought, which, by protecting the ego’s fragile formation, make it possible to establish a relationship with the world and reality.

CHAPTER TWO

Interminable illusion

If a good narcissistic experience is essential to surviving the caesura of birth, we could say that the causation of all suffering resides in the adventures and misadventures of the early core experiences. While Freud regarded the caesura of birth as the foundation of psychic life, Winnicott made the significant discovery of the developmental vicissitudes of these early sufferings, their specific forms of expression, and possible transformations. According to Freud, thought ensues from the frustration of the object’s absence; for Winnicott, life—that is, the acknowledgement of the object’s absence—is possible only if there has been a prior experience of the object’s presence and emotional participation. If the core issue is the caesura of birth, with its complementary urgent need to stave off the attendant separation anxiety, only the illusion of the continuity of the bond with the object can alleviate this wound.

Illusion and disillusionment are two aspects of the same vital process, while disappointment points to the interruption of such process. It is universally acknowledged that life would be unlivable without the ubiquitous presence of illusion; paradoxically, however, if we were unable to bear disillusionment, we would be exposed to a premature death. The lack of a satisfactory early experience of illusion, as well as a sudden premature disillusionment, always ensue in identity crises, or that specific form of suffering nourished by disappointment that melancholia essentially is, with the attendant implication of an impossible work of mourning. The articulation of these diverse layers of experience and alive relationships makes for a more or less pathological or satisfactory development with its oscillations of integration and splitting.

In the Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), Freud speaks of the concept of Hilflosigkeit (the infant’s helplessness), thus implicitly positing the necessity of illusion, and in The Future of an Illusion (1927c), he links the need for illusion with human desire. Subsequently, Winnicott renders illusion a theoretical construct to found the potential for psychic relations, in as much as it provides the basis for the vital transformation of the primary agonies of the beginning of life. Winnicott regards illusion and disillusionment as relational concepts, therefore not really comparable with intrapsychic experiences, because, in the context of a relationship, the illusory experience of omnipotence has a structuring and developmental function. This is unlike omnipotent states, which are usually cut off from relationships and represent a defence from the drives, and, thus, often take on a pathological function.

In “Primitive emotional development” (2001a[1945], p. 152), Winnicott writes,

The baby has instinctual urges and predatory ideas. The mother has a breast and the power to produce milk, and the idea that she would like to be attacked by a hungry baby. These two phenomena do not come into relation with each other till the mother and child live an experience together. The mother … produces a situation that may with luck result in the first tie the infant makes with an external object, an object that is external to the self from the infant’s point of view.

I think of the process as if two lines came from opposite directions, liable to come near each other. If they overlap there is a moment of illusion—a bit of experience which the infant can take as either his hallucination or a thing belonging to external reality.

The “bit of experience” gives way to the construction of the intermediate area, in which transitional objects come into being and the experience of reality is possible only if it originates from illusion. The intermediate area is the creation of the drive to live, which registers the absence of the object as perception of absence, frustration, and lack, intertwined with the desire to make it good. Winnicott calls this “bit of experience” illusion—even if it is essentially reality-based—because it is, nevertheless, subjective reality, which, in the effort to reestablish the condition prior to the absence, creates the illusion of undoing the loss, thereby mastering it by creating it gradually rather than enduring it passively. “This illusion”, write Hernández and Giannakoulas (2003, p. 101, translated for this edition), “provides the child with a protective retreat, but does not isolate him”.

The end point of the process of disillusionment is the attainment of the capacity to acknowledge the absence of the object, and the understanding, which is its corollary, that the object belongs to the external world. If illusion—the overlap between what the mother provides and what the baby imagines it to be (Winnicott, 2005a)—permits the human being to postpone facing the anxiety of being a separate individual, disillusionment helps us become aware of our separate existence.

While Freud sought a dynamic equilibrium between our need for illusion to deal with our finitude and the boundaries of our subjective identity, and the importance of disillusionment for drive development, Winnicott focuses his attention more on the developmental function of disillusionment and on the psychic risk of a premature disruption of illusion. Pontalis (1981) argues that the analytic setting seeks to actualise the area of illusion. He quotes from Marion Milner’s description of transference as a “creative illusion”, fundamental to psychoanalytic technique, through which a better adaptation to the world within and without is developed.

Silvia

Silvia is an eleven-year-old girl, in therapy at three sessions per week. For about a year, she has been suffering from severe panic attacks. She has trouble going to school, playing sports, and leaving the house. She lost her mother aged seven, and about a year ago one of her mother’s old friends, whom her father has started seeing, moved in with them.

In our first few sessions, Silvia is rather unwilling to talk to me, insisting that this take place in the presence of the woman who has taken her mother’s place. Generally speaking, such a period of hesitation signals a traumatic precedent of such significance that it renders the subject deeply wary of any sort of new experience. Silvia’s disappointment is defined by a real sense of grief, and her father’s coupling with her mother’s friend forcefully brings the trauma back.

After an initial period of resistance, Silvia eventually agrees to see me alone, pouring out an enormous amount of affection into the analytic situation and placing upon it a great deal of expectations. With my help, she seems able to rebuild the condition of prematurely lost illusion; it is as if the analytic bond has conjured a feeling that disappeared abruptly with her mother’s death, and Silvia seeks to replace the unbridgeable emptiness that ensued. She brings me her favourite games, tacitly requesting that I allow her to win, and speaks to me insistently of her desire to have a pet dog. Though she has a sister who is two years younger, she feels lonely when nobody pays her any attention. Her father’s probable denial of mourning—which deprived Silvia of the opportunity to share her pain in a loving relationship—has made her loneliness very evident, and aggravated her condition as a little girl so sorely tried by life’s events.

At times, in the transference, Silvia experiences me as the mother who is still alive, or as the replacement object with which to share the lack of the mother. One day, she brings a dream in which she goes up into the sky to visit her mother. Sometimes, in the countertransference, I experience her as a daughter who has fallen from the heavens. At the end of our sessions, Silvia says goodbye—almost as if to preserve “the sense of continuity of [her] existence” (Winnicott, 2001b[1949], p. 189; see also Mascagni’s reading, 1995)—by kissing me on the cheek and reminding me of the date of our next session. These two signals appear to concretise the sense that our relationship is a place for the restoration of illusion and, therefore, a place of potential working through.

A few months into the therapy, I suggest that Silvia draw some pictures, and she finds much enjoyment in these doodles—a game, as Pontalis (1988, p. 184, translated for this edition) writes, “to look together for what we don’t know … an understanding of the circulation of signifiers between two subjects”. In her doodles, a cuddly toy repeatedly appears—her favourite, she tells me, when she was a little girl. She says she would like to bring in and show me this cuddly toy, which is half dog, half bear and wears a bib on which “Hug me” is written. She recalls asking her father what the words meant. From our next meeting, “Huggy” becomes an attentive spectator of our sessions, an intermediary for our emotions. At the beginning of sessions, Silvia asks me to hold Huggy to warm him up; she then places him on the table between us, and talks to me about Huggy, or to Huggy about herself. Facilitated by what is clearly a transitional object recovered from her early childhood, Silvia can communicate her past history and daily sorrows. Through the transference, she can relive the illusion of creating the object, while being able to detach herself from it, seeing as it can be created anew.

Dialogue becomes easier after this. Silvia tells me about herself, speaking to me directly. Huggy is consulted only when feelings become very strong and she asks for his help remembering. The idea of bringing Huggy to the sessions renders ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION
• Dedication
• PREFACE by Maria Luisa Algini
• INTRODUCTION by Maurizio Balsamo
• CHAPTER ONE Difficult identity
• CHAPTER TWO Interminable illusion
• CHAPTER THREE Identity: internal objects and the superego
• CHAPTER FOUR Identity: from oedipal vicissitudes to adolescence
• CHAPTER FIVE The laborious integration of the body image in adolescence
• CHAPTER SIX Adolescence as mode of mental functioning and matrix of identity
• CHAPTER SEVEN Psychopathology of the process of the work of identity: resistance and loneliness when aggression is turned into masochism
• CHAPTER EIGHT Vicissitudes of identity and marriage
• CHAPTER NINE Transference: a continuous search for the origin
• CHAPTER TEN On analysis terminable and interminable
• CHAPTER ELEVEN Loss and its destinies
• CHAPTER TWELVE Treating psychotic children: the experience of anonymity or the feeling of losing one’s identity
• CONCLUSIONS
• APPENDIX: Hans in luck
• REFERENCES
• INDEX