The Environment

Its Role in Psychosocial Functioning and Psychotherapy

Carolyn Saari

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9780231506267
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Challenging Freud's assumption that an individual first develops intrapsychically and is only later confronted with the demands of external reality, Carolyn Saari posits that human beings initially construct a picture of their immediate environment and then construct their identities within that environment. The Environment is an argument in three parts. Part 1 discusses psychoanalytic and developmental theory, showing that while such theory has assumed the existence of an environment, it has taken for granted and therefore left unexamined its role in human development. Michel Foucault's theory of social control provides the framework for Part 2, which examines psychotherapy's capacity either to liberate or to repress the client. Part 3 relates the practical benefits and broader implications of an inclusion of environmental considerations in the practice of psychotherapy.

PART 1 / THEORY

ONE / THE ENVIRONMENT IN EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE

IN CLASSICAL PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY, it was customary to think of the affective experience of the young infant as being a biologically based element of intrapsychic life. Certainly, the affective experience of the neonate does rely on innate biological systems, but these biological systems simply do not operate in the absence of interactions with an environment. For example, hunger and a state of anger at its persistence, while not reactions to a specific external stimulus, are related to the environment’s failure to provide relief for the hunger. Postmodern theory’s conception of the importance of context is now pointing out that it is simply not possible to conceive of any human affective reaction that would occur outside an environment. For many years, theories regarding individual development argued for the hegemony either of a drive theory in which inner states determined affective life or of a stimulus–response theory that emphasized the significance of the environment in shaping the behavior and experience of the individual. Current theory, however, is emphasizing a process of continuous interaction between the organism and its environment both in development and in functioning in adult life. For example, Stern (1985) describes the neonate as innately programmed to seek out stimulation from the external world.

Neonates are now known to be quite competent in communicating affectively and in interpreting the affective signals given by their caretakers. The competent mother–baby pair soon develop an entire nonverbal vocabulary with which to understand each other. Infants are, therefore, “thoroughly social” from the very beginning of their lives (Stern 1985: 118). In the foreword to Schore’s (1994) extensive exploration of the relationship between affect and brain structure, Grotstein commented, “Furthermore, Freud’s concept of drive theory, one of discharge, has become superseded by an object-relations concept; thus, the drives, like the affects, and even like nerves, can now be seen to communicate by signals, and later, signs and symbols. The brain, like the mind, is first and foremost an information-seeking and -functioning organ, not primarily a tension-reducing one” (xxiv). Burman (1994) goes further than Grotstein:

Discussions about the indeterminacy of early responses, then, highlight that there is no such thing as “raw potential”: the behaviour we see exhibited by an infant can occur only within a social situation that, firstly, elicits it and, secondly, interprets it, thereby constructing it. It is now well established that environmental events can modify infant behaviour from the earliest moments of life…. One theoretical consequence of this is that there is no easy separation between internal and external, and that the exhibition of infant behaviour must be regarded as both reactive and interactive [italics added]. (32–33)

The social environment, then, has moved to a position of importance in both child development and adult psychology, with the social environment seen as fundamentally so interactive even with the baby that it is difficult to separate internal and external in causal propositions.

The difficulty in separating internal from external becomes even more apparent in considering Stern’s (1985:158) vitality affects. He calls the affects signaled by facial expressions the categorical affects and then adds vitality affects, which have to do with qualities such as timing, tone, intensity, and shape. The vitality affects are omnipresent, but almost always unconscious. We do not, for example, particularly notice that a person moves her arm with rapid acceleration and fullness of display, but will experience it nevertheless as forceful. Indeed, the patterns of affective communication that are laid down in early childhood remain throughout life, but at an unconscious level, and do so not because they are repressed or full of conflict but simply because they are recorded as part of an “implicit memory system” that is functional from birth and is different from the “explicit memory system” to which human beings have conscious access (Amini 1996).

The existence of an implicit memory system is consistent with research into the nature of the human brain that has now concluded that neural structure, perhaps particularly of the right brain where affective functioning is located, is immature at birth and is experience-dependent for its further development. In this regard, Schore (1994) comments that the physical and social context of the developing infant is an essential substratum of the assembling system. The implicit memory constructed in childhood presumably accounts for individual differences in perceptions and in object choices throughout life. Actions and interactions that do not fit well with existent patterning may simply not be noticed, while events that do fit well with the patterning will readily be perceived. Both Nathanson (1992) and Stern (1985) indicate that affective experiences that are not attuned to or amplified by caretaking others do not become conscious. In this manner, then, throughout life the individual will react selectively to environmental events in ways based at least partly on interpretations that had prominence in interactions in early childhood.

The interactive nature of the human infant is also emphasized in current theory because infants are seen as having an “emergent self” (Stern 1985) right from birth; in other words, there is no early symbiotic relationship from which the child must disengage. Experiences of psychological merger are now being interpreted as evidence of an achieved state of relatedness, rather than as a global or an amorphous state from which the child must learn to distinguish self and nonself. After research on newborns that was both extensive and intensive, Demos (1982) concluded that “the human infant is capable of making, and [is] probably perceptually biased to make, distinctions between self and environment, including other humans, right from the beginning” (558). Rather than having a Freudian stimulus barrier, the infant of current theory seeks sensory stimulation and appears to evaluate and hypothesize about the nature of stimuli from birth (Stern 1985). Neonates are curious about and attentive to their environment, both social and nonsocial.

Mutual affect signaling resonates with both infant and caregiver, ordinarily giving pleasure to both parties and amplifying the intensity of the experience. The infant is, however, not fully capable of dealing with this intensity and at times experiences sensory and affective overload, a very distressing state. Affect regulation is, therefore, an area in which it is crucial for infants and young children to receive adult assistance. The mother who holds her upset child closely and sings softly is literally changing the baby’s psychological state, acting as a soothing agent or, to use Stern’s (1985) term, as a “self-regulating other.” The caregiver’s regulation of affective states, allowing the child a slowly increasing level of arousal but stepping in to reassure the infant before the intensity becomes unbearable, is essential to the child’s ultimate ability to calm herself in the future. Only slowly will the child be able to take over these functions for herself, and the manner in which the child does this will reflect the flavor of the caretaker’s interventions.

Current theory, then, puts the influence of the social environment in the life of the young child on center stage. Yet often this social environment is understood basically to mean mother. Siblings, fathers, grandparents, and others, while not as totally neglected in theory as they were twenty-five or more years ago, are still rarely included in studies or discussions about child development, and the physical environment is almost never considered. While from a research perspective the need to limit the field within which variables will be selected is understandable, limiting studies to mother–infant interactions results too often in an overestimation of the mother’s influence within the child’s milieu, and with it comes the potential for blaming her for any failures or defects. Bronfenbrenner (1979) postulated that the competence of the mother–infant dyad is to a large extent a function of the other dyadic relationships that each of these partners has. Thus the mother’s ability to regulate her infant’s affect will be highly influenced by whether or not her environment can help to meet her needs, including her own affect regulation. Burman (1994) notes that not infrequently what is understood to be maternal deprivation is really a function of poverty. Thus while theory is now taking into account the immediate interpersonal environment of the infant, any child’s environment and its influential qualities remain, in fact, far more complex than has been fully recognized.

ATTACHMENT THEORY

BOWLBY’S (1969) ATTACHMENT THEORY had its roots in observations about what would now be called a pervasive “failure to thrive” in institutionalized infants whose environment lacked stimulation and continuity of caregivers. These children had little investment in their environment, human or nonhuman, and their physical and emotional development was severely delayed or skewed. Bowlby, as well as others who studied these children (e.g., Spitz 1965), focused primarily on the deprivation of human interaction that these children suffered. Bowlby thought that human beings need a close affectional bond with a caretaker in order to develop optimally. Operating within the context of Darwin’s theory of evolution, Bowlby included in his considerations the behavior of nonhuman animals, examining attachments in other species as well as humans. He adopted the term internal working model to refer to the aggregated experiences the child has with the caregiver—experiences that are then used by the child as an expectation of what attachment relationships are like.

Following Bowlby (1969), Ainsworth (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, and Wall 1978) developed what is now a well-known test for attachment pattern that involves observing the infant’s behavior in a laboratory when the mother departs, leaving the child with a stranger, and later returns. From the results of this test, Ainsworth postulated three categories of attachment in the young child: secure, anxious-avoidant, and anxious-resistant. Since that time, Main (Main and Morgan 1996) has identified a fourth group: disorganized-disoriented children. During the 1970s and 1980s, Bowlby’s attachment theory was largely ignored by mainstream psychoanalysis as too biological, but during the 1990s it attracted much more attention because of neurological studies indicating that the brain of the neonate actually develops in conjunction with environmental interactions (Amini 1996). Currently, attachment theory is getting even more attention due to studies that indicate the possible transmission of attachment styles from one generation to another. Mothers, for example, when examined on the basis of an interview regarding their own experiences with childhood caretakers, have been found to have attachment styles similar to those of their infants (Fish 1996).

Fonagy (1999) reports that three major longitudinal studies have shown a 68 to 75 percent correspondence between the attachment classification of an individual in infancy and later in adulthood. In explaining how secure attachment may be transmitted from caregiver to child, Fonagy suggests that the caregiver who has a more developed understanding of behavior as influenced by an inner state of mind is more likely to consider behavior in the infant as determined “mentalistically” in the child, thus stimulating the development of a “theory of mind” in the infant. Fonagy notes that children may have an understanding of an independent mind in the other as early as eighteen months.

Attachment theory now has been examined in an impressive number of studies with consistent results. Thus the existence of attachment needs in the neonate can be postulated with a considerable degree of confidence. Nevertheless, the manner in which results have been interpreted has been criticized, primarily on the basis that the strange-situation test, on which so much of this theory rests, may not take into account all the environmental factors that influence the child. Both Burman (1994) and Benjamin (1988), for example, note that a child who is accustomed to a baby-sitter on a regular basis due to the mother’s working does not protest the mother’s departure as much as does a child not habituated to such events. In this way, children of working mothers may be classified as anxious-avoidant when in fact they may be secure. Such interpretations may, these authors suggest, be used to further conservative political positions that emphasize women’s role as homemakers.

INTERSUBJECTIVITY

IN DISCUSSING THE mentalizing of the child, Fonagy (1999) states:

The child’s development and perception of mental states in himself and others thus depends on his observation of the mental world of his caregiver. He is able to perceive mental states when the caregiver is in a shared pretend mode of playing with the child (hence the association between pretend and early mentalization), and many ordinary interactions (such as physical care and comforting, conversations with peers) will also involve such shared mentation. This is what makes mental state concepts, such as thinking, inherently intersubjective: shared experience is part of the very logic of mental state concepts. (11)

Intersubjectivity is a concept used in explaining mental processes that is now in vogue with both child developmentalists and psychoanalytic theorists, and as such it is used by different theorists in differing ways. Applegate (1999) notes that Winnicott’s work (1958–1986) anticipated much of current thinking about intersubjectivity, and it is those theorists who have built on Winnicott’s ideas, specifically Stern (1985) and Benjamin (1988, 1998), who are most useful in considering the importance of the environment in psychological development. This is not surprising since Winnicott’s (1975b) well-known concept of transitional phenomena—that is, the child’s using an external, soft, nonhuman object to act as a soother in the absence of the mother—involves not a dyadic human interaction but a triad with one element being nonanimate.

Stern (1985) describes intersubjectivity as beginning with an awareness on the part of the infant (around seven to nine months) that the other has a separate mind. He views intersubjectivity as constituted of several pre- or nonverbal processes that include interattentionality, interintentionality, and interaffectivity. Intersubjective processes have major significance for the construction of a richly experienced inner life. These processes, however, should be seen to relate not just to interactions between two people, since the sharing involved is about some object, experience, or event in the environment. Intersubjective processes, therefore, are tripartite. Stern (1985:127) adopts Trevarthen and Hubley’s (1978) definition of intersubjectivity as “deliberately sought sharing of experience about events and things [italics added].” Further, Stern notes that once an infant becomes capable of intersubjectively experienced states, his mother becomes engaged in the socialization of her child.

Winnicott (1971b) thought the infant’s rage at the caretaker, whose devotion is inevitably insufficient to supply whatever is desired immediately, would eventually cause the infant to destroy her representation of the caretaker. Yet if this destruction is survived by the caretaker—that is, if the caretaker neither abandons nor retaliates—then the infant has learned that the other is external, out of the infant’s control. The paradox that Winnicott poses here is that it is only through this destruction of the inner object that the infant can come to love, because only an external object can truly be loved. This love is not a love that banishes hate, but a love that can tolerate the hate that is felt for the other and thus can achieve and live with the ambivalence that is characteristic of all mature human relationships. The achievement of ambivalence is pleasurable because with the recognition of the externality of the other comes the joy of being able to share experiences with that other.

Benjamin (1988) builds on this interpretation of Winnicott (1971b) with her concept of recognition, which is the needed experience of seeing and being seen that underlies the ability to share:

In my view, the concept that unifies intersubjective theories of self development is the need for recognition. A person comes to feel that “I am the doer who does, I am the author of my acts,” by being with another person who recognizes her acts, her feelings, her intentions, her existence, her independence. Recognition is the essential response, the constant companion of assertion. The subject declares, “I am, I do,” and waits for the response, “You are, you have done.” Recognition is, thus, reflexive; it includes not only the other’s confirming response, but also how we find ourselves in the response. We recognize ourselves in the other, and we even recognize ourselves in inanimate things [italics added]. (21)

Note that the recognition that is needed is external—it comes from the environment.

Benjamin (1988) also points out that a theory of intersubjectivity built on Winnicott’s ideas and a concept of recognition also requires a different understanding of reality. Reality is now not the “harsh” world to which the Freudian oedipal boy adjusts as he relinquishes his wish to have his mother in view of the castration threat his the father. Reality is now a delightful presence that can be explored, that can potentially be mastered through one’s own actions, and that can be shared with an intimate other. The child is now having a “love affair with the world,” as Mahler observed and recorded (Mahler, Pine, and Bergman 1975). Mahler, however, was working from a drive-theory perspective and did not pay further attention to the role that the world might play for the infant.

SOCIAL REFERENCING

IN PLAYING AND REALITY (1971a), Winnicott asked, “What does the baby see when he or she looks at the mother’s face? I am suggesting that, ordinarily, what the baby sees is himself or herself. In other words the mother is looking at the baby and what she looks like is related to what she sees there [italics in original]” (112). The infant’s picture of self is shaped in large part by what the mother’s a...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1. Theory
• Part 2. Domination or Liberation?
• Part 3. Implications for Practice
• Conclusion
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index