Self-Hatred in Psychoanalysis

Detoxifying the Persecutory Object

Jill Savege Scharff, Stanley A. Tsigounis

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317762881
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psychology
• Categoría: Psychotherapy

The persecutory object is the element of the personality which attacks your confidence, productivity and acceptance to the point of no return. Persecuted patients torture themselves, hurt their loved ones and torment their therapists.
In this book, the authors deal with the tenacity of the persecutory object, integrating object relations and Kleinian theories in a way of working with persecutory states of mind. This is vividly illustrated in a variety of situations, including:
·individual, couple and group therapy
·serious paediatric illness
·working with persecutory aspects of family business.
It is argued that the persecutory object can be contained, modified, and in many cases detoxified by the process of skilful intensive psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Self Hatred in Psychoanalysis will be invaluable to a variety of practitioners including psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, social workers, psychiatrists and mental health counsellors.

Part 1

The theory of persecutory states of mind

Chapter 1

Introduction to the persecutory object

Stanley A. Tsigounis, PhD and Jill Savege Scharff, MD

WHAT IS A PERSECUTORY OBJECT?

The persecutory object is a part of the self that is imbued with a sense of harassment, suppression, subjugation, tyranny, torture, vengeance, and self hatred. The term persecutory object refers both to the mothering person as actually being, or being perceived to be, threatening (the external object) and to the trace of early relationships inside the infant self (the internal object). The persecutory internal object is structured in reaction to the nature of the external object: to the parents’ physical and psychological holding and handling, their temperaments, and their capacities to contain anxiety and give meaning to experience in interaction with the infant’s constitutional energy, esprit, and capacity for relating. A persecutory internal object, then, is a harsh, retaliatory part of the self that controls and torments self and other (Klein 1935).

We will raise questions about the persecutory object in formation as the infant deals with the mother in the first year of life. We will illustrate the ways the persecutory object exerts its hateful effect on the self and others, and conclude with examples of the adult refinding the persecutory object in the baby.

HOW DOES THE PERSECUTORY OBJECT FORM?

As human beings we have the gift of self-consciousness and reflection. We recognize our vulnerable state of being, both physically and psychically, and realize that the world contains real threats to our existence. We are conscious of feeling anxiety and capable of anticipation. Whether threat is real or imagined, survival becomes a dominant concern and motivates our behaviour towards preserving life. The wish to survive creates anxiety that acts as a warning system, alerts us to real danger, and triggers an adaptive response. If anxiety becomes too intense, we deal with it using a number of defence mechanisms designed to protect us from being overwhelmed, projective and introjective identification being the most fundamental.

When a person who is the object of our dependency and desire for relationship (the external object) is oppressive towards us, we take in the experience to control it inside our self. There forms an internal object with which the ego is in a dynamic relationship inside the self (the internal object relationship). The external object may be actually oppressive or just felt as being so. Theorists disagree over which is the defining variable. Frosch (1990) argued that many adults who struggle with persecutory anxiety were actually persecuted in some form earlier in their lives. They have been hurt, humiliated, tortured psychologically and often physically, and are compelled to repeat this process symbolically throughout their lives. Abraham (1924) thought that self-criticism and self-reproach stemmed from the introjection of objects or self-objects experienced with ambivalence and hosility due to sadistic libido. Klein (1946) thought that the constitutionally given aggressive force of the death instinct drives unconscious fantasies that, if unchecked by the loving power of the life instinct, interact with external reality to fuel the growth and development of the persecutory object. Once there is the nidus of a persecutory object in formation, its presence leads to expectations of persecution, draws more bad experience to it, and continues to build intrapsychic structure of this kind. It is the complex interplay between actual events and the individual’s emerging internal structure that leads to the formation of persecutory internal objects, affecting both the individual’s sense of self and perception of significant others.

WHERE DID CONCEPTS OF PERSECUTORY PROJECTIONS ORIGINATE?

Freud suggested that a harsh superego forms in direct proportion to the degree of harshness of the father, through a process of identification and introjection of his qualities. Later he suggested that the severity of the harsh superego is determined by the destructive impulses of the child and the need for modulation of drive energies. According to him, a person is vulnerable to both external and internal forces arising from aggressive and sexual impulses. These sexual and aggressive impulses supply the necessary ingredients for positive growth and development while simultaneously providing a threat to existence. Freud suggested that directing the impulse back towards one’s own ego modulates aggressive impulses.

There it is taken over by a portion of one’s ego, which sets itself over against the rest of the ego as superego, and which now, in the form of ‘conscience’, is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to have satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals.

(Freud 1930, p. 123)

This, Freud postulated, becomes the foundation for guilt and subsequent punishment. However it appears that this superego can mutate and become overly punitive. Klein later called this the harsh superego and Bion described it as the ego-destructive superego. The influence of a primitive superego denies the individual the normal use of projection to expel the persecutory feelings and he is left with only the mechanism of turning it back against the self.

Anna Freud gave importance to the defence of identification with the aggressor. She discovered that children identify with an aggressive individual (the external object) so as to modulate inherent anxiety. The identification with the aggressor becomes introjected into the child’s character structure (the internal object in object relations terms). The child imitates the aggressor and thus transforms himself from the person threatened into the person who makes the threat (Freud 1936). Having introjected the aggressor, the child projects the aggression outward to be rid of the persecutory anxiety.

Melanie Klein extended Freud’s thinking on superego formation in her extensive work with young children and developed a theory of psychic structure formation. In ‘Personification in the Play of Children’ Klein (1929) described the superego formed by the child’s use of multiple identifications and splitting. She suggests that through the mechanisms of identification and introjection, and in order to deal with the infant’s destructive aggressive impulses, the superego is split, resulting in the formation of a harsh superego. Contrary to Freud’s notion that superego development begins during the anal phase and consolidates after the oedipal phase, Klein thought that the infant superego starts to form during the first few months of life. Through experiences with the environment, the infant modifies its harsher aspects. Until then, the cruel superego fills the infant with persecutory anxiety, the hallmark of the paranoid-schizoid position.

This paranoid-schizoid position develops during the first two months of life (Klein 1946). The infant, besieged with anxiety and aggression emanating from the death instinct, must defend the self from the threat of annihilation. It uses the mental mechanisms of splitting, projection, projective and introjective identification (Scharff 1992). In Kleinian theory, the idea is that the projection of anxiety and aggression is specifically directed towards the mother’s breast or other body parts, which then become the repository of the infant’s persecutory anxiety. The breast is experienced as either a good breast or a bad breast, with the bad breast containing the anxiety.

The baby then fears retribution from the mother and her breast, which becomes a persecutory object. If the life instinct dominates and the breast is felt to be reliably there for nourishment and nurture when needed, death anxiety is held at bay. The breast is experienced as a satisfying, good breast, and that gives rise to a good internal object. When the death instinct dominates the life instinct, the need for the breast is too great, and it is experienced as a hostile bad breast, ready to devour or poison the infant, which gives rise to a bad internalized object. The object is split into good and bad. The ego and superego are split accordingly, resulting in the formation of a harsh superego which directs its aggression at the bad internalized object for failing to provide satisfaction. If the infant, or later the patient in the paranoid-schizoid position, cannot expel anxiety and aggression arising from the death instinct through projection, the developing person is forced to contain the persecutory anxiety in the form of an internal persecutory object.

Bion (1959) described the abnormal superego as the ego-destructive superego. He saw this ego-destructive superego developing from failures of communication between mother and infant, leading to the destruction of the ego, links with the object, and links between thoughts. It becomes a ‘super’ ego that destroys links. It becomes easy to imagine why a child would want to rid itself through projection of any process that could be experienced as destructive to the ego.

Example: Superego projection into the baby

Mr Alvez, a 35-year-old Hispanic man, was a New York City bus driver. He was a polite and deferential man who had driven for the Port Authority of New York for the previous fifteen years. He felt honoured to be entrusted with an expensive piece of equipment and the responsibility of its passengers. He took great pride in his ability to navigate a large, cumbersome machine through the crowded and narrow streets of Manhattan in a timely and safe manner. He had never had an accident, quite an accomplishment in New York.

One day, while on his regular route, a mother boarded his bus carrying a screaming, inconsolable infant. As Mr Alvez guided the bus along the route he began to feel anxious, provoked by the crying infant. Perspiration flowed down his face and his respiration quickened. His anxiety grew with each block he travelled. He became so anxious that he worried that he would not be able to drive the bus safely. Simultaneously, he began to grow angry. The baby would not stop screaming. He thought to himself, ‘If only the baby would just stop. Why did the mother pick my bus? Why couldn’t she quiet the infant? What am I going to do? The incessant crying and screaming is making me crazy.’

His anger and anxiety grew to such proportions that he became certain that he could no longer safely control the bus. He pulled the bus to an abrupt stop at the kerb and, with a shaking voice, ordered the woman and infant off the bus. The woman, shocked and confused, stood and slowly began to gather her belongings. By this time Mr Alvez was in an uncontrollable rage and state of acute anxiety. As the infant and mother passed to disembark, Mr Alvez raised his fist to strike at the infant. At that instant, with arm raised and poised to strike, Mr Alvez’s arm became paralyzed in mid air. He looked at his arm in amazement and fear, wondering if God himself had intervened and both protected the baby and punished him in one swift stroke.

The woman and infant quickly left the bus. With his arm frozen above his head, a shaken Mr Alvez called his dispatcher on the radio and requested a supervisor and relief driver. By the time the supervisor had arrived Mr Alvez could lower his arm to waist height but both his arm and hand felt paralyzed. He was seen by the company physician who prescribed tranquillizers, placed him on sick leave, and instructed him to get psychological assistance.

It was five days after the incident when I first met Mr Alvez. His arm and hand had minimal mobility and he felt frightened. Mr Alvez felt ashamed about his behaviour on the bus and humiliated at having to attend psychotherapy. His perfect employment record was ruined. This would stay as a smear on his personnel file forever. He desperately wanted to return to work yet he remained conflicted, fearful that he might see the woman and infant and repeat the whole experience. He felt guilty and ashamed about his reaction to the infant and mother; a true man would never strike or even pretend to strike an infant and mother. He also expressed great concern that his arm would not improve and that he would never be able to return to his bus, his passengers, and his route.

In fifteen years as a bus driver Mr Alvez had certainly encountered crying babies. It wasn’t clear whether he was directing the anger and the raised arm towards the infant, the mother, or both. It wasn’t clear what this particular mother and infant symbolized for Mr Alvez. What was clear was that Mr Alvez felt attacked and persecuted by the crying, screaming infant, felt that the infant was out of control and inconsolable, and then became himself out of control and inconsolable. His inability to think and thus to verbalize his experience was destroyed. He could only express his internal experience through the gesture of an affective outburst and subsequent paralysis.

If language is the cure for infancy as Phillips (1998) wrote, then the inability to form language represents a regression to infancy. We can hypothesize that the baby and/or mother–infant interaction acted as a symbolic catalyst, stimulating tremendous anxiety and rage in the bus driver. The crying, screaming, inconsolable baby was felt to be an intolerable persecutory object, attacking his internal sense of stability. He began to feel overwhelmed by his own inconsolable affects and, as is often the case, attempted to gain control by switching roles himself from victim to persecutor. Now he would rid himself of these overwhelming affects by attacking and destroying the external symbol of his distress, the baby. In his mind, only an act of God saved the baby, mother and himself from real tragedy. Of course we would say that the threesome was saved by an act of his unconscious mind in the form of a hysterical conversion reaction of the type that so interested Freud throughout his career. We could speculate that the bus driver was himself inconsolable as an infant and the crying infant represented the repressed pain of that primitive experience.

Fairbairn (1943), writing about the formation of internal objects in response to persecutory experience, noted that if a child is given a choice between a bad external object or no object the child will always choose the bad object. The need for relatedness supercedes the avoidance of the pain of relating to a bad object. Over time this bad object becomes internalized. As the child relates to the bad object the child feels bad himself. This appears similar to A. Freud’s observations regarding identification with the aggressor. Feeling worse than the bad parental figure, the child will argue vehemently that it is she who is bad, not the parent. This gives the child the illusion that her badness is under her control and conditional on her own behaviour. This process serves a defensive function against the realization that it is really the parent who is bad. As long as the child sees herself as bad she retains hope that her parent is bad only in response to her and that the parent is really good after all.

Fairbairn showed how the ego that is whole at birth is split in response to rejecting and need-exciting experiences with the mother. If the mother is experienced as rejecting or exciting, the objects that are internalized are rejecting or exciting objects. The ego splits off parts of itself called the antilibidinal and the libidinal egos to repress the rejecting and exciting objects respectively. This creates rejecting and exciting internal object relationship systems, each consisting of ego, object, and affect. Both systems threaten to return from repression and either of them may be of persecutory dimensions depending on the excessive quality of the original experience, the thoroughness of repression, and the strength and flexibility of the central ego.

Fairbairn was particularly interested in traumatized patients whose difficulties with ego integration interfere with metabolizing and transforming internal persecutory objects and confuse what is real from what is imagined. They may resort to a delusional world in order to sustain the relationship with the persecutory object. They maintain the status quo of their internal world of bad objects as a closed system that resists contact with others and blocks the therapist’s attempt to break the closed system.

Guntrip continued the work begun by Fairbairn, and then formulated his own theory of the creation of the persecutory object. He emphasized the role of the environment. He said, ‘Fear, persecutory anxiety, arises in the first place as a result of an actually bad, persecutory environment’ (1962, p. 199). This experience is taken inside and repressed as a rejecting object in relation to the antilibidinal ego, which Guntrip saw as a persecuting ego that directs its energies to hating its own weakness. Thus the persecutory object permeates the sense of self. The degree of this unconscious self hatred determines the level of the individual’s psychic stress.

WHY DO PARENTS FEEL PERSECUTE...