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Mother Tongue?
I've been working with Willy, a man in his 80's and a refugee (in his childhood and along with his mother, father and younger brother) from Hitler's Europe. Our psychotherapy has focussed largely on Willy's fraught relationship with his wife of many years--herself a holocaust survivor--around their difficulties with each other, with their children and their grandchildren.
A year or so ago, his oldest daughter died. I had come back from a vacation to his numbness and literally unexpressible grief. It's his inability to experience his grief--and what it took for him to move forward--that I want us to think about.
His daughter's death had not been unexpected. She had had advanced liver disease--the consequence of intravenous drug use earlier in her life, and the consequence, Willy himself had acknowledged many times, of a life of promiscuity and drug abuse. "I lost my daughter many years ago," he would say.
But now he was also saying, "There must be something wrong with me. I can't cry. I can't mourn...." "I don't know, doc," he would say, "What's wrong with me?" Over the weeks that followed he would lapse into a numb silence and then into his repetitive questioning and fruitless self-examination. I sat with him, I felt for him, I tried to give him a way to think about himself--in all the ways psychoanalytic clinicians do: how he might feel; how I might feel, what it all might mean: the frustrated anger with his daughter, the disappointment, his self-protective distancing from his own feelings.... All to no avail.
Then in a session some months after the event, Willy was talking about his wife and their early relationship. He was remembering the early sweetness of married life, how much his wife had wanted a baby girl, a little "meidlele," he said in Yiddish, and how when the baby was born, he said, "We had our little meidlele," and at that his voice broke and he cried!
There was nothing I needed to say at that moment; I offered him the box of tissues; I took one myself.
So the question: What happened there? Why did the word in Yiddish, and his saying it aloud, allow things to move forward--forward with the emotional process of grieving, and, subsequently, forward with the interpretative process as well?
Surely there's something to say about this question from a range of psychoanalytic prespectives. My own feeling is that what is most interesting here is the nature and power of early language--how we talk to ourselves in our intimate and ungarded moments--but I'm eager to hear what others might think.
--Henry Seiden
2009 Morton Schillinger Division-Wide Essay Contest
Section V announces the 2009 Morton Schillinger Division-wide Essay Contest.
All Division 39 members are eligible.
The topic is "What Is the Most Urgent Question for Psychoanalysis Now?'
Maximum length is 15 Pages (double spaced). The deadline is March 1, 2009
First Prize is $1000, Runner-up is $200.
After blind judging, winning essays will be posted on the Section Web site: The Sphinx.
The awards will be made at the Section V Reception in San Antonio.
Address for submissions:
Administrator for Section V
333 West 57th Street, Suite #103
New York, NY 10019-3115
Please send six printed copies with no author identification to the above address. Also include a separate cover sheet with author, title, and contact information.
Our New Name
Our New Name
Please note our new name. The Sphinx is an enigmatic character: sometimes woman sometimes man, part human part beast, neither silent nor discursive. The Sphinx poses a question. Like the psychoanalyst the Sphinx is not the one who knows but the one who may provide the condition for new knowledge. This is the spirit of The Sphinx as a site of inquiry on the web, a site where psychoanalytic inquiry takes place. We invite you to engage The Sphinx. Post your inquiries. Submit your hypotheses, half formed queries, and open questions. This site is open to all to read and to respond. All members of Division 39 may join: click 'register' and you are then free to enter into discussions and post replies.
Please note: Your user name and password will be sent to you automatically when you register. If you don't see it in your email inbox check to see if it went into your spam folder. If you have any questions or problems registering, please contact us directly.
The Special Enough Child?
The Special Enough Child?
A patient says (in so many words), "I know I'm not the center of your universe and not the only person to whom you're important... but I can still feel Special Enough to trust this process we are in together and allow it to help me without undermining things." Clearly the analyst has created a holding environment and is behaving as a Good-Enough mother. But what processes are actually at play in the patient?
Winnicott's good-enough mother is by now quite usefully ubiquitous. But I wonder what exists, qualitatively, on the other side of the dyad. A special-enough child? With so much focus on the interrelatedness of mother/child throughout early development, surely the presence of a good-enough mother is not the sole guarantee of success. Neither does not-quite-good-enough mothering doom every child to the same sealed fate. So what are the achievements and contributions of the child with (and without) good-enough mothering? What is her experience? At the other side of symbiotic merger, does the child perceive coming into her own existence? Winnicott says the infant goes from requiring a mother-person's full-time presence simply to exist ("there is no such thing as a baby") to an awareness of dependence on an object who must be shared with others. That seems a rather challenging leap, one requiring both intraspychic and relational scaffolding for safe passage. How does the child let go of the idea that its own wishes for things (including for a perfect mother) makes them so? How does she grasp that it is mother's choice to meet her needs, and how might it come about that such awareness does not wipe out or subsume the child's agency in wanting? Perhaps there is something about feeling she is special-enough to her good-enough mother to risk the transitions towards increasing autonomy. Being too special leaves the child no room to see herself as effective (all good is the work of the Perfect Mommy - I can't be trusted to get anything that right). Being not special enough keeps the child imprisoned in a non-responsive environment, where there is no evidence that wishes initiate or deserve met needs, and thus no sense of being worthy.
(I'd be happy to know about writers who take up this perspective, and/or of concepts I may have misread!) --Priscilla Butler
Theory as Trauma
Editor's Note:
What follows are the complete texts of two papers that were presented in slightly shorter versions at the recent meeting of Division 39 in NY (April 2008). They are introduced by a new discussion written by Ghislaine Boulanger.
The papers present how the psychoanalytic field has addressed and failed to address the psychic meaning of profound historical and social trauma in general and in particular those associated with Nazism and the Holocaust.
Please send us your responses and comments.
From Dissociation and Denial into Meaningless:
A Response to Kuriloff and Prince
Ghislaine Boulanger, Ph.D.
This response cannot possibly do justice to the breadth and scholarship of Kuriloff's and Prince's papers; their conclusions are so far-reaching, the ripples assume tsunami-like proportions for psychoanalysis. I don't have the luxury of time to reflect on all the points they make, yet the luxury of time and distance to reflect will turn out to be a key part of my brief response to their work. Click here to read the rest of this post...
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