by Gabriella Serruya
The Section V 2003 Student Essay Award Competition winner is Gabriella Serruya, Institute for Graduate Clinical Psychology, Widener University, Chester, Pa.
In this beautifully written essay that ranges from memories of her own childhood play to insightful clinical encounters, Gabriella Serruya describes the unconscious as a ghost writer, a "story teller weaving its own logic and its own sequences into a tapestry that mezmerizes all who view it, if they dare." What Serruya has set out to do is nothing less than locate the unconscious processes that underlie Fonagy and Target's current work on the development of attachment and reflective function. In so doing, she describes a uniquely co-constructed intersubjective unconscious, very much in line with current relational models of the unconscious as unformulated experience.
—Ghislaine Boulanger
Part I: Play and Books
My parents are both psychiatrists.
Now, informing some people that your parents are psychotherapists, not to mention medical doctors, is something akin to casually mentioning that you descend from a line of witches. Inevitably, such people respond with an uncomfortable pause and a nod of the head or bland comment that screams the suspicion they forebear to admit. More often, people laugh out loud, and chuckle "So, did they analyze you all the time?" which, when they discover I am a graduate student in psychology, quickly turns to, "So, are you analyzing me?" The notion that one is an "expert" on the life of the mind seems to activate a fantasy in many ordinary, non-schizophrenic people that their thoughts can be read, almost as if thoughts had a bar code which could be scanned into consciousness by those with the proper equipment—namely, therapists.
Nor am I one to scorn this fantasy or even the discomfort that words such as therapy, words which promise contact with the psyche, elicit. As a little girl, I recall sitting in the back seat of the family station-wagon, wondering, as we sped along, whether my thoughts could be read, rather like the splashy signs for suntan lotion, liquor, and weekend getaways dotting the highway. I knew, with all the authority of my seven year old rationality, that mind-reading was not possible. But just in case, in the spirit of prudence, I decided to regulate any possible leakage. While I was thinking thoughts I considered innocuous, I would silently say "GO," visualizing a traffic light on green; when I came to thoughts that seemed more private and risky, I commanded "STOP," and the traffic light turned red. With a not entirely coherent logic, I decided that, though I could not altogether stop others from penetrating my thoughts, I could control their access. I must have imagined thought-readers as a rather friendly lot who would dutifully comply with my mental stop-lights and detour signs.
I no longer engage in what was, truthfully, a rather arduous degree of thought-monitoring. However, I do have moments in which I am convinced that other people can gauge my deepest intentions (particularly when I feel guilty), and I wager to say that most people share in such periodic experiences of felt transparency. There is something about the workings of the unconscious that provokes magical thinking, dramatic fantasy and equally dramatic fear.
I prefer not to believe that this mode of perception, or "primary processing," represents a more primitive, uncivilized, aspect of the self, governed alone by selfish demands. Or, if the unconscious must be characterized in such a way, I maintain that a great deal can be learned from the immediacy and force with which it translates impulses into images and feelings, i.e. in dreams, stories, and associations. And I am wary about attributing the sense of magic and mystery that attends such images and feelings to, simply, the mechanics of repression. To say that the power of a dream—or a poem, for that matter—simply reflects the affective charge of forbidden material seeping through ego-censorship is like saying that Beauty derives its impact from shock-value. I like to think there is a wisdom to the way the unconscious translates feelings into visions.
For instance, take the way my brother and I , as children, interpreted my parent's rather intangible profession. We knew our parents talked to patients, often on the phone in the morning. While we shoveled spoonfuls of Rice Krispies into our mouths, Mom and Dad calmly instructed people to increase or decrease their doses and made scribbly marks with ink pens in important leather books covered inside with times and dates. The medications bore exotic names: Xanadu, Ceyloneril, Marzipan (so it seemed), and they came in mysterious little packages called "milligrams," a word which thrilled my seven year old self with the hint of grown-up power and authority. Little wonder, then, that in the stuffed animal kingdom ruled over by me and my brother we had not only restaurants, shops, an airport and a dentist's office, but also a psychiatrist's office, presided over by an olive-green stuffed dragon with narrow eyes and a red flicker tongue. Dr. Dragon, as we dubbed him, was a wise and officious practitioner who was liberal, if a bit rigid, with his prescriptions: nearly everyone who came to see him was diagnosed with Major Depression and prescribed a hefty dose of "Hyderecees," a medicine whose active ingredient was Helium. This caused the frequent but relatively benign side effect of floating about ten feet off the ground. Psychiatric consultations consisted primarily of instructions on how to control the unwanted levitation. This , after all, reflected our understanding of our parents' profession: the language of mood disorders and thought disturbances was beyond us, but bodily symptoms we grasped. And maybe we were not too far off—somehow, in our enactment of the grown up world, we understood that the role of the therapist is to "lift people" without scaring them.
As I got older, and eventually set my sights on a career as a child therapist, I became more attuned to the subtext of play. Sometimes, the directness with which children announce unconscious emotional needs through "pretend" startles me. I remember, for example, babysitting a little girl of six or seven, whose parents were going though a complicated divorce, in part over the stress of taking care of their youngest, autistic child. The girl, black pigtails flying, entered the playroom in a storm of cheer. With a wide smile and unceasing chatter, she took down all the stuffed animals from the shelves and piled them on the floor. She would begin playing with two or three animals, and no sooner had we settled on our characters and the beginning of a plot, that she would jump up, grab two more toys, and announce, with the same vehement vigor, a new storyline. Dazed by her frenetic pace, and, frankly, overwhelmed, I ventured to admit my exhaustion, indirectly, at least. At that point, I was playing the part of a rhinoceros, and she spoke for a small elephant with a rainbow saddle. Hoping not to upset her, I made my rhinoceros into a severely shy and skittish character who finally implored his boisterous elephant companion: "I am too afraid to play with you. You move so quick and talk so loud, it makes me scared!" I was counting on the medium of play, or "pretend," to buffer any feelings of rejection—I forgot that there is a degree to which play is not pretend, but a direct representation of feelings, all the more so, perhaps, when high anxiety enters the fray. The little girl immediately sobered and turned a long, freckled face to me. She then picked up the elephant slowly, and had it speak, in a doleful tone, to the rhinoceros: "I guess you don't want to be my friend."
Overcome with guilt, I quickly moved the rhino towards her, and had him protest: "Oh, no, no, I do want to be your friend, I do, I do, it's just that I get so scared so quickly, but maybe if you could just talk lower or move more slowly so my slow mind can keep up, oh please…"
I am glad to report that the rhinoceros and elephant did manage a friendship after that. However, the incident made me acutely aware of the intense reality of feelings and the means used by children to protect themselves from their fears. If it were not for her relentless enthusiasm and near hyperactivity (attitudes, which closely mirrored her mother's approach to stress), my young friend would not have been able to stave away the intense fear that her family was dissolving and she would be left alone.
If anything, I wish this little girl could have played better: for longer periods of time, and with more ability to be "transported" into the play-space. In later times I spent with her, she refused to play, a pattern I have noticed in some of the children I saw in an outpatient mental health clinic. One of the positive powers of the unconscious is to help bind anxiety by enacting curative or healing solutions to emotional distress in play. The ability, in turn, depends on the more mysterious ability of the unconscious to weave a spell of "pretend," which removes children from the contents of the play, so that they see it as pure fantasy, and thus frees children to insert the most powerful and confusing aspects of their life into the fabric of the play. This quality of enchantment, of virtual self-hypnosis, amazes me. The unconscious is not just some cavern of loosely floating images and fragments, or a baby's maw, screaming out dreams and hunger; it is a storyteller (a wise old woman, I imagine, like one of the Fates) weaving its own logic and its own sequences, into a tapestry that mesmerizes all who view it—if they dare.
Part II: Attachment
What does attachment theory have to do with play, literature, and the magical unfolding of unconscious processes? It provides a necessary context. It explains that we are social creatures who require not just physical survival, in the domain of the material environment, but emotional survival, in the domain of relationships. This requires not only that we accurately read meaning into the vast lexicon of gesture, expression, and inflection with which people communicate, but also that we, as "readers," connect the behaviors of others to feelings within ourselves. I so like Fonagy's proposal (indebted to the work of Bion and Kohut) that, as infants and young children, we find our "self" via its reflection in the mind of the caregiver. Moreover, he explains, through the dual process of reflection and containment, the caregiver both "gives back" and helps structure the child's experience of selfhood, or way-of-being-with, in Stern's words (Fonagy, 1995). For instance, when an infant, overtired and somewhat hungry, cries, the caregiver, recognizing the signs of distress, generally scoops the baby up, croons something reassuring while looking at the child with a long face, in sympathy with the child's mood. Soon after, the caregiver locates a bottle, feeds baby for a short spate, and puts baby to bed. In loosely mirroring back the child's own distress, the caregiver not only validates the baby's experience, but also brings the experience of distress into the intersubjective domain.
Besides reflecting back the baby's distress, the caregiver's ability to recognize the source of the child's distress, and to act accordingly (i.e. feeding the baby, putting him to bed) contains the child's feeling and sends the message that the child's distress is a logical response to a solvable problem. In Fonagy's words, the caregiver recognizes the child's intentionality, or his active agency in the world (Fonagy, 2002).
Why do I like this theory so much? As a literature lover, I find the emphasis on reading the minds of others, and, in particular, reading the "text" of one's self in the mind of another, powerful, thrilling and deeply promising. If the self is borne out of multiple acts of interpretation—both the parent interpreting the child and vice versa—then there is that much more opportunity for elaboration, modification, and reinterpretation (a.k.a. therapy, for instance!). I suppose I am a product of my undergraduate literature department, where much was made of the connection between constructing a personal identity and writing a story. But I do not believe that any story, or any interpretation, can be made to fit a life or self. In a paradoxical fashion I don't fully grasp, the continuous mutual acts of interpretation that characterize human communication (both verbal and non-verbal) has to honor the core meaning of the other's gesture—even at the same time that a novel interpretation can change the meaning of the other's gestures. An obvious example of this phenomenon is that of a young child who has just fallen while running and looks, wide-eyed, to a nearby adult. The child's face is poised to either contort into a maelstrom of tears or to soften and brighten with a giggle of relief. The adult's response decides which response wins out: does the adult interpret the fall as a disastrous assault to the child's well-being or as yet another incidental casualty of childhood activity, with little harm done? In such an instance, the adult's interpretation may radically shape the child's subsequent reaction. Then again, it may not. If a child starts instantly bawling and clutching his knee, chances are that an adult's casual assertion that "Oh, it's OK, honey," won't carry much weight, as it ignores the child's essential experience. And, yet, even here, generalizations fail, because of the many examples, in clinical literature and personal experience, of how children learn to interpret events—even pain and distress—according to the dictates of important others, even when the interpretation conflicts with their own spontaneous reaction. The essence of an avoidant attachment, for instance, is the child's learning that marked distress will not be acknowledged and thus must be avoided, in order to win needed parental proximity (even while appearing to disdain it). A "false self" indeed.
Part III: Good Ghosts and Bad Ghosts
So, in all of this reciprocal writing and re-writing of behavior which dyads engage in, where does the unconscious come in? I imagine the unconscious like a veritable "ghost author": behind the scenes, he writes stories that paint a reality somehow not allowed, or "edited out," of the person's conscious life. The reasons for such editing are voluminous, but concern some kind of breakdown or tension in interpretation, i.e. in the mismatch between how a person sees and feels himself to be and how another sees (and so treats) him. This discrepancy need not be disastrous; quite the opposite, it may create an essential "playspace," as Winnicot might call it, for growth and change. In fact, young children at play with one another are experts at carrying off interpretations that, at first glance, conflict with their peers' desires. Imagine the following imaginary scene, based on many observations of kids at play.
"I don't want to be the dog," a five-year-old complains in a game of house.
"But we need the dog to bark when the robbers come. He saves us!" coaxes a peer. This naturally casts the role of "dog" in an entirely new light, from passive "extra" to starring role.
The therapeutic maneuver of reframing achieves the same end. In both cases, the re-interpreter, be she playmate or therapist, offers an interpretation that transforms (as opposed to crushing) the other person's perceptions into a richer, perhaps more gratifying and, at any rate, more compelling story. But it can't be the content of the new story alone that lends it its power—I think there has to be some unconscious communication between the two people in the room, such that the one offering up the new story or interpretation does so in a manner precisely tailored to address the concerns and desires of the other person. One person, to draw on Fonagy's model again, must present in his new story a reflection of the other that allows that other person to discover himself in a new light. I like to imagine that, through a process of inter-personal attunement, and under the direction of people's unconscious "ghost-writers" invisibly communing with one another, the text of peoples' characters develop and bloom.
So far, however, I have referred only to the good ghosts, the ghosts who want to share and even change their stories. There are also bad ghosts, ghosts who want to lord their stories over everyone else's. Instead of reading the works of their fellow ghosts and trying to merge stories into a richer whole, the bad ghosts pen interpretations that compete and bitterly antagonize other people's unconscious narratives, or, worse, smother them, until a thin, rigid and impoverished story is all that is left of the other's self. I call this abuse.
Case material and literature provides numerous examples. A mother sees her child as "manipulative" and "seductive," unconsciously interpreting the child's behaviors in light of the mother's own experience of sexual abuse. The child, equally unconsciously, "accepts' the interpretation despite her initial experience of her own actions as innocent. A father authors a story that his son is "lazy" and "ungrateful"; the son grudgingly "accepts" this interpretation, and struggles dutifully to rewrite his life along lines more tolerable to his father. However, the son's unconscious meanwhile rejects the father's story and writes an alternative narrative which renders the father a helpless subject, prostrate before the son's tyrannical anger. This particular father-son dynamic borrows from Kafka's many descriptions of relations between young male characters and older men. The older men, such as the judges in "The Trial" or the father in the short story "The Judge," appear as all-powerful, rather bestial types to whose whims the younger men are subject; yet, there are climactic moments in which the younger men appear to "turn the tables" and assume full control, laying waste to the pitiful forms of their decrepit, aged fathers. With the brilliance characteristic of Kafka's work, the nature of such reversals are ambiguous, such that it is impossible to tell whether they occur in "real life" or in the fantasies of the younger men. This ambiguity captures the essence of unconscious life, where fantasies are realities—stories—rivaling the doings of conscious life.
Where do these so-called "bad" ghosts come from? The attachment literature has long suggested that the caregiver's ability to perceive the child in a generally positive manner consistent with details of the real relationship between caregiver and child (as opposed to seeing the child, unconsciously, as a reincarnation of sorts of some past figure, often an abuser) is critical to the formation of a secure bond between caregiver and child. Fraiberg, in her classic essay "Ghosts in the Nursery," likened the tenacious hold of past abusers to haunting by ghosts (Fraiberg, 1968). I see these ghosts as struggling writers traumatized by their failure to have their stories told, desperate to narrate themselves into life through living vessels. I don't think this metaphor of possession is accidental: there is a magic and a kind of sorcery in the unconscious' ability to write stories that so profoundly shape people's behaviors. In my own, still quite limited, clinical work, I have been amazed to find the accuracy of the ghost metaphor: working with trauma survivors sometimes really does feel like working with the possessed, if only for brief moments. I recall one mother, for instance, who brought her seven year old to see me because of his clinging behavior at home and at school and extreme anxiety about her physical health. The mother had been physically abused as a child and then abused again by her boyfriend, the father of the child, whom she had since left. What struck me most about this mother was her intense calm, as if within the confines of her lowered voice and gentle communications with her son, she were holding at a bay a furious wind that could destroy them both. She identified this wind one day when she described to me her "former self" who had, she described, a terrible temper. She had vowed to prevent this anger from intruding on her relationship with her son because she had learned that it "did no good," and she did not want her son to learn similar patterns of behavior. I applauded her resolve to learn from her past experience and to create the safety for her son she had so sorely lacked growing up. And yet, I could see, without fully understanding, that there was a more powerful force present in the interaction of mother and son. The very pressure of her quiet and the unerring evenness of her tone hinted at a lurking danger, a danger which the son seemed to fear would carry his mother away. One day, in school a teacher's aide at school roughly handled the boy, thinking he had been insolent. That afternoon, as scheduled, the mother brought her son to see me. She was furious. It was with awe and a little bit of fright that I sat across from her as she pored out her anger in near whisper of words, perfectly spaced and arranged in tight sentences that had the chop and edge of military orders. "I will not let my son be treated like I was treated" she intoned, staring past my shoulder as if at an invisible aggressor behind me. I studied her face in rapt attention, feeling as if I could not look away, feeling as if there were a smoldering fire of injustice between us that I had to help her put out.
I never expected that my first clinical experience with hypnosis would have me as the subject and my patient as the hypnotist.
Then there was the physically and verbally abusive mother who brought her two teenage daughters to see me, only to end up slapping one of them, hard, across the face in one of our first sessions. Shock does not begin to describe my reaction. It was not simply the unleashed aggression, the total failure of impulse-control that astounded me about this family in which disputes were settled (or, more aptly, perpetuated) with fist-fights all around. I more or less understood the girls, with their tight-eyed reserve and muscle-taut wariness. It was the mother's mien that astonished me: her doughy lower lip, the dark furrowing of her brow, the big eyes and the taunting, whining words that tumbled from her mouth. It was like seeing a six-year-old charading as a mother! (I am forever grateful to my supervisor who, upon hearing of my anger at the mother, asked me what psychological age I imagined the mother to be. This perspective vastly improved my understanding of the case.) This mother was possessed by an irritable, unsatisfied little girl bent on punishing all those who failed to meet her insatiable demands. Here was a case in which a simple "re-interpretation" of facts did not suffice; it did not help for me to suggest to the mom that her own longstanding experience of hardship and legitimate desire for care and nurture made her children appear ungrateful to her, when, in fact, it was not they who could provide the love she desired. My powers of "authorship" were nil in comparison to the wrathful, hurt, six year old ghost who wielded the pen of this mother's perceptions. However, once, when I saw the mother alone, and asked about her own childhood, I saw even this ghost blow over and away, revealing a wasteland behind the mother's eyes that told me as much about her history as a detailed report. She simply sat, smiling a little, rather insipidly, and staring askance with blank eyes. "Are you spacing out?" I asked with concern, alluding to a pattern of behavior she had admitted to in an earlier session.
"I guess," she giggled in a feathery voice.
She did not describe her childhood, nor did she return to therapy .
Part IV: Accepting the Ghosts
Despite my dichotomous labeling of "good" and "bad" ghosts, as with most psychological phenomena, multiple aspects usually are present at once; ghosts are good and bad, so the stories they tell can be neither accepted full-heartedly or dismissed out of hand.
The struggle and complexity of living with ghosts, those unconscious authors of a wished-for life, is expertly chronicled in Toni Morrison's astonishing book, "Beloved." Here, a mother, Seth, is haunted by the ghost of her toddler daughter whom she murdered to save from slave-owners. I think this book should be required reading for anyone who works with trauma, and not just the trauma of an individual but the trauma of a people. If unhappy ghosts arise where attachment breaks down, then slavery, one of the greatest perversion of attachment imaginable, bred generations of miserable haunting. In Morrison's story, the ghost Beloved, arises from the river one day, the exact age she would have been if she had survived. The ghost-child moves in with her mother and sister, and the family life becomes dominated by the fierce hungers and joys of this returned spirit who does not speak but sings in eerie haunting poetry that captivates the reader as much as her family. Whether Beloved's return is real or elaborately fantasized, and whether it is more of a blessing or a curse, is left, wisely, wide open.
Beloved's voice, a voice of suffering and innocence and blood-thick rage, a voice which has as much power to destroy as it does to redeem, is a voice and embodiment of the unconscious. Stories like Morrison's remind us that the unconscious writes not just the narratives of individuals but of generations, and that letting the ghosts speak—no matter how "bad" or frightening they seem—is the first step to letting the slow magic of healing begin.
Thus has my conception of the unconscious evolved and I do not doubt for a second that this path, through play and books and introspection and various relationships, clinical and otherwise, is itself a haunted one. I know I am not the only writer here. I know that my interest in attachment theory and my fascination with the suffering and love that goes on between parents and children is itself a legacy, a kind of haunting. I believe this haunting is a gift that, when handled with care, offers a means with which to communicate with the past and continuously re-write the future. As a developing individual and as novice therapist, I aspire to court all the ghosts I can find.
References:
Fonagy, P., Steele, M., Steele, H., Leigh, T., Kennedy, R., Mattoon, G., and Target, M. (1995). Attachment, the reflective self and borderline states: The predictive specificity of the Adult Attachment Interview and pathological emotional development. In: S. Goldberg, R. Muir, and J. Kerr (Eds.), Attachment Theory: Social, Developmental and Clinical Perspectives (pp. 233-278). New York: Analytic Press.
Fonagy, P., and Target, M. (1997). Attachment and reflective function: Their role in self-organization. Development and Psychopathology, 9, 679-700
Fraiberg, S., Adelson, E., & Shapiro, V. (1975). Ghosts in the nursery. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 14, 387-421.
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