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
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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.

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Theory as Trauma





Theory as Trauma
A foray into applied psychoanalysis

Emily Kuriloff, Psy.D.
… We forget that all of us are in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by a train is waiting. (Levi, 1986, pp.50-51)
…The greatest enemy of Fascism is man. (Grossman, 1980, pp.195)

It was Tuesday, September 11, 2001, and the radio in the taxi had just reported that the second tower had fallen. I paid my fare and proceeded to the third floor of the William Alanson White Institute. The weekly clinical services meeting would welcome Gail Hornstein, author of a new biography (2000) of Frieda Fromm Reichmann, a founder of an American psychoanalytic tradition upon which the White Institute was built, and a refugee from Nazi Germany.
The conference room on the Upper West Side of New York was far from empty that morning as the minutes passed, and while a small number of participants chose not to stay, it was decided fairly quickly that the program would proceed. Hornstein broke the tension by noting that Fromm Reichmann herself had not cancelled a similar weekly meeting on the Monday night of December 8th, 1941, despite the fact that Roosevelt had just declared World War II. When she was asked at that gathering what she would do for the war effort, Fromm-Reichmann reportedly stated, "I know what I'm going to do. I'll do what I know best. I'll do psychotherapy" (p. 117)

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THEORY AS THICK DESCRIPTION[1]

DRAFT
THEORY AS THICK DESCRIPTION[1]

Robert Prince, Ph.D.

The question, How did the cataclysm that befell Europe during the Holocaust effect Psychoanalysis?—has been seriously neglected if not repressed. An attempt to consider this question leads immediately to trying to understand its avoidance, and implications of its avoidances for psychoanalytic institutions and ideas.

Psychoanalysis is a survivor of the Holocaust. Certainly we approach all survivors, even those who happen to be psychoanalysts, with care, partly because of our own dread and awe and their sensitivity acknowledging the impact of the external world on their lives and especially to attributions of damage. If insight amounts to shining a light on something that is, in Salberg's(2007)felicitous phrase, "hidden in plain sight." then Emily Kuriloff's decision to look at six psychoanalytic theorists in the context of their personal Holocaust experience is a stunning illumination. To use a concept from anthropology, Kuriloff "thickly" (Geertz,C.1973) describes psychoanalytic theory by adding this layer of historical context. The goal of my discussion is to provide further historical support and elaboration regarding the perspective that Kuriloff brings to psychoanalytic ideas.

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A More Natural Conversational Style?

In his pursuit of the laudable goals of more passion, risk-taking, and activity in psychoanalysis Irwin Hoffman, in his keynote address to the Division 39 Spring Meeting in Toronto, made the error of throwing out the baby with the bath water. He dismissed free association and analytic listening in favor of a more natural conversational style of interaction. In doing so Hoffman recommends giving up what is in truth the richest source of the very things he says he is after.

Freud quoted Schiller and his advice to young poets when he described the open attention to what comes to mind. Freud's recognition that he was introducing into therapeutic service a tool of thought used by poets and artists should remind us that rather than a dry and formal routine, the method of free association is rooted in an appreciation of surprise and risk-taking.

'Natural' conversation on the other hand, while apparently more relaxed and informal is heir to all the checks and limits that socialization supplies. Regard for the other's turn in a conversation, indeed for the other's comprehension and general feeling of well-being, place reasonable constraints on what we say in 'natural' conversations. Relaxing these constraints and opening up the possibilities of speech, i.e. the possibilities of what one can say and how one can say it, is a way to let more not less passion enter the discourse.

Hoffman is right that analysis can drag on in a long and lifeless manner. He is also right that it is the analyst's proper responsibility to seek and suggest ways to enliven the work and its effects. However, this is best done by a greater appreciation and attention to the often subtle passion of free association not replacing it with the more obvious expressions of feeling in 'natural' conversations.


--David Lichtenstein

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