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Unself-Help

 

Self-help and psychoanalysis are incompatible. Despite attempts to turn some of the offshoots of psychoanalysis – such as attachment theory – into digestible ideas for people to work on individually, psychoanalysis itself doesn’t offer much in that vein. This is in part because it doesn’t have an unambiguous idea about what it means to be well. Being effective or successful might be viewed as a form of narcissistic madness by some psychoanalysts. (Indeed, the narcissistically defended tend to come to therapy hoping to ‘perfect’ themselves, only to be confronted with deeper and more troubling imperfections.) Even the alleviation of suffering is not necessarily seen as an object to be aimed at; Freud’s famously pessimistic comment that he wanted to change ‘neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness’ is, seemingly, not a great advertisement for his therapeutic goals. In ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’, he comments, ‘One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be ‘happy’ is not included in the plan of ‘Creation’.’ This being the case, it seems reasonable to ask: what is psychoanalysis for?

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Psychoanalysis is not a series of ideas about what it means to be a top-notch human being, or, indeed, how you might become one, or how to be chipper despite everything. Rather, it is a very particular way of interacting that is designed to bring about certain forms of insight. This way of interacting precludes the approaches that underpin self-help.

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Psychoanalysis depends upon the ‘analytic attitude’, essentially, a mode of being with someone which is unobtrusive and largely neutral. This is a cornerstone of what is offered, because, in the absence of answers to personal questions, the offer of advice or reassurance and the unwillingness to structure the session or give ‘homework’, the way the person-in-therapy relates to the therapist becomes the object of attention and exploration. It is not really possible to offer a self-help manual without offering advice or reassurance, so what I offer here (and what you’ll find in psychoanalytic therapy) is unself-help. If I don’t try to persuade you, or imagine I can solve your problems, or offer you a consolatory sop, what can I do? Perhaps rather than trying to make you feel better, in the sense of easing your worries or sadness, I might enable you to feel better, in the sense of being more aware of what you feel and why you feel it. Perhaps rather than perfect you, I might enable you to understand yourself. Though the careful listening embodied in psychoanalysis may not make you happy or successful, it might enable a deeper form of living: it might enable a greater – or at least a less anguished or defensive – knowledge of your inner world. Perhaps we can work to replace the ‘neurotic misery’ of feeling like a prisoner of your own mind with the ‘ordinary unhappiness’ of a life lived with others.

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There is something importantly egalitarian in this view. As the inventor of attachment theory, John Bowlby, puts it ‘some traditional therapists might be described as adopting the stance “I know; I’ll tell you’, the stance I advocate is one of ‘You know; you tell me’”. The psychoanalyst just wants you to express to yourself (and perhaps begin to admit both in the sense of own up to and to let in) what you have always known. D. W. Winnicott has a beautiful expression of this idea in his essay ‘The Use of an Object’ (to which I will return later):

If only we can wait, the patient arrives at understanding creatively and with immense joy, and I now enjoy this joy more than I used to enjoy the sense of having been clever. I think I interpret mainly to let the patient know the limits of my understanding. The principle is that it is the patient and only the patient who has the answers. We may or may not enable him or her to encompass what is known or become aware with acceptance.

The analyst’s interpretations in this understanding are there not to offer the textbook truth, but to show how much has been understood and to invite the person-in-therapy to say: ‘No, not that, not quite.’ If Bowlby is right about the authoritarian stance of the ‘traditional therapist’ what he says is even truer of self-help gurus; they are very happy to tell you what’s good for you. One can see it in a relatively benign form in the psychologically informed agony aunts and uncles who are to be found in newspapers, who offer advice about relationship problems and the like. You see it in a far more pernicious form in books like Jordan Peterson’s Twelve Rules for Life. These rigid maps to a certain form of psychological functioning go against the idea of an open mode of relating, the outcome of which is up for grabs, there to be debated; in psychoanalysis, the answers are not in the back of the book.

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There is another way in which what I offer might be called ‘unself-help’. The analytic attitude reveals what the person-in-therapy brings to a session beyond or behind the story she tells; the way she reveals her ‘inner world’. She says things, but she also brings the way she has learnt to relate to people. The person of the therapist is the subject of what is known as the ‘transference’. Common sense tells us that any act of communication is designed to convey information; but it also has a by-product as well (and this is especially true of the unique communication that takes place in the psychoanalytic space) in that it recreates implicit ideas about what communication is for, what sorts of things it can achieve. We are haunted by former attempts to receive and transmit, haunted by other times and places, but most importantly by other people. Any act of communication is an attempt to influence, to gain something, to affect the listener in ways that look back to our very earliest attempts to make ourselves understood. What we are all trying to say, every time we open our mouths, or even make a bodily gesture is, as Nietzsche puts it at the start of his autobiography, ‘Above all, do not mistake me for another!’ Psychoanalysis is a system – a way of listening – to make these elements of communication come into consciousness.

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This notion of how other people dwell within us can be further explained by looking at Freud’s paper ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (another text to which I will have frequent cause to return). Here, he investigates the difference between the feelings experienced in bereavement and those experienced during depression. Both, Freud argues, are experiences of loss. Mourning is different, however, as it serves the function of proving to the grieving person that the loved and lost figure has really gone. After that, the energy, the love, invested in that person can be gathered back into the self (eventually), and redeployed to carry on living. In melancholia (or depression, though this distinction is another to which I will return), the loss is a strange and ambiguous one that the person cannot acknowledge or process. So instead of regathering that lost energy, it remains unavailable for positive or productive action. Indeed, it gets used in a horribly self-destructive way. Instead of learning that the loss has happened, a deep, subterranean link to the loss is forged. Feelings of anger or resentment for that loss get felt against the self.

Thus, the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object. In this way an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification.

‘The shadow of the object’ is one of Freud’s most haunting and haunted phrases. The shadow he conjures is both threatening and chilling. The ego splits into a critical voice and a damaged new version identified with absence itself. What the phrase means for us here is that Freud’s explanation of depressive illness in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ is also an explanation of the sources of the self. We are made up of identifications with the things we have loved and lost. When Polonius advises – indeed admonishes – Laertes in Hamlet ‘to thine own self be true’, he is begging the question that the play itself asks so frequently: ‘What piece of work is a man?’ or more simply, ‘who am I? What am I made of?’ Freud’s answer here is: our identifications with other people. So, to be true to ourselves is a deeply ambiguous experience. We learn the language of the self from the repertoire on offer; at times these identifications can be felicitous, at others, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ argues, they are disastrous. When we identify with a figure that mistreats us our internal world is fractured and punitive.

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As if this were not a sufficient assault on the notion of the self, there is also the most significant contribution of psychoanalysis to the history of thought: the unconscious. In ‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis’, Freud writes,

[…] psycho-analysis has sought to educate the ego. But […] two discoveries—that the life of our sexual instincts cannot be wholly tamed, and that mental processes are in themselves unconscious and only reach the ego and come under its control through incomplete and untrustworthy perceptions—these two discoveries amount to a statement that the ego is not master in its own house. Together they represent the third blow to man's self-love, [after Copernicus’s discovery that the earth rotates the sun and Darwin’s discovery that humans are merely animals] what I may call the psychological one. No wonder, then, that the ego does not look favourably upon psycho-analysis and obstinately refuses to believe in it. (Emphases original)

As Freud suggests here, psychoanalysis gets a bad press because it is the bearer of a series of bad tidings. Our sexuality comes to us unbidden, as does our sense of gender identity, and they are not subject to transformation. Indeed, happily, such a view is now enshrined in law for the time being; there can be no conversion therapy. In this arena, Freud is very much our contemporary. In responding to a mother who asked Freud to ‘cure’ her son of homosexuality he replied: ‘Homosexuality is … nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation … . What analysis can do for you son runs in a different line. If he is unhappy, neurotic, torn by conflicts … analysis may bring him harmony.’ The radical message of psychoanalysis is that what passes for normative heterosexuality is just as strange an aberration as what might once have been viewed as the most baroque sexual pathology. There is no ‘normal’, there is only the endlessly troubling expression of desire. More importantly, there is bad news about our self-knowledge; we only know part of ourselves and that only hazily. The uncanny nature of dreams – the world in which we are actor, spectator and author all at once – confirms how little we grasp of our own mental processes. We are not only not ‘master of our own house’, but we have a variety of tenants about whom we know virtually nothing. We are not selves in the sense of self-authoring agents; we are a very strange hotch-potch of known and unknown elements which often act in ways that are entirely beyond our control or comprehension.

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This essay asks, how can these insights – that we are always someone else before we are ourselves and that we know only a tiny part of our mental functioning – be helpful or therapeutic. 

 

Childhood: Blake and Winnicott

I want to consider an unself-help approach to childhood, by looking at some poems by William Blake. The first is called ‘The Clod and the Pebble’ and explores what it means to be a self (or a type of self) in love:

"Love seeketh not itself to please,

Nor for itself hath any care,

But for another gives its ease,

And builds a heaven in hell's despair."

 

So sung a little Clod of Clay,

Trodden with the cattle's feet,

But a Pebble of the brook

Warbled out these metres meet:

 

"Love seeketh only Self to please,

To bind another to its delight,

Joys in another's loss of ease,

And builds a hell in heaven's despite."

It might seem strange for me to begin with a poem in which the word self is so prominent. But what this poem dramatizes is the idea that the ‘self’ obscures the other just as much in self-negation as in self-assertion. The clod represents the former idea of self-negation. But what it reveals about ‘selflessness’ is that it is a sort of self-assertion in reverse; though it mentions ‘another’ it does not seem to have a real idea of what that other is like. The clod ‘builds a heaven in hell’s despite’; the implication is that the clod negates the self for a calculated reward. At the very least it wants the beloved to notice how selfless it is. We have all met clods; those people who seem generous, but, it turns out, have counted the cost of every sacrifice and are determined to get it repaid in one form or another in full. The pebble seeks to please ‘the self’, to ‘bind’ others to its own needs. We see its stony indifference and might be tempted to see it as a form of mental health – that version of honest self-interest. But the most significant thing about the poem is the way the first and last verse mirror one another. The first verse appears, on an initial reading, to be a traditional and perhaps Christian account of love. Indeed, I once heard it read (without the second and third verses of course) at a wedding. But it is as obsessed with the self as the pebble. These two forms of consciousness form a destructive negation of one another; love between a clod and a pebble would be an inhuman sadomasochism.

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The fruitful process of living, the redeemed way of thinking Blake called the ‘contrary’ is captured in ‘Infant Joy’:

 

I have no name;

I am but two days old.

What shall I call thee?

I happy am,

Joy is my name.

Sweet joy befall thee!

 

Pretty joy!

Sweet joy, but two days old.

Sweet Joy I call thee:

Thou dost smile,

I sing the while;

Sweet joy befall thee!

 

On a first reading the poem seems almost pointlessly simplistic; a short saccharine-sweet nursery rhyme. However, this simplicity is deceptive. It dramatizes the interaction between two figures, whom we assume, from the title, the poem itself and if we look at the illustration that accompanies it, are a mother and child (although it is worth noting that Blake offers no clue to the gender of the speakers in the poem itself). One remarkable thing about the poem which, I think, makes it almost unique in English literature, is that it dramatizes this moment of communication without any commentary by an external narratorial or organising consciousness and does not employ inverted commas (‘perverted commas’ as James Joyce called them), so that, although there are two figures involved in a dialogue, textually there is no distinction between them; this unity is central to the reading of the poem I want to propose. We are not in a world of separate selves, of clods and pebbles, but rather we are where being meets and mingles. In the poem, nothing is explained or narrated and we are dropped into this world in medias res; this is very much a poem which shows rather than tells. The poem begins with a comment: ‘I have no name’. The child is ‘but two days old’ so the poem is not a realistic depiction of a conversation between mother and new-born child; the poem is not literally about naming, but nevertheless it has the force of a convincing insight as an investigation of the moment a consciousness might begin to exist in some symbolic sense for itself and for others. The poem presents an implicit criticism of the authority assumed in the process of naming the other, in the sense of defining the nature of the other’s being and offers an alternative mode.[1] Naming is not here an act of appropriation or domination, but rather of mutual creativity and play. The first speaker appears to identify a lack – ‘I have no name’ – and the second responsively offers to address this sense: ‘what shall I call thee?’ The child begins its self-realisation in response to the mother’s question, first by a simple description of its state – ‘I happy am’ – from which a name effectively precipitates itself: ‘Joy be my name’. This name is confirmed by the mother, not once, but throughout the second stanza:

Pretty joy!

Sweet joy, but two days old.

Sweet Joy I call thee:

Thou dost smile,

I sing the while;

Sweet joy befall thee!

 

Though there is the unity I mentioned there is also a responsive separateness. Their activities are different though they echo one another: ‘Thou dost smile/ I sing the while’. The mother thus acknowledges the baby’s otherness even as she repeats its name. A further distinction exists in that the baby is only aware of its present nameless but joyful state, while the mother can conceptualise a future of other possibilities: ‘Sweet joy befall thee.’ Thus the poem imagines the generous creation of a fruitful sense of self in an in-between space where a desire for recognition is met and creatively returned to the child in a way that neither dominates nor impinges. Separation emerges in mutual, if significantly asymmetrical, recognition. As the critic Heather Glen puts it: ‘In ‘Infant Joy’ identity is not defined in opposition, but emerges in relationship. […] The child at once answers the mother’s question and gives voice to its own selfhood in the word ‘joy’: both a particular name and a word with a shared meaning. It is a word less used than played with… .’ Going back to ‘The Clod and the Pebble’, the idea of self envisioned here is not selfless or self-asserting; both of these versions are solipsistic forms of defence that lead to a misery of frustrated need.

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It seems to me that the insight offered by Blake in his poem has a direct analogy in the work of D W Winnicott. ‘What does the baby see when he or she looks at the mother’s face?’ Winnicott asks in ‘Mirror-Role of Mother and Family in Child Development’:

I am suggesting [he continues] 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.

This passage is the realistic, or true to life correlative of Blake’s vision. Just as the infant of Blake’s poem has its sense of itself reflected back in the echoing repetition of the name ‘joy’ so Winnicott’s baby here reaches out for reality and offers its as yet unformed sense of itself, and in as much as that offering is reflected back, constructs a felicitous sense of a self in the world. For Winnicott, this moment, which is easily taken for granted, is of enormous importance.

To take a slightly sideways step here, we might turn to the question of self in the therapeutic setting. Sarah Luczaj addresses precisely these questions:

'self' is a concept that appears as people talk about their personal experience, usually to mark a lack. Perhaps it is only when something is missing, deficient, or not strong enough, that we feel a need for it and call out for it. And the 'it' which is missing, is what many clients coming to therapy often explicitly state in terms of self: 'I've come because I've lost myself', 'I don't feel like myself anymore', 'I just don't like myself', or 'I need to find my real self'. These experiences, conceptualised as 'lost self,' seem to express fear and anxiety, on an existential level. Use of the word 'self' may function as a signifier that we are not living fully, that something feels blocked or has not been taken into account. There may be a sense that everything is going well, yet there's a lack of meaning. We do not feel as secure or as happy as we once did, or sense that we might, or that other people do. There's just something wrong. How has the concept 'self' come to carry so much?

At the close of ‘‘Mirror-Role of Mother and Family in Child Development’ Winnicott thinks again about the mother/child dyad and offers some thoughts which might answer Luczaj’s question and the questions of her imagined clients:

The glimpse of the baby’s and child’s seeing the self in the mother’s face, and afterwards the mirror, gives a way of looking at analysis and at the psychotherapeutic task. Psychotherapy is not making clever and apt interpretations; by and large it is a long-term giving the patient back what the patient brings. It is a complex derivative of the face that reflects what is there to be seen. I like to think of my work this way, and to think that if I do this well enough the patient will find his or her own self, and will be able to exist and to feel real. Feeling real is more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself, and to relate to objects as oneself, and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation.

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Earlier – in the introduction – I quoted Bowlby’s comment that his approach is to say ‘You know’. That view is echoed in Winnicott’s view of therapy as a ‘long-term giving back what the patient brings’. We will return to this in a consideration of what psychoanalysis has called the transference. But here, it is worth mentioning Winnicott’s argument elsewhere, that this involves some hateful and destructive energies as well as the benign ones we encounter here. The baby (and by extension the person-in-therapy) must destroy the carer/therapist; but then the carer/therapist must be able to say ‘you killed me, and look, I survived – now you can make use of me’. But more of this later.

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Blake’s poem and the initial passage from Winnicott that I quoted depict what might happen when all goes well. Bowlby’s notion of the securely attached child, like Winnicott’s account of the baby who sees himself or herself in the mother’s face, have in common with Blake a fundamental notion of innocence: the possibility of a creative sense of being in the world. In this form of being, loss, though painful, can be encountered, mourned and hopefully endured. Blake strongly believed that innocence is not a utopian fantasy but something we witness in the world all the time, if only for comparatively brief moments. However, as the companion piece he wrote in the years after the composition of the Songs of Innocence shows, he was painfully aware that there are powerful forces which mean that things often do not go well.

‘Infant Sorrow’

My mother groand! my father wept.

Into the dangerous world I leapt:

Helpless, naked, piping loud;

Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

 

Struggling in my fathers hands:

Striving against my swaddling bands:

Bound and weary I thought best

To sulk upon my mothers breast.

The child in this poem does not communicate with either parent. There is only isolation and fear. Despite being held, this does not feel securely containing, but more like imprisonment, the rhyme of ‘hands’ and ‘bands’ emphasising the sense of claustrophobia. If in ‘Infant Joy’, we met the careful attunement that enables a faith in the world to exist, here there is no recognition, just lonely suffering; the mother and father are too miserable to attend to their new child. In this condition, the child cannot rely on parental care and must begin internally to calculate what is ‘best’. As Winnicott puts it:

The baby quickly learns to make a forecast: ‘Just now it is safe to be spontaneous, but any minute the mother’s face will become fixed … and my own personal need must be shut down.’

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It is under these conditions – conditions that we all experience in one way or another – that people grow up with the feelings or questions enumerated by Luczaj; they become aware of the self precisely as something that they lack or that feels wrong. And it is under these conditions that the sort of therapeutic relationship that Winnicott describes, where the analyst gives back what the patient brings, is required.

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Common sense might suggest that the self is unitary and that authenticity lies at the back or midst of that apparent self who thinks and perceives. However, what Blake and Winnicott suggest is that such an I, one in which the self contracts defensively into self-awareness and solipsism, is the opposite of authenticity. It is a clod or pebble self, experienced as alien or mysterious. Indeed, authenticity, the ‘true self’ which Winnicott advances, may be a misnomer. The true self is not a self at all, but a happy effect of a relationship. As Winnicott argues, a self into which one may retreat for relaxation is only possible if it is founded on a sense that the creative interspace of play between people is a lived experience.

There is another legacy of our early experience which is not quite as benign as the world described in ‘Infant Joy’ and in some of Winnicott’s work. ‘Infant Sorrow’ depicts a world of cold emotional neglect, but even worse can befall people. Many of Freud’s early cases of hysteria appear to have been the legacy of terrible sexual trauma. But there is a further dimension here, which goes beyond cases of abuse. As John Fletcher writes, summarising his understanding of the French analyst Jean Laplanche: ‘what Freud encountered but failed to recognize as such, in the restricted and grotesque form of the pathological cases of infantile sexual abuse with which he worked, was the universal role of the adult other, with an unconscious and a fully formed sexuality, in the formation of an infantile subjectivity as yet lacking in both.’ We come into the world innocently as Blake suggests, and some of what is communicated to us is joyfully understood in forms of interactive play. But some of the messages we all receive are in a language that is entirely beyond us. Indeed, one way of understanding the unconscious, which will play such a dominant role in our lives, is as a vestigial inheritance of the strange messages about sex, unconscious life and perhaps death too, that we inevitably receive in a more or less unprocessed way from the adults in our lives. Melanie Klein, who is the most influential figure in British psychoanalysis, wrote extensively about the extremities of early childhood ‘phantasy’ which often involve massively destructive attacks on the mother (or fears of being attacked) and highly sexualised ideas about parental genitalia.

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What Blake describes in ‘Infant Sorrow’ leaves a legacy that affects the whole of life. Even in conditions where the relationship between parents and child have been generally good (‘good enough’ is Winnicott’s formulation), memories of the moments when care was not forthcoming can be stimulated if other elements of life – bullying at school for instance – remind us of these early negative experiences, of the sense that the world is hostile. What the baby in ‘Infant Sorrow’ experiences is an agonising sense of his smallness, his vulnerability. (I am using masculine pronouns deliberately here for a reason that will become obvious.) As well as calculating what is ‘best’ in terms of relating to primary caregivers the child also makes other fundamental defensive reactions. As Hanna Segal puts it, there is a form of ‘omnipotent denial’, a world of ‘perfect babies, never protesting and never crying, as though all experiences were experienced by them as being good’. It is too frightening to be weak, and too dangerous to have needs that are not met. Going back to our earlier mention of ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, this is the unmourned loss that is perhaps most common in depression. Rather than feel anger towards the parents who failed them, many people grow up despising their own weakness and neediness. Many of us disavow our intense desire for love and care and instead adopt a façade of adult convention and the ability to ‘move on’. We develop a false self and experience life in a false way. The true needy self is denied – often we try to destroy it in ourselves as it is the source of a terrible shame. The tougher with ourselves we are, the more we ‘man-up’ and ‘grow a pair’, the more we are socially approved and the more this false self strengthens its hold on us.

 

What Helps in unself-help?

I have been making a case for an attitude to being a person. What we are, I have been arguing, is the accumulated history of our relationships with others, for better and for worse. What sort of help, if any, can this insight provide? A secondary question we might ask is, why might it help to have a relationship with someone who is not giving you advice, or homework, or inspirational quotations to think about, or telling you to walk with your back straight, or any of the other things that are offered as means of improving yourself; why might it help to be with someone who is listening very carefully, not only to what you say, but to the way you say it and some of the things you aren’t saying?

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The answer to these questions goes back to a term we encountered in the introduction: transference. It first entered the language of psychoanalysis as a way of explaining why so many people fell in love with their therapists. The answer was that something about the therapeutic relationship stirred up very strong feelings, feelings that belonged elsewhere in reality – mostly to the feelings people had for their mothers and fathers. These feelings were being ‘transferred’ from elsewhere and other times onto the therapist. Of course, it quickly became clear that it was not merely love, but hostile sentiments also came into play. Another way of thinking about this is to say that the therapeutic relationship brings the whole history of the person-in-therapy’s relationships into the room in a rather ghostly fashion. Initially, Freud thought that transference would get in the way of the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. Later, he came to see that it was absolutely necessary for it to work. In his remarkable little paper ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working Through’, Freud argues that remembering events is replaced by re-enacting them. Things are repeated, both in what the patient says and in the ways they resist remembering. Rather than trying to stop this happening he comments ‘we render the compulsion [to repeat] harmless, indeed beneficial, by allowing it some sovereignty.’ The re-enactment is given the ‘playground’ of the transference, where it can be ‘worked through’ and subject to thought. Feelings that might seem unbearable in the ‘real’ world, can be approached and investigated in the ‘playground’ because it is contained and subject to careful attention.

An important change has occurred in psychoanalytic thinking about the transference since Freud. For Freud, it is a means of accessing repressed memories, today it is seen more as a site of current unconscious experience. All our anxieties and fantasies are implicit somewhere in the transference – in the relationship between therapist and person-in-therapy. Going back to our discussion of what happens after childhood misattunement, the transference might be thought of as being the place where the denied self, needy and hated, might become visible, not as a memory, but presenting itself in its current forms, having undergone all the transformations that a secret life in the world has caused. Parts of the self, which have been silenced or destroyed (at least in fantasy) become present in the world of the therapeutic relationship. And this second element is important, because it is not just what is happening in the person-in-therapy, but the responses evoked in the therapist that are key.

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In a striking and strange passage from the work of Wilfred Bion, he examines the relationship between mother and infant:

Normal development follows if the relationship between infant and breast permits the infant to project a feeling, say, that it is dying into the mother and to reintroject it after its sojourn in the breast has made it tolerable to the infant psyche. If the projection is not accepted by the mother the infant feels that its feeling that it is dying is stripped of such meaning as it has. It therefore reintrojects, not a fear of dying made tolerable, but a nameless dread.

To my mind, this passage reads like some as yet unformed Blake poem. A way of domesticating it a little would be to say that a mother might respond to a shrieking baby or child with a red cheek, ‘Oh, you must have a tooth growing’, and act accordingly, soothing the pain. This application of thought, imagination and action by the mother – what Bion terms maternal reverie – renders the suffering, which might feel overwhelming to the child, comprehensible, something that the infant can understand and deal with. Feelings are expelled in horror and then, if possible, taken back in having been turned into something that can be thought about. What is experienced in the body becomes available to the mind. This is – as Bion repeatedly suggests – a direct analogy to the system of the transference. In therapy, it depends on the therapist’s ability to understand and be sensitive to the feelings that go on in a session that they can be thought about and processed and returned to the person-in-therapy. This can be a simple matter of reframing, as in the case of the red cheek; in a deeper sense, it is the total situation of the therapy: its time, its repetition, the ways silence, entrances and exits and difficult moments are all handled. Going back to an earlier idea, what psychoanalysis is about is not just making you feel better, but making you feel better, by improving your capacity to understand your internal emotional world by having it carefully reflected back to you in a meaningful way. And perhaps even more importantly, it is a process that works towards replacing melancholia – the stuck repetition of loss – with mourning, in which loss is accepted and transformed into the energy for life.

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The focus on the transference has come to be thought of as a sort of intersubjective ‘third space’ between therapist and person-in-therapy. The most significant exponent of this idea is the American analyst Thomas Ogden, who has been profoundly influenced by both Bion and Winnicott. I quote from Lavinia Gomez’s useful summary of Ogden’s idea of the ‘analytic third’:

Therapist and patient will each experience the analytic third differently and, since the patient contributes the major part of the input to the therapeutic process, the components of the analytic third will always derive more from the patient’s material than from the therapist’s. It is not an easy process to distinguish or decipher, given the different and sometimes subtle roles the therapist and patient hold in relation to it. The patient supplies the majority of the material through his presence – his free associations, styles of talking and behaving, what he projects onto and into the therapist. She, meanwhile, has her own part to supply through her own way of being. The background sense she makes of these and the patient’s contribution subtly affect the atmosphere of the session and how the patient perceives it. It is the therapist’s task to gather together as much of the patient’s and her own background material as she can and by reflecting on it, bring it to a state where it can be given words, in her own thoughts or in communication with the patient.

The selves which Ogden imagines are porous rather than hermetically sealed. What it is possible to think and feel is always determined by the spaces opened up or closed off by the other. In ‘Privacy, Reverie and Analytic Technique’ Ogden comments that the couch is ‘a means of facilitating a ‘play space’, an area of overlapping states of reverie, that is a necessary condition for the elaboration and analysis of the unconscious, intersubjective analytic third.’ Here we have play and intersubjective space, but we also have the elaboration necessary for the self to be returned to the person-in-therapy. Thinking back to ‘Infant Joy’ we might read the poem as the mother facilitating just such a play space. The poem should perhaps be taken as operating entirely at an unconscious level; the mother’s reverie responding to the infant’s unconscious thoughts and desires; the process of naming representing the necessary act of interpretation involved in giving back to the infant that with which it reaches out into the world.

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Winnicott adds to this picture a significant final move. In the processes of projection that are described by Bion above, the infant or person-in-therapy cannot fully distinguish between what is their own thought and what exists in the external real world. Winnicott employs an image, again from infancy:

[…] two babies are feeding at the breast. One is feeding on the self, since the breast and the baby have not yet become (for the baby) separate phenomena. The other is feeding from an other-than-me source, or an object that can be given cavalier treatment without effect on the baby unless it retaliates.

Later he extrapolates the analogy in therapy: ‘the patient can only feed on the self and cannot use the breast [analyst] for getting fat [well]. The patient may even enjoy the analytic experience but will not fundamentally change.’ Eventually, for analysis not to become endless, as Freud feared in his late paper ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’, the third must turn back into two separate people. As he puts it, ‘This destructive activity is the patient’s attempt to place the analyst outside the area of omnipotent control, that is, out in the world’. What happens is a series of attacks on the analyst, the analytic technique and the therapeutic frame; these can be very difficult to withstand, but, several times, Winnicott emphasises that there must be no retaliation, even in the form of interpretation: ‘Better to wait till after the phase is over, and then discuss with the patient what has been happening’. Only then can the analyst become a ‘surviving object’; only then can these words be spoken (although probably only unconsciously): “‘Hullo object!’ ‘I destroyed you.’ ’I love you.’ ‘You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you.’ ‘While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy.’” 

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The strangeness of the human animal cannot be overestimated. Our internal worlds are full of fantasies and memories, projections and identifications, words and signs both understood and completely enigmatic. Given this complexity, though we may often be happy, it is perhaps wise if we do not expect it. What we can do is be alive to this intricacy, this convolution, turn ourselves towards it, rather than trying to simplify ourselves in a manner that conforms to a notion of normality or effective function. Our weirdness is to be celebrated as well as endured. The unexamined life is not worth living; a life spent trying to understand ourselves without pre-judging the outcome, and being open to our fellow humans, is a life well-lived.

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When we suffer, as all of us must, we should not turn inwards, we should not aspire to solipsistic self-help. We should turn to each other. And perhaps we should try psychoanalytic therapy, because it is a place in which we can meet the variety of our selves and learn not to fear what we find.

 

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