OUT OF MY MIND

ON MAGIC AND BEING CHILDREN NO LONGER.

Ask most adults if they believe in magic and they will usually make a face, laugh or look at you like you have lost your mind. Yet, magic is what this blog is about: magic, and how we lose access to it and forget how to use it.

A definition from the Oxford English Dictionary:

MAGIC: 1) the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.
 2) a quality that makes something seem removed from everyday life, especially in a way that gives delight.

Tuesday early morning’s celestial event is for me, a good example of a magical moment. The lunar eclipse coincided with the winter solstice for the first time since 1638. The next occurrence of such a confluence of events will be 2094! The December  21st total lunar eclipse – http://www.youtube.com/user/KxbTV– was dramatic in appearance — from bright orange to blood red to dark brown and finally gray/luminous white and large, so large that it felt as if we could almost reach out and touch it.  The moon moved into Earth’s penumbral shadow and puff—it turned RED! Magic. Think of it–this type of eclipse occurs only when the Sun, Earth, and the Moon align exactly, with Earth in the middle. This alignment is in itself, a very rare event. A time when magic happens, some would say. For non believers, here is the ‘scientific’ explanation: The eclipse occured as the moon passed through the northern portion of Earth’s shadow, just four days before perigee, when the moon is closest to Earth. Facts are good and necessary, but nothing like the experience (and magic) of the event itself.

Say what you will about this, but seeing a red moon over New York City is, well magical. I call your attention to this spectacular event as a reminder that magic happens, most often in not such a spectacular way. Spectacular is meant to get your attention, but magic happens in other ways too. Here are some that come to mind: Childbirth. The look in a child’s eyes when they see something for the first time that they cannot yet grasp but it gets them thinking. The feeling that we have when we fall in love. Or when we understand something in our bones. Or that feeling that comes about when we look at art, or listen to music, or read poetry and feel stirred deeply, as if a personal communion with that object has taken place (look up last blog entry). There are many explanations for all of these events, and as a psychoanalyst I could elaborate on them, yet, I want to focus on the magic within them. All of these events retain a quality that makes something seem removed from everyday life, especially in a way that delights us and stirs us with a sense of wonder.

Fairy tales are a concrete way to draw us into a sense of wonderment that is contained in the magic of the stories. They invite us to battle and deal with many fears, difficulties, and struggles in a magical world. Through the magic written in fairy tales, children learn to deal with and repair emotional wounds. Magic thus becomes a tool for mastering trauma. Bruno Bettelheim, the child psychologist, was the first to discuss the emotional and symbolic importance of fairy tales, and suggested that the darkness of abandonment, death, violence, hatred, and other traumas, which occurred in a magical world, allowed children to grapple with their fears in symbolic terms. Children believe in magic because they can work out and rehearse personal crisis and achievements within it. Think of the magic involved in child’s play. Magic allows them to move in mysterious and yet to be thought of ways. Anything is possible. Not so in the world of adults.

Perhaps because children are constantly evolving and developing, decoding the cues and situations around them, magic is just another way of working out their understanding of the world. Working it out is in itself a magical process. Perhaps because the world seems (is) magical in the beginning: new, awe inspiring, full of unknown and infinite possibilities, the magic of it all allows them to engage and play with a sense of wonder, where the possibilities remain open and anything is possible. Where there is always a magical solution, it just needs to be found. Perhaps because magic operates closely with and through fantasy, it provides both a potential way to work through difficulty and an escape from the insufferable. Either way, for children, magic is in the air, and available.

Not so in the world of adults. As adults we have lived through and survived (in various and personal ways) many of life’s blows. We have adapted, defended, protected, fought, processed and carved out a life and a way of being. As adults we deal, or we try to. As adults we know better than to believe in magic.

OR do we?

Life can indeed deal us a raw hand. It can demand that we engage supernatural powers to survive. It can make us feel like puppets about to give under the strain of its hand. It can break us. In the immediacy of experience, and particularly traumatic experience, it can make us forget that life itself, our life, is full of magic and possibilities.  Somewhere along our  developmental trek toward adulthood we may lose the ability to connect to magic and its possibilities, to remember our use of it. Somewhere along the line we may lose our sense of wonder and replace it with our adulthood, our maturity, our ability to deal.

I now ask you to join me in the magical world, to think of the characteristics of a wizard: a wise, mature being who can engage magic through the wisdom and knowledge that can only come through the process of living a conscious life. A wizard represents, in my mind, someone with a mature engagement with the possibilities, all of the possibilities—thought, and not yet thought or known. In short, an adult connected to magic! To quote a patient who worked her way through her conflict and trauma with magic (through her reading of the Harry Potter series) and our sessions, “there are muggles(non magical folks) and there are wizards,” she said to me, “and it makes all the difference in the world!”  (For a quick refresher in magic as a tool for mastery, I encourage you to read the Harry Potter series and find your own wand!)

The truth is, we never stop looking for magical solutions, we just stop believing in magic.

ON LANGUAGE AND ITS LIMITATIONS.

As a psychoanalyst I believe in the power of words – spoken, written and thought. So at first, it may seem paradoxical that I should think of language as limited in helping us access and interpret our experience. It is, after all, our way of being conscious- we think in words, we articulate our thoughts in language. We communicate with ourselves and with others through language. And yet, while being a proponent of the talking cure, I am keenly aware that words and language are not enough to capture the complexity of human experience.

Take for instance, the experience we have when we listen to a piece of music. Whether the piece is a piano sonata, or a contemporary song, the emotions and memories that it may elicit are beyond what a semantic register can capture. It is the music itself that moves us, through its particular rhythms, tones and cadences, touching us deeply and stirring us from the inside. Music moves us beyond words to a visceral, deeply internal experience. While this experience can be shared, say in a concert hall, it remains particular in what it stirs in each of us. The same can be said for a work of art: a painting can capture and provoke a deep reaction in all of us. Art, in its various forms is a form of aesthetic communication that bypasses language while accessing personal experience. It dwells in an area of experience where words are not enough yet deep meaning is present. The aesthetic experience speaks through rhythms, tones, and traces that are not yet coded through language but are perceivable through colors and frequencies, a sensorial register if you will, that is yet to be defined by language and defies a particular meaning.

Poetry, despite the fact that it is a form of the written word, is an excellent example of how we “fill in” for the limits of language, “reading between the lines”. The poetry invites us to project our own forms and ideas onto the place of meaning. When we are moved by rhythm, intonation, vocal gesturing -we are deeply stirred in the poets sensory crucible, the writing has the power to use, disrupt and transgress language evocatively and convey meaning. Poetry creates a temporal experience through the use of ordinary words, which evokes extraordinary responses that cannot be made to stand still and cannot reproduce themselves in the same manner again. We feel what we feel in that moment – the life of the poem is the experience. Perhaps, as my colleague Philip Bromberg has noted, poetry is language evolved.

In his essay on Poetry and Psychoanalysis, Adam Phillips (2001) views poetry as “a way of talking of our doubts about language, skepticism inevitable in a profession committed to language as therapy- about words and the value of meaning… The privileging of poetry and poets is a counterforce to the fear that language and meaning don’t work. Or don’t work in quite the way we might want them to.”  As psychoanalysts we rely on the word to reach, translate and extend meaning to our patients. We speak, and through our speak we make it so. Sometimes my patients refuse my words, momentarily enraptured in meaning so personal and profound, that it resists words. This is the area where language breaks down and experience moves us.

Christopher Bollas (1987) identifies the aesthetic experience as that which reaches the true self and promises the elaboration of its numerous possibilities. Such a moment is an occasion when “ a person is shaken by an experience into absolute certainty that he has been cradled by, and dwelled with, the spirit of the object, a rendezvous of mute recognition that defies representation.” He refers to those moments when we are enraptured by a piece of music which makes us cry, or captured by the beauty of a painting or a sculpture, which speaks to only us in a silent personal language that stirs us deep inside. These moments are noteworthy in their intensity of feeling and their non-representational knowledge. It is often the case that the self finds expression in objects that speak to it- books, paintings, music, and dance. These objects appeal to the senses and perhaps by-pass language, reason, and cognition. Such objects are enlisted in the creation of personal meaning, and likely operate on multiple levels; language encoded and purely unformulated ones.

I think about the times when words fail to capture the intensity of a feeling or experience, when that experience remains dissociated from language and takes shape in the form of a symptom, precisely because it cannot be accessed through words. This dissociation from language allows affect to be mobile and free from the restrictions that govern language. When affective experience is deprived of its investment for verbal expression (to think, to know, to understand), it takes up residence in the senses -the gaze, voice, smell and touch, which are then experienced as intensely powerful because they remain unmediated by language. Without words to assign meaning, affect seeks an object for expression and articulation. Thus we can think of over affectation, those moments that are so powerful they overwhelm us and lead us to believe that some sort of magic has happened, as an experiential attempt to achieve symbolization. Artists circumvent semantics and language, precisely because they can communicate, capture and mediate experience through multiple and different registers. Where an object is drawn in as a co-conspirator and a potential mediator of experience- a found object to help elaborate parts of our self.

Of course, as psychoanalysts we know better than to become wedded to our verbal interpretations and technique. We know that silence, the experience of being with a particular patient, our experience of them, is a powerful carrier of meaning. By implication, we are in a position of being the object of elaboration, the container of many experiential moments which convey a meaning of their own through their powerful affective pull and challenge us to find words over and over in our sessions. Perhaps, this is the art of psychotherapy: the chance to move with another into spaces that defy language but are nevertheless steeped with meaning and experience which strives to be understood and articulated through and with another.

ON BEING GOOD ENOUGH.

During the second World War, the English peadiatrician and psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott spoke regularly to thousands of young mothers on his radio show about solo parenting and mothering, as most of the United Kingdom’s men were otherwise engaged.  Winnicott brought his experience as a peadiatrician into his analytic thinking, and is responsible for many innovative ideas in psychoanalysis. This is the same guy who brought us the notion of the true and false self, transitional objects, psychic containers, and heralded object relations theory. He is my psychoanalytic hero. One of his most important ideas, to my mind, was the concept of the good enough mother, which he spoke about during his radio shows, and elaborated on in his writing. It goes something like this:

Since we are born in a state of total dependence, our parents, and more likely our mother, is responsible for our care and survival. During pregnancy, the mother becomes attuned to the feelings in her body and to the rhythms of her fetus. Once the baby is born, this attunement becomes more and more refined and particular to the mother-infant dyad. Winnicott called this primary maternal preoccupation, a term which captures the sensitivity and interconnectedness of new mothers to their infants’. While many of the things that Winnicott described may have signaled an ideal situation, he emphasized that mothers did not need to strive for perfection, or do everything by the book. Instead, he suggested that what was needed  for the baby to thrive and feel safe was being  a “good enough” mother.

If we take Winnicott at his word, good enough meant just that…good enough. Not perfect, not angel like, not all knowing, not brilliant,  just good enough. Enough is the operative adverb here- good enough to help launch another into life and subjectivity. Good enough to be real, present, tuned in, attentive and caring. Good enough to say no and establish boundaries, to be non-intrusive yet available. Ok, I realize this is starting to sound like a how to guide, and yet, what does it really mean to be good enough? Winnicott described a mother who was able to be real, who knew when she was angry and did not retaliate against her infant, who could take care of her baby’s basic needs, who could protect him/her from danger, and who could begin to establish, through her relationship with her baby, a basic roadmap for life and the outside world.  Through her sense of herself, and her relationship to her baby, a good enough mother prepares her infant for adult life.

How different than the early “how to” guides to parenting! Perhaps it is significant that the idea of “good enough” mothering comes to us from a British analyst- culturally, good enough is not only acceptable, but code for as good as possible. Here, on the other side of the Atlantic ocean, good enough may not be so politically correct, it may sound like not enough. Yet, I think that is what Winnicott was trying to capture, our best being good enough.

This idea of being good enough applies to human beings in general. Think about it. What does it mean to be good enough? For some of the answers, I turn now to a book that is wise in its concise ideas: The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. In this tiny jewel, Don Ruiz manages to capture the essence of the idea. I re-interpret the  “agreements” for this blog, but encourage you to click on the link above on your own.

The first of the agreements asks us to speak impeccably, defined as speaking without sin. As simple as this sounds, it is quite difficult to manage. It asks us to pay attention to what we feel and think before putting it into words, and then to find the courage to speak only what is true for us. In other words, speak only the truth and nothing else. Everything we do in our lives is predicated on this first idea. We speak and communicate with words, and it is how we develop a narrative of our lives. Our thoughts are based on our own narration. Our relationships are forged through our ability to communicate. The second agreement asks us to not take anything personally. It asks us to consider that much of what we believe about other people and their intentions is colored by our desires and needs, our projections if you will. It also, to my mind, says, that we are often so personally invested in something or someone that we lose our sense of perspective and forget that other people have their own issues and difficulties to deal with, that they are not of our doing, they are theirs alone. In the language of psychotherapy this is about recognizing the others’ subjectivity and giving up our narcissistic position. We are not omnipotent, we can only be responsible for ourselves. The third agreement is about not making assumptions about anything. This reminds me of my statistics professor in college, who went on and on about assumption being responsible for most if not all errors in judgement. Not making assumptions requires that we ask questions when we do not understand or know something. It requires that we be willing to be humble and courageous, both to ask the questions and then integrate the answers into our thinking. It requires that we speak and listen. The fourth and final agreement is about always doing your best, which takes me back to Winnicott and being good enough. The very idea of it requires us to be conscious, to question and attend to what we are thinking, doing, dreaming, creating. To do what we can as well as we can, and to be willing to be active and present in the narration and experience of our lives. Perhaps I have managed to develop a “how to” list despite my efforts to avoid it. I hope it gets you thinking like it did me.

IDEALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS.

When President Barack Obama was elected, there was dancing in the streets of many cities – in my city of New York, people stayed up late into the night celebrating his victory. I remember the following morning, across the ocean, in the United Kingdom, getting my coffee at the nearby shop, where an English lad began doing a little jig when he heard my American accent: “Obama, Obama, we love Obama, we love America again” he sang to me. It was a great day.  At the time of his election President Barack Obama held the hopes of many in the world, and he became an instant vessel for the wishes, anticipation, and projections of people all over the world. Such adoration and idealization is not unusual for world leaders, rock stars, actors, teachers, mentors, and most especially for those we love.

This blog is not about President Obama, but about the role of idealization in our lives. And about how we manage our disappointment. It is about what idealization and disappointment say about us.

In psychoanalytic circles, idealization and the inevitable disappointment that ensues when it shatters, is seen as a natural process which comes about as a developmental achievement, a milestone that allows us to move from a position where we are one with mom and the world, to one where we are separate from mom, and individuals in our own right. This rather complex psychological shift from total dependence and egotistical rule to independence and separation is contingent on our ability to recover from our first, narcissistic injury: the fact that we are not as all powerful as we thought, and the fact that mommy, isn’t either. The world is not necessarily our oyster, and mom, capable as she might be, is not without faults. The realization of our own limitations comes about through our awareness that the person whom we idealized (primarily mom, our caretaker) has let us down in some way. Hopefully these let downs have occurred in small doses and over time, but, nonetheless, the trauma (i.e., narcissistic injury) of not being all powerful brings us face to face with disappointment: the first of many to come. Keep in mind that this process occurs at about age two, and disappointment continues throughout our lives.

Idealization is a state in which we take another, and assign them with supernatural traits and powers: the wisest, most beautiful, all understanding, kindest…you get the idea. We idealize this other as all good, as someone that will take care of us and always come through for us (starting to sound familiar?) and as we are doing so, we fall in love with them. As the object of our love they are now exalted to, and placed on the highest of pedestals, the fall from which can only lead to a huge tumble and great disappointment. In the process of falling, the object of our affection will transform itself from a highly loved and desirable one to a fallible, broken, and perhaps useless one. In the best-case scenario, as we recover from our disappointment, the object (the other) becomes human, and adopts all the frailties, limitations and other characteristics of mortals. Or, in the worst cases, when the idealized other loses its shine, he/she becomes useless or discarded, perhaps even hated. You can see that disappointment, and how we learned to deal with it as children, has everything to do with how we get on with it as adults. You can also see that our investment in idealization, and our response to disappointment says a great deal about us.

Why is idealization necessary at all you might ask. It turns out to be a necessary psychological step, and pre-condition of early attachment, which is the bedrock for our future relationships.  Our ability to see someone as all good allows us to come closer to him or her, to feel safe, and to develop feelings for them. It allows us to feel understood, recognized and found. It also allows us to project unto them many of our wishes, needs and hopes. Idealization is pure magic in this way: it allows us to believe that what we most want and desire can be achieved by another- for us. You can see how this arrangement is borne from the early mother-infant dyad.

As a psychological process, idealization does not work very well without disappointment. On its own, idealization keeps us trapped in awe and wonder of the other as reflective of our own needs and wishes.  It keeps us at a relatively early stage of emotional development. Disappointment ushers in reality in an otherwise personal, magical world. It challenges us to take in the whole picture, to consider the other, not as ours but as an(other). One could say that disappointment forces us to deal with our own subjectivity and its use of an(other) for its manifestation. Our disappointment tells us much about our desires and needs, and about what and how much we have placed on others to articulate and realize for us. While idealization envelops the other in our own, personal magical cape, disappointment clarifies the connection to an(other), highlighting inter-subjectivity. Ultimately, how we deal with and manage our disappointment, in all matter of situations, accounts for how successful we are in our lives.

SECOND HAND SMOKE: Mirror Neurons and their reflections.

The first time I read about mirror neurons I felt great excitement. Here, finally, was a scientific team of researchers ( 2007-Giacomo Rizzolatti, Corrado Sinigaglia, Frances Anderson) confirming that we are relational beings, that we read each other automatically, unconsciously and at the neurological level. Wow. Science catching up to psychoanalytic theory, Freud would be ecstatic! This is science, trying to pinpoint the mechanism in our brains responsible for inter-subjectivity.  This brand of neuro-science is all about the relationship that we have to one another, and a special set of neurons, now identified and called mirror neurons, that reflect the behavior, emotional state and feelings of the other back to us, and in turn, help us to develop a sensitive attunement to the other. Wow. One scientist is so impressed with the ability of these neurons to reflect back sensations, emotions and feelings, from one person to the other, that he would have called them the empathy (or Gandhi) neurons! (see Ramachandran).

You can see how this would have all kinds of implications for us humans. And for those of us that are interested in human behavior and human motivation. Let us consider the implications of these neurons together.

First, mirror neurons are located in the frontal lobes, the same place that is responsible for motor commands. Motor neurons respond when we perform an action. Apparently, they also respond when we watch another person perform an action. That is because mirror neurons take in and reflect the others’ movement or action back to us. They respond to movement, touch and sight. Science tells us that mirror neurons must be involved in imitative and emulative behavior, which requires that one adopt the other person’s point of view. There are also mirror neurons for touch that activate the somato-sensory cortex, so that when someone touches your hand, a neuron in the sensory part of your brain fires. It now appears that, the same neuron will fire when you watch another person being touched- ergo the empathy neuron! Vision, movement and touch all seem to activate mirror neurons in our brain.

Second, mirror neurons seem to bypass cognitive function (i.e. thinking and language) instead, they initiate a neuronal dialogue with the other, thus linking us together through a mutual experience. Mirror neurons provide a specific link through which we have knowledge of the other, both when we observe the action and when we perform the same action. They provide a mirroring capacity for shared experience, which is neurologically based. Essentially our nervous system is automatically wired to respond to the other. It seems to me that this new neuro-science is attempting to locate a mechanism of the mind, which is built on many of the tenets of interpersonal and relational psychology.

Furthermore, the Italian group of scientists at Parma University, think that we are predisposed to be “good”, precisely because we are wired to, and feel  (empathize) what the other person feels (Rizzolatti on Charlie Rose) .  Think about this: we have a natural, biological link to understand experientially the emotional state of the other.  We are social beings and as such, we learn to read others early and quickly. Mirror neurons appear to be the cells that allow us to read the other and share their experience. They seem to account for much of our interpersonal learning.

So if we are predisposed to be good, why would we want to feel anything that is not so good? As psychoanalysts we know that human behavior and motivation is complex and multi-determined. We look both to the personal history of a patient, as well as the social and cultural context. Both nature and nurture. Indeed, much of what becomes our way of being in the world begins with what we learn in our parental lap through reinforcement and imitation. Mirror imaging scientists agree with the complexity of human behavior, and feel that much (but not all) of human behavior is imitative and culture bound. Add to this their discovery of mirror neurons, and we have a neurological system, which helps us to predict and affect the behavior of others. Mirror neurons are apparently involved in recognizing behavior and intention. They provide the link between the what (action) and the why (reason). All of which is a pre-requisite for empathic behavior underlying many, if not most, of our relationships. This is a highly sophisticated system of neurons, which is still being studied in human beings. It appears to be lacking and/or greatly reduced in autistic individuals, who have difficulty understanding others’ feelings and their behavioral intention.

This makes sense from a psychological point of view: we learn about our feelings, our thoughts and our actions and interactions within a relational matrix. It now appears that we are biologically wired to do so. Mirror neurons then, have serious implications for the way attachment develops between mother and child, and for the way that our relationship with others turns out. They suggest that problematic behavior may in turn elicit more of the same.

These studies got me thinking about the emotional difficulties that people struggle with daily in my office. Does the partner or parent or child of a depressed, anxious or angry individual find themselves the victims of second hand smoke? Slowly and over time, inhaling and responding to the emotional context around them?  Having it become part of the architecture of their psyche? When I think of a patient who described her mothers’ depression as the oxygen she breathed in childhood and, necessarily inhaled, making it the very bedrock of her own character, I think the answer must be yes. My patient came up with the idea of her depression being like second hand smoke: not hers, but somehow necessary to her being.  The science behind mirror neurons would suggest that nurture has powerful repercussions on nature. As a psychoanalyst I could not agree more.

Don’t Want to Feel-Don’t Want To Know : On Boredom and Confusion.

 

I have been thinking about boredom and confusion, as two states which herald dissociation. Both occur often enough in my consulting room; and we all seem to experience them at one time or another. They seem to block certain thoughts and sensations, memories, and feelings under a fog of non-experience. We are then left bored (not feeling anything) or confused (not able to think clearly). Boredom and confusion blur our ability to be present and to experience anything fully.

When I first began to think about this, I was sitting opposite an adolescent boy who was “bored bored bored”. I started to envision boredom as a big fluffy quilt: a comfortable, soft blanket that covers up all feeling, and leaves us enveloped and comfortably numb…like the Pink Floyd song on the album Dark Side of the Moon. One could wrap oneself in this quilt, arrange it cozily, even pull it up over ones’ head. Underneath it, a general feeling of nothingness, just white noise, fluffy clouds, nothing, zero, zip. My patients often fashion these quilts for themselves, metaphorically speaking, and bring them into their sessions with me. I too, have partaken of this special binkey myself, having to shake myself loose from its numbing grip. So, while sitting in front of my young patient, and asking myself why he needed to be “bored bored bored”, I began to think of boredom as a psychic blanket which keeps us from having to experience anything at all, perhaps because we need the psychological rest, the ability to disconnect our feelings and sensations; or perhaps because we do not want to feel what is afoot. Either way, it seems to me that we are talking about a form of dissociative experience. We are bored. We are empty, curiously suspended, floating in limbo. We are not feeling.

Confusion, is more like an intricate cobweb weaving itself in our head. Not comfy like the boredom blanket, quite the opposite. The confusion cobweb can be discomforting and maze like, it can leave us with quite a headache. It can make our brain feel like peanut butter- the chunky kind, each chunk barring the entrance to potential clarity. Confusion does to our thinking what boredom does to our feelings. Confusion does not allow us to think clearly, to put words to our thoughts, to complete our thoughts, to link one with the other, or to articulate thoughts to completion. Instead, confusion moves us into its labyrinth of webs, and seems to have no end. This labyrinth is designed (you guessed it) to keep us from knowing. Busy trying to, but not knowing. It is designed to disconnect us from our ability to think clearly and reach a conclusion. It keeps us, well, confused, cotton headed and stuck, the information or conclusion we need just out of our reach, behind the cotton. Again, it seems to me that we are dealing with an experience that is potentially dissociative. We are confused. We are unable to think, we are circling around the maze of our thoughts without being able to comprehend them. We are not thinking.

I have talked about these two self-states with patients over many years now. Since boredom and confusion are states that lead to dissociation, they operate in the same way: sometimes protectively providing a respite from the demands of daily life, and/or defensively, entrenching themselves as part of a psychic mechanism which is meant to exile experience from consciousness and prevent it from returning in its original form. My patients have found it useful to think about their own boredom and/or confusion in this way, and it has led them to be curious about such states. Curiosity of course, rather than kill the cat, is one way out of dissociation. It opens the door behind the cotton or the blanket and brings you resoundingly into the present.

Being curious is a wonderful thing! It engages us in a thorough, here and now, examination of the object we are studying. When that object is ourselves, and our experience, curiosity requires us to engage fully, it demands our focused attention, and mobilizes all our senses in an acute way. It is as if,  we are playing at being a detective, and our curiosity helps us to sort through the information at hand. Curiosity even makes potentially difficult information or experience easier to process. This is because it keeps judgements and  potential “should’s” (rooted in our personal history) at bay. Instead, curiosity relies on our ability to play and stay open to the possibilities. It requires that we learn something new while using all of our accumulated experience. One of the skills of a psychoanalyst involves maintaining our curiosity in the face of what we do not know or cannot yet understand, of what may appear to be empty space, whether it is caused by boredom or confusion, or another self-state altogether. When our patients are able to be curious about their experience they re-engage it anew. It is then possible to label it, name it and begin to process it. It is the stuff that makes change possible.

DISSOCIATION – Part One and Three Quarters.

 

Several weeks ago, I wrote two blogs on dissociation: On Being (One)self and Dissociation and Trauma. Both pieces described the process of dissociation on a spectrum of severity. Today’s blog, part one and three quarters, is meant to address a crucial difference in how dissociation is enlisted by our psyche, either as protective or defensive, and the point at which it shifts from a normal psychic activity to a more entrenched part of our character and way of functioning that becomes pathological.

In On Being (One)self, I wrote about dissociation as a normal, adaptive aspect of mental functioning, which protects us against potential disorganization. As a protective mechanism, dissociation is enlisted by our psyche automatically, much as an alarm system that alerts and protects us from incoming danger. As such, it is used as a protective device that proactively keeps us from becoming emotionally overwhelmed from the potential return of past experience that remains isolated from our conscious mind. As a normal psychic process, dissociation takes care of our daily and customary way of being, as well as any crisis that could threaten our experience of oneness.

In Trauma and dissociation (part 2), I described how trauma changes everything. Particularly our brain structure, and thus, our experience of ourselves. When we are exposed to trauma, dissociation is enlisted as a defense, which protects the psyche from being overwhelmed by more than it can process on the spot and in that moment. It provides, as my colleague Dr. Philip Bromberg states, “an escape when there is no escape.” With psychological trauma, dissociation is used as a defense from knowing. Its’ primary purpose is to keep us from knowing what has happened directly. It becomes the psyche’s way of enfolding the trauma, segregating it and exiling it into various parts of the self. As a defense, its primary purpose is to keep those self- states from communicating and linking the traumatic information. Think of it as a psychic army, which by dividing itself, contains the enemy in an attempt to conquer the trauma. But this psychic division is costly to psychological functioning and health. Survival, in such cases, is predicated on the dissociation of the traumatic experience from conscious states of being.

In the aftermath of trauma, what remains unconscious is not just the event, or affect, but a self-state (or many) with its own way of relating and being. These dissociated self-states provide a sense of selfhood, but again, at a cost. The traumatized psyche exercises an eternal hyper-vigilance on itself, destroying the ability to live creatively and spontaneously because it has lost its ability to move fluidly within itself.  Where psychological health requires the ability to experience all of our various self-configurations and conflict, and move within and between them.

To use a quote of Adam Phillips, describing what is curative about psychoanalysis, which I find appropriate to mental health: “it is the ability to meet and own all of those parts of ourselves that we spend much of our lives avoiding. “

NINE YEARS AND COUNTING: Life after September 11.

That is how much time has passed.

Nine years.

To the day.

Almost to the hour as I write this.

You know what I am talking about. None of us can forget.

Time has gone by, it has in fact, altered everything, and also left scars and open wounds. The smoke has cleared, the debris has been removed, yet the hole remains. Nine years after the twin towers were attacked. The hole remains.

Last night, as I looked out onto where the towers stood, there was a single beam of pure white light, two of them really, merging into one, illuminating the precise spots where towers of steel and glass stood, announcing the city of New York to the world.  Gentle reminders, like ghosts, which shine upon the night sky every year this time in September, every year for the past nine. Faint traces of what was, in a moonlit sky. This very night, it is beautiful, New York glimmers and the sky is inky blue deepening rapidly but for the beams of light reaching toward the heavens.

I am not the only one to remember, nor the only one who cannot and will not forget. It is part of my history now and I am forever changed by it. Nine years ago, a beautiful blue, cloudless New York sky greeted me in the early morning. I had already seen three patients’, and my 8:45 was late, no message, 10 minutes of his 45 minute session gone by. Unusual for him, a man dedicated to details and punctuality, he had never missed a session or been late before. But there is always a first time I said to myself. I decided that I would run downstairs to my corner deli and get some coffee, and at worst, I would run into him in the hallway.

We psychoanalysts lead very isolated lives once we are at work. The world cannot intrude and we are unavailable except for the 5 or 10 minutes that we allow in between our sessions, if that. So off I went to the deli, not knowing that this would be my last delicious moment of  innocence. That as I entered the deli to order my coffee, I would be changed forever and my world would never be the same.

Everyone in the deli was paralyzed. No one was moving. The radio was LOUD. No impatient crowd waiting for their smears and coffee’s. This crowd was silent and open mouthed. And the radio was REALLY LOUD. And then, as I settled into this slow-motion world myself, I HEARD the voice on the radio. I HEARD the words. It was announcing that tower one had been hit by a plane and it appeared to be a terrorist attack. I checked myself. Attack? Must be a re-play of War of the Worlds I told myself. But I stood there and listened. I think the coffee was on the house that day because I turned and ran back to my office where I could listen to the news. Sitting down. Where I could start calling patients who were …where? There?! On their way? Trapped somewhere?!

I walked home, me and many other New Yorkers, zombie like and disbelieving. Dissociated yet here and on our feet. I got home just in time to see tower 2 crumble and disappear into a huge mushroom cloud. War of the worlds indeed: the outside world colliding with everything I held in my world. Imploding on our psyches.

The catastrophe of 911 has affected all of us. We have all became survivors since none of us could have known or expected what happened. That is the way of trauma- it is an assault on the psyche, which remains unassimilated until it is processed, talked about and understood. I count myself as one of the lucky ones.  As a psychoanalyst I found words, many words, with many patients over many sessions. The talking helping both of us: patient and doctor. Each word, each sentence giving meaning to the incomprehensible event of 911. Each story, and the retelling of it, bringing the trauma of it into focus. The words knitting together, spinning  meaning and interweaving it with emotions and feelings into the experience. The pain ushering in our loss, our grief. The clinical space becoming a safe haven for the unbearable to be named, relived, and slowly put to rest. But never too far and never forgotten, Always a part of our history.

This is not a special story, there are millions of them. It is just mine. And I am one of the fortunate few who did not lose any loved ones. I  just lost a part of myself. And every September 11 I remember.

TRAUMA AND DISSOCIATION.

Last week I wrote about the fact that our experience is discontinuous in nature. I also said that despite the fact that we experience ourselves as one, unitary being, we actually have many self-states or self configurations which help us along, are not always in our awareness, and are often dissociated. Then, a patient who read that blog, told me that in my attempt to address dissociation as part of normal experience, he felt that I may have trivialized it. Definitely not my intent. So here comes part two – dissociation as the result of trauma.

What happens when we experience severe trauma? When our mind is assaulted by something it could not have thought of or conceived? At its most basic, psychological trauma consists of an experience which comes too unexpectedly to be known, or fully processed and understood. Trauma interrupts our minds’ ability to think clearly and make sense of what has happened. Since we are unable to understand it and process it fully, traumatic experience overwhelms us and fragments our experience of being, of selfhood. It strikes at the very nature of who we experience ourselves to be. Traumatic experience demands that we deal with conflicting and incompatible ideas, thoughts, perceptions, emotions and sensations. That is where dissociation comes in: it holds the incompatible and conflictual for us. Out of our conscious awareness, but replete with information about the trauma and our experience of it.

Psychological trauma is and remains unassimilated experience, and it comes back to haunt the survivor experientially. Survivors often feel that they are no longer themselves and have been changed forever. Even Freud, in his early studies of hysteria found that the experience of trauma repeated itself, unremittingly, through the unknown acts of the survivor and against his/her will. Psychological trauma remains alive in the unwitting reenactment of an event that one cannot leave behind. It involves a breach in our experience of time, self, and our connection to the world. This is where dissociation operates. Our survival is predicated on it. Dissociation attempts to protect our psychic integrity  by isolating traumatic experience and un-linking it from conscious awareness. In the process, it may alter our perception of time, our memory, and our ability to be present in the here and now.

Sometimes, a traumatic event and its sequelae is exiled (dissociated) and carried by another part of us (a self state), leaving a rumbling trace of itself in our conscious mind, which can be triggered in part or in its entirety by life events and/or intense emotions. Or, as in the case of Multiple Personality Disorder, where self-fragmentation has occurred, many self states (or full personalities) will hold parts of the original trauma and the reaction(s) to it, as well as feelings, sensations and memories. It is precisely at the intersection of knowing that something has happened, and not knowing (what, how, when, if ) – that dissociation envelops the traumatic event, creating a psychic lacunae. In the dissociative space brought on by psychological trauma, it is action through behavioral repetition and re-enactment that narrate the story, and become the voice and language of the original trauma. Think of repetitions, particularly of painful experiences, as attempts to get it right and heal. Psychological trauma and the psychic wound that it creates is often felt but not consciously accessible, -it remains dissociated- except as it imposes itself again, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor. The repetition itself offering an opportunity to face the trauma anew, to prepare, to respond differently, and to be finished with it.

Psychological trauma is not healable in a simple, straightforward way. Often healing and integration of traumatic experience  requires a re-processing of the original event(s), feelings, thoughts and sensations. It is not only a matter of locating psychological trauma in the original event(s) in an individual’s past, but also of discovering the way(s) that it returns to haunt them: In the way it seeps into their lives and the very fabric of their experience. In the way that it helps to construct and destruct their relationships. The dissociation that accompanies psychological trauma holds the story of a reality that is lived, experienced, and survived by the self and its many configurations, but at a very high cost. It is the story of  tragic past experience that continues to impact its survivor in search of  resolution and finality.  It is the story of psychic survival in the wake of catastrophic experience.

* For more on this topic please look up and read  Philip Bromberg (in the suggested reading list in my resource section).

ON BEING (ONE)SELF: The discontinuity of experience.

Modern psychoanalysis thinks of the self as having multiple states or narratives. Patients walk into our offices and present us with their story, but as analysts we know there are many stories to one self, and many experiential states to that self. Furthermore, we know, that depending on the day, event, mood, and situation, we may meet and come upon a different self, one who can narrate and/or be in touch with a different set of experiences. I am not speaking about Multiple Personality Disorder, as in The Three Faces of Eve or Sybil, where the psyche fragments due to severe trauma. I am referring to normal experience. Our “sense of ourselves” is discontinuous from the very beginning.

Psychic experience begins as a chaotic state consisting of physical sensations, which start to take shape through the modulation of our experience by our caretakers. It is further assisted by language development and our ability to begin to use words to label our experience and communicate it to others. This continues to evolve over time incorporating the impact of our experiences. We develop a more or less cohesive sense of ourselves that comes about as we mature, and continues to evolve and elaborate itself as we knit together who we are from our experiences: the good, the bad, the traumatic. This allows us to entertain the illusion of one self: coherent, consistent, and authentic. Yet there are many self-states that are part of that oneness, and we are not always aware of them. In fact, we cannot be. Our experience is necessarily discontinuous and fragmented to various degrees.

For instance, have you ever been driving and suddenly wondered whether you actually stopped at the last red light? Chances are you did, but you do not remember or have a mental picture of doing so. You “blanked out” and some other part of you, hopefully the part that knows how to drive, took over – automatically filling in. We might consider this momentary ‘spacing out’ as a dissociative moment in normal experience. These moments occur to all of us. They help filter and titrate experience and the demands that life and circumstances place on our psyche.

Consider now a more emotionally loaded situation. Years ago, when I gave my first psychoanalytic presentation, I remember watching the entire event while sitting with the audience. I knew I had been nervous prior to the presentation, yet I did not expect what happened next. I could recognize myself at the podium, and could hear my voice clearly, but I was not presenting, some other I was (and it knew how to address an audience!). Thankfully, when it was over and I was talking to my friends and colleagues, I was back, and we could laugh and commiserate over my performance anxiety and my out of body experience during my talk. This “out of body experience” constitutes a dissociative state. Both these examples highlight dissociation in service of the ego, that is, in the service of maintaining our ability to function.

We flee or dissociate when we cannot hold two conflicting states of mind at the same time, so one part of us goes away while another tries to get on with the situation at hand. Yet, we are indeed not fully there. In the example above, I was more nervous than I cared to admit on the day of my presentation and rather than panic in front of my colleagues, potentially blowing my presentation, I ‘went away’ leaving the podium to a calmer me. In this instance, dissociation kept me from experiencing acute anxiety and potential shame while allowing me to finish my presentation. Dissociation is the psyche’s response to the threat of fragmentation. It is the psyche’s attempt to protect us from conflicting and overwhelming information and experience. The degree of dissociation is often determined by the degree of the threat to our psyche. Thus, on a continuum of experience we can space out at one end, have fugue states or amnesia, and experience discrete and separate self-states, as in multiple personality disorder at the other: With many and multiple dis-variations of experience in between.

Dissociation can take many forms, individually crafted by our history and personality. Think of it as our psyche’s way of maintaining and supporting our sense of ourselves, of shuffling our various self-states into our experience of one self.