The Affect Theory of Silvan Tompkins for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, E. Virginia Demos (2019)
Dynamic Systems Theory
Demos advocates a dynamic systems view of personality. Dynamic systems theory states that the behavior and development of living organisms is determined by both endogenous and exogenous principles.
Endogenous Principles. As stated by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, living organisms are born with “highly complex organization” as well as an endogenous impetus governing “initiation or action and function.” One corroboration for this claim came several years ago when embryologists studied the roundworm, an incredibly simple organism with just 959 cells. Although each embryonic roundworm developed into a similarly structured adi;t roundworm, “no set of cells followed the same pattern” of development; rather, there “seemed to be an infinite number of routes taken, yet the end product was always the same.”
Exogenous Principles. Had our evolutionary history been different, we might have not developed into bipedal walkers. When environmental influences (or “constraints”) are not too substantial, the self-organizing organism is able “to recognize and assimilate” these influences, and only minor changes occur, enabling homeostasis. If the constraint is more substantial, but not too substantial, then the organism experiences change, e.g., a new behavior.
Summary. In sum, “lived experience is as powerful a determinant in shaping developmental outsides” as are “genetic outcomes.”Moreover, given all this it follows that “individual variation and idiosyncratic adaptations are the rule.
Dynamic Systems Theory and Infants
Researchers have documented many examples of dynamic systems at work in human development.
Walking. Esther Thelen discovered that, whereas researchers had previously believed that walking was a learned behavior, infants are born with a “stepping pattern.” She found that the neonate would actually begin life walking if born with the requisite muscular strength, something she demonstrated by putting infant’s lower bodies in water.
Reaching and Grasping. Whereas Piaget claimed that infants must “obtain a certain level of cognitive organization” before they can perform reaching and grasping behaviors, researchers have more recently discovered that “what appear to be random swiping motions of very young infants are in reality quite well-organized reaching and grasping motions directed at objects.” These young infants fail to perform reaching and grasping behaviors, not because they lack certain cognitive organization, but because they lack sufficient muscular strength. Thelen found that, much like the roundworm, infants obtain the ability to reach and grasp but come to this ability in different ways, e.g., more active infants getting there by learning “to damp down their movements” and other infants getting there by learning “to increase the speed and energy of their movements.”
Affects. The infant is born experiencing different affects states, each coming with a corresponding facial, vocal, and body response. "The interested baby will widen and focus its eyes intently on a stimulus, with brows raised or knitted, cheeks raised, and mouth relaxed, holding its limbs relatively quiet, and will tend to scan the stimulus for novelty.” "The joyful baby will smile and tend to produce relaxed, relatively smooth movements of its limbs, savoring the familiar.” "The angry baby will square its mouth, lower and pull its brows together, cry intensely, holding the cry for a long time, then pause for a long inspiration, its face will redden with increased blood flow, and it will tend to kick and thrash its limbs forcefully or arch its back.” The distressed baby "will produce a rhythmical cry, with the corners of the mouth pulled down and the inner corners of the brow drawn up and will tend to move its limbs and head around helplessly.” The surprised baby “will open its eyes and mouth wide and stop its activity.”
Perceptual Capacities. The infant is born with “a highly complex and unified perceptual system.” For example, “infants can visually recognize the shape of an object that they have previously only explored with their mouth or tongue, and they can match the intensity of a sound with the intensity of a light.”
Intentionality. The neonate spends his waking hours “actively exploring the world,” suggesting a “capacity for intentionality.” Additionally, there’s evidence suggesting that the infant can differentiate himself from others. Martin and Clark (1982) found that calm newborns will begin crying and crying newborn infants will continue crying if “they hear tape-recorded crying of other newborns.” However, when these same infants hear tape-recordings of themselves crying, the calm infants will not cry and the crying infants will stop crying. Further, calm newborns do not begin crying when they hear the tape-recorded cryings of older children or chimpanzees.
Social capacities. The infant is born with the capacity “to interact with a human caregiver.” Researchers trained to administer the Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale razelton found they were able to “elicit smiles from well-organized, alert neonates held in the en face position.” Wolf (1963) found that “the human voice is the single most effective elicitor of neonatal responses.” Field, Woodson, Greenberg, and Cohen (1982) found that “neonates are capable of discriminating and imitating three facial expressions (happy, sad, and surprised) modeled by a live adult.”
Human Psyche
We’re born with 30 billion neurons, and the number of neurons does not change throughout life. Rather, our brains develop as “the result of lived experience, which leads to the proliferation of dendrites, axons, and increasingly complex neural networks.”
The brain is “organized hierarchically, beginning from the bottom, and moving up from the brainstem, midbrain, limbic, and subcortex to the neocortex.” When we’re born, dendrites and synapses are more prevalent in these first four regions. Consequently, “the subcortical, limbic, emotional circuits that develop in infancy” are less plastic than the neocortex, which “continues to develop new dendrites and synapses through life.” This fact allows us to understand why “emotional learning can have long-lasting effects on psychological functioning, but these effects can be modulated and regulated by continued development in the neocortex.”
The early infant processes learning through the first four regions, producing implicit (procedural) knowledge. Implicit (procedural) knowledge includes knowledge of how to do things as well as “non-verbal concepts of sensory-motor, and emotional-relational patterns of behaving and interacting that occur implicitly through sensing, preverbal thinking, feeling, and doing.” Importantly, “early, non-verbal, emotionally patterned communications between infants and caregivers are stored in implicit, procedural memory.”
Once we develop language, we rely more heavily on explicit (declarative) learning. Explicit (declarative) involves “integrating sensory and emotional information with spatial and temporal sequential information, over longer time spans and with semantic associations or images, producing narratives.” Implicit (procedural) knowledge can remain separate from explicit (declarative) knowledge. We can turn implicit (procedural) knowledge into explicit (declarative) knowledge by label and verbalizing experience.
Conscious, Unconscious, Non-conscious
Neuroscience further holds that mental phenomena can be conscious, unconscious, or non-conscious.
Conscious. There are two types of consciousness. Primary consciousness is the awareness of “the current, continual stream of perceptual, emotional, cognitive, and motor events.” Primary consciousness is made possible by implicit (procedural) knowledge. Self-reflective consciousness involves reflecting on “mental processes in a symbolic, representational mode, creating a virtual reality that can be shared.” Self-reflective consciousness is made possible by explicit (declarative) knowledge.
Unconscious. The psyche can employ “defensive efforts designed to exclude [certain mental events] in the future from consciousness, thereby becoming unconscious for defensive reasons.” The unconscious thus consists of “experiences that were once conscious but could not be subjectively tolerated and thus cannot now be allowed to recur.”
Non-conscious. Our minds can only “seven bits of information” in our consciousness at one time, and we “would quickly become swamped if [we] had to be conscious of everything going on” inside us. “Many neurological, chemical, and homeostatic processes, as well as many perceptual, cognitive, and motor processes are designed to function outside of consciousness.”
Basic Human Priorities
The infant psyche possesses two basic psychological priorities: “(1) the need to maintain psychic coherence and (2) the need to be an active agent in bringing about desired goals.”
Psychic Coherence
Humans are “meaning-making organisms,” meaning we are continually categorizing and recategorizing experience and in so doing adapting to new experiences (Ghent, 2002). Tomkins believed that humans possess six mechanisms — affect, sensory, motor, memory, cognitive, and drive mechanisms — that are all “capable of acting independently, dependently, and interdependently.” He argued that affect mechanisms possess correlated bodily responses.
Demos provides research findings that illustrate the infant’s “capacity to coordinate affective, perceptual, cognitive, memory, and motor functions in order to bring about a desired event.”
Although infants possess these capacities, “they have only modest abilities to regulate exposure to stimuli.” They “cannot rid themselves of excessive auditory or tactile stimuli, nor can they use cognitive strategies to deal with information overload.” Thus, caregivers are needed to modulate stimuli. Regarding affect states, infants “are capable of self-regulation when arousal levels are low to moderate.” When negative affect increases, they do not possess the ability to modulate the affect, “and without a caregiver’s help it can escalate in a positive feedback loop, cycling up into higher and higher densities moving from distress to anger, to fear, and disorganization resulting in a potentially traumatic experience.”
The caregiver must do two important things. (1) Protect the infant “from affect deregulation that can lead to disorganization in the infant and threaten the infant’s psychic coherence.” (2) Provide “support to the infant through optimal densities of negative affect, thereby enhancing the infant’s capacity to endure, tolerate, and persist in the face of ‘trouble’ in order to develop instrumental coping skills.” Thus the caregiver does these things, the infant will develop a sense of trust “in the reliability and manageability” of her “own inner experience.”
When the infant has this sense of trust, “the onset of distress or anger does not mean an escalation and the need to retreat, and thus does not evoke dread or shame, but rather it reflects the learned expectation that these states can be tolerated, that their causes can be resolved, that they have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that one can return to a more positive state.” Additionally, the infant learns “that others are helpful and reliable and perhaps that the world is trustworthy.” This “learning provides a baseline of perseverance and optimism in the psyche, and a recognizable experience of inner cohesion and sameness.”
The caregiver also plays a part in “helping the infant to sustain and elaborate the positive affects of interest and enjoyment, which are needed to sustain any ongoing effort.” Children “have limited capacities to develop new ideas and strategies on their own.” The more that children receive support “in expanding, sustaining, and communicating their states of interest and enjoyment,” the more they’re able “to experience themselves as the source of interesting ideas and events, to sustain their interests when alone, to invest in their interests readily and easily, and to find a wide range of objects and activities interesting and enjoyable.” If, on the other hand, the caregiver is not “a facilitating presence” or if they become “frustrated with the child,” the child is more likely to constrict her interests, get bored, not engage others, not sustain her interests when alone, and not “derive enjoyment or excitement” from her activities.
Agency
Demos provides research findings that illustrate the infant’s “capacity to coordinate affective, perceptual, cognitive, memory, and motor functions in order to bring about a desired event.”
Although infants possess these capacities, “they have only modest abilities to regulate exposure to stimuli.” They “cannot rid themselves of excessive auditory or tactile stimuli, nor can they use cognitive strategies to deal with information overload.” Thus, caregivers are needed to modulate stimuli. Regarding affect states, infants “are capable of self-regulation when arousal levels are low to moderate.” When negative affect increases, they do not possess the ability to modulate the affect, “and without a caregiver’s help it can escalate in a positive feedback loop, cycling up into higher and higher densities moving from distress to anger, to fear, and disorganization resulting in a potentially traumatic experience.”
The caregiver must do two important things. (1) Protect the infant “from affect deregulation that can lead to disorganization in the infant and threaten the infant’s psychic coherence.” (2) Provide “support to the infant through optimal densities of negative affect, thereby enhancing the infant’s capacity to endure, tolerate, and persist in the face of ‘trouble’ in order to develop instrumental coping skills.” Thus the caregiver does these things, the infant will develop a sense of trust “in the reliability and manageability” of her “own inner experience.”
When the infant has this sense of trust, “the onset of distress or anger does not mean an escalation and the need to retreat, and thus does not evoke dread or shame, but rather it reflects the learned expectation that these states can be tolerated, that their causes can be resolved, that they have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that one can return to a more positive state.” Additionally, the infant learns “that others are helpful and reliable and perhaps that the world is trustworthy.” This “learning provides a baseline of perseverance and optimism in the psyche, and a recognizable experience of inner cohesion and sameness.”
The caregiver also plays a part in “helping the infant to sustain and elaborate the positive affects of interest and enjoyment, which are needed to sustain any ongoing effort.” Children “have limited capacities to develop new ideas and strategies on their own.” The more that children receive support “in expanding, sustaining, and communicating their states of interest and enjoyment,” the more they’re able “to experience themselves as the source of interesting ideas and events, to sustain their interests when alone, to invest in their interests readily and easily, and to find a wide range of objects and activities interesting and enjoyable.” If, on the other hand, the caregiver is not “a facilitating presence” or if they become “frustrated with the child,” the child is more likely to constrict her interests, get bored, not engage others, not sustain her interests when alone, and not “derive enjoyment or excitement” from her activities.
Agency
The infant is interested in “being an active agent in making things happen in [her] life.” We have an innate desire, not just to have certain things but to also acquire those things ourselves.
This idea is represented by AIM. The infant becomes aware of a distressing affective state (A); she then sets an intention to end or decrease it (I); she finally mobilizes to achieve that goal (M). When the caregiver intervenes and matches “the specificity of the infant’s goal,” the infant experiences her initiative as recognizes and validated, and she receives help achieving her goal. This interaction/help consequently enhances “the infant’s use of internal cues and self-generated goals as a frame of reference for future plans and actions.”
If the caregiver intervenes too early, the infant never experiences “affective awareness of [the] problem” or her intention to intervene and her need to “mobilize a response.” And if the caregiver intervenes too late, the infant’s negative affect will exceed the optimal limit, and she will not have the experience of setting an intention and then mobilizing to achieve her goal. “Meeting the infant, during the moment the infant is most aware and ready to receive help, and matching the specificity of the infant’s goal is crucial in fostering the infant’s experience of agency.” Demos adds that there are “obvious parallels here to the timing and specificity of interventions in the therapeutic process.”
Responding in the optimal way requires several things of the caregiver: (1) she must recognize the infant as an autonomous, not a helpless, being; (2) she must value the infant’s goals, not regarding them as silly and not perceiving them as threatening to the caregiver; (3) she must understand the infant’s abilities so as not to allow her to be overwhelmed by unattainable goals resulting in overwhelming affective states.
When the child does not receive an optimal response, she will come to experience the self as devaled, helpless, and ineffective — devalued because she concludes that her affects and wishes are not valued by her caregiver, helpless because she concludes that her caregiver will not be there to provide help when needed, and ineffective because she does not develop the confidence needed to modulate her affects and persist in reaching her goals. Now feeling devalued, helpless, and ineffective, the child learns to turn away from “a focus on inner states and goals as reliable guides for developing agency” and instead focuses on “obtaining and sustaining [her caregiver’s] involvement.” Doing so “constricts the degrees of freedom open to the infant/child by closing off internal sources of vitality, affective information and self-initiative.” Demos concludes: “One is reminded of Winnicott’s notion of the false self.”
This idea is represented by AIM. The infant becomes aware of a distressing affective state (A); she then sets an intention to end or decrease it (I); she finally mobilizes to achieve that goal (M). When the caregiver intervenes and matches “the specificity of the infant’s goal,” the infant experiences her initiative as recognizes and validated, and she receives help achieving her goal. This interaction/help consequently enhances “the infant’s use of internal cues and self-generated goals as a frame of reference for future plans and actions.”
If the caregiver intervenes too early, the infant never experiences “affective awareness of [the] problem” or her intention to intervene and her need to “mobilize a response.” And if the caregiver intervenes too late, the infant’s negative affect will exceed the optimal limit, and she will not have the experience of setting an intention and then mobilizing to achieve her goal. “Meeting the infant, during the moment the infant is most aware and ready to receive help, and matching the specificity of the infant’s goal is crucial in fostering the infant’s experience of agency.” Demos adds that there are “obvious parallels here to the timing and specificity of interventions in the therapeutic process.”
Responding in the optimal way requires several things of the caregiver: (1) she must recognize the infant as an autonomous, not a helpless, being; (2) she must value the infant’s goals, not regarding them as silly and not perceiving them as threatening to the caregiver; (3) she must understand the infant’s abilities so as not to allow her to be overwhelmed by unattainable goals resulting in overwhelming affective states.
When the child does not receive an optimal response, she will come to experience the self as devaled, helpless, and ineffective — devalued because she concludes that her affects and wishes are not valued by her caregiver, helpless because she concludes that her caregiver will not be there to provide help when needed, and ineffective because she does not develop the confidence needed to modulate her affects and persist in reaching her goals. Now feeling devalued, helpless, and ineffective, the child learns to turn away from “a focus on inner states and goals as reliable guides for developing agency” and instead focuses on “obtaining and sustaining [her caregiver’s] involvement.” Doing so “constricts the degrees of freedom open to the infant/child by closing off internal sources of vitality, affective information and self-initiative.” Demos concludes: “One is reminded of Winnicott’s notion of the false self.”
The Interplay between Coherence and Agency
Demos shares some of the findings from the Boston-Denver longitudinal study “that began initially in the 1950s and, and produced the most thorough, in-depth, exhaustive data set, yet available, on thirty families, through pregnancy, birth, and subsequent development over a three-year period of their first child.” Researchers identified seven issues that the child negotiates between the ages of 0-36 months:
“When things go well, the infant continues throughout to develop a strong inner-directed agency, with coherent and stable inner states.” But when things go wrong, the infant will experience “a failure to achieve a new inner coherence and mutuality.”
Attachment
Demos rejects Bowlby’s belief that, “as a protection against predators,” we are programmed to experience anxiety when separated from our caregivers. “If the brain is a self-organizing, dynamic system, then the functions available to the infant cannot be so specialized and already dedicated to such a specific goal.”
Yes, the infant is predisposed “to attend to human [as opposed to non-human] stimuli,” but these predispositions “operate in a general way.” For example, the infant will initially be interested in any human and only after exposure to specific humans over time will she become especially attached to those humans. And the infant will initially cry when impinged upon aversive stimulus without knowing that the cry can make things better; it takes “experience with a responsive, reliable other” to teach her that her cries can result in help.
“In order for life to feel livable, each person has to find their own way to make coherent sense of their experiences and to feel they have some control over what happens to them. Optimally, this will include rewarding relationships with others,” but people “born into dire or less than optimal environments can live without becoming bonded or attached to other people.”
Motivation Theory Reformulated
“What motivates human behavior?” Or put differently, “Why do humans do what they do?” Freud attempted these questions by proposing his dual instinct theory. Freud had wanted “to ground motives in the neurological functioning of the body, but was limited by the science of his day.”
Demos argues that in order to understand human motivation, we need to develop a theory of affects. This theory needs to explain “how affects are activated and function and how they relate to drives and cognitions,” as well as how “the distinctive quality of each affect” is produced, how the quality of each affect is related to “the psychological experience of feeling motivated.”
Jack Panksepp has tried to relate neuroscience to psychoanalysis. Panksepp has shown that “there is no evidence in the brain to support Freud’s conceptualization of the two primary instincts, namely, the death instinct and libido, as viable motivational sources for all our human capabilities and psychological experience.”
Demos shares some of the findings from the Boston-Denver longitudinal study “that began initially in the 1950s and, and produced the most thorough, in-depth, exhaustive data set, yet available, on thirty families, through pregnancy, birth, and subsequent development over a three-year period of their first child.” Researchers identified seven issues that the child negotiates between the ages of 0-36 months:
- Ages 0-3 months: “the central issue being negotiated is the initial regulation of coherent states of sleeping, waking, eating, elimination, and so on.”
- Ages 4-6 months: the infant is capable of more reciprocal exchanges; if the caregiver is responsive, “affectively spontaneous back-and-forth sequences, for the sheer joy of them can then occur.”
- Ages 7-9 months: the infant, now more mobile, “becomes more intentional and goal directed.”
- Ages 10-13 months: the infant feels the need to “determine how available the caregiver will be when the infant makes a bid for attention, and until this issue is resolved,” the infant becomes preoccupied with the caregiver’s whereabouts.
- Ages 14-20 months: the infant, now more mobile, “becomes more self-assertive about goals, which are now asserted intentionally, and at times against the caregiver’s wishes, again, requiring a new adjustment between caregiver and infant,” a period some call “the terrible twos.”
- Ages 18-36 months: the child begins using language and “becomes more aware of his inner intentions, state, and fantasies, and can now experienced that another is aware of what [she] is aware of within [herself].”
- Ages 18-36 months: the child also feels the need “to disrupt and then restore mutual coordination with the caregiver through intentional, aggressive disruptive and repair behaviors, so as to experience, and to test the limits of ‘continuity’ of a separate self and in relation to the other.”
“When things go well, the infant continues throughout to develop a strong inner-directed agency, with coherent and stable inner states.” But when things go wrong, the infant will experience “a failure to achieve a new inner coherence and mutuality.”
Attachment
Demos rejects Bowlby’s belief that, “as a protection against predators,” we are programmed to experience anxiety when separated from our caregivers. “If the brain is a self-organizing, dynamic system, then the functions available to the infant cannot be so specialized and already dedicated to such a specific goal.”
Yes, the infant is predisposed “to attend to human [as opposed to non-human] stimuli,” but these predispositions “operate in a general way.” For example, the infant will initially be interested in any human and only after exposure to specific humans over time will she become especially attached to those humans. And the infant will initially cry when impinged upon aversive stimulus without knowing that the cry can make things better; it takes “experience with a responsive, reliable other” to teach her that her cries can result in help.
“In order for life to feel livable, each person has to find their own way to make coherent sense of their experiences and to feel they have some control over what happens to them. Optimally, this will include rewarding relationships with others,” but people “born into dire or less than optimal environments can live without becoming bonded or attached to other people.”
Motivation Theory Reformulated
“What motivates human behavior?” Or put differently, “Why do humans do what they do?” Freud attempted these questions by proposing his dual instinct theory. Freud had wanted “to ground motives in the neurological functioning of the body, but was limited by the science of his day.”
Demos argues that in order to understand human motivation, we need to develop a theory of affects. This theory needs to explain “how affects are activated and function and how they relate to drives and cognitions,” as well as how “the distinctive quality of each affect” is produced, how the quality of each affect is related to “the psychological experience of feeling motivated.”
Jack Panksepp has tried to relate neuroscience to psychoanalysis. Panksepp has shown that “there is no evidence in the brain to support Freud’s conceptualization of the two primary instincts, namely, the death instinct and libido, as viable motivational sources for all our human capabilities and psychological experience.”
Tomkins’ Affect Theory
Affects are “organized sets of responses widely distributed throughout the body involving changes in the blood flow in the face, changes in breathing and vocalizations, in the heart, in the endocrines, and in the skeletal muscles, which generate feedback that is experienced as either positive or negative.” We are born with programs for each specific affect “stored in subcortical centers.” “Thus the infant does not have to learn to cry in distress when hungry, or how to startle to a loud noise.”
Tomskins believed our facial response is more important to the response of our inner organs — first, because it “responds faster and with more precision,” and second, because it communicates to both the self and to others. His listed affects in both their weak and strong form.
See Affects — Silvan Tomkins.
Tomkins’ Script Theory
We link together different experiences to form scripts. This process can be selective and arbitrary, as we can discount certain experiences and exaggerate others. Scripts serve as rules or guides for action. Tomkins told the story of a young girl who was hospitalized, and thus separated from her parents, for a week. The experience was obviously unpleasant for Laura. One week after she returned home, her parents left her with a stranger before visiting an art exhibit. Had Laura constructed a script that being left in a strange place would result in danger, she would have cried. However, Laura didn’t crying, indicating that she still possessed a script that expected positive things to happen to her.
Scripts can be positive. Demos describes Donna, a little girl she observed over time. Donna’s mother was responsive, showing support and encouragement when Donna shared her interests with her and showing empathy and helping her to problem solve when Donna became distressed. By the time Donna was watched by babysitters, she would if needed share her distress with them, expecting them to help her as her mother did.
Scripts can also be negative. Demos describes the shame that can occur in one’s family of origin. The child, for instance, might be shamed for losing control of her bowels, being called “baby” by her mother and subsequently “feel a loss of love” and feel that she is a bad person. Such a child might grow to approach new situations, “such as school or a social group in a shy and hesitant manner, wanting to join and be included” but possessing a script that tells her that any misstep will be met with hostility and rejection.
We link together different experiences to form scripts. This process can be selective and arbitrary, as we can discount certain experiences and exaggerate others. Scripts serve as rules or guides for action. Tomkins told the story of a young girl who was hospitalized, and thus separated from her parents, for a week. The experience was obviously unpleasant for Laura. One week after she returned home, her parents left her with a stranger before visiting an art exhibit. Had Laura constructed a script that being left in a strange place would result in danger, she would have cried. However, Laura didn’t crying, indicating that she still possessed a script that expected positive things to happen to her.
Scripts can be positive. Demos describes Donna, a little girl she observed over time. Donna’s mother was responsive, showing support and encouragement when Donna shared her interests with her and showing empathy and helping her to problem solve when Donna became distressed. By the time Donna was watched by babysitters, she would if needed share her distress with them, expecting them to help her as her mother did.
Scripts can also be negative. Demos describes the shame that can occur in one’s family of origin. The child, for instance, might be shamed for losing control of her bowels, being called “baby” by her mother and subsequently “feel a loss of love” and feel that she is a bad person. Such a child might grow to approach new situations, “such as school or a social group in a shy and hesitant manner, wanting to join and be included” but possessing a script that tells her that any misstep will be met with hostility and rejection.
Concluding Comments
Early mother-infant interactions, as described by Beebe, Lachmann, and Jaffe (1997), “in which mother and infant jointly create experiences of ‘being with,’ can serve as a paradigm for what we are trying to achieve in our work with patients. Sander (1995) describes such moments as ‘now moments’ that involve specificities of timing and affective matching, which when achieved create the vitalizing feeling of being known in the other.”
Sander describes the experience of the mother and infant looking into one another’s eyes. “Other infant investigators have found that young infants choose to look at their mother’s eyes. Haith, Bergman, and Moore (1977) reported that 4-week-old infants spend 30 percent of face-to-face time looking at their mother’s eyes, and by 8 weeks they spent 60 percent of their time looking at their mother’s eyes.”
Demos returns to the AIM, an acronym for the steps the infant takes to achieve goals: the infant becoming aware of a distressing affect (A), setting an intention to act to change (I), and mobilizing a response (M). When the caregiver responds “at that specific moment with a specifically matched response, it creates the vitalizing experience of having the meaning of one’s inner experience understood, as well as the success of having one’s actions achieve a desired result.” These experiences “lead to a trust of one’s effects, which then supports the use of one’s inner cues and understandings to guide one’s behaviors and goals.”
When children fail to receive these experiences, they grow into adults who “seem to have lost contact with the most vital parts of themselves, namely their own thoughts and feelings about events in their lives or in the world, and their own wishes and desires.” Moreover, they grow to believe “that anyone would care enough to want to know about them,” and as a result, their “vital, affectively powered inner cues have become deeply hidden” from others and mabe from themselves. Their “emotionally vital cues no longer guide their thoughts, behaviors, and goals. Without such inner guidance, [they] may feel lost without direction in their lives, or strive to please others, project their alien states onto others, or look to others for direction and goals.”
Given this, it is our job as therapists “to create an atmosphere of attentive, non-judgmental safety that will slowly allow our patients to risk letting us know what happened to them.” “And through all this we need to be alert to opportunities for joining in specific moments of ‘being with,’ which requires a specificity of both timing and a matching of affective tone. Only then will patients begin to feel those vitalizing moments of being recognized and met and imagine that ‘maybe, just maybe, someone will finally value who I am and help me.’ Patients seem to know when and if someone is really listening and is willing to believe and bear witness to the troubles that have been so deeply buried inside.”
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