My Psychoanalytic Journey

Although Winnicott never presented his ideas “in a clearly organized manner,” he “espoused a consistent view of development throughout his work, and his views on psychopathology and treatment emanate from this developmental scheme.” His goal was to understand “the preoedipal phases of development and their role in psychopathology.” Development Everyone is born with a drive (“maturational process”) “to develop in a given direction.” If the facilitating environment is not “good enough,” one’s drive and thus development might be blocked. Our development consists of three phases of dependence: absolute dependence, relative dependence, and toward independence. The last phase is the equivalent of the oedipal stage. Absolute Dependence Infant.  The neonate is born in a state of unintegration (his feelings “not experienced as belonging to a common whole”) and undifferentiation (unable to differentiate himself from his mother). He also lacks an understanding of reality, his experience being tha

Emotion Purpose.  Emotions offer a compass in life. They color our world and orient us to what matters at any moment. They move us to action, and they communicate to others.  Health.  Emotional health involves having access to our emotions, being able to trust the signals they send, and being able to regulate them. Approach emotions — joy, evoking relaxed engagement and openness; surprise, evoking curiosity; anger, evoking assertion and moving toward goals. Avoidance emotions — shame, evoking withdrawal and hiding; fear, evoking fleeing or freezing; sadness, evoking withdrawal or comfort-seeking. Six Core Emotions.  Approach emotions — joy, evoking relaxed engagement and openness; surprise, evoking curiosity; anger, evoking assertion and moving toward goals. Avoidance emotions — shame, evoking withdrawal and hiding; fear, evoking fleeing or freezing; sadness, evoking withdrawal or comfort-seeking. Elements of an Emotion.  Trigger: “There is a shadow in the darkness.” Fast, Basic Percep

Introduction Some people believe that emotions should be controlled (the mind-over-mood view), and others believe that they should be gotten rid of through venting (the cathartic view). Greenberg writes that we should instead “identify on each occasion what type of emotion is being experienced” and then decide the best way to deal with that emotion. Primary, Secondary, and Instrument Emotions Greenberg categorizes emotions into three groups: primary emotions, secondary emotions, and instrumental emotions. Primary and Secondary Emotions Primary emotions are the automatic emotional responses we have to a trigger. Primary emotions can be adaptive, meaning that, if listened to, they will help the person get his needs met. For example, if I’m feeling sad because I experienced a loss, this is a primary emotion because this emotion is moving me to reach out to be comforted, the very thing in need in this situation. Primary emotions can also be maladaptive. A maladaptive primary emotion is not

Demos (1988) writes that Ekman and Izzard coded facial muscle movements “in the three regions of the face separately—the upper face, with forehead and brows; the eyes, cheeks and nose; and the lower face, the mouth and chin.” * * * * *  From The Definitive Guide to Reading Microexpressions  by Vanessa Van Edwards. Surprise Upper face: eyebrows raised and curved; horizontal wrinkles across forehead. Horizontal: eyelids opened; whites of eyes showing above and below. Lower face: jaw open; teeth parted but no tension or stretching in the mouth.  Function: “When we raise our eyebrows, we open our eyes wider. This lets other observers see where we are looking much easier…so they can see exactly what we are surprised about.” Fear Upper face: eyebrows raised and drawn together; wrinkles in the center of the forehead. Horizontal: upper eyelids raised; lower eyelids tense and drawn up; eyes have upper not not lower whites showing. Lower face: mouth open; lips slightly tensed or stretched and d

Affects Introduction. An affect is an inborn, automatic, physiological response to a stimulus. This response involves changes in one’s facial muscles, voice, and autonomic nervous system. “Because the facial muscles in humans are more finely articulated and can change more rapidly than the correlated autonomic responses (three-tenths of a second versus one to two seconds), Tomkins argued that the face is the primary site of affect and takes the lead in establishing and creating an awareness of an affective state, with the other correlated responses coming into play more slowly.” Affects are innate. Ekman and Izzard “independently explored the validity of the facial expression patterns described by Tomkins. Their work demonstrated that these expressions were produced, recognized, and given similar meanings in a wide range of Western and Non-Western cultures. This cross-cultural consensus supports the proposition that affects are biologically inherited responses, universally shared by

(1) Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena Transitional Objects Described. It is common for an infant to become deeply attached to a specific toy or object. “The parents get to know [this object’s] value and carry it round when travelling. The mother lets it get dirty and even smelly, knowing that by washing it she introduces a break in continuity in the infant's experience, a break that may destroy the meaning and value of the object to the infant.” It is during times of sickness and distress in which the infant most tenaciously clings to the object. As he grows, he gradually loses interest in the object. What is going on here? What makes this object so important? Winnicott’s answer is that the infant imbues the object with some special, fantastical quality, a type of power that another object with identical physical characteristics would not possess. We’ve all experienced an infant taking “part of a sheet or blanket, into the mouth with the fingers.” As this happens, Win

“Who is speaking?” Paula Heimann of the British School changed psychoanalysis when she thought to ask this question when an analysand was free associating, her assumption being that “at any one moment in a session a patient could be speaking with the voice of the mother, or the mood of the father.” Margaret Little further changed psychoanalysis by saying that the analyst should be asking what she herself is feeling, her assumption being that the countertransference, her point being that “the analysand uses the analyst as an object in the transference in order to put the analyst into the patient’s mind, compelling the analyst to relive with the analysand the nature of the patient’s early life and to exist with some feeling inside his internal object world.” “The work of a clinical psychoanalysis, particularly of object relations in the transference and countertransference, will partly be preoccupied with the emergence into thought of early memories of being and relating. As exploration

Introduction Bollas shares two experiences that changed his view of psychoanalysis. The first was his analysis of a man named Jerome who used the therapeutic space in a way Bollas had never before experienced. “He got me thinking about how an analysis can provide the patient with transference objects that seem to facilitate the analysand’s spontaneous expression of unthought known elements of his own character.” The second experience was the birth of his son. “What struck me was how he was who he was from scratch. He seemed to be in possession of his own personality, his own very unique configuration of being (what I term an idiom) that has never really changed in itself.” One day when working with Jerome, he realized that “that one of my functions for him was to be of use for his idiom moves — for private articulations of his personality potential — which could only be accomplished by eliciting elements of my own personality.” Bollas noticed that there was a link between the way Jer

I have had four different therapists throughout my life. Actually five if I count Gordon, but I don’t know if he should be counted. Gordon was a wizened academic who’d become a therapist after his retirement from teaching. We met for about three months over Zoom. He would sit on his couch and rest his computer on his lap, this creating an upward angle that revealed the insides of his untrimmed nostrils. Gordon seemed to sometimes remember me the way someone at the nursing home might remember you, meaning he knew we’d met before but the details were fuzzy. He once fell asleep in a session. I was mid-sentence when I noticed one eyelid slam down. And then the other eyelid. And then his head drooped to the side. I waited in silence, thinking about saying something but not wanting to embarrass him. He suddenly startled awake and began talking, his first sentence making absolutely no sense, but then one sentence built on another, and he was again saying something coherent about my situation.

What is the point of it all? Why get up in the morning? Why keep going? Put differently, what needs to be happening in my life for me to want to keep going? Or what do I need to do to live a meaningful life? In order to live a meaningful life, I need to be doing the following things: learning, expressing, loving, being known, and being loved. Learning. I need to learn, not for the sake of learning, but to get answers to specific questions that, if left unanswered, would haunt me and disrupt my sleep. Expressing. I need to express myself through my words. There’s something exhilarating about combining words to convey meaning and something especially exhilarating about combining words to convey my own inner experience. Loving.  I need to know others, empathize with them, do my part to help them live healthier and happier lives. Being known. I need people to know me, the real me, to see past their preconceptions of me. Being loved.  I need others to accept me, like me, want to spend time

Frank Summers Frank Summers writes that we have inborn needs for both relatedness and self-realization. Self-realization refers to our inherent motivation to develop our potential self or to develop our unique configuration of psychological capacities. These psychological capacities include affects. The child’s ability to develop his psychological capacities is dependent on his caregiver, the caregiver’s role being to facilitate the development of these capacities with the right balance between helping but not helping too much. To use affect regulation as an example, if the mother immediately responds whenever a child experiences bad affects, the child will never learn to regulate these affects himself. However, the mother must intervene when the infant’s affects become too intense for him to regulate on his own lest he become overwhelmed. Self-realization is supported by the writings of Donald Winnicott, Christopher Bollas, and Heinz Kohut, as well as infant research. Regarding infa

The Early Organization of the Psyche Demos argues in this essay for the competent infant, a view supported by recent infant research and a view that contradicts traditional psychoanalytic thinking. Traditional Psychoanalytic Understanding Noy (1969) described the neonate as follows: “In the first weeks of life, the infant shifts between states of sleep and states of tension. Any need (hunger, thirst, cold, etc.) will awaken the infant from his sleep when the tension has mounted to a sufficient degree. This tension is expressed in various somatic ways, such as crying and arms and leg movements. When the specific need is satisfied, the tension is reduced and the infant falls asleep again. In this stage, consciousness is equal to tension, and the only affective qualities that we may assume to exist are pain and pleasure.” These “experiences of tension and pain are overwhelming and urgent,” and “the infant is completely dependent on the caregiver for relief.” Similarly, writers like Mahler