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van der Post, L. (1977). Jung and the Story of Our Time. New York.
Random House.
(1978). Jung and the Story of Our Time. Harmonds>vorth. Penguin.
INTRODUCTION
My area of concern in this paper is the complex interrelationship
between innate life and death forces on the one hand and, on the
other, impulses projected from external objects which are internalized
by the subject as unconscious life and death wishes. I shall be exploring ways in which a fundamental balance between life and death
forces is portrayed within the Oedipus myth and I shall be showing
how there are times when, as theorists, we are blind to the on-going
dynamic polarities contained within the myth.
The crucial question which binds the polarities is: 'What gets constellated and in whom in the interaction between nature and nurture?'
When, years ago, I attended my first seminar on Freud's theory of
the Oedipal conflict, I read the myth itself in preparation. At the
seminar I was surprised to find that the beginning of the myth had
been entirely omitted from Freud's theory. Puzzled by this, in the
discussion following the lecture I asked this question: 'In the story,
the parents want to kill the child first. Why did Freud leave this part
of the story out?' The unsatisfactory response which I received was
that it was omitted because it was not relevant. This question continued to haunt me intermittently but I never seriously focused on it
until the time was right for me to confront the infanticidal impulse,
and the child's fear of it, and its painful implications for me in my
own analysis. Once I became aware of this I was able to see more
clearly its emergence in certain cases in my clinical practice.
The Greek myth begins with the conspiracy of the parents of
Oedipus to do away with him in order to defeat the prophecy of the
Oracle that, when he grows up, he will kill his father and marry his
mother; it is their act of abandoning him on a hillside to die, in
order to outwit the prediction, that sets in motion the events which
subsequently lead to the fulfilment of the prophecy. This story underwent a dramatic transformation in Freud's hands. His theory omitted
the murderous act of the parents and focused on the deeds of Oedipus.
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It treated the murder of the father and the marriage to his mother
as universal drives, isolating them as inevitable stages in a child's
development. Had Freud applied the same principle of inevitability
to the entire myth, the parents' wish to kill the child would then also
have been universalized as the inevitable first step in the Oedipus
conflict and as the precipitating factor in the child's preoccupation
with incest and murder (cf. Bloch 1984).
Melanie Klein's clinical fmdings modified Freud's theory of the
Oedipus complex. Through her work with very young children,
Klein came to consider the origins of Oedipal feelings to be located
in the first year of life. They are instigated by disruption in the
connection between the baby and the mother through frustration and
anxiety evoked in weaning and toilet training, which precipitate a
turn to the father in the form of genital phantasies and, in the boy,
a subsequent retum to the mother on a genital rather than oral level.
Klein extended the role of phantasy in psychic life, positihg the view
of phylogenetic inheritance which provides a reservoir of unconscious
images and knowledge for phantasy to dra^w upon. By emphasizing
the phantasy content of the instinctual impulses, Klein showed
especially the pre-genital components (oral and anal) of Oedipal phantasies (mainly sadistic phantasies concerning the parents and evoking
paranoid anxiety regarding retaliation) which she took as evidence of
the early, and pre-genital, origin of the Oedipus complex. Klein
attributed to envy a central role in the formation and functions of
the human personality. She conceived early, primitive envy as representing a particularly malignant and disastrous form of innate
aggression which attacks the good, and as an oral and anal sadistic
expression of destructive impulses in operation from birth and constitutionally based (cf. Greenberg and Mitchell 1983).
Klein postulated that beneath the classical Oedipal complex lies the
very early terrifying and 'psychotic' phantasy life of the child. She
also took the view that the fear of being annihilated is part of the
unconscious phantasy experiences with which the infant is endowed
at birth, that central to the earliest experience is the fear of personal
annihilation similar to that felt by psychotic patients and that this is
the way the death instinct is experienced as working within the
personality (cf. Hinshelwood 1989). When writing about the terror
that invests children's phantasies she said:
We get to look upon the child's fear of being devoured, or cut up, or torn to
pieces, or its terror of being surrounded and pursued by menacing figures, as a
regular component of its mental life. (Klein 1933)
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I have no doubt from my own analytic observations that the identities behind
these imaginary, terrifying figures are the child's own parents, and that these
dreadful shapes in some way or other reflect the features of its father and mother,
however distorted and phantastic the resemblance may be. . . . How does it come
about that the child creates such a phantastic image of its parentsan image that
is so far removed from reality? (Ibid.)
While Klein did not in fact repudiate both benevolent and malevolent
factors coming in from without, nevertheless her main emphasis was
on what came up from within the child, i.e. from nature. She understood these phantastic images to be the instinctual and projected
manifestations of the infant's own aggressive impulses. She states for
example:
the child's sadistic attacks have for their object both father and mother who are
in phantasy bitten, torn, cut up or stamped to bits. The attacks give rise to
anxiety lest the subject should be punished by the united parents, and this anxiety
also becomes internalized in consequence of the oral-sadistic introjections of the
objects. (Klein 1930)
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that have not yet been rendered psychic, are converted into alpha
functioning, i.e. sense impressions are converted, through the mating
with preconceptions, into usable thoughts (Bollas 1987).
The area of unthinkable thoughts named beta elements by Bion,
Jung called 'psychoid processes', the psychoid unconscious being the
area where 'both psychic image and physical instinct mix together,
where they unite' (Jung 1946).
The case material which follows exemplifies the clinical use I have
made of these theories and ideas which have enabled my capacity for
thought when so much of what was taking place was unthinkable.
The selection of this presenting material concentrates upon the ways
in which this particular case exemplifies the vicissitudes of the theme
of infanticide.
I have the consent of the patient to include this part of her story
and some of our richly shared experience of it in this paper. When
the time was right we discussed the content of the paper together,
although it could not have been done during the period here portrayed. My main concern about using her material has been that in
so doing I might be reproducing some of her mother's extractive
traits and narcissistic usage of her. We have been able to talk about
this. Having further expanded her above-average capacity for insight
and having a very real and creative internal self working within her,
she is in a different place now, both in her internal and interpersonal
world and also geographically. She has secured for herself a much
sought after professional position abroad and has a home of her
ownin itself a feature of great relevance, as you will see later. I
respect and admire her.
The family history I am about to present represents not only the
external family 'out there' (as far as we therapists can ever know the
'accuracy' of that) but also her inner family, that is, the way in which
the patient has internalized these features and uses them, or they her,
intrapsychically.
THE CASE
Mary is an intelligent, articulate, softly spoken Irish woman in her
thirties. Her family w^as, and is, an extremely malignant one. She
described her family thus:
Maternal grandmother, whose image seemed, for a long time, to
be predominantly in the background: a heartless, hateful, envious
woman who suffered from intestinal problems all her life and who
compulsively set family members one against the other. In terror of
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disastrous, 'stuck' situations which she was unable to get out of,
continually losing money 'as if into a black bottomless pit'. She was
only just able to avert bankruptcy in the material world about a year
after we had begun our relationship and had started to find ways to
think about these things. Although I appreciate the anal characteristics
as a component in the money problems (and especially in view of
familial patterns indicated), I understand Mary's relationship with the
material world to mirror her early relationship with her mother. This
was a powerful metaphor of how she experienced her mother as
draining her of all her reserves and of her self-worth, which she has
always felt compelled to pour into mother.
These elements are encapsulated in a childhood memory. Mary
recounted with anguish how, as a little girl, she hated being at the
breakfast table where terrible rows took place (usually about money).
Her mother would scream at her father, who always remained passive
and silent. Mary would pray for her mother to stop attacking her
father but also for her father to stand up to her mother, thus showing
he could protect himself and Mary from her. Mary had learned early
on that to protest, or to become openly upset, led only to denial and
the accusation that she was wrong to act so. Mary recalled one scene
^vhen she w^as on her mother's lap when a screaming ro^v began.
Her spontaneous and silent weeping drenched the table cloth in front
of her with her tears. When her mother noticed, the row was turned
against Mary for 'crying for nothing'. Thus, her own natural
responses were extracted from her, stripped of their meaning.
Bion investigated the vicissitudes of the containing relationship by
describing the quality of the link between the containing mind and
the contents put into it. These links have three potentialities: 'L', 'H',
and 'K', which represent loving, hating, and wanting to know about
the content. Thus, the mother will at times love her child, hate him
or her, or fmd herself trying to understand how he or she is experiencing, feeling, and thinking. For the purpose of the development,, of
thought, the 'K' link is the most important. Mother's linking with
the infant in this way develops the capacity of the child through the
introjection of the 'K' link (Hinshelwood 1989). However, there are
disturbances to the 'K' link (ibid.). In Mary's case the predominance
of the 'H' element and the disturbance of 'K' are crucial and are most
fittingly described thus:
The stripping of meaning from the object's projected experience, leading to a
denuded and meaningless experience which gives rise to the infant feeling an
internal terror from an introjected envious object that deprives it of meaning for
its experiences. This is referred to as minus 'K'. (O'Shaughnessy 1981, quoted in
Hinshelwood 1989)
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Mary described her father as placid and passive, which is also how
she described herself and how she appears to be in the world. A
country doctor, father was rarely at home. He was an 'absent father
rendered impotent by mother'. Father was either physically or
psychologically absent or not available to her, a situation which has
continued into her adult life and has permeated her unconscious partner choice in her relationships with men. Although she has had some
relationships, they have always been of little substance or constancy,
with either another woman in the background, or another woman
causing the break-up of the affair. She longed to have a baby of her
own and for a time dreamed of phantom pregnancies by invisible
men. There had been one planned pregnancy which she spontaneously
aborted in the fourteenth week. The father of the baby was absent
from the knowledge of it. He was not there for her and he never
knew. I understand this pregnancy and the abortive result to be a reenactment of her experience of both the earlier and the later Oedipal
phase. On the night she conceived the baby she dreamed that she
had two wombs. The first one was healthy and was receptive. The
second one was behind the first and was closed up and non-receptive.
Jung wrote about the 'dual mother' and refers to splitting in the
image ofthe mother. This phrase can be understood on several levels:
as the duality between the personal mother and the pre-personal
psychological patterning of the mother archetype, or as the duality
between the good and bad images of mother (Jung 1912). There has
to be a 'good-enough' mother for idealization in order to give form
to a good mother imago. Donald Meltzer has talked about the initial
experience of an aesthetically beautiful mother whose impact has a
profound emotional effect upon the baby, and this becomes an aesthetic conflict when natural disillusionment sets in (Meltzer 1988).
This dream may show how for Mary the beautiful, good-enough,
life-giving mother was lost and obliterated right from the beginning,
from within the womb and at birth and in all her new beginnings.
Developmentally, this dream could be thought of as an image of her
internalized experience of her non-receptive mother, or of grandmother in the background. Or, according to Michael Fordham's
theory of deintegration, there can be a failure in a deintegrative
process of an aspect of the archetypal mother from within. This
means that the infant's primary integrate self affects the humanizing
of an archetypal potential, creating a freezing of a 'self state'an
autistic barrier (cf. Fordham 1976). From the classical Jungian viewpoint, in the myth Oedipus was an adopted child, a child of two
mothers.
The parental couple in Mary's internal world pursued her into
hellish death zones where they formed an awful triad, as depicted in
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Mary was devastated by the loss of the baby she had conceived
and has spent a great deal of our time together in mourning for it.
As our work progressed, I came to recognize the resurgence of this
mourning to be an indication that an insight conceived of between
us, a psychic baby, had been spontaneously aborted. I have been
continually shocked by the ferocity of the way in which the internalized murderous mother, re-evoked in the transference, attacked these
psychic babies in her envious, spoiling, destructive rage.
Continuous countertransference analysis was particularly crucial at
these times, as her denigratory, envious, spoiling attacks on my
psychic babies often left me feeling robbed of my capacity to think.
I felt helplessly impotent, useless, and questioning my own capacity
to provide the containment she needed, and was always faced with
the question: had I unconsciously attacked her? I do not think that
Mary's experience of me in the transference as wanting at times to
get inside her and attack her was altogether a reversal of her own
destructive impulses towards me. I think that this was also her internalized experience of her mother, which, without adequate countertransference analysis, could be blindly re-enacted. In our work as
therapists we are committed to try, through the dynamics of the
relationship, to facilitate health and growth (whatever that might
mean for any individual) not to hinder or sabotage the process. The
recognition of the infanticidal impulse in humanity inevitably leaves
us with the uncomfortable realization that, on some level, we may
at some time have infanticidal impulses towards our patients (all the
more powerful if they are unconscious to us). In therapy this could
take the form of attacks on the patient's creativity. If that happens
and is recognized by the patient, then it is vital that the therapist
responsibly acknowledges it to the patient. Not to do so would be
extractively to introject the patient's perception and cause further
^vounding.
The depressed mother, as Mary's mother was, is often unable to
emerge enough from her own narcissistic wounds to offer her baby
affirmation of its own selfhood. If the mother has not detached herself
from the image of another person to whom she was ambivalently
over-attached, then she fails to grant the infant boundaries, otherness,
individuality, and aloneness. This appears to be the case with Mary's
mother who tied her infant into a false closeness based on her unconsciously identifying with her own abandoned self which she has
projected into the infant. A depressed mother who cannot bear or
bring to bear her own self may fmd her baby unbearable. The killing
qualities of the mother's angry depression overdevelop the infant's
negative potential and too many and too strong negative archetypal
images are absorbed by the infant (cf. Hubback 1988).
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From the outset, there was a split need in Mary for, on the one
hand, incestuous involvement, fusion in a boundless state and, on the
other, a desperate need for containing boundaries. As we progressed,
the formation of necessary boundaries was a crucial element in our
relationship. It became vitally important for Mary to see my capacity
to contain myself within my own boundaries and outside her omnipotent control while at the same time maintaining an empathic attitude
and facilitating her regressive incestuous needs; in other words, to
allow incestuous involvement but to know when to draw the line. I
am speaking here of a necessary regenerative regression and incestuous involvement in the Jungian sense, that is, in order psychically
to re-enter the womb of mother. The analytical relationship provides
the opportunity to repeat and return to a pre-object state as in the
final months of foetal life and in the primordial relationship with
mother. Hence the therapist's body-pangs and pains. These necessary
countertransference positions, both psychic and physical, helped me
to enable a humanizing of the archetypal good mother inside my
patient. The French analyst Elie Humbert says that in a regression
such as this, the 'Return to the Mother' is experienced with a partner
who is different from the mother, putting the patient back into the
initial experience in which the object takes shape through a dual
relationship (Humbert 1988).
When she was two months old Mary contracted whooping cough
and was very ill. Her mother was terrified of nursing her and,
although she was medically qualified to do so, she could not bring
herself to administer the injections necessary for Mary's treatment as
she was obsessed with the idea that if she did so, then that injection
would cause Mary to die. It is likely that this obsession of the mother
was a manifestation of the infanticidal impulse and her resistance of
it an expression of the conflict between the life and death wishes she
held for her baby. Mary's infantile experience of this conflict in her
mother may be linked to her dream of two wombs and could be an
indication of how Mary internalized the split in her actual mother
and her mother's ambivalent duality. The administration of the injections was taken over by Mary's father. Her mother became ill too,
and a nurse was brought in to care for mother and child.
In the first few weeks of our meetings Mary absented herself for
half of her sessions by getting lost en route and arriving late. She
developed quite severe chest pains and a harsh cough. Several times
after the session she had a problem starting her car and on two
occasions, while in the car, her breathing became so difficult she
thought she was going to haye a heart attack. Yet she always managed
this by herself and never sought my help, assuming an 'out of sight,
out of mind' attitude on my part and that anyway there was nothing
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This dream had frightened Mary, but she couldn't think about it. So
she made a clay sculpture which, when I first saw it, evoked in me
the same feelings I experienced when she told me about the scenes
at the breakfast table. When I looked at it, its impact flipped me
straight into the grip of a concordant countertransference, my eyes
spontaneously filled with tears, my chest ached and I began to cough.
It took me a while to recover my capacity to think. Mary is a talented
sculptress and has used this art at the most unthinkably painful times
in our work together. It is worth noting here that, since I first knew
her, the only sculpture she did of a male figure was one which was
a requirement of a sculpting class that formed a part of the training
she was doing. Her male figure turned out to be anorexic with a
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infant. It is through her eyes that the infant can see the affirmation
of its selfhood and thus internalize a sense of self and home, homecoming into the world. On the other hand, the infantiddal impulse
of the parent(s) is likely to be conveyed to the infant most powerfully
through their eyes. A recurring dream, not only for Mary but also,
as I have come to recognize, for other people who have experienced
the infantiddal impulse most acutely, is a dream of persecutory figures breaking into their home through the windows, with the intention of butchering them. We could think of the eyes here as the
windows leading into the body and whatever vulnerabilities there are
held or hidden inside the body. For the infant in the early feeding
relationship there is the likelihood of an eye-nipple pre-symbolic
equation. When describing the part-object breast as the non-thinking
breast, James Astor gives as an example: 'the child who latches on
to the mother's eyes as if they were the nipples that kept the child's
mind in order after a feed' (Astor 1989).
In developmental psychology, perception is considered to be the
link between the eye and the brain. Our theories are metaphors about
how we think about and see thingsour visions of reality which can
be communicated. The pupil of the eye opens to receive light and it
also opens when it wants to take someone in, and narrows when it
does not. Eyes that are full of love bring life and give vitality, while
the glare of the green-eyed monster of envious hate freezes life,
blights the child, transfixes, or makes an end out of a beginning.
Then there are the eyes of depression, to which 'all things look dead'.
I Avas reminded of Bion's concept of container and contained when
I read that Jung considered the meaning of the eye itself to be the
'maternal bosom' and the pupil its 'child' (Cirlot 1962). The pupil is
also the black hole in the centre of the eye. Frances Tustin tells us
that the psychotic child has a gap or a hole at the place where there
should have been a point of contact or a bridge from you to me
(Tustin 1986).
It has been noted that some victims of the Holocaust, Jewish people
who survived the camps, do not look people in the eye when they
tell their stories of their experiences. The reason for this is not only
because they do not wish to see the reflection of their pain, it is also
because they fear that by eye contact they will transmit to the listener
the evil of which they were the victims. They also fear that by eye
contact they will re-constellate the evil intent in the other, or project
it into the other, or that the other will see in their eyes their own
capacity for evil. Himself a survivor of the camps, Bruno Bettelheim
(i960) tells us how some of the victims developed a capadty to get
so far behind their eyes that they became invisible to the guards.
They did not do this by fl-voiding looking at the guards, they did it
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According to Winnicott an absence of a holding response, experienced as a gap stretching infmitely, may be more catastrophic than
a persecutory presence. We conceive of the experience of 'gone' either
as a black hole of infinite extension into which we might fall for ever
(the basis of the autistic defence), or as a looming dark presence. In
Kleinian thought, emptiness, or the 'absent breast', is experienced as
persecutory, i.e. the 'good breast absent' is experienced as 'the bad
breast present' (O'Shaughnessy 1964).
Mary brought a picture she had drawn when she came for our first
session. This picture was a stark, visual representation of her internal
Belsen Jewish mother. I was struck by the incongruity of the horror
of the eyes with the pleasant, slightly smiling mouth, a chilling
contrast. As well as the Jewish victim, this image also embodied an
element of the Nazi persecutor. Theoretically, we can think of this
as an image of the interplay between internal and polarised sado/
masochistic impulses.
At times in the therapy, Mary spoke of experiences in her life of
non-relatedness, isolation, detachment, and invisibility. She described
an inddent when she was about six years old
It ^vas Saturday because father was there. I was in bed in the room I shared with
my sister. Mother called for us to get up for breakfast. I had a sheet over me so
no one saw me. I felt invisible. They searched the house for me. I felt very
powerful and waited until everyone got quite upset before I made myself visible.
They were very angry and I was hit when I showed myself.
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where you are becoming aware that you have had to do this'. This
led her to acknowledge that 'since birth, or even before, I have always
been either in a crisis or a void. I am now terrified at the prospect
of living without a crisis'. She had used pain itself as her internal
container and as her defence against her terror of the void.
The Oedipus myth illustrates the effectiveness of parental attitudes
on the on-going dynamic polarities between life and death forces,
both intrapsychically and interpersonally. The meaning of the term
'Oedipus complex' is a symbolic one, a metaphor working on many
levels, portraying among other things the profound importance of
the role played by the sexual drives in our development and the deep
conflicts that these drives evoke, including the unconscious patricidal
and incestuous desires, and the infanticidal impulses. However, the
emphasis on sexuality as fundamental to the Oedipus myth
seductively blinds us to one of the most important crises we can face:
the possible outcomes of having given birth to an autonomous human
being. The sexual hfe-force with its inherent hope for the future is
also riddled with death. Psychologically, sex is linked to giving birth
to a threatening autonomous human being. Quite simply, it is ari
Oedipal question of kill or be killed. For every birth there is a series
of deaths: the death of the couple's controls, over each other and
over events. There is the death of the dyad as a third comes into
their lives. In parenthood, if the child can be seen as a narcissistic
extension of the parent, if the parent is identified with the child, then
the child carries for that parent the promise that their hfe will go on,
their death can be avoided. The parents' fate is assured and unless
there is in the child a strong epistemophilic desire for knowledge,
then the child's life is fated, doomed, at least in part, to live out
parental unlived life and phantasies. But if the child is weak or sick,
or if the child's autonomy is too recognizable, if there is too much
otherness, too much life, then speaking from the fearful and envious
parental position, the infanticidal impulse is evoked as a means of
coping with the fear and envy. One of the most important questions
we face is: 'Can we hold the tension, manage our controlling impulses
and destructive tendencies in the face of a threat to the established
order, and so enable the next generation to create their own life and
develop their own autonomy?' Autonomous individuals create their
own destiny. This is an inescapable fate.
The infanticidal impulse evoked in the face of autonomous new
life also has wider implications than in our family life. It permeates
our politics, our institutions, and our trainings. The threat and the
ensuing problems of autonomy are age-old and universal.
In Greek mythology infanticide can be traced back further than the
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myth of Oedipus to the pre-Zeus divinities and is therefore fundamental to Greek creation myths and a background to our civilization.
Uranus repeatedly and defensively killed off several of his children
but was eventually castrated by Cronus, the strong son who survived
his father's attack and turned upon him. Because of the prophecy
decreed by the dying Uranus and Mother Earth that one of his sons
would dethrone him, Cronus annually swallowed the children whom
Rhea bore him. For both Uranus and Cronus there was an element
of denial and of wish-fulfilment in the means they used to dispose
of their children: Uranus by pushing them back into Mother Earth
from whence they came as if pretending that they had not happened;
Cronus by taking them back into himselfre-incorporating them by
eating them and thus denying that they had ever existed. Cronus'
son Zeus was saved by Rhea when she wrapped a stone in swaddling
clothes which Cronus swallowed, believing he was swallowing the
infant Zeus. Here we can see another ramification of infanticide, i.e.
the mother who saves her son from the murderous impulses of the
father and in so doing participates in bringing about the father's
death. The whole story of Heracles, son of Zeus, pivots on the fact
that he murders six of" his children while being beside himself in a
blind, mad rage. This rage was inflicted upon him by Hera in her
jealousy of his relationship with his father and in her envy of his
successes. When he realizes what he has done, his disgust, shock,
grief, and remorse are not enough. He has to have his labours, both
as the revenge upon himself and as his atonement.
In Judaeo/Christian mythology we have in the background to patriarchy Abraham's attempt to sacrifice Isaac; in the story of Moses,
the hero of the saving history of the Jews in cast into the bulrushes
to save him from death at the hands of the old king. There is the
repeated motif of the slaughter of the innocents, and the ultimate
hero, Jesus, is crucified, nailed by his hands and feet, to a cross on
a hillside. James Hillman (1988) postulates Jesus's cry from the cross:
'Eli, Eli, la'ma sabachtha'ni?'My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me?'as the great archetypal cry uttered by all victims of
infanticide in humanity.
The complex interrelationship between nature and nurture is also
the crucial element in the relationship between therapist and patient,
where once again the question is: 'what gets constellated and in whom
in the interaction between the two?'
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CONCLUSION
I have found this a particularly difficult paper to write, partly because
of the subject matter of the infanticidal impulse and partly because
in writing it I encountered the same countertransference phenomena
I had experienced with the patient.
Throughout the therapy Mary produced dramatic images of exceptional force which were insidiously effective and at times evoked
countertransference feelings of despair, depression, and destructive
doubt with a predominance of defensive splitting of affect. I experienced phases of losing self-confidence and wondering if I were any
good at all as a therapist, let alone being the right therapist for Mary.
My capacity to think was affected, I experienced blanks and voids
and felt emptied of my own creativity. At times, as in the sessions,
I could not see ways forward and I had problems with my contact
lenses. I sometimes felt out of my own element and ill in a way that
felt quite foreign to my own bodyfull of beta elements struggling
to be converted into alpha functioning. In working with this patient,
I could only be of 'use' (in the Winnicottian sense) to her in so far
as I was able to tolerate the experience of the terrible murderous
mother inside me, not only projected, but also, because we all have
these areas in us, in the overlap betAveen us. I believe this overlap to
be one of the most crucial features of our w^ork. As Judith Hubback
reminds us, our own sickness is part of our personal totality and we
are doing well as therapists when we act, in sessions with our patients,
on a genuine working belief that sickness and shadow, integrity and
integration, are parts of a continuous spectrum (Hubback 1988). But
while the overlap of woundedness is vital for empathy, recognition
and use of the points of difference are also crucial. What I have learned
to do, to prevent my being over-identified with the patient in the
countertransference, is to draw upon these differences. Having been
a patient and still having wounds (but nevertheless having a healthy,
good-enough parental imago inside me that isn't confused in any way
with Mary's) enabled me to use these inner parents in my therapeutic
parenting of her. The therapist needs to have a 'well established
coniunctio of intemaL images' (ibid.) to draw upon.
I conclude with the reminder that infanticide and attempted infanticide (the impulse to kill off those whose destiny it is to take your
place and therefore become the object of much envy) is something
we kno'w about, have aWays written about, yet often fearfully avoid,
not daring to look it in the eye.