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Sunday, September 13, 2015

Freud, Klein, Bion and the intersubjectivists – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst and his Stepdaughter Disagree about whether Relationships are like Planetary Systems


Relationships are like planetary systems  (OK, you know which side I’m on).  We exert influence on and are influenced by those in our interpersonal orbit.  With actual planetary systems, for instance the earth and the sun, the earth doesn’t really revolve around the sun.  If there were no other objects in the Universe, the earth and sun would revolve around a point between the two objects, but much closer to the sun, because it is much larger than the earth.  Similarly, when we are in a relationship with another person, we revolve around a point that is somewhere between us, and much closer to the person who exerts the most emotional gravitational pull.

So, for instance when we are born, developmental psychologists have clarified that we are born into a systemic relationship with our caregivers.  The infant is dependent on the caregiver for food, but even more importantly, perhaps, for comfort.  The caregiver – the parent – is knocked out of whatever orbits they have been in and begin to orbit around this little bit of nothing that is new in their lives.  We might be able to place the point that they revolve around between them – though we might also experience the parent – certainly the one with more physical mass – as revolving around the infant, or a point closer to the infant.  This would be because the emotional mass – the amount of weight the other has for the person – might be huge for the parent.  Of course, for the child, even if the ability to appreciate the emotional mass is limited, the needs for sustenance and nurturance place that infant’s orbital center quite close to the parent.   

Mapping the earth and the sun, in physics, is called a two body problem and it is a relatively simple one to solve.  In the first paragraph, I said that “If there were no other objects in the Universe” because when we introduce even one more object – say another planet – the problem becomes infinitely more complicated.  The relative mass of the three objects creates a dynamic and changing central point around which all three objects are revolving.  So when we have a planetary system with multiple planets, all exerting influence, it becomes really tough to solve these problems; tough enough that Newton invented the calculus to have a go at it.

A few mornings ago, on the way to her first day away at college, the reluctant stepdaughter and I had an extended period of time together in the car.  As the start of college has approached and the end of the social world that has supported her to this point has occurred, it has been a challenging time for her – and thus for the people around her.  We were puzzling about how to understand this, and an interesting conversation broke out (This is not the first time I have reported on a conversation with her – see the posting about The Big Lebowski).  Relationships, we posited, involve two or more people revolving around each other.  Or at least I thought we posited it.  When I showed her a draft of this blog, the reluctant stepdaughter disowned the model I am about to describe – she saw it as coming entirely from me and described it as a cool thing I figured out that didn’t apply to her.

Well, at least she said it was cool, so I will continue…

When you apply the relationship as planets model back to physics, a weird thing happens.  The interpersonal system is dynamic in ways that the physics system is – but in other ways as well.  For instance, while the mass of the various planets and the sun is stable, the emotional masses of the individuals in our lives are dynamic.  When someone we are drawn to (love) becomes sick or imperiled, their mass can become larger – we can be drawn into their orbit.  Of course, this being a science that is much more complex than physics, it is also the case that the other's mass can decrease – we can distance ourselves from them for a whole host of reasons.  Imagine that someone is married to someone with a terminal disease.  He cares for her and she dies.  This is difficult, but he recovers and falls in love within someone else who contracts the same disease.  He may choose to withdraw rather than going through a similar process a second time.

So we have a system in which not only are there many important objects revolving around each other creating a dynamic and changing point of revolutionary center – these objects are all changing their weights at varying rates.  Wow!  What kind of math will we have to invent to figure that out?  Especially when there are seven billion objects involved?

Once you grant the metaphor  substance, some interesting things follow: being in a relationship creates a kind of dynamic stability as you and the other revolve around each other, creating a centrifugal/centripetal system – not unlike the wheel of a bike that, the faster it spins, the more stability it provides.  So riding at a high rate of speed is relatively easy (“look Ma, no hands”) vs. riding at slow speeds where the vehicle becomes very wobbly and hard to control.  This creates a sense of stability to the self – but in the context of having that system fall apart – it becomes apparent that the stability resides, at least partly, outside the self and, without others to anchor us, we can fly out of orbit.

I experienced this metaphor as being built in the conversation between the reluctant stepdaughter and me on the way to college.  In retrospect, the bricks come from me.  The reluctant stepdaughter is very bright – and while she certainly helped me apply some of the mortar, her email clarified that she experienced this as a less collaborative conversation than imagined.  I experienced us as using the metaphor to explore the details of the perturbations that have taken place during this time of transition, and I (consciously) was trying to help her think through how she might go about re-establishing a sense of equilibrium as she enters a new field filled with other objects ready to mingle and create new and complex relational systems. 

Lawrence (Larry) Brown, who visited our institute this past winter and whose book, Instersubjective Processes and the Unconscious I have been wading through, would have a lot to say about the conversation – though he would have to translate some of his terms because Brown is interested in the relationships between analysts and their analysands – a powerful dyadic pair – and he does not talk much about the relationships between regular folks (unless we count parents and infants as regular folks).  In the following I will try to apply what he says to a more ordinary, run of the mill, but also complex relationship – that between a parental figure and child on the cusp of adulthood, but I think the ideas apply to all kinds of relationships – relationships between spouses, lovers, and friends.  There has to be some intensity in the relationship for the components to come into play, but once the intensity is there, I think the intersubjective field opens up.

Brown does a nice job of articulating the psychologies of Freud, Melanie Klein, and Wilfred Bion.  Melanie Klein was a German psychoanalyst who, along with many others, emigrated to England while Hitler was gaining power.  There she and Sigmund Freud’s daughter Anna led two opposing camps that fought for the soul of psychoanalysis.  Klein was an object relational psychoanalyst – she believed not only that we are dependent on each other but that we internalize our relationships with each other – and these internalized relationships form the core of our characteristic ways of interacting with each other.  Wilfred Bion, a student of Klein who applied her ideas early on to the functioning of groups, ultimately emigrated to the United States and wrote in a dense style that Brown works to translate in his book. 

Both Klein and Bion have ideas that are a bit crazy sounding at first.  For instance, when working from a Kleinian/Bionian perspective, I was taught to offer an interpretation to a psychotherapeutic group along the lines of “the group seems to be feeling x today,” as if a group could have a shared mind.  And yet, in T groups (named after the Tavistock Clinic where Bion Practiced when he lived in London), when a group is left intentionally leaderless, the intensity of shared feelings is quite remarkable.  As a member of such a group, I have felt tossed and turned and have experienced powerful feeling states that did, indeed, seem to be shared – and have had sensory and perceptual alterations that were, despite being quite transitory, arresting in their power.

Brown takes the ideas of Klein and Bion and suggests that part of what is transpiring in what he calls the
“dynamic field” goes beyond the conscious communication between two people – it is an intersubjective communication – meaning one where – in addition to the conscious communication – and the communication of one unconscious with another (and with one’s self as well – “oops, I called you my Mom” would be a flat footed example where both the analyst and the analysand might together realize an unconscious wish had become conscious), he is proposing an ongoing intercommunication between the two unconscious minds of the interlocutors – the intersubjectivity is a shared but unconscious communication.  Brown points to an Argentinian couple, Wally and Madeleine Baranger, who, in 1962 took Kleinian ideas and moved them into the intersubjective realm by positing a dynamic field in which “neither member of the couple can be understood without the other.”  Further, the couple together constructs the shared fantasy of what will take place between them – what their interaction will produce.

The conversation with my stepdaughter was a charged one.  She was setting off for college.  Things had been difficult between us as that time had approached.  While she intermittently maintained good communications with her mother (who was also in the car with us) during this time, she and I had not talked much.  This is not unusual in many ways, but I, at least, was feeling dissatisfied with the ability of the conversations that she was having with her mother and that her mother reports to me to help me manage the feelings that were being stirred in me by her leaving.  And those feelings were intense, complicated, internally contradictory, and far from known by me.  What did I want from the conversation?  A lot.  How well could I articulate that?  Not so well.

The reluctant stepdaughter was a willing participant in the conversation, but it was not one she sought out.  I ambushed her a bit by driving and inviting her to sit in the passenger seat rather than her mother.  What did she want from the conversation?  There was likely a big part of her that wanted out of it.  But she was also willing – and I think even eager to figure out some of the stuff that had been bothering not just me but her.  And the metaphor that we created (or I imposed) was one that allowed us to have a language to talk about what had happened and to work towards acknowledging some of the anxieties that we each felt as she took this big step forward.  The astronomical metaphor that arose as a means of articulating the elements of her current situation – while it relied in large part on information that I provided – was fleshed out by both of our conscious minds, but Brown, Bion, Klein, and the Barangers, would further posit that our unconscious minds were hard at work – on the problem – and with each other.  I think Brown would add that this was also an expression of a shared though not articulated fantasy of what the conversation could produce.

To return to the metaphor for a moment, this conversation is one that takes place in the context of a myriad of relationships – and while there is an expression of wishes between us, I think the wishes between the reluctant stepdaughter and her mother, her father, and all of the people that we were talking about as planets in her personal solar system would come into play.  Similarly, my relationship with her mother, but also with my own solar system would have at least a residual influence, if only through the ways in which they had been internalized in my unconscious processing at the moment.

Brown proposes that Bion posits a special kind of relationship between people involved in an intimate relationship.  In this relationship, one person entrusts powerful feelings to the other – in the hopes that the other can “contain” them.  This containment idea is one that has been expanded to describe the entire process of treatment or analysis, but also the process of parenting.  The idea is that a child entrusts a feeling that is too powerful to contain to another, one who is able to hold on to it, and to metabolize it, and then to be able to return it in a form that is more manageable – perhaps as something that can be, for instance, articulated in language.


In the interaction with my stepdaughter, I think this was somewhat reversed.  I had powerful feelings that I wanted to express but was afraid to – I was angry with her, I was scared for her well-being, and I wanted to let her know that I would miss her.  But I was also afraid that expressing some of those feelings would destroy our ability to relate, at least in the moment.  The metaphor created a means for me to organize my thoughts and to communicate some of those feelings – and Brown/Bion would say, to introject – to deposit them inside her – for her to contain them and to metabolize them.  Her email was polite – she, I think, appreciated the effort on my part.  She also felt that I had missed the mark.  The model described something important, maybe about the way that I relate to people, but it was not relevant to the way that she relates to people.  She experiences relationships as much more chaotic and exerting less influence, at least on her, than the model, with all its gravity would suggest. That said, as we were leaving the dorm that night, she called out a very lovely “love you”, to which I was able to respond, “love you, too.”  Conscious or unconscious, intersubjective or just as a result of two bull headed people engaging with each other over time, we have created a connection, one that, I hope, in the constellation of other connections, exerts some pull as she heads off in new directions.

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