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…
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.
To read an essay describing other posts on this site, like here. For a subject based index, link here.
To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information. I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...
No comments:
Post a Comment