Rupture and Repair, Safran, Muran, Clinical Practice, Applied Psychoanalysis, Applied Psychological Research, Original Sin
At our local meeting of the Association for Psychoanalytic Thought (Apt), we recently had a panel on Rupture and Repair – a concept that emerges out of the research literature to describe an important psychotherapy phenomenon – one that predicts a good therapeutic outcome. Apt is not, however, primarily a group of people interested in clinical phenomenon. We get together to talk about the ways that psychoanalytic thought can help us more fully appreciate works of art, but also politics, religion, and just plain living. We call this applied psychoanalysis, which is a little confusing because psychotherapy itself is usually thought of as applied psychology, but psychoanalysis plays a bit by its own rules and imagines itself to be a particular kind of psychology - a branch unto itself, as it were.
We had a panel on rupture and repair because these concepts
had come up when we were discussing the film Good
Luck to You, Leo Grande. One of the
board members was taken with the idea of Rupture and Repair and wanted us to articulate what is meant
by that and to help us have a better sense of what the concepts were and how we
might apply them to the works of art that we address in the programs that we
present. Dutifully we set off to make
sense of these ideas and to present them to a group that is analytically curious
but not necessarily steeped in or interested in being steeped in clinical and
research lore.
Jeremy Safran and Christopher Muran first proposed Rupture and Repair as
an important set of variables in an article in 1996. Sadly, Jeremy was killed in his basement by
an intruder in a robbery gone awry. I
had an opportunity to interview him before then and reported on that here. To prepare for the panel, we read a more
recent introduction to a book on Rupture and Repair, by Muran,
Eubanks, and Samstag (2022).
As I was mulling over the concepts they described in the chapter,
focused mainly on how repairing ruptures helps maintain the therapeutic
alliance which, in turn, predicts a positive outcome of a psychotherapy, I happened
to listen to a
podcast of a lecture about classical ideas of erotic love. In the podcast, the author of the lecture
talked about two models of erotic love.
The first is in Plato’s symposium (which recently caused an uproar in Texas about its appropriateness for a college
audience because it deals with LBTQ+ issues) and the second is in the book
of Genesis.
In Plato’s Symposium, a series of people speak about
love. The most memorable speech is a fable that
is made up by Aristophanes, the Greek Comic Playwright. Aristophanes proposed that humans were once
four legged, four armed two headed creatures who were tremendously strong. Zeus was concerned that they were plotting
his overthrow, so he cut them (us) all in half – so that we would only have 2 legs, 2
arms, and 1 head (the first great rupture).
Even after this, Zeus was afraid we would band together to overthrow him,
so he distracted us from that task by creating sexual organs and desire. We could now repair our lost connection with our other half (Some men yearned for the men
they had been separated from, some women from the women they had been separated
from, and some men who had been separated from women – and those women, would
desire the person of the opposite sex).
So sex became the repair of a rupture.
In the second Genesis creation story, the author argued that
the nuclear family (including Adam and Eve’s family with God, but every nuclear
family after that) has a centripetal force (or perhaps a gravitational pull)
maintaining that family as the center of the lives of all of its members. It is erotic desire – the wish to connect
with someone outside the family – being drawn to them – that is the centrifugal
force that allows the family member to pull away – to have a life of his or her
own.
Graphically, I represented it like this:
The blue circle on the left represents the family which has
been the center of the person’s life and blue circle on the right is the erotic
(love) interest, that pulls the person out of the orbit around the family and
into a new orbit – now around a love object.
If a friend of yours has ever fallen in love with someone, you will
understand this experience (or, of course, if your child has).
Rupture, in this model, is a desired goal. It is how the child grows up and then leaves
home to start their own family.
When I went back to read the current article on rupture and repair,
I discovered that Safran and Muran had based their understanding of rupture on
a number of concepts in the clinical literature. They stated that “rupture is intended to be a
synonym for: breaches, breakdowns, challenges, derailments, deteriorations,
dissociations, disturbances, disruptions, dysfluencies, failures, impasses,
misalliances, mis-attunements, miscoordination, misunderstandings, negations,
pulls, resistances, splits, strains, threats, and weakenings (Muran, Eubanks,
and Samstag, 2022).”
That is a whole lot of condensation that is going on
there. They went on to say that “Rupture
is intended to be associated with: enactments, negative processes, projective
identification, transference-countertransference, vicious circles or cycles
(Muran, Eubanks, and Samstag, 2022).”
Again, that’s a lot of stuff to say that it is related to.
I think that the way that rupture and repair has been
applied to this point is that the focus has been on the ruptures and repairs
that take place between a therapist and their client or patient. But that is only part of the picture. Part of what the therapist is trying to help
the client or patient do is to engage in a huge rupture – with their usual way
of doing things. This might be
understood as helping them, for instance, break away from their family or origin,
much as a romantic interest helps a young person do that. But it might also be breaking away from a pattern
of behavior, or an idea, we might think of it as helping them give up an
addiction, or whatever it is that the patient is trying to change. An author, teaching students of writing about how to write a novel, has proposed that we should be writing about how the person deals with a lie. In our culture, perhaps the first rupture in the family is when we discover that the Christmas presents don't really come from Santa Claus...
I think this way of thinking about the bigger picture may
help us better understand how complicated it is to maintain the therapeutic
relationship. We are trying to help the
patient feel heard and understood – which is difficult when something like 70%
of the time when we are speaking we are not understood by the person listening
to us. But we are also trying to keep
them in orbit around the new way of doing things – to keep them engaged with a
whole new way of functioning while an old way of functioning is still exerting
tremendous centripetal or gravitational pull.
If we lose our grip – or they lose their grip on us – they risk being
pulled back into a pathological (but familiar and therefore comfortable) way of
doing things. But repair is not our central task. Rupture is. We are trying, in part through the relationship that we offer, to help them break with something that has been life giving, or order producing, or comfort providing.
So, part of the repair work that we need to do has to do with
the relationship we have with our clients/patients, but part of it has to do
with helping our patients mourn the way of life that they have left behind. Often, too, we are inviting them into a world
that is tremendously uncomfortable. It
is more difficult in the short run, for instance, for people to tell others
what the problem is than to simply ignore those who are discomforting or to figure out how to get back
at them in some indirect way.
So, not only do we help repair the ruptures that occur in the hour with the treater, but also more broadly, we help repair the client/patient’s experience of a larger scale rupture with the world as they knew it, without, however, having them fall back into those old patterns and ways of doing things. So, when we marry someone, we have to figure out how we, as a family, are going to function. It would be easiest to just have our family do it the way my family did. But our spouse's family did things differently. Not only that, but both of us found some aspects of the life in our family of origin onerous. So we need to construct a whole new way of doing things, while also borrowing from what worked and what we are both accustomed to and is functional.
Psychoanalysis comes into this picture by pointing out that we are talking about an operating system (if you will) in each member of the new pair that is largely unconscious. We don't actually think about whether to have the toilet roll come over the top or out the back, we do it the way we learned how to do it - it only becomes a point of conscious point of attention (and possible contention) when our families did things differently - or we had planned on changing that when we got out on our own.
The rupture repair
model then can be used fruitfully as a means to understand the coming of age stories
that are at the center of so many of the movies and books by which we are
entertained, but also enlightened.
The protagonist or hero often learns to connect with the world in a
novel way (or to give up the lie, or to point out to others that they are living according to a lie). Most recently, I have written
about Lamia, the hero in The President’s Cake, who must search through embargo isolated
and war torn Iraq to find the eggs, flour, sugar and baking soda needed to bake
a cake for her class on Saddam Hussein’s birthday. As she goes about this, she learns that she
is capable of navigating in an adult world - that she is less dependent on the adult world than she knew – a lesson that comes far too early
for this nine-year-old girl.
It is no accident that the second creation story in Genesis - the one that follows the origin story of light and dark, heaven and earth - the one about Adam and Eve, is about rupture. Original sin - in this language, original rupture, becomes the foundation for so many stories that come after it. We feel guilty, but also feel compelled to break with what came before in order to create what will be. And just as Eve needed a collaborator in Adam to get out of paradise, we need helpers to do that in our lives. Psychoanalysts, but other therapists, teachers, friends, and family members end us serving this role in novels, movies, and in the lives we lead.
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