The
reason Klevius is self-promoting is (except for no one else daring to do
it, and to serve an audience starved on the "real thing") exactly the
opposite to why most bloggers (and media) do it. Compare the promotion
of ordinary, or even sub-standard products among high quality ones. A
reader stumbling over a blog that looks out of the ordinary and says
strange (but logical) things, may need some hard facts about the author,
who himself is out of the ordinary (although he calls himself "the
extremely normal" to emphasize his logic and internal harmony that
should attract those who value it). Dear reader. Of some reason word and
phrase statistics etc. clearly show you've a positive view on Klevius.
However, how do we get more people reading and understanding Klevius? If
you support Wikipedia you shouldn't be forgiven for not supporting
Klevius and his defense for your Human Rights, right!
Peter Klevius: Relying on my scientific methodology I enter the field of
subversion* through the Trojanian pores of diffuse discourse
conceptualizations. My pockets are full of "alien" thoughts and well
inside, when I am throwing them around, they might reveal internal
inconsistencies in the very discourse I am visiting, not sharing. My
employer? Negative human rights, of course!
*the
potential subversion is already there waiting for revelation via the
dynamics that is created by "alien" thoughts. But "alien thoughts" are
no threat to a certain discourse if they don't use this particular
method.
Charcot and his school considered the
ability to be hypnotized as a clinical feature of hysteria. Here Charcot
demonstrating hypnosis on a "hysterical" Salpêtrière patient, "Blanche"
(Blanche Wittmann), who is supported by Dr. Joseph Babiński (rear).
Blanche acted"hysteric" for to prove Charcot's senseless charlatanic
fantasies true. It was here Sigmund Freud got his first kick into the
unethical and unscientific swamp that he called "psychoanalysis" - an
extension of exorcism, now clad in a new language spiced with medical
latin words.
Wikipedia's weird description of this monster of charlatanism:
Jean-Martin Charcot (/ʃɑːrˈkoʊ/; French: [ʃaʁko]; 29 November 1825 – 16
August 1893) was a French neurologist and professor of anatomical
pathology.[1] He is known as "the founder of modern neurology",[2] and
his name has been associated with at least 15 medical eponyms, including
Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease and Charcot disease (better known as
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, motor neurone disease, or Lou Gehrig
disease).[1] Charcot has been referred to as "the father of French
neurology and one of the world's pioneers of neurology".[3] His work
greatly influenced the developing fields of neurology and psychology;
modern psychiatry owes much to the work of Charcot and his direct
followers.[4] He was the "foremost neurologist of late
nineteenth-century France"[5] and has been called "the Napoléon of the
neuroses".
Richard Webster on Charcot's student Sigmund Freud: If Freud’s early
patients were, for the most part, not suffering from psychological
disturbances at all, and if Freud’s therapeutic technique was founded on
the medical errors of Charcot, it might well be asked how it was that
he (and Breuer) succeeded in curing so many patients in the remarkable
fashion attested to by the early case histories.
Peter Klevius psychosocial Freud timeline
The hysteric birth of psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud
desperately tried to "scientifically" defend how he treated his wife in a
world that already had begun abandoning most of sex segregation in
practical life. In fact, what many psychoanalytic feminists now ascribe
to the "patriarchy" is often a product of this prolonged "artificial"
sex segregation and hence due to Freud's and their own separatist
efforts.
Sex segregation is the reactionary "phallus" seen as the
"hystericized site of displaced" sexes in a world entering the
confusion of modernity.. Feminists & Islamists = guardians of the
"feminine".
The lost ghost in the machine and the psychoanalytic chameleon Mr. Nobody
There
has been an all time on-going development within biology, genetics, AI
research and robot technology, which narrows our view on, not only the
difference between animals and humans, but also the gap between what is
considered living and dead matter. Not only free will, but also
properties and representations/symbols are getting all the more
complicated and vanishing as their subjective meaning seems less usable
in a new emerging understanding of our invironmental positioning.
Although the psychoanalytic movement seems ready to confirm/adapt to
this development equally fast as Freud himself changed his ideas to fit
into new scientific discoveries (it was a pity he didn't get a chance to
hear about Francis Crick) psychoanalysis is forever locked out from
this reality. PA is doomed to hang on the back of development just as
feminism and middle-class politics, without any clue on the direction
(neither on the individual nor the collective/cultural level).
Psychoanalysis
has survived just because of its weakest (in fact, absent) link, namely
the lack of a border between folk psychology and itself. The diagnosis
for psychoanalysis would consequently be borderline.
Sigmund's dream of a biological psychoanalysis was his biggest mistake.
However, for women he suggested "a normal penis several times" to keep hysteria at bay.
This timeline (launched on the web in 2003) is copied from a yet
unpublished book: Homo Filius Nullius - the Illegitimate Man by Peter
Klevius. It consists of mostly Peter Klevius' own observations but
includes other gathered material as well.
An interesting detail
in the timeline below is Hollywood's early and strong engagement in
psyhoanalysis. My working hypothesis is that it might have something to
do with certain characteristics of Hollywood, which in a way, are
precursors of Homo Filius Nullius and the social state he (and she -
compare Finnish non-gender/sex 'hän') lives in. Attractive people were
transported to this particular place where they met with other equally
attractive but lonely people. As we all do know, apart from movies
Hollywood’s favorite product for the media was divorce. It became cool
to divorce because these attractive stars did it at an early time with
quite some frequency But for many of these stars it might not have been
that cool as it appeared and most likely the introduction of
psychoanalytic thinking in Hollywood was an attempt to try to better
resolve personal relations on these grounds. Here again we see the same
pattern of modernity, sex-segregation and lose attachment treated with
the disease itself!
1879-80 Translated one volume of Mill's
collected works and didn't like Mill's idea about women's emancipation
and equal rights. Actually this was the real starting point for Freud's
fanatic and lifelong search/construction of a "scientific" defense for
sex segregation (see What is sex segregation?) in an unprecedented time
of female "gender" breakers..
1881 Sigmund Freud finally gets his delayed medical degree, and a poorly paid job.
1882 Suddenly left his job without getting a new one.
1883
Tried to convince his fiancee that Mill was a moron and that a woman
(by nature) belonged to kitchen, nursing room and bed.to such an extent
that it "...practically rule out any profession". However, the
(deliberate?) development of psychoanalysis into a female profession
(many of the female child psychoanalystst were childless including his
own daughter Anna Freud), forced him to a pragmatic acceptance of
professional (but sex segregated) women while reinforcing his sense that
the distinction was still regarded as fundamental..
1884-5 Freud ruins his scientific reputation by presenting too hasty and erroneous conclusions about cocaine.
1885-86 Freud visits his mentor and idol Jean Charcot's lectures on "hysteria" in Paris.
1886
At the end of April, Freud, known as a “practising magnétiseur”, opens
his private medical practice in an effort to economically survive after
having been laughed down (because of the cocaine mess) by the Viennese
scientific society.
1886-7 Turns to hypnotic suggestion based on the lectures of the pathetic Charcot in Paris.
1888 Freud begins treating Anna von Lieben, known in "Studies in Hysteria" as Caecilie M.
1889
In July, Freud begun using the cathartic method on Anna von Lieben, a
wealthy morphine addict he treated twice a day for some three years.
1890-92
The “discovery” of electrical activity in the brain was debated in the
Viennese ‘Centralblatt für Physiologie’. Freud and his Viennese
colleagues did not know about the original discovery by the British R.
Caton from 1875.
1891 Caton sends a letter to Centralblatt in which he describes his findings presented in Britain in 1875 and 1878.
(Peter
Klevius is, until disproved, to be considered the first (2001) and only
one (so far) to have acknowledged the crucial connection between
Freud's emerging psychoanalysis and Caton's discovery). Few researcher
even know abt the basic controversy (i.e. that Caton was some 17 years -
sic - ahead of the Viennese scholars) underlying Klevius' theory. The
implications of Klevius findings abt the Freud/Caton connection, are
presented in "Pathological symbiosis", and are entirely described in yet
unpublished Homo Filius Nullius.
1891 Freud’s ideas on neuronal
transmission were altered because of Waldeyer’s hypothesis that the
nervous impulse also had to be discontinuous.
1891 Death of
Fleischl von Marxow (Freud’s friend who erroneously thought he was the
first who had discovered electrical activity in the brain, and who
became a cocaine addict because of Freud).
1891 On Aphasia 1891. London and New York, 1953. Indicates a psychosomatic connection between body and language.
1892
Freud moves (according to Macmillan) from the descriptive level of
Charcot’s hysteria to the more sophisticated ideas of Janet (March 11).
1892 Dec. A preliminary report on hysteria. A preliminary report for the 1895 book Studies in Hysteria.
1892 First mentioning on tics.
1893
“…in mental functions something is to be distinguished, a quota of
affect or a sum of excitation which possesses all the characteristics of
a quantity (though we have no means of measuring it), which is capable
of increase, diminution, displacement and discharge, and which is spread
over the memory-traces of ideas somewhat as an electric charge is
spread over the surface of a body. This hypothesis, which, incidentally
already underlies our theory of ”abreaction” in our ”Preliminary
Communication” (1893), can be applied in the same sense as physicists
apply the hypothesis of a flow of electric fluid explaining a great
variety of psychical states”.
1893 Freud, S, On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena. [with J. Breuer] SE 2, 3-17.
1894
- The first written appearance of the word "feminism" as we know it.
Two completely different "feminisms" can be exemplified by "feminine"
Hubertine Auclert and "non-feminine" Madeleine Pelletier. Also compare
the notion of "false feminism" ascribed to competent women competing on
male turf.
1894 Freud, S, The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence. SE 3, 43-61.
.
1894 “… a complicated electrical apparatus” (in The Neuro Psychosis of Defence).
The
obvious connection between Caton and Freud has to my knowledge not been
pointed out before the presentation of this timeline (P. Klevius).
1894
Freud suffers from impotence. Fliess gives him cocaine to cure a sinus
infection – Freud got addicted and begun his "self-analysis".
1894 December. Fliess visited Freud and examined Emma Eckstein.
1895 Women's football on the rise (e.g. Nettie Honeyball).
1895
In February Freud asked Fliess to cure Emma Eckstein’s “nasal reflex
neurosis” (a hoax diagnose, see above) by unnecessarily removing the
middle left concha of her nose. Emma was on the verge of bleeding to
death from gauze that carelessly had been left within her nasal cavity.
According to Freud Emma was not bleeding because of ruptured veins but
because she had, unconsciously, fallen in love with him.
1895
First woman scales Matterhorn (Europe's highest mountain), gets big
headlines and becomes notoious in Victoian circles. Did Freud think she
actually climbed a penis, and did her (and other women's) strength
contributed to the birth of psychoanalysis one year later?
1895
Fliess is peeping on his toddler son’s spontaneous penile erections
while looking at his mother. This is then connected to Freud’s “memory”
of his desire to copulate with his mother at the age of two.
1895 May. “a consuming passion for psychology” (a “tyrant” as Freud himself describes it in a letter to Fliess).
1895
The first Freudian psychotherapy appeared in 1895, in Freud’s
contribution to his and Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria. Here Freud gives
the concepts of ”resistance” and ”transference” their first definition.
1895 Freud, S, A Project for a Scientific Psychology. SE 1, 283-397.
1895 On July 25, 1895, the secret of the dream "revealed" itself to Freud.
1896
First coins the term "psychoanalysis”. Freud's father dies and Freud
starts his self-analysis (according to some interpretations – but see
1894).
1896 Freud, S, The Aetiology of Hysteria.
1897 “I no longer believe in my neurotica” (seduction theory).
1897 University of Vienna for the first time permitted the enrolment of women.
1897 When Anna Freud was two or less Freud “discovered” infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex.
1898 Freud, S, Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses.
1898
R v Krafft-Ebing: Psychology of sexual life. Mentions "psychoanalysis"
(Krafft-Ebing was positive to Freud because they both shared the view
that "sexuality" was world-embracing, and hence "readable" in every
aspect of life. He strongly supported Freud's application to his
university).
1899 Freud, S, Screen Memories.
1900 S. F. The Interpretation of Dreams published. (written in 1898-1899).
1901
In the autumn of 1901, Freud was faced with a mind far superior than
his own. Otto Weininger approached him with an outline for his thesis
(not the final book version) Sex and Character. Of course Freud wasn't
the man to take it so he rejected the young (21) genius in the most
brute way and hence probably contributed to this sensitive youngster´s
suicide. Although Weininger based his thoughts erranenously on a
speculative male/female "sex-fluid" in every cell (he didn't know abt
DNA and therefore couldn't properly asssess the power of heterosexual
attraction), his importance as a genius is the internal logic in his
construction - a logic that made Wittgenstein choose Otto, but not
Sigmund, to his list of a few important thinkers that had impressed him.
Also see Klevius analysis of mind and awareness!.
1904 S. F. published Psychopathology of Everyday Life; and ended relationship with Fliess (who accused Freud of plagiarism).
1905 S. F. published Three Essays on Sexuality and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.
1907 Freud and Jung meet in Vienna.
1908 First International Psychoanalytical Congress, Salzburg,
Vienna.
1909
S. F. forms International Psychoanalytical Society with Carl Jung as
its first president. Comes to US to give a series of lectures at Clark
Univ. (invited by G. Stanley Hall).
1911 Adler left Freud.
1914 Jung left Freud.
1914 S. F. "On Narcissism"-- the first mentioning of the ego ideal, which will become the superego.
1915 S. F. delivers introductory lectures at University of Vienna.
1917 S. F. publishes Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
1918-22
S. F. analyzed his daughter Anna Freud and put more emphasis on a
mother's role in a daughter's life versus the father's role as being the
sole motivator for behavior.
1920 S. F. publishes Beyond the Pleasure Principle; introduces the death instinct.
1920 The first child psychoanalyst, Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, publishes “On the Technique of Child Analysis”.
1921
British FA bans women's football by the help of female physicians, who
(as experts on the female body and mind) declare the game "unsuitable
for women". Several of the doctors involved are now presented as
feminists by feminist writers of today. And feminists should know who
are feminists, shouldn't they (also see Heroic gender breaking women -
and some tiny men)?
1921 S. F. publishes Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; applies social context to psychoanalysis.
1921
Margaret Schönberger (Mahler, 24) had severe stomach pains and attacks
that horrified her circle of friends. She was diagnosed with
Heirshsprung disease, "a congenital disorder of the colon rectum which
is unable to relax and permit the passage of stool. During the surgery
severe adhesions were discovered and removed. After the procedure, the
problem ended.
1922 Anna Freud became a member of the International Psychoanalytic Congress.
1922
Margaret Schönberger (Mahler) age 25, arrived to Vienna and was taken
care of by the "expert on delinquency" August Aichhorn.
1923 A
long series of operations on Freud’s jaw to remove cancer. Anna felt she
had to stay with him because, not only had he been borrowing money from
friends, but also he was now ill.
1923 S. F. Publishes The Ego and the Id; a final structural theory.
1923
Anna Freud, while taking care of the neighbors’ children: "I think
sometimes that I want, not only to make them healthy, but also, at the
same time, to have them, or at least have something of them, for myself”
1923
Sigmund Freud:"Our symbiosis with an American family, whose children my
daughter is bringing up analytically with a firm hand, is growing
continually stronger"
1923 Klein M. The development of a child. Int. J. Psychoanal., 4:419.
1923 Presented structural model of id, ego, & superego (at age 67).
1924 Hermine Hug-Hellmuth publishes “New Ways to the Understanding Youth”.
1924
On 9 September Hermine Hug-Hellmuth was found strangled (by the boy she
had analysed) on her couch. 2.400.000 Kronen were stolen from her
underwear. According to a brief entry by Siegfred Bernfeld in
International Journal of Psychoanalysis Hermine expressed a desire in a
will a few days before she was murdered that no account of her life and
work should appear in psychoanalytic publications!
1924 S. F. allegedly turns down an offer of $100,000 by Samuel Goldwyn to cooperate in making movies of famous love stories.
1924 Klein M. The role of school in the libidinal development of the child. Int. J. Psychoanal., 5:312-331.
.
1925 Anna Freud began getting heavily involved with Child Psychoanalysis.
1926 Infant analysis., Int. J. Psychoanal., 7:31-63.
1926 Publishes Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety.
1926
Helene Deutsch began analyzing Margaret Schönberger (Mahler). After 14
months of cancellations she said Margaret was "unanalyzable".
1927 Symposium about the Freud/Klein controversy, arranged by Jones.
1927 August Aichhorn (who had a “personal relationship” with her) became Margaret Schönberger’s training analyst.
1927
Anna Freud, Eva Rosenfeld and Dorothy Burlingham organized a school for
local children, later, Hampsted War Nursery research.
1927 Anna
Freud’s first book entitled Introduction to the Technique of Child
Analysis. It was a collection of all her lectures, and a direct attack
at Melanie Klein's theories.
1927 S. F. publishes The Future of an Illusion; debunks religion on rational, scientific grounds.
1933 Margaret Schönberger (Mahler) was finally accepted as an analyst.
1934-6
(?) Rolf (who strangled Hermine Hug Hellmuth 1924) was released and
started chasing the psychoanalytic movement and especially Helene
Deutch). Deutch’s husband hired two protectors and Rolf eventually
disappeared).
1942 M. Mahler: Pseudoimbecility: a Magic Cap of Invisibility.
1944 M. Mahler: Tics and Impulsions in Children: A Study of Motility.
1947
"The Hampstead Clinic is sometimes spoken of as Anna Freud's extended
family, and that is how it often felt, with all the ambivalence such a
statement implies," one of her staff wrote
1949 Margaret Mahler
gives the first hint of her coming theory about symbiosis in a footnote
in ‘Clinical studies in benign and malignant cases of childhood
psychosis – schizophrenia-like”, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry,
vol 19, s 297, fotnot.
1949 Therese Benedek published what was
perhaps the first use of the concept of ‘symbiosis’ to characterize the
early mother-infant unit.
1951 John Bowlby: Maternal Care and
Mental Health," published by the World Health Organization (WHO) in
1952. ). It stimulated future studies of infant-mother bonding and the
effects of early separation.
1955 Mahler and Gosliner presents
an idea about human symbiosis and separation/individuation, that
launches the research project “The natural history of symbiotic child
psychosis” at Masters Children’s Center in New York.
1957
Bowlby's first formal statement of Attachment Theory, ‘The Nature of the
Child's Tie to his Mother’was read to the British Psychoanalytic
Society. The paper was controversial. Donald Winnicott: "It was
certainly a difficult paper to appreciate without giving away everything
that has been fought for by Freud". Anna Freud: "Dr Bowlby is too
valuable a person to get lost to psychoanalysis".
.
1957 The
revelation of the deeds of “the real Psycho”, Ed Gein. Although he
suffered and was diagnosed with severe paranoid schizophrenia, the
popular “psycho”-analytic “diagnosis” about a too close attachment with
his mother is the one that still labels him. When Ed appeared in the
psychoanalytic circles and popular culture (which are almost the same as
has been noted above, i.e. that psychoanalysis far from being radical
can thank its success precisely because it is reactionary) he fulfilled
every possible expectation.
1950-64 When Leo Rangell arrived in
Los Angeles in 1946, he felt that psychoanalysis seemed ideal.
Psychoanalysis was then, according to Rangell, 'as golden as the
Southern California sun'. The treatment of the war neuroses together
with the arrival of the European analysts who had fled Hitler advanced
psychoanalysis, attracting much professional and popular interest. While
LAPSI had become almost paralyzed in the late 1940s, the period
following the split became for some a 'golden age' for psychoanalysis'.
Both societies expanded and graduates quickly developed full analytic
practices. Mel Mandel who began training at LAPSI in 1952 recalled that
the animosity between the societies 'was as thick as a heavy fog'.
Still, within LAPSI the 1950s provided some 'periods of quiescence'.
By the early 1960s, the 'golden age' was over.
1957-61
In 1947, Ernst Simmel appointed Greenson as a training analyst. After
the split Greenson became president of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic
Society (1951-53) and Dean of Education (1957-61). He was Clinical
Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA Medical School.
1959 Mahler et al’s follow up study with normal children and their mothers.
1959
Psycho, book by Robert Bloch (compared to the movie a more incestuous
relationship between a 41 year old man and his mother).
1960
Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock (about a young man that killed his mother).
Based on Robert Bloch’s novel but influenced by the screen player Joseph
Stefano and the information he got from his psychoanalysts (compare the
LAPSI controversy among US psychoanalysts at the time). The movie can
be interpreted as a mix of Kleinian and Mahlerian thoughts on the
mother/son-relationship. "He used to ask me about my analysis. Many of
the things I supplied for Norman's background were not in the book
because I was learning in analysis why boys killed their mothers. I
would tell Hitch all these things. I told him I felt I could have killed
my mother at a certain point in my life, and it was sort of a miracle
that I hadn't done that. He thought all that was very interesting."
1963-65
A follow up study to the follow up study was granted and launched for
M. Mahler et al. This study is presented in The psychological birth of
the human infant (see below).
1968 Ralph (Romi) Greenson was
closely connected to Anna Freud and her group in London. His Foundation
for Research in Psychoanalysis in Beverly Hills provided an important
source of funds for Anna Freud's work in London as well as for Albert
Solnit's New Haven group around the journal, The Psychoanalytic Study of
the Child. The fund financed Anna Freud's purchase of Freud's London
home and half of the Hampstead Clinic's 1968 budget shortfall of
$60,000. The chief wealthy donor for this Foundation was one of
Greenson's patients, Lita Annenberg Hazen.
Freudian chock waves also reached Sweden.
1970;
nr 14 Socialstyrelsens Råd och anvisningar (Advises and Direktions from
the Social Boyard) 1970 no 14 Åtgärder mot misshandel av barn (tar även
upp psykiskt skadlig behandling). Measures against child abuse
(including psychological abuse).
1972 Barnbyn Skå starts
treating families in accordance with a psychoanalytic "understanding". A
main focus is laid on parent’s “lack of understanding their children".
1973
Beyond the Best Interests of the Child, by Joseph Goldstein, Anna Freud
and Albert J. Solnit (financially contributed to Anna Freud’s Hampstead
Clinic).
1975 The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant (M. Mahler et al).
1976
The UKÄ-report 1975:24 officially introduces psychoanalysis
(psychotherapy and psycho-social work) in the state financed social work
in Sweden.
1978 As a result of the official means now available
because of the UKÄ report, a psychoanalytic research group, including
Sven Hessle, is put together at Barnbyn SKÅ.
1979
Alice Miller: The Drama of the Gifted Child (see Alice Miller's genosuicide)
1979/80:1
Government Bill introduces LVU, the new child protection act. Main
features include the suppression of the word “compulsory”, as well as
the removal of the punishing aspect of measures directed towards
children and youth.
1980 Alice Miller: Det självutplånande barnet in Swedish (Das Drama des begabten Kindes und die Suche nach dem wahren Selbst)
1980 The Shining (movie about domestic violence by the father).
1981 Alice Miller: Prisoners of Childhood.
1981
Socialstyrelsens Allmänna råd (General advices from The Social Board)
1981:2 LVU warns for “destructive bonds” between parent and children,
and the necessity of compulsory care because of these ties.
1983 Alice Miller: For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-rearing and the Roots of Violence.
1984 The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant (M. Mahler et al) is published in Swedish.
1986 Sven Hessle introduces “symbiotic rejection ”, a concept he later (2001) seems to be less convinced about.
1987
BRIS (a society connected to Anna Freud) contributes to the preparatory
works for a revision of LVU by stating that "symbiosis is the most
fundamental of dangers facing a child and thus should be used as a
criterion for separating children from their parents".
1989/90:28 Government Bill proposing the new revised LVU including “pathological symbiosis”.
1991-03-01
The revised LVU (SFS Act No: 1990:52) including “Pathological
symbiosis” as a legal criterion to take the child into state "care".
For
a detailed scientific analysis of the stealthy introduction of
"pathological symbiosis" in the Swedish child protection act read
Klevius thesis: "Pathological Symbiosis" in LVU
- Relevance, and Sex Segregated Emergence.
Peter Klevius comparison of early female child psychoanalysts (in Pathological Symbiosis, 2004:46).
3.3 Symbiosis in psychoanalytic epistemology
S. Freud
never seems to have used the term “symbiosis” to refer to phenomenon
associated with psychoanalytic concepts of development (T. M. Horner
1985) in the sense presented here. Sandor Ferenczi, who was the
psychoanalytic thinker that, from M. Mahler’s teenage and on, together
with A. Aichhorn was the most influential on her development,
contributed to this topic already in 1913 by asserting omnipotence as
embedded in an original undifferentiated state (ibid.). In the 1920’s
Jean Piaget, who focused his research in developmental psychology and
genetic epistemology on how knowledge grows, referred to the
non-differentiation of self and others in the child’s developmental
process (Piaget 1929). Freud’s follower, Otto Rank, used
separation-individuation and symbiotic modes of functioning to deal with
the “trauma of birth” part of his central thesis in Truth and Reality,
published in 1929 (1968). In Escape from Freedom Erich Fromm[53]
presents the idea of symbiosis connected to his social psychoanalysis
(1941). His description of separation-individuation is, according to T.
M. Horner, essentially the same as that later presented by M. Mahler. In
1949 M. Mahler gives the first hint of her evolving theory about
symbiosis in a footnote in ‘Clinical studies in benign and malignant
cases of childhood psychosis – schizophrenia-like’, American Journal of
Orthopsychiatry. Vol 19, p 297, footnotes. The same year, 1949, Therese
Benedek published what was perhaps the first use of the concept of
‘symbiosis’ to characterize the early mother-infant unit (1949). This is
one year after the “invention” of the “schizophrenogenic mother” (also
in a footnote, see footnote 54 below). In 1975 M. Mahler et al published
the main work The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant.
A
precursor to the idea of symbiotic relationship between mother and child
is clearly visible in A. Aichhorn’s method of creating dependency in
children and youth (1936). Furthermore most of A. Freud and M. Mahler’s
contributions to child psychoanalysis were presented during the period
of sexual counter-revolution between the 1930’s and the 1960’s.
According to L. Appignanesi & J. Forrester the mid-twentieth century
was a special time of emphasis rather on a proper motherhood instead of
a penis envy transformed to competition with males (1992:458).
3.4 The emergence of “pathological symbiosis”
3.4.1 Early child psychoanalysts
The
history of child psychoanalysis begins with Sigmund Freud’s case[54] of
the five-year-old “Little Hans”, published in 1909. However, treatment
of delinquent children and youth by the means of psychoanalysis got a
bad start for the first female child psychoanalyst, Hermine
Hug-Hellmuth, who also was an important influential of Anna Freud. H.
Hug-Hellmuth´s analysis/treatment of her first child client, ”Rolf”,
seems to have miserably failed. The boy got a bad history of foster
homes and boarding schools and eventually killed and robbed his
analyst[55] the same year, 1924, when her ‘New Ways to the Understanding
of Youth’ was published (L. Appignanesi & J. Forrester
1992:196-203). More than three decades later Margaret Mahler presents
her view on how a too close, “symbiotic” attachment between parent and
child causes pathology and delinquency.
3.4.2 “Black Devil” [56] mothering the “frail child”[57]
According
to R. Webster, her father entrusted Anna Freud with the “frail child”
of the psychoanalytic movement. She then guarded it with all the
jealousy and all the fierceness of a mother protecting her own child
(1995:402). “From the beginning Anna did not form a close bond with her
mother” (J. Bumb 2002) and Freud’s analysis of his daughter was aimed to
support her to develop the right “femininity” thus helping her getting
married in an appropriate way (R. Webster 1995:409-418). S. Freud’s
emphasise on the pre-Oedipal stages in 1918-1922 may be related to this.
Anna stated, “I wanted beautiful clothing and a number of children but I
considered myself to be too shabby and inconspicuous” (J. Bumb 2002).
The family referred to her and her sister as the “beauty and the
brains”. According to Anna she never wrote much on female issues within
psychoanalysis because she felt that she identified with male case
studies. She was then sent, together with her grandmother, to Sicily and
other parts of Italy to improve her health[58] – probably depression
and anorexia – (J. Bumb 2002) and to make her more “joyful” and
“marriageable” (Webster 1995:407-409). “According to Freud’s own
theories his analysis of his daughter was an attempt to resolve her
problems with her sexuality. Psychoanalytic theory suggested that Anna
had become fixated at an essentially infantile stage, and that she had
simultaneously identified with the father who had supposedly been the
object of her first sexual desires”[59] (ibid. 415).
A. Freud’s
special mix of career and psychological motherhood begun in 1923 when
she cared and analysed the children of Freud’s neighbours who lived in
the same house. She vicariously tried to be a mother for them (from
Young-Bruehl[60] 1994, in J. Bumb 2002). “…I have this dependency, this
wanting to have something, even leaving my profession aside, in every
nook and cranny of my life." According to S. Freud "our symbiosis with
an American family, whose children my daughter is bringing up
analytically with a firm hand, is growing continually stronger" (Dyer,
1983 in J. Bumb 2002). In Anna Freud: A Biography, E. Young-Bruehl
states: “She remained a ‘vestal’ – to use the apt word Marie Bonaparte
later chose to signal both Anna Freud’s virginity and her role as the
chief keeper of her father’s person and his science, psychoanalysis.” (
in J. Bumb 2002).
In addition to a strong wish for motherhood,
and a strategy to create dependent children in the analysis (compare A.
Aichhorn above and below), knowing what is best for the child seems to
have been the main characteristic of A. Freud’s child psychoanalytic
approach, all of which is embedded in a rigidly sex-segregated
discourse. Half a century since the first analysis of the Burlingham
children A. Freud co-authored Beyond the Best Interest of the Child,
mentioned above as the main source for the “children’s need” approach,
which also became the view of the Swedish legislator. We are here warned
for the “confusion” of “insufficient” sexual identities: “The sexual
identities of the parents may be insufficiently resolved so as to create
confusion in the child about his own sexual identity.” (A. Goldstein et
al 1973:15).
Anna Freud showed a visceral antipathy against
Melanie Klein, the foremost child psychoanalyst of the time. According
to Alix Strachey, Anna hated M. Klein, the “ultra-sexual Semiramis
waiting to be pounced on”, simply on personal grounds (L. Appignanesi
& J. Forrester 1992:289) thus supporting a more personal view on the
work of A. Freud and its motives as a whole. A. Freud’s influence in
the field of child psychoanalysis grew rapidly and “the Hampstead Clinic
is sometimes spoken of as Anna Freud's extended family, and that is how
it often felt, with all the ambivalence such a statement implies,” one
of her staff wrote (J. Bumb 2002).
According to Anna Freud drives
play a major role in the psychological development of a child and a
teenager (1994). The force of the sexual instinct can be regarded as the
energy underlying sexual urges i.e. the “libidinal energy” of the
child, meaning the energy of the child’s sexual activities. In the same
manner “aggressive energy” underlies the aggressive urges of the child.
The flow of this energy, says A. Freud, we have to try to observe in the
child if we want to have any chance to guide and influence it (A. Freud
1992:69). She then outlines the child’s fight against its family ties:
On
the line from Biological Unity with the Mother to the Adolescent
Revolt[61] against parental influence, we expect the normal child to
negotiate a large number of libidinal and aggressive substations such
as: the symbiotic, autistic, separation-individuation phases (Mahler);
the part-object (M. Klein), need-fulfilling, analytic relationship; the
stage of object constancy; anal-sadistic ambivalence; the triangular
phallic-oedipal relationship; the latency extension of ties to peers,
teachers, the community, and impersonal ideals; pre- adolescent
regressions; adolescent struggle against infantile ties and search for
objects outside the family (1982:63).
Early stages of infantile
sexuality, not the puberty, are crucial due to the normal or abnormal
development of the child as well as for its capacity to love (A. Freud
1994:116-117). But reversed, this statement would imply that puberty,
not early stages of infantile sexuality, should be the crucial,
measurable variable, revealing deviance. Thus, instead of focusing on
uncertain and quantitatively, immeasurable mystical[62], sexual traits
from early childhood – deformed by the hypothetical
repression/unconsciousness hypothesis – there may be alternative
hypotheses better in accordance with measurable deviance. One can, for
example, reverse the separation-individuation thesis of M. Mahler, hence
narrowing an attachment approach. According to this, deviance and
delinquency are negatively correlated to attachment between parent and
child. But contrary to this, A. Freud expects the normal child to
develop from the biological unity with the mother to a defense against
parental influence. A. Freud’s own personal situation is reflected when
she states that:
…parents’ feelings for their children arise from
the depth of their inner lives and are based on procreation and
pregnancy, on the emotional dependence of the child, and on the
unquestioned proprietary rights of the parents. None of these feelings,
however, have any significance for the professional. I cannot help
seeing it as our task to arouse this type of interest (deeper dependency
on their side, or deeper bonds from the side of the adult) in all the
people who work with children. Not love, for which there is no real
basis, but an insatiable curiosity to learn more about the problems of
child development seems to me the appropriate bond which ties the
professional workers to the child in their care, irrespective of the
fact whether work is located in school, in the hospital, in a social
agency, or in the child therapist’s office (1982:298-299).
Although
Anna Freud emphasized a limited love approach she does not seem to have
considered the balance between the subjective, human and the
professional[63]. Moreover, an important, but perhaps also misleading,
key to A. Freud’s understanding and interpretation of children lies in
“the parent’s bedroom”:
I and my co-workers could demonstrate to
them how often their playrooms became stages where sexual and aggressive
scenes in the parental bedroom were acted out by the children, and that
understanding of this nonverbal communication offered a key to the
children’s confusions, distresses, anxieties, unruliness, and
uncooperativeness, i.e., to behavior problems which remained
inexplicable otherwise (1982:309-310).
Although Beyond the Best
Interest of The Child served as an influential guide for those who
argued for the removal of the child from their parents, she also
strongly emphasized, according to L. Appignanesi & J. Forrester, a
child’s need for “unbroken continuity of affectionate and stimulating
relationships” (1992:304). In fact, her contribution seems to have
rested in a worry about children in temporary foster placement. This
aspect of A. Freud’s later thinking seems not to be reflected in the
preparatory works of the revised LVU.
3.4.3 An un-analyzable, “sticky libido” “disturbed by motherhood”
Psychological
symbiosis is a key concept intimately connected to M. Mahler’s work.
Consider, says P. Stepansky, its widespread usage: “To the extent that
when mental health workers and psychologically astute laymen
characterize relationships of extreme dependency as ‘symbiotic
relationships’, and speak of the chronic needs of such people for
support and reassurance as ‘symbiotic needs’, they operate within a
Mahlerian paradigm.” (P. Stepansky 1988:xvii). M. Mahler took her
inspiration directly from Anna Freud, in theory as well as in
observational techniques, which she extended to the use of film cameras.
But who was M. Mahler?
Expectations on a girl’s development to a
woman in a rigidly dichotomized gender world were extremely pronounced
in A. Freud and M. Mahler’s upbringing. “Growing up for Margaret was not
a happy time, she had a very low self-esteem and was jealous of the
praises that Suzanne received from their mother.” (L. Woolf 2002).
Margaret obviously did not fulfil the gender expectations of her time,
and in an extension she seems to have internalised her childhood
experiences in her evaluation of motherhood:
Margaret once
overheard her mother say to Suzanne “I have brought you into this world,
I suckle you, I love you, I adore you, I live only for you, you are my
whole life.” Margaret’s heart being shattered, replied, “And I, I was
born to my father.” Margaret later believed that the way her mother
treated her was the reason she grew such an interest in paediatrics and
psychoanalysis (L. Woolf 2002).
A. Freud and M. Mahler had
similar relations to their fathers who supported a “tomboyish” profile
while they were young and later on pushed them back into the “womanhood”
and “femininity” of the 19th Century. The clash between out-dated
femininity and modern intellectuality seems to have severely affected M.
Mahler:
Margaret's father supported her and watched while
Margaret excelled in Math and Science. Margaret felt she needed to make
up where she was lacking, and gave up her feminine self-esteem for an
intellectual self-esteem. Crying one day to her father because none of
the boys noticed her he replied, “You don't need a man, you are man
enough for yourself.” After realizing she would not be a successful
sculptor, she decided to enrol in Medical school in January of 1917.
Margaret’s father was so proud she was successful in gaining admission.
Though he encouraged her to stay away from anything too masculine and to
study ophthalmology, because it was “dainty” (L. Woolf).
Already
in her teens M. Mahler developed a “deep adolescent friendship” with
her high school classmate Alice Balint, another famous theorist of the
mother-infant relationship. M. Mahler ended up as a paediatrician on a
well-baby clinic in Vienna after having finished her medical and
psychoanalytic training (M. J. Buhle 1998:246-248). Her early
professional career became strongly influenced by sex segregation and a
demand to fulfill her femininity, and especially her “motherhood”:
von
Pirquet’s appreciation of my research skills did little to mitigate his
absolute horror at the prospect of having any woman in a position of
authority. Thus, when I later requested a promotion from ”apprentice”
{Hilfärztin) to ”assistant” paediatrician, he replied, ”I will never
have a woman as an assistant. You are very smart, and I like you very
much, but if one is a woman, and especially if one looks like you, one
should marry and have children.” The remark about the desirability of a
woman who ”looked like me”, marrying instead of pursuing a profession,
was repeated on more than one occasion. I recall, as well, von Pirquet’s
comment the first day I donned glasses at the clinic. Inspecting me
carefully, he remarked: “Do me a favour. Put those glasses in your
pocket,” by which he conveyed the clear meaning that he couldn’t stand
them on my face! This disparaging estimation notwithstanding, I
idealized von Pirquet and regressed to the point of being well nigh ”in
love” with him. (M. Mahler 1988:45).
August Aichhorn, M. Mahler’s
tutor and most powerful influential on her “formative years”, was “a
mysterious man who lived a strange and charmed life with close
connections to the underworld[64] of Vienna” (M. Mahler 1988:51-54). He
analyzed her when the therapy with Helene Deutsch miserably failed (see
below). According to P. Stepansky, A. Aichhorn also had a “personal
relationship” with M. Mahler who was in her early twenties back then.
These topics were obviously still too difficult to face when M. Mahler,
at the age of 87, was preparing her autobiography (1988:xxxiv). But
regarding symbiosis A. Aichhorn’s concept “dependency relationship” was
especially important for M. Mahler:
Aichhorn used dependency
relationship to ”show” that the child had chosen his delinquent
life-style on the basis of past frustrations, abuse, or
misunderstandings, but that this life-style was not appropriate to
current circumstances. “He was a master at drawing the unconscious
motivation out of a child’s recital of circumstance and happenstance and
then confronting the child with the underlying reason for his
delinquency… These counselling strategies ushered in the second stage of
treatment in which Aichhorn undertook to make the
child, in his own words, ”as neurotic as he can be made” in order to render him analysable (M. Mahler 1988:51-53).
According
to S. Freud the essence of the analytic profession is feminine and the
psychoanalyst “a woman in love” (L. Appignanesi & J. Forrester
1992:189). But psychoanalytically formalized sex and sex segregation
also seem to have been troublesome components in the lives of female
psychoanalysts struggling under a variety of assumed, but irreconcilable
femininities and professional expectations. How sex segregation was
experienced back then is perhaps best illustrated by Helene Deutsch in
Psychology of Women: “She passively awaits fecundation: her life is
fully active and rooted in reality only when she becomes a mother. …This
speculation, which is based on my own experience, can perhaps be
confirmed by a more objective observation: no human being has great a
sense of reality as a mother.” According to H. Deutsch “the most
miserable feminine type in existence” is a woman who is “disturbed by
motherhood” and who “protects herself from the development of feminine
qualities” (1944:140-142). H. Deutsch’s emphasise on motherhood has its
modern child psychoanalytic counterpart in Daniel N. Stern’s[65]
“motherhood constellation” (1995). This stays in sharp contrast with the
striking lack of motherhood in pre-historic records (R. Tannahill
1992:36-37).
Because of the above it seems less surprising that
M. Mahler’s career within the psychoanalytic movement was initiated by a
painful clash with H. Deutsch, who, encouraged by Ferenczi, became her
first training analyst. However, after 14 months of constant
cancellations H. Deutsch insisted that M. Mahler was “un-analysable” (L.
Woolf 2002). According to H. Deutsch, M. Mahler-Schoenberger[66] had a
“sticky libido” (M. Mahler 1988:60). Although they apparently did not
cope well with each other they also shared some similarities. H.
Deutsch’s main “love affair” throughout her life was her father, whereas
her mother’s role mainly seems to have been to watch guard Helene’s
“femininity” thus causing an early rebellion (L. Appignanesi & J.
Forrester 1992:307-328). But unlike M. Mahler and A. Freud, H. Deutsch
seems to have emphasized the fulfilment of femininity through real
motherhood.
The fact that M.Mahler’s major works are published
after her menopause may be considered when evaluating the background of
the concept of ”pathological symbiosis” and its connection to her
interpretation of “motherhood” and “femininity”. “Margaret loved working
with children’s clinical studies on childhood psychosis, it was her
passion. She loved the way the children gave her all of their attention
and enjoyed working with her as well” (L. Woolf 2002). Her own
description is revealing:
Paediatrics, I should perhaps explain,
represented a compromise of sorts: it would enable me to be what my
father was, while simultaneously accommodating my desire perhaps my
outstanding “feminine” trait to work with children. At the time, the
desire to become a baby doctor, and thereupon to be a practicing
physician like my father coexisted with the equity strong desire to
become a psychoanalyst like Ferenczi, the warm father figure I had
encountered in the Kovacs household (M. Mahler 1988:23-24).
Like
most psychoanalysts, M. Mahler’s theoretical method relays on the use of
“normal development” as a reference for the abnormal. In a fast
changing world such an approach does not, neither however, necessarily
takes enough into account an all time ongoing change in human behaviour
nor does it allow for historical flexibility in human societies. Hence
the “normal” may in fact rather be interpreted as traces of the past,
and as such of limited value in assessing the development of
contemporary children. On top of this comes the fact that the scientific
basis for M. Mahler’s research seems weak. It is difficult to explain,
say M. Mahler et al, how the self-object-representations of the
symbiotic phase develop into a self-representation (1984:244). The
results follow from a complicated process of conclusions based on rules
that are not clearly established. This is especially true for
psychoanalytic research (ibid. 272). An additional problem is hinted at
when M. Mahler et al, “half-way through the examination”, decided not to
include those children (25 percent) who did not fit into the categories
created by the team (ibid. 282). A. Freud taught us, say M. Mahler et
al, that children’s playing with their mothers from the age of seven
months is not the result of altruistic behaviour[67]. We think the
purpose is to discriminate the child’s view on its body from that of the
object (M. Mahler et al 1984:245). Briefly, says M. Mahler, “one could
summarize my hypothesis as follows: whereas in primary autism there is a
de-animated frozen wall between the subject and the human object, in
symbiotic psychosis, on the other hand, there is fusion, melting, and
lack of differentiation between the self and the no self” (1979:5). This
view constituted a considerable brake to traditional psychoanalysis and
places the parent in the position of being potentially accused for
treating the child in a deviant way. M. Mahler describes the theoretical
introduction of the parent (mother) in the realm of the child’s “mental
apparatus”:
The whole idea of the mother-infant dual unity, for
example, originates in their (Ferenczi[68], Herman, Bak, Benedek)
theoretical and clinical perspectives. This developmental viewpoint did
not gain expression in the German or Viennese psychoanalytic literature
of the time. It is not even found in the later work of Anna Freud. At
her Hampstead Clinic, the mother-child pairing was surely recognized,
but the child was evaluated separately. “Leave the mother in the waiting
room; she is tired,” the Hampstead analysts would say. Anna Freud and
her collaborators were concerned almost exclusively with the
intra-psychic, which they believed to be the only proper domain of
psychoanalysis. Indeed, the intra- psychic is the main thing, but as I
have undertaken to show over a lifetime of research and writing, the
intra-psychic only evolves out of the differentiation from the
individually undifferentiated matrix of mother and child. At the
Hampstead Clinic during the 1930’s and forties the clinic analysts had
to take great pains to differentiate their position from that of both
Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott. It was Winnicott it will be recalled,
who claimed that there is no such thing as a baby without a mother (M.
Mahler 1988:16).
M. Mahler’s method in practical use is described
in a paper from 1977 concerning the assessment of narcissistic and
borderline personalities in the boy Sy. Two main characteristics in the
assessment are recognizable: 1) strong structural expectations and b)
“biologism” (constitution) as an alternative explanation when negative
expectations are not fulfilled. At first Sy is assembled into the
theoretical framework:
Sy’s sub phase developmental history was
characterized by prolongation up to his twentieth month of the nocturnal
“child-lover-at-the-breast” symbiosis. This, without more than a
nominal experiencing of the practicing and rapprochement sub phases of
separation-individuation, was overlapped by and continued as a bizarrely
frank oedipal relation with his mother and later with his father (M.
Mahler1979:201).
In the next step, Sy’s mother is accused for causing borderline in her son:
From
the time he weaned himself and walked, Sy was treated by the mother as
her “man,” with reciprocal behaviour on his part. It is a demonstration
in statu nascendi and step by step of what Kernberg (1967) describes as
the genetic-dynamic analysis of the borderline personality’s oedipus
complex. He says: “What is characteristic of the borderline personality
organization… is a specific condensation between pregenital and genital
conflicts, and a premature development of oedipal conflicts …” (p. 678
in M. Mahler1979:201-202).
However, because of “lack of space”,
all the failures of Sy’s poor ego function cannot be elaborated. One
example is given, though:
We could follow, in the second part of
Sy’s third as well as in his fourth, fifth, and sixth years, the
vicissitudes of the failure of the ego’s function of normal repression.
There were many instances of this failure, but for lack of space we
cannot elaborate on them. An example might suffice: Sy remembered minute
details about the Centre, which the other children had completely
repressed. These details were syncretically retained by his ego’s
pathological memory function (SPI:11 in M. Mahler 1979:201-202).
There
are no hints given, except of this fairly poor one, due to the
disastrous powers assumed to reside in Sy. M. Mahler and her research
team, however, are deeply concerned: “Sy’s intra-psychic conflicts can
be only guessed at, of course, and we would like to get Sy into
analysis, but both parents are opposed to it” (M. Mahler1979:201-202).
Quite contrary to M. Mahler’s prediction it all seemed to get a happy
end – except for the teachers’ un-explained irritation with the family:
Follow-up
home and school interviews of Sy in his eleventh year described him as
faring much better than we would have predicted. His academic
achievement in an honors class in a local public school is excellent and
he is fairly popular with his classmates. The teachers, however, could
not suppress their irritation with Sy and his family (M.
Mahler1979:201-202)..
The explanation to this incomprehensible success M. Mahler finds in Sy’s biological constitution:
We
believe that the positive qualities that saved Sy from psychosis were
his excellent endowment, for example, the way in which he made up for
his slow locomotor development by becoming extremely proficient in
gymnastics (his favourite activity was acrobatics) (M. Mahler
1979:201-202).
A similar reference to biological factors,
however, is completely absent in the case of “another girl” who, during
the last couple of days before she arrived at the Centre, had been
unable to pass her stool. According to M. Mahler et al, the 29-month-old
girl’s behaviour was extraordinary because she liked to play with water
in the children’s playroom, and the most plausible explanation to this
was a “compulsion”. When she sat on the toilet the “observer” reported
that she looked worried and asked not to let the mother in. The
“observer” asked her to tell more about it[69]. Then, we are informed,
through the “observer”, that the girl said: “Mother hurts me” (this
happened during the most intense “the battered child”-debate). But when
the pain increased the girl asked for her mother, who then read a book
for her until she was released and happy. According to M. Mahler et al,
the stool was passed when the girl saw a picture of a foul and shortly
after she had pointed to a picture in the book saying: “Dad has a pig in
his belly”. This has to be explained as the result of a poor mother
relation. Later the girl did very well at school and her social
development was good (1984:99-103). This case is of special interest
because of its close resemblance with the private life of M. Mahler
herself. As noted above, she suffered from a poor connection to her
mother and in 1921 she had severe stomach pains and attacks that
horrified her circle of friends. She was diagnosed with Heirshsprung’s
disease, a congenital disorder that makes one unable to relax and permit
the passage of stool. After medical treatment the problem ended.
Considering the psychoanalytic interest in anal problems the connections
above may not be surprising.
3.4.4 Main characteristics of pioneering child psychoanalysts
M.
Mahler, who was childless[70], intellectually relied on S. Freud and
his childless daughter Anna. She made her contributions to child
psychoanalysis after her menopause and mainly in the especially
sex-segregated period from the 1940´s to the 1960´s[71]. A comparison
reveals that the similarities between A. Freud and M. Mahler stay in
sharp contrast to the view represented by Melanie Klein, the mother of
three and a female child psychoanalyst of the less sex-segregated
1920’s. M. Klein was considered a dissident in the psychoanalytic
movement because of her early insertion of the Oedipus complex and her
suggestion of a primary femininity phase for both sexes (L. Appignanesi
& J. Forrester 1992:451-452). Having in mind that M. Mahler’s
“pathological symbiosis” concerns mothers, and that “motherhood” is
intimately connected to “femininity”, two opposite views on mother/child
relations emerge. Whereas the Kleinian view emphasizes the child’s
destructive and even violent tendencies towards the mother, the view of
A. Freud/M. Mahler recognizes the mother as the main source of
pathology.
M. Klein compared free associations with the play of a
child and, like S. Freud himself, analysed her own children (Webster
1995:431-432). But in contrast to the view that small children have a
weak and unformed superego, she considered the superego of a young child
as monstrous, because of early – even before birth – persecutory
experiences and fantasies. The superego, hence, should not be
strengthened, as A. Freud advocated, but rather be modified to help its
integration (L. Woolf 2002). Thus M. Klein’s mother appears to be a
resource rather than a threat. Where M. Mahler is searching for a
possible “parasitic parent”, M. Klein sees “good enough mothers”.
Whereas M. Mahler emphasizes the victimization of the child who has not
been properly released from the mother, M. Klein’s approach includes an
inherent “badness” in the child in accordance with S. Freud’s own
theories. In M. Mahler’s theory the idyllic Eden in the form of the
mother/child-symbiosis has to be broken up for the survival of the
child, whereas M. Klein’s children already from the beginning were
basically paranoid. And whereas S. Freud introduced the super-ego at the
age of five, M. Klein inserts it at the age of five month (M. Klein et
al 1995:29-35). M. Klein, contrary to A. Freud and M. Mahler, remembered
her childhood as mostly serene and happy. She was tremendously
impressed and stimulated by her father's intellectual achievements and
he was always ready to answer her many questions. M. Klein had a good
relation to her mother. Opposite A. Freud and M. Mahler she did not cope
well with S. Ferenczi[72] (H. Segal 2003).
In contrast to M.
Klein, but in accordance with M. Mahler, A. Freud traces the threats
against the child’s healthy development to its mother. The emerging
picture is a sensitive, vulnerable being, incapable of adaptation to
certain of its mother’s behaviour. Unexplained symptoms are interpreted
as psychological:
So far as they (the earliest disorders) have no
purely organic cause, they can be traced to interaction of inborn modes
of functioning with the mother’s handling of these given
potentialities, i.e., her more or less skilful or insensitive, well- or
ill-timed response to the infants needs; or they can be traced to the
infants high sensitivity to the mother’s emotional states, her
anxieties, her moods, her predilections, and her avoidances. Un-pleasure
or distress due to either cause can find discharge only in two manners:
either through crying, or by way of physical pathways within the
somatic areas mentioned above” (A. Freud 1982:19).
Apart from the
fact that the above seems more like a simple and quite obvious
qualitative evaluation of different methods of parenting wrapped into
the mystique of something[73] “discharged through somatic pathways”, a
comparison with the view of M. Klein is striking. M. Klein believed that
in the play young children “ceaselessly imagined how they might fellate
or castrate their fathers, defile or attack their mother’s breast, or
imaging or recalling their parents copulating (R. Webster 1995:431-432).
But according to A. Freud: “Where a mother, for whatever reason, is
unable to give adequate comfort to her infant, this may have a lasting
effect on this individual’s own capacity to cope with even normal
amounts of un-pleasure, pain, and anxiety, i.e., on his frustration
tolerance.” (1982:21). Furthermore, although kinship and other family
ties may be the more important the older the child gets because of a
widening and more complex life-sphere and a corresponding need of a
closer and more sophisticated attachment A. Freud’s following statement
reveals a quite limited picture of “the parental task” seemingly utterly
devoid of thoughts on continuity, especially over generations:
With
the blood tie wholly ignored at this age, he recognizes as his parents
the adults who fulfil the parental task in the psychological sense,
i.e., who serve his growth by day-to-day interchange of continuous care,
affection, and stimulating involvement. As the law stands today
children can be forced away from psychological parents, to whom they are
deeply attached and under whose guardianship they prosper, and with
continuity broken, be made to adapt to biological parents with whom no
ties are in existence. It is alleged by some people that return to the
biological family is truly in the “best interest” of the child, who
thereby will be spared an identity crisis in adolescence. The truth is
that in adolescence most children undergo what may be called a crisis of
identity when they have the difficult task to grow beyond the parents
of their childhood… (A. Freud 1982:302-305).
In conclusion the
above reveals a pronounced hostility between childless female child
psychoanalysts and female psychoanalyst who had children of their own
(A. Freud vs. M. Klein and M. Mahler vs. H. Deutsch). Main
characteristics of female child psychoanalysts, as reported above,
dichotomised for and against the parent (mother):
From Peter Klevius comparison of early female child psychoanalysts (in Pathological Symbiosis, 2004:46).
Alice Miller´s psychoanalytic genosuicide
The secular trend against religion in its most primordial sense
(religare = tie back, ancestor worship) is perhaps best exemplified
through the writings of Alice Miller. Although the notion of "the child
itself" seems philosophically unintelligible, it reveals the myths and
inconsistencies of what is believed to be the modern individual. Alice
Miller's inner desperate longing for parenthood lost in modernity.
Lack
of deep (not superficial) and lasting attachment (family, kin and
friendship ties) is, together with cultural/political segregation (sex,
race, etnicity etc), the social cancer of today. In this respect A.
Miller's family hatred/jealousy constitutes a weapon directed against
the very core of human society, i.e. it's the most lethal and massive
form of genosuicide and the basis for the new human being Homo Filius
Nullius!
In psychoanalysis a person tells a story she did
not know about and the psychoanalyst is a person who lets her be "such
as she is right now" says Alice Miller (1980:74), one of the most
ardent, psychoanalytic proponents for connecting personal difficulties
at adult age, on parental deviance. "My patients", she continues, lack a
"genuine emotional understanding" for the course of their own
childhood, and they express "complete unsuspecting" for "the real needs
of their own". Miller refers to the works of M. Mahler, D. Winnicott and
H. Kohut (A. Miller 1980:12-13).
Little is available from
general resources as to Alice Miller's personal circumstances and she is
known for not revealing her private life. But she writes: "I was a
stranger to everybody in my family. Today, I know for sure that I was
unwanted, rejected from the conception on, never loved, emotionally
completely neglected, and used for the needs of others. But above all I
was lied to, I grew up with a perfect hypocrisy. My parents, both
absolutely unconscious of their true feelings, pretended to love me very
much, and I believed this (because I so much needed this illusion) for
more than 40 years of my life until I started to suspect the truth
hidden behind their pretensions, hidden probably to them too. Suspecting
is not yet as much as knowing for sure but it was the start. It took me
20 years more to get rid of my denial because I was so alone with the
knowledge of my body and my dreams, and a wall of denial surrounded me
wherever I opened my mouth. Writing and painting were the only ways to
continue with my search without being offended and "punished" for being
the troublemaker"[1] (Miller 2001).
According to Alice
Miller, "any person who abuses his children has himself been severely
traumatized in his childhood in some form or another. This statement
applies without exception since it is absolutely impossible for someone
who has grown up in an environment of honesty, respect, and affection
ever to feel driven to torment a weaker person in such a way as to
inflict lifelong damage. He has learned very early on that it is right
and proper to provide the small, helpless creature with protection and
guidance; this knowledge, stored at that early age in his mind and body,
will remain effective for the rest of his life" (A. Miller 1990:190).
Parenting seems an almost impossible task when looked upon
through the writings of Alice Miller. Furthermore she does not serve us
with more precise advices about the alternatives. Only generalized
expressions, such as "seeing the child", are given. Instead Alice Miller
asks herself if we ever are going to conceive the extent of the
loneliness and abandonment that we have been exposed to as a child. The
"very huge number" of people suffering from narcissistic disorders "very
often" have had "discerning", "ambitious" and "supporting" parents.
Often they have received praise for their talents and achievements.
According to Miller, almost all of the individuals attending her for
analysis have become dry already during their first year (sic). They
tell her that their parents have been empathetic and they have no
compassion for the child they were themselves (A. Miller 1980:12-13).
According to Miller there is an "original narcissistic need"
in the child to be "as it is". "As it is" has to be understood as M.
Mahler's[2] notion that the infant's inner sensations constitute the
core of the self. These sensations "seem" to remain the point of
crystallization on which the sense of identity is built (1980:14). But,
says Miller, if the patient through the analysis, "consciously" has
experienced? how he has been "manipulated" in his childhood by his
parents and which "wishes for retribution" this has created in him, then
he is going to be less manipulative himself (ibid).
This
is, concludes Alice Miller, based on my own experiences (A. Miller
1980:103). She gives an example of how remaining "Oedipal pain" can be
delegated to the child through parenting. One day she walked behind a
young and "tall of stature" (sic) parental couple and their whining
two-year-old son. Alice Miller, contrary to the parents, understood that
the boy wanted an ice cream stick of his own instead of licking the tip
of those of his parents. Why, asks Miller, did not the parents
understand the boy and why did not they give half of their ice cream to
him? It could only be explained if we look upon the parents as children
who now have got a weaker individual on whom they can feel powerful
(1980:63-65).
However, an alternative view, as out-lined above,
could interpret this as "psychic energy" of Sigmund Freud, that talks
through a disappointed adult in search for a suitable explanation that
could help her clarify her own life.
But the final question
remains: Why do so many assign Miller with such an important role and
how do we get back on the old tracks again without fundamentalist
degeneracy?
[1] Alice Miller was obviously not a child when
she discovered the ?child? in herself. But the question is whether that
child would have recognized itself? If not, unrecognizable parts would
then belong entirely and only to the already grown up Alice Miller!
[2] In M. Mahler 1972:17.
by Peter Klevius 2003
Shortly after Alice Miller's death her son Martin Miller stated that he
had been beaten by his authoritarian father during his childhood - in
the presence of his mother. Miller first tried to defend herself by
saying she intervened, but later admitted that she did not intervene.
