"The Confusional Link"
Working with patients who have been traumatized as infants and young children can be confusing for the therapist who is accustomed to working in the symbolic order. In order to cope with traumatic, psychic overwhelm, they have retreated from object relations and continue to relate to others concretely as things or functions. Their relations are body relations, consisting of unconscious symbiotic union with others. Since often trauma survivors become adept in the world, becoming well educated and finding professional jobs, their concreteness and difficulty processing emotion may go unnoticed. They display a pseudo-maturity and pseudo-object relations.
For therapists and analysts working with them, their somatic relational process can be confusing and disorienting. We ourselves frequently report being confused by not being able to find meaning in their words or emotion in their narratives. Confusion then is uncomfortable and frightening, sometimes eliciting in the analyst a need for an immediate answer, an immediate understanding. When that does not appear in the analyst’s confused mind, unmediated affect such as rage or extreme maternal care, intense love or violent hate, can arise inside the analyst. This adds to the confusion and disturbance, while the violent affects and emotions seemingly create an illusion of certainty. If the analyst can learn to value the confusion as information, containment of previously unrepresented experience can result in the development of a three-dimensional analytic space and be internalized by the patient.
Participants will:
- Learn to differentiate a confusional object from a transitional object.
- Recognize a somatic defense as found in ‘language as action’.
- Appreciate the value of pathological mimicry.
Seminar will be divided into three segments with discussion between them:
1. The Confusional Object
When normal projective identifications are disrupted due to early trauma, a patient might, in phantasy, become the person they are with. This silent and unconscious fusion enables a primitive organization to develop that provides structure and seemingly results in a capacity to function procedurally in the world. Whenever this phantasy is threatened by relationship, confusion results. Neither the patient nor the therapists can discern who is who. The confusion becomes manifest in a variety of ways, for example, in passivity, poor memory, or in a difficulty making decisions. It also appears via unconscious mimicry which includes a primal identification.
2. The Play of Identifications
In a healthy psychic world, our identifications serve to build internal structure and create our personalities and our identities. In addition, they serve to link us emotionally with those we consciously love and admire, creating an internal and external community that is cohesive and integrated. As defenses, much like language is a defense, identifications create a background of safety. They do this by unconsciously splitting themselves and their objects into black and white categories. These can eventually become less polarized, enabling us to differentiate, categorize, and subordinate information gained from experience. When early trauma interrupts these processes, the spontaneous psychic play is restricted. With such restriction comes a disruption in body relations and object relations.
3. Somatic Defenses
Somatic defenses isolate a person from whomever they are near. When a patient functions in a pseudo-object relations manner, the symbolic order is challenged. Words are about words and are not symbolic. Confusion can arise, for example, when the analyst makes an interpretation and the analysand focuses on the sound of the voice, the rhythm and tone, the volume and alliteration of sounds. The words become stripped of meaning and unrelated to emotional experience. Confusion and miscommunication can then arise when each member of the dyad assumes the other is using words in the same manner they are.
