Every mother-child interaction
involves having “ghosts” – uninvited (unremembered, not conscious,
procedural) memories of parent’s past. Ideally, those ghosts are to
be repressed. Baby tried to make full claim to parental love, and without
malevolent intruders. Even in a stable/strong parent-infant bond/love,
intruding scripts from parent’s past, with different circumstances/players
can come up. When brief and non-impairing, then it is not too much of
a concern. There is concern where intrusions from parents’ past does
impair functioning, such as feeding, sleep, toilet training or discipline.
When those intrusions of the parents’ past is transient, such parents
generally come for professional advice, with a good working alliance,
and reap the benefits of counseling.
Not all suffering/poorly-parented/
Then, there are another group of families, where the intergenerational crap is a permanent fixture. “The ghosts were not invited, but have taken full-time residence”. They “rehearse the family tragedy from a tattered script”. By the time that they come to counselling, the baby shows the distress of emotional starvation, grave symptoms, or developmental impairments. In such families, the issues are intergenerational (i.e. even 3-4 generations!), and the instruction of past scripts are rigidly seen as ego-syntonic. They tend not to come for counseling, and the therapists/youth-protection is seen as the real intruders, by such families. Freud’s concept of repetition compulsion is at its best in those families. Otherwise, babies who are afflicted by their parents’ past must await a spokesman for dealing with that (i.e. a therapist).
Therefore, the therapist must
access those past experiences of the parents and process them in order
for them not to influence the present as blindly as they do. Such work
combines the ideas of social work, psychoanalysis and developmental
theories.
The following part of the paper
is case studies of May and of Greg.
Mary
5 ½ months old, whose
mother wanted to give up Mary for adoption, while the father did not
agree to consent to this. Un uncovering the mother’s crap, this “rejecting
mother” had am underlying depression with suicide attempts (i.e. Aspirin).
Mary had the features of a “crib baby” – i.e. well fed, but not
more than that. The back of her head was bald. She rarely smiled, few
vocalizations, little interest in her surrounding, very few eye-contacts/reaching
out to her mother. The one time that the baby did (in the videoed session,
the mother did not respond, and looked dreadful. It was as if mother
did not hear the cries of the baby!
Mom’s story:
Attempted suicide several times (aspirin, gunshot which deformed her face). She was cared for grudgingly by family members, as parents were absent. Poverty, crime, family secrets, promiscuity, and incompetent child-protection agencies were part of mother’s own history. Mom married in her late adolescence to a man with similar history of crap. They both wanted “something better”, but after a few years of trying that, the downwards-spiral has begun. A central theme in mom’s guilt was that the husband was not “father” of Mary– everyone commented that Mary is probably due to some affair of the mom (due to looks). Dad kept on saying that he does not care, but that what is of essence here is caring for Mary. Both parents’ families-of-origin had a lot of illegitimacy in their history and carried no stigma. (They happened not to be from Cornwall). So, why did mom feel so guilty? Was she one of them illegitimates? To uncover this, Mary’s mom was sent to psychoanalysis, but she could not handle it, as it was too scary for her. She could not stop speaking of how much she hates men.
As also dyadic work was sought to work on Mary’s situation, the in-home component was a good way to see natural observations in the natural context of the mom-infant dyad.
The more that the in-home therapist “allowed” Mary’s mom to cry and grieve her own crap, the more she spontaneously grabbed Mary and comforted herself and Mary (as opposed to not touching her baby at all!). baby began to seek comfort in mother and spontaneous smiling at mom. Therapist reflected this to the mother (i.e. “spoke on behalf of the baby”). Therapist made the connection for the mom as to how the mother brought her own suffering onto the relationship with her daughter, Mary.
By age 10 month, Mary showed
appropriate attachment (i.e. preference for mother for comfort/safety).
The mother’s depression had constricted. But it was still there! The
raging disease was at least controlled.
Other conflicts:
The next stage of counselling also moved freely between Mary’s developmental needs and mother’s conflicted past.
Issues were not as grave as in the beginning. But there were still issues to be worked out. Mother still did not see the attachment needs behind making haphazard babysitting plans when mom had to go work. After all, for a woman who grew up in poverty, wouldn’t she see work as primary for survival, before attachment needs? Mom’s rule of thumb was still “forget about grief – you will have losses in life and you have to get used to it”.
In working out mom’s own
numerous losses of parental figures and the related rule of thumb of
“forget about it” (which precludes grieving over it), Mary’s mom
was helped to see that she is doing the same to Mary (i.e. “forget
about the loss of a baby-sitter, as they come and go, so, I will ignore
your distress about it and ignore it too”).
At this time, the secret of
men came out (i.e. the strong counter-transference towards men as seen
in mom’s psychoanalysis): in mom’s family of origin, incest was
commonplace, and was minimized by the maternal parental figures. This
was processed with the mother, and mother’s anxieties around men and
“child-making” were abated.
End of story: At age
2, Mary was appropriately attached, and shows maternal/comforting behaviours
towards her dolls. Mother seemed freer to empathize appropriately.
Greg’s story
Just like Mary’s story, Greg’s
story is of how parent’s personality/historical crap, which when unprocessed,
is then crapped on the kids, despite best
intentions.
Greg is 3.5 months old. Mom
(16 years old) won’t touch/care for him. Mom forgets to buy milk and
often feeds him with Kool-Aid and Tang. She lets 19-year old dad do
the care-giving. Mom’s family is known to social service agencies
for 3 generations. Delinquency, promiscuity, child abuse, poverty, school
failure, psychosis brought every family member to community agencies/courts.
Mom is now the third-generation child-abandoner. Dad did the caring,
which was deemed as somewhat adequate. Mom saw the therapist as a conspirator,
just like her own mother. Her emotions seemed blank. Basic trust of
the therapist was an issue for the mom, and she did a quite a few no-shows/moving
to different addresses tricks in the beginning of the therapy. Problem
is, baby is in peril. Therapy was done with an in-home setting.
Turns out (after mom started
opening up a bit) that she was supposed to care for her siblings since
her early childhood, and not doing so risked corporal punishment from
a father who was alcoholic, an probably psychotic. Mom’s descriptions
were factual, with little emotion expressed. But then, for the first
time, mom went to pick up the crying baby as she was talking about her
own experiences, not only factually but emotively/experientially. Mother’s
play with Greg still has aggressive themes. i.e. when Greg picked up
a toy hammer, mom took it from him and (softly) tapped Greg’s head,
saying “I am going to beat you”. Mom still needed to align herself
with a mother identity and may need an auxiliary ego to defend from
dangerous impulses. For that, a therapist would have been needed 24/7
in this case. There was a therapeutic dilemma here: to open up the unconscious
destructive feelings was not possible as they were a still repressed,
and quite strongly in the mom. But working on client’s current ego
state meant colluding with the repression which to begin with brought
on the current situation (i.e. distancing from baby/lack of care-giving).
And after all, repression of the suffering/emotional experience behind
the factual memories is the key to maintaining the repetition compulsion
of the intergenerational crap. But, there was hope! After talking about
her childhood (albeit in a flat manner), mom did respond to Greg. So,
plan was set to face the anxieties of the mom, head-on with all the
therapeutic (and transference) implications of it.
Mom started speaking about
the charade of men in her own mom’s life. One would beat her a lot
when not caring for the siblings (until the belt broke). Mom used to
laugh at herself being beaten as a kid, as it would not hurt anymore.
When the original (biological) father died, mom left the children (6
from 4 men) at an old lady’s home, who would lock them out of the
home for punishment. When mom returned, she was absent (i.e. work or
at “unknown” places). Therapist tried to access mom’s feelings
of missing her mom, and mom started to respond. But then one time, the
mom locked the therapist out of the in-home visit. Mom did not remember
the affective terrors behind her experiences, but she definitely acted
them out in transference and acting out (i.e. locking the therapist
out of the house). Best reaction is to not abandon client (due to the
understanding of the transference/counter-
The therapist questioned the
rule of thumb of mom and dad’s respective families-or-origin: that
even an infant is capable of malice. Then parents started to seek cause-and
effect of Greg’s behaviour, as opposed to seeking a negative attribution
to Greg.
But when mother had a psychic
regression, therapist and mom were able to relate that to meaning behind
mother’s moods.
Other issues which arose:
Last therapeutic issue
When Greg became more independent,
he would become more mobile mischievous and curious, and mom stopped
the comforting behaviours and became obnoxiously loud in her disciplining.
Greg would laugh nervously, just as mom did when she was beaten as a
kid. Identification with the aggressor is usually done in response to
anxiety and helplessness towards the attacker. Mom had probably regressed
to the helplessness which she felt as a child, when she had to deal
with Greg’s developmental stage of exploring/testing the world. But
her tone of voice was still ego-alien to her (mom didn’t even realize
the drastic change in herself!). One time, as Greg was eating breakfast,
therapist called mom on her directive shouting (Greg was playing with
his breakfast), and mom sounded initially defensive, but got the point…
but then she spoke and showed her anxiety around the sense of helplessness
behind her shouting at Greg. And then, the identification with the aggressor
began to dissolve in the mother. Then, therapist taught mother concrete
ways to be attuned to Greg’s developmental needs without being critical
of them.
At the end of this story, mom
got pregnant again, with a baby she wants and expects, and is able to
foresee her care-giving roles, as well as possible reaction of Greg
to the new baby/etc…
Conclusion:
What determines whether parents’
conflict will be repeated with the child? It is not the parents actually
having their own negative experiences as children, but rather the
repetition compulsion and identification with the aggressor
mechanism. The negative events were remembered explicitly by the parents,
often with chilling gory details. What was not remembered was the associated
affective experience. Those affective memories are not gone, but repressed
(i.e. alive and kickin’ from under the carpet). Then when the kids
come alone, the repressed crap gets placed on them, repeating the past
ills in their lives (i.e. externalize the conflict).
For parents who can speak not
only of the incidents which they experiences, but how they experienced
it, then their pain has not undergone repression, and they can identify
with the injured child, as opposed to the fearsome figures of the past.
In short access to childhood pain is a powerful deterrent to repetition
of those traumas in subsequent events, while repression/isolation of
painful affect provide the psychological requirements for identification
with the betrayers and aggressors of childhood.
Unsolved mystery: why do some children not align/identify with the aggressors.