In a paper for social workers called “Communicating with Children”, Ms. Winnicott (1977) wrote, “if only there had been someone at the point of crisis to encompass the child, to recognize that the child has feelings about what is going on, and to help him through the shattering effect of losing all that is familiar, then perhaps some of the shock and trauma could have been absorbed.” In her approach to psychoanalysis, she is exquisitely and immediately sensitive to the need to be that other person, even for - especially for - the defensively self-sufficient person.
...
For Ms. Winnicott’s patient, the shock and loss of the other person - her lover’s leaving her after three years - had thrown her into despair and a dissociated state for which she had no memory. Having learned a bit of her history and having realized from her total practice how early the “illness pattern” starts, Ms. Winnicott suggested that this loss of memory may cover up something from long ago that had also been a shock to the patient.
Soon thereafter, the patient reported a recurring dream about being with wooden or cardboard animals in a vast empty desert. Menagerie. The animals begin to sink into the sand leaving her alone and terrified. Having seen in her social work with evacuated children their need for familiar possessions and helped her husband, Donald, think through his groundbreaking theory of transitional objects, Ms. Winnicott suggested to her patient that these might have been her nursery animals which she, for some reason, did not love anymore and had sent away, leaving her totally alone. The patient reacted with indignation at the idea that she may have been sending the animals away. We can hear in this interpretation Ms. Winnicott’s looking for the anger and the sense of agency in her patient, realizing, as her husband put it, that in cases of great loss there is “a precious moment of anger” to be re-contacted in treatment.
...
As she puts it in Communicating with Children “the social worker needs to know (the) story and its effects on the child, and to live through that experience with the child as fully as possible, without denying the pain….In this way, moments of great pain can become moments of truth, on which a future might be built in time.”
Ms. Winnicott was able to carry her patient through the great pain of recurrent depressive episodes in the course of the patient’s re-establishing emotional contact with her childhood self. The patient had another dream, this one of a pile of coal at the foot of her bed that was slowly disappearing and a camel whom she knew, in the dream, to be Ms. Winnicott. She woke up sure that she would never have the nightmare about disappearing animals again and then had the spontaneous thought “where’s my teddy?” She then actually went to her childhood home to get it and brought it to her next session. Soon thereafter, she recovered positive memories of her mother from before their separation. This part of her analysis she later referred to as “the time when I began to want to live.”
Why? What had happened here? Clare Winnicott had learned from countless experiences with evacuated children that, in the face of loss suffered helplessly, children often have to tell themselves, as her patient said in their first meeting, that “I can do anything.”The original injury has occurred in a relationship of dependence, and so the defense of self-sufficiency is designed to protect the child from any future need for a person, any future vulnerability and any memory of the painful past. This is an untenable, if understandable, solution. It leaves vital parts of one’s basic self behind, and it prevents intimate relationships in the future.
Clare Winnicott knew that psychoanalysis offered a setting in which her patient could experience a therapeutic regression to a moment of truly depending on her – her reliable presence and understanding and her survival of the patient’s anger – anger because, in contrast to her usual dissociated state, the patient was really feeling pain now, in fact the work of therapy was causing her pain. ...The life’s work of Clare Winnicott is about the developmental fact that moments of pain must be experienced - and can only be experienced if another person is present – in order for them to be transformed into moments of truth. Her implication is that it is the truth that people really need to move forward in life.
makes me cry ~ feel of hope ~
The evidence of her patient’s analysis is that, having achieved the ability to truly depend on Ms. Winnicott, she could then re-connect with her very early depending on a teddy bear and on her mother as well. These positive memories of a mother who had abandoned her and with whom she was so angry for much of her life represent what Vamik Volkan (2006), our Erikson Scholar at Riggs recently, calls the re-libidinization of the patient’s inner world – meaning the coming to life of early experiences with people who really mattered to the person, experiences that reassure the person about the foundations of their place in the world.
At one level, this raises the question for social work practice as to how often, when we think we are replacing a bad parent, we are actually being invited to help the client contact somehow the lost good parent of their early life.
...
The next night she dreamt the same dream, but “the child moved its arms more easily and lifted them towards me. I thought: ‘that child wants picking up, so I’d better go and do it.’ I picked up the child, put her under my arm and walked down the garden path towards the gate.”
Two things strike me about these dreams and Ms. Winnicott’s response. The first is that dreams are real. It is a distinctive feature of the Middle School of British Psychoanalysis – which is the Winnicottian frame of reference – that it places subjective experience at the center of its theory and emphasizes the need for an intermediate space for experience to come into being and reach its fullness.
Winnicott’s renegade colleague and former analysand, Masud Khan (1974), conceptualized the “dream space” as such an intermediate space and argued cogently that the dream is not only the compromise formation between unconscious impulses and constraints; it is also a space in which new experience can crystallize, marking the subject’s achievement of a new level of integration. This seems to me to have been the case with Ms. Winnicott’s patient. Having achieved a durably dependent relationship with her analyst and having survived the summer holiday, she was ready to truly re-connect with this long-dissociated part of herself.
That the patient does so in the dream with such spontaneity and assuredness, that she responds to this child by going and meeting her need to be picked up, brings me to my second thought, which is that this is what her analyst did for her in that first session. With equal spontaneity and assuredness, she said to her patient that she could not herself be the other person and implicitly that she, Ms. Winnicott, could do the picking up if the patient wanted her to. Not only has this dissociated child come alive, but so has the relational essence of the patient’s adult self, and this has happened in a deep identification with her analyst who had not only picked her up but had spent her social work career picking up so many despairing children.
...
Ms. Winnicott too once reported a dream of a reunion. Some time after her husband’s death, she dreamed that they were in their favorite department store buying Christmas presents for friends and enjoying a spending spree. Then they were sitting face to face, having their usual Saturday morning coffee. “I looked at him full in the face and said: ‘Donald, there’s something we have to say to each other, some truth that we have to say, what is it?’ With his very blue eyes looking unflinchingly into mine he said: ‘That this is a dream.’ I replied slowly: ‘Oh yes, of course, you died, you died a year ago.’ He reiterated my words: ‘Yes, I died a year ago.’” oh
Ms. Winnicott later wrote that “For me it was through this dream-of-playing that life and death, his and mine, could be experienced as a reality.” Clearly, experiencing life as fully as possible, including inevitably its ending, was a primary value for both Winnicotts. Donald’s old-age wish was typically playful and paradoxical: “May I be alive when I die.”
As a social worker, Clare Winnicott had immersed herself in the reality of loss suffered by young children. She saw that so many of them had come to defend themselves against this pain through a deadening of their capacity for experiencing life, and thus had lost the capacity for play dad so essential to further growth and fulfillment. This was a kind of living death, and her way of being as a social worker-psychoanalyst inclined her toward picking up those traumatized children-turned-adults and being the other person for them, just as she and Donald in that dream were so intimately the other person for one another. Clare Winnicott understood in her being that it is only in this kind of relationship that “some truth we have to say” can be borne. (tolerated.)
No comments:
Post a Comment