LOVE ADDICTION RECOVERY: CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT THROUGH RESOLVING SPLITTING AND DEMON-LOVER THEMES

Former Years of Seduction and Betrayal

Cathy’s first few years in psychotherapeutic treatment were spent with her narration of all her tales of seduction and betrayal by men. She was hypersexual at this time. She became quickly and addictively attached to all kinds of men who she would have sex with, spend the night with– and then be shocked that they would have a girlfriend, and were quick to drop her. She continuously felt abandoned but also was obsessed with each man who she had merged with through sex, only to find that the man was unavailable in one way or another. She spoke of perpetual humiliation as she attempted to cling to each man. Cathy couldn’t stop calling the men, which only drove them further away, and made it clear to her that she was being rejected, more and more emphatically, with each of her compulsive clinging phone calls.  Sometimes she would grovel, and she wrote about this in a letter to me, as she wrote a novel.

Then there was the man who seemed available, because he had no attachment to a girlfriend or wife.  But before long she discovered that his attachment was to money, and he ended up convicted of a White-collar crime and was put away in prison. This man was also attached to cocaine, and he had seduced Cathy into taking the drug, to the point that she had to join a cocaine addiction group for her substance abuse recovery.

Cathy seemed to be swayed by every wind that each new man in her life blew in her direction. She hated herself for her susceptibility to romantic fantasies of love and commitment, while the men she was attracted to were aversive to commitment, and used romance mainly as a sexual ploy. She hated herself for continuing to sabotage herself, and to mortify herself, by chasing after each man who eluded her.

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However, Cathy then became addicted to me, her female therapist.  Suddenly, everything began to turn around for her. Through her dependent longings for me, which also could take the form of falling in love through identification, Cathy committed to a treatment with me, where she could mourn her primal mother and father loss. Through mourning the grief of loss that her newfound dependence on her psychoanalyst had brought, she found a healing and recovery process for her love addiction. All of Cathy’s rage, loss, love, and longing could be felt and expressed in her psychotherapy.  It became clear that all the time that Cathy had been narrating her dramas to me, through tears of anguish and rage, she was forming an attachment to me. She gave up a defensive hysterical laughter in her attachment to me, and therefore she headed towards experiencing the whole range of her authentic feelings. At first Cathy’s attachment illustrated an addictive attachment within a symbiotic transference. This symbiotic mode of attachment would be gradually relinquished, freeing Cathy for the first time from addictive attachments in general, and to addictive attachments to men in particular. It was through Cathy’s opening up to her own separate feeling states, evidenced most specifically in the grief of mourning primal object loss, that she could relinquish the symbiotic mode of attachment to me.  I served as a

symbiotic object, and then as a transitional object, as Cathy felt her psychophysical being come alive, independent of clinging to a man as an extension of her false narcissistic image self. My role as her symbiotic extension helped her let go of this clinging to men as extensions of her. Then as I let her separate, which her primal mother had not done, she progressed in overcoming her developmental arrest.  She began to process her psychological development through all her genuine affective feeling states, generally returning to grief and loss with each stage of new development. Yet sometimes there were only tears of rage!

Cathy’s Split Object Transferences

Cathy had been identified with me, seeing me as her own potential ideal self.  She projected a fantasy ideal object (a symbiotic object) onto me, even as her conscious self was experienced as defective, as a failure, or as generally inadequate. Cathy’s internal Ideal object was attached to her inadequate self structure. When the other side of the split emerged in Cathy, she began to perceive me as a critical bad object mother. This transference dynamic called for interpretation. For Cathy, her perception of me as a critical mother felt like a break in the preoedipal idealizing transference, or in Heinz Kohut’s terms, as an “empathic failure.” I did not, however, interpret in such terms, although I did acknowledge an injurious comment I had made. My focus with Cathy was the internal object experience that connected with her sense of injury, rather than on myself as an external object. Together with Cathy I focused on Cathy’s capacity to grieve, following her overt expression of her rage to me as her transference mother. This allowed Cathy to move beyond anger to forgiveness. She also moved into the depressive-position achievement of concern for others, and towards a sense of mutuality in relationship. Her beginning capacity to perceive the subjectivity of the other facilitated her grieving process, as she mourned the loss of others that she had felt addictively attached to.

Cathy’s Family Dynamics

Cathy began to remember her family as one in which all the members were blocked in their capacity to love, due to their compulsion to hold on to rage in the form of retaliatory revenge. All her family members lacked an awareness of their own revenge fantasies. Her family members rationalized their coldness towards one another with the conviction that forgiveness was a weakness rather than a strength.  Such rationalization allowed them to hold onto their bad objects through enacted dramas of contempt and retaliatory hostility, which they imposed on those family members upon whom they projected their bad objects. Cathy described the “burgess” factor in her family, using a Yiddish term for a grudge. She

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claimed she had a “burgess” against me for having said something that she never would forgive. The offending comment reminded her of her mother’s insults.

The Transference Rage

Due to her “burgess” Cathy left her treatment with me at one point. She didn’t return for a period of time. In fact, she went to see a male therapist. However, she found that the male therapist neither understood her creativity, nor did he understand the significance of her crying, which had become a mournful crying of true separation and loss. She and I both understood. So, Cathy left her male therapist and returned to see me. She then told me that the male therapist interpreted both her creativity and her crying as resistance. Cathy quickly resented his attitude, and she began to yearn to come back to me.

When she came back, she revealed the reason for her departure, which up until then she had kept secret. According to Cathy she had harbored a grievance, a grudge, a millstone of a burgess.  As she told me what I did, I waited and listened. She told me she would never forgive me. I waited and listened.  She told me about the burgess of her mother and grandmother. Ultimately, as she forgave me, she felt the grief and relief of letting go, and the comfort of the reparation and healing between us. She had been able to articulate, more fully than ever before, the nature of her resentment, as well as the shame induced by the perceived insult, which had stirred her into a state of retaliation. The seed of the burgess turned out to be that I had made some careless comment about her being easy with men.

Cathy did not want to be judged. Yet she continually judged herself.  In judging me she changed the pattern. She felt powerful anger. In giving up her anger and her harsh judgment, Cathy set herself free.  She had never experienced such a process of forgiveness leading to freedom before.

Mourning and Healing

As both of us returned to our work with each other, we both felt the pain of the loss that Cathy had to grieve to forgive. It was the loss of the old family, the old patterns, the attachment to her mother that Cathy was compelled to mourn.  She mourned the loss of the mother with whom she allied against her father, who had left them both when he demanded a divorce. As Cathy relinquished these old object constellations through grieving, she emerged, coming out of her symbiotic cocoon, and entering the world of new and real current relationships in her life. Cathy could see both of us in a different way with this progress. Even more striking, however, was her development of concern, compassion, and of a love that also required limits and boundaries.

As Cathy began to feel compassion for herself, she began to take care of herself better. She began to set the boundaries that she needed, and not only with men. As she began to care for herself by setting boundaries, Cathy could feel love and acceptance for those in her family who had hurt her, due to their limited psychological growth. She began to accept these family members more (including her father).  She became less compelled to look towards them for her emotional needs, and for a response to her dependent longings that they could never respond to. Nevertheless, she began to be able to accept realistic help from her family. She became gracious in her receptivity, rather than feeling the resentment that she had always carried around with her in the past, since she had never been offered apologies or reparations for past injuries. Cathy’s growing “capacity for concern” (Winnicott 1958, 1965), promoted by her grieving of guilt, and by her surrender to both rage and need, allowed her a new and stronger voice. She began to express a voice of love that could never be fully extinguished by an internal and diabolical self-hating voice. As Cathy entered Melanie Klein’s depressive position, Cathy also entered Winnicott’s stage of mature dependence.  She could now love the other for him or herself, rather than as

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a part object projection that had been based on an incorporated early parent experience, and its psychic fantasy formation.

Cathy has become increasingly kind to others as she was able to better understand the subjective feelings of others. This has helped her to be more kind to herself. She is much more reflective and less impulsive and is thus less self-sabotaging.

From Pre-Oedipal Transference to a View of the External Object

Prior to this critical transitional stage mourning, and object relations work, Cathy recounted to me another tragic saga in which she played the part of a man’s victim. At what seemed like a critical moment in her description, I asked if she ever thought about what the man was experiencing. My question seemed to shock Cathy! She appeared to be coming out of a trance, as she exclaimed in a startled manner, “I didn’t think about what I’m doing them. I only think about what they’re doing to me!” At this stage in treatment Cathy was not operating from a depressive position stage of mind, so she could not sense a dialectic between her own experience and that of the other. She was, at this point, still unable to own her aggression. Generally, she would turn her aggression against herself, becoming the victim of the aggression of others. Another way of describing her state of mind, at this stage, is in terms of reference to transference dynamics. Cathy could then be seen to have existed in a psychic cocoon (Modell, 1976) of a narcissistic transference, with its mirroring and idealizing aspects (Kohut, 1971). This explains why my question about the man’s point of view seemed like a pin puncturing a balloon (or cocoon). This balloon-cocoon transference and self state was always existing during the first several years of her treatment (at least through the fourth year), as Cathy reconnected her saga about men to me.

In addition, Cathy’s narcissistic transference involved her idealization of me as an all-wise mother, an archetypical goddess of wisdom, one who would have every answer. This fantasy was partly formed in reaction to the mother that she never had. However, it also seemed to contain a more realistic characteristic of her mother’s presumed all-knowing attitude, one which I may have also played into.

In terms of the narcissistic transference, the mother and self of the internal world had never been fully differentiated. Cathy saw me in the beginning years as a strong, capable, fearless and self-reliant feminist. This was the kind of female ideal and stereotype that she believed she herself could never be. I was her ideal self, a self she would possess by possessing me through her enchanting story telling. As she offered me her seductive dramas, she wished to entice me into a fascination with her, despite the agony she was suffering, as she cried and spoke.

Cathy’s narcissistic seduction was intimately related to her fantasy of merging with me as her external idealized self. From a developmental perspective I was serving as a transitional ideal object, which could be internalized by Cathy, and then could become a symbolic ego ideal for Cathy’s internal psychic structure. The process was facilitating her future developmental strivings. The idealized transference allowed Cathy to avoid experiencing me as the sadistic counterpart to her internal persecutory object (or Fairbairn’s antilibidinal ego). Cathy then projected the internal persecutor onto the men in her life, who became her demon-lovers. For the most part, earlier in treatment, Cathy did not experience me as the external representative of her internal critical and contemptuous mother, nor as the negative mother of the separation period, from when the primal developmental arrest trauma occurred.

When Cathy’s idealization of me met with disillusionment, Cathy would begin to perceive me as her split-off internal world abandoning mother, or she might perceive me as the hostile contemptuous mother of her teenage years, as in when she had an extreme reaction to interpreting a comment of mine as a “burgess” level insult to her. However, this disillusionment tended to occur in tolerable doses.

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Cathy experienced disillusionment in gradual, tolerable doses, resembling the titrated frustrations provided by Winnicott’s “good-enough” mother. Such disillusionment facilitates the transitional stage described by Winnicott. This developmental phase closely parallels Mahler’s (1975) process of separation-individuation, which follows the earlier period of maternal symbiosis, or “dual unity.”

Experiencing me as her bad object allowed Cathy to grieve the loss of her fantasy mother goddess.  She could grieve the loss of the infant symbiotic mother, who she experienced as a psychic fantasy godmother of eternal wisdom. At one point she had projected this fantasy mother onto me in the transference.  With gradual disillusionment Cathy became prepared for the mourning of the mother loss and grief, which was continually triggered by her “love addict” type of relationships with men.

Homoerotic Transference

Another aspect of Cathy’s transference was the homoerotic transference, in which I was a woman with whom Cathy was falling in love. As Cathy fell in love with me, she became fearful that she would be seen by me as a lesbian. Her erotic desires for men, which were contained in the story-telling ritual of her analytic sessions, started to spill over into desires for me.

This story telling ritual could also be compared to the “chimney sweeping” storytelling of Freud’s Anna O. (Freud, 1885, Kavaler-Adler 1991, 1996/2014). Corresponding to Cathy’s infatuation with me, one of Cathy’s dreams depicted her father turning into her mother, illustrating the transference involved in her new homoerotic desire. In contrast to her dreams, however, where Cathy’s love was indirectly expressed, Cathy consciously expressed her erotic desires for me by wanting to be like me in every way (Bollas, 1992).

Cathy had continuous fantasies about me at this time, around the fourth year of her treatment.  She perpetually compared herself to me in her mind. Cathy envisioned me as being able to calmly and self-sufficiently handle everything that she could not handle, especially in relation to men. She imagined me to be cool, controlled, and able to set boundaries. She imagined me as able to assert my needs and desires with men. When she was “weak,” according to her own evaluation, she saw herself as turning misty and melting into a man. Cathy viewed this as her submission to the man’s control, not as a conscious surrender. She imagined me, in contrast, to be totally in command. In one dream, in which Cathy turned me into a black woman, she associated her image of me in the dream with black women at her job, whom she viewed, in contrast to herself, as tough and self-reliant. Within an idealizing transference, with homoerotic longings, she saw me as being all that she wished to become. On an unconscious level Cathy’s homosexual desires bonded her to me as an idealized mother figure, a muse mother, who would inspire her entire destiny towards identity.

This was the same pattern of a woman’s eroticized ideal transference with a female analyst that can be seen in my case of June in my book on Mourning, Spirituality, and Psychic Change: A New Object Relations View of Psychoanalysis (Kavaler-Adler, 2003). In the case of June, the homoerotic desires developed from being idealizing fantasies and eroticized transference feelings, to becoming explicit whole object sexual desires for me in the transference. The transference evolved as June mourned, separated from her internal mother, and psychologically integrated split-off parts of herself.

An idealized transference can never be seen as merely narcissistic in nature.  It always involves instinctual levels of erotic and incestuous desire. Nevertheless, Cathy’s idealization of me, and her psychic use of me as powerful extension of herself, can be seen in terms of her developmental search for an ego-ideal, one which needed to be based on another woman, a woman whom she considered mature and wise.  Unlike June (who I treated many years later), she did not state explicit sexual fantasies about

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me.  She followed the line of Bollas’s thinking (1992), e.g. that wishes to be exactly like one’s same gender analyst was often the expression of unconscious homoerotic transference desire in heterosexual

Foreground and Background Transferences

One way of clarifying these transference dimensions might be to view the idealized transference as a foreground of narcissistic (self-object) transference, while viewing the more object related transference dimensions, related to erotic and aggressive impulses, as background transferences. However, the foreground and background perspective of the transferences can also be experienced in reverse. Frank Lachman (1989) viewed this as an overlap of narcissistic and object related transferences in this psychic spatial manner. Such a theory seems to be derived from D. W. Winnicott’s (1984) notions of the overlap between the infant’s needs for two mothers simultaneously: the simultaneously: the “environmental mother” and the “object mother.” If the object mother remains at first in the background, and the environmental mother is in the foreground, the transference may be primarily idealizing.  For Winnicott, however, the environmental mother is an actual presence, as in the “absent presence,” or the “present absence,” which allows the other (baby or patient) to be safe enough to grow into her/his “true self.”  Perhaps the environmental mother even inspires the other in addition to providing safety, and thus can be the powerful muse, one not necessarily prompting instinctual discharge, as the erotic object transference mother, or father, does. There is transference dynamics related to the need for this environmental mother.  The child within the therapy patient (or analysand) is allowed a sense of “going-on-being” by being with a mother-therapist, who, to a “good-enough” extent, does not intrude on the patient’s psychic space with her own separate needs.

Cathy’s original preoedipal transference can be seen as a combination of split narcissistic transferences, and bad-object transferences. Part object transferences contain dyadic constellations of idealized self and object, as well as bad self and object dyadic constellations. The triadic constellations of psychic structure form through the self-integration and separation-individuation process, to emerge at the oedipal stage.  Separation mourning, and its working through, allows the triadic transference to evolve, as it did in Cathy. As Cathy relived the toddler stage of separation-individuation, she displayed practicing stage and rapprochement stage dynamics. Although she was an erotic woman, her sharing of her separate life, in which she brought tales of her encounters with men to me, could be compared to a two-year-old in the practicing period, bringing spiders from the garden to show mommy. The drama, however, was of course, much more gripping and sensational, and had oedipal erotic dimensions that a practicing stage toddler does not evidence.

When Cathy was ready to experience me as an oedipal stage mother, I became more differentiated in her mind, particularly more differentiated from a male father figure. Her triadic oedipal state constellations represented me as a mother who might potentially be in competition with her. Of course, as such transference dynamics arose in parallel with a triadic internal structure, then id, ego, and superego components of psychic structure could be seen to emerge through representations in the transference.

Another way of perceiving the developing psychic structure would be in terms of Fairbairn’s (1952) object relations model. From such a perspective, we can see libidinal ego and antilibidinal ego split-off parts, which were renamed dependent and antidependent selves by Jeffrey Seinfeld (1991).

Through the conscious integration of the split-off separation-individuation stage trauma experience, which leads into a fuller developmental mourning process, the dependent and antidependent self-parts gradually become a whole self structure, which has subjectivity, rather than just reactivity. However, we also have to account for the id and superego dynamics related to drives, which go beyond the self

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forming from part object parents in the internal world. Klein’s theory acknowledges the id and superego components that Fairbairn’s theory does not.

Oedipal Transference

By her fifth year of treatment Cathy began to be extremely sensitive to any instances when she didn’t experience me as supportive. At these times she feared I was feeling competitive towards her. Cathy’s fears were first expressed as thoughts that I was critical of her. She didn’t acknowledge any potential competition because she resisted any awareness of her competitive impulses towards me. She was terribly “shy” about showing me the more attractive and feminine parts of her, which I assumed she feared would threaten me, and would stir up my fantasized (unconscious).

One incident highlights this shyness and its avoidance of conscious knowledge of me as an oedipal level mother. One evening when she had an engagement directly following the analytic session, she came to her session wearing her nightclub dancing clothes, clothes that she had never exposed to me before. She looked extremely attractive; she had make-up on, and her hair was done.

She wore fitted dress slacks and a knit fitted top, with high heels. These clothes showed off the fine curves of her petite figure. Instead of being radiant as she showed herself off at her best, she was shy, avoidant, and squeamish. It was clear that she felt quite a bit anxious about revealing herself to me in this manner. In fact, in her embarrassment she even returned to some of her former hysterical giggles.  Yet Cathy evidenced more than embarrassment and/or shame. I believe her anxiety reflected oedipal guilt about the success of revealing herself as a beautiful woman in front of her oedipal level transference mother. I believe that she was quite frightened that I would become the competitive mother of her fourteenth year, a stage in her development when her mother played out her own oedipal competition in a hostile manner towards Cathy.

Cathy’s unconscious fantasies about this phenomenon emerged indirectly, as Cathy spoke about female friends.  They also manifested when Cathy said to me during one session, “If you have to tell me about how great you are, how am I ever going to feel good about myself, and be able to compete?”  She was responding to some countertransference acting out on my part, in which I told her about some achievement of my own. At that moment, Cathy seemed to experience me as the mother of her fourteenth year. She was no longer the victim, however. Now Cathy asserted herself, demonstrating her own competitive impulses to knock me down, or at least to get me out of the way. I believe that Cathy’s ability to assert herself at this time had become a possibility through the object relations work we had done within her abandonment depression mourning process, in which she faced her deepest fears of mother loss. Cathy proved herself capable of owning her own aggressive impulses at this time, and she expected me to do the same!

James Masterson (1981) has spoken of a contracted oedipal period for the preoedipal character. I believe such a description fits Cathy, particularly in relation to the critical character transformation, which evolved within the separation-individuation phase of development, as this developmental stage was re-experienced through treatment. Even though this development carried Cathy forward into ambivalence and psychic conflict, allowing her to enter triadic relations, Cathy would still focus on her positive and tender feelings towards female friends. Then, when these friends were critical of her, Cathy felt hurt, and even betrayed. Sometimes she was devastated. She never seemed to see these attacks coming, and she never saw them in the context of the other woman’s whole personality. The attacks always came as a shock, since she had idealized her women friends as always supportive mother-figures. In fact, the criticism of these same friends made Cathy feel attacked, and at the mercy of a “bad” mother. The friend’s realistic competitive impulses were not identified by her.  She didn’t perceive the envy of the

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women. Therefore, Cathy would suddenly feel like a victim of a woman who she experienced as mean. Her own role in stirring up her friend’s competitive feelings was not within her awareness. As Cathy became increasingly capable of experiencing her own aggression, however, she became a more three-dimensional person. Not only grief, but aggression is part of developmental mourning, following consciousness of primal object loss.

As Cathy became increasingly capable of experiencing her own aggression she began to bloom into a three-dimensional person. Also, with new phases of mourning within the depressive position, in which Cathy could increasingly tolerate feeling the depressive pain of both loss and oedipal modes of guilt.  Soon Cathy was able to hear questions and interpretations from me about oedipal dynamics that she could not have heard before. I suggested to Cathy that she tended to choose female friends who were critical of her, particularly when they commented on her relationship with men. I also suggested to her that these women may be critical due to envy and competitive strivings.

Gradually, Cathy could perceive this pattern within her own life. In her last year of treatment Cathy was able to pinpoint, on her own, the sabotage of a supposedly envious female friend. She could even begin to experience her own impulses to compete with such women, and to defy their envious attacks.

In one dream of this later period, Cathy saw a man, whom she was attracted to, with another woman.  Rather than her old tendency to immediately feel inferior, she responded, in the dream, with a contemptuous thought that the woman was merely a sex object, rather than a real love object for this desired man. Now, in a new mental attitude of triumph, she viewed herself as the loyal lover, one whom a man could truly want. When the man in the dream turned away from the rival woman Cathy felt triumphant. Given these unconscious dynamics, Cathy’s enraged insistence that women be supportive figures can be seen as, in part, a defense against her own competitive strivings, and the aggression involved in these strivings.

Despite her wish for female support, Cathy had continued to choose girlfriends who put her down whenever she shared her experiences with men. They might be supportive to her in other ways, but when Cathy looked for empathy in relation to her dealings with men these female friends harshly commented that she deserved exactly what she was getting from these men. The unempathic judgments recapitulated the contemptuous comments of her mother from her teen years, when the mother was dating again after her divorce, and was competitive with Cathy. Cathy’s subjective experience with these women was still dominated by the unconscious connection to her internal world mother.  Cathy was very wounded by the unconscious envy and competition of the women she chose as friends, who expressed disgust for Cathy’s compulsions to cling to men. They would mock Cathy’s love addict tendencies, which reflected Cathy’s unconscious longing to go back and cling to an aloof and detached mother. Cathy would cling to seductive and abandoning men, and then, going back for “one last sip,” never realizing until later in her treatment that her clinging to men was her clinging to her seductive and rejecting mother/father. Her unconscious motives for seeking her female friends’ opinions stemmed back to her mother as well, for they would all seduce her into their victimization by offering advice and commentary on her escapades with men. The women acted superior, showing contempt, as her mother had, for Cathy’s positive and tender feelings and experiences with men.

Each time these women were critical of Cathy, she would feel extremely hurt. She would feel betrayed. Still splitting, but now at a higher level, in relation to triadic oedipal dynamics, her friends’ criticism made her feel at the mercy of a bad mother. The friends’ realistic competitive impulses were not identified by her. Cathy felt like a victim of mean women. It took time for her to consider how she might be stirring up her friends’ competitive feelings, in terms of how she presented her tales of men.

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However, as Cathy became capable of owning her own aggression, and as she became a more three-dimensional person through the mourning of her primal mother loss, she finally heard my interpretations about her tendencies to pick friends who were critical and competitive in relation to men.

Last Year of Treatment Change in Consciousness of Oedipal Dynamics

Gradually Cathy saw this pattern in her life. In the last year of treatment, she was able to pinpoint the sabotage of a supposedly envious female friend. The friend was a co-worker who knew the male co-worker with whom Cathy had engaged in several romantic encounters. After a particularly erotic episode with this man, Cathy found out through another friend that this male co-worker had gone out on a blind date about a week later. Instead of only being angry at the man and blaming him, as she would have done previously, Cathy now realized that the woman involved in the triangle had played a significant role in the man’s rejection of her. She was giving up the defensive alliance with her mother that she had formed in relation to her father, and which had been internalized. Cathy reported to me, after doing all her own thinking upon this matter that she had taken the initiative to tell the man involved about the sabotaging role of “the other woman.” She was able to come to this conclusion because she had discovered that her female confidant had offered her male friend the blind date. Cathy’s new understanding of a woman’s behavior helped her to empathize with the man for the first time, rather than to turn the man into the “demon-lover” villain. In fact, she told me that she could acknowledge to herself that if the situation were reversed, and she had been offered the blind date, she would have accepted it, just as the man did. This incident illustrates that a whole preoedipal psychic constellation had changed within her, as she proved she could now empathize with, and identify with, the man, while also confronting the aggression of her female friend. With interpretation she could now perceive that she was in a triangle with rivaling triadic oedipal relations.

Althea Horner (1991) has written about the triad in the preoedipal patient, and of how it differs from the triangle of the oedipal level character patient. Through a combination of interpretation and a developmental mourning affect and object relations process, Cathy emerged out of such a triad, which had emphasized the overall prominence of a dyadic relationship, rather than a triangulated relationship with three gender differentiated figures.  Cathy had always seen herself as a victim, especially when she was compelled to identify with her “victim” mother.  Therefore, in her mind, the man had always been the persecutor. Other women then had been the confidants who she looked to for rescue, overlooking all their realistic characteristics, including their competitive features.  All this changed for Cathy as she moved through the mourning process from her separation years, journeying beyond the primary dyad with its split villain and victim part object figures, to that of the full whole object triangle of the oedipal stage.

Developmental Growth into a Healthy Capacity for “Love-Creativity Dialectic”

There are many lenses through which Cathy’s developmental growth can be described. Melanie Klein’s phenomenological theory helps us to view the full psychic transformation, in which growth towards capacities in both love and creativity emerge. Klein provides a view of the psyche in which love and creativity can be seen to originate in the same internal world motivational source and consequently can be seen to be blocked in the same way. With Klein’s view of the depressive position, in which one comes to feel differentiated object-related yearnings, concerns, and modes of compassion; we move deeper into the self-integrating grief and healing process, which engenders psychic space, and psychic structures. This leads to the channeling and flow of both creativity and love. A balance between creativity, in terms of internal object relations and love, and in terms of external object relations, is increasingly attained through the self-integration process. This comes with a depressive position mode of

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mourning. This is the mourning of loss that is often accompanied by guilt as well as rage, and which is related to specific others that represent the primal parental objects upon whom we were first dependent, and with whom we remain so profoundly attached in our unconscious psychic fantasy.

The narcissistic “mystique,” which can accompany psychic incest, especially in a case such as Cathy’s where the father was both seductive and abandoning, creates internal objects in the form of images and mirrors that serve a defensive purpose. I have referred to these part object images and mirrors, with a narcissistic defense function as “image objects” (Kavaler-Adler, 1996/2014). These image objects are used psychologically to ward off, and to counteract, the anguish and grief related to early trauma. With developmental mourning, however, such defensive image objects begin to transform into full and whole objects, which have three-dimensional aspects of interpersonal relatedness. Once such whole objects are formed there is an internal world process that can evolve into both interpersonal love relations, and into creative process. In Melanie Klein’s view of love capacity, and creative capacity, both emerging from primal internal good object relations – potential intimacy and potential creative self-expression – evolve from the same psychic structure source. The energy source is also the same – that of primary love between the core self and the core parental objects, which fuel psychic experience through psychic fantasy. The energetic impulses within psychic fantasy formations become a fuel for interpersonal love relations, and for creative process relations. These fantasies can often be psychoanalytically traced back to the earliest infant times, within our unconscious minds.

If early loss promotes a premature psychic separation between mother and child, the evolving internal process, which fuels both love and creativity is blocked. However, once the critical primal loss, and its later manifestations, are consciously experienced through the developmental affect process, dialectics between love and creativity can be opened up. Then spontaneous associations, spontaneous play (Winnicott, 1974), and resulting interactions, can be used as part of one’s subjective life for both external love relations, and for creative process relations.

Meaning Creativity Versus Novelty Creativity

According to Melanie Klein’s theory, as we increase our capacity to love we increase our resources for creativity. This occurs because creative resources come from connections between internal objects, and between core self dynamics and internal objects, whatever form these internal relations manifest within psychic fantasy. These internal dialectics of subjective self, and psychologically penetrating objects, create energy, and associative links, within our preconscious mind (Kubie, 1958), and within our unconscious mind. In other words, object relations capacity, based on an internal world of sustained and subjectively felt connection, develops the potential for what I would call “meaning creativity,” following Stark’s use of that term in 1968. In my observations from several decades of leading writing and creative process groups, meaning creativity grows organically because of its connection with deep affect life within the primary self core (Winnicott’s “true self”). Stark (1968) has contrasted “meaning creativity” with “novelty creativity.” My view of novelty creativity is that it operates separately from internal affect life, and from internal object relations. Novelty creativity is by and large a cognitive phenomenon. Novelty creativity can operate in a split-off intellectual state, split-off or dissociated from the profound affect links of the internal world object relations life.

Althea Horner (1990, 1991) has pointed out how intellect and motility can become split-off from object relations within the internal world of psychic structure, and from external world object relations, due to developmental trauma, particularly during the critical stages of separation-individuation (Mahler, 1975).  Consequently, split-off intellect and split-off motility, can become dissociated, and then take autonomous developmental directions. This can be seen to operate in a disconnected manner from the

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perspective of the subject. This autonomous and dissociated process I would put under the category of novelty creativity, as opposed to meaning creativity. When intellect and motility are split-off in this manner, schizoid character dynamics can develop, which can manifest in full narcissistic and schizoid personalities. An intellect, running on its own autonomous route, can spew out novelty creativity on a continuous, and often on a compulsive, basis. Such intellect can perpetually be disconnected from the affect life of the central conscious self, without ever connecting such creative expression with it or with unconscious areas of object relations life. Thus, little or no psychic meaning is delivered through the creative act, although productivity may be overwhelmingly prolific. The subjectivity of the self is bypassed, and little self-integration occurs through the act of creative work. The work is consequently experienced more as a production than as a process.

I would speculate that it is only through Melanie Klein’s form of depressive position mourning process that we can open up the interior life necessary for meaning creativity, as opposed to novelty creativity.  This type of mourning consists of mourning regrets related to our own hostile aggression sabotaging object relations, as in grief experience promoted by concern for hurting the ones one loves. I have written about this extensively in detailed cases in my book, The Anatomy of Regret: From Death instinct to Reparation and Symbolization in Vivid Case Studies (Kavaler-Adler, 2013).

Within the mourning of regrets is the yearning to repair one’s relations with the other. This inspires both communication as well as the actual work to express the communication and can evolve into a “meaning creativity” process. Loss of the other through one’s self-sabotage is also a primary aspect of the mourning, as well as loss of the loving capacity of the self. Depressive position mourning involves developmental mourning (Klein, 1940; Kavaler-Adler, 1992, 1993/2013, 1996/2014, 2003a, 2003b), as well as the encounter with object loss, and with real abandonment experience, which stems back to the past primal other who had been incorporated within the psyche as an undigested, and un-symbolized, dynamic internal object (Fairbairn’s “bad objects,” from actual experience with the primal mother and primal parents). The “meaning creativity,” which evolves from the conscious mourning of both losses and regrets, can touch people on a profound emotional level. Consequently, such “developmental mourning” permits the growth of love connections with the external interpersonal world (Kavaler-Adler, 2003b).

Gorkin (1984), in a paper on “Narcissism and Pathological Mourning,” touches on some of these distinctions. Gorkin indicates that although certain kinds of development continue when early separation mourning is incomplete. Then the psychological development that does continue has the split-off schizoid aspect of the narcissistic character’s intellect.

My own interpretation of novelty creativity and meaning creativity comes from my view of psychopathology and psychic development as conceived within object relations theory, with a particular emphasis on the rich theories of Melanie Klein. I believe that they operate in a dissociated fashion, in relation to the affect and object connections of the internal self. Such individuals rarely experience blocking in creativity. Writers and artists, who have the profound early trauma of narcissistic character formation may produce much work, but such work then suffers from the lack of emotional and relational authenticity. Sometimes the work of such an artist can be little more than an externalization of a self state, which can merely expose the solipsistic dimensions of the artist’s mind. Kernberg (1975) has commented that although narcissistic characters are often preoccupied with creativity, they generally manifest shallow forms of creativity, despite high intellectual and creative potential.

I have observed that many such narcissists, whether artists or not, can wear the “mystique” of creativity as a badge (Kavaler-Adler, 1996/2014). The prolific performance of the narcissist, who suffers from

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deficits in sustained authenticity, as well as from sustained relatedness, suggests a lack of affect connection with internal object relations. Thus, the creativity lacks self-made interpretations of subjective experience. This can result in a paucity of psychic meaning within the context of creative work, for those with the developmental arrest of the narcissistic character, despite prolific productivity.

Narcissistic characters, such as the British poet Edith Sitwell, are often talented performance artists, whose genius expresses itself most fully when standing before a live audience, as opposed to on a sheet of paper or on a canvas (Kavaler-Adler, 1993/2013). This explicitly provides the instantaneous mirroring that external audiences can provide to prop up the developmentally arrested self of a narcissist. The audience mirroring can inflate the bubble of the false grandiose self. Narcissistic artists may create shallow figures in whatever artistic form they inhabit. As authors, creative writers tend to produce flat, rather than three-dimensional characters in their literary work, as in the case of Edith Sitwell, or Oscar Wilde. They can be quite witty and intellectually astute but may not have the blueprint of whole object three-dimensional representational figures within their internal worlds that are necessary to allow for the creation of three-dimensional whole object characters in their creative work. Such artists may therefore produce caricatures or cartoon-like figures, as in the early poetry of Edith Sitwell, rather than characters capable of genuine dialogue.

Dialogue, by definition, consists of reciprocal emotional responses, stemming from an intrapsychic dialectic. Such emotional responses from within the internal world are also needed for “love-creativity dialectic” so that artists can have love and intimacy in external relationships, and have sustained relationships, as well, within their creative work (Kavaler-Adler, 1996/2014).

The issue of flat versus full characters in creative work may be a concern of the artist and of the writer.  After first publishing The Compulsion to Create book (Kavaler-Adler, 1993/2013), I received a letter from a young woman, who was experimenting with writing plays. She thanked me for some insights she had gained while reading my work. One insight, she mentioned, was related to the nature of her plays, and to their shortcomings. She said she came to realize that her male characters were not three- dimensional human forms but instead emerged from within her internal world as part objects. She sent me two copies of rejection letters. These letters cited the failure of her male characters to come alive. She shared with me that when she read my book, she discovered that unresolved psychological issues relating to her father were responsible for the part-object limitations of her male characters. Asking to enter psychotherapeutic treatment, this woman began to face the formerly unconscious feelings towards her father, who she had felt to be a shadowy, and gravely depressed, figure haunting her internal world.  As she and I worked together in her therapy process, we also discovered, as is often the case that the “flat” father was used defensively to disguise the more malignant demon-lover mother figure.

Cathy’s Working Through of the Depressive Position: Changes in Psychic Structure

In the first four years of Cathy’s psychotherapy, Cathy attended her sessions two and three times a week.  Following this, financial difficulties interfered and made more limited treatment necessary. During Cathy’s ten years of object relations treatment, in which only six years were ongoing intensive, and consistent work, Cathy’s character changed dramatically, as did her life. In describing these changes, I will employ Melanie Klein’s dimensions of the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions.

Daniel Stern’s RIGs

When Cathy first entered treatment, she had appeared to be a predominantly reactive being. She did not then have self-agency, because all her engagements with others were reenactments of unresolved and split-off self and other constellations. One description of these self and other psychic constellations is

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that of primary imprints from infancy, as in the RIGs (Representations of Interactions that have been Generalized) proposed by Daniel Stern (1985) in his descriptions of mother-infant interrelating.

Daniel Stern attempts to describe the nature of mother-infant bonding without theorizing about the derivation of its dynamics. With the use of Ronald Fairbairn’s theories, however, I can speculate on the psychodynamics. I can speculate on the developmental dynamics in terms of separation-individuation deficits. Thus, self-development comes into view through infantile RIGs made dominant in Cathy’s whole life experience.

Stern (1985) speaks of RIGs as the psychic structures that develop when internalization of mother-infant relations occurs. According to Stern, the internalized RIG is a synthetic conglomerate of varying modes of mother-infant interaction that overlap across a central matrix of frequency. However, perhaps more important than frequency in determining the level of internalization, the degree to which the psychic imprint takes its place in the internal world, is related to intensity. Focusing on intensity brings up the

psychological issue of instinctual impulses, as opposed to mere affect. Stern suggests that the internalized RIG is a composite of many overlapping modes of interaction. What happens, however, to interactions that are strongly impacted by instinctual needs, whether conceptualized as drives for gratification or for object attachments? Further, what happens when interactions are strongly impacted by trauma? Stern does not deal with these issues, as far as I know. Perhaps the case of Cathy allows us to speculate where Daniel Stern does not venture to tread.

Stern’s RIGs and Transformations of Psychic Structure

When entering treatment, I believed that Cathy’s psyche was dominated by two RIGs. The first RIG was the father-daughter RIG, in which Cathy was reaching after the tantalizing man who would always end up pulling away from her, as in a dream of the man turning into Jello, disappearing when Cathy reached out to touch him. The second RIG was the mother-daughter RIG, related to the internal mother, who had frequently been severely critical of Cathy. It appears that these two negative RIGs; negative in terms of painful affect, and in terms of the destruction of object connection, and they were in the foreground, at first, while the background RIGs were initially projected within the transference. One background RIG was the father-daughter RIG, in which that of the re-lived father experience was that of the nurturing father, the one who cared for Cathy when she was sick or in need. The other background RIG was the mother-daughter RIG of an all-wise mother, who was perpetually offering advice to a distressed and needy child. These background RIGs were part of both the idealizing and positive transference dynamics in Cathy’s treatment.

Formulating these RIGs allows us to specify psychic structure that took shape through real preoedipal experience, as Fairbairn sought to do. By speaking of distinct RIGs, however, we are not limited by Fairbairn’s generalized, and amalgamated, psychic schema; in which mother and father can blend into the exciting and rejecting objects in the internal world, combining to form an overall antilibidinal ego structure (made up of all the “internal saboteur” experiences that are incorporated).

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Why were the negative constellations in the foreground within Cathy’s expression of her internal world, while also being split-off from self-control and self-agency? Why did these negative constellations only later come into the transference? Perhaps because Cathy was capable of forming narcissistic alliances with each of her parents at one time or another. Therefore, she unconsciously wished to preserve these alliances with me, when I became her transferential parent. This would reflect Cathy’s need to protect and support herself in the face of the enactment of her negative RIGs, which had gotten played out in her external life.

Why did the positive constellation of RIGs persist in the foreground as transference experience, while forming modes of identification in the background? Since Cathy had a split between her good and bad objects, she protected herself with idealizing transference and positive transference, as well as with narcissistic identifications. Such identifications were experienced between us as projective identifications that held her unconsciously captive in a cocoon fantasy or holding environment illusion (Modell, 1976). Still in the psychic cocoon (Modell, 1976), Cathy often appeared naïve in her relations with others. However, she would then be blasted into a shocked consciousness of others through bad object, or negative RIG, experiences. This was the consequence of the primary splitting, where polarized enactments of idealized and bad object experience (uncomfortable, but intense and addictive) was always being re-lived. Therefore, only when Cathy could understand the genetic and developmental origins of her internal bad object constellation could she sustain a conscious awareness of it.  Cathy faced it with my support, as the constellations manifested as various demon-lover figures in the external world. Only in this way could Cathy re-own the split-off aggression and eroticism that was originally put into these demon-lover figures (both fantasies and real people that were compounded by her projections). Then she could form her own separate sense of agency for self-assertion, interpersonal relations, and creativity.

Levels of Internalization: Loewald and Klein

According to Loewald (1973), we have varying levels of internalization. Loewald speaks of identification and internalizations. The latter are integrated symbolic representations. The identifications are more in the nature of incorporations. I have thought of this as relating to in-depth levels of internalization that are at our self core, which I would call integrated, or assimilated internalizations.  Such assimilated internalizations can be compared to Wilford Bion’s “alpha” elements, which are symbolized assimilations of psychically digested incorporations, called by Bion “beta” elements (Bion, 1963). Those superficial levels of internalizations, which are often more manifest, I would call conglomerate “incorporations,” those appearing much more gross and primitive than integrated internalizations that can appear in symbolic, differentiated, and representational form. These gross incorporations are far less refined and neutralized. Therefore, they are much less integrated into the central organic self than are assimilated or digested internalizations, which have been refined into symbolic level introjects. These incorporations, which are much more manifest in their effects on behavior, are more figuratively called internal objects. When Edith Jacobson (1954), Margaret Mahler (1975), Sandler & Joffe (1969) and Sandler (1987) have written about introjects, they have neglected to address this whole area of preoedipal incorporations that exist as gross objects in the psyche, and which enact a profound drama in cases of preoedipal trauma. Ronald Fairbairn (1952) and Thomas Ogden (1986) have attempted to grapple with the conceptualization of these neglected modes of internalization, the more manifest and yet split-off and dissociated internal objects. Ogden resolves the puzzle of a dynamic internal object, which is subjectively felt as a bad object or demon. He speaks of object representations that get powerfully attached to split-off visceral self components. The object images take on the organic energy and affects of the split-off self-parts (including instinctual energies).

Of course, Melanie Klein has also written about internal objects, but not from the position of internalization but from understanding of innate origin to the psychic fantasies that bring these internal objects to our attention, as opposed to mere discharge drive phenomena. If we view D. W. Winnicott’s theory of Klein’s phenomenology, however, bypassing the metapsychology of the “death instinct” and substituting a developmental metapsychology of symbolization (see Kavaler-Adler, 2014) – we can arrive at a clinical theory of internalization, as an extension of Klein’s thinking (Kavaler-Adler, 2014).  Also, the seeds of conceptualization, concerning internalization, are found in Klein’s (1957) theory of

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gratitude, first expressed “Envy and Gratitude.” Building on Klein, I would say that the moment of expressing gratitude is open to both giving and receiving. Interpersonal and intrapsychic dialectical capacities both flower at moments of heart-felt gratitude, where the loving core of object connection is felt consciously. Further I would add, with connection to the other forming through the giving and receiving of love, psychic transformations from external relations to internal internalizations can take place. I am referring here to Klein’s internal whole object relations as part of an internal, but open, world. I am not referring to Ronald Fairbairn’s sealed-off internal world of bad part-object relations.

Speculations on Development and Psychic Structure in the Case of Cathy

In order to view the increments of psychological growth that occurred through Cathy’s treatment, we need to see how Cathy was at first dominated by split-off incorporations, which acted like out-of-control internal objects. These internal objects are comparable to Ronald Fairbairn’s split-off victimized libidinal ego, and to his split-off sadistic antilibidinal ego, also referred to as an internal saboteur. The libidinal ego clings to its sadistic torturer, within a closed system. Consequently, the internal self does not develop through external relations. We can translate this arrested development into the language of Donald Stern’s RIGs (1985).

Stern’s RIGs serve as composites of internal object and self experience from the earliest time of infancy.   Drawing on his work, I believe that when infant and mother relations are obstructed by trauma, and/or intrapsychic conflict, a free flow of emotional and psychic energy takes on the rhythm and intensity of compulsion. This compulsion can become sado-masochistic addiction. In Fairbairn’s view such intensity might be seen as the frustration of a drive towards object connection or attachment (Bowlby, 1969, 1980).

Fairbairn and Stern interact as theorists of real object experience internalization. Yet it is through Fairbairn’s eyes that we can best view the notion of trauma. I have hypothesized that Cathy’s primal trauma first occurred during the critical phases of separation-individuation (particularly during rapprochement), with a recapitulation of intense sensitivity from that earlier era. This then dramatically impacted Cathy during her adolescence.  Her primal internal object constellations, or RIGs would have become infused with the affect (and drive) of longing to cling to a primal mother. I propose that Cathy had suffered intolerable frustrations in her basic need to have the primal other as a containing love object, which created dissociations in self and whole object experience. Repression only emerged later in treatment, when an internal psychic container was developing. Therefore, repression was secondary in its effect on the personality forming to that of dissociation, enacted through Kleinian modes of splitting and projective identification. Since Fairbairn speaks of object attachment as being more dominant in the early preoedipal psyche than instinct gratification, his theory clarifies Cathy’s character pathology as an outgrowth of frustrations in this primal need for an object to form psychic structure.

Yet the instinctual power of Cathy’s love addict mode of object clinging can be understood from Winnicott’s perspective as well. When Fairbairn proposes a drive towards an object, as opposed to a mere desire or need to connect, he helps us to understand the instinctual power that is mixed in with a primal object motivation in babies. Such power exerts considerable internal pressure to cling to the primal other, for both security, and drive gratification. However, from an object relations perspective, there are also primal cravings for multiple levels of connection, which also evolve developmentally to more mature levels of differentiated sexual desire, creative and spiritual desire, as well as desire for intimate relatedness and mutuality.

In Michael Balint’s terms, Cathy can be seen as having been traumatically frustrated in her primal need for an object. Balint spoke of “primary love” (1979), rather than Freud’s “primary narcissism.”  The

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passionate craving (at first at an oral level) for Primary Love induces psycho-physical clinging. Later in life, such early infant and toddler clinging can be transformed into the adult symptom of obsessional thinking and compulsive action. From Winnicott’s perspective Cathy’s parents’ limitations in being able to recognize Cathy as a unique and true self separate from them play a profound part in Cathy’s early trauma. In Fairbairn’s terms, Cathy was not sufficiently loved for herself. Therefore, as she sought emotional nurturance, she was forced to eat the “poison pie” (Fairbairn, 1952) of her parents’ pathology.  Cathy’s self and other constellations were found to be replications of her parents’ modes of relating or resisting relating. Her parents’ character pathology became a major part of Cathy’s primary incorporations. I say incorporations, rather than internalizations, because pathological modes of resisting healthy relating could not be psychologically digested into symbolic internalizations, by Cathy. Cathy therefore formed RIGs (Stern, 1985) that reflected the undigested parent personas, creating bad objects.  When viewed in instinctual terms of excitement, as in Fairbairn’s “exciting object,” the hunger for a real emotional contact and connection with a parent becomes converted, and perverted, into an insatiable craving for an unavailable exciting object. Consequently, internal demon-lovers can re-traumatize us continually in our fantasy. Thus, Cathy is only shielded from self-annihilation by unrefined narcissistic transferences, such as Heinz Kohut’s mirroring, twinship, and idealizing phenomenon (Kohut, 1971, 1977).

When Cathy came into treatment, she was compulsively reenacting her intense internal object RIGs in interpersonal relations. To try and control these out-of-control intensities, which can be felt as “beastlike” drives (Mitchell, 1988), she employed splitting. Within treatment Cathy’s transference, composed of positive and idealized RIGs, was projected onto me as her analyst, and was acted out through projective identification. I felt this, as her analyst, in terms of pressures exerted upon me to be and become her goddess-mother ideal.  Outside of treatment Cathy experienced her bad internal object RIGs in external relations, primarily with men.

With further development to the oedipal stage Cathy’s bad objects were projected onto women, but they were then more than parent objects. Cathy’s psychic RIG of an abandoning father was enacted with men repeatedly. Cathy’s RIG of a critical and hostile mother was played out with women but was only truly recognized by her in women during her oedipal phase.

Only as Cathy allowed her severely frustrated primary-object needs to enter the treatment room, could she navigate through the difficult stages of a primal mourning process. She had to fall in love with the analyst to begin to internalize the good object. Also, Cathy needed the good object to tolerate the grief of mourning. Through her mourning, Cathy began to integrate the split-off internal objects (the disparate RIGs) into a self core, expanding that which Fairbairn would refer to as a healthy central ego area. Cathy then could develop an internal area of self-agency, from which she could experience all the intrapsychic and interpersonal dynamics that she needed to, to become a whole and independent person. Gradually she became a person with an alive interpersonal world, in which the subjectivity and psychic locus of the other could be perceived for the first time, and could also be empathized with. This involved the experience of her own subjectivity through the affect states of mourning. The symbolized subjectivity, based on affect, could provide a container for Cathy to tolerate her internal self-experience.

Envy and Gratitude

I distinctly remember when Cathy burst out declaring, in the middle of a session, “I can’t stand how you sit there so calmly, like you have it all together, like you’re in this state of peace, while I’m writhing all over the place in agony. I feel like a mess, and you seem so serene.  It makes me hate you!”

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While Cathy openly confessed her envy toward me in this manner I thought of how she had formerly been unable to experience her envy as a subjective experience. Prior to the critical abandonment mourning of her re-lived separation-individuation phase, Cathy had always experienced me unconsciously as an object of envy. This envy was experienced by Cathy through displacements onto others, those women who acted like mother figures. Cathy’s primal oral envy (the kind addressed by Melanie Klein and Otto Kernberg, 1975) was a conglomeration of self and internal other experience.  She had been holding within her the mother of her youth. This mother had disowned her own envy.  In fact, she acted it out against Cathy, since it was unconscious. She attacked Cathy with insults, and projected negative and disowned aspects of herself onto Cathy. Cathy’s primal incorporation of this critical, attacking, and contemptuous mother was Cathy’s experience of envy. In Cathy’s subjective experience, envy had always been something that was assaulting her from the outside. However, once the mother’s mode of envy was internalized, Cathy experienced it through introjective identifications with mother displacements, or through women who unconsciously were experienced as mother figures in her mind.

Because of Cathy’s internal RIG of the contemptuous mother and victim child, she may have unconsciously played a significant role in prompting the envious attacks of female friends. Cathy’s friends did not just appear like her mother to Cathy, with metaphorical perspective of one psychologically separated. Cathy actually perceived her friends as frustrating as her mother.

I would explain such interpersonal dynamics in two ways. The first explanation is that Cathy did, in fact, get drawn towards women like her mother, because she had an internal psychic imprint that matched such figures. Her internal self and other RIG structure was compulsively driven by un-mourned trauma, which had its own psychodynamic intensity. Cathy reenacted a compulsion to repeat that which was still split-off and then dissociated from conscious assimilation. The repetition was also an attempt to hold onto her mother, and to control her. In addition, the repetition with these women friends also carried the hope of reparation with her primal mother. Within the repetition was the hope of resolving destructive relations into a constructive relationship, one which could fulfill Cathy’s yearnings for sustained connection, as well as for a good-enough other to make her feel less lonely, and more full and complete. The second explanation for Cathy always finding female friends whose comments became envious and contemptuous attacks in her mind is that Cathy’s projective-identification processes triggered the hostile mother response in female friends, who were already ripe for such aggression.

The women would have to be susceptible to this inducement. In other words, they would need to possess a contemptuous part of themselves like that of Cathy’s real mother. In this sense, the two explanations of Cathy’s experience of the envy of other women interact. Furthermore, because at the early phases of treatment, Cathy did not have an adequate self-core to contain her own intense impulses, she would not have experienced her own envy as her own. She would have experienced envy only as residing within the other.

There will always be a debate over to what extent aggression is instinctual, as opposed to reactive, with identifications having formed through the original aggressors. However, with mourning and separation, the subjective experience of aggression will naturally change from being experienced as coming from the object to being experienced as coming from the self. This change transpires as abandonment mourning resolves serious gaps in self-development.

In an article called “Nightmares and Object Relations Theory” (Kavaler-Adler, 1987), I refer to two cases in which a clear transition is made from the subjective experience of aggression as coming from the other outside, to the subjective experience of feeling the aggression, in its hostile form, as emanating

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from an internal-self locus. Two patients that I describe in that paper had similar arrests in separation-individuation to that of Cathy. Yet as they mourned through the abandonment depression from a traumatic separation era, they began to describe dreams differently than they had described the same dreams prior to their mourning process evolution. First dreaming these dreams, both women associated monster-like figures in their dreams with their mothers. However, two years later in treatment, these patients spontaneously recalled their earlier dreams. They brought up these earlier dreams, without any prompting. Then they emphatically declared that the monsters were not, in fact, their mothers. They both spontaneously declared that the monsters were now seen by them as themselves. They declared that the monster figures were their own monster-like desires, their own subjectively experienced insatiable hunger.

What had earlier been thought of as a monster mother, who had been fantasized to have all the riches of life inside of her, was now experienced differently, as they had developed a new sense of a subjective self.  Now they experienced the monsters in their dreams as their own insatiable hunger monsters.

This mode of developmental change, culminating in depressive position ownership of aggression, is seen here in the case of Cathy as well. In fact, Cathy became conscious of her envy without me interpreting it, as she navigated through her developmental mourning and separation process in her therapy sessions, feeling much grief as well as anger. Prior to that she had only felt envy as an external assault from other women. In Melanie Klein’s 1957 paper on “Envy and Gratitude,” she brought in the clinically necessary formulation of aggression by defining it in terms of intrapsychic impulses from a dynamic unconscious. Klein also adds the relational dynamics of viewing aggression as an interpersonal dynamic of envy. This interpersonal focus on aggression, starting with envy experienced within dyadic relations, and then becoming jealousy within triadic relations, is a conceptualization that is quite helpful in defining Cathy’s growth. Consequently, by focusing on Cathy’s movement from split-off destructive envy to that of a quite personal, subjective, and even an assertive experience of envy, we can see an encapsulated view of developmental growth – with its resolution of psychic deficits, and its articulation of psychic conflicts on a conscious level.

The psychic dimension of envy versus gratitude that Melanie Klein examines in her 1957 paper on “Envy and Gratitude” has particular relevance for Cathy. As Cathy reached the point at which she experienced her subjective sense of envy as located within herself, she also moved toward the point in her psychic development when she became capable of gratitude. In Kleinian terms, gratitude is a simple manifestation of a complex internal phenomena, which has to do with the growth of loving capacity, and with the capacities for internalization at a core self level. As mentioned, internalizations at this level are not split-off incorporations, but are integrated internalizations, as sadness and love affects are consciously felt, allowing for self-reflection with a new psychic tranquility found within. The affects of grief that mix love and sadness can provide a containing atmosphere within the subjective self area of the psyche. This allows for the processing of their free associations, related to cognitive images of self and others. With such assimilation, based on symbolic containment of new self and other constellations (RIGs), new psychic structure continues to evolve within an ever-integrating self.

With such an evolving process Cathy could begin to build intellectual, creative and interpersonal skills that formerly had been disrupted by internal reenactments. Her internal life began to blossom, allowing for new and expanded nodes of psychic fantasy, which Cathy then could employs in her various modes of creative writing. Cathy’s impulses and affects became increasingly organized through internalized self and other relations. The psychic fantasies related to such impulses and affects provided psychic containment.

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As Cathy consciously owned her envy, along with facing the many levels of her losses, Cathy could sustain ever deepening connections within her interpersonal life, as well as in the internal life that engendered her creativity. As her inrapsychic and interpersonal perspectives evolved into an organic dialectic, so did her capacities for love and creativity.  She increasingly demonstrated her growing facility for love-creativity dialectic (Kavaler-Adler, 1996/2014).  Cathy became increasingly free of compulsive clinging reactions, which had formerly disrupted such dialectic.

Through mourning of primal object loss due to separation-individuation trauma, Cathy moved through the developmental separation-individuation process, and she began to own all her split-off parts, particularly her aggression. Thus, self-integration proceeded along with her separation process. Cathy’s superior intellect emerged. Her intellect had formerly been hidden as she chased after elusive men and chased after the mystique that they promised to endow her with. Rather than continuing to split-off her intellectual capacities and seeing them only in projections on to the female analyst, her intellect, as well as her aggression, became integrated within her conscious self. Progressively, Cathy began to work at jobs that allowed her to not only use her intellect, but which also allowed her to express her creativity in both interpersonal and intellectual areas. Also, she developed more positive relationships with women and gradually began to date more emotionally available men. However, she also found a community of writers. As she developed her own creative resources, and found sources of recognition for these resources, she became less compelled to hold onto men, when things went wrong, or when their ultimate inability to commit became apparent.

Gratitude

With such change, and with the gratification that Cathy found in such change, Cathy became aware that she was grateful to me. She expressed her gratitude in various ways. Along the way Cathy’s resistance to expressing heartfelt gratitude, when she truly felt it, had been discussed, just as her resistances to feeling grief and loss had been discussed. As Cathy became aware of her own aggression, she became quite capable of responding to interpretations of psychic defense and resistance. She became aware through this that although she had reparative wishes, which contained tender feelings, her tender feelings were sometimes the source of her anxiety. She became aware that resisting the expression of gratitude was one manifestation of this. At times, when Cathy did experience her tenderness, and could express gratitude, she giggled as she had in the past. She might cut off this expression altogether, or she might only mention gratitude as she was halfway out the door at the end of a session. Then she would literally bolt out the door. My attention to Cathy’s anxiety concerning her “loving feelings for me” made Cathy aware of her embarrassment, and of the underlying shame that she harbored in relation to all intimate feelings.

Whereas formerly Cathy’s shame had related to her sense of inadequacy, it now related to her embarrassment about exposing to me the exhibition of her love, and to the latent erotic desire that possibly lay behind this love. I became aware that even though Cathy had rational reasons to be grateful to me, because of all the positive changes in her life, there was also a natural developmental dynamic at work, one first lightly foreshadowed by Klein in “Envy and Gratitude” (1957). Cathy grew from the ability to own aggression in the form of envy, to the ability to feel, and to ultimately express gratitude, regardless of what the concrete changes were occurring within her life. Another way of conceptualizing this transition would be in terms of negative transference (following the initial idealizing transference), inevitably leading to positive transference (see Ellman, 1991, on “Freud’s Technique Papers”).

We can also formulate this dynamic in terms of the analyst “surviving” a patient’s aggression, without abandonment or retaliation (Winnicott, 174). Such object survival on the part of the analyst provides a

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safe enough environment for the organic emergence of both mourning and loving tenderness (see Kavaler-Adler, 1993). As long as an organic need exists within the patient to connect to another, there will be an organic need to mourn, since the individual is always faced with disappointments and losses in relation to any other who is looked for connection. The need to mourn then gradually resolves itself, into an active desire to express gratitude towards an external other, who is felt to be a source for both love and reparation.

As Cathy became increasingly free to express her gratitude to me, she simultaneously developed ways of expressing her gratitude within the realm of her creative work. She developed her abilities as a writer by being able to mourn independently within her creative work. She then wrote a novel in which she created a psychotherapist who was modeled after me. Within her book Cathy described how I had helped her transform her life by helping her to cure her love addiction. She also showed, in this book, her gradual opening to subjective self experience at a deeper level. In fact, Cathy began to experience the aliveness of her internal world, opening up her creative writing as her internal life opened. Due to the deep grieving of the mourning process Cathy was able to feel her subjectivity as a deep interiority within her own being. This allowed her to sense the deep interior location of motivation in others.

Cathy’s Creativity

Consequently, Cathy developed her unique creative process, not having to become trapped in a “creative mystique” (Kavaler-Adler, 1996), after having been formerly trapped in a male mystique. Resolving her internal mother-father demon allowed her not only to free herself of a compulsion to seek a grandiose extension of herself in men, but also from a compulsion to seek such a mystique in the image of her creativity, or in a contrived image of being an “artist.” Consequently, Cathy could allow her creative work to come to her organically. She no longer needed to use it as a manic narcissistic defense of expulsion, which would block the mourning of grief, guilt, shame, and loss. Cathy became able to see the realistic dimensions of her strengths and her weaknesses. She could see her talent without omnipotent dimensions. Ultimately, she became astute at negotiating with the world at large in a realistic manner. Cathy was then able to write two novels with an editor, and in addition to publish a memoir, as well as to produce one of her dramatic plays.  She also appeared on stage, within her own play.

Furthermore, Cathy did not give up her interpersonal life to seclude herself in her internal world creativity, as many well-known women artists and writers, some of whom I have written about, have done (Kavaler-Adler, 1993/2013, 1996/2014). Cathy was not captured by a compulsive drive to produce more and more. Thus, she distinguishes herself from brilliant women writers and artists who have secluded themselves from the world, e.g., Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Edith Sitwell, and Camille Claudel, who, later in life, only lived for their creativity.  Within the creative work itself, Cathy’s alter-ego heroines spoke of her developmental growth through mourning.  One of these characters expressed gratitude openly to her psychotherapist, in a similar manner to how Cathy had shown such gratitude to me.

Cathy’s Depressive Position Psychic Achievements

by those who can move into Klein’s depressive-position state of mind.  He also states, however, that the paranoid-schizoid position state of mind is never fully relinquished, nor left behind. According to Ogden, as one becomes more integrated, moving increasingly into the depressive position, a free-flowing dialectic takes shape. There are psychic movements back and forth, between the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions.  I would concur with Ogden, related to all my clinical experience.

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We never totally leave the state of mind in which we split our objects, an early child position of thinking in black and white terms about love versus hate, as opposed to processing and tolerating ambivalence.

Nevertheless, the character structure of those perpetually inhabiting the paranoid-schizoid position state of mind can change with treatment. With an active capacity to grieve, and to process guilt and loss we become less likely to experience the world in terms of self-states of bliss versus self-states of annihilation terror. In the paranoid-schizoid position, as soon as one feels anger one wants to get rid of the object imagined to be the source of that anger, because the role of psychic fantasy in causing the anger is not comprehended. To get rid of the offending object, one spoils the image of it with varying degrees of hostile devaluation. The entire Object becomes coated with aversive affect, which creates the belief that the object is entirely “bad” in one’s mind. However, once someone psychologically journeys to the more solid place of self-integration, where the depressive position is fully faced, one has become a very different kind of personality, although subject to regressions. This new personality tolerates much psychic conflict, and develops a capacity to mourn, which can become a life-long habit for self-growth.

Cathy did go through such a transformation. She became a totally different personality from that which she had been. I would like to describe her changes in somewhat different terms than previously.

Psychic Transformation: Growth in Love and Creativity

In more traditional Kleinian terms, Cathy became able to love and hate the same object. Thus, she was thrown into all the depressive position struggles related to conflicts about forgiveness, guilt, and differentiating modes of love. She became increasingly capable of feeling angry at me, and at others; while still valuing me and all I had done for her. She became increasingly capable of expressing her anger, and of getting past it. She could express anger and still retain the relationship with the person she was angry with.  She could renew love and gratitude, rather than turning anger into hate, and into the total spoiling of the object. As I mentioned, Cathy did leave her treatment out of anger, and when she returned she said that I had said something unforgivable to her. Despite this declaration, she became able to accept my apology. Cathy also became able to express through tears and words the acute pain of her hurt from my comment, and from how she interpreted my comment.  This allowed her to also mourn the grief of self loss, along with that of object loss. Her capacity to feel, and to process her feeling into communication, unlike her family’s acting out retaliatory “burgess” revenge, behaviorally and perpetually, allowed Cathy to continue, and to sustain her psychotherapeutic work with me. She was then not compelled to destroy all the work we had accomplished together. Through her experience with me in her therapy, and in her more in-depth psychoanalysis with me, she became capable of sustaining all relationships – even though she felt hate as well as love within these relationships. Nevertheless, Cathy could also leave a relationship if she consciously chose to. Simultaneously Cathy became able to sustain her work as a teacher, which she did for a living, as well as to continue ongoing work as a writer.  Also, Cathy’s ability to sustain a loving relationship with me allowed her to internalize all the ups and downs of the creative process.  Having increasingly solid internal object relations allowed Cathy to build the psychic structure she needed to process her mourning, and to therefore sustain the creative process that comes from the working through of such mourning. In contrast to her whole prior history of distrusting her creative talents, and of dropping projects, when she entered the depressive position, she was able to follow through on her writing. She developed a whole book and then wrote another one.  Cathy also became capable of sustaining the interior work of the creative process.  She learned, not only to write and revise, but also to critique, use editorial feedback, and to do many revisions to tighten and sharpen her creative expression.

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Gradually Cathy learned to wed herself to the genre of writing that she pursued.  She learned to develop her own self-expression, without the kind of displays of giggling (with underlying rage) that she had resorted to in childhood, as when her father would be very critical because she needed help from him with her school work in math In fact, when I said something that penetrated Cathy deeply, related to the advisability of her accepting the part of her that still wished to grovel to men, she began to think about using her writing to express her urges to grovel and beg. After a session in which we discussed Cathy’s compulsion to grovel, Cathy wrote a letter to me, expressing her gratitude:

I just want to thank you for our session yesterday.  It was very helpful.  My yearnings to call Tom have gone all the way down. I definitely feel more in control and centered. Sometimes it scares me to think what may have happened if I hadn’t met you. I am adding a groveling scene to my novel and therefore have to change a lot of things around in other chapters. But in the long run it is for the best novel-wise.  It’s more of a real New York woman’s story now.  And I couldn’t believe it, but it did feel good to write about my female heroine’s groveling. I guess I get so into her as a character that it almost feels as if I am doing the groveling, which gets it out of my system.

A Love Addict’s Groveling Compulsion Within Creativity

Both Cathy and I thought of her writing about her groveling compulsions. Such complaints could be more aptly described as her clinging impulses, caused by both powerful instinctual needs to have an Object, and by powerful retaliatory impulses that demanded an aggressive control over her object.

As the above quote shows, when I suggested to Cathy that she might write about her impulse to grovel Cathy immediately got excited. She proceeded to pursue the very challenging work of rewriting whole parts of her book, to round out the portrait she was creating.

Cathy didn’t become enraged by the necessity to revise. She didn’t even complain. She opened up to the excitement of the creative challenge, never shrinking from the strenuous work. She was very receptive to feedback about her creative work, as she had been sexually receptive in the past, when anticipating a state of bliss. But now, by contrast, Cathy was anticipating the very real hard work of re-writing, the very real work of adding, cutting, shaping and integrating the creative work.  It was her new state of psychic integration, which allowed her to do. She was opening to the excitement of real dialectical interaction between herself and her work. Similarly, Cathy could now open to the excitement of relationships with friends and lovers, while still being discriminating. As with her writing, in her relationships she also edited her involvement. She was able now to realistically care for herself.

Cathy’s Depressive Position Psychic Growth

It is interesting to look at Cathy’s psychic growth through some conceptual measures of developmental achievement that Thomas Ogden has created as an extension of Melanie Klein’s depressive position theory. One particularly significant measure is that of those entering the depressive position becoming “interpreting subjects.” By the term “interpreting subject,” Ogden (1986) means that a person becoming capable of separating from his own experience enough to reflect upon that experience is also capable of understanding that she/he is constantly interpreting her/his own experience. Thus, she/he understands that the subjectivity of the experience is continually molded by his own interpretations (also interactive with psychic fantasies of course). In other words, only when the person is in the psyche state of the depressive position, which involves the capacity to mourn, does the individual realize that she/he is constantly creating meanings, rather than just perceiving what is, and then just reacting to it. By contrast, a borderline patient (or anyone with developmental arrest trauma) might claim that if the therapist is late

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to see him that the therapist hates him and also loves the patient who was still in the therapist’s office, while the patient was waiting. Ogden (1986) offers examples of the borderline black-and-white paranoid-schizoid position thinking. Only someone who is an “interpreting subject” (not borderline) can realize that a belief that you love or hate someone because of some incident of external behavior, is an interpretation made out of wish to take personal meanings form external happens. Once somebody is aware that she/he is having associations to an external event, and is creating interpretive meanings from those associations, that individual is no longer experiencing the world in a reactive borderline manner, or in a manner symptomatic of Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position. The “interpreting subject” is no longer just a victim having things done to her/him. She becomes an active agent, who is initiating and playing a part in all interactions, through the means she creates herself within her cognitive process. She also comes to see that her feelings and reactions continuously color her cognitive process, when choosing certain associations and interpretations, rather than others. Once in a depressive position, no perception is just a perception. All perceptions are loaded with interpretive meanings that extend beyond cognition to affect. Perception also extends beyond internal self and other constellations that are fixed in associations with specific affects. Perception extends beyond the drama that has been reenacted during subjective experience, taking into account now the process of, as well as the content of, self-made interpretations.

Cathy as “Interpreting Subject”

Cathy underwent a very clear transition from a reactive being of the paranoid-schizoid position to becoming an interpreting subject of the depressive position. She increasingly could question her perceptions and reactions and could reflect on different possibilities that might motivate the other, who currently became the object of her attention and evaluation.

“It’s so confusing.” This related to how Cathy could not understand how her father could have been both a demon and a victim, someone complex, who had both sides. At this time Cathy was struggling to put two alternate explanations together to explain someone else’s motivation. Due to developmental changes in her psychic structure Cathy was no longer able to jump to her old standard conclusion that men were out to use her. She had been “forced” to see others, as well as herself, from varying perspectives, not only through the perspective of her original “RIG” imprint and psychic structure. She could now entertain different possibilities for explaining the motivation of others.

Cathy resisted this widening perception by becoming confused.  She experienced her new perspective as aversive at first. Life was becoming more complicated. To entertain two possibilities for explaining another’s motivation, rather than just one, meant to Cathy that she had been making inadequate choices all along. She had formerly made choices automatically and reflexively, thus relieving herself of an active interpretive role that she now was becoming conscious of playing. However, that former mode of reflexive and reactive activity had also left her feeling like a victim, one who could not take into consideration the complexity of human motivation, whether located within the other or within herself.  As she began to relate to two alternate points of view, Cathy began to see that she had overlooked all the difficulties of the men in her life, who existed separately from her. She also began to see that these difficulties might relate to how these men acted towards her, whereas formerly she had considered their behavior pure diabolical sadism; a view stemming from her old belief that her mother had been a total victim in relation to her father.

Ideas, motivations, everything, could be put together in different ways now. This required that Cathy think and reflect more before acting. She became increasingly aware of the process by which she turned her own subjective associations into interpretations about life, and about human motivation.  She now

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became capable of more self-reflection, which became a new habit. Gradually, Cathy’s new mode of self-reflection also became less aversive and less of a burden. She became aware of winning the developmental achievement of owning her own subjective experience.

Before Cathy’s developmental mourning, she had not been able to have a separate perspective from that of her mother’s stereotypical views. Formerly, she had little observing ego perspective from which to see her own experience as subjective and idiosyncratic. Growing cognitive or ego capacities came to interact with her growth as an “interpreting subject.” Increasingly, Cathy became capable of questioning her own interpretations of life. She saw that the conclusions she jumped to, particularly concerning the motivations of others, and regarding her own inadequacy, were influenced by her experience. This experience had been incorporated, not psychologically digested. However, with the developmental mourning and self-integration process in treatment, images and fantasies, induced by early experience, had been imposed on Cathy’s internal representations through associative links, which could now, for the first time, be accessed through “five associations.”

With her new and more complex mode of thinking, Cathy became much more capable of communicating with others, who had their own separate, and subjective, perspectives. Also, within her creative work, she shaped characters that had perspectives differing from her own, or perspectives different than an alter-ego character. Unlike the narcissistic poet, Edith Sitwell (Kavaler-Adler, 1993/2013), Cathy could write dialogues between her characters and could thus write a novel. Also, as Cathy became increasingly aware of the internal dialectic within her that produced interpretations, and thus subjective meanings, through which perceptual reality could be filtered, she became capable of taking in psychoanalytic interpretations in her treatment. Once achieving the psychic capacities of an “interpreting subject,” she could truly become an “analysand,” an analytic patient who could both free associate and interpret, along with me. She came to own and interpret her own associations, as well as her own subjective experience.

Ogden’s Historical Subject

Another depressive position characteristic of growth is that described by Thomas Ogden (1986) as becoming a historical subject. In the paranoid-schizoid position state of mind, time does not have the dimensions it does in the depressive position. Cause and effect do not exist in the mind of the paranoid-schizoid character, particularly in terms of her/his own behavior. People in the paranoid-schizoid position can impulsively drop anyone they feel angry at. They leave relationships abruptly, and prematurely, because anger immediately turns into hate. Hate then immediately turned into the spoiling, devaluing, and demeaning of the other, leaving the other bereft of any value. When those in the paranoid-schizoid position drop “the other,” they may throw away a whole part of life that has formed around this other person. Future plans with that other are all forgotten. The process of getting to know the other, and of becoming known by the other, and of creating life and work with the other, is immediately canceled out. This is extremely frustrating for anyone dealing with such a person.

A therapist working with such a person, lacking in historical subjectivity, may wait for a patient to appear following an extremely profound session, only to find that the patient fails to appear, and has “forgotten” the session. In fact, narcissistic, borderline, and schizoid patents may be more apt to “forget” you, or to cancel sessions, when they get close to you than when they hate you.  It may only be after the direct expression of hatred that the person can sustain the memory of the connection with the psychotherapist (as opposed to Bion’s “attacks on linking’), since dissociative defenses are surrendered, when one’s hate is no longer feared. Sustaining connection after hate opens possibilities for tenderness, love, and historical recall. Whether they drop the other due to hate, which may cause them to fear abuse

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and abandonment, or due to love, which causes them to fear engulfment; they cancel out other people and any relationship to other people. They start their lives over again, as if from point zero. They deny the passage of time and are shocked by all the mishaps in their reality resulting from this.

If we view the cognition of narcissistic, borderline, and schizoid characters (the preoedipally arrested) to be affected by deficit due to trauma – not just by psychic conflict – we might conclude that each person just ceases to exist in their psychic reality. Then, when stuck in the psychic twilight zone of the paranoid-schizoid position (in oppose going back and forth), the preoedipal character moves from person to person, always expecting that each new beginning with a new person will give them what they want. Consequently, the anticipated new life is all they focus on. They live a life reminiscent of Harry Guntrip’s (1969) “in and out solution.” Such people do not want to be reminded of the past. They may get very angry if they are reminded of the past by a therapist. They don’t want to see a pattern in their behavior. They want to live in the moment. They want to continually contemplate a bright future, one which they imagine having with their new person. They continue to naively predict their future in this way, even when, time after time, their interpretation of reality has led to disaster; and even when they are repeating all the same behaviors in this new relationship, which led to disaster in each old relationship.

However, when such a person goes through the mourning and self-integration process of the depressive position, integrating split good and bad images of the other, and integrating love and hate for one person, they begin to develop a sense of time. They then begin to perceive patterns in their behavior, an in the behavior of others. They then can see themselves as having a history that has led up to present circumstances in the manner of cause and effect. How did this happen in the case of Cathy?

Cathy as Historical Subject

At first Cathy seemed more in the habit of being dropped by another than of dropping the other. However, from an intrapsychic perspective these modes of behavior are just two opposite sides of the same coin.  In the unconscious we all operate as opposites. Those who act like “clingers” in their outside behavior have “distancers” within them, and vice versa. This makes sense from an interpersonal perspective, as well as from an intrapsychic perspective, in that a child who is faced with a distancing mother will cling, and a child faced with a clinging mother will distance. Both sides of the interaction will be internalized. The interaction will be carried on intrapsychically, with one side being identified with, and the other being played out with the other who takes on the transaction of the original parent.  In the case of Cathy, the patient (analysand) consistently played out the role of the clinging child, while her boyfriends play out the role of the distancing and abandoning father (also resonating back to the emotionally abandoning mother). When Cathy once again started out a relationship with a new man, she would have amnesia for that had just happened before with the former men. She canceled out a sense of time and did not sustain a history. However, this was only true within the beginning years of treatment.  She began mourning in her psychotherapeutic treatment. She began to learn from experience. She began to reflect on sequences of repeated behavior problems that were self-sabotaging.

I propose that Cathy’s varying degrees of being an historical subject were relative to one another. When Cathy originally came into treatment, one of her relationships seemed to follow quickly upon another.  Also, all her brief and tortured relationships with men seemed rather stereotypically alike. After one relationship ended, Cathy did seem to enter the next one with a kind of forgetfulness. With each new man Cathy expected true love. She never looked back to see the pattern of events that had led to her last disappointment.

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However, as Cathy began to be able to consciously experience her rage, she began to remember what happened to her in her past relationships. She stopped forgetting. She began to desire to understand her behavior, and her unconscious motivations. She showed increasing interest in understanding her repeated patterns, and enactments, so that she could avoid future self-sabotage. She began to have a history and wanted history. She became an “historical subject” and even wrote a memoir about herself. With all this Cathy demonstrated a developing interest in learning from her own experience.  She then sought to learn from psychoanalytic interpretations related to psychic conflict, psychic fantasy, and interpersonal matters. In this way Cathy came to value the memory of her own behavior, to avoid indiscriminate repetition of that behavior in her now apprehended future.

Conclusion

Becoming an interpreting subject, and an historical subject, is also the route to becoming someone capable of psychic dialectic, and thus of the love-creativity dialectic (Kavaler-Adler, 1996/2014). Through the processing of grief and loss within what I have described as a developmental mourning process, split-off internal object relations can gradually become integrated into a more cohesive and reflective self. The case of Cathy illustrates how such mourning can transform love addiction and demon-lover attachments into greater self-agency, whole-object relatedness, and the capacity for both intimate love and meaningful creativity. Her treatment demonstrates the cognitive, affective, and personality dimensions of change that can emerge when developmental mourning opens the psyche to interpretation, historical awareness, and psychic integration.

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