Case Response II

On my first reading of Alice’s story, I felt nauseous, horrified, furious and terribly sad for this young woman and for the split-off feminine aspects her analyst has encountered, welcomed and helped safely contain. It constellated within me yet another level of confrontation with my own complexes related to the wounds of childhood trauma and informed by the intensity of affect I felt in reading Alice’s story. I also believe my feelings to be a response to a collective conscious attitude of bias and discrimination against the feminine that continues to negatively affect women, girls and the feminine principle in boys and men. Nevertheless, to respond to this invitation by the Self to another “level of confrontation”, I had to admit an avoidance, a facet of a defence apparent early last year when I first streamed the movie Women Talking: I had watched the beginning and couldn’t continue as the violation, abuse and poisonous silence inflicted on the girls and women had evoked those initial affects with which I introduced this commentary. However, because of my commitment to write a commentary, because of Alice’s experience of the film and, finally, because of my previous emotional response to it, I watched Women Talking in full. Jung explains in Dream Analysis that theatre is a kind of “psychotherapeutic institute where complexes are staged” and that movies, which are less restricted than theatre, produce “amazing symbols to show the collective unconscious” (McGuire, 1984, p. 12). Alice would agree: “This is my story,” she weeps with her analyst after watching Women Talking on Christmas Eve, a momentous date for the Christian community. After years of Alice and her dissociated little-girl-selves “talking” in and through the analytic relationship, Alice, herself, heretofore detached from and impassively reporting on Lindy or RP or CareTaker Girl’s drawings, begins to feel the “realness” of hers and her little girls’ emotional and physical trauma. Although archetypal images and energies of the masculine and feminine principles provide an impersonal, analytic lens through which to envision an objective perspective of a process, the personal experiences of the particularly negative aspects of these dynamics have deeply wounded our analysands and infected their relationships to S/self and other. Alice’s early childhood abuses by a brutal and malignant familial and religious masculine is a familiar replication in the relationships with her former husband and “explosive” boyfriend, suggesting the unconscious defences, projections and autonomous psychic effects of her personal trauma. And the negative feminine, as described by the abandonment, neglect, jealousy and emotional “incontinence” of the maternal legacy, has overpowered the elementary, positive character of the feminine principle—hanging her at the scene of the crime. The overwhelming objective and subjective realities of Alice’s story of horrific, cumulative trauma and its system of dissociative defence call to mind the work of Don Kalsched. Don’s facilitation of a case colloquium with eight of us in our last two years in training 17 years ago was grounded in a love for Soul and a theoretical and clinical focus on the analysands’ experience of trauma and its effect in the analytic relationship. His perspectives of the inner world of trauma, and relating to that trauma and to what he describes as the psyche’s self-care system, have been invaluable: Early relational trauma results from the fact that we are often given more to experience in this life than we can bear to experience consciously ... but it is especially acute in early childhood where, because of the immaturity of the psyche and/or brain, we are ill-equipped to metabolize the whole of our experience .... [Consequently,] ... a life-saving split occurs that we call dissociation. Dissociation ... prevents annihilation of the unit self, substituting multiplicity and an archetypal story that implicitly holds the parts together. The unbearable affect is distributed to different parts of the psyche/soma. (Kalsched, 2013, pp. 10–11) Ironically, he explains, the dissociative defences save a vital core of the self while simultaneously splitting off the animation and vitality that characterize ensouled living. Dissociation as a life-saving split and Alice’s little girls’ suffering with this is a painfully challenging paradox. I can imagine Alice’s analyst as consciously tending to and holding a safe space as he patiently engages in the consulting room with “RP’s rogue excesses and search for love,” or compassionately reads from The Velveteen Rabbit in those 2.30 am awakenings to “be with” and help assuage the terror of the three-year-old sobbing Lindy. The story of an abandoned, stuffed velveteen rabbit, whose tears initiate the transformation from being unreal to real, suggests not only the receptive, feminine container Alice’s analyst has provided for Lindy’s tears but resonates with Alice’s reflective journal entry of questioning the therapeutic process and the “realness” of herself and her analyst. When met in the analytic relationship with the experience of trauma—with incomplete stories, cloudy memories, explicit dreams; with the affect constellated by complexes encountered with others or depicted in movies that grip us, novels that move or provoke us—we can oftentimes recognize characteristics of the inner Protector/Persecutor dyad Kalsched (1996) discusses that dissociate us from the intense and unbearable feelings of vulnerability experienced in childhood. Archetypal in this system’s relationship to the Self and amplified in the stories of fairy tale and religious and cultural myths, the affiliation of its psychic energy of defence with repressed emotional trauma is judiciously enacted by the complexes of the personal unconscious. Early on this defence serves the survival for the core self and acts as a protector but in time becomes a persecutor wielding a finely polished blade akin to Bluebeard’s or threatening with the black, malevolent winds of Tornado Man, both sadistic aspects of the psyche’s dark shadow elements exposed by trauma. “Do not go there,” it warns, when a male analysand reveals a fantasy he has as he waits in his car before coming into our session (after experiencing vulnerable emotions the previous session): He imagines grabbing his (licenced) gun from his glove compartment, walking in, sitting down and then slamming the gun down (which he accentuates by slamming his hand) on the table next to his chair in my office and emphatically stating with a gaze of ice—Do not go there! Thankfully, a split-off, creatively expressive little girl does go there: Alice has an unredeemed strength in her CareTaker Girl's black, pressured, fevered strokes depicting Tornado Man, an outer and inner annihilating presence, which illustrates an inner story of abduction to Hell. This “little girl” is obviously compelled, courageous in her exposure of HIM and an ally for the courage of the analyst who knows he will encounter aspects of HIS whirling diabolical energy in the transference/countertransference, perhaps not unlike his opening description of “coming apart, hovering in the consulting space, breaking up.” This defensive system, evolved and strengthened through years of control, is threatened by the analytic relationship which is slowly, patiently built on a trust in the process and the integrity and vulnerability of being human in its beauty and ugliness. When Alice and her analyst have experienced those “real” moments, such as Alice’s sharing her emotional responses and her tears constellated by Women Talking, the persecuting Tornado Man will seek to disrupt or destroy the intimate relationship. This clinical/theoretical nugget of gold from the depths of those colloquium hours of talking and processing with Don and my colleagues has been a treasure in my practice. I have experienced the value in recognizing and responding to such attacks on the relationship, whether directed at me or the analysand. Although I have not worked with an analysand who has endured the horrific extremes of trauma and dissociation Alice suffers, and which her analyst seeks to contain, process, and bring to consciousness, I have worked with men and women who have experienced extensive neglect, cruel abandonment, sexual and physical violation and emotional abuse as children and adolescents. They have survived—yet; been successful—but; managed life well—until there is something that isn’t right. Feels uneasy, uncontrollable, overwhelming or blank, joyless, “like just going through the motions.” They have lived with the silences imposed by any number of trauma’s factors. They have struggled with dissociation, or haziness of memory; absent, frozen or numbed emotional responses; cutting, burning, alcohol or drugs unconsciously employed; and, with the irrational, unmitigated shame and guilt that haunt a true sense of self. We have experienced together an interactive field in which the psyche-soma knowing is confused by the mind’s cloudy unknowing and yet something is in the room, a third, that wants to be acknowledged. Alongside these concerns, and unavoidably associated, as Alice’s analyst recognizes, reside the deleterious effects of abandonment, betrayal and abuse by parental, cultural and/or fundamentalist religious beliefs and attitudes which disparage, distort or disclaim the analysand’s trauma. Childhood trauma is unavoidable and its experience and toll are far removed in years from the adult who consciously, most often unconsciously, suffers its effects. By adulthood, the dissociative system has served as a kind of default setting for living one’s life on its diabolical terms—until the “glitch” in the system; the presence of the analytic third. For Alice, there have been gradual, consistent, timely “glitches” in the persecutory control of the self-care system. Alice has been able to leave her first marriage, home and community, successfully complete her degree in art, begin graduate work in mental health, suffer an intensive breakdown (read breakthrough), and seek analysis for a repetitive pattern of negative masculine relationships. She has painfully persisted in analysis and developed a “realness” in relationship with the support and influence of the positive masculine within her analyst who proves related to the feminine principle within his and Alice’s nature. And, finally, it is truly an unfixable glitch that both are committed to consciously struggle with the complexity of Alice’s unconscious material and their analytic relationship. Alice’s analyst poignantly summarizes her recognition of and emotional response to the girls’ and women’s trauma in the movie. To read this case and then to watch the film to completion, I have been struck by the parallels in characters, themes and tensions that literally and metaphorically exemplify Alice’s story. It is as if the timing of Women Talking has helped bring a blurry lens of dissociative defence into a more focused reality, mirroring for Alice, in the characters’ dialogues and emotional gravity, the “realness” of such trauma and elucidating for her the repressed experience that her “little girls” have exposed to her and her analyst. Those absent tears of emotional import are now available for the conscious ego to experience. In her own desire for healing, the numinous promise of Christmas Eve 2022 may, in time, give birth to a new feminine from which Alice and her maternal legacy have been alienated. Her “talking” with her analyst and relating to her inner world in its creative and destructive aspects has been and will be paramount. “This is [her] story.” “It’s a painful story, but it has some hope.”

Psychoanalysis · Film in Education and Therapy · Jungian Analytical Psychology · Psychology · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications · Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy

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