Want to read a summary of my last psychotherapy session?
PATIENT: So, you know, something has been preying on my mind the last week. I keep wondering: what it is we are doing here. What is it that you are trying to accomplish with me? I don’t know. I just wonder about that.
[The therapist didn’t respond to my concerns.]
I kept thinking about my idea that I was an intruder in my family. I was kind of dismayed about your reaction to that. You seemed to challenge that idea. I don’t know, maybe you weren’t challenging that idea. But I wonder, were you challenging that idea?
THERAPIST: Did you think I was challenging that idea?
PATIENT: I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking. But I thought that perhaps you where challenging my idea that I was an intruder in my family, that I had destroyed my parents’ paradise—something we talked about—that I was an outsider or scapegoat in my family.
THERAPIST: I don’t think I was challenging that idea.
PATIENT: Well, I raised the issue three times in past sessions. And each time you said things that made me think you were challenging that idea. I remember the first time I mentioned that I had destroyed my parents’ paradise. And you seemed to dispute that.
[At the session on August 21, 2018 I said that I had formed the tentative idea that perhaps my parents had viewed the six-year period before I was born as idyllic, as a kind of paradise. It was the first seven years of their marriage, and after their first year of marriage they had a daughter, my sister, whom they idealized.
I recorded that the therapist had responded in the following way to my comments at that session: “The therapist pursued the issue of factual truth. The therapist said, "Maybe it wasn't idyllic for your parents. Maybe that's your misinterpretation (of the facts). Maybe there were problems even before you were born." Notice how the therapist is taking subjective, or psychic, truth and measuring it by objective standards and saying, in effect, "Maybe you are factually wrong. Maybe your parents were not so happy before you were born. Maybe that is simply your (factually distorted) narrative. Let's reality check your belief." Yes, that is my narrative and my narrative has both factual and psychic components. The therapist seems mired in the factual and the real, as if she sees herself as a fact-checker for The Washington Post. If our narratives were all factually accurate, we would all have the same narrative, and we would all be alike; there would be no individuality. But note well: only in cults is the lack of individuality a virtue. It is our personal myths, composed of the symbolic and the imaginary, that make us individuals. As Woody Allen has said, “All people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it.”]
PATIENT: Then, the second time I mentioned that my parents viewed me as an intruder, you said, “Did we actually agree that that was the case?”
[In this instance the therapist appeared to want to extinguish the possibility of independent thought. Similarly, on another occasion, she asked: “Are we on the same page?”]
THERAPIST: I didn’t say that.
[I have learned to ignore my therapist when she denies having said something that I recall her having said. I see the therapist’s denials as instances of gaslighting: her attempt to erase the past. Gaslighting is a form of projective identification where one individual attempts to deny facts, events, or what one did or did not say. Gaslighting is not an uncommon practice among psychotherapists. Dorpat, T.L., Gaslighting, The Double Whammy, Interrogation And Other Methods Of Covert Control In Psychotherapy And Analysis.]
PATIENT: Then, the third time I said that I thought I was an intruder in my family you said, “Did anybody ever actually tell you that?”
THERAPIST: That’s not something I would say. I recognize that it’s your sense of things that you were an intruder.
[I have a firm recollection of the therapist having said “Did somebody ever actually tell you that?” because I remember responding, “Well, my niece said to me on one occasion, ‘My mother says she wishes you were never born.’ The therapist then replied: “Why did your sister say that?” And I replied: “Jealousy. One psychiatrist said, ‘Your sister was the little princess for six years. Then you came along. You toppled her from her pedestal.’” My inference is that the therapist’s other patients won’t question the therapist’s many contradictions, false denials, and questionable statements because they have regressed to a state of infantile symbiosis with her, a state in which they assume a referential posture or an unquestioning worshipful attitude toward her. These patients have lost their rationality. In my relationship with the therapist I remain rational and critical of the therapist’s limitations. By analogy, committed Communists in the Soviet Union were blind to the flaws in the Party’s pronouncements. Cynical citizens, on the other hand, were left bemused and uncomprehending by the Party’s utterances.]
PATIENT: Yes, it’s my sense of things that I was an intruder. But there is more than that. If you look at all the things I’ve said about my family you can see that, in fact, I was seen as an intruder in my family. It’s not just my sense of things. I mean, we talked about the issue of intergenerational transmission of trauma; typically, in dysfunctional families who scapegoat a child you will find a history of intergenerational transmission. We talked about the fact that my parents argued all the time: that there was a lot of parental discord, which is consistent with scapegoating. We talked about the issue of parental favoritism: my sense that my parents favored my sister over me. Like, for example, I always had the feeling that my parents criticized me all the time and that they almost never criticized my sister.
But then the really crucial thing is my attachment style. I have a dismissive avoidant attachment style. I am cut off from people but I don’t feel lonely. I seem to dismiss the value of relationships. They say that a dismissive avoidant attachment style is generally caused by a rejecting mother. So, it’s kind of like my attachment style speaks for itself. My having had a rejecting mother seems to fit in with the idea that, in fact, I was an intruder in my family. And you know what? I’m thinking something interesting. A person who is securely attached would never say, he would never have the feeling, that he was an intruder in his family. He just wouldn’t say that; he wouldn’t feel that. A securely attached person would have the idea that he was loved by his parents. So the mere fact that I would say that I viewed myself as an intruder is kind of self-proving. Only a person who was in fact treated like an intruder would even say that he had the idea that his parents viewed him as an intruder. You didn’t seem to see that. It’s all recorded in the person’s internal working model, according to attachment theorists. If a person was an intruder in his family, that will be recorded in his internal working model – it will be recorded in his attachment style. Certain types of parental interactions will give rise to certain attachment styles in the child. So the idea of whether my sense of my family is correct or not is something that can be revealed if you simply look at my internal working model. According to attachment theory, the nature of my adult relationships will tell you what my early relationships were. It’s not even something that you need to speculate about. It’s all recorded in the internal working model. It’s all recorded in my attachment style.
But there’s something else I want to mention. You look at the things I talk about here, and you seem to assume that I’ve always thought this way. That, for example, if I say that I felt that I was an intruder, then I felt that way as a child. And you seem to assume that you need to challenge that idea – that negative thought. But I didn’t feel that way as a child. I didn’t see myself as an intruder when I was a kid. Well, maybe at some level I felt like an intruder, but that was never my conscious perception. Let me tell you something that highlights what I am talking about. When I was 24 years old I was seeing a psychiatrist, and he said, “You were abused. You had to have been abused. Only people who were abused have the personality problems you have.” And you know what? I was incredulous. I said to him, “I was never abused.” That never entered my mind. I never thought of myself as an abused person. But as the years went on and I started thinking about my family, I arrived at new insights about my family and my place in the family. I began to see how I was an intruder or scapegoat in my family. So that represents a new way of thinking for me that only emerged in adulthood. I never had those thoughts as a child. The thing is, when a patient talks about his childhood does his description relate to longstanding distortions in his thinking – or does it actually reflect emotional growth and growing insight and his ability to deal with painful truths that he could have never have faced when he was a child? You don’t know that when I, or anyone, talks about his childhood. You seem to assume that if I say something negative about my childhood or people in my family these things are distortions— and you feel a need to challenge my “distorted thinking.” But what about the extent to which my ideas reflect emotional growth and insight and the breakdown of childhood idealization? You don’t know that and you make assumptions and challenge what I am saying, when, in fact, what I am saying may represent mental health and not mental weakness.
You know, I saw an interesting YouTube of John Bowlby. He’s the father of attachment theory. It’s a five-minute video and he was giving a talk and he said there are patients who are convinced that their mothers loved them, but that’s a false belief. That belief is simply a product of idealization. In fact, their mothers never loved them. And he said, you need to get the patient to the point of understanding that his mother never loved him—that he was never loved. Bowlby said, “the patient will be better off in the long run knowing the truth of his mother’s feelings for him.”
Bowlby said: “So there is a reason why I think it's – the greatest reason to assist a patient discover their own past and also, of course, to realize, to recognize, how it comes about how they cannot initially come to, can't do it, or don't want to do it. Either it's too painful – no one wants to think that our mother never wanted them, and always really rejected them, it's a very painful, very, very painful situation for anyone to find themselves in. Yet, if it's true, it's true, and they are going to be better off in the future if they recognize that that is what did happen.” John Bowlby on Attachment and Loss, videotaped presentation, 1984.
[Bowlby saw important therapeutic value in helping the patient to see that the parent's lies did not remain the patient's truth. Bowlby's technique contrasts with the therapist's Pollyanna-like strategy of preserving the parent's idealized self-image. At the first session when I told the therapist that my mother was negligent, she replied: “I wouldn't say she was negligent.” How would she know that at the first session? If I had a negligent mother, wouldn't I be better off in the future if I recognized that that was the case? When I offered speculation that my maternal grandfather might have been exploitive, she said, “I wouldn't say he was exploitive; maybe he was an optimist.”]
THERAPIST: And how would you feel if you had the idea that your mother never loved you?
PATIENT: I guess that would be kind of sad. But, you know, I don’t really know. I guess it would be sad.
[The gist of my opening comments centered on my sense of myself as an intruder in my family and facts tending to support my lived experience as an intruder. My comments alluded to parental rejection, scapegoating, targeted criticism, and parental favoritism: forms of emotional abuse that are associated with the development of a dismissive avoidant attachment style. See, e.g., Muller, R.T. “Trauma and Dismissing (Avoidant) Attachment: Intervention Strategies in Individual Psychotherapy.” These are trauma issues that need to be addressed by the therapist, and not denied by misdirection. The therapist focused on my reference to Bowlby to promote her need to depict me as struggling only with proximity-seeking, that is my thwarted need for mother’s love, rather than interfamily abuse. “Individuals who are dismissing of attachment put considerable psychological effort into closing off discussion of threatening issues. Unless challenged [by the therapist], such issues will likely remain closed off.” See Muller. In my opening comments I approached threatening issues of interfamily abuse that needed to be pursued by the therapist. Instead, the therapist ignored these issues of abuse and directed her attention to proximity-seeking with mother. “The challenge facing the therapist is to make active attempts to turn his or her attention toward trauma-related material; to listen for it, notice it, ask about it, and facilitate rather than avoid such painful topics. If not, the risk is that of replicating the rejecting response of the parent who reacts to the child’s abuse revelations by discounting or minimizing their importance.” See Muller.
I had the impression that the therapist seemed dismayed that I cut off my discussion of my feelings about what it would mean to me if my mother didn’t love me. I viewed the therapist’s question as off point, as not relating to what I had on my mind, as if she were pursing her agenda – which seems to focus, in her mind, on my need for mother’s love – instead of thinking about what was unconsciously pressing on my mind that afternoon. This clinical exchange is emblematic of my conflicts with the therapist. It is my belief that she picks and chooses fragments of my narrative to comment on, based on her projective needs, without regard to what is pressing on my mind unconsciously. She consistently does not allow meaning to emerge from the context of my associations. She seems oblivious to the importance of context and the meaning that emerges from an assessment of the associations in my narrative.
When the therapist asked: “And how would you feel if you had the idea that your mother never loved you?” did she want me to talk about how sad it would be not to be loved by one’s mother? Was the therapist projecting a need for me to talk about the state of wanting something that was being withheld from me, namely my mother’s love? Was the therapist unconsciously asking, “When you were an infant did you not want desperately to suck on your mother’s breast? And did you not have feelings of envy for your mother’s breast when your mother had milk that you wanted, but that you felt she withheld from you?” When I shared facts with the therapist about John Bowlby and attachment theory that may have been outside her fund of knowledge, did the therapist experience envy of my possible superior knowledge that she then tried to discharge through projective identification, namely, by imputing breast envy to me (“How would you feel if you had the idea that your mother never loved you” – that is, how would you feel if your mother had something [love or milk] that you wanted?) and then directing me to talk about that breast envy? Did my evasive response (“I guess that would be kind of sad”) really amount to my attempt to refuse her projective identification? I will return to these ideas later in this letter.
I recall an interaction from a previous session on May 29, 2018. I had pointed out facts about attachment theory to the therapist – the therapist fancies herself an attachment therapist – that were at odds with her knowledge base. I then talked at that session about an email exchange I had had with a leading attachment theorist, a university professor. The therapist later had an outburst: “You think you’re smarter than everybody else.” Will the therapist typically respond with verbal aggression or projective identification of envy in instances where she feels I possess something that she lacks?
A digression. In the letter about the session on August 21, 2018, I imagined a fictional psychoanalyst commenting on my belief that I was an intruder in my family, an intruder who had destroyed my parents’ paradise, that is, the six-year period in my parents’ marriage before I was born. In that letter I had the fictional psychoanalyst say: “I sense possible envy and unconscious feelings of triumph in your report that you destroyed your parents’ paradise. I suspect that at some level you relished the idea of destroying your parents’ ‘beautiful world’ because it was denied to you. You know there is a psychological theory that the infant both loves and envies the mother’s breast: that at some level the infant wants to destroy the mother’s breast – precisely because it is good – at those moments the infant feels that the mother has withheld the breast from him. Your family’s beautiful world, their Paradise as you call it, was denied to you and you envied it; you wanted to destroy it. I’d like to offer a reconstruction that ties together your creativity and your destructive impulses. It may be that a regular feature of your mental life is that when you envy something and cannot merge with it, you destroy it in fantasy, then recreate an image of that envied object in your mind. What I am saying is that you envied your parents’ paradise, you could not have it, you proceeded to destroy it in fantasy, and you resurrected an idealized image of it in your inner world. I suspect that we can find residues of former envied objects in your idealized world, your inner Garden of Eden, your own private paradise, that you retreat to.”
The above speculations find some support in Melanie Klein's view that idealization can be a defense against envy. Klein and others suggest that the idealizing transference in therapy is in part a defense against the person's envy of the therapist, as well as being an indication that envy was an overwhelming experience for the person as an infant. She suggests that before the person can consciously accept envy of the therapist, the idealizing transference needs to run its course without interruption or interpretation, and the person needs to become stronger through gradual increments of frustration in the therapy.
Is it noteworthy in this regard that my therapy relationship with Stanley R. Palombo, M.D. was marked by my intense idealization of him coupled with painful feelings about him centering on my sense that he was insensitive to my feelings of victimization – thereby thwarting my hunger for empathic understanding?
What I am proposing here psychoanalytically is that (1) my therapist’s response to me at this session – namely, her possible projective identification of envy onto me by having me talk about my feelings about my mother withholding her love from me (“And how would you feel if you had the idea that your mother never loved you?”) – and (2) my possible psychological response in childhood to my sense that my family had a paradise that was denied to me, which involved my destroying that “paradise” in fantasy and proceeding to internalize an idealized image of that paradise in fantasy – represent two distinct vicissitudes of envy and destructive impulses. I propose that an elaboration of these issues, these two vicissitudes of envy and destructive impulses as between the therapist and me, which amounts to a transference/countertransference enactment, would say a lot about the therapist’s and my distinct levels of ego development as well as the nature of my psychological relationship with the therapist and, furthe
[The therapist didn’t respond to my concerns.]
I kept thinking about my idea that I was an intruder in my family. I was kind of dismayed about your reaction to that. You seemed to challenge that idea. I don’t know, maybe you weren’t challenging that idea. But I wonder, were you challenging that idea?
THERAPIST: Did you think I was challenging that idea?
PATIENT: I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking. But I thought that perhaps you where challenging my idea that I was an intruder in my family, that I had destroyed my parents’ paradise—something we talked about—that I was an outsider or scapegoat in my family.
THERAPIST: I don’t think I was challenging that idea.
PATIENT: Well, I raised the issue three times in past sessions. And each time you said things that made me think you were challenging that idea. I remember the first time I mentioned that I had destroyed my parents’ paradise. And you seemed to dispute that.
[At the session on August 21, 2018 I said that I had formed the tentative idea that perhaps my parents had viewed the six-year period before I was born as idyllic, as a kind of paradise. It was the first seven years of their marriage, and after their first year of marriage they had a daughter, my sister, whom they idealized.
I recorded that the therapist had responded in the following way to my comments at that session: “The therapist pursued the issue of factual truth. The therapist said, "Maybe it wasn't idyllic for your parents. Maybe that's your misinterpretation (of the facts). Maybe there were problems even before you were born." Notice how the therapist is taking subjective, or psychic, truth and measuring it by objective standards and saying, in effect, "Maybe you are factually wrong. Maybe your parents were not so happy before you were born. Maybe that is simply your (factually distorted) narrative. Let's reality check your belief." Yes, that is my narrative and my narrative has both factual and psychic components. The therapist seems mired in the factual and the real, as if she sees herself as a fact-checker for The Washington Post. If our narratives were all factually accurate, we would all have the same narrative, and we would all be alike; there would be no individuality. But note well: only in cults is the lack of individuality a virtue. It is our personal myths, composed of the symbolic and the imaginary, that make us individuals. As Woody Allen has said, “All people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it.”]
PATIENT: Then, the second time I mentioned that my parents viewed me as an intruder, you said, “Did we actually agree that that was the case?”
[In this instance the therapist appeared to want to extinguish the possibility of independent thought. Similarly, on another occasion, she asked: “Are we on the same page?”]
THERAPIST: I didn’t say that.
[I have learned to ignore my therapist when she denies having said something that I recall her having said. I see the therapist’s denials as instances of gaslighting: her attempt to erase the past. Gaslighting is a form of projective identification where one individual attempts to deny facts, events, or what one did or did not say. Gaslighting is not an uncommon practice among psychotherapists. Dorpat, T.L., Gaslighting, The Double Whammy, Interrogation And Other Methods Of Covert Control In Psychotherapy And Analysis.]
PATIENT: Then, the third time I said that I thought I was an intruder in my family you said, “Did anybody ever actually tell you that?”
THERAPIST: That’s not something I would say. I recognize that it’s your sense of things that you were an intruder.
[I have a firm recollection of the therapist having said “Did somebody ever actually tell you that?” because I remember responding, “Well, my niece said to me on one occasion, ‘My mother says she wishes you were never born.’ The therapist then replied: “Why did your sister say that?” And I replied: “Jealousy. One psychiatrist said, ‘Your sister was the little princess for six years. Then you came along. You toppled her from her pedestal.’” My inference is that the therapist’s other patients won’t question the therapist’s many contradictions, false denials, and questionable statements because they have regressed to a state of infantile symbiosis with her, a state in which they assume a referential posture or an unquestioning worshipful attitude toward her. These patients have lost their rationality. In my relationship with the therapist I remain rational and critical of the therapist’s limitations. By analogy, committed Communists in the Soviet Union were blind to the flaws in the Party’s pronouncements. Cynical citizens, on the other hand, were left bemused and uncomprehending by the Party’s utterances.]
PATIENT: Yes, it’s my sense of things that I was an intruder. But there is more than that. If you look at all the things I’ve said about my family you can see that, in fact, I was seen as an intruder in my family. It’s not just my sense of things. I mean, we talked about the issue of intergenerational transmission of trauma; typically, in dysfunctional families who scapegoat a child you will find a history of intergenerational transmission. We talked about the fact that my parents argued all the time: that there was a lot of parental discord, which is consistent with scapegoating. We talked about the issue of parental favoritism: my sense that my parents favored my sister over me. Like, for example, I always had the feeling that my parents criticized me all the time and that they almost never criticized my sister.
But then the really crucial thing is my attachment style. I have a dismissive avoidant attachment style. I am cut off from people but I don’t feel lonely. I seem to dismiss the value of relationships. They say that a dismissive avoidant attachment style is generally caused by a rejecting mother. So, it’s kind of like my attachment style speaks for itself. My having had a rejecting mother seems to fit in with the idea that, in fact, I was an intruder in my family. And you know what? I’m thinking something interesting. A person who is securely attached would never say, he would never have the feeling, that he was an intruder in his family. He just wouldn’t say that; he wouldn’t feel that. A securely attached person would have the idea that he was loved by his parents. So the mere fact that I would say that I viewed myself as an intruder is kind of self-proving. Only a person who was in fact treated like an intruder would even say that he had the idea that his parents viewed him as an intruder. You didn’t seem to see that. It’s all recorded in the person’s internal working model, according to attachment theorists. If a person was an intruder in his family, that will be recorded in his internal working model – it will be recorded in his attachment style. Certain types of parental interactions will give rise to certain attachment styles in the child. So the idea of whether my sense of my family is correct or not is something that can be revealed if you simply look at my internal working model. According to attachment theory, the nature of my adult relationships will tell you what my early relationships were. It’s not even something that you need to speculate about. It’s all recorded in the internal working model. It’s all recorded in my attachment style.
But there’s something else I want to mention. You look at the things I talk about here, and you seem to assume that I’ve always thought this way. That, for example, if I say that I felt that I was an intruder, then I felt that way as a child. And you seem to assume that you need to challenge that idea – that negative thought. But I didn’t feel that way as a child. I didn’t see myself as an intruder when I was a kid. Well, maybe at some level I felt like an intruder, but that was never my conscious perception. Let me tell you something that highlights what I am talking about. When I was 24 years old I was seeing a psychiatrist, and he said, “You were abused. You had to have been abused. Only people who were abused have the personality problems you have.” And you know what? I was incredulous. I said to him, “I was never abused.” That never entered my mind. I never thought of myself as an abused person. But as the years went on and I started thinking about my family, I arrived at new insights about my family and my place in the family. I began to see how I was an intruder or scapegoat in my family. So that represents a new way of thinking for me that only emerged in adulthood. I never had those thoughts as a child. The thing is, when a patient talks about his childhood does his description relate to longstanding distortions in his thinking – or does it actually reflect emotional growth and growing insight and his ability to deal with painful truths that he could have never have faced when he was a child? You don’t know that when I, or anyone, talks about his childhood. You seem to assume that if I say something negative about my childhood or people in my family these things are distortions— and you feel a need to challenge my “distorted thinking.” But what about the extent to which my ideas reflect emotional growth and insight and the breakdown of childhood idealization? You don’t know that and you make assumptions and challenge what I am saying, when, in fact, what I am saying may represent mental health and not mental weakness.
You know, I saw an interesting YouTube of John Bowlby. He’s the father of attachment theory. It’s a five-minute video and he was giving a talk and he said there are patients who are convinced that their mothers loved them, but that’s a false belief. That belief is simply a product of idealization. In fact, their mothers never loved them. And he said, you need to get the patient to the point of understanding that his mother never loved him—that he was never loved. Bowlby said, “the patient will be better off in the long run knowing the truth of his mother’s feelings for him.”
Bowlby said: “So there is a reason why I think it's – the greatest reason to assist a patient discover their own past and also, of course, to realize, to recognize, how it comes about how they cannot initially come to, can't do it, or don't want to do it. Either it's too painful – no one wants to think that our mother never wanted them, and always really rejected them, it's a very painful, very, very painful situation for anyone to find themselves in. Yet, if it's true, it's true, and they are going to be better off in the future if they recognize that that is what did happen.” John Bowlby on Attachment and Loss, videotaped presentation, 1984.
[Bowlby saw important therapeutic value in helping the patient to see that the parent's lies did not remain the patient's truth. Bowlby's technique contrasts with the therapist's Pollyanna-like strategy of preserving the parent's idealized self-image. At the first session when I told the therapist that my mother was negligent, she replied: “I wouldn't say she was negligent.” How would she know that at the first session? If I had a negligent mother, wouldn't I be better off in the future if I recognized that that was the case? When I offered speculation that my maternal grandfather might have been exploitive, she said, “I wouldn't say he was exploitive; maybe he was an optimist.”]
THERAPIST: And how would you feel if you had the idea that your mother never loved you?
PATIENT: I guess that would be kind of sad. But, you know, I don’t really know. I guess it would be sad.
[The gist of my opening comments centered on my sense of myself as an intruder in my family and facts tending to support my lived experience as an intruder. My comments alluded to parental rejection, scapegoating, targeted criticism, and parental favoritism: forms of emotional abuse that are associated with the development of a dismissive avoidant attachment style. See, e.g., Muller, R.T. “Trauma and Dismissing (Avoidant) Attachment: Intervention Strategies in Individual Psychotherapy.” These are trauma issues that need to be addressed by the therapist, and not denied by misdirection. The therapist focused on my reference to Bowlby to promote her need to depict me as struggling only with proximity-seeking, that is my thwarted need for mother’s love, rather than interfamily abuse. “Individuals who are dismissing of attachment put considerable psychological effort into closing off discussion of threatening issues. Unless challenged [by the therapist], such issues will likely remain closed off.” See Muller. In my opening comments I approached threatening issues of interfamily abuse that needed to be pursued by the therapist. Instead, the therapist ignored these issues of abuse and directed her attention to proximity-seeking with mother. “The challenge facing the therapist is to make active attempts to turn his or her attention toward trauma-related material; to listen for it, notice it, ask about it, and facilitate rather than avoid such painful topics. If not, the risk is that of replicating the rejecting response of the parent who reacts to the child’s abuse revelations by discounting or minimizing their importance.” See Muller.
I had the impression that the therapist seemed dismayed that I cut off my discussion of my feelings about what it would mean to me if my mother didn’t love me. I viewed the therapist’s question as off point, as not relating to what I had on my mind, as if she were pursing her agenda – which seems to focus, in her mind, on my need for mother’s love – instead of thinking about what was unconsciously pressing on my mind that afternoon. This clinical exchange is emblematic of my conflicts with the therapist. It is my belief that she picks and chooses fragments of my narrative to comment on, based on her projective needs, without regard to what is pressing on my mind unconsciously. She consistently does not allow meaning to emerge from the context of my associations. She seems oblivious to the importance of context and the meaning that emerges from an assessment of the associations in my narrative.
When the therapist asked: “And how would you feel if you had the idea that your mother never loved you?” did she want me to talk about how sad it would be not to be loved by one’s mother? Was the therapist projecting a need for me to talk about the state of wanting something that was being withheld from me, namely my mother’s love? Was the therapist unconsciously asking, “When you were an infant did you not want desperately to suck on your mother’s breast? And did you not have feelings of envy for your mother’s breast when your mother had milk that you wanted, but that you felt she withheld from you?” When I shared facts with the therapist about John Bowlby and attachment theory that may have been outside her fund of knowledge, did the therapist experience envy of my possible superior knowledge that she then tried to discharge through projective identification, namely, by imputing breast envy to me (“How would you feel if you had the idea that your mother never loved you” – that is, how would you feel if your mother had something [love or milk] that you wanted?) and then directing me to talk about that breast envy? Did my evasive response (“I guess that would be kind of sad”) really amount to my attempt to refuse her projective identification? I will return to these ideas later in this letter.
I recall an interaction from a previous session on May 29, 2018. I had pointed out facts about attachment theory to the therapist – the therapist fancies herself an attachment therapist – that were at odds with her knowledge base. I then talked at that session about an email exchange I had had with a leading attachment theorist, a university professor. The therapist later had an outburst: “You think you’re smarter than everybody else.” Will the therapist typically respond with verbal aggression or projective identification of envy in instances where she feels I possess something that she lacks?
A digression. In the letter about the session on August 21, 2018, I imagined a fictional psychoanalyst commenting on my belief that I was an intruder in my family, an intruder who had destroyed my parents’ paradise, that is, the six-year period in my parents’ marriage before I was born. In that letter I had the fictional psychoanalyst say: “I sense possible envy and unconscious feelings of triumph in your report that you destroyed your parents’ paradise. I suspect that at some level you relished the idea of destroying your parents’ ‘beautiful world’ because it was denied to you. You know there is a psychological theory that the infant both loves and envies the mother’s breast: that at some level the infant wants to destroy the mother’s breast – precisely because it is good – at those moments the infant feels that the mother has withheld the breast from him. Your family’s beautiful world, their Paradise as you call it, was denied to you and you envied it; you wanted to destroy it. I’d like to offer a reconstruction that ties together your creativity and your destructive impulses. It may be that a regular feature of your mental life is that when you envy something and cannot merge with it, you destroy it in fantasy, then recreate an image of that envied object in your mind. What I am saying is that you envied your parents’ paradise, you could not have it, you proceeded to destroy it in fantasy, and you resurrected an idealized image of it in your inner world. I suspect that we can find residues of former envied objects in your idealized world, your inner Garden of Eden, your own private paradise, that you retreat to.”
The above speculations find some support in Melanie Klein's view that idealization can be a defense against envy. Klein and others suggest that the idealizing transference in therapy is in part a defense against the person's envy of the therapist, as well as being an indication that envy was an overwhelming experience for the person as an infant. She suggests that before the person can consciously accept envy of the therapist, the idealizing transference needs to run its course without interruption or interpretation, and the person needs to become stronger through gradual increments of frustration in the therapy.
Is it noteworthy in this regard that my therapy relationship with Stanley R. Palombo, M.D. was marked by my intense idealization of him coupled with painful feelings about him centering on my sense that he was insensitive to my feelings of victimization – thereby thwarting my hunger for empathic understanding?
What I am proposing here psychoanalytically is that (1) my therapist’s response to me at this session – namely, her possible projective identification of envy onto me by having me talk about my feelings about my mother withholding her love from me (“And how would you feel if you had the idea that your mother never loved you?”) – and (2) my possible psychological response in childhood to my sense that my family had a paradise that was denied to me, which involved my destroying that “paradise” in fantasy and proceeding to internalize an idealized image of that paradise in fantasy – represent two distinct vicissitudes of envy and destructive impulses. I propose that an elaboration of these issues, these two vicissitudes of envy and destructive impulses as between the therapist and me, which amounts to a transference/countertransference enactment, would say a lot about the therapist’s and my distinct levels of ego development as well as the nature of my psychological relationship with the therapist and, furthe
