|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Previous Page | ||
 |
||
| Next Page |
| PROFESSIONAL ORIENTATION
|
A number of specific events usually occur when one is structured along one of the following series [as described in the Structural Theory of the Psychoses page]:
In each of these series, one at least of the fundamental imprints is lacking. Frequently the last two are lacking, and sometimes the first, since
The disturbed person experiences as prime global motivations (running on the backstage):
Any type of crisis stems from this dual trend and displays: 1-the features of the original trauma(s), plus 2-the attempt at self-extraction from these trauma(s).
The type of crisis to be expected for either during childhood, at adolescence, or in the adult life are thus:
Violence may not always be "physical rape" or "beating a child". Violence can also be verbal or situational as shown by numerous authors [Marie-Claire Hirigoyen, Alice Miller and many others]. Violence can also be inflicted by the deficit of something, in which case it is more difficult to assess: for instance the lack of the proper symbiotic response from a mother to her newborn is a conduct of violence, although there is nothing really apparent. Here are some samples of non obvious violent conduct: evasive answers, absence of presence, lack of definite positive action, passive attitude (passivity), use of toxic drugs of any kind, confused or non-referenced talk (absence of reality or of consistency), automatic acting (acts without ground), failure of reciprocity in relationships, depressive state. These are variants of invisible attacks of the other's integrity or vitality even when the person is not deliberately willing it.
Violence can have three main root forms (very roughly following the autistic, psychotic, and paranoic series, respectively):
|
Main Type |
Opponent |
Archaic meaning |
|
burst everything >—< shell in |
no specific other "everything" refers in the archaic life to no-one, or to the internal or the external womb |
early originary life (inner "other" or object not yet formed): try and remain whole under extreme violence (early aggression or rejection) |
|
destroy the other >—< avoid the other |
caring other not responding to innate needs or abusing neonate or infant ("not to die, I must make the other disappear by whatever mean") |
middle originary life ("other" already formed): try and destroy the one who does not give what is needed or abuses possible acting out of the incorporated parent's urge to kill the foetus, neona–te or infant |
|
kill everyone >—< dominate everyone |
all others attempt at destroying all who are menacing the egocentric position and privileged relationship (even when this position is imaginary) |
late originary life ("other" already formed): try and destroy the consort of the privileged other or anyone who attempts at dissolving the symbiosis (usually toxic symbiosis) points either at a destructive mother or at an overprotective mother with no significant effective father |
We have put in the first column two distinctly opposite forms, but having the same root, stemming from the same archaic event. From those basic forms, derive innumerable types of violence, either in their positive or negative form.
It is usually obvious that the act of violence, a specific type of "acting out", is but the re-enacting of at least one of the original traumas endured during perinatal life, infancy, adolescence or early adulthood. This is true of rape and sadistic acts, but other types of violence feats can be tracked back to the original events during regressive therapy, even when those events have taken place in utero, during the perinatal period, or during infancy. We have instances of acts of violence on the foetuses during pregnancy, during labour and delivery, on neonates right after birth and during the first days, either from the parents, from relatives, or from the medical staff (the gathering of this material of course has required the methods of archaic life psychotherapy). Similarity of the original trauma and the later behaviour is as evident in the case of an early trauma than in the case of later shocks. The consequences however, maybe scaled: the earlier the shock, the worse the result, for a comparable intensity. The more basic the function attacked, the worse the results (attack of instinctual life => psychoses, attack of higher functions => neuroses). Furthermore, later trauma often cumulate on earlier ones, either from frailty and lack of self protection due to the early posttraumatic disorders, or as an unconscious search for replay of the early one.
The search for repetition is well known (repetition compulsion). When this search concerns an early trauma, the display may be quite disconcerting and are very often misinterpreted since we are not accustomed to think in terms of the events of the archaic life.
One very important aspect of a burst of violence is that while it releases a great amount of energy (tension reduction) in a short time, it produces integrity (which is precisely needed for that release) instead of the imminent breakdown it tries to avoid, it postpones incipient decompensation. Many authorities label displays of violence as "decompensation" (which they sometimes are), when it is exactly the opposite: a procedure to maintain wholeness. For the individual, this outburst is often salutary and on the contrary tends to avoid imminent psychic fracture, decompensation, and especially delirium. Of course, safety for others has to be provided.
Some types of fits of violence are a way to avoid delirium.
It is not just because that fit of violence may be detrimental to others or dangerous that it is "craziness". It is important to recall the violence we have put on that person in the first place early in childhood or at birth that we have labelled "good" to mask our deeds. Protecting people against violence is necessary, but why don't we protect neonates and infants from violent acts in the first place?
Sometimes, the burst of violence comes after decompensation has taken place. In this case, it expresses in delirious form an attempt at safeguarding against a violent situation put on the child in its archaic life.
Another type of violence burst is a delirious act (instead of words or images).
Provided bursts of violence are given a special place and all possible protection to self and others, expressing the original event in this form can be a step towards alleviation of the defects due to bad structuring. It is even precisely this which is sought by the unconscious drive of the person to self repair.
"Psychotic" individuals (of either autistic, psychotic, or paranoic series) have a deficient or distorted psychic structure. They usually seek repair through 1-a replay of the originary life which is as a rule violent since impeding the structuring of the psyche is always a very violent act put on the foetus, neonate or infant, and 2-a reduction of the psychic fracture by reappointing which is also somehow violent when sought during adulthood. During this process, a kind of "therapeutic decompensation" is often observed, sometimes to be repeated. It implies passing through abandonment and despair, deprivation and torture, and reactions of violence to self or to others as a consequence. It is our mission as therapists to assist those attempts at rehabilitation without harm done to others or self.
We only have to think that the violence displayed is exactly the replica of that which was forced on the child at first, or its instinctual rebound, and that at this time he was completely impotent and helpless. Preventing this curative replay is tantamount to a second condemnation with an effect possibly worse than the first, and a pressure on the person towards a new breakdown and a new psychic collapse.
It has to be recalled that a great number of suicides or other violent acts (even collective) are perpetrated when an exterior agent comes into play in an adverse way (investigation, accusation, police summon, judgement, etc.).
In the same fashion, it is very easy to link delirium to early events. During structural psychotherapy, events akin to adult deliria are notable. Since disturbing events occur during preverbal infancy under extreme conditions such as abandonment (rejection of symbiosis) or aggression (non symbiotic responses), those events are not recorded nor displayed in verbal form, but in body form: attitudes, responses, sensations-reactions, and especially changes of state.
The neonate or infant may pass into a definite and identifiable change of state where most of the suffering associated with the unbearable context is alleviated, and opens up a foreign state where solutions for biological survival may appear (of course in infant's terms) at the detriment of elementary functions such as needing, feeling etc. This type of early change of state we call "non-verbal delirium". From the reports of individuals having lived (and relived in psychotherapy) such events, there is little doubt that these episodes are precursors of later fits of delirium.
Delirium appears thus mostly as a change of state and solution to extreme suffering, turning down or even turning off the feeling function, which amounts to disconnecting the "body" altogether, suppressing also reactions to suffering which are in the ordinary state triggered by sensations. Distancing reactions also in many cases diminish the threat since the caretaker usually responds negatively and dangerously to those reactions.
Once lived, that solution to suffering is ready to be used anew.
In later life, when a similar context triggers the original suffering, the non-verbal delirium state solution can be used, i.e. automatic cut off body sensations thus cutting off reactions (which in this case would be violent). Clients report the magic feeling of being freed from tensions, extreme sensitivity which opens up an increased perception, especially those of the secret motivations of the people around, and sense of unlimited freedom. The loss of all repression systems (we recall that repression is but muscular tension to refrain responses) give access to perceptions the ordinary do not perceive.
In this state of extreme perception, the surroundings which to us are banal become evocating and usually produce rapidly an upsurge of archaic material. Conversely, this upsurge of archaic material may trigger the delirious state. What happens next is that the full flow of the archaic event replays itself using whatever contextual stimuli it can hook on. Words or thoughts can add to the originary material. The result is a display of the archaic episode using the correspondent elements of the present actuality. To untrained people, the words and acts of the delirious appear at variance with actuality. They are not. They are both a valid display of the archaic episodes lived and a display of the motivations of the present to self-heal. The emotional content of the display is that of the infant and may sound irrelevant to those present. This confusion of past and present scenes is characteristic of this state and is not perceived by the delirious.
Delirium is a state of high perception and absence of repression where the past is replayed and displayed to tell about the originary disaster.
The discourse of the delirious is true both in the past (revealing the past events) and in the present (revealing the undisclosed elements similar to those of the originary life). Carl G. Jung has taken a long time in his life to trace back the narratives of delirious persons to the roots of their lives, and to the roots of our procedures of distorting natural instincts to our societal purposes. He named those features "archetypes" on the ground of their uniformity in the occidental society.
Situations of reclusion, confinement, internment, deprivation, loss of members of the family or of close friends, aggressive attitudes of various nature, repression of action and reactions, are usually good triggers of delirious states.
That magic state is sometimes sought for to evade from a loss of power over the situation. The threat of losing power or control may bring the person to use the delirious state to regain power, which in this case is absolute power. This fact is called "temptation for delirium" by Didier Anzieu.
"Depression" is sometimes used as a vague notion, although there is considerable clinical evidence of its origin and mechanism. For instance, to produce depressive subjects in a population of rats, one prevents the necessary bonding and attachment at birth by taking away newborns from the mother right after delivery.
Textbooks speak of neurotic depression (due to "excessive repression of affect") and of psychotic or anaclitic depression (depression due to early difficulties of separation).
Depression is multiform, but can be usually described by a breakdown of normal vigilant activity, loss of motivation and will, fits of despair, feelings of impotence, sadness, loss of confidence, loss of future prospects and desire for life. Its course is characterized by a loss of appetite for existence associated with a loss of power over life; there is a joint loss of vitality for this prevents too much suffering. Depression sets in when one cannot cope with the situation. Depression is frequently triggered by an external event, which may be:
It can also emerge without the intervention of an external event, as an upsurge of an emotional formation (a recorded past event) owing to a favourable context, such as
Very generally, the depression state is a replay of a traumatic source event in the past, and most of the time of a deep trauma lived at birth, namely the dramatic loss of the mother's body. This loss is run in three steps:
Adult depression 1 is in general the recall and replay of the loss of the mother's body at the critical time of bonding and its subsequent phases of degradation.
It has to be recalled that any unnatural context or attitudes from the part of the environment (even transferential influences), whether parents, the neonate's father, staff or else, may prevent the mother from easy and instinctual delivery. Some mothers may not be able to deliver naturally due to their own psychic state, but even able mothers may be grossly distracted from their instinctual functioning by an unwanted adverse environment. Once a mother has been set off track during this critical time by the assistants, she most probably will not bond to her child (the change of state do not occur after the window is closed) and will turn a detrimental mother without her willing so, the child not being recognised as her own, the one she had previously in her womb. We have numbers of these cases in our clinical records.
There is another source of depression often relived in therapeutic contexts due to disturbance of the natural birth process. Modification of the various necessities of the childbirth process usually lead to psychic havoc: time of birth chosen by the neonate, need for the waters to ensure floating so that he can find the best position, position of the mother to help delivery (usually standing to make use of gravity and favourable head down position for the foetus to be able to rotate), relaxation and acceptation of the mother to help the neonate push and find his way through the birth canal (her pushing is needed but only for a short moment at the right time, and not a pressure to the extent of impeding the delivery: the child expels itself, he is not pushed passively by the contractions or the staff), extracting the child with tools, cutting of the umbilical chord before natural respiration has taken place, distancing of the neonate from the mother for whatever reason. Worse of all is the programmed artificial delivery by caesarean section which regularly produces individuals of the primary autistic series.
The state of impotence and confusion produced before delivery by undue acceleration and deceleration of the birth process due either to the resistance of the mother or by chemical action (oxytocine). This can provoke a dramatic panic and even the psychic death of the child (a type of intrauterine secondary autism). Another type of dramatic event produced by current medicine practice is the use of an anaesthetic during labour and delivery: the anaesthetic diffuses through the placenta into the blood of the foetus provoking a characteristic paralysis of its lower limbs and creating an induced impotence impeding the self-extraction of the child (we recall that the child's self-extraction is a fundamental part of the delivery process and the initialisation of the innate vitality for the rest of the life). This is followed by panic and usually by a loss of what remains of the vitality in the upper part of the body. Since the lower part has been paralysed, there is no onset of vitality in the lower body, the child tries to self extract with the upper part, without effect, and soon panics and despairs.
Adult depression 2 is the recur of the impotence during labour and/or delivery either due to a perturbation of the natural process, either by a refraining mother, or by the use of hormonal modifiers or psychoactive drugs.
Later in life, the loss of an important support may set the repetition of this first recorded event on and start the replay through its subsequent phases. A complex state of things is thus created, since the recurring event may not be accepted, and the effort to repress it consumes too much energy and leads also to a loss of will and appetite for life. The depression is then double-layered: first the archaic event and second the attempt to hold it in check.
Type 3 depression can be traced back to early attacks on the individual, either on his body, on his instinctual drives, or on his welfare context, during his prenatal or post natal life. The most prominent cases of this type during pregnancy are attempts at abortion, abortion or death of the twin, aggression of the womb or the foetus. Also retrieved in therapies are attempts at killing the neonate at birth, isolation of the neonate from the body of the mother or her breasts. We also have cases of sadistic treatment of the neonate either during delivery, after delivery, or some time later in life from the part of the mother, the father, other children or even relatives. Foetus and non-vitalised babies react differently form vitalised newborns. The latter usually defend themselves by regressing rapidly to a state before the vitalisation reflex, into the non-vitalised foetal state, thus becoming a foetus again. The vitality then has to invest somewhere else than the body and form a protective shell against any contact characteristic of the secondary autistic series. The world is lived then as totally insecure, and any demand or invasion from the outside will produce regression to that state.
Depression 3 is due to early regression, sometimes even to the non-vitalised womb state, to protect from an attack of the integrity of the foetus or neonate (either the body- or psychic- integrity).
[1] ordinary paranoia seem typical of attempting at dissolving a symbiosis which has already not been lived.
[2] the reflex of attachment of the mother may be handicapped from various sources: use of hormonal, sedative, narcotic or anaesthetic drugs, during labour or delivery (including epidural anaesthesia); distancing of the neonate just after delivery (and during the first hours after childbirth); intervention of the medical staff and/or significant family members to discourage holding and feeding the baby; jealousy from the male environment including physicians, nurse, spouse, with manoeuvres to discourage natural maternal bonding; rejection of the child by the mother, either anticipated or during labour, from various origins.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Previous Page | ||
|
||
| Next Page |
| PROFESSIONAL ORIENTATION
|