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| PROFESSIONAL ORIENTATION
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Psychic disorders were viewed early in this century in Europe as disturbing fantasies about the parents created in childhood, and a universal phenomenon common to all humans. Then came the evidence that in fact these 'fantasies' were but the consequence of real frustrations, considered at that time as 'normal'. Severe disorders such as psychoses were viewed as a cut with the consensus 'reality' due to the same frustrations but of such intensity that it left the psyche with a greater anxiety than usual. However, it appeared in the 30s that those disorders were not due to normal frustrations, but to early severe traumatic events not readily accessible by ordinary analysis, if accessible at all. At that time, the question of birth and care of neonates was left unquestioned. And so was the society and its collectively accepted methods of birth, nurturing, children care and education. Psychoanalysts never thought that parents, medicine doctors and nurses, educators and some schemes of the society itself could be instrumental in creating disasters into the life of children.
However, from many sides at roughly the same time (ethnology, anthropology, sociology, ethology, mythology, body techniques, and especially from the study of deficient children and of their family), during the 50-60s came the revelation that those disorders were caused by precise manoeuvres from the part of some parents, nurses, doctors and educators, under the guise of a discourse called 'science' or 'pedagogy' which was to be shown as part of the disorder producing scheme, of the pathogenic mechanism itself.
With the advent of structural ideas, it became clear that heavy disorders were caused mainly by the mistreatment of foetuses, neonates and infants, by impeding the normal course of nature and correct imprinting of the essential structuring impacts, or/and by attacking the root instincts of the child. Thus, in less than a century, was discovered that our major disorders were in fact caused not by early fantasies about the world due to wrong conditioning at a later age, but by lack of care or even specific attacks of the instinctual roots of life common to all animals. Furthermore, it was shown that these attacks were described very carefully in the founding myths of our society, some of them dating as far as 3500 years back. Therefore, these facts were not unknown in our corpus theoricus, but until recently simply covered up by a consensus discourse masking its real significance.
We may say today that
Severe psychological disorders all stem from faulty basic imprinting having stopped or distorted the few essential programs of our structuring.
In this context, we shall call
content problems = minor disorders or psychological troubles or neuroses, and
structural problems = major or severe disorders or psychoses or psycho-pathology or 'abnormal' psychology. 'Psychoses' here is generic and may designate all structural types of disorders elsewhere classified under: autism, schizophrenia, antisocial disorder, perversion, and their derivatives using an addictive mean of socialising.
The lack of even a single imprint produces a deficient structure with subsequent severe disorders. For instance, withdrawing rat neonates from the mother produces depressive adults rats. As in all complex phenomena, there is not a one to one correspondence between the lack of one imprint and the subsequent form of the disorder. This follows also from the theorems of complexology and of 'intrication'. The lack of one imprint may be partially compensated for, even by the parent or instance having produced the defect in the first place, or worsened by repetitive attacks. It may have had happened (the program initialised) but broken in its natural evolution (the program has been stopped).
The origin of the deficiency may come from many sides. Usually, the deficiency comes from a lack of attention to the needs, and especially imprinting needs of the child. The imprints have to be impacted when the window for imprinting opens, which may last only a few minutes, and one has to be aware of what is happening. Excess care also produces erroneous or absent imprinting. Caring for anything but the important call of the child's program is equivalent to preventing imprinting. The call for imprinting is very obvious, and the instinctual response to the call is also very obvious, but one has to be aware not to impede the natural functioning of the instincts in the father and mother. Intruding between nature and mother, or between parent and child is likely to provoke the absence of correct imprinting.
We may put the origin of erroneous imprinting into 3 categories:
|
Type |
Examples |
| accidental |
biologically difficult birth; father absent for extraneous reasons; illness or death of one parent; etc. |
| provoked |
intentional unnecessary caesarean; withdrawal of child at partum from the mother by elders, nurse's or doctor's orders; preventing the father to assist the mother and the child; pressure of the environment onto the mother for not bonding and feeding; etc. |
| impossible to prevent |
psychologically difficult parting or childbirth; inaptitude of the mother to form maternal bond, or of the father to fulfil the safety-provider role (from psychic deficiencies) |
Here the question of intentionality is an issue since the result is the destruction of a necessary function of the child. This is one of the most complicated questions of psychology and has to be left open. Here we mean provoked and intentional when there is a discourse associated to the detrimental act, being thus conscious.
What seems today the root of all the forms of autistic disorders is the lack of spontaneous vitality and subsequent response to external stimulation.
Autism may be associated with the lack of vitality.
Lack of vitality is generally associated with autism and especially soft autism (amoeba types).
All of these patterns have shown up in therapy settings.
Another very demonstrative example is the technique of 'holding' or 'Festhalttherapie' of Alain Gillis [Psychiatries, 96, Corps et Thérapies, 1992, pp. 27-37.]: in a therapeutic setting, persons showing autistic traits are held firmly for a while until something happens; normally, after a few minutes, a sort of fury sets in to try and free from the pressure, with uncoordinated violent movements, and enormous amount of motion. Heavy breathing, heretofore always very weak, usually sets on. Afterwards, the person feels more alive and responding. It may take 3 to 7 or 8 such exercises (depending on age and case) to recover minimum vitality showing what has not been triggered in the first place.
Shelled in persons come also in the category of autistic problems (schizoid types). They may not be unborn persons such as the previous type but born persons having reverted to the womb, thus sheltering from heavy aggression. The aggression may be as common as the abandonment of the child due to not bonding, this one being sufficient to induce despair and massive regression. Or it may be due to facing an inappropriate medical care, a detrimental mother by aggression or by omission. It is useful to recall here that mothers having been prevented from bonding, from external or internal reasons, are prone to the unconscious impulse of leaving or killing the child as in other mammals.
Then the neonate may have had a natural birth to some point, with triggering of the frenzy of self-expulsion, but feeling the enormous lack of safety (lack of positive and tender body contact with the mother) or destructiveness, it regresses quickly to the state before the contractions and onset of frenzy and begins a foetus like life. Then, much depends of the subsequent care the neonate is submitted to: it may close the window for bonding and never again show demand for the body of the mother and evade symbiosis.
A frequent pattern in these type of structures is the mechanicality of functioning. Feeling being driven by a mechanical device, especially external to self, is current in these types of disorders. Being commanded by extraneous forces, acting in a mechanical way, seeing inside of self as a clockwork or a machine is the usual self-appreciation. Such a mechanical inside 'projects' (in the psychoanalytical sense) onto the world, i.e. is attributed to the environment and the whole world is seen as but a mechanical and causal machine.
When submitted to threatening lack of natural care or any type of aggressive treatment, the neonate may react by subtracting its own vitality. Abandonment, i.e. not bonding, has been shown in therapy to be of sufficient intensity to induce this emergency procedure: killing own vitality prevents enduring the torture and despair of abandonment which in any case will lead to death. In fact, he kills itself and live a living-dead life in the hope of not dying biologically (crab types). This self-ablation of vitality usually annihilates the need for symbiosis, which in this case could be foreseen as potentially dangerous (call for symbiosis comes with vitality and will induce violent reactions when not available). This point may be used to distinguish, if one wishes, autistic types from schizophrenic types: psychotic types may be associated with unnatural symbiosis, autistic types with the absence of call for symbiosis.
Another very frequent patterns is due to the premature section of the umbilical chord. If the umbilical chord is cut before natural respiration has set on, the neonate lives immediate asphyxia, a life threat, and panic of death. This leaves the child with the record of that panic and a automatic and permanent restriction of breathing. When later submitted to the necessity of emotions, which demand a great deal of energy and respiratory input, he or she will asphyxiate again and panic. This emotional crippling may also combine with the necessity of protecting self from the parents by withdrawing all emotional pattern and having recourse to the early panic record.
As shown in the previous page, the automatic creation of a bond between neonate and mother and of a temporary symbiosis is common to all upper species (birds, mammals). It is innate on the ethological level (biological like psychic level). It is an IRM, i.e. it is a program needing an external definite stimulus to initialise and run. Any disturbance in this program will lead to 'abnormality', that is it will be replaced by other emergency procedures which will take up the control of the whole life and prevent the natural development of the child.
If the natural autistic phase roughly corresponds to the uterus life until the trigger of the expulsion procedure, the symbiotic phase corresponds to the first months of life, roughly the first 9 months until the beginning of walking autonomy.
Psychoses may be associated with aberrations in the bonding-symbiosis process
The lack of initial bonding is terrible for both individuals, except for the mother who in any case was not prepared for it and does not desire it or cannot live it. For the latter, whatever the surrounding care, bonding would not have occurred owing to her psychological state. For other mothers who do not know what to expect and who do not carry too heavy a neurosis, delivery will lead to bonding provided no one in the family or in the staff takes steps to prevent that natural process. A rough guess is that probably 80% of mothers may be able bond to their child if not prevented to do so.
One has to be aware that in many occidental countries, the present medical dogma uses currently measures which prevent bonding. If not, as is the case in certain clinical settings, unconscious motives of the staff can also in some cases tend to impede the natural psychological course of childbirth. This is an issue of immense impact on the neonates and future well being of individuals, and of course on the society at large.
The mother who has not bonded to her child is faced with reactions she may not understand. First is the loss of the being in the belly not replaced by anything: for her, the child she had is dead, and she is given another one. Second is the reaction to that loss: depression. Third is the rejection of the child she is given: not recognising him (emotionally) as the one she had in her womb, and not being transformed by the shock of bonding, she may be indifferent to him and burdened by this unwanted needy being. The reaction of rejection and abandonment and the unconscious wish to dispose of the child or to kill him will he be imposed to her is the one we hear most often.
For the child, lack of bonding produces distress and threat of death. A newborn who has not been held close to the body of its mother (heart and breast) immediately after delivery and in any case during the few hours the bonding window is open is faced with a terrible predicament. During these first hours of possible symbiosis creation, he will fight to the utmost to get back the known heartbeat of the mother, and the safety producing breast, by crying, raging, and gesticulating.
After these few hours have passed, the window will close, and despair sets on. Definitively abandoned, he begins to adjust in the new situation. His hands retract, gesticulating subsides, crying stops. Depending on what occurs then, he has but a few outcomes: 1-cutting all sensitivity to minimise the torture of despair; 2-regressing to the autistic womb state; 3-cutting vitality and becoming living-dead to suppress the torment; 4-ceasing to feed as an appeal to better treatment; 5-ceasing to breathe as an ultimate device and biologically dying.
Another predicament he or she has to face is the reality of the unbonded mother. As shown by many studies on the mammals, and as many subjects of therapy also describe, the mother who is not taken by the maternal bond experiences a loss of her child at birth and whatever consequences of that loss. She may respond on four levels:
|
|
urge to abandon or kill the foreign child she is given | very generally repressed |
|
|
loss and depression | usually manifested |
| with reactions of indifference, lack of interest and care, of welcome, attention and love, with mechanical attention to the neonate | generally repressed | |
| being dispossessed of her maternal natural role, she may withdraw into selfishness, and even lose the urge to live | generally repressed | |
| helpless and disoriented by the strangeness of the baby she is given | may be repressed or not | |
|
|
rejection of the child as a burden preventing her to live a 'normal' woman's life; recalling unconsciously the burden of her own childhood with possible reactions of attack of the child in the place of her own mother/father | may be repressed or not |
|
|
compensation owing to guilt of the repressed instinctual and emotional urges, and/or to the need to conform socially to the consensus mothering style | may be conscious or not |
Thus, the unbonded child is in fact abandoned and left to die, at least psychologically. Later, he may be adopted by his own mother, a mother who may be as foreign to him than he may be foreign to her, or not. Worse of all, that mother is in no way equal to the mother of the womb or to the mother of the symbiosis he or she may have had. Depending on how she has lived the loss, and of her resources for compensation, the outcomes for the child may range from a strong regression to womb (autistic types) to a partial repair of the lost symbiosis (psychosis types). It is to be remarked that the mother may be also the victim of external pressures or acts before, during and after delivery separating her from the newborn at the crucial moment of bonding, making her unvoluntarily a rejecting mother, an event we call here neonate kidnapping.
Without symbiosis, the mother cannot bear the natural demands of the child: sucking, being carried, sleeping with the child at more or less the same rhythm. Nor she has the automatic anticipated response to his needs since the rate of transference is very low compared to the mother of the symbiosis who knows what is happening. She does not understand him or her, and she has doubts as to whether her responses are appropriate. She is overanxious and tends to 'think over' the child or refers to paediatric help and dogma for lack of the inner feelings of what he or she experiences. She does not bear breast feeding and the necessary care for the newborn rapidly overburdens her, and she tends to look for mother substitutes.
For the child, the lost bond with a symbiotic mother produces an autistic organisation, with recurrent attempts to reform, or to form, the symbiosis. These demands are generally not 'heard' as such by the mother and interpreted as 'difficult child'. The child may revert to autism, i.e. womb states, in various ways or try to create a symbiosis on a substitute.
In some cases, symbiosis does not happen, the child organises itself in isolation and refuses too close interaction. It is a state akin to some forms of autism, even though vitality has set on during delivery. Vitality may be high or may have been withdrawn in order to minimise the threat of bursts of violence which are common to this type.
In other cases, the child will try and use a substitute for a tentative symbiosis. The substitute can be the mother herself, here an adoptive mother, the father, a nurse or a parent figure. As the substitute cannot function as a symbiotic mother, in all cases it will be a partial and problematic symbiosis that he or she faces. Aberrant symbioses of those kinds are a torment to the child. He or she will be asked to behave as 'normal' children, from birth on, and especially later when reaching the age of school, in order to gratify the parents. But on the contrary, the unbonded child will seek constantly regression to infancy stages, mostly the newborn stage or even the womb stage, in order to reclaim what he or she has not got (bonding and symbiosis) and try a repair. He or she will be misunderstood, and the incongruent demands of the parents will be new attacks on his or her already frail structure.
The father imprint is somewhat more elusive than that of the mother and thus not so readily described. Furthermore, in therapy settings, being more concealed than the obvious mother complex, it tends to appear at a later time and many unfinished therapies do not show its features.
The father imprint is got on the father's side by the shock of birth, of getting a child full of vitality in his own hands, suddenly connecting the strong emotional fact with his own participation in procreation some 9 months earlier, or in the whole life with his consort on a more general plane. This shock is necessary and generates a processes of care and tenderness for the neonate, but also towards the mother who plunges into symbiosis with the child and becomes as needing as the child himself. It is very obvious that the mother cannot live the symbiosis if the father does not create around the mother a safe cradle for the nurturing process.
On the child's side, being in symbiosis with the mother, he perceives the father and the father's role only through the mother, who to him is but an extension of himself. The presence of the desire for a man, or rather the quality in the mother that he (the child) is not the only one and not sufficient to fulfil her is the trace of the father's presence and of the great world beyond. Safety for the child comes from the knowing, through the mother's sentiments, that there is a world beyond her which surpasses her. The other side of it is that his own existence is somehow mysteriously linked to the presence of the father the mother needs so much. That is the father's imprint for the child: safety for the mother, therefore safety for himself, and mysterious sexual origin of self.
When this imprint is absent, the child feels engulfed in an undefined and indefinite matrix without bounds nor law and overpowerful over him. He or she has no clue for the fact of his own existence. He comes from nowhere and may 'pictograph' [Piera Aulagnier] any fantasy about that matrix. Depending on the structure and of the state of the mother, he or she has either an infinite power over her or none at all, both being equally threatening. Either he is monstrously powerful, or monstrously impotent. He feels alone and terrorised. Terrorised by his own desires and violence, or by the violence of the world (the mother) around him.
Feeding with a complacent mother may seem a bonus for a while, but a 'sufficiently good mother' as Donald Winnicot calls her, without a man can not separate from the child. It seems a natural fact that a mother, a bonded mother, does not possess in herself the faculty of separating from the child in the second year. Without the sex drive and the social drive, she is likely to cling to the symbiosis and try and extend it eternally, using various devices to achieve it. It is not rare to meet symbiotic mothers having 'abnormal', or rather unnatural symbioses, with their child, at any age between infancy and 40 or 50 years, thus both stuck and imprisoned at some stage of his first year of life. A mother, whatever her feeding, carrying and nurturing aptitude, cannot have a normal dissolution of the symbiosis she has with her child, even a natural symbiosis, if she does not have a strong sexual (and social) drive. And this is felt from the very first days by the neonate and is a guarantee of his later freeing. If this is not felt, he is in danger and somehow knows that he is caught in something terrible: he cannot grow independent.
Thus, the absence of the father, not the physical father, but the sexual drive and social drive inside the mother is paramount in bringing to the child the feeling that separation is wanted and possible.
Regularly, the absent father device is born by the mother who unconsciously cannot tolerate the presence of a man besides her. She then uses many devices to achieve living without being bothered by the sexual consort and his permanent lust for her. She can fantasy a love affair, have one or marry with a weak man, an alcoholic or an addict, an inaccessible man, a married man or even not approach one and fancy a parthenogenetic life. She can use a number of stratagems to avoid the crucial moments of genital encounter even without naming what is wrong with 'that'. Actually, she can eliminate of her inner life all trace of what is sexual in man and man's lust. In that way, she has all the power as mother to shelter the child from the father, that is her own desire for a man, the real sexual cause his or her origin.
This is the reason why the absent father imprint is often mistaken for the absence of the real father as the source of psychosis, when one does not take into account that it is in fact the refusal or denial of sex of the mother which produces it. Of course, her consort accepts to play the part he is given and is also instrumental in the problem.
The father's role in creating the good conditions for mothering is also important: it relaxes the mother and prevents her anxiety to flood the child. The father has to provide a 'womb' around the mother for her to nurture. This is the natural consequence of the shock at birth which creates the father in him. If he does not transform on this occasion, he will very soon be burdened by a mother-child 'autistic' cell he will be unable to penetrate and has to provide for. There are chances he will unconsciously rejects them and nourishes wishes of abandonment or destruction. There are also motives of jealousy in unbonded fathers due to the fact that the child is given (even imaginarily) the attention he has not got in his own childhood. Jealousy is invariably associated with impulses of murder. All of this carries a menace on the mother she will respond to at least by anxiety and at most by retaliation, which may even be redirected to the child.
One may say also that the lack of trust of a woman for the ability of a man to stand by her and to provide for her absolute safety during the pregnancy and symbiosis period may be sufficient to prevent her to bond to her child at birth.
Of course, in that case, the child feels and records all this turmoil or worse. He or she has to take steps to shelter from it while at the same time being in the impossibility to reject the parents, and he or she will even try to repair both of them when old enough.
Other accidental imprinting can occur, the most frequent of which is the inversion of the two major ones. Sweetness of desire, easiness of pleasuring, and later the force and transforming effect of lust take their root in early bonding, carrying and nurturing, in the necessary body-to-body relationship between infant and mother. Pleasure and enjoyment come from the ability to let-go in states of arousal, originating from body stimulation in the absolute safety of the mother's lap. Later, in the adult, pleasure transforms into joy. Law, comes from the absolute limit to the enjoyment of the child of the mother the father imprint carries. That father impact enforces the taboo of enjoying the body of the other. Therefore, Pleasure/Lust and Law are two ends of the same structure, one corresponding to the bonding-feeding-carrying imprint, the second to the end of symbiosis, guarantee of autonomy and limit to omnipotence of the father imprint.
Some individuals show evidence of an inversion: seeking enjoyment becomes a rule and rules are taken as play and ridiculed. The French psychoanalyst Jean Clavreul [Le désir et la loi, Denoël, Paris] following Joël Dor [Structure et Perversions, Denoël, Paris] and Jacques Lacan has shown that this inversion is structural and entrains many traits common to the perversion disorders.
Here we use this approach and define perversion as a disorder where Pleasure and Law are one in the place of the other. This defines a structure opposite to neurosis where those imprints are in their natural place. It can be shown that the denial of the difference of the sexes often taken as characteristic of perversion is a consequence of that inversion of major imprints.
Perversion is the structure where Pleasure is in the place of the Law and Law in the place of Pleasure.
Note that for an adult, pleasure and enjoyment have given place to satisfaction and ultimately joy. Law has been integrated as reason and ethics. Therefore, perversion structured types seek avoidance of the passage transformation and evasion of all adult commitment even when pretending to do so. Taboos are not denied, but derided.
The antisocial syndrome viewed from the structural perspective may be thought as one of the many variants of the autistic-psychotic disorders matrix. The 'leitmotiv' of the antisocial personality is: denial, defiance, violation. The salient trait is that of lack of reaction to the other's needs, suffering and distress, or even to the other as a human being, and more precisely the absence of reciprocity of feeling in relationships. This trait shows either that the 'emotional cell' (primary register) has not built up, (absence of 'affect') also common in psychotic types, or that transfer of contents do not occur in interaction, which is rare in psychotic types. Also common is the omnipotence and intolerance to a real other. However, the reaction system (originary register) in the antisocial case is somewhat different from that of the the autistic or psychotic types. If one wants gross rules of reactions, the psychopath attacks and destroys, the psychotic flies and evades, and the autistic individual retracts and withdraws within. When pressed to extreme by the context, these reactions can appear in the any of those types.
The typical originary scene is an absent father, both physically and ethologically, and a very indulgent mother, usually overwhelmed. The originary imprints are both absent, as is also the case in most psychotic types, but there must be something specific so that the reaction to socialisation be of such style. This is still open to debate: there are so few therapies of psychopaths having gone as far as regression in the originary register that we have still not been able to investigate such cases.
When one at least of the imprints is absent or erroneous, there is no chance of developing to this stage ('genital stage' in Freudian psychosexual terms, 'adolescence' in Ericksonian psychosocial terms), 'fixation' occurs from the necessity to fulfil early programs before advancing to the next step, and the adolescent experiences a fight to stand up and achieve standard requirements in a complicated environment while the pressure of sex boosts all emotional activities. This fact may be one of the many reasons why the occidental societies have dropped the passage structure.
An adolescent having had both Mother and Father imprints may show a firm and confident structuring and a good ability to cope with others, groups and challenges without signs of breakdown nor depression. He has an efficient emotional system to release unwanted tensions, and may be designated as a neurotic structure. However, he or she still needs the confrontation to sex, marital and children raising problems, and to the loss of the children motivations of power and play to get the adult's motivations of satisfaction, duty, potentiality and reverence to nature. If no transformation happens at that age, we recall that it needs not only the impact of the parents but also that of the society, the young adult will grow and cope, but will be unable to get rid of the motivations of childhood of power, play and pleasure which will then subtend all his goals and all his activities. His or her problem will then be the delay or even the prevention of maturing and the difficulty to face the obligations and commitments normal to the adult age. He or she will have difficulties also in integrating group and individual necessities and will tend to see them as conflicting.
Finally, it is good to recall that children are very able and compliant and have innate procedures to mend themselves. Therefore most emotional disorders, can weaken and subside provided the context allows it. Even faulty imprinting can, in principle at least, repair itself in some way: the whole program tempts to restart and reopen the window for imprinting; a correct or better imprint than the originary one can be tempted with some chances of success. It takes careful and attentive, cheerful and assertive parents to help a child repair him- or herself of early trauma. They may be compared to the 'sufficiently good parents' of the English school. They must understand that all regressions of a child are attempts to return to a former stage where some event got stuck and demands for a fulfilling of former basic needs. They will respond to these needs and not question the child on this. They do not put exigencies on him which he cannot meet owing to bad handling in the past, and in particularly not press him for school results until he has completely overcome his affective problems.
However, if mis-imprinting is due not to mishandling from the staff or family around the mother and father but to emotional disorders of the parents themselves, the affective environment of the child will remain similar to that of his birth, and the difficulties he endures will pass unobserved, add to the 'burden' those parents endure, and will be met with as little attention as before or even worse: fight. This is the case of the pathogenic families which are described in most textbooks: one does not describe the root of the problem but its consequence and extension in the later stages of development. The pathogenic family 'at work' does not destroy the child, it continues the destruction of the neonate started at birth with other means. Abuse is regularly the continuation of early destructive work. One shows readily in structural therapies that the menace and persecution of the child is but the recall of an apocalypse which has already happened.
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