The Mother's Signature
Excerpts
CHAPTER 1
The Mother’s Signature
For each thing manifests its mother, which thus gives the
essence and the will to the form.
— JACOB BOEHME,
The Signature of All Things
All sciences strive to find the origin of the problem they’re
investigating. We always turn to origins—it is in our
nature. There is no doubt in my mind that with man’s
very
first breath he wondered about the origin of the world about
him: the sun, moon, planets, oceans, mountains, trees, and
meadows. The when, how, why. It is the “why” that
most stirs the imagination toward the inner world, evoking
daunting possibilities of forces greater than mankind, more
daunting than some care to think.
No sooner was psychoanalysis discovered than the thrust of
exploration ran progressively toward origins. In a little
while the child came into view as a proper vehicle for investigation
and study. Analysts examined and thought about infancy, just
as the physical scientists scraped away at the physical universe,
picking and poking in the incessant endeavor to discover
the where, when, how, and why.
By
now countless theories about mental functioning and personality
development, and about childhood and infancy, have been set
forth. Tools from many physical disciplines have been brought
into the field of analysis, aiding us as we investigate the
infant in all
the physical and physiological ways possible. But, as analysts,
we have to have faith in the tools of our profession. We
must have the conviction of there being an unconscious and
a conscious, and there being entities called dreams which
can lead us to all the answers we want to know. If we pursue
with purity the method of dream analysis discovered by Freud1,
we find that the dream is the Rosetta stone of inner mental
life—or so my experience has taught me.
My experience has also taught me that all emotional illness
is based upon the relationship between mother and infant,
from the moment of conception—and even before the infant
is conceived, for the mother already has a plan, albeit unconscious,
that she will execute upon her future child. This is beyond
the conscious fantasies she may harbor, the way all of us
harbor dreams of the future. What the unsuspecting woman
does not know is that the plan was already executed upon
her. She has no choice other than to pass it on to her children.
This process has such fixity that one may say it has a genetic
quality. One can do nothing about it psychologically. Even
so, I have found that analyzing even that which appears to
be instinctual will yield to psychoanalytic exploration.
Since all analysts begin learning their profession by dealing
with the adult, there is often a reluctance and fear on the
student’s part in dealing with children, unless one
is doing a child analysis course. Specialization in this
area requires additional years of training, and few analysts
are willing to spend extra time in this area. I do not think
specialization is necessary, however, for in view of my work
I have come to the conclusion that there is no such entity
as adult analysis.
The
adult part of the patient before us does not need analyzing.
An adult can get dressed, drive a car, shop for food, do
work, and so on. Wherever adult function is impaired, there
infantile trauma has been. Pathological mechanisms rush to
the wounded site the way leukocytes rush to a wound. Only
we do not see the blood, the swelling, or the heat, for this
process all takes place in the mind, which is so vast as
to be capable of containing and even concealing much trauma
and pathology. Of course, if the damage is too great, symptoms
will emerge that the defense mechanisms no longer can contain.
All emotional illness has its origin in infancy, and all
illnesses can be traced to the infant’s relationship
with first the mother and then the other members of the family.
It follows then that there is no such thing as an adult analysis,
for adult qualities and functions do not need analysis in
the main. One is simply, and constantly, analyzing the infant
in the adult— though there is no doubt that analyzing
infantile expressions of pathology in the person will always
improve adult functioning. To talk about these issues intellectually
with the patient is of no use, for only when the infantile
core, which is the emotional core, is available can something
be done through interpretations.
As a matter of survival, all infants have to ensure that
their mothers will live. It has become clearer and clearer
to me that babies’ minds have to split almost at birth,
maybe even before, in order to accommodate a mother who is
beset by emotional disturbances—and, of course, who
among us is not beset by emotional disturbances. To ensure
the survival of the mother, the infant has to become his
or her mother. Then the infant knows that he or she will
live. All of this is unconscious in the baby’s mind,
and though the infant feels that a big problem has been solved,
which it has not been, the infant will indeed live. The consequences
that follow will trail the infant all the rest of its life,
for he or she will have a life-long identification of being
the mother. The mind will be split, and the entity the baby
was supposed to be will never come into existence.
If there is not too much damage in early infantile life,
one can live out one’s life relatively well or less
well, depending on the vicissitudes given one. However, when
the damage is too great, the infant is forced to give up
its own pristine potential self in order to
survive. The task of analysis is for us to reach that well-defended
and often hidden part and begin to set it free. This is not
easily done. The patient will resist the analysis in a myriad
of ways. And the sicker the patient is—that is, the
greater the split—the greater the identification with
the mother will be. It is sometimes so great that the patient
is, for all practical purposes, the mother, and there is
no patient.
Some ten to fifteen years ago I was analyzing a young woman
who was very constricted, a constriction that covered a very
infantile personality, all of which was hidden by an organized,
professional stance. Professions hide much, as we all know.
This woman delivered a baby in the course of her analysis,
and it was a terrifying experience for her. So much so that
she returned to the analysis within one week, driven by her
anxiety. She walked into my office with a tiny baby in her
arms. She sat on the couch, holding the baby awkwardly and
away from her body. It looked as if she were holding something
dangerous, something she needed to rid herself of immediately.
The baby cried loudly, incessantly. I felt like getting up
and taking the baby myself, but I did not. The patient began
telling me her dream amid the squalling noises of the infant,
who was lying now with her back arched. I listened to the
material, trying to concentrate on the patient’s words.
When I felt I understood the dream in relation to the patient’s
associations, I made an interpretation. The dream and interpretation
are as follows.
She said, “I had to do something and as time went by
I became more and more frantic for I could not find out what
it was I had to do and I thought if I did not, something
terrible would happen to me. I wake up, my heart beating
fast, sweating.”
I said to this woman, as she held her week-old infant in
her hands, that what she didn’t know how to do was
to be a mother; and I asked her to look at how she was holding
her child, almost at arm’s length. On hearing my comments,
she folded the baby into the crook of her arm. To my surprise,
as soon as I spoke, the baby quieted down and fell asleep.
I watched as the baby relaxed and fell into a deep sleep.
Her face lost its redness and became pink. Then the patient
relaxed and leaned against the wall. This happened regularly
for the next six months, without fail. Every interpretation
quieted the baby and when she relaxed the mother did as well.
That was the beginning of my understanding that talking to
the mother was talking to the baby. There seemed to be no
barrier between the two. It was a matter of two hearts in
consonance, but with one mind, the mother’s. Later,
other young women analysands brought their babies, often
for lack of a babysitter, and the same thing would occur.
Even with older children, interpretations made to the mother
always affected and quieted the child.
You see, I was to discover that the baby has been imprinted
with the mother, imprinted in the way it is to live and to
die. We are all imprinted in these early moments and hours
of life. Konrad Lorenz found this to be true of birds and
other species, and I say it is true of humankind as well.
The principle is the same. It is simply the law of economy
at work. We hide our imprinting by our brains, by our intelligence,
but a deep analysis uncovers surely and slowly beyond our
technical knowledge and our cleverness the simple fact of
our being imprinted. All things in the world, all creatures,
have their signature. What is DNA except an imprinting device—so
simple, but capable of great diversity? The fact that we
are imprinted is not to be scorned or rejected or fought
against. It is the nature of being, and we take our place
in the universe as one of the creatures with the greatest
potentiality for evolution—that is, if we can get past
an imprinting that leaves us crippled, passive, frustrated,
and bent on self-destruction.
Now it is clear that every person’s problem in life
is not the Oedipal struggle. The problem is in how to find
the spark of the self that one was supposed to be as one
came into existence, and the central issue is how to become
oneself, and break free of the mother’s imprint. It
is over this issue that the patient puts up the greatest
struggle. Confronting this fundamental conflict is the most
frightening task for the patient and for every human being.
Cure can only come about when there is a transformation.
The patient has to repudiate all the emotional connections
that are attached to the maternal imprint2 not by saying “I
let you go,” but by living an emotional letting go,
which may take a very long time.
It is only through a renunciation of the false self that
a true transformation ensues. Short of this, if the choice
is made by the patient not to sail on this journey, a fundamental
change, a true transformation, will not be made. Only when
there is evidence in dreams that the patient is fighting
for himself, only when that tiny hidden spark slowly reveals
itself, can we be sure of there being a transformation and
a cure.
When a genius speaks I have always taken it seriously. I
listen with devotion and awe, for these people are imbued
with a touch of what I must call the “divine”—in
the way we regard the great composers, scientists, artists
who have had that incomparable vision. I think Thomas Carlyle,
the Scottish historian, was on the mark when he wrote that
civilization is the history of those few geniuses whose discoveries
have enlightened mankind, pushing back the powerful envelope
of darkness that constantly threatens to enclose us. Momentous
discoveries have not only brought illumination to mankind,
they have given us hope; they have brought hope of there
being a unity in all phenomena, animate and inanimate, contained
in the world and in the universe.
When
Freud stated he was the most fortunate of men to be given
the secret to the interpretation of dreams, he was absolutely
right. He was given this opportunity and his genius seized
it, for he knew, beyond all doubt, that it held the key to
much of humankind.
My work posits that dreams hold possibilities
that not even Freud wrote of (though we cannot say what he
might have thought or suspected). I understand dreams are
out of fashion, which is paradoxical, for they represent
messages from the unconscious, and analysis is the one discipline
out of all the scientific disciplines that knows how to broach
this leviathan. Without dreams and their understanding there
can be no analysis, and we are flung back a hundred years
to the darkness from which Freud rescued us with his greatest
work, The Interpretation of Dreams.
The unconscious may contain many things that we so far do
not know about. But one thing it does contain without a doubt
is the record of one’s life from the origins of that
life—indeed, even to the formation of that life, egg
and sperm. If one listens properly, these origins can all
be recovered. When a patient tells us a dream, he is tugging
at our sleeve, begging us to hear him out—to understand
his infantile fears and trauma, the imprint that clouds and
conceals his pristine self. In that room and on that couch
he is saying he wants to be aware of his life, to become
open to the secrets of his unconscious. He comes to analysis
because he suffers. He comes because he does not want anymore
to react to his life. He wants to be in his life. When he
opens up the treasure of his unconscious, he will become
greater than what he thought he was before, back when he
was indrawn, constricted, and wearing all the masks that
life has fashioned for us. Masks that cost us our truthfulness,
our simplicity, our essential selves.
The
work of listening to dreams is very difficult, for every
dream carries with it a charge of toxins that makes us weary.
It is not easy to bear the confusion, the disjoint of the
communication—that is, it is not easy to bear the transference
and the hatred that come with this job. The participants
also must have great endurance, and the truth will prevail
only if the patient allows it to, for the patient always
has a choice about how he wishes to live his life. The reward
for the patient is immeasurable: freedom in letting go of
the toxic material that has been lying in his mind, slowly
paralyzing him out of his own life. It is this relief that
gives the patient the impetus to go deeper, to trust more,
to become as a child again and take the hand of the guide.
Here all the strength, the skill and the experience the analyst
can muster are important to hew to the truth of the dream,
for the truth will be contained within it. It is all an analyst
can do. It is the best an analyst can do.
Notes
1. Freud’s method of analyzing
dreams (his use of the day residue, his attempts to gather
detailed associations
to the elements of the dream, etc.) is to be distinguished
from Freud’s wish fulfillment theory regarding the
latent content of each dream. If we follow Freud’s
method, without an a priori theoretical conclusion regarding
the dream’s meaning, then we see that the dream illuminates
a life in its entirety, revealing the truth of that individual’s
being, and more.
2. The maternal imprint
consists of unconscious, unbearably painful feelings and
experiences within the mother,
that
cannot be held within her mind and are thus projected into
her infant’s nascent being. The infant, without a defensive
structure, must then take care of its mother’s unconscious—hold
that unconscious within the infant’s mind—and
in this way become the receptacle for what is unaddressed,
unknown, and unwanted within her. The infant thus becomes
the mother and cannot come into its own unique existence.
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