THE PARENTING PROCESS: A PSYCHOANALYTIC PERSPECTIVE JOAN OFFERMAN-ZUCKERBERG, PH.D.*
Parenthood is undertaken by a majority of human adults. It is a natural, biologically compelling, profound psychological event. It begins with conception and never ends. What continues is an in ternalized set of feelings and thoughts, collective physical and his torical images and sensations, the memories of the pain and joy of attachment. Parenthood changes us in ways mostly unconscious. It affects our identity, our existential sense of ourselves over time and throughout the course of the life cycle. Unlike most events in life, parenthood is irrevocable. Much like birth, aging, and death, we cannot “take it back”; we cannot change our mind. Its irrevocability is biological to the core and fundamentally essential to the survival o f our species. As analysts, we are all constantly immersed in the stuff o f par enting, much as we may think otherwise, and notwithstanding powerful differences between parenthood and psychoanalysis. We make ourselves available as “selfobjects,” to be taken in, digested, and expelled. We are used as reflecting, mirroring agents, affirm ing and confirming our patients’ identities and self systems. We are ingested, identified with, split into good and bad parts, and re belled against. We are emotional containers and catalysts, strug gling to be “there” reliably, fully, steadfastly, a constant emotional center to leave from and return to. As analysts, we try to facilitate the emergence of a separate self. At times, we allow for a kind of benign symbiosis, so as to facili tate subsequent emergent separation and the eventual lifelong pro cess of individuation. We empathize with and care about a broad range of affects arising as they do from a broad range of develop mental needs and deficits. Dynamically speaking, if this isn’t the stuff of parenting, then what is? Our experience of parenthood feeds and informs us as patients, as therapists, as people. It enriches and depletes us. It guides our
♦Brooklyn Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Journal of The American Academy o f Psychoanalysis, 20(2), 205-214,1992 © 1992 The American Academy of Psychoanalysis
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understanding, and it can contaminate our receptivity. As ana lysts, parenthood sets us up for critical sensitivities and coun tertransference reactions, both accurately empathic and, at times, problematic. In the parent-child relationship, as in the therapeutic alliance, the special processes that constitute and precede “empathic attunement,” that is, bonding, attachment, “selfobject transformations,” ongoing internalizations, and subsequent boundary differentia tions, are critical and irreplaceable. They have a unique status in the realm of human communication. In analytic work, we are offered the opportunity to reshape, through what is called a modi fied transference, the course of development. Freud (1937) spoke of “after-education,” the correcting of parental mistakes (p. 175). The amount of analytic “influence,” Freud continues, is deter mined by the degree of “developmental inhibition” present in the patient (Freud, 1937, p. 175). Now we speak of therapeutic activity being gauged by the degree of developmental arrest, need, or defi cit: we say that parameters of treatment must be flexibly suited to individual requirements and can change throughout the course of treatment. While there are certain parallels between parenting tasks and our work, there are as well, of course, powerful differences. De pending on one’s school of analytic thought, these differences may be more or less critical. As parents, most of us attempt both to undo and redo, both to reenact and recreate the parenting we “wished” we had had, and to create the child we wish we had been. Aside from satisfying physical needs, we make ourselves available as role models; we attempt to provide guidance, direction, advice, and nurturance; we impart values consciously and unconsciously. Our children provide us with an opportunity to work through the pain, deprivations, and limitations of our own past. Our uncon scious gets recycled. Fundamental to all of this is bonding, the creation of an enduring tie with our offspring over the course of a lifetime. (As children get older, increasing autonomy does not have to preclude close object ties.) Rooted in our biological heritage and essential to survival is this bond: Mothers of various primate species, apes in this case, have been known to tend dead babies for days, to retrieve them, protect them, and carry them until only skin and skeleton remain. After finally abandoning dead infants,
PARENTING 207 chimpanzee mothers are reported to look intently at other infants for sever al days. (Carpentier, 1942)
The prolonged helplessness and dependency of the human in fant dictates that attachment be powerful and enduring. An essen tial qualification of human attachment is its interactive nature, its mutuality. The baby is born following the mother’s urge to push; the nursing infant satisfies its hunger by stimulating the breast of the mother, relieving tension from accumulated milk and insuring more production. After birth, a biological symbiosis is replaced by a kind of nurturant symbiosis, and bonding acts as a therapeutic neutralizer healing the biological rupture of birth. As a psychotherapist, I incorporate bonding in my work, both consciously and unconsciously. In fact, the relative impact o f the positive therapeutic alliance may rest in part on the positive moth ering experience of the patient and the solidity o f the maternalpaternal bond. The fissures in this foundation—their depth, time of onset, and configuration—will determine, in large part, the nature of pathology, diagnosis, and treatment goals. As psychotherapists, we place “limits” on reenactment. As ther apists, we are healers, facilitators of growth, guides, self-enhanc ers. As analytic psychotherapists, we try to be objective; we try to maintain sufficient separateness to allow for accurate empathic attunement. As parents, this, of course, is very difficult because a good deal of our understanding is based on mutual projective identification, an unconscious process (that is, what we see is in part based on what we need, wish, want). As analytic psychothera pists, we curb our intervention; we carefully monitor the dosage; we are mindful of the degree of closeness and separateness; we are vigilant, we hope, to countertransference signals. As psychoana lytic psychotherapists, we reflect and clarify, interpret and under stand. We know that, in the world outside our office, advice is freely given and seldom useful. Unlike our typical performance in the outside object world, our responses are shaped by an observing ego (difficult in parenting). The fundamental instrument in the work of psychoanalytic psy chotherapy is the person of the therapist. Why is it important, then, to remember, underscore, and study the parenting process, its impact, its influence, its uniqueness? Because, in today’s prac tice, particularly with the increasing amount and/or visibility of borderline, narcissistic pathology, the high divorce rate, and the
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early departure of the mother into the workforce (and its impact on the family), we are using more “actively” the “tools” o f the good-enough parent in our work. What, then, can we say of this phenomenon called parenthood, so readily engaged, so naturally occurring, and so very unconscious? What are some of the com monly reported experiences and emotional repercussions that go into this dramatic “intrapsychic shift”? What are some o f the sal ient features o f the parenting experience? What makes such a pow erfully unique and irreplaceable human passage? As a psychoanalytic psychotherapist for the past 20 years, I have listened to many variations on parenting dilemmas in my patients and in myself. On becoming a parent, I began to listen differently. My identifications deepened and changed—from child to mother, from career to home (and to the inevitable rich integrative balance one achieves). Many highly emotional psychodynamic issues are lived out in parenting, reverberations o f which are felt throughout a lifetime. In this article, I will underscore the following unique dynamics of parenting: (1) the transformation of unconscious wish into real ity; (2) the experience of bonding, attachment, and separation; (3) the learning of empathy; (4) the struggle to love and the negotia tion of firm and flexible boundaries; and (5) the change in our understanding of ourselves. TRANSFORMATION OF UNCONSCIOUS WISH INTO REALITY Perhaps most dramatic and illustrative of the special dynamics of parenthood is the experience of One’s wish(es) and fantasies turning into a fleshly reality that can, in turn, shape another’s life. (Remember for a moment the story of Freud’s dreams when Mar tha was pregnant with his daughter Anna, for Anna was to be the famous one.) Awareness of these wishes can be an important ad junct to fashioning one’s life. The transformation of a wish for a child into reality is often met with an initial feeling of unreality. In the words of one of my patients, the new mother of a baby girl, “Most of the time, there is a feeling of unreality that she’s really mine. It’s so difficult to believe that my pregnancy and Sarah are one and the same . . . the first few weeks I marveled all the time at the miracle of life.” What begins as a wish buried deep in child hood, oedipally fashioned, and waiting to be realized, travels
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through conception and quickening—a physical hint of life—to birth—rupture, loss, psychic gain, another human being. THE EXPERIENCE OF BONDING, ATTACHMENT, AND SEPARATION Forming attachments, and learning to let go, are essential ingre dients of our humanness. As my patient relates, I hug Sarah and say a prayer for her health and safety. She is so inno cent, so trusting, I think about her getting older and becoming more inde pendent and that scares me a little—no, it scares me a lot. Right now, I can only think of her as a baby. . . . It’s hard to imagine her as a walking, talking person.
In attaching, we learn the basic alphabet of human emotion, from joy to despair, from love to hate. The closer the attachment, the more powerful the ambivalence, it seems. We become sensi tized to the different forms of attachment, the ties that keep indi viduals together. What becomes clear and important is that we be bonded to people (our children, our spouse, our patients) through good and benign affects, rather than through anger, disappoint ment, and rage. These latter can, perversely enough, prove to be the basis of attachments that bind and inhibit the person, just think of parents who are infantilizing and what this does to a child’s autonomy. Basic then, to humans is the need to attach. Bowlby’s (1973) naturalistic observations of nonhuman primates further remind us of the deep-rootedness of this biological imperative. He talks of the “lost piping” of young ducklings who have temporarily lost a mother figure. When left alone, patas monkeys screamed with wide open mouths and distorted faces. When separated from our loved ones, protests are biologically intense and powerful; when reunited, we cling. An ongoing wish in adulthood is to be reunited in blissful symbiotic harmony with the mother, perhaps the foun dation of love, “the primordial transference” (Stone, 1961). Bowlby (1973) argues for what is called “primary object cling ing” theory: “There is in infants an in-built propensity to be in touch with and to cling to a human being. In this sense, there is a ‘need’ for an object independent of food, which is as primary as the need for food and warmth.” Added to this search is the very early disturbing recognition that all is not perfection. The infant’s
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mother is unique and irreplaceable, whereas the infant is replace able, by another infant, by other people, and by other activities. And this constitutes an introduction to reality. (In analysis, this situation is revisited through the idealized analyst who sees other patients, has a personal life, and may have other professional activities.) The new infant, in its need for constant attachment, can bring fatigue and depletion. For many parents, the achieving of an inte grative balance between love of the baby and healthy narcissism (love and commitment to oneself), becomes a difficult and impor tant task. Even this process is interactive. My patient speaks of Sarah’s smile, “a smile that makes the earth move,” that can help dispel the fatigue that comes with sleepless nights. As gratifica tions increase, the tasks that were once laborious become less so. How important it is to know that the energy drain that comes through the early nurturant symbiosis lightens once an emotional and mutually gratifying nonverbal dialogue is established between mother and child. Questions like, Does she know me? represent the yearning for recognition, the desire to be known—not under stood, just known—as a separate someone. This experience is shared in many ways in our practice, in parenting and in psy choanalysis. With attachment comes separation and inevitable conflicts. In today’s world, we confront a wide range of complex intrapsychic and interpersonal conflicts regarding separation from children. As clinicians we are more concerned if separation does not bring some ambivalence, some sadness, some sense of loss. The balance be tween parental self-actualization, economic realities, and good parenting is difficult to achieve and requires, as we know, self understanding and the willingness and ability to make rather dra matic intrapsychic shifts, on a daily basis, as roles prescribe. The power of attachment and its vulnerability to contamination by inside and outside forces, was poignantly illustrated in the MaryBeth Whitehead case, in which the real plausibility of surrogate motherhood was called into question. But we needn’t look to the dramatic extreme to be impressed by the power of human attach ment and difficulty of separation. It is at the heart of our work, the heart of our emotional life. Without a keen appreciation of the emotional range that underscores attachment and loss, we cannot begin to understand the mother who spanks a lost child upon finding him, even after only a minute of separation. Where were
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you? she cries, afraid, furious, and relieved all at once. This is the stuff of attachment and separation, the reality o f grief and mourn ing, the language of love and anger. LEARNING EMPATHY From mental wish to powerful attachment, through eventual sep aration and psychic loss, comes the learning of empathy, the ability effectively to understand the other—through feeling, thinking, sens ing, intuiting—without fearing a loss of boundaries or a threat to one’s own self system. I think of a patient who felt ashamed that she could not feel pleased about her high school daughter going to Italy on a special tour. In fact, she felt envy. She talked about her de prived childhood, her critical father, her mother who made her feel “bad” inside, not enough, ugly, awkward. As a result, she thought herself a failure as a mother. After having explored these issues in some depth and over a period of time, the patient, in a subsequent session, said how excited she was at the airport to see her daughter return. She related what a rich experience it had been for her daugh ter, how proud she felt of her daughter’s courage to leave, and how satisfying it was as a parent to be able to provide this experience. Critical here, in terms o f clinical intervention, were the empathic interpretations aimed at clarifying the roots and reasons for her envy and the attendant maternal shame and self-loathing. She bene fited from the understanding that deprivation fuels envy and that her daughter’s ability to enjoy this separation was, in part, testimo ny to her own ability not to repeat her past by imposing the same constraints on her daughter’s autonomy that she had experienced in her own childhood. When she left this session, the patient, in an uncharacteristic gesture, grabbed my arm and kissed me, saying, “Thank you, Joan.” She was grateful for being able to feel happy for her child, to feel proud, to empathize. These feelings had not been able to emerge before some layers of envy, rage, guilt, and shame had been removed. The wishes to empathize and to be understood are powerful forces in human nature, ones that originate in early infancy, per haps in the womb. They are curative forces in psychotherapy, more fundamentally perhaps, in human society at large. In parenting, our capacities to empathize are developed and tested; my patient speaks of being able to feel in ways unknown to her before Sarah.
212 OFFERMAN-ZUCKERBERG I think about babies who come into the world without anyone to love them, and I cry for them. 1 have always been an emotional person, but now if I read the newspaper or listen to the news and hear about a baby who has been mistreated or is sick, I start to cry.
Existential guilt that arises in part out of empathy for others is a powerful affect in parenthood. A patient talks about wanting a better marriage. He is an orthodox Jewish man who works as an insurance salesman. He has four daughters; three have been mar ried off. He has spoken of his agony; his marriage is saturated with sexual rejection, deprivation, rage, and accusation. He wants, at age SO, to end the marriage but feels that his youngest daughter’s chances o f finding a suitable partner would be damaged. The conflict is powerful; the guilt is overwhelming. Here is a passionate man, a devoted father, and a deeply religious individual, tor mented by a classical conflict between an empathic conscience and the wish to be fulfilled himself. The very foundations of empathy reside in the parenting experi ence. The wonderful signs of early maternal empathy make up part of the common experience we share and perhaps draw from in memory and in clinical work. In fact, the biological, physical, psychological interplay in the responses of mothers to infants— both intra- and extrauterine—such as lactation in response to the infant’s hunger, sleep arousal in response to the infant’s cries, the mother’s tears in response to the infant’s, are nature’s way o f insur ing the symbiosis necessary to the growth of attachment, the devel opment of parental identity, and the well-being of the infant. The parent’s empathic response to the developing child, however chore ographed, however imperfect, becomes the original ego graft, the armature around which growth and cohesion of the self proceed.
THE STRUGGLE TO LOVE Perhaps the most important lesson that parenting provides is in the dynamics of love, for it is out of this primary bond that the potential for love becomes a capacity and then a reality (Bowlby, 1973). Like Harlow’s motherless monkeys, a generation of future child abusers would be the likely outcome of parental deprivation. The accuracy of empathy determines the eventual emergence of a solid core self, one capable of loving another and of being loved, and it is out of this loving that intimacy is forged. We are reminded
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of the Schopenhauer parable: One wintry day, a couple o f chilled porcupines tried to huddle close together for warmth, but they found that they pricked each other with their quills. They moved apart and were cold again. After much experimentation, the por cupines found the distance at which they could give each other some warmth without too much sting. Leopold Beliak referred to this dynamic of closeness and distance as the “porcupine dilemma” (1976). How close can we get to one another without hurt? How do we negotiate the boundaries o f self and other? How do we achieve intimacy without loss of autonomy? These are the conflicts of today, an age in which freedom and choice present a new kind of existential burden, a burden that, if not handled well, can become a new form o f bondage. In parenting we teach our children and ourselves learn much about love’s struggle. By providing sufficient attachment, accurate empathy, predictability, and constancy, we are making it possible for love to continue. The degree o f our failure will determine in large part the degree of our children’s struggle to love in adulthood. Our patients and our children in form us of this truth constantly in complaints such as I can’t trust, I will be rejected, I will be engulfed, I will be criticized, I will be abandoned, I will be infantilized, I will be idealized, I will be destroyed. CHANGING SENSE OF SELF The prerequisite to healthy object relations is found in a goodenough childhood. Parenthood begins with a wish, gets fleshed out, shaped, and deepened in attachment, tested and buffeted by separation and loss. It redefines us and places us existentially in a new slot. Sarah’s mother speaks: “My mother [was telling] me something that I did when I was a baby, just about Sarah’s age. I thought to myself, how bizarre it is that I am an adult with a child of my own, relating to my mother as an equal, and yet I was once her baby.” Thoughtfully, my patient reviewed the new arrange ments: I am the Mommy, Bryan is the Daddy, my parents are Grandma and Grandpa. I hear myself say, ‘Sarah, smile for Grandma’ and I think of my .own Grandma. And when someone asks me how it feels to be a Mommy, I think they’re referring to my mother. I guess it takes a while to get used to these new roles. It’s as if everyone moved up a notch on the totem pole.
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Parenting thrusts us into this unconscious recycling process. Like analysts, parents are participants in a world marked by un conscious time, that is, timelessness. This is expressed in a song lyric from “Fiddler on the Roof,” “sunrise, sunset, swiftly fly the years, Seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers. . . . One season fol lowing another. . . . Wasn’t it yesterday that they were smal l . . . ” (Harnick, Bock and Hammerstein, 1964). Our children become unconscious targets of projection, sym bolization, condensation, and displacement. We engage them in mutual projective identification, and we attempt to disengage, to see more clearly, to interact more responsively, accurately, and empathically, to be in objective time. With our patients, we journey through the maze of inevitable disappointment, rage, and rejection. We accuse our parents; we assail ourselves. In coming to understand, albeit slowly, sometimes we can forgive. And, as we forgive, we enter into a new existential contract, one marked by the absurdity of human repetition, the weakness of all heros, the vulnerability of all selves, and the knowledge that what we do as parents and as clinicians to under stand, to heal, is an effort to make sense of it all and to make it a little better for those who follow. References Beliak, L. (1970), The Porcupine Dilemma: Reflections on the H uman C ondition, Citadel Press, New York. Bowlby, J. (1973), A ttachm ent and Loss: Separation A nxiety and A nger (Vol. 2), Basic Books, New York. Carpentier, C. S. (1942), Societies of monkeys and apes, Biol. Sym pos., 8 , 177-204. Freud, S. (1937), Techniques of psychoanalysis, Standard E dition, Vol. 23, pp. 172-182. Harnick, S., Bock, J., and Hammerstein, O., Ill (1964), Sunrise, sunset (from Fiddler on the Roof). Stone, L. (1961), The Psychoanalytic Situation, International Universities Press, New York.
36 Montgomery Place Brooklyn, NY 11215
Parenthood is undertaken by a majority of human adults. It is a natural, biologically compelling, profound psychological event. It begins with conception and never ends. What continues is an in ternalized set of feelings and thoughts, collective physical and his torical images and sensations, the memories of the pain and joy of attachment. Parenthood changes us in ways mostly unconscious. It affects our identity, our existential sense of ourselves over time and throughout the course of the life cycle. Unlike most events in life, parenthood is irrevocable. Much like birth, aging, and death, we cannot “take it back”; we cannot change our mind. Its irrevocability is biological to the core and fundamentally essential to the survival o f our species. As analysts, we are all constantly immersed in the stuff o f par enting, much as we may think otherwise, and notwithstanding powerful differences between parenthood and psychoanalysis. We make ourselves available as “selfobjects,” to be taken in, digested, and expelled. We are used as reflecting, mirroring agents, affirm ing and confirming our patients’ identities and self systems. We are ingested, identified with, split into good and bad parts, and re belled against. We are emotional containers and catalysts, strug gling to be “there” reliably, fully, steadfastly, a constant emotional center to leave from and return to. As analysts, we try to facilitate the emergence of a separate self. At times, we allow for a kind of benign symbiosis, so as to facili tate subsequent emergent separation and the eventual lifelong pro cess of individuation. We empathize with and care about a broad range of affects arising as they do from a broad range of develop mental needs and deficits. Dynamically speaking, if this isn’t the stuff of parenting, then what is? Our experience of parenthood feeds and informs us as patients, as therapists, as people. It enriches and depletes us. It guides our
♦Brooklyn Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Journal of The American Academy o f Psychoanalysis, 20(2), 205-214,1992 © 1992 The American Academy of Psychoanalysis
206 OFFERMAN-ZUCKERBERG
understanding, and it can contaminate our receptivity. As ana lysts, parenthood sets us up for critical sensitivities and coun tertransference reactions, both accurately empathic and, at times, problematic. In the parent-child relationship, as in the therapeutic alliance, the special processes that constitute and precede “empathic attunement,” that is, bonding, attachment, “selfobject transformations,” ongoing internalizations, and subsequent boundary differentia tions, are critical and irreplaceable. They have a unique status in the realm of human communication. In analytic work, we are offered the opportunity to reshape, through what is called a modi fied transference, the course of development. Freud (1937) spoke of “after-education,” the correcting of parental mistakes (p. 175). The amount of analytic “influence,” Freud continues, is deter mined by the degree of “developmental inhibition” present in the patient (Freud, 1937, p. 175). Now we speak of therapeutic activity being gauged by the degree of developmental arrest, need, or defi cit: we say that parameters of treatment must be flexibly suited to individual requirements and can change throughout the course of treatment. While there are certain parallels between parenting tasks and our work, there are as well, of course, powerful differences. De pending on one’s school of analytic thought, these differences may be more or less critical. As parents, most of us attempt both to undo and redo, both to reenact and recreate the parenting we “wished” we had had, and to create the child we wish we had been. Aside from satisfying physical needs, we make ourselves available as role models; we attempt to provide guidance, direction, advice, and nurturance; we impart values consciously and unconsciously. Our children provide us with an opportunity to work through the pain, deprivations, and limitations of our own past. Our uncon scious gets recycled. Fundamental to all of this is bonding, the creation of an enduring tie with our offspring over the course of a lifetime. (As children get older, increasing autonomy does not have to preclude close object ties.) Rooted in our biological heritage and essential to survival is this bond: Mothers of various primate species, apes in this case, have been known to tend dead babies for days, to retrieve them, protect them, and carry them until only skin and skeleton remain. After finally abandoning dead infants,
PARENTING 207 chimpanzee mothers are reported to look intently at other infants for sever al days. (Carpentier, 1942)
The prolonged helplessness and dependency of the human in fant dictates that attachment be powerful and enduring. An essen tial qualification of human attachment is its interactive nature, its mutuality. The baby is born following the mother’s urge to push; the nursing infant satisfies its hunger by stimulating the breast of the mother, relieving tension from accumulated milk and insuring more production. After birth, a biological symbiosis is replaced by a kind of nurturant symbiosis, and bonding acts as a therapeutic neutralizer healing the biological rupture of birth. As a psychotherapist, I incorporate bonding in my work, both consciously and unconsciously. In fact, the relative impact o f the positive therapeutic alliance may rest in part on the positive moth ering experience of the patient and the solidity o f the maternalpaternal bond. The fissures in this foundation—their depth, time of onset, and configuration—will determine, in large part, the nature of pathology, diagnosis, and treatment goals. As psychotherapists, we place “limits” on reenactment. As ther apists, we are healers, facilitators of growth, guides, self-enhanc ers. As analytic psychotherapists, we try to be objective; we try to maintain sufficient separateness to allow for accurate empathic attunement. As parents, this, of course, is very difficult because a good deal of our understanding is based on mutual projective identification, an unconscious process (that is, what we see is in part based on what we need, wish, want). As analytic psychothera pists, we curb our intervention; we carefully monitor the dosage; we are mindful of the degree of closeness and separateness; we are vigilant, we hope, to countertransference signals. As psychoana lytic psychotherapists, we reflect and clarify, interpret and under stand. We know that, in the world outside our office, advice is freely given and seldom useful. Unlike our typical performance in the outside object world, our responses are shaped by an observing ego (difficult in parenting). The fundamental instrument in the work of psychoanalytic psy chotherapy is the person of the therapist. Why is it important, then, to remember, underscore, and study the parenting process, its impact, its influence, its uniqueness? Because, in today’s prac tice, particularly with the increasing amount and/or visibility of borderline, narcissistic pathology, the high divorce rate, and the
208 OFFERMAN-ZUCKERBERG
early departure of the mother into the workforce (and its impact on the family), we are using more “actively” the “tools” o f the good-enough parent in our work. What, then, can we say of this phenomenon called parenthood, so readily engaged, so naturally occurring, and so very unconscious? What are some of the com monly reported experiences and emotional repercussions that go into this dramatic “intrapsychic shift”? What are some o f the sal ient features o f the parenting experience? What makes such a pow erfully unique and irreplaceable human passage? As a psychoanalytic psychotherapist for the past 20 years, I have listened to many variations on parenting dilemmas in my patients and in myself. On becoming a parent, I began to listen differently. My identifications deepened and changed—from child to mother, from career to home (and to the inevitable rich integrative balance one achieves). Many highly emotional psychodynamic issues are lived out in parenting, reverberations o f which are felt throughout a lifetime. In this article, I will underscore the following unique dynamics of parenting: (1) the transformation of unconscious wish into real ity; (2) the experience of bonding, attachment, and separation; (3) the learning of empathy; (4) the struggle to love and the negotia tion of firm and flexible boundaries; and (5) the change in our understanding of ourselves. TRANSFORMATION OF UNCONSCIOUS WISH INTO REALITY Perhaps most dramatic and illustrative of the special dynamics of parenthood is the experience of One’s wish(es) and fantasies turning into a fleshly reality that can, in turn, shape another’s life. (Remember for a moment the story of Freud’s dreams when Mar tha was pregnant with his daughter Anna, for Anna was to be the famous one.) Awareness of these wishes can be an important ad junct to fashioning one’s life. The transformation of a wish for a child into reality is often met with an initial feeling of unreality. In the words of one of my patients, the new mother of a baby girl, “Most of the time, there is a feeling of unreality that she’s really mine. It’s so difficult to believe that my pregnancy and Sarah are one and the same . . . the first few weeks I marveled all the time at the miracle of life.” What begins as a wish buried deep in child hood, oedipally fashioned, and waiting to be realized, travels
PARENTING 209
through conception and quickening—a physical hint of life—to birth—rupture, loss, psychic gain, another human being. THE EXPERIENCE OF BONDING, ATTACHMENT, AND SEPARATION Forming attachments, and learning to let go, are essential ingre dients of our humanness. As my patient relates, I hug Sarah and say a prayer for her health and safety. She is so inno cent, so trusting, I think about her getting older and becoming more inde pendent and that scares me a little—no, it scares me a lot. Right now, I can only think of her as a baby. . . . It’s hard to imagine her as a walking, talking person.
In attaching, we learn the basic alphabet of human emotion, from joy to despair, from love to hate. The closer the attachment, the more powerful the ambivalence, it seems. We become sensi tized to the different forms of attachment, the ties that keep indi viduals together. What becomes clear and important is that we be bonded to people (our children, our spouse, our patients) through good and benign affects, rather than through anger, disappoint ment, and rage. These latter can, perversely enough, prove to be the basis of attachments that bind and inhibit the person, just think of parents who are infantilizing and what this does to a child’s autonomy. Basic then, to humans is the need to attach. Bowlby’s (1973) naturalistic observations of nonhuman primates further remind us of the deep-rootedness of this biological imperative. He talks of the “lost piping” of young ducklings who have temporarily lost a mother figure. When left alone, patas monkeys screamed with wide open mouths and distorted faces. When separated from our loved ones, protests are biologically intense and powerful; when reunited, we cling. An ongoing wish in adulthood is to be reunited in blissful symbiotic harmony with the mother, perhaps the foun dation of love, “the primordial transference” (Stone, 1961). Bowlby (1973) argues for what is called “primary object cling ing” theory: “There is in infants an in-built propensity to be in touch with and to cling to a human being. In this sense, there is a ‘need’ for an object independent of food, which is as primary as the need for food and warmth.” Added to this search is the very early disturbing recognition that all is not perfection. The infant’s
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mother is unique and irreplaceable, whereas the infant is replace able, by another infant, by other people, and by other activities. And this constitutes an introduction to reality. (In analysis, this situation is revisited through the idealized analyst who sees other patients, has a personal life, and may have other professional activities.) The new infant, in its need for constant attachment, can bring fatigue and depletion. For many parents, the achieving of an inte grative balance between love of the baby and healthy narcissism (love and commitment to oneself), becomes a difficult and impor tant task. Even this process is interactive. My patient speaks of Sarah’s smile, “a smile that makes the earth move,” that can help dispel the fatigue that comes with sleepless nights. As gratifica tions increase, the tasks that were once laborious become less so. How important it is to know that the energy drain that comes through the early nurturant symbiosis lightens once an emotional and mutually gratifying nonverbal dialogue is established between mother and child. Questions like, Does she know me? represent the yearning for recognition, the desire to be known—not under stood, just known—as a separate someone. This experience is shared in many ways in our practice, in parenting and in psy choanalysis. With attachment comes separation and inevitable conflicts. In today’s world, we confront a wide range of complex intrapsychic and interpersonal conflicts regarding separation from children. As clinicians we are more concerned if separation does not bring some ambivalence, some sadness, some sense of loss. The balance be tween parental self-actualization, economic realities, and good parenting is difficult to achieve and requires, as we know, self understanding and the willingness and ability to make rather dra matic intrapsychic shifts, on a daily basis, as roles prescribe. The power of attachment and its vulnerability to contamination by inside and outside forces, was poignantly illustrated in the MaryBeth Whitehead case, in which the real plausibility of surrogate motherhood was called into question. But we needn’t look to the dramatic extreme to be impressed by the power of human attach ment and difficulty of separation. It is at the heart of our work, the heart of our emotional life. Without a keen appreciation of the emotional range that underscores attachment and loss, we cannot begin to understand the mother who spanks a lost child upon finding him, even after only a minute of separation. Where were
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you? she cries, afraid, furious, and relieved all at once. This is the stuff of attachment and separation, the reality o f grief and mourn ing, the language of love and anger. LEARNING EMPATHY From mental wish to powerful attachment, through eventual sep aration and psychic loss, comes the learning of empathy, the ability effectively to understand the other—through feeling, thinking, sens ing, intuiting—without fearing a loss of boundaries or a threat to one’s own self system. I think of a patient who felt ashamed that she could not feel pleased about her high school daughter going to Italy on a special tour. In fact, she felt envy. She talked about her de prived childhood, her critical father, her mother who made her feel “bad” inside, not enough, ugly, awkward. As a result, she thought herself a failure as a mother. After having explored these issues in some depth and over a period of time, the patient, in a subsequent session, said how excited she was at the airport to see her daughter return. She related what a rich experience it had been for her daugh ter, how proud she felt of her daughter’s courage to leave, and how satisfying it was as a parent to be able to provide this experience. Critical here, in terms o f clinical intervention, were the empathic interpretations aimed at clarifying the roots and reasons for her envy and the attendant maternal shame and self-loathing. She bene fited from the understanding that deprivation fuels envy and that her daughter’s ability to enjoy this separation was, in part, testimo ny to her own ability not to repeat her past by imposing the same constraints on her daughter’s autonomy that she had experienced in her own childhood. When she left this session, the patient, in an uncharacteristic gesture, grabbed my arm and kissed me, saying, “Thank you, Joan.” She was grateful for being able to feel happy for her child, to feel proud, to empathize. These feelings had not been able to emerge before some layers of envy, rage, guilt, and shame had been removed. The wishes to empathize and to be understood are powerful forces in human nature, ones that originate in early infancy, per haps in the womb. They are curative forces in psychotherapy, more fundamentally perhaps, in human society at large. In parenting, our capacities to empathize are developed and tested; my patient speaks of being able to feel in ways unknown to her before Sarah.
212 OFFERMAN-ZUCKERBERG I think about babies who come into the world without anyone to love them, and I cry for them. 1 have always been an emotional person, but now if I read the newspaper or listen to the news and hear about a baby who has been mistreated or is sick, I start to cry.
Existential guilt that arises in part out of empathy for others is a powerful affect in parenthood. A patient talks about wanting a better marriage. He is an orthodox Jewish man who works as an insurance salesman. He has four daughters; three have been mar ried off. He has spoken of his agony; his marriage is saturated with sexual rejection, deprivation, rage, and accusation. He wants, at age SO, to end the marriage but feels that his youngest daughter’s chances o f finding a suitable partner would be damaged. The conflict is powerful; the guilt is overwhelming. Here is a passionate man, a devoted father, and a deeply religious individual, tor mented by a classical conflict between an empathic conscience and the wish to be fulfilled himself. The very foundations of empathy reside in the parenting experi ence. The wonderful signs of early maternal empathy make up part of the common experience we share and perhaps draw from in memory and in clinical work. In fact, the biological, physical, psychological interplay in the responses of mothers to infants— both intra- and extrauterine—such as lactation in response to the infant’s hunger, sleep arousal in response to the infant’s cries, the mother’s tears in response to the infant’s, are nature’s way o f insur ing the symbiosis necessary to the growth of attachment, the devel opment of parental identity, and the well-being of the infant. The parent’s empathic response to the developing child, however chore ographed, however imperfect, becomes the original ego graft, the armature around which growth and cohesion of the self proceed.
THE STRUGGLE TO LOVE Perhaps the most important lesson that parenting provides is in the dynamics of love, for it is out of this primary bond that the potential for love becomes a capacity and then a reality (Bowlby, 1973). Like Harlow’s motherless monkeys, a generation of future child abusers would be the likely outcome of parental deprivation. The accuracy of empathy determines the eventual emergence of a solid core self, one capable of loving another and of being loved, and it is out of this loving that intimacy is forged. We are reminded
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of the Schopenhauer parable: One wintry day, a couple o f chilled porcupines tried to huddle close together for warmth, but they found that they pricked each other with their quills. They moved apart and were cold again. After much experimentation, the por cupines found the distance at which they could give each other some warmth without too much sting. Leopold Beliak referred to this dynamic of closeness and distance as the “porcupine dilemma” (1976). How close can we get to one another without hurt? How do we negotiate the boundaries o f self and other? How do we achieve intimacy without loss of autonomy? These are the conflicts of today, an age in which freedom and choice present a new kind of existential burden, a burden that, if not handled well, can become a new form o f bondage. In parenting we teach our children and ourselves learn much about love’s struggle. By providing sufficient attachment, accurate empathy, predictability, and constancy, we are making it possible for love to continue. The degree o f our failure will determine in large part the degree of our children’s struggle to love in adulthood. Our patients and our children in form us of this truth constantly in complaints such as I can’t trust, I will be rejected, I will be engulfed, I will be criticized, I will be abandoned, I will be infantilized, I will be idealized, I will be destroyed. CHANGING SENSE OF SELF The prerequisite to healthy object relations is found in a goodenough childhood. Parenthood begins with a wish, gets fleshed out, shaped, and deepened in attachment, tested and buffeted by separation and loss. It redefines us and places us existentially in a new slot. Sarah’s mother speaks: “My mother [was telling] me something that I did when I was a baby, just about Sarah’s age. I thought to myself, how bizarre it is that I am an adult with a child of my own, relating to my mother as an equal, and yet I was once her baby.” Thoughtfully, my patient reviewed the new arrange ments: I am the Mommy, Bryan is the Daddy, my parents are Grandma and Grandpa. I hear myself say, ‘Sarah, smile for Grandma’ and I think of my .own Grandma. And when someone asks me how it feels to be a Mommy, I think they’re referring to my mother. I guess it takes a while to get used to these new roles. It’s as if everyone moved up a notch on the totem pole.
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Parenting thrusts us into this unconscious recycling process. Like analysts, parents are participants in a world marked by un conscious time, that is, timelessness. This is expressed in a song lyric from “Fiddler on the Roof,” “sunrise, sunset, swiftly fly the years, Seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers. . . . One season fol lowing another. . . . Wasn’t it yesterday that they were smal l . . . ” (Harnick, Bock and Hammerstein, 1964). Our children become unconscious targets of projection, sym bolization, condensation, and displacement. We engage them in mutual projective identification, and we attempt to disengage, to see more clearly, to interact more responsively, accurately, and empathically, to be in objective time. With our patients, we journey through the maze of inevitable disappointment, rage, and rejection. We accuse our parents; we assail ourselves. In coming to understand, albeit slowly, sometimes we can forgive. And, as we forgive, we enter into a new existential contract, one marked by the absurdity of human repetition, the weakness of all heros, the vulnerability of all selves, and the knowledge that what we do as parents and as clinicians to under stand, to heal, is an effort to make sense of it all and to make it a little better for those who follow. References Beliak, L. (1970), The Porcupine Dilemma: Reflections on the H uman C ondition, Citadel Press, New York. Bowlby, J. (1973), A ttachm ent and Loss: Separation A nxiety and A nger (Vol. 2), Basic Books, New York. Carpentier, C. S. (1942), Societies of monkeys and apes, Biol. Sym pos., 8 , 177-204. Freud, S. (1937), Techniques of psychoanalysis, Standard E dition, Vol. 23, pp. 172-182. Harnick, S., Bock, J., and Hammerstein, O., Ill (1964), Sunrise, sunset (from Fiddler on the Roof). Stone, L. (1961), The Psychoanalytic Situation, International Universities Press, New York.
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