Pearl E > Recent Status Updates

They are now in the "deep end": able to give and take away life itself-to impregnate or to have babies, to harm or kill themselves, to inflict actual damage on others, on their parents, and on their surroundings. This new-found potency is both exhilarating and also absolutely terrifying.

There is, however, one crucial difference from actual early states of mind for post-pubertal children, and that is that as adolescents they do now possess the mental and physical ability to act on their feelings, urgings, and fantasies.

This may bear on why learning to walk can often be long resisted, as if, despite the extraordinary achievement, it feels too risky to lose, forever, being a crawling person. A degree of mourning as well as excitement must always accompany so major "a step' in life.

In short, all developmental transitions in life are coloured, defined, perhaps even determined, by early issues of love and loss, for each one involves losing, because leaving, the previous known self.

As I have suggested, two very significant determinants of the nature of this inner world include the quality of the original mother-baby relationship and, later, the way in which a third "term" is introduced into, and becomes part of, that first dyad.

All such losses are part of the fabric of life, of what it is to be human… They may, in good circumstances, ones where there is sufficient insight or support, be emotionally pro-cessed, indeed metabolized, so that they can become assimilated within the personality and, as a result, can actually contribute to the individual's emotional growth and development. But they leave their mark nonetheless.

Moreover, it must always be borne in mind how frequently a troubled adolescent is fielded as "the problem' when that problem actually lies in some other aspect of the family dynamics.

The girls, it will be noted, tended to do so against themselves, the boys against an external person or thing. The gender difference is already stark-the girls were preoccupied with intellectual pressure, depression, body image, lack of self-esteem, and separation anxiety taking the form of a fear of rejection.

This age has a general tendency either to "think' (in the narrow cognitive sense) too much, "in the mind alone", as W. B. Yeats put it, or to avoid really thinking at all, attempting to cope with painful experiences through a variety of what might be termed anti-thinking, action-orientated, or mindless modes.

Attacks of unwonted ferocity and contempt may occur unexpectedly, especially towards parents, and very often an alternative ideal is found elsewhere, perhaps in an older "child", or in a teacher, therapist

The object of criticism, whether one parent or the other, becomes not just a bit stupid, but a complete write-off. This is the stuff of myths and fairy tales-the good mother and the wicked stepmother, the good fairy/the bad fairy. In directing bad feelings towards the other, that other is then felt actually to be bad and, significantly, may, as a conse-quence, even experience him/herself as being so.,

He is addressing the issue of what teaching art is all about: it is, he says,
"really a question of discovering the real artistry in a person (every-one has it but often deeply buried) and then liberating this-it is, I suppose, enabling someone (or indeed oneself) to become more fully alive" (quoted in Thomson, 1989, p. 6).

The exchanges in this session convey so much about the possible sources of the utterly characteristic, often homophobic, racist, sexist, violent enactments of teenage pain and despair and the projection of unspeakably vicious feelings onto a selected other (X, in this instance) or, in particular, into siblings or parents.

Margaret Rustin in the context of, as it happens, the learning experience of the observer of infantile development: "the capacity to observe emotionally powerful psychic phenomena is the basis for knowledge of oneself, and for that contact with psychic reality which is at the core of an authentic personality" (Rustin & Trowell, 1991, p. 244).

The psychoanalyst Donald
Meltzer put it another way:
The impact of interferences such as prematurity, incubation, early separations, failures of breast-feeding, physical illness in mother or baby reveal themselves in character development as unmistakeably as the "shakes" in a piece of timber mark early periods of drought.
[Meltzer & Harris Williams, 1988, pp. 25-26]

Later on, for example, one uncontained child will constantly and manically rush around; another will retreat, silent; another will show off; another, as we shall see, may become depressed, listless, and bored; another a gang leader, or a gang follower.

If, by contrast, anxiety is felt to be too intense, or too often misunderstood or misread, ways have to be found variously, in Bion's terms, to avoid it, to master it, or to deny it. These ways will be different at different ages.

So, I am thinking less in terms of chronology as such than of different states of mind-ones that can predominate, if temporarily, at whatever the age and stage, for psychoanalysis is about the expansion of meaning if nothing else.

For the psychoanalytic picture is one that puts the emphasis on the complex relationship between internal states and external tasks; on capacities rather than abilities; with the stress always on what an experience means to a person and not on casual and contractual rela-tionships.

This contribution of Klein was an idea of psychic development described not so much in terms of stages-ones dominated, as Freud had suggested, by the anatomically related primacy of oral, anal, and phallic phases-but, rather, in terms of attitudes of mind or, as she called them, "positions". By this, Klein meant something like the perspective from which a person might view himself and his relationship with the world

Drawn to complex characters, complicated relationships, historical worlds, and the occasional unreliable narrator. A psychoanalytic mind with an existential streak, perpetually fascinated by human nature, unconscious motivations, and the absurdities of being alive. I like my fiction thought-provoking, my characters flawed, and my humor a little dry.

I am drawn to complex characters, complicated relationships, historical worlds, and the occasional unreliable narrator. A psychoanalytic mind with an existential streak, perpetually fascinated by human nature, unconscious motivations, and the absurdities of being alive. I like my fiction thought-provoking, my characters flawed, and my humor a little dry.

Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you're irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough.

I long ago abandoned the
notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces.

Not having children of my own is the single most intolerable regret of my life.

But if love is not the cure, it certainly can act as a very strong medicine. As John Donne has written, it is not so pure and abstract as one might once have thought and wished, but it does endure, and it does grow.

I was late to understand that chaos and intensity are no substitute for lasting love, nor are they necessarily an improvement on real life. Normal people are not always boring. On the contrary. Volatility and passion, although often more romantic and enticing, are not intrinsically preferable to a steadiness of experience and feeling about another person

Maybe it wasn't a failure of imagination or feminism or will.
This state of believing that something was wrong with me around rela-tonships was something I shared with my mother like brown eyes and a monal fear of dental procedures. Maybe I could stop trying to outrun it.
Maybe I didn't have to hide mv grief and confusion from her anymore.

I learned the meaning of the word bittersweet, the acid taste of loss and the honey of hope in one bright fruit.

I would never shake off the sense that something should be there, where the missing limb had always been. There was a bole in my life, a great gaping cavity that could never be filled.