In writing this lecture I have
throughout
been aware that, by using terms such as 'information', 'communication', and 'working
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?
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A-Secure-Base-Bowlby-Johnf
Such sentiments as gratit- ude for the therapist's efforts or respect for his competence are conspicuous by their absence.
The task then is to help the patient grasp that much of his present resentment stems from past mistreatment at the hands of others and that, however understandable his anger may be as a result, to continue fighting old battles is unpro- ductive.
To accept that an unhappy past cannot be changed is usually a bitter pill.
With other patients the situation is reversed: the transference relationship becomes one in which overt gratitude, admiration, and affection are readily expressed, and the therapist seen in a
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? ? ? glow of rosy perfection. Dissatisfaction and criti- cism are notably absent, and anger at the therap- ist's shortcomings, especially absences, unima- ginable. Such idealization of the therapist springs, I believe, partly from unrealistic hopes and expectations of what the therapist is able and willing to provide, and partly from a childhood in which criticism of a parent is forbidden and com- pliance enforced, either by some guilt-inducing technique or else by sanctions such as threats not to love, or even to abandon, the child. With this type of childhood experience, the patient's un- conscious assumption is that the therapist will expect the same degree of obedience as his par- ents had expected and will enforce it by tech- niques or by threats similar to the ones they used.
Unfortunately there has been a tendency in some quarters to confuse the theory advanced here, which regards the way certain parents treat their children as being a major cause of mental ill- health, with an attitude of mind that simply blames parents. No one who works in the fields of child psychiatry and family therapy is likely to make this mistake. On the contrary, as already remarked, it has long been recognized that the misguided behaviour of parents is more often
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? ? ? than not the product of their own difficult and unhappy childhood. As a result much skilled time has always been devoted to helping parents es- cape from the adverse influences of their own childhoods.
Furthermore, during the treatment of an indi- vidual (of any age) who has suffered at the hands of his parents, the therapist, whilst accepting the patient's account, avoids moral judgement. On the contrary, whenever opportunity offers, he will encourage his patient to consider how and why the parent under discussion may have behaved as he or she has done. In raising these questions, it is always useful for the therapist to enquire of the patient what he knows of the childhood experi- ences that the parent in question may have had. Not infrequently this leads the patient to gain some understanding of how things had developed and, from understanding, often to move on to a measure of forgiveness and reconciliation. In family sessions it can be especially valuable if a parent can be encouraged to give an account of his or her childhood. This enables all those present--the parent him- or herself, the spouse, the children, and the therapist--to gain some in- sight into how and why family life has developed
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? ? ? as it has and how each can best help improve it. As already mentioned (p. 150), this strong tend- ency for attachment problems to be transmitted across generations, through the influence on par- enting behaviour of relationship problems stem- ming from the parent's own childhood, is at last receiving the research attention it deserves.
SOME PATHOGENIC SITUATIONS AND EVENTS OF CHILDHOOD
A therapist, I believe, cannot be too well in- formed about the disguised and distorted rela- tionships that can occur in some families, and the terrible things that can happen in others, for it is only if he is so informed that he can have a reas- onably clear idea of what probably lies behind his patient's defences, or of the origins of his anxiety, anger, and guilt. Once he is adequately informed, he is well placed not only to appreciate the truth of what his patient may be describing as having happened to him but also to broach, more or less tentatively, some of the kinds of situation to which the patient may well have been exposed but to which he may be either unable or unwilling to refer. In listing the following situations I am doing no more than indicating some that are both
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? ? ? common and have, until recently, been neglected in the psychotherapeutic literature. 2
Threats not to love a child used as a means of control
It is easy for a mother to say to a child that she will not love him if he behaves in such and such a way. What this means is that the mother is threatening not to provide affection or comfort at times when her child is upset, frightened, or dis- tressed, and not to provide help or encourage- ment at other times. If such threats are used sys- tematically by either parent, or both, the child in- evitably grows up intensely anxious to please and guilt-prone.
Threats to abandon a child
Threats to abandon are a degree more frightening to a child than threats no longer to love him. This is especially so if the parent enacts a threat, per- haps by disappearing herself for a few hours or by packing her child's suitcase and walking him up the street, allegedly to the home for bad boys. Since threats to abandon often take a highly idio- syncratic form, a patient may deny that he was ever subjected to them. In such cases the truth
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? ? ? may emerge with its accompanying emotion only when the special way in which the threat was phrased is recollected. One example is a mother who had concocted the story that a yellow van would draw up and take her son away. Another is a father whose story was that his daughter would be sent to a school on a remote rock surrounded by sharks (Marrone, 1984). Thus, in the first case, all the mother had to say was 'Well the yellow van will come', and, in the second, for the father to say 'Then it will be the rock school', for the child instantly to desist from whatever he or she was doing. In a third case, the code word was 'mar- garine', the mother having coupled her threat to send her son away to a children's home with an insistence that he would have to eat margarine there. For these patients a general phrase like 'threat to abandon' had failed to ring a bell. Only when the code word was unearthed was the ori- ginal terror experienced afresh and the source of the separation anxiety located.
Threats to commit suicide
Sometimes a distraught parent threatens to com- mit suicide if some distressing situation contin- ues. This may occur during quarrels between
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? ? ? parents, which the child overhears, or may be dir- ected at the child himself. In either case such threats strike terror. One lesson to be learned from these cases is that, whenever a patient refers to his parents as having quarrelled, the therapist should always enquire 'What did they say to each other? ' Not infrequently a patient blocks at this. In a fit of temper quarrelling parents may say ap- palling things to each other. This is bad enough. What makes it far worse is when, after cooling down, they disclaim having said any such thing.
Disclaimers and disconfirmations
Examples of disclaimers by a parent of what he or she has said or done, and persistent efforts to dis- confirm what a child has seen or heard, are given in some detail in Lecture 6 and the adverse ef- fects on personality development of such pres- sures emphasized. During therapy these effects emerge as great uncertainty in a patient as to whether some family episode did or did not occur and guilt about adumbrating it. Here, as so often, a key role for the therapist is to sanction the pa- tient's exploration of all the various possibilities, both those favourable to his parents and those unfavourable to them, and to encourage him to
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? ? ? weigh the evidence available, whilst he (the ther- apist) remains resolutely open-minded as to where the truth may lie.
Thus far in this exposition I have not considered the critical issue of how far we can and should rely on the validity of our patients' reports. Memories are certainly fallible, and there are various occasions when an experienced therapist will rightly question the truth of what his patient is saying. What then are the criteria by which we should judge?
First, broad generalizations about the kind of parent the mother or father was and about the kind of parenting received are never to be given credence unless and until they are supported by detailed examples of how each treated the patient as a child in particular situations. For example, the glowing account of a wonderful mother may well go unsupported when detail becomes avail- able. Valid accounts of affectionate parenting not only give plenty of favourable details but are likely also to be interlaced with occasional criti- cism, so that the parent can be seen in the round. Similarly, disparaging accounts of parents in uni- formly adverse terms need close examination. In- valid accounts of either sort tend to be sweeping
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? ? ? and extreme, to be either white or black. Detail is either lacking or, should it be given, is at variance with the portrait presented. By contrast, whenev- er plenty of consistent detail is given and the pic- ture that emerges conforms to what we know, from other sources, does happen in other famil- ies, and also to the known antecedents of the types of problem besetting the patient, it is ab- surd to doubt its overall validity, even if some points remain in question.
The origin of these extremes is not infrequently external pressure. For example, one parent has insisted that the child take sides with him or her against the other parent who is represented as being all bad. Or else a parent who has many shortcomings insists that he or she is above criticism.
Another occasion when a therapist is right to doubt the patient's story is when there is reason to suspect that the patient is a pathological liar. Such cases are comparatively rare and, if only for that reason, may go undetected for a time. Sooner or later, however, mounting inconsistencies and improbabilities, as well as the way the patient tells his story, engender first doubt and, later, certainty that the patient is not to be believed.
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? ? ? Apart from these exceptions I believe patients' accounts are sufficiently trustworthy that a ther- apist should accept them as being reasonable ap- proximations to the truth;3 and furthermore that it is anti-therapeutic not to do so. Constantly to query the validity of the patient's story, even if only by implication, and insistence on the distort- ing role of imagination or fantasy, is the reverse of empathic. It conveys to the patient that the therapist
does not understand him and may indeed con- vince him that the therapist is behaving exactly as his parent had predicted. Thus some parents, having insisted that their child not tell of something the parent is ashamed of, may then add that, in any case, were he to do so no one would believe him.
Among the large range of adverse events and situations not so far mentioned in this lecture that a therapist should have in his mind as likely to have occurred in the life of one patient or an- other are the following:
a child may never have been wanted by one or both parents;
a child may be of the wrong sex in a family in which parents had set their hearts on a boy or a girl;
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? ? ? a child may have been made the family scapegoat, sometimes as a result of a family tragedy that, with greater or less plausibility, has always been at- tributed to him;
a parent may have used guilt-inducing techniques to control a child, for example, frequent claims that the child's behaviour makes mother ill;
a parent may have sought to make one of her children her attachment fig- ure by discouraging him from exploring the world away from her and from believing that he will ever be able to make his way on his own;
a child's unusual role in a family may be the result of his mother having had an extra-marital affair during her marriage so that the child's putative father is not his real father;
another cause of a child's unusual role is when one or other parent identi- fies one child with a relative, often one of the child's grandparents, with whom he or she has had a difficult relationship, and who then re-enacts that relationship with the child;
a child may have been the target of more or less serious physical abuse from a parent or step-parent;
a child may have been involved in sexual abuse from a parent, step-par- ent, or older sibling for short or long periods of time.
For those unaware of the commoner effects on personality development of exposure to situ- ations of these kinds, a number of references are given in an Appendix to references (pp. 194-5).
Inevitably the influential events of an individu- al's first two or three years will either never have been registered in his memory or else cannot now be recalled. Here, of course, the best a therapist can do is to infer, on the basis of the transference situation and of such information as the patient has gleaned about his early years, combined with
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? ? ? such wider knowledge of personality develop- ment as the therapist has acquired, what the nature of those events may have been. In other words, he resorts to reconstruction; but in doing so he can in future draw on a much wider and more reliable knowledge of family influences on personality development than has traditionally been available to analytically trained psychotherapists.
THE THERAPIST'S STANCE
In this account of therapeutic principles, therap- ists will recognize much that has long been famil- iar, though often under a different name. The therapeutic alliance appears as a secure base, an internal object as a working, or representational, model of an attachment figure, reconstruction as exploring memories of the past, resistance (sometimes) as deep reluctance to disobey the past orders of parents not to tell or not to remem- ber. Among points of difference is the emphasis placed on the therapist's role as a companion for his patient in the latter's exploration of himself and his experiences, and less on the therapist in- terpreting things to the patient. Whilst some tra- ditional therapists might be described as
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? ? ? adopting the stance 'I know; I'll tell you', the stance I advocate is one of 'You know, you tell me'. Thus the patient is encouraged to believe that, with support and occasional guidance, he can discover for himself the true nature of the models that underlie his thoughts, feelings, and actions and that, by examining the nature of his earlier experiences with his parents, or parent substitutes, he will understand what has led him to build the models now active within him and thus be free to restructure them. Fortunately the human psyche, like human bones, is strongly in- clined towards self-healing. The psychotherap- ist's job, like that of the orthopaedic surgeon's, is to provide the conditions in which self-healing can best take place.
Amongst those who have recently given de- tailed accounts of the special value of adopting a modest and tentative approach are Peterfreund (1983) and Casement (1985).
In the foregoing description the therapist's role has been likened to that of a mother who provides her child with a secure base from which to explore. This means, first and foremost, that he accepts and respects his patient, warts and all, as a fellow human being in trouble and that his
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? ? ? over-riding concern is to promote his patient's welfare by all means at his disposal. To this end the therapist strives to be reliable, attentive, em- pathic, and sympathetically responsive, and also to encourage his patient to explore the world of his thoughts, feelings, and actions not only in the present but also in the past. Whilst always en- couraging his patient to take the initiative, the therapist is in no sense passive. On the one hand he tries to be attentive and sensitively responsive. On the other, he recognizes that there are times when he himself should take the initiative. For example, when a patient wastes time talking about everything and anything except his thoughts and feelings about people, it will be ne- cessary to draw his attention to his avoidance of the area, and perhaps also to his deep distrust of the therapist's efforts to be helpful or of his capa- city to keep confidences. With another patient, who perhaps is very willing to explore memories of childhood, there will be many occasions when a therapist can usefully ask for more detail or raise questions about situations of childhood that the patient has so far not referred to directly, but which seem plausible possibilities in the light of what he has been describing, and in the light also
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? ? ? of the particular problems from which the patient is suffering. In doing so, moreover, the therapist must never forget that his patient may still be strongly influenced by his parents' injunctions not to know about events he is not supposed to know about and not to experience feelings he is not supposed to experience.
An interruption to therapy probably always generates some reaction in a patient; sometimes it is conscious, at others unconscious, but non- etheless evident. When conscious, it may take the form of overt complaint or angry protest; when unconscious it may manifest itself by the patient disparaging therapy or missing a session or two before the break. How a therapist evaluates these reactions and responds to them will reflect his theoretical position. Someone who adopts attach- ment theory will respect his patient's distress or anger about the separation and will regard them as the natural responses of someone who has be- come attached to another--a respect that will be implicit in anything he says or does. At the same time he will give attention to the form his pa- tient's reaction takes. If openly expressed, he will be sympathetic and may be able to ease the pa- tient's distress by giving him information about
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? ? ? how he could communicate during the break. In addition, the therapist will consider how the pa- tient is construing the interruption and, should there be evidence of misconstruction, will at- tempt to discover how it may have originated. If, for example, the patient is apprehensive that the therapist will not return, the possibility of the pa- tient having been exposed to threats by a parent to abandon him might be explored. In cases where the interruption is due to the therapist be- ing unwell, he will be alert to the possibility that the patient may be apprehensive lest something he (the patient) has done or said is responsible. Were that to be so, the therapist would explore whether one of the patient's parents had sought to control him by claiming that the way he be- haved was making mother or father ill.
Similarly, should a patient react to an interrup- tion by disparaging therapy or missing a session, a therapist who adopts attachment theory would ask himself why his patient is afraid to express his feelings openly and what his childhood exper- iences may have been to account for his distrust.
It is not unlikely that the description just given of a therapist's mode of responding to his pa- tient's reactions to an interruption will contrast
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? ? ? with that of a therapist who adopts and applies one or another of the traditional psychoanalytic theories. For example, one such therapist might regard his patient's reactions as being rather childish, even infantile, and as indicating that the patient was fixated in an oral or a symbiotic phase. What the therapist then might say, and es- pecially the way he might say it, could well be ex- perienced by the patient as lacking in respect for his (the patient's) current feelings of attachment, distress, or anger. Here again there would be danger that the therapist might appear to be re- sponding in a cold unsympathetic way and all too like one or other of the patient's parents. Were that so the exchange would be anti-therapeutic.
How far a therapist can wisely go in meeting a patient's desire to keep in communication during breaks, e. g. by telephone, and for comforting when distressed during a session, turns on many personal factors in their relationship. On the one hand, there is danger of the therapist's appearing to lack sympathy for the patient's distress or even to seem rejecting. On the other is the risk of his appearing to offer more than he is prepared to give. There are occasions when it would be inhu- man not to allow a distressed patient to make
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? ? ? some form of physical contact: the roles are then explicitly comforter and comforted. Yet there is always danger that physical contact can elicit sexual feelings, especially when sexes are differ- ent. Depending on the situation each therapist must make his own decisions and draw his own lines. The more alive to such issues a therapist is the better will he be able to avoid the pitfalls.
EMOTIONAL COMMUNICATIONS AND THE RESTRUCTURING OF WORKING MODELS
When a therapist utilizes the kind of technique advocated here, it can sometimes happen that therapy gets into a rut in which the patient per- sists endlessly in describing what a terrible time he had as a child and how badly his parents treated him, without any progress being made. One cause of such perseveration, I suspect, is that the patient is convinced that his therapist does not accept the truth of what he is saying: hence his endless repetition of it. This may be due to the patient having always been scoffed at by those to whom he has told the story in the past or, and perhaps more commonly, to the therapist himself having indicated scepticism or disbelief. This can be done in a myriad of ways, by tone of voice, by
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? ? ? querying the details, by failing to attach any par- ticular weight to what the patient describes.
Evidently when the problem lies in the therap- ist's incredulity the way out is for him to make it plain that he knows all too well that such things do happen to children and has no reason to doubt the patient's account. Even so the impasse may continue: the story is told and retold in a flat cyn- ical way with no show of feeling whatever.
This situation has been discussed by Selma Fraiberg who, with colleagues, set out to help vul- nerable mothers at risk of either neglecting or ab- using their infants (Fraiberg, Adelson, and Sha- piro, 1975). They describe making visits to the homes of two such mothers and listening to the distressing tales these women had to tell. Each told a story of gross cruelty during child- hood--being subjected to violent beatings, being locked out in the cold, often deserted by mother, being shunted from one place to another, and of having no one to go to for help or comfort. Neither gave a hint of how they might have felt nor what they may have felt like doing. One, a girl of 16 who avoided touching or holding her baby (who screamed hopelessly), insisted: 'But what's the use of talking? I always kept things to myself.
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? ? ? I want to forget. I don't want to think. ' This was the point at which the therapist intervened--by herself expressing all the feelings that any and every child would be expected to have in the situ- ations described: how frightened, how angry, how hopeless one would feel, and also how one would long to go to someone who would understand and provide comfort and protection. In doing so the therapist not only showed an understanding of how the patient must have felt, but communic- ated in her manner that the expression of such feeling and desire would be met with a sympath- etic and comforting response. Only then was it possible for the young mother to express all the grief, the tears, 'and the unspeakable anguish for herself as a cast-off child' that she had always felt but had never dared express.
In this account of Fraiberg's methods of help- ing a patient express the emotions she dares not show I have deliberately emphasized the link between emotion and action. Failure to express emotion is due very largely to unconscious fear lest the action of which the emotion is a part will lead to a dreaded outcome. In many families an- ger with an adult leads to punishment which can sometimes be severe. Moreover a tearful appeal
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? ? ? for comfort and help can lead to rejection and hu- miliation. It is perhaps too often forgotten by clinicians that many children, when they become distressed and weepy and are looking for com- fort, are shooed off as intolerable little cry-babies. Instead of the comforting provided by an under- standing and affectionate parent, these children meet with an unsympathetic and critical rebuff. No wonder therefore if, should this pattern pre- vail during childhood, the child learns never to show distress or seek comfort and, should he un- dertake therapy, assumes that his therapist will be as intolerant of anger and tears as his parents always were.
Every therapist who adopts a psychoanalytic per- spective has long recognized that, to be effective, therapy requires that a patient not only talks about his memories, his ideas and dreams, his hopes and desires, but also expresses his feelings. The discussion of Fraiberg's technique for help- ing a cynical and frozen young woman to discover the depth of her feelings and to express them freely to her therapist is therefore a fitting note on which to end.
In writing this lecture I have throughout been aware that, by using terms such as 'information', 'communication', and 'working
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? ? ? models', it would be easy for an unwary reader to suppose that these terms belong within a psycho- logy concerned only with cognition and one bereft of feeling and action. Although for many years it was all too common for cognitive psycho- logists to omit reference to emotion, it is now re- cognized that to do so is artificial and unfruitful (Hinde, Perret-Clermont, and Stevenson-Hinde, 1985). There are, in fact, no more important com- munications between one human being and an- other than those expressed emotionally, and no information more vital for constructing and re- constructing working models of self and other than information about how each feels towards the other. During the earliest years of our lives, indeed, emotional expression and its reception are the only means of communication we have, so that the foundations of our working models of self and attachment figure are perforce laid using information from that source alone. Small won- der therefore, if, in reviewing his attachment re- lationships during the course of psychotherapy and restructuring his working models, it is the emotional communications between a patient and his therapist that play the crucial part.
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? ? ? 1 Within traditional theory this shift of role by a pa- tient is likely to be termed a case of identification with the aggressor.
2 Since in previous publications I have given much at- tention to the ill effects on personality development of bereavements and prolonged separations, these themes are omitted from what follows.
3 For research purposes, however, criteria for accept- ing retrospective information as valid must be much stricter.
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With other patients the situation is reversed: the transference relationship becomes one in which overt gratitude, admiration, and affection are readily expressed, and the therapist seen in a
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? ? ? glow of rosy perfection. Dissatisfaction and criti- cism are notably absent, and anger at the therap- ist's shortcomings, especially absences, unima- ginable. Such idealization of the therapist springs, I believe, partly from unrealistic hopes and expectations of what the therapist is able and willing to provide, and partly from a childhood in which criticism of a parent is forbidden and com- pliance enforced, either by some guilt-inducing technique or else by sanctions such as threats not to love, or even to abandon, the child. With this type of childhood experience, the patient's un- conscious assumption is that the therapist will expect the same degree of obedience as his par- ents had expected and will enforce it by tech- niques or by threats similar to the ones they used.
Unfortunately there has been a tendency in some quarters to confuse the theory advanced here, which regards the way certain parents treat their children as being a major cause of mental ill- health, with an attitude of mind that simply blames parents. No one who works in the fields of child psychiatry and family therapy is likely to make this mistake. On the contrary, as already remarked, it has long been recognized that the misguided behaviour of parents is more often
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? ? ? than not the product of their own difficult and unhappy childhood. As a result much skilled time has always been devoted to helping parents es- cape from the adverse influences of their own childhoods.
Furthermore, during the treatment of an indi- vidual (of any age) who has suffered at the hands of his parents, the therapist, whilst accepting the patient's account, avoids moral judgement. On the contrary, whenever opportunity offers, he will encourage his patient to consider how and why the parent under discussion may have behaved as he or she has done. In raising these questions, it is always useful for the therapist to enquire of the patient what he knows of the childhood experi- ences that the parent in question may have had. Not infrequently this leads the patient to gain some understanding of how things had developed and, from understanding, often to move on to a measure of forgiveness and reconciliation. In family sessions it can be especially valuable if a parent can be encouraged to give an account of his or her childhood. This enables all those present--the parent him- or herself, the spouse, the children, and the therapist--to gain some in- sight into how and why family life has developed
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? ? ? as it has and how each can best help improve it. As already mentioned (p. 150), this strong tend- ency for attachment problems to be transmitted across generations, through the influence on par- enting behaviour of relationship problems stem- ming from the parent's own childhood, is at last receiving the research attention it deserves.
SOME PATHOGENIC SITUATIONS AND EVENTS OF CHILDHOOD
A therapist, I believe, cannot be too well in- formed about the disguised and distorted rela- tionships that can occur in some families, and the terrible things that can happen in others, for it is only if he is so informed that he can have a reas- onably clear idea of what probably lies behind his patient's defences, or of the origins of his anxiety, anger, and guilt. Once he is adequately informed, he is well placed not only to appreciate the truth of what his patient may be describing as having happened to him but also to broach, more or less tentatively, some of the kinds of situation to which the patient may well have been exposed but to which he may be either unable or unwilling to refer. In listing the following situations I am doing no more than indicating some that are both
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? ? ? common and have, until recently, been neglected in the psychotherapeutic literature. 2
Threats not to love a child used as a means of control
It is easy for a mother to say to a child that she will not love him if he behaves in such and such a way. What this means is that the mother is threatening not to provide affection or comfort at times when her child is upset, frightened, or dis- tressed, and not to provide help or encourage- ment at other times. If such threats are used sys- tematically by either parent, or both, the child in- evitably grows up intensely anxious to please and guilt-prone.
Threats to abandon a child
Threats to abandon are a degree more frightening to a child than threats no longer to love him. This is especially so if the parent enacts a threat, per- haps by disappearing herself for a few hours or by packing her child's suitcase and walking him up the street, allegedly to the home for bad boys. Since threats to abandon often take a highly idio- syncratic form, a patient may deny that he was ever subjected to them. In such cases the truth
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? ? ? may emerge with its accompanying emotion only when the special way in which the threat was phrased is recollected. One example is a mother who had concocted the story that a yellow van would draw up and take her son away. Another is a father whose story was that his daughter would be sent to a school on a remote rock surrounded by sharks (Marrone, 1984). Thus, in the first case, all the mother had to say was 'Well the yellow van will come', and, in the second, for the father to say 'Then it will be the rock school', for the child instantly to desist from whatever he or she was doing. In a third case, the code word was 'mar- garine', the mother having coupled her threat to send her son away to a children's home with an insistence that he would have to eat margarine there. For these patients a general phrase like 'threat to abandon' had failed to ring a bell. Only when the code word was unearthed was the ori- ginal terror experienced afresh and the source of the separation anxiety located.
Threats to commit suicide
Sometimes a distraught parent threatens to com- mit suicide if some distressing situation contin- ues. This may occur during quarrels between
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? ? ? parents, which the child overhears, or may be dir- ected at the child himself. In either case such threats strike terror. One lesson to be learned from these cases is that, whenever a patient refers to his parents as having quarrelled, the therapist should always enquire 'What did they say to each other? ' Not infrequently a patient blocks at this. In a fit of temper quarrelling parents may say ap- palling things to each other. This is bad enough. What makes it far worse is when, after cooling down, they disclaim having said any such thing.
Disclaimers and disconfirmations
Examples of disclaimers by a parent of what he or she has said or done, and persistent efforts to dis- confirm what a child has seen or heard, are given in some detail in Lecture 6 and the adverse ef- fects on personality development of such pres- sures emphasized. During therapy these effects emerge as great uncertainty in a patient as to whether some family episode did or did not occur and guilt about adumbrating it. Here, as so often, a key role for the therapist is to sanction the pa- tient's exploration of all the various possibilities, both those favourable to his parents and those unfavourable to them, and to encourage him to
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? ? ? weigh the evidence available, whilst he (the ther- apist) remains resolutely open-minded as to where the truth may lie.
Thus far in this exposition I have not considered the critical issue of how far we can and should rely on the validity of our patients' reports. Memories are certainly fallible, and there are various occasions when an experienced therapist will rightly question the truth of what his patient is saying. What then are the criteria by which we should judge?
First, broad generalizations about the kind of parent the mother or father was and about the kind of parenting received are never to be given credence unless and until they are supported by detailed examples of how each treated the patient as a child in particular situations. For example, the glowing account of a wonderful mother may well go unsupported when detail becomes avail- able. Valid accounts of affectionate parenting not only give plenty of favourable details but are likely also to be interlaced with occasional criti- cism, so that the parent can be seen in the round. Similarly, disparaging accounts of parents in uni- formly adverse terms need close examination. In- valid accounts of either sort tend to be sweeping
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? ? ? and extreme, to be either white or black. Detail is either lacking or, should it be given, is at variance with the portrait presented. By contrast, whenev- er plenty of consistent detail is given and the pic- ture that emerges conforms to what we know, from other sources, does happen in other famil- ies, and also to the known antecedents of the types of problem besetting the patient, it is ab- surd to doubt its overall validity, even if some points remain in question.
The origin of these extremes is not infrequently external pressure. For example, one parent has insisted that the child take sides with him or her against the other parent who is represented as being all bad. Or else a parent who has many shortcomings insists that he or she is above criticism.
Another occasion when a therapist is right to doubt the patient's story is when there is reason to suspect that the patient is a pathological liar. Such cases are comparatively rare and, if only for that reason, may go undetected for a time. Sooner or later, however, mounting inconsistencies and improbabilities, as well as the way the patient tells his story, engender first doubt and, later, certainty that the patient is not to be believed.
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? ? ? Apart from these exceptions I believe patients' accounts are sufficiently trustworthy that a ther- apist should accept them as being reasonable ap- proximations to the truth;3 and furthermore that it is anti-therapeutic not to do so. Constantly to query the validity of the patient's story, even if only by implication, and insistence on the distort- ing role of imagination or fantasy, is the reverse of empathic. It conveys to the patient that the therapist
does not understand him and may indeed con- vince him that the therapist is behaving exactly as his parent had predicted. Thus some parents, having insisted that their child not tell of something the parent is ashamed of, may then add that, in any case, were he to do so no one would believe him.
Among the large range of adverse events and situations not so far mentioned in this lecture that a therapist should have in his mind as likely to have occurred in the life of one patient or an- other are the following:
a child may never have been wanted by one or both parents;
a child may be of the wrong sex in a family in which parents had set their hearts on a boy or a girl;
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? ? ? a child may have been made the family scapegoat, sometimes as a result of a family tragedy that, with greater or less plausibility, has always been at- tributed to him;
a parent may have used guilt-inducing techniques to control a child, for example, frequent claims that the child's behaviour makes mother ill;
a parent may have sought to make one of her children her attachment fig- ure by discouraging him from exploring the world away from her and from believing that he will ever be able to make his way on his own;
a child's unusual role in a family may be the result of his mother having had an extra-marital affair during her marriage so that the child's putative father is not his real father;
another cause of a child's unusual role is when one or other parent identi- fies one child with a relative, often one of the child's grandparents, with whom he or she has had a difficult relationship, and who then re-enacts that relationship with the child;
a child may have been the target of more or less serious physical abuse from a parent or step-parent;
a child may have been involved in sexual abuse from a parent, step-par- ent, or older sibling for short or long periods of time.
For those unaware of the commoner effects on personality development of exposure to situ- ations of these kinds, a number of references are given in an Appendix to references (pp. 194-5).
Inevitably the influential events of an individu- al's first two or three years will either never have been registered in his memory or else cannot now be recalled. Here, of course, the best a therapist can do is to infer, on the basis of the transference situation and of such information as the patient has gleaned about his early years, combined with
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? ? ? such wider knowledge of personality develop- ment as the therapist has acquired, what the nature of those events may have been. In other words, he resorts to reconstruction; but in doing so he can in future draw on a much wider and more reliable knowledge of family influences on personality development than has traditionally been available to analytically trained psychotherapists.
THE THERAPIST'S STANCE
In this account of therapeutic principles, therap- ists will recognize much that has long been famil- iar, though often under a different name. The therapeutic alliance appears as a secure base, an internal object as a working, or representational, model of an attachment figure, reconstruction as exploring memories of the past, resistance (sometimes) as deep reluctance to disobey the past orders of parents not to tell or not to remem- ber. Among points of difference is the emphasis placed on the therapist's role as a companion for his patient in the latter's exploration of himself and his experiences, and less on the therapist in- terpreting things to the patient. Whilst some tra- ditional therapists might be described as
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? ? ? adopting the stance 'I know; I'll tell you', the stance I advocate is one of 'You know, you tell me'. Thus the patient is encouraged to believe that, with support and occasional guidance, he can discover for himself the true nature of the models that underlie his thoughts, feelings, and actions and that, by examining the nature of his earlier experiences with his parents, or parent substitutes, he will understand what has led him to build the models now active within him and thus be free to restructure them. Fortunately the human psyche, like human bones, is strongly in- clined towards self-healing. The psychotherap- ist's job, like that of the orthopaedic surgeon's, is to provide the conditions in which self-healing can best take place.
Amongst those who have recently given de- tailed accounts of the special value of adopting a modest and tentative approach are Peterfreund (1983) and Casement (1985).
In the foregoing description the therapist's role has been likened to that of a mother who provides her child with a secure base from which to explore. This means, first and foremost, that he accepts and respects his patient, warts and all, as a fellow human being in trouble and that his
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? ? ? over-riding concern is to promote his patient's welfare by all means at his disposal. To this end the therapist strives to be reliable, attentive, em- pathic, and sympathetically responsive, and also to encourage his patient to explore the world of his thoughts, feelings, and actions not only in the present but also in the past. Whilst always en- couraging his patient to take the initiative, the therapist is in no sense passive. On the one hand he tries to be attentive and sensitively responsive. On the other, he recognizes that there are times when he himself should take the initiative. For example, when a patient wastes time talking about everything and anything except his thoughts and feelings about people, it will be ne- cessary to draw his attention to his avoidance of the area, and perhaps also to his deep distrust of the therapist's efforts to be helpful or of his capa- city to keep confidences. With another patient, who perhaps is very willing to explore memories of childhood, there will be many occasions when a therapist can usefully ask for more detail or raise questions about situations of childhood that the patient has so far not referred to directly, but which seem plausible possibilities in the light of what he has been describing, and in the light also
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? ? ? of the particular problems from which the patient is suffering. In doing so, moreover, the therapist must never forget that his patient may still be strongly influenced by his parents' injunctions not to know about events he is not supposed to know about and not to experience feelings he is not supposed to experience.
An interruption to therapy probably always generates some reaction in a patient; sometimes it is conscious, at others unconscious, but non- etheless evident. When conscious, it may take the form of overt complaint or angry protest; when unconscious it may manifest itself by the patient disparaging therapy or missing a session or two before the break. How a therapist evaluates these reactions and responds to them will reflect his theoretical position. Someone who adopts attach- ment theory will respect his patient's distress or anger about the separation and will regard them as the natural responses of someone who has be- come attached to another--a respect that will be implicit in anything he says or does. At the same time he will give attention to the form his pa- tient's reaction takes. If openly expressed, he will be sympathetic and may be able to ease the pa- tient's distress by giving him information about
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? ? ? how he could communicate during the break. In addition, the therapist will consider how the pa- tient is construing the interruption and, should there be evidence of misconstruction, will at- tempt to discover how it may have originated. If, for example, the patient is apprehensive that the therapist will not return, the possibility of the pa- tient having been exposed to threats by a parent to abandon him might be explored. In cases where the interruption is due to the therapist be- ing unwell, he will be alert to the possibility that the patient may be apprehensive lest something he (the patient) has done or said is responsible. Were that to be so, the therapist would explore whether one of the patient's parents had sought to control him by claiming that the way he be- haved was making mother or father ill.
Similarly, should a patient react to an interrup- tion by disparaging therapy or missing a session, a therapist who adopts attachment theory would ask himself why his patient is afraid to express his feelings openly and what his childhood exper- iences may have been to account for his distrust.
It is not unlikely that the description just given of a therapist's mode of responding to his pa- tient's reactions to an interruption will contrast
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? ? ? with that of a therapist who adopts and applies one or another of the traditional psychoanalytic theories. For example, one such therapist might regard his patient's reactions as being rather childish, even infantile, and as indicating that the patient was fixated in an oral or a symbiotic phase. What the therapist then might say, and es- pecially the way he might say it, could well be ex- perienced by the patient as lacking in respect for his (the patient's) current feelings of attachment, distress, or anger. Here again there would be danger that the therapist might appear to be re- sponding in a cold unsympathetic way and all too like one or other of the patient's parents. Were that so the exchange would be anti-therapeutic.
How far a therapist can wisely go in meeting a patient's desire to keep in communication during breaks, e. g. by telephone, and for comforting when distressed during a session, turns on many personal factors in their relationship. On the one hand, there is danger of the therapist's appearing to lack sympathy for the patient's distress or even to seem rejecting. On the other is the risk of his appearing to offer more than he is prepared to give. There are occasions when it would be inhu- man not to allow a distressed patient to make
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? ? ? some form of physical contact: the roles are then explicitly comforter and comforted. Yet there is always danger that physical contact can elicit sexual feelings, especially when sexes are differ- ent. Depending on the situation each therapist must make his own decisions and draw his own lines. The more alive to such issues a therapist is the better will he be able to avoid the pitfalls.
EMOTIONAL COMMUNICATIONS AND THE RESTRUCTURING OF WORKING MODELS
When a therapist utilizes the kind of technique advocated here, it can sometimes happen that therapy gets into a rut in which the patient per- sists endlessly in describing what a terrible time he had as a child and how badly his parents treated him, without any progress being made. One cause of such perseveration, I suspect, is that the patient is convinced that his therapist does not accept the truth of what he is saying: hence his endless repetition of it. This may be due to the patient having always been scoffed at by those to whom he has told the story in the past or, and perhaps more commonly, to the therapist himself having indicated scepticism or disbelief. This can be done in a myriad of ways, by tone of voice, by
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? ? ? querying the details, by failing to attach any par- ticular weight to what the patient describes.
Evidently when the problem lies in the therap- ist's incredulity the way out is for him to make it plain that he knows all too well that such things do happen to children and has no reason to doubt the patient's account. Even so the impasse may continue: the story is told and retold in a flat cyn- ical way with no show of feeling whatever.
This situation has been discussed by Selma Fraiberg who, with colleagues, set out to help vul- nerable mothers at risk of either neglecting or ab- using their infants (Fraiberg, Adelson, and Sha- piro, 1975). They describe making visits to the homes of two such mothers and listening to the distressing tales these women had to tell. Each told a story of gross cruelty during child- hood--being subjected to violent beatings, being locked out in the cold, often deserted by mother, being shunted from one place to another, and of having no one to go to for help or comfort. Neither gave a hint of how they might have felt nor what they may have felt like doing. One, a girl of 16 who avoided touching or holding her baby (who screamed hopelessly), insisted: 'But what's the use of talking? I always kept things to myself.
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? ? ? I want to forget. I don't want to think. ' This was the point at which the therapist intervened--by herself expressing all the feelings that any and every child would be expected to have in the situ- ations described: how frightened, how angry, how hopeless one would feel, and also how one would long to go to someone who would understand and provide comfort and protection. In doing so the therapist not only showed an understanding of how the patient must have felt, but communic- ated in her manner that the expression of such feeling and desire would be met with a sympath- etic and comforting response. Only then was it possible for the young mother to express all the grief, the tears, 'and the unspeakable anguish for herself as a cast-off child' that she had always felt but had never dared express.
In this account of Fraiberg's methods of help- ing a patient express the emotions she dares not show I have deliberately emphasized the link between emotion and action. Failure to express emotion is due very largely to unconscious fear lest the action of which the emotion is a part will lead to a dreaded outcome. In many families an- ger with an adult leads to punishment which can sometimes be severe. Moreover a tearful appeal
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? ? ? for comfort and help can lead to rejection and hu- miliation. It is perhaps too often forgotten by clinicians that many children, when they become distressed and weepy and are looking for com- fort, are shooed off as intolerable little cry-babies. Instead of the comforting provided by an under- standing and affectionate parent, these children meet with an unsympathetic and critical rebuff. No wonder therefore if, should this pattern pre- vail during childhood, the child learns never to show distress or seek comfort and, should he un- dertake therapy, assumes that his therapist will be as intolerant of anger and tears as his parents always were.
Every therapist who adopts a psychoanalytic per- spective has long recognized that, to be effective, therapy requires that a patient not only talks about his memories, his ideas and dreams, his hopes and desires, but also expresses his feelings. The discussion of Fraiberg's technique for help- ing a cynical and frozen young woman to discover the depth of her feelings and to express them freely to her therapist is therefore a fitting note on which to end.
In writing this lecture I have throughout been aware that, by using terms such as 'information', 'communication', and 'working
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? ? ? models', it would be easy for an unwary reader to suppose that these terms belong within a psycho- logy concerned only with cognition and one bereft of feeling and action. Although for many years it was all too common for cognitive psycho- logists to omit reference to emotion, it is now re- cognized that to do so is artificial and unfruitful (Hinde, Perret-Clermont, and Stevenson-Hinde, 1985). There are, in fact, no more important com- munications between one human being and an- other than those expressed emotionally, and no information more vital for constructing and re- constructing working models of self and other than information about how each feels towards the other. During the earliest years of our lives, indeed, emotional expression and its reception are the only means of communication we have, so that the foundations of our working models of self and attachment figure are perforce laid using information from that source alone. Small won- der therefore, if, in reviewing his attachment re- lationships during the course of psychotherapy and restructuring his working models, it is the emotional communications between a patient and his therapist that play the crucial part.
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? ? ? 1 Within traditional theory this shift of role by a pa- tient is likely to be termed a case of identification with the aggressor.
2 Since in previous publications I have given much at- tention to the ill effects on personality development of bereavements and prolonged separations, these themes are omitted from what follows.
3 For research purposes, however, criteria for accept- ing retrospective information as valid must be much stricter.
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