I know for an absolute fact that had my uncle Harry confronted me steadfastly when I stole a pack of Wilkinson razor blades from his medicine cabinet, I would have gone insane. I was around ten years old at the time, and to be faced down would have caused a kind of murder that makes a person’s mind leave the world for unreality. If you have seen any of the videos of prisoners having their heads slowly carved off by terrorists, this is the quality of experience I speak of. As it went, though, my family, nuclear and extended, had always known to avoid reality with me, to hold me to no self-responsibility, to never question my behavior, to never ask me about myself, how I felt, to never intrude into my bubble. Harry’s motivation for this was probably wisdom: He was an obstetrician, my mother’s obstetrician, who became a psychoanalyst. He had let me know he was aware of my theft but then, seeing the inscrutably tranced and escapist look in my eyes, walked away and let the matter pass. My aunt’s motivation was probably pity. My parents’ cause was their own dissociation. I had been cognitively and emotionally disconnected from myself and from people since toddlerhood and this state was never questioned.
I’m describing my peculiar condition to illustrate and explain a necessary hypocrisy. I want my clients, when possible, to go to the pain of their roots, to finally have emotional justice by being and naming and screaming the injustice of their childhood. “The theory is correct,” as Einstein said (regarding the bending of light, I believe). It is pain exorcized that heals or mitigates illness. But for me to fall inside my own child, my own infant that had already banished a birth killed by fire and ice – Cesarean trauma and abandonment to an incubator in 1951 – would be to be engulfed in flames again. Any feeling faced that came from a deeper, troubled part of me, opened up about, known, would have dissolved the wall of dissociation, leaving only a substrate of a void: no identity. And worse: The ten-year-old would be in that crazymade conflagration while having to stand and be rational before unseeing, unknowing authority.
The hypocrisy, and the certainty, is: I know I still cannot face the uncle-in-my-mind about stealing. I still could not tolerate that feeling, or any feeling of the abyssally lost child. It is simply impossible. Everything that is my life now is on top of that – the forbidden, the unlivable.
This is because the feeling pre-dates the “Mommy! Daddy!” that Arthur Janov elicited from his two inspirational clients, Danny and Gary, those who primal-screamed for the first time. Some others, after them, reached cellular memory, wailed, writhed like salamanders on the primal room floor, reliving their birth and pre-birth. But that is where my credence stops. A ten-year-old child could not sustain that original death of the pre-Self, the pre-identity. How could an adult sustain it, decades later, whose greater strength is only his stronger defenses, defenses that are obliterated in the process?
I remember reading, in my teens, a modern parable, in a paperback book of parables, where a man finds himself walking along a country road or path and reaches a gate which a guard forbids him to pass. He can see beyond it a peaceful, Eden-like vista. The watchman tells him to return from whence he came and try again. This he does, and is turned away. Again and again he treks the path, each time refused entry. He knows that beyond the gate is Heaven. Finally, something dawns on him and he asks the guard: Why, in all these times I’ve walked this long road, have I never seen another traveler? The guard replies: Because this is your path.
In an earlier post,* I wrote: “So much of our motivation distills to this paradox: We seek to meet our childhood needs, but we must not find them. Defended against pain, we will not and cannot find that hopelessness, that regression to an abortive start of life.” Instead, you and I can only go as far as . . . possible. Everyplace else is the surface, where we’ve escaped, where we live.
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* https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2013/11/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_14.html.
I,too,TPS, have had to go that far back - against the advice - to peek into the abyss. But there has to be an imaginary adult there, along side you, to hold your hand and pull you back if the abyss threatens to devour you. This is a time when there only was emotions, external images flashing straight through the eyes, directly into the brain, without any filtering or divestation, because those brain structures were yet to be metabolised. Oh! Death! What a journey.
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