The sea
It is enough to watch the sea at night under a full moon. It creeps into the land and covers it. It is calm, yet it can also be stirred up. It is the place of origins, from when we were fish or fetuses. How hard it is to come out and win a strip of land where we can exist.
Body and mind
Psychoanalysis is the science of the mind, but there can be no mind without a body. Physiological functioning runs from the conception of the fetus to its physical birth and through the first two months of extrauterine life. Only then, at around eight weeks, does the mind begin to emerge from the body, provided the newborn has received from the mother the illusion of continuity with intrauterine life.
The mind is made of a substance a little lighter than matter, and so it needs, in order to be understood, a science unlike the others: psychoanalysis.
Two forces
The phenomenon of ambivalence, like bipolar conditions, can be explained only if we consider not one but two forces working at the same time in the mind of each of us. Here the problem of ambiguity appears: the patient wants to feel better, yet at the same time begins to sense the danger of change.
Until recent years psychoanalysis was built on the libido and its vicissitudes, setting aside aggression or treating it as secondary to the libido. As Freud tells us in his letter to Marie Bonaparte, it is in fact aggression that at the beginning of life is directed outward, while all the libido is directed inward and ensures the cohesion of the Self. When a figure cares for the child and provides the illusion of non-discontinuity with the intrauterine state, the newborn withdraws aggression from the outside world in order to invest objects with libido.
Aggression is wrongly seen as a destructive force; here it is a vital force aimed at survival and, in particular, at the development of an oro-gastric system that allows the intake of liquid food (milk) and so bodily growth. The libido, by contrast, is a force that keeps bonds with others and ensures dependence.
Liquid functioning
At birth only bodily functions are active and, within a few months, a first mode of functioning emerges in which there is no distinction between subject and object: a highly imitative function of the mind with respect to bodily functions. At first the mind has no unity; it is fragmentary and not integrated, and it rests on sensations. It is a subjective world, and for the first months this is the prevailing mode of functioning.
Of course, even if the newborn feeds, we cannot yet speak of an oral function: sucking is the discharge, through the muscles, of primordial aggression. Gaddini speaks of imitation and of how the body works as an organ of perception, changing in response to the environment, and then of incorporations, which precede introjections, and of projections.
Psychological birth and solid functioning
Only with psychological birth, at around six to eight months, through the process of separation-individuation from the mother, does the child begin to perceive the other as different from the Self (objective object). The mother becomes an object mother, as opposed to an environment mother. More advanced mechanisms of introjection and projection begin to work, and a first internal object starts to settle in the infant Self.
Before this period maternal care allowed the Self to illude itself and to create an inner space, separated from the outside by a barrier, where the first object settles. But the mother-object comes from within: the mother becomes first a stranger and then external to the child, with the catastrophe of separation.
With the first teeth, the formation of the intestine and the intake of solid food, the child adds another mode of functioning to the earlier one, which continues to exist. The differentiation between the urinary and the fecal system follows, and physical incorporation becomes introjection and projection of the internal object, created by the frustration of absence. The integration of early imitation with the processes of projection and introjection allows a further functioning (use of the object): identification, the adult and mature way of interacting with others in the world.
The differences between liquid and solid functioning are highlighted in the psychoanalytic literature by several authors: Winnicott's distinction between environment mother and object mother, and his pure male and female elements; Freud's analogy of the amoeba, whose body differs from its sensory tentacles; Gaddini's psycho-sensoriality and psycho-orality. A symbiotic child can be mistaken for an autistic one.
The dual: mother, father, Oedipus
The development of the individual mind derives from a dual relationship between the child and the mother and leads, in the first years of life, to the creation of two internal objects in the infant mind.
With the development of language and walking, closely tied to breathing, the child becomes more autonomous around the first year of life. Here the father appears on the scene, the first external object, and the second object differentiates from this one. At first he is a duplicate of the mother: this is the period of the primal scene, in which the two objects overlap and begin to differentiate. An object that at first duplicates itself and then splits. This allows the second object to settle in the child's mind, and the process takes up the whole second year of life.
Between the second and third year another function is represented in the infant mind, that of reproduction, of the relationship of the two objects that gave the child life. Only at this point does the Oedipus complex begin; within a year it dissolves to make room for the search for an external object. All this, however, is frozen by the latency period, and only in adolescence can the search begin.
Technical considerations
This model implies two kinds of intervention during treatment: an interpretive one and a containing one.
It is the therapist who, through self-knowledge, can use his or her own subjectivity objectively in order to understand the other. The meeting of two minds produces a field, and everything that happens in the encounter is a co-construction. The technical considerations that can help us with patients are mainly two: being aware of the level of functioning the patient is at, and being able to come down to the same level rather than staying at a higher or different one. If the other functions in a primitive way, this is difficult for the therapist.
In general, people with a history of traumatic experiences function at the liquid level. In children, and in developmental age, the complication, beyond the parental couple, comes above all from the fact that developmental forces are at work and not a stable mental configuration.
References
S. Freud, in particular the 1937 letter to Marie Bonaparte, published in the introduction to Civilization and Its Discontents; S. Ferenczi, The Unwelcome Child and His Death Instinct; D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, in particular chapter V; E. Gaddini. By the same author: The Liquid and the Solid Mind (Aracne Editrice).
By the same author, the book: The Liquid and the Solid Mind (Aracne Editrice).