Les liens subjectaux et les pathologies transpersonnelles.

Subjectual links and transpersonal pathologies

Anna Maria Nicolò^[1]

Premise

Unfortunately, but fairly often, evaluation parameters and intervention models of an individual setting are applied to families and couples, or in the case of systems therapists or cognitive therapists, the fantasmatic interweaving of the family or couple is totally ignored, but it is this which represents the different element of the work of a family psychoanalyst.

If we were to pick out one specific element of this approach that characterises it within the dual setting, we might see that the psychoanalyst uses an observation perspective that  emphasises certain aspects such as attention to links between people and to interaction and interweaving of representations between members in a session. In my experience, the focus that I use during my work is on the relationship between the intra-psychic and the interpersonal and the convergences, divergences and interweaving between these two levels (Nicolò, 2002). This is the specific point upon which I try to intervene. In my opinion, this assumes that those who work with families or couples, must also know how to work with individuals, and that this is the basis of the analyst’s training. In addition, it also requires a much more complex view of observation.

Parameters of observation

What does it mean to study the relationship between the intrapsychic and the interpersonal?

There are many analysts in the world today who suggest a change in viewpoint compared to that of the more classical analyst. They have understood that in order to read the world that surrounds the subject, they cannot only show interest in the projection of the single any more, but they have to look at the response of the other which is directed at projection and modification which are induced by such responses. As a consequence, all this has led to the fact that in the dual setting too, we may observe the phenomena in terms of the analytical couple, and put the myth of neutrality to one side. We can study one’s experiences and also those of the patient’s as are co-created in the relationship.

It is this which is both different and important compared to other work models.

We mustn’t forget that the history of psychoanalysis is rich in reference and intuition on this point^[2].

Both Bion and Winnicott studied the relationship between the subject’s internal reality and its incidence on the other’s external reality. The projection and its effect upon the other, the use of the object, the way in which the other is made a parasite, exploited, colonised or on the contrary, used internally or in the relationship, in the economy of the lone single or in the collective economy, it is these perspectives that the above mentioned authors present us with. Nevertheless, even though these studies have allowed great strides in clinical research areas, they are not sufficient in explaining what happens in complex fantasmatic organisation such as with couples and families. The attention to what Kaës defines as the third topic arose in this way, that is, a psychic space that is characterised by a “realité psychique, commune e partagée, qui inclut l’espace intersubjectif entre les sujets […] et s’organise sur une articulation entre la realité psychique du lien et quelle du sujet singulier”” [psychic reality, common and shared, that includes the inter-subjective space between subjects […] and is organised on a connection between psychic reality of the link and that of a single subject (Kaës, 2009), he also continues saying that, “la tache d’une troisième “topique”est de décrire et de render intelligibles les relations complexes qui articulent, distinguent et, par certains còtés, opposent l’espace intrapsychique, celui du sujet singulier, et celui de ces espaces pluriels, organises par des processus et des formations psychiques spécifiques. Tel est l’enjeu épistemologique.” [The role of a third “topic” is that of describing and making complex relationships understandable, those that connect, distinguish and in certain instances oppose the intra-psychic space of both the single subject and that of the plural spaces that are organised by processes and specific psychic formations. This is the epistemological stake. (Kaës, 2009).

The Multiple Levels of Family and Couple Functioning

For all the reasons I have mentioned, our observation has become more complex and multi-dimensional, it doesn’t only refer to the contents of the individual’s internal world and neither only to the projections of every subject onto the object (which is also a second level of analysis). There is another level, a meta-level that includes us and which is made up of the network of links which we are inserted into, that we help to build and maintain. The useful evaluations at an individual level are not sufficient in themselves. We could try to explain the functioning by observing reciprocal projective identification that is carried our mutually by each partner on the other partner in a relationship and explain the reciprocal meshing of such projections; that unconscious contract in a couple which corresponds to each person’s needs. This type of theorisation was fundamental to the work of Dick’s, who was and is one of the pioneers of couple psychoanalysis, and his followers. This work of his based on the theory of objective relationships, about which we could ask ourselves if the theory of object relationships is sufficient in order to explain the phenomena that occur inside a couple or family or are seen in pathologies such as psychosis and the “folie à deux.”

Basing himself on the work of Harold Searles (1979) on therapeutic symbiosis, Ogden describes the co-creation, from the side of the analyst and patient together, of a “third” subjectivity which doesn’t actually belong to either of the two individually, but requires both to emerge themselves in their respective roles. So Ogden (1997) doesn’t present parallel worlds that are in resonance interaction between the two partners but, rather, the generation of a combined subjectivity that is made up in a unique way. ^[3]

So many authors, even though they are not referring to the married couple but to the analytical couple, refer to the creation of a third object which is novel and which is activated in the relationship between people.

From this perspective, the concept of linking as the third element, which is made up from the meeting between two or more people, appears to be a useful tool for both understanding and work. I would like to dwell on this point in particular because, in my opinion, it is important to the understanding of the dynamics in these settings.

The expansion of this concept formed a part of a study group at the “Centro di Psicoanalisi Romano” in 2001 – 2003 , which I coordinated, and many articles have been published about this in the journal “Interazioni.” ³

Pichon-Rivière highlights the difference between link and object relationship. In his work “Teoria del vinculo” (1980), – Theory of Linking – he asks, “Why do we use the term link?” In reality we are used to using the notion of object relationship in psychoanalytic theory, but the notion of link is much more concrete. The object relationship is a structure that is inside a link. (….) We could say that the notion of object relationship has been inherited from the atomist psychology while the link is something different which includes behaviour. We can defend the link as being a particular type of  relationship with the object; from this particular type of relationship behaviour that is more or less fixed with the object arises, it forms a pattern, a model of behaviour that tends to repeat itself automatically both in the internal relationship and the external one with the object.”

Berenstein too seems to be on the same wave-length. He reminds us that recognition of the presence of the other, as an unshakable alien of the Self, with which we have a relationship that is both fantasmatic and real, can be extremely creative. Indeed, as it is not possible to take it on board as belonging to us neither refuse it or expel it at least to break the link, to paraphrase Berenstein, if it doesn’t transform itself into being absent, or disappears as an alien, it requires us to modify ourselves as the subject. All these considerations lead to the consequence that the person of the other, for the aspect that is perceived as being external to the Self and distinct from the field of our projections, it provides a field of experience which is radically different from the other who is so intense in the subject sense.

Berenstein reminds us once more about the incapacity of being able to tolerate this element, that comes into being as an alien in front of reciprocal projective identification, this unshakable presence of the other as external subject may lead to attempting to deny it or annul it through various ways such as intrusion into the other or the colonisation of the other’s mind. These things happen quite frequently in psychosis where there is contemporarily incapacity of recognising the differentiated other as an autonomous person who has their own mental functioning, and an intrusion into the other’s mental space of thoughts, fantasies and secrets which are at times, trans-generational.

In order to return to the question that I asked myself at the beginning, we may say that a large difference between the concept of object relationship and that of linking exists, I also believe that the concept of linking is sufficiently explicit in explaining the phenomena that lie between an individual and their partner in a real couple or in a family. We may thus conclude that the theory of object relationships involves the subject’s relationship with their own object and not “the relationship between subjects that is instead, an interpersonal relationship.”

The  subject of the relationship is not only the object of projection but also “the end of a process of psychic exchange and, therefore, is like the other subject, another subject who does insist and does resist in so much as he is the other” (Kaës, 1994). We are speaking about a link between subjects and so, I use the term “subjectual links.”

I therefore believe that we must hypothesise upon the existence of more levels that are simultaneously present in interpersonal dynamics. These must be integrated in order to allow us to obtain a deeper understanding. So, returning to the parameters that guide our observation, we really must see, then, an intra-psychic functioning and also a second level that is represented by the different object relationships which lie between that subject and the object people of his/her projection, and then a third level which we can call link, one that lies between two or more subjects and which is characteristic of the relationship between a subject and another Self other-subject. (Nicolò, 1996, 1997, 2000).

Clinical Case

I will now present the clinical case of the supervision of a couple of patients who have been in therapy for about two years.

Gemma and Francesco came to me because of a marital crisis that they were going through. Francesco’s wife had discovered that he, a businessman who travelled extensively, has had a lover in another town for 5 years. Gemma felt betrayed but above all, couldn’t stand not having realised the fact. Francesco is a very closed man who is not inclined to speaking openly about himself. This seemed to be contradictory even though he has more contact than his wife and thus certain aspects appear to be more contradictory than his internal world would suggest. In the sessions his wife often demonstrates a controlling, intrusive attitude as an attempt at learning about the fantasies and thoughts that her husband hides. Both their children, adolescent very infantile-like and under the mother’s control, is a control that Francesco can’t manage to break. Furthermore, he has much admiration for both his wife’s ability and her family’s prestigious origins. After having analysed the victimised and masochistic aspects that had forced Gemma to experience a lot of her husband’s behaviour without the husband being asked, and also after having thought about the significance of the husbands “wanderings” and the nature of his relationship with his distant lover who was a woman that idealised him without asking for anything in return, the relationship began to seem to be freer and affectionate even though many problems persist.

During a session just before the summer holidays, Gemma started to talk about the following dream:

She was in an undefined place, perhaps outside. There were many men around and she had to try and put them into three glass containers, like the ones she had recently bought. One of the containers was smaller than the others.

She spoke about how non-descript the three were and she associated them with the husband, the son and the father. She associated these containers with those that hold phoetus in laboratories. Francesco associated the containers that his wife described in the dream with snakes in jars in the Natural History museum and remembered the film that they had seen together the evening before where, in a terrible scene, he had seen a jar with a head in it, just like a trophy.

The discussion thus went along the lines of relationships with the men that Gemma had had when she was a girl and also about the relationship that their daughter was having with a boy, who for Gemma was belittled and not good enough for the daughter.

However she defended and tried to praise. Francesco said that putting the men in jars was a way of controlling them and being able to always see them. Both joked about this, even though Gemma appeared to be very struck by the whole thing. She then said that perhaps the origin of such control is due to the fact of the husband’s behaviour. After having noted the sense of solitude that existed in the dream and not having any relationship with these men in question, the therapist commented upon how Gemma spoke about this male presence and not about real men, as if deep down she had always had a fear of having intimate contact with real people.

Gemma observed that putting them in jars allowed her to see but not touch.

Francesco wondered where that left him in the situation, how he had accepted it for so long and said that in fact, he had always had the impression that their relationship was a flitting one. In a flitting relationship, one touches but remains at length. He too has always been alone. The therapist commented that he had completed the interpretation for his part.

Gemma commented that she had many friends, male too, and one with whom she had had a meaningful relationship even though now he was dead. But perhaps her relationships with men have always been mediated by her father who had had a very strong link with the mother. They spent many afternoons together just talking, something which Gemma had never been able to do with the husband. From this aspect, she remembered that the lengthy relationship she had had with her first boy-friend, who was still the ideal type for her. She said that she had had a completely different relationship with Emanuele, not only a perfect sexual relationship but an understanding at a cultural and political level and a close understanding from the point of view about life too. She even now sees him as a friend and feels that the link that they had still remained even though it had faded. The analyst asked why they hadn’t got married to which she replied that she had been very upset by the fact that he had he had courted another woman, even though it had only been a joke, as afterwards it showed itself to be. In the meantime, she had got engaged to her husband.

The analyst noted that in her interpretation that from a certain point of view she seemed to have run from links in her life that had been strong ones. She had left her previous fiancé and married someone with whom she felt more distant. She commented that in reality, intimacy is constructed in two, her husband had always been a bit on the controlled side. Francesco corrected this saying that he felt he was discrete and respectful and never intrusive.

Gemma confirmed that even today when she meets up with Emanuele a very particular climate explodes which she likens to a tuning in of a couple of radios to the same frequency which with the husband, things remain unsaid and un explained. It is for her, an available value upon reception which with Francesco might be possible, but she never listens. However, with Emanuele, he always manages magically to tune in to her immediately.

In this session it seemed that the link that they had both built up over the years had come to light. This defensive, reciprocal control against intimacy is taught in order to keep distance between themselves, it represents the link that binds them but at the same time it leaves them alone, forcing them to look elsewhere for the intimacy that neither of them has ever been able to give the other. Fear of intimacy seems to be, among other things, a distinct feature of this couple where both partners was in a state of equilibrium through using the other, a lover for him, work and fantasy for her. They maintained their distance but also their balance. Successive sessions explained the sense and the advantage as well as the origin of this link between themselves.

In the dream^[4] that she talked about, not only did the defence that she enacted against intimacy come to light, but also did the corresponding one of the husband’s. Such experiences in reality generated reciprocal behaviour that reinforced the corresponded experience and created personal and transpersonal defences. The wandering off of Francesco’s towards another woman was created in such a way not only by his attempt of never trying to have a deep relationship with anyone but also as a compensating response to Gemma who was both controlling and evasive.

What will we define with the term link?

It seems to me that  reducing the discussion to its basics, so that we can speak about the existence of a link, we have to refer to:

1. a shared construction – a third party, co-constructed at least by two people;
2. such a construction is not a conscious one, at least it is not rendered so through the work of working-through. It shows itself and it is possible to observe it in action through behaviour, experience, dreams or symptoms;
3. its being able, after having been constructed, to influence the players who produced it;
4. its being usually unapparent, it becomes evident in the way and when it conditions the freedom of expression of the single person;
5. the link being different from the object relationship because it is a third party construction as compared to the subjects who produce it. Instead, the object relationship, even though it produces “a shared object” (Teruel) in the exchange and even though it is at the base of a couple’s collusion and fruit of projection and reciprocal projective identification, it is the reupdating of an internal object relationship which finds its origins in the past;
6. the link, which is a new element and is co-constructed, extracts different versions of the Self that re-update in relationship to the specific link;
7. the link makes up the background; the scenario against which the various object relationships can move, it generally only shows itself in pathological situations. When such a link prevents the development of each person’s personality it may become compensatory for either the other’s problems or for the couple’s problems; in general the aspects are psychotic, severe depression, problems that mitigate the “life-death” dynamic;
8. the experiences of the counter-transference, interaction, gestures and sensations that are some of the aspects that are present in dreams are very useful for reading the quality and nature of links in both the couple and family setting.

The link and the mechanism of dissociation

To reason in terms of subjectual links opens up an innovative perspective regarding the comprehension of a pathology, but above all, of normality. We can certainly say that there are situations such as psychosis that is very difficult to understand fully if one doesn’t consider the idea that behind these disturbances there is a specific “traumatic organisation of links” and that psychosis is not the illness of an individual  person but a problem of the whole organisation. It is more difficult to understand the existence of links at the level of functioning that everyone commonly portrays in life because I believe that links make up a back-drop that is perpetually functioning in our existence and that they become clearly visible only in situations of stress or pathology.

For many years I have been intrigued by certain phenomena that are also present in normal situations where all of us are exposed to distant situations that are different from our usual ones and how these can trigger behaviour or experiences that are alien to those that we commonly manifest. This appeared to be particularly true when observing the dynamics of couples or when seeing the different behaviour that people are able to portray with different partners^[5].

All these observations have led me to explore the topic in a series of articles, among which is “Versioni del Sé e interazioni patologiche” (Nicolò, 1993). I will summarise it because it seems that I can subscribe to the comments as they are also relevant today.

“many analysts^[6] have begun to question the conception of a unitary and monolithic Self, tending towards the presence, which is inside each of us, of a certain number of “people,” objects or parties who are sometimes even in a counter position or conflict with each other. ^[7] …”

Mitchell (1982-1992) dwells on these topics and expands upon the relationship between the Self as a relational, multiple and discontinuous configuration and another aspect of the Self such as the “integral and continuous” part.

For Mitchell the multiple versions of the Self, more than the representations, are true and real ways of being; organisations. The entity of the detachment processes between the configuration of the Self differentiate the normal situations of multiple identity in borderline patients and psychotic patients in so much as the latter suffer from a feeling of lack of continuity of experience and internal cohesion.

In a normal personality, the different versions are adjoining in relationships between themselves and in certain senses are quite similar, unlike pathological situations that the literature has portrayed in an admirable fashion of falling somewhere between the splitting between “Jekyll and Hyde.” “To a certain extent, every one of us would rank themselves differently according to the relationships that lie with the other as long as it is something significant. Thus, the couple relationships could turn out to be profoundly transforming, not only because they modify our internal experiences but because they also activate versions of ourselves that would have otherwise remained obsolete or hidden throughout our entire lives. The conception of the individual could then be reviewed from the point that places the accent on the relationships, on linking” and on dissociation as a mechanism that allows the coexistence of different aspects of the Self (Nicolò, 1992).

The enormous quantity of studies and research that have been carried out over the last ten years on trauma and post traumatic personality functioning have enlightened these functionings even more by illustrating the use of dissociation in such situations, and they also highlight the presence of this mechanism as being useful and physiological in a normal personality. For example, Bromberg states that “dissociation, like repression, is a healthy, adaptive function of the human mind. It is a basic process that allows individual self-states to function optimally (not simply defensively) when full immersion in a single reality, a single strong affect, (Bromberg, 1993, p. 162-163), “…….the experience of being a unitary self (cf. Hermans, Kempen & van Loon, 1992, p 29-30; Mitchell, 1991, p. 127-139) is an acquired, developmentally adaptive illusion.”

Continuing with his reflection on this point, Bromberg believes that integration is an interpersonal construction jointly “shaped by the individual and the eye of the beholder. The beholder is frequently another person but is always, simultaneously, a dissociated voice of the self”.

The self integration is thus relative to the link with the  external reality.

Bromberg then describes this inter-subjective field as being able to adapt to the immediate reality of the participants in a relationship and the way they experience themselves and each other and highlight how each un-signalled withdrawal from that field by either person will disrupt the other’s state of mind.

An interesting clinical example can be proven by a clinical sequence from a couple I had in therapy. The couple came to me through the woman’s analyst who had had an emergency with symptoms of depression when her father had died one year previously. The therapeutic work had led to the fantasy developing a possible separation. After a period of  treatment, the sudden discovery of the wife’s decision for a separation left the husband in a state of anguish. The husband, who had never previously dreamed and had always kept firm control over all his emotions, lost control and presented this dream at the beginning of the session following his wife’s announcement. “I became aware of suddenly and successively losing pieces of my body. I lost a hand and reattached it, but upon doing so I lost the other, and so on with my legs, genitals, eyes and my heart. I awoke with a start in a state of anxiety and didn’t realise where I was.” It was naturally very easy and also quite obvious to connect the loss of these body parts to the anguish of the separation from the wife, and it was he who had made this connection. Afterwards, the therapy naturally proceeded in a deeper manner.

This dream seemed very explicit in so much as how the break-up of a significant link may be experienced as the threatening break-up of one’s own whole integrity.

The reciprocal confirmation that the participants, upon interaction, give each other spontaneously and automatically, is another of the aspects that warrants attention. They show the natural reciprocal meshing of each person compared to the significant other and – just as the above mentioned patient remembered – also the reciprocal and silent adaptation of the two minds that participate in that link to the extent that the withdrawal of one of the two breaks the mind state of the other.

We still haven’t understood what it is that triggers this tuning in that theorists of love at first sight sometimes describe as “being smitten.” This reciprocal tuning in is also visible in groups of people who meet for the first time. From this point of view, how much happens in the relationship between mother and newborn baby is amazing and all those who have done some Baby Observation using the Esther Bick method can testify. In these situations it often happens to see the baby’s spontaneous, acted or somatic response to the mother’s certain specific functioning, a reciprocal response between the two which transforms itself into repetitive reciprocal behaviour in a brief span of time^[8].

Naturally, a hypothesis like this has a corollary, the fact that each of us, within certain limits, establishes links that are partially different with different people according to the dissociated dimensions of the Self that are activated within a link.

Again, within certain limits it is obvious that a certain continuity, adequacy and dialogue between these various aspects makes up the base of our normal functioning. We could thus say that a certain link weans dissociated configurations of the Self in each one of us. The more that pathological functioning is under way the more such configurations are distant from each other and, furthermore, there is no continuity between them.

This is quite evident with some patients, as with Magda, a 38 year old woman who had a double married life. With her lover she had naturally and very quickly discovered liberal and multiple sexuality which she had felt swept away by. She had a link on the limits with him that also consisted of sado-masochism which arose out of notes of mental cruelty and where the most exciting element of the relationship was the freedom of expression of aggression that she felt as being both possible and natural. On the contrary, she had established a romantic relationship with the husband and from some points of view, was also infantile-like. Magda admired the husband a lot for his enormous culture and sensitivity and with him felt that a type of relationship that “ran along ways of delicacy and sensitivity” had arisen, the only flat point was the sexual difficulty of precocious ejaculation that he suffered from and that had shown itself after some months of marriage which was now in its tenth year. Magda didn’t feel as though she was betraying her husband given that the things she had with him were kept inside the walls of their intimacy. She compared the two relationships saying that one was inside her mind and the other in her body. However, she did recognise that when she was with the lover her ways were freer and more aggressive than in the presence of others. She had amazed a long standing friend of hers whom she had met one evening whilst she was in a restaurant with her lover. Her manner of speaking was direct and uninhibited, much different from that which her friend was accustomed to within the domestic walls. The difference in behaviour that the friend had also noticed, I think, corresponded to a dissociated functioning of the patient’s  who had used dissociated versions of her Self and different links with each of the two men.

The link and trans-personal pathologies

Another example of all this can also be seen in Pasolini’s film, Teorema.

In the film the sudden appearance of a handsome and mysterious young man is able to unleash different pathologies for each member of a middle-class Italian family, triggering behaviour that turns out to be self-destructive in each family member. It is also very interesting to observe the early activation of a destructive link that seems to hypnotise beyond any explanation or word and cast a spell over each of the family  too.

This reference to Pasolini’s film immediately allows us to reflect upon the particular nature of pathology and linking. As is visible in the film, arising from the same stimulus i.e. the presence of a foreigner, each member of the family activates a different pathology. For the maid a kind of mystic delirium, the mother becomes a perverse sado-masochistic nymphomaniac and the son throws himself into a homosexual relationship.

These pathologies were certain expressions of the individual functioning of each person, which up until that moment had been compensated for, or detached or dissociated and then with the specific stimulus from the obscure link had been idealised and unleashed  by a sudden arousal.

In the previous part I stated that there are certain situations that are difficult to fully understand unless one does not refer to the concept of a specific “traumatic organisation of links.” I cited psychosis as an example of this kind of functioning  and psychosis is not the disease of a single person but a problem of the whole organisation.

As in these families we can often see that each person is looking for a container into which they can put anguish and feelings of solitude and non-existence and profound shame and humiliation and do so through various defence strategies that are of the  transpersonal type. I we work with these families we see some defence mechanisms that are not lonely individual such as removal and denial, there are also others that are collectively constructed. For example, we may see mechanisms of  malicious union that are stored with the other and also occupation of the other’s mind (with the consequent annulment of the other’s subjectivity) or the denial of the other and their autonomous existence or of his identity from the beginning. Frequently, there are incredible stories that hide inexpressible secrets and often not spoken about such as; babies left for dead, deviations and pedigree kept under wraps and characterised  by secrecy and abuse or other traumas.

But why can we say that these pathologies of linking are also transpersonal? And what do we mean by this term?

Differently from the interpersonal space which is the place where the exchanges with the other take place, different from the Self, a space therefore defined by differentiation and where transformative and working through processes of the family group take place in a creative and evolutionary dimension, the transpersonal is the place of primitive unconscious communication that is acted or somatized, it is also the place of the trans-generational and transpersonal defences.

Kaës clearly defined that the thing that is transmitted between subjects is not (1993, p.17-22) of the same order as that which is transmitted through them.

In psychotic families, the working-through processes break down, and an attack on one’s own thought is activated because the interpersonal space is reduced and is substituted by union with the other, by control or by removal of emotions in the other. In this situation, work on the trans-personal dimensions becomes crucial because they transport secrets, concrete contents or somatized ones etc. In transpersonal dimensions we can also see defensive links that are created on purpose as transpersonal defences that the family organises when it is faced with shared anguish that is produced by life cycle events or by occasional trauma. There are some families for example, where somatization becomes a privileged response that is transmitted trans-generationally and used by more than one member of the family (Nicolò, 1997, 2000). In my opinion, trans-personal defences are a collective product, are quite stable over time and are often activated by that specific context. They are a collective product in the sense in which “they meet” the participant’s need for a relationship.

Getting better inside the other: understanding of subjectual relationships

Clinical material on families and couples illustrates, once and for all, that there are ways of getting better and becoming ill which use the other. They are a getting better inside the other and a becoming ill in place of the other.

Precisely, the authors who have involved themselves with serious pathologies know very well how much the serious psychic illness is in effect “an interactive folly” (as Racamier noted), it always has another reacting with it.

“To become ill inside the other” is one of the aspects of that pathology of linkage that are called into being cured in these contexts.

We may also add that these links activate levels of mental functioning in the other, states of the Self that update themselves simultaneously to such links. We may therefore witness amazing changes in people when particular links that imprisoned them previously are released, broken or resolved because of life’s events or thanks to therapeutic work. The appearance, or, on the contrary, the disappearance of serious depression and claustro-agrophobic symptoms have, for example, very much puzzled us as a consequence of a break up of significant links. The fragility of the limits of the Self of the individuals involved in the link, is, naturally, one of the characteristics of the areas of primitive functioning and often makes up one of the points where we can focus our therapy. But in order to reply effectively to these that probably still remain hypotheses and questions, we have to better understand the status of the other inside our psychic life, we have to overcome those positions that always put our “unattainable Self” at the centre so that we can see not only our perturbing unconscious but also the other that is inside us. How many others we are made up of, how many others we are an expression of. From the beginning of our lives.

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[1]  MD., psychyatrist, training analyst SPI – IPA, director of International Review of Psychoanalysis of Couple and Family.

[2] For example, Bion held that we should not only consider projective identification but also that which such projected identification, “makes” from the other. We should therefore observe the effect of such a defence mechanism on the other, that is, how much expressed fantasy through projective identification is able to substantiate itself in the reality of the other and then modify it. (Bion, 1962, p. 65-66).

Winnicot also studied the use of the object and distinguished it from the relationship with it, saying that the object’s reply, that is able to survive the baby’s destructive fantasy, founds its reality and creation. Through this operation that Winnicott described in his famous work on the use of the object, the baby takes it upon himself to test the other’s response when he sees it, and experiences it as destructive in his fantasy. If the object survives then that vital energy, ruthlessness, “love-hate” (Bollas, 1987, p. 127) that the subject felt at that particular moment and in that stage of his life, will be useful for him in feeling different, in subjectivising himself to using reality.

[3] Ogden states, “I don’t consider the transference and counter-transference as being separate entities that arise in relationship to the other, but, rather, in reference to aspects of a single inter-subjective totality that is experienced separately (and individually) by the analyst and patient (Ogden, 1995, p.696).  ³ “Interazioni” and “Centro di Ricerca Psicoanalitica Coppia Famiglia – Firenze” organised a congress in Florence in June 2003: “Analizzare il legame nella coppia”.

[4] Quite often during couple or family therapy, we are able to see the emergence of a dream which is presented by one of the two. When this occurs, we don’t only have the experience which expresses the world around an individual person, but we may see such a dream as being a vehicle of collective functioning. In certain situations the dream expresses the nature of the partner’s reciprocal join or the nature of the link that unites them. In others, a dream will be present as a result of some agitation that the other partner causes. In some families one of the members will be a sort of spokesperson for everyone’s dreams and thanks to this, and to the group or couple associations, starting from the dream, we may observe a complex reality that is made up not only of the emerging content of the dream but also the personal and group defences that are organised around it. For reasons of space, I will not expand upon this here but refer to my following works (Nicolò 1994, 2002, 2005).

[5] Studying these phenomena, Meltzer’s statement struck me particularly, he said, “Everyone of us has multiple relationships; some of these are connected to the healthy part of our personality, others to the non-healthy part or even the psychotic part. It is because of this that almost everyone shows some instability in personality functioning, depending on the meeting they have in specific moments” (Meltzer, 1979, p. 45).

[6] Starting from Fairbairn’s theory of object relationships that described the personality as made up of the self auxiliary and internal objects, that are suggested as being dynamic structures with specific characteristics. Many authors have developed similar concepts.

In his stimulating book “The Matrix of Mind,” Ogden (1986) extrapolates similar concepts from the work of leading authors such as Winnicott and Bion. He reminds us of Winnicott’s two-way partition proposal in true and false self, that is suggested as organisations that work one compared to the other inside the personality. Finally, in Ogden’s opinion, Bion too perceives the individual as “being made up of multiple sub-organisations of personality, each one able to function in a semi-autonomous way,” but also able to include and process the projective identification of the other (Ogden).

[7] Many authors, either directly or indirectly, refer to that which Winnicott states one reaches, that is, “a cohesive identity” when “many selfs, that are contained in everyone’s official self, listen to each other” and discover paradox and contradiction. Through an accurate study on borderline personality, Harold F. Searles also managed to state that a healthy individual’s sense of identity is far from being unitary. According to Searles, the healthier a person is the more aware he is of the numerous people that go to make it up, each one of which represents an aspect of their own identity.

[8] There are many questions that naturally fill our minds, one of which regards the giving of importance to a context because it is the context which gives us important initial information about the nature and quality of the links which lie between people given that it is often shown more as being actions, moods or concrete gestures instead of narrations or stories.

Analysts are not accustomed to this concept which has been happily used in systemic therapies for years. The only author to cite it is Modell. Anyway, this concept refers to the climate in which the links are emerged and that they contribute to creating. Such a climate has an influence upon the triggering of primitive processes of functioning.