a mood, and when he does, the space created for the experiencing of a mood disappears with the act of temporal emergence. If someone has ‘gone’ to sleep, he undergoes a particular psychic experience which is universally recognized. If a person enters a mood, he approximates in this form of psychic activity another means of establishing and elaborating elements of the infant-child self: sleep cre-ates the dream, some moods establish fragments of former self stcre-ates.
Generative and malignant moods
Certain moods may be psychic phenomena that are as necessary to the well-being of the person as is the dream. While in a mood, a part of the individual’s total self withdraws into a generative autistic state so that a complex internal task is allowed time and space to work itself through. By virtue of the person’s psychosomatic identity during a mood experience, a special territory is usually marked out to ensure that this experiencing is not mistaken for object-directed communicating, even though it would be incorrect to assume that the person who is having a mood has no potential effect upon the Other. In my view, what differentiates a generative from a malignant mood is the nature of the mood’s function and the quality of that boundary that preserves a space for mood experiencing. If we feel, let’s say, that a person’s withdrawn imperviousness is a means of coercing another into serving some self function, then such a mood would constitute a malignant interpersonal process, one which I would like to differentiate from a generative withdrawal, when we do not feel that the person’s mood is fundamentally aimed to force us into some capitulative activity. To be sure, it is not always possible to draw a hard and fast line here, as almost all moods are invested with object-relational implica-tions. A malignant mood, from a functional point of view, would be one, however, that is primarily aimed at some Other. A person who sulks, for example, would be using mood experience in order to effect some significant Other. In a generative mood the person goes into himself to contact the mute, unknown child self and thus has a greater chance of generating some knowing of what has been part of the unthought known.
The quality of the boundary that marks the territory for mood experiencing must also be considered in assessing whether a mood is generative or malignant. If a person emerges from sleep and cannot distinguish his dreams from his wakeful perceptions, we think in terms of a potential psychotic process. At the very least the dream will have lost its generative potential as the awakened person, unable to distinguish it from reality, will no longer have that perceptual differentiation necessary to reflect upon the dream as an object (Pontalis, 1974). The boundary between the self asleep who is dreaming and the awake self who is perceiving is essential to the preservation of these two domains of distinct self experience.
Similarly, for a mood to be generative a person must be able to emerge from a mood in such a way that he can reflect upon the mood as an object without feel-ing the migratory effects of mood experiencfeel-ing overlappfeel-ing into ordinary affects.
The mnemic environment
Musing on the often-heard comment ‘I am not myself today’, Ralph Greenson (1954) stated that such a comment pointed out the ‘close connection between the questions “How are you?” and “Who are you?” ’ He wrote: ‘One can describe moods in terms of objects. Patients do not just become depressed, but they become the rejected little boy they once were in childhood. The anxious patient is not just a frightened adult, but is the scared little child of the past.’ He concludes: ‘Moods are not only derived from the internal representatives of external objects, but are often the representatives of one’s own past state of mind; one’s conception of oneself in the past’ (pp. 73–4).
Moods are complex self states that may establish a mnemic environment in which the individual re-experiences and re-creates former infant-child experiences and states of being. Just as the dream allows for the unconscious experience of child parts of the self, in elaborating and negotiating with adult life, so, too, does mood experience allow for previously lived self states to reappear in the ongoing negotiation with reality. When we become in our being that which we recollect from former self states, the psychic accomplishment of the mood may be as valu-able as the work of the dream.
Indeed, because of the particular features of the analytic setting and process (Winnicott, 1965; Khan, 1974), the analysand’s mood life may be particularly responsive to the nature of psychoanalysis itself, rather like a dream is a response to sleep. Analysands create environments within the clinical setting and the living through of a mood is one of the idioms for the establishment of an environment.
Who is it that emerges from within the mood? Since a special being state is established, what is the total self’s relation to this part of the self ? In what way may we be able to learn something of the person’s relation to himself as an object through mood experience? An otherwise dour person, for example, might on occa-sion become rather inexplicably happy, even though such happiness might appear strangely incongruous with the person’s ordinary self system. Every so often he might become rather silly and mildly vulnerable. It may well be that such an indi-vidual’s ‘happiness’ – which might puzzle those who know the person as being oddly ‘unlike him’ – is a temporary regression to a former self state that prevailed in his childhood. In other words, the child self is still present in the person’s total self functioning, but it appears to be an oddity relative to the person’s more usual self. If so, the person has possibly internalized a lifeless parenting environment and the mood of infrequent silliness is an unconscious re-creation of the occa-sionally happy child self who is nonetheless dissociated from a lifeless parenting environment that failed the child’s libidinal and ego needs. The ‘usual self’ of such an individual personifies and sustains the lifeless parenting environment, whilst the ‘oddly’ silly and happy self that emerges amidst a mood actually represents the former child self, still refused recognition by the depriving parental element.
An otherwise rather superficial person, who seems almost perversely content about everything, on occasion stumbles into inertness and something close to
sadness. Such a mood could be the remembering of moments in childhood when the other than happy child – happiness being a parental need complied with by the child – registered other aspects of life. But the individual’s mood of awkward sadness may, in his relation to himself as an object, re-create this person’s expe-rience of the way in which the parents disposed themselves towards sadness or vulnerability.
In order to clarify why I think that some moods may represent a breakdown in the individual’s self development, in such a way that self states released in a mood are acts of conservation and protest, I will present three cases which illustrate my point.
Clinical examples / I
David is a fretful man. Always involved in more than he can possibly accomplish, his dreamy ambitiousness is inevitably complemented by an intense frustration with his inability to complete even the simplest of tasks. Were he not quite intel-ligent and genuinely creative, he would only be hopeless, and yet his situation is compounded by the fact that, even while leaving many of his tasks undone, he has managed to receive recognition in his field and to get on somehow. He is modestly successful in three distinctly different professions which he maintains simultaneously. However much he might plan to fulfil the obligations of one of the professions, he is no sooner embarked on such work than he is compelled to attend to a crisis in another area of his work life. Indeed, crises seem to punctuate his grandiose dreaming, as one dream after another is interrupted by a crisis that demands immediate attention.
Now and then, while ensconced in his study, he is able to feel a kind of sublime rapport with the intellectual aspect of one of his professions. In such moments, he feels quite enraptured by the aesthetic dimension of his task, but such experiences are painfully short-lived. A telephone call from a rather irate client might jolt him back to a recognition that he has not actually attended to some ordinary but essen-tial task in one of the other professions.
As a child he was quite a daydreamer. Both of his parents, however, seemed to have supported his phantasizing as a dissociated alternative to living. They read him an uncommonly excessive amount of stories – sometimes for hours on end – whilst virtually all the other moments of the parents’ lives were spent bickering with one another. With their child, however, they seemed to create rare moments of tranquillity; each night, for example, they regularly gathered in his room for the ceremonial storytelling, which somehow managed to abate their intense unhappi-ness with one another.
David’s parents divorced when he was eleven, and he was completely deserted by his father, who waited a further nine years before he tried to see his son again.
Although the parents had argued quite a lot, both were self-styled liberals, and it was contrary to their self image to debase themselves in unsavoury rows; they nit-picked and withdrew, or scored points over each other. It was a terrible shock for
David when they divorced, and it was a catastrophe to be deserted by his father just as he needed paternal help in dealing with the shock of adolescence.
Whatever David’s presenting material might be for any particular session it was often spoken against the background of a kind of character mood, although this mood was split off from the presentation of his narrative. As time passed, I became increasingly attentive to his mood, and I asked myself what sort of environment he was creating for himself, as his mood established a being state that was quite distinct.
How did he behave?
Often, when I opened the waiting-room door he would jump to his feet and race past me into the consulting room, rather like a professional entertainer called on to the stage. Once he had hurled himself into the clinical space, however, he would pause for a second as if confused, almost as if he had entered the wrong place. Whereupon he would rearrange the analytic couch by taking off one of the cushions, and he would move the couch a few inches closer to me. All of this he did with the grace of a lumberjack serving tea at a fundraising event; it was so well done, even though odd, that it took me some time before I saw it.
When he spoke, he would also rearrange his voice. That is the only way I can describe what he did when he ‘cleared’ his throat with guttural expulsions, as if this was a prerequisite to the material that followed. When he narrated life’s events, he conveyed his accounts with a kind of mournful urgency, rather like someone who feels he must describe a dreadful event that he has seen as quickly as possible in anticipation of losing consciousness. Crossing and then recrossing his feet, putting his hand under his head to support himself, rubbing his face again and again, and heaving and sighing were characteristics of his person in the sessions. It amounted to a kind of emotive tidal activity, as he would sigh in waves of released but never resolved despair, and his personal activity was never intrinsically linked to the material presented. He would, however, stop this agitated activity as soon as I spoke. The sighing would cease, his body would be at rest, and he might report a dream or talk about material from another session, all stated in a calm and serene manner. In fact, he was dreamy, and sometimes he would slur his words or break off in mid-sentence and lapse back into private thought.
By the time I came to analyze this phenomenon, which I regard as a character mood, I had already analyzed his grandiosity as a need to be mirrored in the radi-ant light of an admirer, something which he had lost through parental discord.
The matter is further complicated by the fact that I think the parents denied their internal pain by treasuring their own split-off child selves, acted out by them in relation to David, who in some ways was overdosed with parental idolization. By preserving several different professions he manages to sustain a boy’s world, for reality is viewed as a kind of intrusive frustration of the life of daydreams.
The point at which I took up his mood was when I realized just how intent he was upon setting up an originating grandiose moment (as seen when he entered the consulting room) only to have that lovely possibility collapse into a kind of agitation (fretting at being inside himself ) and then eventually a serenity that was occasioned usually when I spoke. Now what did all of this amount to?
One of the transference features of his mood was its mnemic singularity. He wanted to live inside this environment! Only through his mood of boyish ambition oblivious to true reality orientation could he preserve the last moments of family life. By living amongst grandiose dreams he remained in contact with his mother and father and their recognition of him as their child. His fretting did not register a frustration with reality: it was an expulsion of reality orientation. When I spoke, I was that mother or father telling him stories, whereupon he lapsed into reverential calm, knowing now that the parental objects were present. When I analyzed the unconscious aim of his mood, there was intense resistance. Only well after a year of working this through did his resistance devolve into a desperate sense of loss.
It was not simply that understanding what he was holding on to through his mood would mean separation from a delusion – that of being the boy with his family. It also meant that he had to mourn the loss of a compensatory future lived with his mother and father together. It is one thing to mourn the loss of an experience that has happened in one’s past – it is quite another matter to lose the future, and David’s registration of this loss was intense. To be a failure had been his greatest uncon-scious ambition. Not to succeed enabled him to remain ‘at home’ with his parents.
That mood which I have identified as a feature of David’s character was in the nature of a mnemic environment. The unconscious aim of his fretting and his dreaminess was to create the familial atmosphere that prevailed at the moment when he suffered the loss of his family.
Clinical examples / II
George contributes to the creation of his own personal environment through a recurring mood of anticipatory mourning. His mood is a suffusive expression of the certainty of grief. He knows he will be failed. Hence liveliness is only suffered by fools. Session upon session is characterized by a quiet but triumphant certainty that all will fail in life, and he certainly endeavoured for years to make the analysis fail, lest I come to the mistaken conclusion that analysis was a potentially life-enhancing process.
To some extent, it would be fair to say that George’s mood was always the object of the analysis, but I felt I was able to analyze its unconscious function only when he turned to it as a phenomenon in its own right. This came about when he was involved with his first real girlfriend. She had promised him that she would leave her mother and come to live with him, but month after month she could not bring herself to make the move. For a long time he had been tirelessly supportive of her, but gradually a mood that I had often witnessed in the analysis began to prevail in his relation to her. Instead of telling her how he felt, something which he felt would reduce his potency, he used his personal withdrawal from her to compel her into anxious dependence on him. Although she could not move in with him, his withdrawal led her to telephone him more frequently and to ask him for reassurance. This he did not give. Quite the contrary. He addressed her as if the relationship were over and insinuated himself into her psychic life as a person
who would both inflict and share the loss with her. At a certain point, however, this rather vengeful attack on his girlfriend seemed less predetermined. Indeed, he drew closer to her; now, he loved her the more intensely, but his expression of love was to withdraw from her and cause her a great deal of pain. Odd as it may sound, his libido declined in favour of a kind of grief orgasm. He would seek her out in order to undergo a form of intense mutual loss that would culminate in tears and agonizing pain upon separation. He characterized the ending of the relationship as fated. It was over, and there was nothing he could do. Yet he would remain with her to see her loss through to the end.
Something of this same phenomenon had been acted out by him in the transfer-ence to me. His determined sense that we were all fated to mutual failure would be accomplished by his deft refusals to let me understand him. For the first years of his analysis he would change the version of his statements each time I tried to establish some understanding of him. I will describe the nature of my countertrans-ference with George in some depth (see below, chapter 12 ), so I shall restrict my account here to the observation that I too was compelled to live in an environment of his creation, one in which the loss of the future was a daily certainty. I came to understand, however, that in many ways George’s mood re-created an object setting. As an infant, he had been separated from his mother who left him in the care of different persons, and his father remained emotionally removed from him.
To a great extent, George and his parents mourned over a sense of mutual failure and of their collective fate. George knew that when he tried to talk to his father, his father would withdraw and change the conversation. Knowing this would happen, he often approached his father in a mournful manner that anticipated the outcome.
The mother, a frequent witness to these occasions, would try to share the father’s sense of failure and at the same time comfort her son.
I began to regard George’s mood of anticipatory mourning as his way of re-creating the family environment. Like David, he did not want to give it up, for it represented that little bit of intimacy that he had achieved with his family, and his sense of self was intricately featured in the collective mourning process. In the family environment, each of the participants enacted a wistful hopefulness tinged with the knowledge of its inevitable and fated disappearance. They experienced loss together, they went off into separate and known corners of the house to sulk and slump into a desultory state, they tried to console and patch each other up.
They knew this about one another very well indeed. They did not argue vigor-ously. They did not really try to engage one another. They used shared grieving and mutual loss as an alternative to all the other facets of living, and it was this mood that George brought to the analysis, a special state in his overall being that conserved his child self’s relation to his mother and father.
Clinical examples / III
Janet’s moods seemed to vary. Indeed in the early years of her psychotherapy I never quite knew what mood would prevail in the sessions. One day she would