Ordinary regression to dependence
6 This state may not be reached, since a person may only come to the above stage before emerging from it to report the dream or work on something
important with the analyst. However, on occasion, the evocation of images (as contrasted with thoughts, words, or abstractions) inspires some deep affec-tive state. The patient may find himself profoundly moved as a result of the imaging. This in itself seems to further deepen the ego’s capacity for receptive evocation.
7 It is after the stage of imagining and feeling (probably what Masud Khan means by the experiencing of one’s being) that a person in regression to dependence may suddenly ‘see’ what it is all about. I find this exceptionally difficult to describe. I believe that what happens is almost a metonymic act.
The image is part of self-object experience and the affect deepens the mem-ory. At such a moment a patient may suddenly discover something about the mother, the father, and himself which he has never thought before but which has been part of the unthought known. Some patients may break down in tears. Others behave as if they have experienced a revelation. It is very impor-tant for the analyst to remain silent and to hold the situation and not to act on
his curiosity. Throughout much of the process described above, there is a need to experience this discovery in privacy, as a person may feel he must secure his own private inner experiencing before reporting to the analyst. There can be a fear that to speak the discovery will amount to losing it.
8 Finally, there is an intense need to tell the analyst. I have never found this to be accompanied by a fear that the analyst will fail to understand the report. It is as if the patient believes (perhaps necessarily) that the analyst has been in on the experience from the beginning and depends on the analyst’s ability to provide for it. There is great joy at the discovery, even amidst intense grief, and the patient may need to talk at length to the analyst.
Needless to say, if at any moment during the course of these stages of develop-ment the analyst asks the analysand what is on his mind, the regression will self arrest, and the process will terminate. I think that analysts who practise classi-cally (and here I’m afraid I really am going on speculation) probably allow their patients to reach the fourth stage, where the patient is in an intermediate area of experiencing. Any question or statement – such as ‘what’s on your mind?’ or ‘you seem to have lapsed into silence’, or ‘perhaps there is something you prefer me not to know’ – is an intrusion and may result in the analysand’s stating in a somewhat embarrassed manner that actually he has only been thinking of an image.
I can recall interrupting a patient during such a stage when she was imagining her play box in her nursery. She had been recalling the toys one by one, and when I broke in on this, she and I worked a bit on understanding why I thought she was
‘in’ her nursery at that moment in the transference. I do not disparage the knowl-edge gained at that moment, nor to some extent the accuracy of the transference interpretation. Nonetheless, I do regret the fact that I interrupted the potential completion of her experience, as I am convinced that she was on her way to expe-riencing an important self state that lay dormant in the image. Winnicott calls this the freezing of a situation, and I have referred to a conservative object. In a sense, the toy box in her room at that time in her life ‘held’ a self state (and important experiences with the mother) that was not consciously known by the analysand.
Fortunately, she got to this point some six months later. I regret that, so far as regression to dependence is concerned, I know precisely those analysands whom I have failed over the last ten years. There are certain patients who unfortunately cannot trust an analyst to allow the emergence of inner experience such as I have described a second time, and they never use the analytic space for regression to dependence again.
The uses of silence
To understand regression to dependence, it is important to differentiate between the analysand’s uses of silence. To be sure, some silences are resistances, and it is quite proper for the analyst to inquire about the patient’s reticence to speak.
But the silence which is a necessary condition for regression to dependence is
of a different kind. Silence becomes a medium through which to experience the analytic holding environment. It is something like the silence of the small child some ten to twenty minutes before falling asleep. During this very special transi-tion from wakeful life lived in relatransi-tion to important objects to unconsciousness and the dream, children lie tranquilly in their beds, eyes open, imagining their life.
Sometimes it will be a going over of some of the events of the day, often it may be wishing for some object, and there is a consistent interplay between gazing at external objects and contemplating internal objects. A child may look at a toy rocket on the desk across the room. For a few moments he may imagine himself as a space pilot and the rocket is now in outer space (internal object usage), then he may look at the rocket as an object in its own right and notice that it has a damaged nose (perception of external object), which may lead to a wish to tell the mother about this (contemplation of conversation with real object), but may inspire an anxiety that he has not been a good enough boy that day for the mother to want to do something about this (reflection on the nature of intersubjective life and the interplay between internal and external). He may become sad. He may think of asking the father to buy him a new rocket, and he may imagine the father being quite pleased to do so. He may think of swapping it the next day with a friend at school and at this point he might imagine another child’s toy. All of this may take only a few seconds and over the course of twenty minutes many such musings may take place.
In this experience silence is usually a necessary condition for the ‘processing’ of internal world and external reality. This valuable time before sleep is a vital expe-rience for children, and lasts from early infancy at least through adolescence. It is often accompanied by toys, as some children will have a teddy in bed with them, and to some extent these ‘transitional objects’ are part of the nature of the ‘inter-mediate area of experience’ which to my mind aptly describes this use of silence.
I have come to value this experience as a feature of regression from three sources:
entering this frame of mind during my own analysis; observation of my children who I think were ‘there’ before bedtime; and subsequently, observation of patients in analysis.
I mention these three different situations because I believe it is necessary for us to address the question of just how we can differentiate the uses of silence, in particular between silence as resistance and silence as the medium for intermedi-ate experiencing.
I will take one of my children as an example. Usually after story time he would ask if I would remain in the room with him when he went off to sleep. I agreed and would sit in a nearby chair. I think he was going through a period of some private anxiety and needed me to be around. After a story, he might ask me something about life: ‘Why do parents have children?’; ‘where was I before I was born?’;
‘why do some of the children at school act dreadfully?’; ‘why were you cross with me at the dinner table?’ or ‘I like being a child, why do I have to be a “bigger boy”?’ It is difficult to re-create these questions. Sometimes they emerged after story time, but most often in the course of the ten to twenty minutes before sleep.