Inner Work Notes

Tag: Kohut

  • The Conversation You Only Had in Your Head

    Someone sends you a short message. Before long you have decided what it meant, what they think of you, what they would say if you brought it up, and how you would feel afterward. In your head the whole conversation has already happened, and all of it is settled. None of it has been checked with the person.

    Then you do not bring it up. Weeks go by, and you are just as sure as you were at the start. The only thing that changes is that the story in your head gets more detailed every week.

    You cannot find out who you are on your own

    You learn what you are like, and what other people make of you, from how they actually respond when you speak to them. On your own, your guess about what they would say never meets anything that pushes back against it, corrects it, or surprises you. And with nothing new coming in, you cannot tell the difference between what the other person really thinks and what you fear, or hope, they think.

    People often tell a story to make this point: a child raised by wolves. When he is found, he walks on all fours. He is clearly a human being, yet he takes himself for a wolf, because wolves are the ones he grew up among. Real cases like this are few and most are disputed, so take the story as an illustration, not as evidence. But you can see the point in any family: we learn what we are from how the people around us respond to us.

    When you never actually talk to the other person, your mind still supplies their answer. But it builds that answer out of what you already expected, so the answer can only confirm the fear, or the hope, you started with.

    Guessing comes easier than talking things over

    Left alone with a question about someone, a person does not stay undecided. They become more certain.

    “She likes me; that is why she said that.” “That tone was on purpose.” “They are talking about me right now.” The people involved may simply have been saying what they wanted to say and getting on with their day; it may have had nothing to do with you. Still, the guessing runs on and always reaches a verdict, because the one making the guess is also the one judging it.

    We are more practiced at imagining than at talking, because imagining came first: it is with us from the very beginning of life, while talking things over with another person is something we learn later. So when a conversation feels risky, the mind falls back on the older, easier habit. It plays both parts itself, so you never have to let the other person see what you feel, and you never hear an answer you did not make up yourself.

    Notice how comfortable this is. In your head, the other person says only the lines you give them, when you expect them to. Nothing catches you off guard. Nobody asks you a question you were not ready for. You guess, you have your feelings about it, and it ends there.

    The sentence that has to be said out loud

    Say you are fairly sure someone likes you, and you like them too. There is exactly one thing to do with that: go and tell them, in words. “I like you. Do you like me?”

    But you would probably rather not say it. You are afraid that if you do, the other person will run away.

    They might, if they do not feel the same way, and that hurts. But now you know something you could not have known before you asked. Asking out loud matters because it lets the other person give their own answer, which may not be the one you predicted. Until you ask, every new detail comes from you, and the relationship you imagine keeps growing with nothing real to correct it.

    The frustration you were avoiding is the one you needed

    When you finally speak, you may get an answer you did not want, and think, “I thought they liked me. They don’t.” That letdown is what psychologists call frustration: the disappointment of not getting what you hoped for.

    In that disappointment you feel, and not just know, that there is a real world outside your head. The other person turns out to have wishes and feelings of their own that do not follow the script you wrote for them. Frustration that is too great, or that humiliates you, can do real harm. But a disappointment you can bear teaches you two things: that you can survive an answer you did not want, and that the answer tells you something you can use. Meeting reality this way, again and again, is how you learn to live in it.

    D. W. Winnicott, an English pediatrician and psychoanalyst, wrote about the “good-enough mother.” She is not a perfect mother. At first she meets her baby’s needs almost completely. Then, as the baby becomes able to cope, she meets them a little less completely and a little later. Through those small gaps, the child faces the world a little at a time, in amounts it can manage. Heinz Kohut, another psychoanalyst, called frustration of this bearable size optimal frustration. Too much frustration makes it harder for a child to accept reality; the right amount helps the child accept it bit by bit. Neither of them saw this as a parenting failure to be apologized for. A child who is looked after perfectly, one hundred percent of the time, does not mature.

    Adults need this kind of bearable frustration too, and the way to get it is to ask. If you never ask, the guessing simply goes on, and nothing in the guessing itself will ever bring it to a stop.

    Not asking has another cost that is easy to miss. Every conversation you rehearse in your head and never actually have leaves you a little more convinced that you already know what people are like. That makes you a little less likely to try the next real conversation. So, quietly, you grow less practiced at talking with people while you grow more certain about them.

    What the avoidance costs later

    The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung summed up what avoiding pain costs in a sentence worth keeping: “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” Legitimate suffering is the pain a person simply has to go through in the course of living. Neurosis, meaning lasting anxiety and other symptoms, is what grows in its place when that pain is avoided.

    Addiction works the same way. There is a specific pain — a conversation you dread, a loss, a refusal, a limit you have to accept — and instead of going through it, you reach for something that stops the feeling for a while, the way a painkiller does. That original pain had a cause, and it could have come to an end. But each time you avoid it, new problems pile up on top of it: you come to depend on what you reach for, you start keeping secrets, and all of this causes trouble of its own. So the suffering that comes later is larger than the pain you put off.

    What you use does not have to be alcohol or a drug. The phone does it. Work does it. So does a relationship that exists only inside your own head, where the other person always behaves, is always available, and has never once said anything you did not write for them.

    Asking takes about four seconds

    There is nothing wrong with a mind that runs ahead. It is a good mind and a quick one. The only trouble is that no one ever contradicts it, and ideas that are never contradicted drift further and further from what is really happening.

    So the fix is not more rehearsal. If the other person is not someone who insults or threatens you, go to them and say one sentence, a question that leaves room for their answer, and wait to hear it: “When you said that, I thought you meant ___. Did you?” They may say yes, or they may say no. Either way, you hear something you did not write yourself, and the imagined conversation becomes a real one.

    References

    • Jung, C. G. (1938). Psychology and Religion. Collected Works, Vol. 11, para. 129. — “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.”
    • Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press. — the graduated failure of adaptation.
    • Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. New York: International Universities Press. — optimal frustration.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • The Child Who Was No Trouble at All

    She waits until the adults have finished before she asks for anything. She takes her plate to the sink without it being mentioned. She has never once had to be told twice, and she does not cut into a conversation, and when the visitors are here she sits where she is put and stays there.

    Nobody in the house finds this strange. She is the one person there who never makes any extra work.

    What state are we in when we are born?

    We are born in pieces.

    What is in pieces is the self. By ‘self’ I don’t mean a name or an age or a list of things you’re good at. I mean the bare sense that you are here at all. And that sense does not come pre-assembled.

    A newborn has sensations and states — hunger, warmth, fear, relief — but does not yet experience them as parts of one continuous self. The sense of “I am the same person across all these moments” develops later.

    At first, the person caring for the baby holds the pieces together for her. When the baby cries, that person finds out why; when she is startled, that person calms her down. Because this happens in the same way, time after time, the baby gets from hunger to being fed, or from a fright to calm, without the hunger or the fright ever becoming more than she can bear.

    We usually picture a baby as a complete person who only needs to grow bigger. The body is complete. The sense of being one person is not. At birth, that sense is like a pot whose pieces have been set in place but not yet glued. A loud noise or a sudden jolt, and the pieces come apart. What glues them, little by little, is care repeated day after day.

    What joins the pieces?

    The British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott had a name for what the caregiver does here: holding. The caregiver shields the baby from what is too much for someone so small — the loud noise, the sudden jolt — and responds reliably enough that separate moments of hunger, distress and comfort start to join up into the experience of being one person.

    Holding has two sides. One is physical: the baby is picked up and carried, and while she is very small, that side matters more. But the emotional side is there from the start too, and that is the side I want to look at here.

    Holding a child emotionally means welcoming her: accepting her as she is, paying attention to her, and letting her see that you are amazed by her.

    Consider the fuss a parent can make over a full diaper. An adult who is otherwise a serious person will pitch her voice up half an octave and announce that this is the most remarkable thing she has seen: “Look at that! Would you look at what you did!” Somebody else is called in to look.

    Now measure the reaction against the event. The baby has not achieved anything. She has not tried. She could not have done otherwise, and she has no idea what the fuss is about. The reaction is wildly, comically out of proportion to what happened — and the very size of the reaction is the message. What it says is not well done. What it says is: what comes out of you is welcome here, and you did not have to earn that.

    And then it happens again, the next day and the day after that, and in between there are a thousand smaller versions of it — the face that lights up when she wakes, the voice that changes register the moment she is picked up. To the adults, these are small, everyday things. Nobody in the house would remember any of them afterward.

    No single moment builds the self. What glues the pieces, one at a time, is the repetition: the baby shows a need, someone notices, and nobody pulls away. Over time, she learns that she can let out what is inside her and still keep the people she depends on.

    The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut called the result a cohesive self: a self whose pieces have joined and now hold together.

    None of this means giving a baby everything she wants. It means staying close, in ways she can predict, until whatever she is feeling has come out and she has settled again.

    Growing up in pieces

    Now picture the same scene with a parent who is irritated from the start. The full diaper gets a scolding instead: “You wouldn’t go when I told you to, and now you go in your diaper?”

    Not a cruel parent. An impatient one. The necessary things get done — she is fed, she is changed — but with an air of getting it over with. Later, once she can talk, this parent is already answering before she has finished her sentence, and meets her second question by asking why she is still asking. She is looked after, but never once welcomed.

    In a house like that, the glue never sets. The pieces stay pieces.

    A child whose pieces never joined has to spend her attention holding herself together. Anything new that is asked of her, any strong feeling, even someone coming close, can be too much, so she pushes people away before they can knock the pieces loose. From outside this looks cold or difficult. From inside it is protection against falling apart.

    Where does your attention go when your hand is cut?

    Cut your hand and every bit of your attention goes to that hand. You will find yourself carrying it slightly raised. Walking down an ordinary street you curl it in, in case somebody knocks it. Somebody comes toward you and your whole body turns a few degrees to put the hand on the far side.

    Nobody has touched your hand. You’ve flinched in advance, repeatedly, at nothing.

    You are also, for the duration, extremely poor company. Someone is telling you about their week and you are tracking a stranger’s shoulder at the edge of your vision. You are not being self-absorbed. You are guarding something, and guarding takes everything.

    To anyone else in the room, though, it just looks as if you only care about yourself. A self that is still in pieces is like that hand: guarding it takes all the attention a person has. So when someone seems to think only of themselves, it may be that they are hurting.

    The child who watches the adults

    A small child is entitled to think only of herself. At that age, every child’s self is still fragile, like that cut hand, so all her attention goes to herself. Where would she find any left over for anybody else?

    So when a small child starts paying attention to the grown-ups instead of to herself, something has gone the wrong way round. It can happen, for example, when a parent often blows up or is often depressed. Then the child has to manage the mood of the house, because she is only safe when the parent is calm. Here is what she does.

    She knows which evenings not to ask for anything. She can tell from the sound of the front door how the next hour is going to go, and she adjusts before anyone has spoken. When someone asks one of the adults an awkward question, she answers it before they have to. She never lets other people see her wanting anything.

    Adults are delighted by her. “She’s so grown up,” they say.

    I do not see maturity here. I see a symptom: a sign that this child has been deeply hurt. She has learned that she is safe only if she keeps watch on the adults, so she reads their faces before she has even noticed what she herself needs. She makes sure she is no trouble, because asking, interrupting or wanting might irritate an adult, or cost her the care she depends on.

    The praise covered the wound

    A child who throws tantrums wears the adults out. She is inconvenient, and inconvenience gets investigated — somebody eventually sits down and asks what is going on with her.

    The child who is no trouble is never inconvenient, so nobody investigates. She gets compliments instead. People tell her parents they have done a lovely job. Teachers write that she is a pleasure to have in class. Relatives compare her, out loud and in front of her, to the cousin who is a handful.

    So nobody finds out that she is hurting, and she never gets the chance to find out either. There is praise lying over the sore place, and praise is not a thing anybody thinks to look underneath.

    Worse, the praise teaches her to go on being no trouble. Asking for nothing is what earns her warmth and approval, so, to keep them coming, she holds back more and more of what she needs. She comes to feel that the moment she says “this is hard,” she will let her parents down. And the better she gets at looking as if she needs no one, the less likely any adult is to notice that she is anxious, lonely, or afraid to need anyone.

    If you were a child like this, you may still be hearing the same praise today. That you’re no trouble. That you never need anything. That you always manage. That praise is no proof that you were safe. It is worth asking what you had to hold back to earn it.

    References

    • Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press. — holding.
    • Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self. In Winnicott (1965), listed above. — the child who fits herself to what the adults need.
    • Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. New York: International Universities Press. — the cohesive self.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board