The alarm goes off and you turn the phone face down. Nothing bad has happened. Nobody shouted at you, nothing broke, and the day in front of you is perfectly ordinary. Still, the only thing you really want is to stay under the covers and be nobody for a while.
The voices in the next room sound far away, as if they were coming through glass. Your list of things to do is sitting right there on the kitchen table, and somehow it feels like somebody else’s. So you ask yourself what you always ask. What’s wrong with me? Am I just lazy?
Before you call yourself lazy, ask why your mind responds to the ordinary demands of the day, like that list on the table, by withdrawing, putting off decisions, and wanting someone else to take over. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s theory suggests that this is not random. Under pressure, the mind goes back to a way of coping from much earlier in life, when pulling back made you feel less afraid and someone else carried the responsibility for you.
Which came first — the world, or your picture of it?
Most of us assume a baby first gets to know the world as it really is, and only later, with more words and more years behind it, starts to imagine.
Klein turned that around.
Long before a baby can speak, she said, its mind is already full of pictures of what the world is like, built from what its body feels. She called these pictures unconscious fantasy, but she did not mean daydreaming or making things up. Fantasy, for her, is how a mind that has no words yet first makes sense of the world. When the baby is hungry, it feels as if no one will ever come. When it is held and fed, the whole world feels safe.
For the infant, these unconscious fantasies are not occasional thoughts. They shape the baby’s whole experience of hunger and fullness, danger and safety, long before it has words or can check what it feels against what is really there.
In Klein’s view, then, you did not begin with an accurate understanding of reality and add imagination later. You began with unconscious fantasy and gradually corrected it through experience. Each time someone close to you turned out differently from what the picture inside you expected, and your bond with them survived the surprise, that picture moved a little closer to the world as it really is.
What does a good home actually give a child?
If life begins in fantasy, that changes what we mean by a good home. We usually think of how much love a child was given, or whether there was enough money in the house. But part of what makes a home good is how much of the real world it lets a child take in — how often, and how safely, the child can check the picture inside against what is really happening.
Put plainly: the worse the home, the less of the real world a child can afford to let in.
That may sound backwards, but the reasoning behind it is simple. Children learn to swim in water they can stand up in. A steady home hands a child small, survivable disappointments — the promise kept a day late, the answer that turns out to be no — and every one of them is a chance to check the picture in their head against what actually happened and find out it was slightly off. Nothing collapses when that happens. The child learns that a disappointment is not the end of the world, corrects that part of the picture, and goes back to playing.
When home is too painful — when the adults are unpredictable or frightening — a child has no room to calmly check the picture against what is real. Every look on an adult’s face can read as a sign of danger. So the child retreats into the world inside, which at least feels like something they can control. And the more time the child spends in that inner world, the less often the picture inside gets tested against someone safe, and so the less it gets corrected.
Children are not the only ones who retreat into that inner world. Most of us go there for a while and then find our way back out. At the extreme are people who cannot find their way back out at all. That is the territory of psychosis: in schizophrenia, for example, a person stays shut inside their own private world. This does not mean that a painful home is the single cause of any particular illness. But it can shape how a person handles stress later in life.
Why is the pull to retreat strongest at certain times in life?
There are three times in life when people are most likely to feel they are coming apart: the teenage years; the early twenties, when many people leave home; and the years after marriage, or after setting up a household with someone.
Why those three? Because that is when the demands of real life arrive all at once, from every direction. Your body changes, or your address does. The people around you change, and so does what they expect from you. You’re handed a role that nobody bothers to explain. There are more decisions to make, and more of the blame falls on you when one goes wrong. Worst of all, the way you’ve always coped stops working — quietly, and completely.
At times like these, there is more to carry than you can manage all at once, and carrying it simply hurts too much. So the mind slides backward, into that inner world of early pictures. Every human mind begins there, which makes it the mind’s first home — a home inside you, not the house you grew up in. When you retreat like this, in a sense your mind is simply going home.
If this is the year you feel like you’re coming apart, look at where you are in life before you go looking at your character. Check whether this moment falls on one of those three times, or on another big change in your life, such as starting a job, having a baby, or going through a divorce. You may not have gotten weaker at all. Reality may have just started asking for far more than it used to.
So what is this pull backward, exactly?
You live out in the real world for a while, it hurts, and something in you wants to be a small child again. No decisions. No judgment calls. Somebody else handling the difficult parts, the way somebody once did.
The name for this return is regression. The mind is not inventing a new response. It is returning to an earlier state in which withdrawing, becoming passive, or waiting for someone else to act once provided relief.
Why is it so hard to come back out?
Regression feels familiar because you learned this way of coping early and used it many times. Avoiding a message, staying in bed, or waiting for someone to tell you what to do takes the pressure off right away. That relief makes the old way hard to leave, even while the unanswered messages and postponed tasks pile up and the anxiety grows with them. The safer it feels under the covers, the harder it becomes to come out.
It shows up in ordinary ways, too. The afternoon that disappears into your phone. The message you could answer in four lines and somehow cannot. The steady, quiet wish that somebody would arrive and simply tell you what to do next. None of those look like much from the outside, and every one of them is the same short walk back to the mind’s first home. The pull is never loud when it arrives, and it usually comes dressed as tiredness, or as a small and very reasonable decision to deal with the whole thing tomorrow.
When ordinary tasks feel far away and you want to pull back from every demand, you may be falling back on an old way of protecting yourself, not showing some permanent flaw in your character. Once you see it as regression, you can ask a more useful question: what is pressing on me right now that set this off?
Does that mean you should get rid of the old picture inside you?
No, and you couldn’t manage it even if you tried. The picture isn’t a part you can unbolt and throw away — it’s the place you started from. Adult life is the slow work of checking it against whatever is really in front of you and correcting it a little at a time.
Stop revising the picture, and your trips back into that inner world get longer and longer. Keep revising it, and your time out in the real world gets longer instead. That is the choice, and the work is never quite finished.
So pick one scene from the past week that felt heavier than it had any business being. A message that has been sitting there unanswered. A room that went quiet the moment you walked into it.
Then write down, in a single line, what you were quietly expecting. “He should know without me having to say it.” “After everything I did, somebody should have noticed.” One sentence is plenty. Don’t tidy it up, and don’t argue with it. If the line makes you wince a little, you’ve probably written the real one down instead of the polite version.
Once it’s sitting there on paper, you can slowly begin to see where it came from — the situation you were actually in, or a much older picture you’ve been carrying since before you had words for anything. Some of those lines will turn out to be fair. Others were formed a long time ago, to fit a house you no longer live in.
That’s where the revising starts. One line at a time.
References
- Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110.
- Klein, M. (1935). A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 16, 145–174.
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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