Integrity

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

A life. A person finds in her everything that corresponds to his ideas. She is seen as coinciding with his inner images. They can be renewed and modified by experience. Or stay the same.

Man lives in constantly changing conditions. But life is mainly seen in two aspects: everything is good, or everything is bad. It can be heavy, haunting, tormenting, tense, demanding, exhausting, and not very attractive. At other times she is good, kind, sympathetic, caring, gives what she wants, her heart is filled with love and butterflies.

Basically, it is believed that this life turns one of its sides to a person. Can be good or bad. Sometimes they say the same about fate. At such moments, only one side of the face is seen. Another part disappears somewhere, becomes invisible. At this moment, the integrity of life is only in one of its parts. There can be not only two, but many. But I will stick to the idea of this pair of opposites. It will become clearer why later. So where does such a rigid division and exclusion of one of the parts come from?

For this, it is important to have experience in differentiating and retaining the idea that the world is dangerous or good. Based on Melanie Klein's Object Relationship Theory, you can trace how this happens.

As a baby grows up, the first experience of receiving benefits comes from the mother's breast. Then he reunites this part with his mother into one common object and builds a relationship with her, as with a whole person and the world behind her. He writes down this experience and uses it for pleasure in his future life. But before that, at times he perceives the breast as a bad object that causes him suffering. Appears not at his will, disappears when he wants, interrupting a pleasant meal. He is angry and hates her, but he also values her as a source of life. Then he has guilt. He is saved from her by separating the evil part from himself, which destroys the breast, and projects it outside, onto the same breast, and begins to see in it:

“… In the first few months of his life, the child goes through paranoid anxieties related to the“bad”denying breast, which is perceived as external and internal persecutors,” writes Melanie Klein (On the psychogenesis of manic-depressive states).

It is in this place that the participation of the mother is desirable and not succumb to the child's attempt to change her and become his terrible fantasy. Accept his anger and hatred. To resist and remain whole without turning into the monster that she seems to the child. Change his projection and restore his calmness. It can be an outburst of anger, hatred, anger. The desire to swaddle him so that he does not get out, to shut his mouth and not only with a dummy. It is important to breathe in and breathe out, asking himself the question, maybe he wants to tell me something with his cry and indignation? Listen to yourself and grasp the message behind this? He still cannot speak and this is his only way of communication that his mother can decipher. Donald Winnicott believed:

“The mother knows how the child can feel. Nobody else knows this. Doctors and nurses can know a lot about psychology and the health and disease of the body. But they do not know how the child feels at any given moment, because they are outside this area of experience”(Family and Individual Development).

But, if the opposite happens and the child receives confirmation of his fantasies, he writes it down in an additional folder and stores the information received there. The persecution anxiety remained unchanged. The world is dangerous, as are the people. But this does not exclude that pleasant experience acquired during the hours of calm and satisfaction. They will only be perceived separately. Either everything is awful, or everything is good, but not for long. Something will be excluded. I'll add this with a statement by Melanie Klein:

“… In the earliest phase, persecuting and good objects (breasts) are far apart in the child's mind. When, together with the introjection (acceptance) of the whole and the real object, they become closer, the Ego again and again returns to the mechanism - so important for the development of relations to objects - namely, splitting images into beloved and hated, into good and dangerous."

However, as they get closer, the child is confronted with guilt, realizing that his destructive impulses and negative feelings were directed to the same object that brought warmth and care. If on the path of rapprochement there is no dissipation of guilt, restoration of a beloved object and paranoid anxieties with the help of a mother or another reliable person, then the idea of a cruel and aggressive world will take root. Then the child will immerse them in the depths of the unconscious, and from there he will direct them to the real world in the form of projections. It will concern not only life, but also relationships, where everything will be turned by only one side.

From SW. gestalt therapist Dmitry Lenngren