The Phallic Container in the Post-Partum Couple
This paper examines a specific auxiliary defensive process that enters the post-partum period in a couple. To protect her infant, a mother splits and diverts aggressive impulses activated by her infant into the phallic container, represented by the father.
Abstract
This paper examines a specific auxiliary defensive process that enters the post-partum period in a couple. To protect her infant, a mother splits and diverts aggressive impulses that are activated by psychic intrusions from her infant into the phallic container, represented by the father. This is achieved through splitting libidinal from aggressive instincts (love and hate) and diverting the hate away from the infant. This normal defensive manoeuvre can create lingering couple conflicts that can damage the relationship and lead to problems that are rooted in this period. Issues of psychic intrusion, instinct-driven attempts to restore equilibrium, maternal hate, oedipal associations, splitting, and diversion are examined with a view to better understanding the conflict and processes of pregnancy and the postpartum period and its effects on the marital dyad.
KEYWORDS: splitting, diversion, post-partum hate, couple conflict, phallic containment, infant protection
“I suggest that the mother hates the baby before the baby hates the mother, and before the baby can know his mother hates him” (DW Winnicott)
Introduction
Conflict in couples in couple therapy has numerous sources. Most important of these are the complex exchange of unconscious mental contents that each partner brings and which enables both the creation of the couple, but also the nuclei for its dissolution (for example, Perkel, 2007). Sometimes, though, these very personalised individual exchanges are overlaid by normal developmental challenges. Life events such as having a baby can be intensely evocative of individual issues but also bring universal challenges met by universal responses. During such times in life, the normal and the pathological seem to mingle freely and it is as if the line dividing them blurs. Moments of neurosis and even psychosis occur frequently and merge in and out of reality. One would scarcely label these moments as pure pathology yet nor could one dismiss them as ‘simply normal’. In couple work, this mingling is of utmost importance since these events influence the couple’s capacity to negotiate ‘coupledom’.
Sometimes, conflict in a couple during therapy carries a powerful charge of hate (which can be in either a ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ form) from the wife to the husband, especially during the post-partum period, or in any event, rooted in it. These roots can sprout branches that weave through the couple’s dynamics, lingering over the years, and possibly becoming a chronic feature of their conflicts. The intensity of this hate is often outside the scope of real events and can create enormous confusion for both the couple and for the couple therapist failing to grasp a dynamic that might at first blush be invisible. Most couple therapists will know from experience that there is no such thing as an individual in the couple. Always, ‘coupledom’ involves an exchange. But in this paper I will not be examining all that complexity – rather, I wish to amplify one significant dimension of development in the couple, one that has emerged empirically in the therapy work.
I should state from the outset that this paper is not about containment in the Bion tradition (for example, Bion, 1962). The ‘phallic container’ is not about a father’s capacity to absorb, metabolise, and return negative affects to the mother-infant dyad. In this respect, the title of this paper is a misnomer. Both of these dimensions enter the picture in important ways, but the centrality of the dynamic I wish to explore appears to emanate from a maternal process, one that taps into her instinctual responses and her internal representations of the phallus. This paper is therefore about mothers in a specific developmental stage, pregnancy and the postpartum period, experiencing psychological changes specific to that stage. The phallic container might, therefore, be viewed more correctly as a phallic target or reservoir, into which maternal affect is directed – one that may or may not facilitate metabolising and might not even be equipped to do this job. As I will discuss below, whereas the mother is structurally predisposed with a tendency to metabolise and contain her infant’s affects, the father is not always well endowed to perform this function for the mother-infant dyad. The importance of the phallus – as opposed to the paternal – lies in what the phallus represents to the mother at an intrapsychic level and how she might use this representation to protect her infant from harm. In some respects, other women can provide a metabolising function (for developmental reasons related to Oedipal outcomes). Men can and do provide an auxiliary-ego function (Winnicott, 1974) and can be supportive and protective. But their capacity in a metabolising function is limited by their own natural tendency to be outward, rather than inward focussed, and one step removed from the inward focus of the maternal-infant dyad.
The issue I wish to tackle might, therefore, more usefully be framed from the point of view of the infant: What protects it from reactive or neurotic maternal anger and hate? Considering the demands a baby places on the mother, why is rage not generally more manifest and even acted out? This paper seeks to understand what these mechanisms of protection are and how aggressive impulses that are evoked in the mother by her infant are processed and dealt with to protect her infant from emotional harm.
I want to begin by presenting a case that illustrates a pathological version of this dynamic in pathological circumstances. Later, I will present a case of a pathological response in more normal circumstances to illustrate how diverse the manifestations of this dynamic can be.
Case Sample One
Bob and Jane presented for couple therapy approximately 18 years into their marriage. They were referred in a state of crisis and overload. Severe stress seemed to disable their ability to relate. Jane was struggling to contain her heightened emotional arousal and feelings of being overwhelmed. It was as if she was in a state of perpetual breakdown mingled with a super-coping housewife and mother role to her 2 children. The older daughter, then in late adolescence, presented with depression. The youngest child had been born with a genetic abnormality, a syndrome that entirely consumed the family’s emotional resources and especially that of the mother, who devoted virtually all her time and energy to keeping the sickly child alive. For the first 4-5 years of her life the child needed constant attention and interventions from various specialists and beyond this period constant emotional care and monitoring.
Initially attracted to each others’ sensitivity and lightness, this couple found themselves consumed with the agonies and frustrations of a life hijacked by a special-needs child. Their dedication to her was remarkable and tested their resources and commitment to the superhuman level. However, the flip side of their heroism was a severe testing of their relationship – sleep deprivation, high anxiety, serious family disruption, raw fear of her dying, and a dedication that consumed time and space.
Jane came from a family with its own psychological problems, characterised by chaos, volatility, and negativity. She developed highly attuned radar, bordering on paranoia, as a defence against her father’s violent and unpredictable nature. No doubt, with the advent of her troubled child, the respite and safety she had found in her gentle, if emotionally distant husband was threatened. The rage she carried from her childhood threatened to emerge as her defences became increasingly overwhelmed by the challenges and demands of her child. Her husband’s soft retreat added fuel to the fire and violent unconscious impulses of rage and murder, provoked by the child’s incessant demands, struggled to find safe expression. As the therapy progressed, she feared at times that her rage, so intense and frightening, could kill Bob if it were released.
Connecting this rage to her child was impossible – a connection fully repressed in the early stages of the work. Jane loved her child and protected her with utmost devotion. Bob was removed, not schizoid so much as unaffected by the emotional barrages that hammered their way through the household. He worked hard, and seldom retaliated at the virulent and constant attacks from Jane. Of course, his withdrawal was a source of rage for her – as was her charge that he was antagonistic and impatient toward their daughter, often causing ructions to escalate in the family constellation. His own family of origin tended to cut off from emotional problems and he felt that he was never really ‘held in mind’ by his parents. As such, he created himself into being something of the outsider – always diligently providing for the family and uncomplaining about the multiple expenses associated with the daughter’s demands. In this context, Jane would sometimes feel murderous to him – especially when she experienced him as “non-human” and “not-present” in the family.
Separation from the child had been unthinkable and any negative affect toward her equally so. This tragic and tortured little girl evoked tremendous sympathy and sadness, but also intense frustration. Her demands could evoke murderous fury, albeit at an unconscious level. Given the child’s condition, it would have taxed this mother to the extreme to be conscious of her inner rage and frustration, adding further burden to her daughters already heavily burdened and struggling little life. Aggression in her history had been negative – a volatile father and a family ‘cocktail of violence’ leaving her with a deep fear of both external aggression and her own. She thus began to repress her own aggressive responses and becoming fearful of her explosive impulses. When her child activated these, they could find no outlet except through utilising her husband as a repository for her violent and fearsome affect. She began to project her violent feelings toward him, finding in him a safe place on which to target unyielding and uncontainable fury. To save her child, she channelled her destructive impulses away and thereby preserved her position as the good, containing mother. The aggression ‘found itself’ directed at the auxiliary third in the triadic system.
The Phallic Container
This case illustrates the use of the phallic third, the father, in which to deposit and contain negative affect in what amounted to extreme circumstances. In this case, the aggression was high and the circumstances grave. Also, both spouses’ histories predisposed them to constellate around a dynamic of projected aggression away from the child and into the father. However, if one looks more closely at couples in general following childbirth, the evidence is readily available that what this case demonstrates is probably a fairly normal principle of systemic functioning in the marital dyad, at least for a limited period of time. It is to this general tendency in couples that I wish to focus in this paper, highlighting both its pathological and adaptive purpose. To begin, however, we first need to establish whether such a concept is theoretically tenable and can withstand analytic scrutiny.
Mother-infant Symbiosis
In the aftermath of a pregnancy and birth there is a natural and healthy merger that takes place between a mother and her new infant. Mahler (1975) described this initial process of merger, in which there is no real capacity for differentiation. Later, however, the infant begins to hatch from the symbiotic bond with the mother. The ‘mutual cuing’ and ‘mirroring’ of the early stage, enabled by what Winnicott (1965) calls a “high degree of identification with her infant” (p.147), gives way to greater separation. The intensity of the mother-infant exchange is formed by a multitude of layers, with raw affects flowing more or less freely from mother to infant and infant to mother. The infant's experience of frustration, pain, or comfort can translate into a blazing trail of psychic communications into the mother and a demand for them to be metabolised. For the mother, her own possible joy and excitement may be mixed with fears and fatigue, and at times deep powerlessness and rage. The simple fact of these relentless demands – sleeplessness and fatigue, loss of power and control, and even of choice over basic aspects of her life – may create situational stress and evoke deep emotional reactions. This occurs even in the absence of any internal psychopathology in the mother.
Klein (1975) and others have made clear the mechanisms used by the infant to metabolise primitive affects and impulses, developing an ambivalent relationship to the breast into which negative affects can be put and frustration-aggression can be processed. In return, the infant can be a repository for mother’s emotional states, her current feelings and raw affects, which in the post-partum period tend to be significantly amplified for both good and bad. Apart from the situational pressures, however, the mother also has an unconscious and brings into her bond with her infant her own life history and its conflicts. These do not remain closeted in her own mind, at least not fully, and unconscious influences and projections form part of the exchange in this very intimate psychic embrace.
Some of the experiences are highly evocative for the mother. The interface of both normal external pressures and internal psychological issues can produce a volatile mix. The negative affects that are invariably generated in this mix, sometimes quite normal and sometimes beyond normal need to be taken up. From the perspective of the infant, this is a match made in heaven in which the breast/ mother provides a unique container in which negative affects, aggression, anxieties, and needs can be put and metabolised (Bion, 1962). This role comes more or less naturally for an attuned mother and enables the infant to maintain a relatively toxic-free emotional state.
Infantile attacks
For the mother, however, the match is not as perfect as for the infant, since the infant does not assist in metabolising her negative affects. “The mother”, said Winnicott (1949), “hates her infant from the word go” (p.73). She faces an onslaught of challenges, which may be exceedingly difficult to metabolise. Some of these he lists as follows – which I quote at length because I think they are interesting:
“The baby is not her own (mental) conception; the baby is not the one of childhood play, father's child, brother's child, etc.; the baby is not magically produced; the baby is a danger to her body in pregnancy and at birth; the baby is an interference with her private life, a challenge to preoccupation; to a greater or lesser extent a mother feels that her own mother demands a baby, so that her baby is produced to placate her mother; the baby hurts her nipples even by suckling, which is at first a chewing activity; he is ruthless, treats her as scum, an unpaid servant, a slave; she has to love him, excretions and all, at any rate at the beginning, till he has doubts about himself; he tries to hurt her, periodically bites her, all in love; he shows disillusionment about her; his excited love is cupboard love, so that having got what he wants he throws her away like orange peel; the baby at first must dominate, he must be protected from coincidences, life must unfold at the baby's rate and all this needs his mother's continuous and detailed study; for instance, she must not be anxious when holding him, etc.; at first he does not know at all what she does or what she sacrifices for him. Especially he cannot allow for her hate; he is suspicious, refuses her good food, and makes her doubt herself, but eats well with his aunt; after an awful morning with him she goes out, and he smiles at a stranger, who says: ‘Isn't he sweet!’; if she fails him at the start she knows he will pay her out for ever; he excites her but frustrates—she mustn't eat him or trade in sex with him” (pp 72-73).
That is, there are many realistic reasons that might tax a mother’s emotional restraint and threaten her love for her child. These experiences alone could certainly account for an intensity of hate-driven feeling in the mother, especially in a context of disruption and sleep deprivation that threaten normal defences in the personality. But would this be enough to account for the extremes of negative affect that can be roused in the mother that we see clinically? Would we not easily find many other cases where sleep deprivation and other physical and psychological challenges tax a woman and which do not lead to feelings of hate or a rousing of aggression? It would seem to me so – since sleep deprivation and other similar challenges, as difficult as these can be, tend to amplify rather than initiate underlying emotional states. A new couple in love, for example, will not find sleep deprivation evocative in a negative way, nor will it rouse much beyond affection and fatigue.
Something of a much deeper nature would be more likely accountable for an emotional rousing of such magnitude as to evoke hate within a mother that cannot easily be metabolised. Freud (1920, 1923a) pointed out that there are two primary instincts operating from birth – the well known libidinal life force of the sexual instincts whose aim is both sexual cathexis (i.e. cathexis of objects) and gratification through discharge; and also that of the self-preservative instincts (cathexis to the ego)(Freud, 1923a). Under the banner of Eros, the life instincts aim at combining into ever-larger unities and prolonging life and drive the origin of the infant in the first instant, and later the instinctive merger between the infant and its mother when it is born.
There is, however, also another class of instincts, represented by the sadistic impulse and based on the death instinct. Life itself is a “conflict and a compromise” (Freud, 1923a, p. 381) between the two trends of the life and death instincts, fusing and defusing, blending and conflicting in various forms and combinations of personality and pathology. One pure manifestation of a defused death instinct is aggression, an instinct of destruction directed against the external world and other objects.
The death instinct, unlike the life instinct, is an energy that Freud (1920) has argued to be a conservative instinct, one striving to preserve the status quo. It aims to restore an organism disturbed by external impingements to its prior resting state, or as close an adaptation to it as is forced upon it. The only mechanism available for this purpose is one that offers resistance to impingements, and that is capable of defending the organism from pressures to change. The death instinct is aggression-based because aggression offers defence against impingements and a protection of the status quo – that is, a return to the resting state pertaining prior to the impingement. Any primitive organism, or more complex one that carries some of the essential energies of its more primitive components, will resist change imposed by impingement by defending itself aggressively. The death instinct is, therefore, a conservative energy predisposed toward restoration of the familiar – not predisposed to the creation of novelty, or ascendant growth (Freud, 1920).
An infant in distress illustrates this apparent paradox of the instincts. A satiated infant remains content and comfortable in a state of bliss. Given a vote, it would retain this state and give its endorsement to a continuation of this comfort zone. Why change it? However, the nature of life is that impingements will exert themselves, either from the external environment or from the internal one. Let us assume, by way of example, that the infant is roused from a comfortable slumber by pangs of hunger. Unable to differentiate external impingements from internal ones, reminded as we are that both reach the mental apparatus through the sensory apparatus, the young infant becomes distressed and disturbed by a state no longer quiescent. Homeostasis is being challenged and its ‘conservative’ state imposed upon. A hunger pang or a pinprick would have the same impact on a quiescent infant, rousing it into a state in which it will fight for a remedy, a reversion back to a quiescent, satiated state. This restorative struggle to revert back to the comfort zone that existed prior to the impingement might involve crying, flailing, biting, or a combination of these – a utilisation of whatever means the infant has at its age, to find a path toward a return to stasis. The infant is, therefore, defending itself, or more accurately, its ‘content state of being’, by ‘aggressively’ alerting the environment to its plight, by forcing itself into the environment, by forcing responsiveness.
The environment is to the very young infant an extension of itself and virtually indistinguishable from itself. When internal excitations “produce too great an increase of unpleasure: there is a tendency to treat them as though they were acting, not from the inside, but from the outside, so that it may be possible to bring a shield against stimuli into operation as a means of defence against them” (Freud, 1920, p. 301). From its point of view, impingements create dis-equilibrium whether they are emerging from the outside or from the inside. This also implies that impingement in the form of hunger, or pain from an external source, are the same to the infant in creating dis-equilibrium. But the unconscious is also a reservoir of accumulated experiences, of ideation laden with affect and instinctual cathexes, and which become internal representations of objects and the infant’s experiences of them. As such, unconscious sources of emotional or instinctual discomfort, representing previous experiences of physical discomfort, or of instinctual frustrations and ‘unpleasure’, can prompt into consciousness and be experienced by the primitive psyche as a source of ‘unpleasure’. These may be no different from physical sources of unpleasure. Internal ‘unpleasure’ that has a purely psychological origin can therefore also impinge as a direct noxious stimulus challenging the equilibrium of the psyche.
Whatever the source of impingements that create dis-equilibrium, the infant will have to respond to restore it. This restorative instinct is driven by the aggressive but conservative death instinct. It forces the environment to respond to its will, bending it toward addressing the impingement. Anyone who has heard the pained cry of an infant can testify to the absolutely compelling effect it has on caregivers. A young infant’s cry can leave a caretaker’s nerves frazzled and raw, provoking an impulse to restore peace as quickly as possible.
But how can distress in the infant be seen to be aggressively driven? An infant’s distressed cry does not aim to promote change, so much as comfort and attachment that gears towards a restoration of a state of satiation and quiescence – that is, of biological and psychological homeostasis. The infant’s wail is intrusive, oftentimes highly penetrative, and has the capacity to colonise the emotional world of responsive adult figures, and in particular, its own mother. Only the most impervious parents might remain untouched, at least consciously so, by this infantile “attack” on their emotional equilibrium. The young infant is in a state of what Freud, and many analysts would call, primary narcissism. It experiences the world as an extension of Self, one that can be controlled and bent to accommodate its needs. Only impervious responding by the environment might create a deep sense of despair and helplessness, evoking anxiety, depression, and un-metabolised rage that remains active in the infant’s psyche. But in the normal course of events, discomfort in the infant leads to a penetrative “attack” on the environment, geared toward a de-animation of its emotional state toward one of contentment or bliss, that “oceanic feeling” (to borrow a phrase from Mahler, in Mahler & Gosliner, 1955, p.197) in which impingements are at bay and the infant’s sense of continuity is uninterrupted. Seen in this light, a cry of distress can represent the early manifestation of a death instinct-driven current that balances the life force that seeks attachment and procreation with its objects. This latter instinct invariably brings frustration and disappointment – which in turn might need an aggressive response to restore peace.
These ‘attacks’ are powerful, intrusive, and generally frequent. All infants communicate in this manner and the accumulative effect on a mother can be profound. It would seem that this reality of aggression forced into the mother can leave its residues and evoke aggression and hate in her that must be directed somewhere – either at the self, or at another external to herself.
Verges of Defence Failure
There are times when these pressures become overwhelming for the mother. Mother’s normal defences can become stretched, and still further stretched by these demands and ‘attacks’, to the point where her normal capacity to defend reaches breakpoint.
Winnicott (1949) addresses this point: “A mother has to be able to tolerate hating her baby without doing anything about it. She cannot express it to him. If for fear of what she may do, she cannot hate appropriately when hurt by her child, she must fall back on masochism…” (p. 74).
That is, she might fall back into a depressive position of introjecting her hate to protect her baby, this being governed largely by her personality and intrapsychic defences. For most mothers, the stretching of her normal defences is inevitable with a young infant and this imposes endemic risks to her normal mental health and functioning. Without the benefit of an auxiliary defence, an alternative mechanism of protection that can emerge temporarily in this unique situation, the intactness of the dyad might be threatened, even in healthy women. During moments of high emotional stress, underlying frustration, aggression, and hate can threaten to break through into consciousness and even into acting out. This can precipitate a deep fear of destructiveness and hence also of destruction to the infant, who is an extension of mother’s self. This moment, when normal defences threaten to crack under the strain of these demands, and her hostile instincts being roused against her infant threaten to break through, I term a ‘verge of defence failure’. Under these (normal maternal) circumstances, some auxiliary protection is required in the service of her usual individual defence profile to protect the baby from her aggression. The infant’s capacity to physically and psychically invade the mother, that is, by-pass her normal barriers (defences) against intrusion, requires ‘something’ that can emerge temporarily during the early post-partum period, to prevent psychological damage to the mother. This mechanism must be unique to this period and must be able to service the dyad in what amounts to an extra-ordinary situation. Normal defences in a person serve to defend against aggressive instincts, and deal with these according to each personality. But infant demands threaten these individual defences that operate in the service of the individual ego and risk a most inopportune emergence of instinctual aggression that is ordinarily contained in the mother. Her usual defences hence come under threat of failure and during such a verge of failure additional measures are required to protect the infant. The binding of excess psychic stimulation and disposing of it becomes the natural requirement (Freud, 1923a, p. 301).
Nature appears to have provided mothers with such an auxiliary mechanism of protection – not necessarily against her intrapsychic scripts and deeper issues, but at least against her own destructive feelings that threaten to break through during ‘verges of failure’. In these moments, the mother instinctively appears to seek at outlet for her destructive feelings, unconsciously searching for any target other than her infant. Her protective instinct inhibits lashing out or sometimes, like in the case of post-partum depression, even acknowledging bad feelings to her baby. “The most remarkable thing about a mother”, said Winnicott, (1949), “is her ability to be hurt so much by her baby and to hate so much without paying the child out…” (p. 74). However, if these feeling are restricted too far, and the aggression is introjected in certain personalities, the result may be depression or worse.
In the normal course of the nuclear triad, the father provides an available auxiliary ego to the nursing couple, one that serves as a natural reservoir for negative affects. But father is not a container in the sense of metabolising these affects for the mother, and returning them to her in a modified form (Bion, 1962), as the mother is wont to do for the baby. The one-step-removed status of the father enables him to form barriers against intrusion that the mother is unable to do, as will be discussed below. Whereas father can support, he is limited in his capacity to metabolise, at least not to the extent the mother is ‘forced’ to do by her inseparable status in relation to the baby. In the middle of the night, when ‘night time psychosis’ stirs menacingly on little sleep, amplification of affects can be enormous and even minor domestic irritations can explode into dark and powerful energies and murderous feelings to an ‘offending’ spouse. Wetwipes left in the wrong place, or a forgotten nappy chore, or a misplaced torch, can lead to uncontainable resentments, not directed at the screaming infant and its sleep-intruding needs, but at the husband for his inconsiderateness, his passive neglect, or his active role in tormenting mother and her child.
Emotionally loaded experiences during the first year post-partum seem to have the capacity to become etched into the psyche and carried with the mother as grievous injuries making her love and connection with her husband difficult. It is as if the charge in the emotional atmosphere of pregnancy, childbirth, and the post-partum period are so heightened that anything experienced as injurious by the mother can become virtually indelibly etched into the psyche. I have often encountered such cases where an infringement during this time is resentfully recalled for decades. In one case I saw, for example, the wife still felt an intense rage that made their relationship vulnerable to a cold retreat, ten years after the husband neglected to remember to bring new nappies from the grocery store. Or the mother that years after her husband spent 5 minutes toasting the arrival of their new child in the hospital car park with a friend rather than being by her side, still felt a violent and disappointed fury that affected their warmth and sexual intimacy.
The mother’s ‘primary maternal preoccupation’ (Winnicott, 1965) is a healthy tendency following the birth of a child – this tendency holds within it a protectiveness over the infant which nature appears to build in for the mother. The good-enough mother, says Winnicott, starts off with an almost complete adaptation to her infant’s needs, throwing “her whole self into adapting to the needs of her infant…” (p. 234).
But where, then, are the mother’s bad feelings to go? When she is at the end of her tether at 3 am and a screaming baby will not sleep, and she begins to feel a rage amplified by the psychosis-inducing effects of night and sleep deprivation, and her internal world begins to explode with bad feelings? What does she do when, as Winnicott describes, her “identification with her infant” and her “devotion” borne out of her essential maternal function (1965, p. 147) reaches breakpoint? It is interesting how suddenly the awareness of husband happily ensconced in his dreams in another room, can surface into mind and become the cathecting-post, the reservoir, for all these destructive urges that threaten to break through into consciousness and even action.
The ‘snoozing Other’, guilty or not, can become increasingly positioned as an alien, an enemy, and the source of persecutory intent. Many fathers will testify to their confusion over this position, and whilst some better-adjusted ones manage to absorb these projections, some men become alienated, hostile, and increasingly resentful themselves, cooperating less with their partners, turning to external sources of affirmation and nourishment, and generating a withdrawal response that can cost the couple their relationship. Such a scenario in couple work can be tragic and necessitates understanding to nudge such couples back from an intractable brink.
There is a problem that appears to emerge with regard to the role of containment. It is not at all apparent that men are instinctively equipped to provide a metabolising role, or when they do that this role is fulfilled with near the efficacy of maternal containment of her infant’s emotions. Men are not endowed with near as intimate identification with his wife as the mother is with her child, who is an extension of her Self. For men, the extension of self can be there, but evidently to a more diluted extent, since his wife is not a direct extension of him, and nor is his child as it is to the mother, coming from the mother. The role of the phallus as a ‘containing’ mechanism rests more in the psyche of the mother than it does in the paternal reality – these associations being set up through her own development in relation to the father – and his phallic influences. Nonetheless, his presence is in resonance with an internal representation in the mother, and through this representation, a support for failing defences can be brought to bear. What is interesting to notice in this regard, as that in many cases there is no father present, yet these mechanisms continue to function. It exists whether or not the father is physically present in the mother’s life, supporting the notion that it is the symbolic representation of the container than is ascendant, rather than a physical presence, even when the physical presence can provide a supportive function. Ironically, therefore, conflict in couples can derive from an important protective function for the infant, to which I now wish to turn.
Mechanisms of Defence Support
I want to propose that during the first year of an infant’s life nature has built into the mother-infant dyad a psychological mechanism of protection. I will be building a case for these mechanisms of defence support below – but in short, they involve the channelling of potentially destructive aggression away from the immediacy of the mother-infant dyad. This helps to preserve the infant’s mental health from greater harm than would be the case were the mother to channel her hate into the infant. In normal circumstances this diversion of affect is not extreme, nor is it prolonged beyond the first year – and represents the usage of the phallus as a method of auxiliary protection. This mechanism appears to be the natural instinctive choice for the nursing mother and for the most part the father is able to absorb those projections that do not belong with him. Sometimes, however, this process goes awry and instead of a gradual remitting of the process, either the father refuses to take on negative affect to which he feels un-entitled, or the natural withdrawal of the affect from mother’s side does not occur. Sometimes, like in the case above, there is no natural developmental end to the need for the phallic third to contain negative affect. For her own internal reasons, the mother may unconsciously sustain it, such as to maintain her symbiotic bond with her infant beyond the developmental call of duty, or for reasons of an affair, or deeper resentments to father/ men/ husband.
This paper deals with intra-psychic issues that can influence mothers’ negative feelings towards their husbands. Of course, it is true that in some cases the failings of husbands are real. But one cannot contest the reality of difficult, intense, and dark emotions that can plague many mothers in their early postpartum period, contributing to problems for her own mental health, such as in post-partum depression, or in her relationship with her spouse. Without drawing more attention to the workings of the phallic container, there is a danger that this dynamic would remain unrecognised and may lead to failures in individual and especially couple psychotherapies.
Nonetheless, a sceptical reader would be justified in seeing that the formulation is incomplete. The question remains: if women need an auxiliary container in which to channel their own rages and negative affects, do men naturally take on the role of this repository in normal circumstances and act in the form of an auxiliary ego to the mother-infant symbiosis? Would we not expect a natural resistance to what is effectively a masochistic positioning? And are we saying that all men are, by extension, endowed with a masochistic bent in order to enable this diversion?
The answer is incomplete. Experience seems to indicate that after the birth of a child most men do and can survive the assault of quite suddenly being relegated to an outside position where once he was King. Most men, sometimes grudgingly, will coddle the nursing dyad and feel protective over it, since this unit becomes for the male psyche, an extension of himself too, albeit in a different way that the infant is an extension of mother’s self. His own needs will temporarily, if not happily, be dispensed with at first. His own instincts to provide may be cultivated. He may resort to resilience, a ‘thick-skin’ in the face of the periodic emotional upheavals, partly through not interpreting the attacks as really meant for him. Unlike the mother, father is designed to maintain a capacity for separation whilst still experiencing the dyad as an extension of himself and hence one deserving of his protection. Hence, a duality is maintained for the father of involvement and separateness that the mother does not enjoy in the first stages post-partum.
In less resilient men, however, the effects of these processes can be devastating. Often I have heard mothers describing how the central place their men occupied prior to the birth of their child have changed and he is affectionately relegated to nuisance status, a presence to be accepted and tolerated. For narcissistic men this can be a grievous injury and the destructive effects can linger well past the point of developmental necessity. Some couples I have seen have become fixated in the position of rejection and narcissistic injury for which these husbands have felt mortally wounded, and from which relationship recovery has been impossible. For some mothers, their investment in their child has afforded an opportunity to channel unresolved anger and hate in the husband’s direction where it becomes fixated. This enables her to avoid dealing with her ambivalence in her internal world in relation to her infant.
On the Origins of Hate
The observations above might be interesting but without an adequate theoretical base to explain this mechanism we have arrived at little of value. Can we justify the clinical observation of diversion of hate during ‘verges of failure’?
“I suggest”, said Winnicott (1949), “that the mother hates the baby before the baby hates the mother, and before the baby can know his mother hates him” (p. 73).
As discussed earlier, Freud (1923a) argued that life is characterised by conflict and compromise, fusing and defusing of the two trends of the life and death instincts. These instincts can carry an intense and raw emotional charge manifesting without inhibition or control, or time for sublimation into some higher and transformed expression. Whilst the instincts can fuse, they can also defuse. Instincts can, therefore, be split.
“We perceive that for purposes of discharge the instinct of destruction is habitually brought into the service of Eros… Making a swift generalisation, we might conjecture that the essence of a regression of libido (e.g. from the genital to the anal-sadistic phase) lies in a defusion of instincts…” (Freud, 1923a, p.382, second italics mine).
Through this capacity, we might understand that the ego is capable of protecting itself (or more accurately its objects that are cathected with positive libido) by defusion – a separation or splitting of the aggressive from the love instincts (Freud, 1923b). This splitting of the two instincts enables the libidinal instinct to retain its cathexis for an object, especially where there is intense love such as for an infant.
The fusing or defusing of the instincts is not unique to post-partum mothers. As Klein pointed out, splitting of the good and bad can occur in early infancy as protection of the love-object. It is a developmental stage that can carry through in pathological forms in adults who have failed to integrate these two trends in the depressive position. On the other hand, the postpartum period and the maternal relationship to her infant does present unique circumstances in which defusing of the instincts is endemic, necessary, and even healthy. But it is also fraught with broader dangers. It seems fair to note that a mother is generally endowed with a profound sense of obligation and protectiveness over her infant, even in situations where she feels numb or depressed, both of which are likely to be related to the introjection of hostile feelings that cannot be metabolised. In the normal course of events, a mother’s instinct to protect her infant will include from her own feelings of hostility. She seems to have a capacity to temporarily split her instincts, diverting destructive ones during ‘verges of failure’. In these moments when her limits are severely tested, aggressive feelings are diverted either inwards or wayward, usually into the third container - that is, the father.
Freud (1923a) noted that:“For the opposition between the two classes of instincts we may put the polarity of love and hate. There is no difficulty in finding a representative of Eros; but we must be grateful that we can find a representative of the elusive death instinct in the instinct of destruction, to which hate points the way. Now, clinical observation shows not only that love is with unexpected regularity accompanied by hate (ambivalence), … but also that in a number of circumstances hate changes into love and love into hate” (p.383).
Freud goes on to argue that in the changing of love into hate, that there has to be in the ego or id a displaceable energy which can be added to either the erotic or destructive impulse. Some degree of communication can be said to exist between the instincts, and that energy from one erotogenic source can be shifted to another component instinct originating from another source. It has to be assumed, says Freud, that such energy is derived from a store of desexualised Eros, and that this displaceable libido is employed to “obviate blockages and to facilitate discharge” (p. 385). The maternal ego makes use of this tendency and facility during her heightened emotional state, to preserve her love for her infant by divesting it of the hate and channelling added libidinal energy into her hate.
Neurotic “acts of revenge” can be directed against the wrong people, and Freud makes this point that “punishment must be exacted even if it does not fall upon the guilty” (p.386). Instincts can change their aim by displacement, and this ability, argues Freud, fulfils an essential function. In this instant, displacement facilitates the preservation of the mother herself, and of her infant who is an extension of herself – through diversion of destructive affects. That is, she extends a self-preservatory requirement to her infant.
However, a word must be added on the issue of displacement. Why is this diversion of hate not simply a displacement in the classic sense? Whilst splitting and diversion of maternal hate might include displacement, displacement itself differs from this process: displacement proper is an intrapsychic defence more geared to deal with an individual’s internal neurotic promptings, rather than a normal and temporary developmental phase (as normal as childbirth is actually a temporarily abnormal state). As Sandler and Freud (1983) noted, “the whole idea of defence is that it is an intrapsychic process, not one connected to the object world…except as an instigator – or one of the instigators – of ego’s criticisms of the id” (p. 98).
In the maternal state, diversion is accompanied by splitting, without which it could not occur, and is a response to an ‘external’ universal developmental challenge accompanied by a universal auxiliary defensive manoeuvring in its service. It is also a temporary manoeuvre, one that emerges in response to the specificity of the maternal challenge and is not in the service of the ego at any other time. It is in the service of the infant. In addition, these mechanisms are not available to the father, who is not subject to the same merger with the infant as is the mother, who is unable to form a psychic barrier against its impingements. These dimensions appear to distinguish this process from classic displacement.
Why the Father?
If we can accept the above formulations as carrying some merit, we are still left with one inadequately explained problem. That the mother splits hostile affect and diverts it away from her infant and into a Third is not difficult to see clinically, nor is the value of these defensive manoeuvres difficult to understand from the infant’s point of view. But why should the mother automatically choose the father as the third? Surely, this cannot be simply because he is sufficiently available for this purpose? What of parents, friends, or any other real or imagined reservoir?
Winnicott (1965) has noted that “in the simplest case the man, supported by a social attitude which is itself a development from the man’s natural function, deals with external reality for the woman, and makes it safe and sensible for her to be temporarily in-turned, self-centred” (p. 147, italics mine). By extension, he is, therefore, the layer of skin that protects the mother-infant from the impingements of the environment, and possibly also the dyad from their own complex merger by bringing in an external energy. This is a plausible and perhaps sufficient explanation for father’s place in this regard. But couples in conflict readily demonstrate that this explanation falls short in accounting for the intensity with which maternal affect can be directed toward and cathect on the father, and the unconscious representations of the phallus that this tendency represents.
Having a baby carries with it a complex array of Oedipal connotations. During the Oedipal phase, a girl’s identification with her mother can take the place of attachment to her mother. Freud (1940) explains that the girl puts herself in her mother’s place, and in so doing tries to take her place with her father.
“Her new relation to her father may begin by having as its content a wish to have his penis at her command; but it culminates in another wish – to have a baby from him as a present. The wish for a baby takes the place of the wish for a penis or at all events branches off from it” (p. 69).
This wish to have father’s baby becomes later the wish to have the baby with/ of a man onto whom she has displaced these feelings. Her adult mate, in whom her love is placed, now carries a great deal of the earlier unrealised affects and wishes. For here the incest taboo is gone and the realisation of her love for a man, and its fulfilment in the actualisation of having a baby with him, can be achieved. It is the culmination of the Oedipal wish to become pregnant with a baby from a man on whom so many earlier, frustrated desires have found a home, and which carries many of the components of the love for the father, or such variation on it as were present in the Oedipal period and beyond. A pregnancy and birth carry this charge and a wanted conception represents the culmination of the wish to have a baby and the father’s gift. So it is that the father of the child, most generally a woman’s husband but not always, is strongly associated, albeit unconsciously, with her own father and the incestuous wishes from that relationship.
So, on the one hand, therefore, this act represents the culmination of a wish, and having a baby the fulfilment of the ‘gift’ from the husband, a peak experience of the phantasy of the ultimate consummation and love. However, on the other hand, when times turn bad and the struggles and pain of birth make themselves felt, there is another often-heard refrain: “you did this to me!” This replaces the associations of the wish and its fulfilment, and turns it into resentment and hate, a splitting of the love and hate and an inversion of the love-wish to have father’s/ husband’s baby – into a hate and rejection of the wish/ father/ husband. “I do not wish this from you – you have forced this upon me!” becomes instead the sentiment directed at the perpetrator of the bad, the party responsible for the pain and the anguish. The splitting of the bad affect from the good, or the hate from the love, in order to protect the infant from damage, leads also to a diversion of this hate into a third. The father of the child is associated with the actualisation of the Oedipal wish, and hence the good. But when the bad is disowned, he becomes its source. The origins of this Oedipal association that can turn good to bad so readily, seems to rest on the well known fact that if a father does indeed cross the physical boundary and respond sexually to his child’s Oedipal phantasies, this abuse immediately relegates him to a position of bad and the good is quickly lost. This would appear to be the source and the prototype for the rapid denigration of the good father, transferred onto the husband when a target is needed in which to rest hostility and hate that threatens to break through the defences. Associations of Oedipal fulfilment during the good can, therefore, turn into associations of Oedipal hate during the bad.
Case Sample Two
It was discovered during a couple therapy, for example, that a sexual problem that had persisted for many years, had originated during the pregnancy of their first child. This woman hated being pregnant, had mixed feelings about having a child, but ‘fell in love’ with her child when she was born. She split off all her hate to the foetus/ child and began to divert this affect into her husband, the source of her pregnancy, the one who had ‘done it to her’. This unconscious process relieved her of the burden of ambivalence to her child and facilitated a good-enough mothering experience for both her and her child. She did indeed love her husband, but the association of his culpability with her hated pregnancy, his ‘penis-baby gift’ – that is his sexuality – made her deeply resentful of him sexually, and increasingly unable to feel comfortable sexually. She ‘did’ sex dutifully, but was persistently resentful of his sexual needs, a problem that persisted through years of their marriage. Her unconscious splitting to protect the infant had inverted the situation – from her seduction/ invitation to him to have his penis in her, to a sentiment that he had done this to her, perhaps even violated her, put in her the penis-baby. Perhaps this is not unlike the Oedipal drama, in which a girl phantasises the seduction of her father. Should the father actually cross a boundary and materialise the phantasy, however, he has violated her, done to her, hurt her.
The Prototype of Psychic Intrusions
In this case, a new dimension is opened which questions the sufficiency of the formulation so far. We have traversed the realities of infant intrusions and interferences that on their own can evoke hate. We have also gone deeper into the aggressive aspects of infant intrusion caused by its attempts to restore equilibrium through bending the environment and mother to its needs, and in the process leaving aggressive residues in the mother to metabolise and/or defend against (since attack will invariably require some defence).
Some mothers, perhaps all, have some ambivalence long before the baby is born. So where do these feelings emerge from if external reality is not the root at this stage? During pregnancy, however, welcome it might be, there can also be feelings of hostility and discomfort in response to being colonised. At some level, the baby represents a parasitic intrusion and invasion, symbolic of something ‘being put’ into the mother, rather than acquired by her. Since, as Freud (1923a) said, “that love is with unexpected regularity accompanied by hate (ambivalence)” (p. 383), we can see, as in the second case above, the negative side of the intrusion accompanied by a loss of control and feelings of hostility and hate. These feelings were accompanied by Oedipal associations and intrapsychic symbols related to this phase, ‘into’ which these feelings could be ‘put’ during pregnancy. Her hate was sufficiently conscious to not become diverted in reality, as it did when the baby was born and her splitting of her instincts emerged in the service of her infant (for whom she suddenly then only felt love). The hate side of her ambivalence was then split and diverted to the husband/ phallic representative where these feelings could be safely put and at least tolerated (even if not metabolised).
In the physical intrusion of pregnancy, we may also, therefore, find the prototype of later psychic intrusion. This psychic intrusion forms the original basis for the later intrusions of aggression by the infant discussed above. It also presents a vital difference to the psychic nature of the father and why he does not, in fact, cannot replicate a metabolising containment for the mother as the mother does for the child – since the mother has no capacity to form a physical barrier against the ‘invading’ organism. It is in her and there is no capacity to ‘defend’ against it. Later, this physical reality will form the basis of subsequent psychic emergence, and in the postpartum period, the mother will be left with this residue. She will be predisposed with an inability to form a full psychic barrier against her infant’s psychic intrusions. In pregnancy, the infant is internal to her, and later when it emerges it remains an extension of her. In the initial pre-separation phases of the first months she will, therefore, be predisposed to not be able to form a psychic barrier either. Accordingly, (aggressive) impingements emanating from the baby post-partum will tend to penetrate into her mind – surely an adaptive mechanism for the infant, but one that leaves a toxic residue on the mother. Only with time, as the development of the infant under the pressures of the life instinct forces individuation from the mother, will her capacity to re-form a psychic barrier emerge.
Discussion
With this formulation, we have hopefully addressed several initial problems. When a husband in a dyadic couple finds himself becoming the outsider through the advent of the threesome, he may be baffled and angry. His child and his wife become engaged in a symbiotic bond to which his status is relegated to that of an auxiliary. His previous position of exclusivity might be banished to a position of the ‘third’ as maternal preoccupations vigorously exert themselves in his partner. His role is shifted to one of support, containment, and expedience, that is one of use-value. The phallus that is represented by him may have previously been perceived as enlivening and perhaps even fulfilling. But in the intermediate period postpartum and the first year beyond, it represents more of functional value, and sometimes according to mothers I have worked with, merely a nuisance to be accommodated.
Of course, these might be exaggerations but nevertheless, examples of this experience appear repeatedly in couple work. There are complexities and nuances in the feelings of the intense post-partum period that change from day to day and phase to phase. That a shift seems to occur in the nuclear couple in the post-partum period is a certainty, one to which some couples do not find an easy accommodation. The auxiliary ego that husband/ father provides for the new symbiotic dyad, may become misused and exaggerated, the reservoir for negative affects that are not metabolised in the mother-child dyad, and which if exaggerated may become toxic for the father and the marital relationship. How these processes might impact on the couple will vary. In case one above, the entire couple and family constellation was affected quite directly and the hostility was overt, even though its origins were not understood or conscious. In the second case, the manifestation of the hate was unconscious and manifest through a sexual dis-cathexis and symbolisation – whilst overt conflict was virtually non-existent and the relationship was not plagued by overt hostility. The ways this mechanism can manifest varies considerably, oftentimes finding its path through manifestations that are traceable to these post-partum roots only through careful dissection.
What I have attempted to arrive at is a theoretical justification for this often noticed phenomenon in couple therapy. Sometimes, a new mother has the perception and experience of injury to her by her husband’s villainous indifference, neglect, or contempt. Equally often, these can be traced back to ‘verges of defence failure’ and the breakthrough of destructive, death instinct-driven affect. During these times, the one stream of instincts and its aggressive and destructive impulses are roused into full and strident form, threatening to overwhelm the defences, the ego, and the ego-extension infant. A splitting of instincts can be brought into the service of these components. Protecting the vital source of infant sustenance, that is the mother-self and of course the infant by extension, both depend on the diversion of the destructive instinct away from this symbiotic dyad. To destroy the infant is to destroy self in this initial symbiotic relationship. The ego brings into full force mechanisms of opportunistic defence that may not normally be in the service of that personality – that is, defences that emerge in the specific reverie of the mother-infant dyad and which have as its aim the protection of the infant from the destructive instincts.
Normal death instinct aggression can have little place in the early stages of infant protection, but yet the mother also cannot be immune from her aggressive and violent impulses that are inevitably stirred by the demands, narcissistic attacks, and sleep deprivation that invariably accompany the challenges of a new child. Nature appears to assist this psychological conundrum, forcing a splitting of instincts by the mother, and diverting the dangerous ones to an outside target, fulfilling a discharge function and enabling ‘punishment to be exacted’. The father of the child, as representative of the father of the mother, is the natural person on whom these affects can be pinned, whatever his failings, in reality, may be. She did not wish the child - he put it in her. So he must be punished for being neglectful or persecutory, the source of bad.
At times, the intensity of destructive impulses can be so powerful that they become not just diverted into the father for metabolic reasons, but attached to him and cathected in a form that can become encrusted and fixed. This immutable form of instinctual splitting and diversion can lead to pathology in the spouse system and set up a cycle of fixation from which damage increasingly evolves. In the first case referred to above, it can be seen how external circumstances can inhibit the normal resolution of this process because the external demands simply do not allow the two trends of affect to be re-fused in a healthier balance. Sometimes, of course, the cause of this unfortunate atrophy in development is internal, to the mother, the father, or usually both, and for intra-psychically pathological reasons the elasticity in the marital dyad to process and evolve is lost. Instead, rigidity sets in which promotes developmental atrophy.
In the second case mentioned, wherein one aspect of this couple’s difficulties involved chronic sexual disaffection, the mother’s experience of her family of origin and subsequent losses in her life had left a defensive system in place that had lost its elasticity. Her initial hatred of losing her hard-won independence by getting pregnant, and subsequent falling in love with her baby after birth, as a strong reaction-formation protection, left little room for processing. These internal reasons coincided with a husband who also had intolerance for the “negative” side of feelings, and a belief system that said one should not harbour bad feelings. In this case there were no external reasons to maintain the anger and hate for the husband – instead, they had become fixed because there was no way she had internally to metabolise her split hate for her child, and their sexuality, symbolic of the child, suffered greatly. Over the years she hated him less, but still enough to prevent a revival of their intimacy.
It is important to recognise that these trends, the splitting and diversion, are not inherently regressive or pathological. These are mechanisms employed in the normal course of the post-partum period and which for the most part do not promote permanent pathology or an irreversible regressive tendency in the couple. The reintegration of the two instinctual trends usually happens naturally over time, and particularly as the infant outgrows the massive vulnerability and dependency upon which its survival depends. As the separation-individuation process occurs through the first year (Mahler, Pine & Bergman, 1975), there is a gradual lessening of the need for maternal defensiveness and protection and a greater capacity for integration of the two instinctual currents as her capacity to form a psychic barrier re-emerges.
In the first case of pathological diversion referred to above, the external demands of the child remained pressing and critical for many years, with the mother remaining almost entirely responsible for the care of the child’s needs. Should the mother have succumbed to her violent feelings in response to these impossible demands, this child could have been in severe trouble. And so the metabolising of her aggressive affect never occurred. Only 17 years later, as these demands lessened, could she for the first time begin to consider her own hate for her child and the way she had diverted this hate into the husband, and “punished” him with resolute consistency. Of course, he brought his own factors into this equation, as is always the case in couples, but for the purposes of this paper I will leave that complexity out.
At times in couple work, I have found a pathological version of this otherwise apparently normal phenomenon, even in the absence of any compelling external pressures to maintain it. Sometimes this has led to a split in a couple representing the defusion of these two currents – with father becoming the all-bad object and experienced as entirely void of texture, ambiguity, and goodness. These fathers might provide well, work hard, be long-suffering, and even tend to avoid retaliation through a schizoid retreat. Their lack of retaliation can make the split easier. But there is a variation on this, lending itself to an even greater and more permanent version of this split. The husband might regress in response to the diversion of negative affect and then, narcissistically wounded, counter-attack the dyad. That is, he might react by feeling excluded and injured. In these cases, the noxious label that has been attributed to him through the process described here, becomes hardened and even enacted in reality, with infantile tantrums in response to exclusion and bad-object projections, eliciting a behaviour that easily lends itself to the refrain often heard in couple therapy: “you see how he is?” And on the face of it, that is exactly how he is. But it is all too easy to miss the reasons why if we are not consciously aware of the power of the splitting and diversion of maternal hate in protection of the infant.
Conclusion
It is my view that sensitivity to these currents in couple work can enhance resolution of difficult and oftentimes intractable conflicts or symptoms that appear un-amenable to intervention. Even in situations that are more fluid, I have noticed that many couples feel painfully confused by the conflict enveloping their relationship, apparently since the arrival of children. These couples may not understand why an apparent third force with its own life has taint the love they do feel for each other. Recognising the diversion of maternal hate and the general tendency for father to be the recipient of this diversion, can assist both the mother to avoid depressive tendencies through struggling to metabolise such affects, as well as helping the couple normalise their split and work toward a better re-integration. Individual patients with post-partum issues might also be assisted if their own diversions of hate could be integrated. Most importantly, as all psychotherapists know, things are not always as they seem. Understanding when a symptom, or a general pattern, might be connected in some way to this splitting can assist to unlock difficulties that might otherwise have been overlooked.
Acknowledgements
Gratitude is due various people for insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper: my wife Jennifer Perkel, the members of the Association for Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists (ACPP) in Cape Town, the editor Rika vd Berg, and two anonymous referees.
References
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Addendum to The Phallic Container
Some points raised in response to concepts in this paper would benefit from additional clarification. In particular, two issues will be addressed: asymmetry in the male-female/ mother-father experience; and secondly, on the issue of how aggression might be utilised in the post-partum period.
By definition, birth presents deep asymmetry in the male-female experience. Structurally, the mother and her infant are for the only time in life without a physical, and later psychological boundary between each other. Like the merger of pregnancy itself in which no boundary exists physiologically, so too in the early post-partum period there will be no initial psychological barrier against psychic exchanges. The infant’s ‘attacks’ on the mother, her being forcibly entered and controlled through projective processes, and which as Klein suggests is present from the beginning of life, are designed to elicit attunement and responsiveness. But this has two effects: they initiate an (unconscious) aggressive response in the mother aimed at restoration of her own mental equilibrium, the (destructive) energy of which cannot be directed at the infant; and it leaves toxic residues in her from the infant’s forced aggressive entry into her mind. These are, by definition, unconscious transactions and do not, probably cannot involve the father in such a direct manner.
Some of these aggressive residues will be channelled into what I term ‘adaptive paranoia’ - that is, protectiveness over her infant generated by aggressive residues being projected externally into the environment. Some aggression will benefit from diversion into the phallic container. And some may be introjected, leaving depression in its wake. But some is generally utilised in a projected form, in which mother perceives the father (or environment) as having potential to harm baby through inadequacy or neglect – potentially an adaptive function. Maternal hate is therefore not something to merely be acknowledged and metabolised but recognised as having a necessary and positive function for the development of the mind of the infant and mother’s identification, attunement, and protectiveness over it.
To expand on this concept, nature appears to have built in vulnerability in mothers to their infant’s aggressive attacks. Because in her inability to attack her infant in response, she is forced to hold onto a certain amount of aggressive residue, which in turn may form the seeds of her ‘adaptive paranoia’, an increase in paranoid concern for her infant. Nature has thereby found a route through which at least some retaliatory attacks are obviated in the mother and in its stead are formed adaptive paranoid feelings of concern. In many couples, mothers are particularly prone to feeling their husbands will not tend their babies adequately – and father’s to feel no matter what he does it is never ‘good enough’ - an example of her aggression being put to adaptive use from the infant’s point of view but which can cause problems in the couple. In some respects, this is reality-based since fathers are not subject to a psychic merger with the infant and hence are not as attuned.
For the father, no matter how evocative having a child might be, there is simply no structural equivalent affecting him. If there was, it is doubtful in my mind whether he could fulfil a positive containing function for the mother-infant. This is an unalterable fact of nature’s asymmetry (and wisdom) in this aspect of development – just like the lion will always eat the Impala and never the other way around. We may baulk at this asymmetry when it comes to men and women, but in neutralising any thought of judgement that during this period women’s unconscious and emotions will be activated more directly, we can more comfortably dispense with the need to find symmetry and equivalence in a situation not disposed to it. Descriptiveness at whatever level, accepted for what that is, enables us to move away from having to ‘defend’ mother against ‘attack’ – into an understanding of a challenging reality that unalterably changes everything – physiologically, psychologically, and in the couple.
As we see so commonly with post-partum depression, the unconscious has a tendency to prevail and the rage/hate does not comply with conscious choice. An example of this is maternal guilt. Let us not forget, however, that guilt is intra-punitive. That is, it is fashioned and formed out of the aggressive instincts – and that when guilt becomes ascendant in the maternal experience this is often linked directly to the activation of her hate and it's being directed in ways that protect the infant. Post-partum depression and the utilisation of aggressive energies in a defensive introjection, or ambivalence or guilt, are less likely to be the purview of fathers because structurally the father is not “attacked” so directly by the infant. Post-partum depression, for example, does not commonly affect fathers. What is evoked in him may have unconscious associations, but no evidence compels us to view these associations and reactions as universal. In the mother, on the other hand, what is evoked in her is primarily and developmentally current. It is structurally built into the nature of childbirth and involves an unprecedented, unavoidable, and undiluted unconscious-to-unconscious transaction without a psychic boundary between mother and infant. This has no parallel in father’s experience any more than there is in his physical experience of birth. Are fathers affected? Yes definitely, but in different ways that are individually diverse.
The focus on maternal response also does not exclude an unconscious activation in fathers, since there can never be a lack of Unconsciousness in any situation. My formulations do not compare unconscious to conscious. They do, however, differentiate normative from individual processes. Linked to this, most importantly, is that whereas father’s varying possible responses represent an activation of his existent defences and intrapsychic issues (which are largely symbolic), the splitting and diversion to which I refer is an auxiliary process assisting the failure of mother’s defences in response to a real structural situation. They are additional, temporary defensive manoeuvres.
As Winnicott (1974) put it, “The subject says to the object: ‘I destroyed you’, and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says: ‘Hello object. I destroyed you. I love you. You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you. While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in unconscious fantasy” (pp. 105-106). This object is mother, not father. Unconscious reactivity to these attacks is structurally built into the mother-infant dyad. Father is largely peripheral at this structural level of intensity. His evocations are, as it were, ‘his issue’.
The utilisation of hate in more mature, ambivalent ways is, as Klein points out, a developmental achievement. In the early post-partum period, more primitive mechanisms hold sway, particularly splitting of the love and hate. Indeed, the formation of a psychic boundary between mother and infant does take place over the first few months of life, and with it a separation of psychic projections is enabled. This too, like the capacity to hold the love and hate together in a creative balance, is a developmental achievement. It speaks also to the positive function of maternal hate, as in Parker’s view of ambivalence. Hate (or aggressive ‘attacks’) ‘force’ attunement and responsiveness in the mother – but in the restoration of infant, equilibrium can be left maternal disequilibrium that requires restoration. It can also evoke guilt, which fashioned out of the aggressive residues has the function, together with its projected variants of ‘adaptive paranoia’, of protecting and sustaining a maternal merger and identification with her infant.
What distinguishes the pathological from the non-pathological within this is not contained in the source and mechanisms used to process the hate. These mechanisms are inherent to the post-partum mother-infant dyad and the activation in the mother’s unconscious of a need to defend, which is an aggressive process. The extent of splitting and diversion is what distinguishes the pathological versions. This is in the degree rather than in the mechanism.
Finally, the issue of instincts is a complex one, to which these few comments cannot do justice. We cannot escape the realities of nature and the merger and emergence of baby from mother, physiologically and psychologically. Men and women are different in this respect. Parenthood does bring up things in both mother and father, but we can likely accept in different ways. Is it problematic to be able to amplify these differences for the benefit of understanding and intervention rather than strive to neutralise them? And that is my point – zoning in on the depth and textures that make the mother’s experience of pregnancy and the post-partum period absolutely unique, asymmetrical, and not subject to conceptual parallelism. What if this is a period, albeit a brief one, in which irrationality and unconscious processes do dominate the maternal experience? She is not at “fault” in this, any more than she is in experiencing pain during labour. Pregnancy, birth, and its aftermath is a period of powerful unfiltered psychological exchanges and activations in its normal course – it is endemic.
If we ignore all these differences, we run the risk of forgetting that, as Milner (1934) said, “… experience is always bigger than the formula” (cited in Pickering, 2006).
Long, C. (2007). Hate in the Phallic Container. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in South Africa, 15:1.Pickering, J. (2006). The Marriage of Alterity and Intimacy. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Couple Work, 2. Society of Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists, London.Winnicott, D.W. (1971). ‘The Use of an Object’, in Playing and Reality. London: Pelican 1974.
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