The Pre-Conceptual Trauma and the Traumatised and Non-Traumatised State of the Personality

The reason why we concern ourselves with things that are remembered, with our past history, is not because of what it was – although that might be quite important in its own right – but because of the mark, it has left on you or me or us now. -Bion: Taming Wild Thoughts

For this ordered world (cosmos) is of a mixed birth: it is the offspring of a union of Necessity [traumatized state] and Intellect [non-traumatized state]. Intellect prevailing over Necessity by persuading (from Peitho, goddess of persuasion) it to direct most of the things that come to be toward what is best, and the result of this subjugation of Necessity to wise persuasion was the initial formation of the universe. -Plato: The Republic

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality. -Seneca

Introduction

In the introduction to his paper about “a theory of thinking” (1967), Bion explained that his contribution was

…devised with the intention that practising psycho-analysts should restate the hypotheses of which it is composed in terms of empirically verifiable data. (p.110)

My intention is to do just that with the introduction of the following argument: “all possible forms of existing psychopathology we deal with in the consulting room, are always the immediate consequence of a childhood trauma.” I defined trauma as ‘the mental condition that results when a temporary fact becomes permanent by way of repetition compulsion.’ From this, I have come to define two forms of traumas: the “pre-conceptual” and the “conceptual.” Pre-conceptual traumas are ubiquitous and represent traumas that occur early in the life of every human being, at the time when the mind is not developed enough to be capable of containing and providing the child with significant meaning. They also occur when the mother’s reverie, or her intuitive capacity fails. We could repeat here what Freud (1905) once said about the Oedipus complex; except with a little twist: “Every new arrival on this planet is faced with the task of mastering the Oedipus complex,” to which I add: ‘that is always modified by the pre-conceptual trauma.’

In a previous publication I have described “pre-conceptual traumas” as follows:

Pre-conceptual traumas, diachronically structured as a narrative of conjoined presences of absences, stand for highly toxic and emotionally organized 'parasites' that inhabit the unconscious mind from very early, feed on time and space, inhibit processes of symbolization, are projected everywhere and reproduce themselves incessantly; thereby determining not only all forms of psychopathology, but also the idiosyncrasy of every existing individual. (López-Corvo, 2014, p. xxi)

Pre-conceptual traumas represent ‘constant conjunctions,’ ¹ or facts, which inflicted by chance, are repeated by compulsion and will always determine the particular idiosyncrasy in all existing individuals. ‘Conceptual’ traumas, on the other hand, are accidental and take place at a time when there is already a mind capable of containing them, but fails to do so. This is due not only to the trauma’s intensity but also and very importantly because conceptual traumas always unconsciously trigger pre-conceptual traumas; a concept I have previously referred to as “trauma entanglement.” (López-Corvo, 2013, 2014)

Pre-conceptual traumas split the mind in two states: the ’traumatized’ and the ‘non-traumatized.’ The former represents the compulsive unconscious repetition of the pre-conceptual trauma, and it is structured by repressed emotions which Bion had referred to as “beta elements.” The ‘non-traumatized,’ on the other hand, is characterised by the natural development of mind from birth to old age, and it is ruled – according to Bion – by the “alpha function,” which can be defined as the capacity in every human being to think thoughts; or in other words, to be able to ‘mentally digest’ the pre-conceptual traumas and to contain their painful experiences, by changing ‘raw emotions’ into logical and creative thoughts or “alpha elements.”

The “Traumatized” and “Non-Traumatized” States of the Personality

Several years ago, at a conference about child analysis in Bello Horizonte, Brazil, I talked about the urgent need to establish a ‘marriage’ between Jean Piaget’s cognitive psychology and Melanie Klein’s psychology of emotions, so that both, the cognitive and emotional sides of the mind may be integrated. It was an idea Freud was exploring in 1922 after listening to Piaget at a Psychoanalytic Congress in Berlin, when Freud became interested in Piaget dissertation on “symbolical thinking,” because of the similarity with his own work about the unconscious (Piaget, 1961, p. 234). Anthony (1956, 1957) had also published two articles on the same subject, although more critical than integrating, referring to Piaget’s work as a “psychology without emotions.” Bion’s contributions have been determinant in providing the bridge between cognition and emotions, as observed in his original work on leaderless groups. In this, Bion established the existence of two different forms of groups: the ‘working’ (cognitive) and the ‘basic assumptions,’ (emotional) a consideration that served as the basis for his future paper on the “psychotic and non-psychotic parts of the personality”. I have made use (López-Corvo, 2014) of this paper for my conception of “pre-conceptual traumas” as well as to define two states of the mind, the “traumatized” and the “non-traumatized.” In relation to this matter, I have previously (Ibid) stated the following:

In a very similar inquest, Meltzer (1978) pointed out that Bion did not discriminate between the psychotic part of personality and clinical psychoses, because of Klein’s influence in considering the paranoid-schizoid position as representing the fixation point for schizophrenia. He also added that it was not clear whether Bion “thinks that this part of the personality is ubiquitous or only present in the person who actually presents a schizophrenic disorder.” [p. 26].

Based on this statement, the experience of many other psychoanalytic researchers, as well as my own experience, I consider that Bion's reference to "psychotic" and "non-psychotic", is in fact a dynamic present in all human beings, resulting from early uncontained traumatic events. To avoid confusion – as stated by Meltzer – I decided to change Bion’s term of “psychotic and non-psychotic” to “traumatized" and “non-traumatized” states of the personality.

“The traumatized state” is structured by the presence of unconscious emotions organized according to the specific logic of childhood thinking.

This precise epistemology will be determined according to the time – as a point of fixation – when the particular pre-conceptual trauma was established. In other words, one can look at Piaget’s cognitive work to represents not only the language of children, but also the language of all forms of psychopathology as they are present in the “traumatized stated” of all minds, The epistemological structure of emotional thinking in adults, always follows childlike logic like unconscious unremembered memories that Bion has referred to as beta elements or, in simple terms, the clamour of a once misunderstood child will, in the mind of an adult, eternally and unconsciously repeat itself.

This argument between cognition and emotions is not a new concern, it was already present in Plato’s mind when he, by the voice of Timeous, argued that in the conception of the cosmos, there was a dialectical interaction between two opposing elements: "Intellect” (Nous) and “Necessity” or Destiny (Ananke). Plato stated the following: "For this ordered world (cosmos) is of a mixed birth: it is the offspring of a union of Necessity and Intellect. Intellect prevailing over Necessity by persuading (from Peitho, goddess of persuasion) it to direct most of the things that come to be toward what is best, and the result of this subjugation of Necessity to wise persuasion was the initial formation of the universe.” ²

There exists some resemblance between this statement made by Plato about the ‘external universe,’ and Bion’s description of the dialectic interaction between beta and alpha worlds, related to the ‘internal cosmos,’ where the beta domain would be equivalent to ‘necessity’ by means of repetition compulsion, and the alpha world will correspond to the ‘intellect’ with the use of alpha function. An interesting variance between Plato’s and Bion’s positions is found in the use of ‘persuasion’ by the former and ‘digestion’ by the latter, in order to explain how the 'intellect’ contains ‘necessity’ for Plato, and alpha function contains beta elements, for Bion.

I have previously described ‘traumas’ as the result of a temporary state that changes into a permanent one, much like how the ancient footprints of dinosaurs have become eternal. Imagine a thirsty dinosaur, perhaps a tyrannosaurus, has one day walked slowly to quench its thirst to the edge of a lake, that has long since disappeared, and the mud has turned to limestone. One hundred and eighty million years later heavy showers disclosed footprints engraved in the limestone revealing the footsteps of that precise morning, when the thirsty dinosaur walked to the lake. It might have been a regular uneventful act repeated by the tyrannosaurus every day, although this time, the existence of a series of variables conjoined to preserve the footsteps. Perhaps it was the massive weight of the animal together with weather conditions – like temperature, humidity, the quality of the sand, and so on – that managed to preserve the tracks forever. It meant in summary that now, when there is no longer a lake and the dinosaurs have been erased from the face of the earth, its footprints produced in just one instant, became preserved for eternity; or in other words, what should have been otherwise a temporary event became a permanent fact; an overwhelming absence became an everlasting presence.

I have considered (López-Corvo, 2013, 2014) the presence of two different forms of trauma: 1) One universal, I have referred to as "pre-conceptual traumas," which are present in all existing human beings and take place during the first years of life. 2) The other form I have referred as “conceptual traumas,” which are accidental and take place at a later age when there is a mind already, that fails to contain the facts from an overwhelming traumatic reality ³ . Due to a failure of the mechanism of ‘reality testing,’ there is always a continuous emotional entanglement between conceptual and pre-conceptual traumas.

All individuals experience pre-conceptual traumas early in their life, when the “absence” of a primary essential object – like the mother, for instance – becomes a ‘permanent presence,’ once the rudimentary mind of the child and the mother’s capacity to intuitively understand her child’s distress (referred to by Bion as reverie) fails to contain the absence. Similar to the dinosaur’s footprints, the possibility that this absence of the object changes into a lasting and chronic presence hinges on an imaginary equation, between the particular impact of the traumatic experience and the capacity of the environment to contain such a loss and turn it into a harmless and meaningless affair.

Pre-conceptual traumas are the consequence of at least three main factors: 1) the discrepancy between the supremacy of the parents and the helplessness of the child; 2) the fact that parents are just ordinary people, never ‘chosen by God,’ as children's idealization usually leads them to believe; and 3) the loneliness

and impotence induced by the adult’s incapacity to follow the logic of children, or their particular epistemological idiosyncrasies, or in simple words: how they think. A vignette could provide more clarity on this matter: A young woman asked about her three-year-old boy who started the unpleasant habit of urinating everywhere after his father had ‘disappeared,’ when he was suddenly called away for business, without giving any explanation to the child who became very angry thinking that his father had deserted him. In these cases, a mother can determine whether the child’s undesirable behaviour will disappear or become chronic. If she was to be supportive of the child’s need and not react angrily and confrontationally, the behaviour will eventually extinguish itself, but if she was to engage in a continuous struggle with the child, he might stubbornly stick to his demeanour for a very long time

and even become a symptom.

It may seem reductionist to say that all human beings, are now and will forever be unconsciously dealing with some form of childhood trauma, or with the clamour of the child who was once misunderstood by his parents and who is still now misunderstood intrapsychically, by the "adult mind" or “non-traumatized state” where “it” now dwells.

I do believe that a simple empirical psychological observation will allow any keen eye to come to terms with this statement. Not all forms of pre-conceptual traumas are obvious and ostensible and easy to follow, as can be seen for instance, in individuals who had been physically or sexually abused. Sometimes “pre-conceptual traumas” can be so diluted that it becomes difficult to put it together, a concept Kahn (1963) had described as “cumulative trauma."

A clinical vignette could be useful: Olga was a young girl who appeared very disturbed, presenting a paranoid delusional system where she felt threatened by obscure forces that were accusing her of being a lesbian. She was the daughter of two pleasant and conscientious paediatricians and in spite of a thorough investigation, we could not find any childhood event capable of explaining the intensity of her mental suffering; except for the fact that she was the eighth child in a family of ten children. By the time she was born, her mother was ‘eight times diluted’ and this ‘passive absence’ of a mother’s necessary presence was at the core of her need and in the heart of her paranoid delusion. It was an everyday attenuated trauma, which over time had a vast and determining effect on her mind. She had projected in other women the immense need she had for her mother’s presence, and confused this need with a homosexual problem, then developed as a form of defence, the paranoid delusion of being accused of being a lesbian.

Most of the time pre-conceptual traumas can be understood in a few interviews, although it can take several weeks. In private practice it is essential to determine, as soon as possible, the specific characteristics of the particular trauma that patients have experienced in early childhood, because once you grasp the core of the pre-conceptual trauma, you will see that most of the time, what you gather from any patient’s psychopathology as well as from the transference and the counter-conference, is always a repetition of the core of the trauma. The form or how the conflict presents itself changes, but the unconscious meaning of the conflict is always the same. Some of these true traumatic characteristics can be inferred from the manner patients communicate their emotions to the therapists – something we refer to as the "transference," – or in how the therapist responds emotionally to those feelings projected by the patient, referred to as "counter–transference." As stated earlier, these emotions that are always re-experienced by the adult, were previously directed towards the parents during infancy, and represent traumatic conditions which have remained frozen, continuously repeating inside the unconscious mind. Gender and order of birth can also provide evidence about a particular trauma. In a family of three children, for instance, the older might feel ‘abandoned’, the middle one ‘forgotten’ and the youngest one ‘abused’. But when there is only one child, pre-conceptual traumas could be structured around significant feelings of an extreme sense of responsibility towards their parents’ wellbeing.

TRAUMATIZED	NON-TRAUMATIZED
Mental Logic: Follows childlike emotional epistemology. “Transductive” logic (from parts to parts) Structured by beta elements.	Mental Logic: Follows adult cognition. “Deductive and Inductive logic.” Uses alpha function to change beta elements into alpha.
World of Projections (Transference-countertransference)	World of Reality (True Objects)
Pathological Narcissism: Time is circular: the past being continuously repeated in the present and in the future. Space Confusion: No discrimination between Inner and Outer worlds.	Normal Narcissism: Time is linear. Time and Space differentiated. Inner and Outer Worlds are discriminated.
Loneliness: To exist in relation to the Other: like a child to an adult.	Aloneness: To exist in relation to the Self: like an adult to a child.
Need for an Outside “Rescuer”	The Only “Rescuer” is Yourself
Vengeful Hope	Hope by Renunciation
Symbolization: Continuous or “Homeomorphic.”	Symbolization: Discontinuous or “Heteromorphic.”

Another significant aspect of childhood trauma lies in how difficult it is to remember the emotional aspect of the trauma. One may be able to recall it intellectually, but the related emotions that structure the trauma, usually remain repressed. Let’s examine a clinical vignette: After a year into his analysis, a patient brought up a dream from which he awakes in terror feeling that he is choking because he could not swallow something. He said he remembers having this dream several times before. He does not recall any event from the previous day that could have triggered this dream, although he remembers that he was enduring dealing with a difficult and demanding problem at work. I said, "You mean that perhaps this problem was choking you?" “Well," he answered, “sometimes I feel I worry too much, that I could get fired and my family will suffer, although I know at the same time, that it would be impossible to be laid off because of something like that." I asked if there was any situation in his childhood when he felt like choking. "Yes," he said, "when I was around 4 or 5 years old, I was visiting my maternal grandmother and then swallowed several aspirins from a bottle and was brought to the hospital where my stomach was pumped; it must have been something extremely unpleasant." I asked if his family was there, and he said that all of them were there, his mother and father and his grandmother. The next day his grandmother had a stroke, was taken to the same hospital and eventually died. He does not remember, but this could have made him feel extremely guilty, equating the fact that she died because of what he did. Then I said: "now we know what choked you!” Every human shelters in their mind the existence of the traumatized eternally chiselled by the particular characteristics of their ‘pre-conceptual’ trauma.

There is another important aspect to consider. In psychoanalysis or psychotherapy, it is essential to the ‘non-traumatized state,’ to make use of the coexisting alpha function present in this state to digest the beta elements that conform to the ‘traumatized state’ and to change them into the alpha elements required for 'logical thinking.’ A patient starts her session with a common remark stating – while crying – that she feels very guilty and upset because she had been having fantasies of attacking my wife. She has never met my wife, but imagined her to be ugly, angry, unpleasant and old. I said, that the problem seemed not to be that she was critical, but that she was making a great deal of a fantasy – something we had discussed several times before. It seemed that an envious and angry little girl in her was attacking her mother projected onto my wife, because as her father did, she felt I was abandoning her. However, since she knew all of this, I felt that the real conflict for her was that the envious and angry little girl in her, had the power to control her mind, while the reasoning and logical adult in her did not make itself present and appeared helpless. I wondered if perhaps she was unconsciously testing me, by inducing me to use my own alpha function in order for her to feel that, unlike her father, I really did care for her. But if this were to be true, she was paying a high price for this with guilt and anxiety.

A woman in her forties, of Hindu extraction and who wedded in an arranged marriage when she was eighteen to a man fifteen years her senior, initiated couple therapy on account of continuous pugnacious arguments between them. They unceasingly argued in a way that emulated children’s ‘sibling rivalry.’ I said that they acted as if there were two different people: on one hand there was an adult element (non-traumatized state) that wished to improve their relationship and had searched for therapy, and at the same time, there was another element (traumatized state) that, similar to how they were as children, needed to accuse each other of being ‘bad’ in order to feel ‘good’ in the eyes of a mother they have inside their heads, a mother they also projected on me. There was the unconscious desire to make me a ‘rescuer’ from the helpless condition they had invented and recreated in their minds, following a script, they learned when they were children. They were trapped in a cycle or repetition. However, in the end, what they really did was to forcedly place themselves in a trap. This mechanism is always present in all couples' discrepancies and continuous mutual aggression.

Why is it that when our child element or traumatized stated controls our mind, the non-traumatized or adult part in us, does not intervene to rescue us? Why does it remain passive and rather indifferent? Bion had often remarked that projections of ‘un-thought thoughts’ or beta elements, always takes place together with that part of the mind capable of containing them. For instance, if someone expresses apprehension about getting inside an elevator, someone else who does not experience that fear, might explain that there is nothing to be anxious about, that an elevator is perfectly safe. This explanation, capable of containing the unreasonable dread, is missing in the phobic person and it is this form of reasoning – possibly adding unconscious meanings – that we provide in the consulting room as an interpretation. However, we could question: What makes the phobic person unable to use his/her own cogent reasoning – non-traumatized state – in order to relax the inner frightened little child or ‘traumatized element’? We could consider three possibilities:

1. 1) Fear of extreme childhood aggression: A repressed condition that can induce the disavowal of the adult part or non-traumatized state, out of fear of the child’s desire to ‘murder their parents,’ an act they were unable to perform when they were children but are capable of as adults.
2. 
   

1. 2) Self-envy: A condition I have referred to previously (López-Corvo, 1992, 1995,1997) as the attack on logical thinking or ‘alpha function,’ because, for a child, ‘thinking logically’ belongs solely to adults or to parents as their obvious functions, as well as power and privileges. As children, we enviously attack this thinking capacity in our parents because we do not have it for ourselves. However, once we have grown up and became adults, we might then, by means of ‘self-envy,’ attack the ‘thinking-adult’ inside of us, just as we enviously attacked our ‘external parents’ capacity to think, when we were children. Bion (1962) said the following:

1. The attempt to evade the experience of contact with live objects by destroying alpha-function [non-traumatized states] leaves the personality unable to have a relationship with any aspect of itself that does not resemble an automaton. Only beta-elements [traumatized state] are available for whatever activity takes the place of thinking and beta-elements are suitable for evacuation only – perhaps through the agency of projective identification [p. 13]

1. And also:

1. Attacks on alpha-function, stimulated by hate of envy [self-envy ⁴ ], destroys the possibility of a patient’s conscious contact either with himself or another as live objects. [Ibid, p. 9]

1. 3) Magical thinking: All children use magic and omnipotent defences as a form of protection, due to the discrepancy between the child’s helplessness and vulnerability, and the power and control exercised by the parents. It is very difficult to give up these defences that have been unconsciously used for all of one’s life, as the only protection and way out. The conflict implicit in this type of childhood defence is that once we reach adulthood, obviously, childhood no longer exists, but in order to continue making use of these omnipotent defences, we have to recreate that childhood again and again inside our adult mind like a mirage, mimicking the same conditions we used to experience as a child, when we felt completely helpless in relation to our powerful parents. The whole condition becomes a mental trap that repeats endlessly, due to the paradox, that in order to use omnipotent defences, the whole sense of impotence also has to be recreated, in an endless circularity, so powerful, that it can completely paralyze the capacity to think logically, or to use the alpha function present in the non-traumatized state. Living in the present as adults, while at the same time our mind is continuously ruled by ‘logic’ fashioned by the child (traumatized state) that we used to be, without having access to our logical thinking or alpha function (non-traumatized states), will always result in the states of hopelessness, anxiety and mental suffering, which could eventually compromise our own life.
2. 
   

1. Another aspect to contemplate is the difficulty therapists and analysts have in following the logic related to patient’s psychopathology –similar to the difficulty parents have conceptualizing their children’s epistemology based on the fact that mental suffering is usually a consequence of emotional confusion that was structured in childhood.

Catastrophic Change as a form of Defence used by the Traumatized State

Bion (1965) referred to two forms of ‘catastrophic change’: one whose consequences involved persons outside the consulting room; the other remaining as a “controlled breakdown” within the analytic dyad (p. 8). I believe the difference between these two forms will hinge on the seriousness of the psychopathology involved; however, I will be referring now, to a third form of catastrophic change, the one taking place intra-psychically between internal part elements, such as the ‘traumatized’ and the ‘non-traumatized’ states. But before I continue, I would like to summarize Bion’s description of the “catastrophic change.”

Bion borrowed René Thom’s concept of ‘catastrophe theory’ to develop his own dissertation about catastrophic changes ⁵ . Following this model, we can infer that interpretation – introducing integration by changing ‘bivalent and dialectic part-objects into univalent total objects, as well as changing different kinds of equilibration (from symmetrical to asymmetrical) – could result in a discontinuity of the mental system and sometimes in a catastrophic change. In other words, catastrophe could be induced by the introduction of time, space, and symbolization into a currently steady or levelled state of equilibrium, which was assembled and sustained by the circular ‘repetition compulsion’ of childhood pre-conceptual traumas. I have previously alluded (López-Corvo, 2014) to how pre-conceptual traumas eventually organize the existence of every human being, becoming a ‘selected fact’ that progressively determines the individual’s own specific idiosyncrasy. The continuous action of the interpretation (alpha function), will erode the well-structured pathology or narcissistic equilibrium, which assembles the 'traumatized state of the personality'; working its way to a point, where some structures might collapse, producing a ‘turbulence’ and giving way to a new state of equilibrium, which often results in a catastrophic change. Discontinuation of therapy is frequently induced by uncontained catastrophic changes.

Catastrophic change can be illustrated with numerous clinical examples. Elsewhere (López-Corvo, 2006a) I have referred to a patient's suffering from “false-self” psychopathology, who felt trapped between opposite false selves: one complying, obvious, initially present in the transference and related to oral fixations; the other negativistic, hiding, initially present in the counter-transference and related to anal fixations. When the analysis progressed, and the hiding ‘negativistic false self’ became obvious, there is sometimes the possibility of a catastrophic change and of premature interruptions of the analysis.

For instance, a supervisee expressed her concern that her patient was “getting worse.” The patient was a man in his fifties who displayed an excessively compliant attitude related to ambivalent feelings induced by a cruel, castrating and punishing father. As an attempt to struggle with his repressed murderous wishes and to keep his ‘murdered internal father’ “alive,” he would continuously and compulsively travel to places he used to visit as a child with his father. After several interpretations attempting to link his compulsive driving to his repressed aggression, the patient portrayed a change of attitude epitomized in the session presented by the rather concerned supervisee. She started the patient’s session as follows: “I’m not doing well. I drove yesterday, and I’m still driving. Yesterday afternoon I went into the office but I didn’t stay long. I seem to be on a course of disaster. I want to be on this course of disaster. There is something about it that I find appealing. I have this feeling like, yes, I want to do this. I suppose it is a form of rebellion that I couldn’t act on as a child and now I can rebel. I just don’t care anymore. All the normal checks and balances are thrown out the window: consciousness, work ethic . . . I just don’t care anymore.”

This was a style of discourse completely different from his usual compliant demeanour, a drastic change towards a negativistic kind of false self, a form of protest that introduced the danger of a catastrophic change and the possibility of the treatment being “thrown out of the window.” This type of ‘catastrophic change,’ can also occur in the analysis of borderline adolescents, who have been used by their families as a depository of undesired projective identifications. Once they refuse to play that role any longer, another member of the family, usually the mother, becomes symptomatic.

Homosexuality as a form of Defence

David, a 27-year-old man, three years older than his only sister, consulted me because of chronic anxiety, depression, suicide ruminations, not being very happy with his work, and feeling very ambivalent about being homosexual. He said that he studied engineering in order to please his father who is also an engineer, but now, he strongly dislikes it. He described a quite difficult childhood, because of a very aggressive father and a rather passive mother. He stated that since he was a little boy his father demanded that he “act like a man,” and used to beat him often. His father accused him of being effeminate or “too bland,” and forced him to take judo classes to “build his character.” At a given moment, he expressed that he suspected I was trying to make him ‘straight,’ I said that ‘there seems to be in him a powerful need to “invent” other persons like ‘his own father, by means of projective and introjective identifications,’ as if he felt he could only exist in relation to others, and not to himself. I also added that I was not interested in his sexuality, but in the fact that he seemed not to be aware that he was already a man, that he was autonomous, on his own, who existed just by himself alone, on his own accord and was no longer a little boy.’ Since he continued to claim that I wanted to change his sexuality, I felt that he was insisting, because a part of him strongly needed this transference, making me his ‘accusing father.’ I started to wonder about the true meaning behind this powerful ‘need,’ and considered several possibilities: 1) He experienced a great dialectical ambivalence between killing his father by disregarding or ignoring him, while at the same time, bringing him back to life by acknowledging and pleasing him, as shown by his becoming an engineer like his father; 2) As a child, he became aware that his father was intensely homophobic, and as a form of revenge and control, he became homosexual; Now however, as an adult, he was unsure that he wanted to be homosexual, but since this was his best ‘weapon’ to attack and control his father, he was afraid to give it up, because he then would be completely defenceless and vulnerable; 3) His mind was controlled by the child in him, who felt lost and very lonely and in need of his father to rescue him, even if by doing so, he feared him too; however, through the years, he had become so accustomed to this condition, that even if he felt threatened by his father’s anger, he preferred it to being lonely. In the end, I said to him, ‘it all depends on which mental part of him controlled his mind, whether it’s the ‘helpless child’ he used to be or the ‘powerful and thinking adult’ that he now was.’

At a given moment, he produced a dream that woke him up in the middle of the night, and also portrayed his anger towards his parents as well as his own guilt and ambivalence.

“I was speaking to my mother who had decided to donate her organs and I was supposed to do the operation, which would kill her, and she was ready to die. I tried to convince her otherwise, but she was certain. Next, I was speaking to my father, who also wanted to donate his organs and die. Two strange men came into the room and began to approach me and beat me violently, and killed me, then I woke up.”

A Second Opportunity

We are a product of Nature, usually born pure from influence, but afterwards always marked by the ignorance and hegemony of our ordinary parents, who will at all times induce a ubiquitous traumatic condition that I have already referred to as ‘pre-conceptual trauma.’ This traumatic situation is mostly the outcome of a fatal combination between the helplessness of the child and the supremacy of the adult parents. This sense of helplessness will always trigger in the child a magic and omnipotent defence with the purpose of ‘neutralizing’ the powerful control exercised by the parents. At the same time, ‘emotional confusions and infantile logic,’ – I refer to as the ‘traumatized state’– repeats itself in a circular and endless fashion. As our mind matures as we grow, and become independent adults, we evolve to the ‘non-traumatized state,’ with possibly even more intellectual capacity than our parents had. After all, one of the reasons humanity has progressed is because children, most of the time, have been much more creative than their parents. I have already specified, that there is always a continuous dialectic interaction between the ‘traumatized’ and the ‘non-traumatized’ states, and our regular way of dealing with reality, will constantly depend on which one of these states controls our mind. Using our ‘alpha function’ – following Bion’s theory on thinking – present in the ‘non-traumatized state,’ or in simple terms, using our capacity to think logically, we might be able to contain our childhood’s traumatized elements and provide for ourselves a second possibility of freedom from the detrimental effects induced by the ‘traumatized state’. After all, this possibility is what psychoanalysis attempts to achieve with the use of the analyst’s own alpha function. As powerful ⁶ adults, we are granted a “second opportunity,” by understanding the reasons behind our ‘pre-conceptual trauma,’ and by finding ways to provide logical meaning to the mental pain that results from what I consider a “mental trap.”

The capacity to achieve this ‘second opportunity’ is not a simple task, since we have to deal with two imperatives: in the first place, the immense resistance to give up the omnipotent and magic defences, we have created using our early childhood logic, and to which we have become quite accustomed, after unconsciously ‘relying’ on these defences for most of our life. The second quandary relates to the inordinate difficulty of attaining a clear look and understanding of something that remains so close to our self, that it is very difficult to see; something that harkens back to what Shakespeare once said: “…for the eye sees not itself.” This is why, in order to find a solution to these ongoing troubles, it will be absolutely indispensable to find outside help, either from a psychoanalyst or from a psychoanalytic psychotherapist.

The main purpose of this second opportunity would be, to attempt to regress to the time when we were born, when we were untouched and not yet marked by destiny, by the hands of our ignorant and ‘dangerous’ parents; but also, and very importantly, to forgive them and to forgive ourselves, for our mistakes and for what we all have done wrong. The main issue will be to conceive the possibility of ‘containing’ the repetitious trauma in our mind, instead of being ‘contained’ by it and to act it out. In other words, in order to become who we really are, we have to acknowledge that whatever marks were inflicted on our soul, we did not deserve them! We must become our best unconditional loving friend, one who will create and maintain, an inner state of wellbeing!

References

Anthony, E. J. (1956). The Significance of Jean Piaget for Child Psychiatry. J. Med. Psychol., 29, 20-34.

Bion (1962). Learning from Experience. London: Karnac Books. 1965, 1967)

_____ (1965). Transformations, in Seven Servants. London: Karnac Books,

_____ (1967). Second Thoughts, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Books, 1993.

Freud, S., (1905). Three Essays, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. SE, Vol. VII. Londres: Hogarth Press.

Khan, M. (1963). The Concept of Cumulative Trauma. Psychoanal. Study of the Child. 18: 286- 306

López-Corvo, R. E. (1992). About interpretation of self-envy. Int. J Psychoanal 73:719–728.

______ (1993). A Kleinian Understanding of Addiction. In: M. Klein and Object Relation Journal, Vol. 11, No 1.

______ (1995). Self-envy, Therapy and the Divided Inner World. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.

_____ (1999). Self-envy and Intrapsychic Interpretation, Psychoanal. Quarterly, Vol. LXVII, No 2.

_____ (2003). The Dictionary of W. R. Work. London: Karnac Books.

_____ (2006). The Forgotten Self, with the use of Bion’s theory of Negative Links. Psychoanal. Review. 93: 363-377.

_____ (2006a). Wild Thoughts Searching for a Thinker, a Clinical Application of W.R. Bion’s Theories. London: Karnac Books.

_____ (2013). The distortion between “Conceptual” and “Pre-conceptual” traumas. Psychoanal. Review. 100 (2), April.

_____ (2014). Traumatized and Non-traumatized Stated of the Personality. London Karnac Books.

_____ (2017). La Trampa Traumática: Quan estar sortint significa que s’ està entrant!, Revista Catalana de Psicoanàlisi. Vol. XXXIV/2.

Meltzer, D. (1978). The Kleinian Development Part III, The Clinical Significance of the Work of Bion. Perthshire, Scotland: Clunie Press.

Piaget, J. (1961). La Formación del Símbolo en el Niño. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Notes

1. 1. A concept Bion borrowed from philosopher David Hume, to explain how an object or a fact points to another, although the ideas implicit in both are not at all related. It seems as if there is nothing logic to explain their relationship, which bears more toward a causality or cause-effect relation, where both were linked by experience, by accident, but remain associated since. Two elements are in constant conjunction, said Hume, when we infer one from the other not by reason, but from the particular experience that surrounded them, although we might fail to penetrate inside the logic of such conjunction. (López-Corvo, 2003)
2. 2. Translation of John M. Cooper, p. 48a.
3. 3. Most of the existing literature refers to this form of trauma as “post-traumatic stress disorders” or PTSD.
4. 4. See: López-Corvo 1992, 1995, and 1997.
5. 5. René Thom was a French mathematician who introduced the concept of "Catastrophe theory". In simple terms, the theory implies that small alterations in certain factors of a nonlinear system, can affect the equilibrium in such a way, that it can preserve it or make it disappear, inducing significant and abrupt changes in the performance of the system.
6. 6. I mean ‘powerful’ in comparison to the ‘helplessness' of the child.
7. 
   
8. 
   

Rafael E. López-Corvo is a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst with the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), Venezuelan (ASOVEP) Canadian (CPS), and American (APsA) Psychoanalytic Associations.