Reflections on Connectedness

Eileen Paris, Ph.D.

I'll never forget the day my nineteen-year-old son came to me with tears streaming down his face. He had recently experienced his first romantic heartbreak. "Mom," he said with a kind of pained ecstasy, "I had an epiphany in the shower. I know the pain of the human condition . . . We have enough consciousness to feel how we are separate, but we don't have enough consciousness to feel how we are all connected."

This mysterious connectedness—I believe we recognize it when we feel it. I felt it as I listened to the humanity that was palpable in the interactions between Richard Geist and his patients, as he told their stories in his paper, "Connectedness, Permeable Boundaries, and the Development of the Self." He presented his paper at the 29th Annual International Conference on The Psychology of the Self. The conference, titled "25 Years After Kohut... New Generations, New Directions," was held in Chicago last fall. Dr. Geist's paper illustrates his view "that connectedness is more than intersubjective, is more than co-created. It requires an interpenetrating mutuality." When Dr. Geist's patients expressed their desire, each in their own way, to know how he felt, to know his private or personal thoughts and reactions, Dr. Geist was willing to reveal himself in this way. His view of permeable boundaries provides a theoretical construct that may reduce the threat to oneself that an analyst may feel in risking such personal self-disclosure. This construct may also encourage the analyst to engage with the patient in a way that allows the analyst to be shaped in the metaphorical space of the patient. Dr. Geist believes that in the process of acknowledging his contribution to the dyadic experience, especially when addressing a rupture, he is simultaneously empathizing with his own mistakes. This creates the potential for the development of self-empathy in the patient because the patient experiences the analyst as part of her or himself, making it more possible for the patient to process emotional experience in a healing way. This interpenetrating mutuality expresses itself in both patient and analyst as they become an important felt affective presence in each other's lives. Dr. Geist presents three components of connectedness that form an indivisible whole: selfobject function, personal subjectivity, and empathy. The operation of these three components of connectedness becomes a way to listen and gather information from the inside. This coming from the inside then informs how we speak and interpret, including unconscious and spontaneous communications. Connectedness facilitates what Donna Orange describes as a "second developmental opportunity" for the patient.

I worked as a preschool teacher at a progressive, psychologically informed preschool for nine years beginning in 1966. One thing I soon learned, as a new teacher was that the kids were always telling the truth about their feelings. As soon as I would validate a child's feelings, we would have the space to investigate and co-construct meaning. When I was empathic I could contribute to the evolution of the meaning of the incident in a way that would support the development of the child's self esteem.

I am currently a candidate at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. This fall I attended my first self psychology conference. There, in Chicago, I had the experience of connectedness with a larger community that was richly enlivening and that contributed to my ongoing growth as a clinician. It was heady. One of the things I love about the culture of my institute is that it promotes and supports "living in the anxiety of not knowing" which is allowing me to be open to the profound conversation of ideas that is taking place in the contemporary analytic world. Dr. Geist's paper certainly added to and sparked more of this engaging exchange.

The dialogue of ideas was rich and stimulating. During the post panel discussions and subsequent conversations, some clinicians challenged Dr. Geist's views. They questioned that his self-disclosures might be too personal or his spontaneous reactions not thought through with the discipline that psychoanalysis should demand. However, it was just this quality—his spontaneity—that captured my attention. For me, Dr. Geist's presentation challenges us as analysts to respond more from the part of ourselves that is in empathic union with our patients than from our intellect informed by theory. I believe that if you live in an empathic relationship with someone, you are disclosing yourself all the time. Additionally, verbal self-disclosure will become organized and expressed spontaneously in a rhythmic way. When analyst and analysand are able to remain in the connectedness of their relationship, transformation is possible for both. As Dr. Geist so beautifully portrayed in his paper, when there is a rupture, a break in the rhythm of this connectedness, it is ameliorated through the analyst's efforts to empathize with the patient's experience of the analyst and the analyst's willingness to acknowledge his contribution as a living part of the connectedness.

A second challenge to Dr. Geist's presentation that was expressed during the post-panel discussion group was that the impact of Dr. Geist's offering acknowledgement of his contribution served to disarm the patient's anger too soon. Implicit in this critique is the view that anger is an innate component of man's intrapsychic life. To gain control over the aggressive drives then requires that the patient be allowed to feel and express the anger, so that its intrapsychically derived unconscious elements can be made conscious and the aggression neutralized. However, Dr. Geist and I share a very different view of the meaning of anger. To illustrate, I refer to my preschool experience.

A Preschool Vignette

Johnny hits Susie hard. She is sobbing. Everyone runs to her aid. I walk slowly toward Johnny. He is fuming. As he sees me approach, he lowers his four year old head and slumps in his chair. I lower myself to his level and ask gently, "Susie's crying pretty hard?" "Uh huh," he says. "You must have hit her pretty hard?" I inquire softly. "Uh huh," he says. "You must have been really mad," I say, the tone and pitch of my voice rising in a half statement, half question. Johnny perks up, "I was. I was on the swing and she called me stupid because I wouldn't let her have a turn. It was my turn!" he proclaims. "Oh, she really hurt your feelings?" (He nods emphatically.) That's what made you so mad?" I ask. "Yeah," he says, kicking at the leg of his chair. I say, "It's okay to feel mad, but it's not okay to hit. Hitting really hurts." Johnny and I have more conversation about what else he could do when he feels hurt and gets mad. There is a pause. He looks toward Susie who is still crying. I muse, "What's it feel like to you that Susie is still crying?" Johnny lowers his eyes a bit and says, "I feel bad." Maybe you want to tell her that?" I wonder out loud. He takes my hand and says, "Come with me."

This is how I understand Geist's self psychological view of aggression: the aggression is always a result of feeling hurt in some way. Our primary goal is not to address the anger per se, but to address the narcissistic matrix, that is, the disruption in selfobject connectedness.

All during my therapeutic career, I have incorporated my learning and experience into a model to help parents become empathic, psychologically-minded parents. I am continuing to develop this work and hope to present it to a self psychology conference soon. I have seen many well meaning, young parents whose only education in child rearing was to have been a child in their own family. Doubtless, a psychoanalytically informed education for parents aimed at preventing the transmission of their own trauma would be better. Children deserve a chance, "a first developmental opportunity," to be related to in ways that transcend the developmental possibilities that were present for their parents—hope replacing defeat. I feel that this is especially urgent today with so many challenges confronting our humanity.

I grew up a child at risk. Finding my way to the nurturing environment of the preschool at nineteen saved me. I decided then that when I became a mother I would always believe my child. I knew my child would always tell me the truth about his needs through the expression of his affects and behavior. We would make music together. We would create a dance. I would have to tolerate the shame of my mistakes and missteps when we fell out of step and righted ourselves.

As part of analytic work I think parents can learn how to get in a regulated rhythm with their kids. Soon after coming home from Chicago, I attended a Beatrice Beebe conference in Los Angeles. Dr. Beebe was teaching mothers the language of their babies by showing them their split screen videos. This afforded the mothers the opportunity to change their dance from "chase and dodge" to one of connection. It was inspiring to watch. Dr. Beebe understood that many mothers who were pregnant during 9/11 were traumatized and that this was going to affect their babies. Now these mothers and babies are in the process of developing connectedness. This connectedness can change not only the lives of these patient/families, but the future families of their babies and their participation in larger communities.

Trauma is reflected not just in the lack of empathic relatedness to each other, but also to the life of the earth. We are now aware that in order to survive as a species we must learn to live in harmony with the biosphere—there will be no survival one without the other. If we can feel ourselves to be part of each other, our chance to experience ourselves in connectedness with the larger fabric increases.

H. G. Wells told us that ". . . human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." And Einstein said that we need to change our perceptions in order to survive. I believe we must see the needs of the planet and the person as connected. Theodore Roszak emphasized in his book Voice of the Earth that our physical survival now depends on our emotional growth. I equate emotional growth with the growth in humanity's capacity for compassion, I associate Kohut with compassion. The International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology is growing, Jim Fosshage told us excitedly, and so grows the influence of compassion in the public square. Richard Geist asks us to reflect on connectedness—and not a moment too soon!

Eileen Paris, Ph.D. is an Infant Mental Health Specialist and an analytic candidate at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles with a private practice in Venice, CA. She works with adults, children, families, and mother/infant dyads and is the co-author of "I'll Never Do to My Kids What My Parents Did to Me!" A Guide to Conscious Parenting (Warner Books, 1994).

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