10/13/24
Marriage
Why is it that as a culture we–if there is a we– often express love for our mothers through the language of possession, capital and martyrdom? If you are in a room of people talking about why they love their mothers you will inevitably hear the following three phrases: “She is always there for me,” as though were she not “there for me” she would cease to exist. “She does so much for our family,” as if she is valuable insofar as she is a productive and profitable member of the family enterprise. And most disturbingly, “She has sacrificed so much for me.” As if to be beloved by her is an inherently sadistic project.
If mothers are our first love, then it's worth wondering if we ever get over or grow beyond our need for transitional objects that satisfy our need to be satisfied at all costs– and preferably there is a cost. In a more cynical part of me, I'm not sure we– of which I'm one–do overcome this need. One way of talking about this question is to ask you to think of the promises, words spoken or vows in the last marriage ceremony you attended. We often speak about how loved and helped we have been by the other. The promises we make are to care for the other even when–especially when–we don't want to. But perhaps formalized commitment is a somewhat self-selecting crowd. Consider instead when you last told someone you loved them. Was it for the ways in which they frustrate, oppose and resist you? Or was it for the ways they sooth, love and champion you? How difficult it is to love someone for who they are, not just how they make you feel?
Where we fight, disagree and clash is where we meet another person. It reminds us that this person actually exists. Could a love of the ways other people resist us be the beginning of truly recognizing and valuing difference?
Psychotherapy
One of the most challenging parts of being a psychotherapist is to allow myself to get lost with my patients. This is less about so-called “understanding” and more about surrendering to the experience of another person. Like the beginning of a scary movie, or the top of a rollercoaster, there is something in my body that shouts “NO” right before. But in the moment that follows the patient is no longer alone. This “joining,” or “attunement” is what I call to myself “getting lost.” In order to find what is truly lost you must become lost yourself. I allow myself to enter a kind of maze, like Theseus seeking the minotaur. Once the patient is no longer afraid, they are no longer lost. When this is done I have to find the thread to exit their maze and come back to myself.
Therapists–as with mothers, as with people–differ in their willingness to have their being penetrated by another and in their faith about what allowing such an invasion can do. To paraphrase Jacqueline Rose in a 2023 interview about her book Mothers: an Essay on Love and Cruelty; as any mother knows, pregnancy and childbirth is an invasion of such fierceness that it makes incest look like a walk in the park. Psychotherapy as a whole–if there is a whole–while gifted at the development of various theories that express an understanding of mothering (attachment, attunement, containment etc..) tends to shy away from exploring the visceral, physical poignancy of these experiences.
There are many therapists who would disagree with my means of treatment, and I wouldn’t try to convince any other therapist (or mother for that matter) that it’s the right way. But what I will say is that for me, and people who find it useful, it provides an antidote to the idea that understanding is an end in and of itself. And it opens the door to what is frankly a much more mystical pursuit–the evocative and transformative properties of experiencing and of being experienced. In this version it's an experience of the other, rather than an understanding of them, that we give up control to.
The locus of control
What happens when your mother is too good at her job? What happens when, for example, she is able to deliver on your infantile fantasy of oneness? to make you believe that she really can read your mind, know you better than you know yourself and bring you what you desire at the split second you first desire it? Part of the reason childhood is so hard on children is that mothers are too good at their job–children often believe themselves omnipotent and therefore to blame. Elsewise and equally challenging, they plunge into the sometimes sudden knowledge of just how powerless they actually are.
In psychotherapy, people come with different project ideas. One project idea some people have is to figure out what we can do to end or mitigate our own suffering. These are conversations about god (and really with god) where the therapist is a somewhat unnatural interlocutor. These conversations sometimes revolve around the question of where the locus of control lies; with god (destiny, fate, divine purpose), or with the self (free will, agency and choice). Our mothers are the first gods we know. And their qualities (whether benevolent, wrathful etc) are the first pictures we get about the world’s response to our desires and our suffering.
Implications and applications
One of the things I hear patients and colleagues wrestle with–and it’s one of the things I wrestle with–is the feeling that at the confluence of social justice advocacy and ego psychology, ego psychology can suddenly seem to lose its moment and its nerve. In some, but not all, of the social justice spaces I have been in there has an emphasis on the idea of “othering,” how this perspective harms and the theory that “we are more alike than we are different.” This line of reasoning leaves me cold. Certainly, there is use, warmth and merit in recognizing our shared values and experiences. But do we really want sameness to be the measure of our care and respect for one another?
Something that the theory of othering seems to get right is that there is no separating the way we treat ourselves from the way we treat others. As Jung said; “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Relationally we might say; the parts of ourselves that we ignore show up in another, seemingly to drive us mad. If colonialism, white supremacy and other imposed hierarchies are the result of projecting parts of self that cannot (or will not) be claimed by the ego, then what would valuing difference do for or to these hierarchies?
In spite of all it’s talk–and perhaps this is transparent–psychotherapy has an uneasy relationship with the idea of another’s influence. Part of this is due to a radical and enduring belief in the Self as a sight of radical transformation. Psychotherapy–if we can call it that–would say that because enacting racism is reforming and punishing oneself through the farce of “perfecting” another, the project of loving one’s own unlovableness has tangible social and political merit. But the relationship to change would be that way ‘round. After all, everyone you know is vulnerable to the worst ways you treat yourself. But so too are we vulnerable to the worst ways we treat others.
What can love–and here love is a kind of curiosity about and appreciation for the ways in which another person is different from us in ways that terrify and frustrate us–do for us? If sameness wants more of itself, what might difference want? And since mothers are our first–and for that reason the most defining–experience of projecting unbearable parts of ourselves onto another; what would it be like to say to our mothers; “I love you because you fed and clothed me and helped me survive and also because you ignored me enough to pursue your desires.” The responsibility of oppression always lies with the oppressor, but its solutions don’t seem to.
Friends
I know a pair of best friends who were raised closely since middle school. A few years after I became friends with one of them, I began getting to know the other. I saw the same bright swaths of quick, funny, serious, irreverent, stylish, conversational fluidity I had believed was uniquely my friend’s. I was taken aback and horrified by the question of whose personality this was. The experience was a mirror of my heart-sickened doubt–emblematic in those early post-grad years–about whose style dominated my own personality.
I met Lillian when I was 19 years old. She was 18 and ablaze: beautiful, intimidating, loud, smart, hilarious, caring and best of all, she wanted to be my friend. I was too shy to go to parties without her and too fearful to join the revelry. When her attention was on me I was brilliant; fascinating and hilarious, insightful and enigmatic. Without it I was in the dark. For years, everywhere I went, people asked me where she was.
Influence is never 100% even. Even now, when I’m honest with myself, most of our shared characteristics are hers. In our best friendships we become the parts of our friend we adore the most, in our worst friendships we wear the other person like a mask. Influence is, however, always a rope that tugs both ways. I have lived both sides of that dynamic and I have some awareness of how lonely, frustrating, flattering and confusing it can be to have someone else try on your personality, to feel torn by their malice and adoration–to be envied. Lillian has never reproached me for envying her.
Trivet
There's a trivet in the kitchen of my apartment, hanging above the oven with the following inscription written on it: “many a woman has started out playing with fire, and ended up cooking over it.” This inscription serves as a daily Rorschach test in the form of affirmation, inspiration and warning. In a certain light, it’s an alchemical creative injunction: begin in play, learn your interests and in the arc of a life you are meant to make something of them. It could be read as a headline of defeat: Girl Who Once Played With Fire Relegated to Dutiful Housewife–or at least to dutifully appear as one–calling to mind Sylvia Plath. Or, if it's the woman who is cooked over the fire, it could suggest that one ought not play with fire at all. Summoning to mind some witch archetypes and stories in which a certain kind of person or people are taught to “know your place” in the order of things.
Of all of these interpretations, the most hopeful– and my favorite–is the first. But it’s worth noting that it's the most individualistic interpretation. It pans from maiden to krone; from self-possessed child to self-possessed adult. Two singularities where–like most singularities–there is a good deal of fantasy present. A fantasy about the impregnable nature of the self, and a seriously Romantic belief in what a kind of psychological individualism can deliver. A Romanticism that is increasingly suspect–rightly so–given the dual application of its definition: that it’s better to be like yourself than other people (to put it anti colonially, and anti fascistically), or (to put it colonially and fascistically) that if other people would only stop having thoughts, needs and ideas of their own you could finally be yourself.
As Adam Phillips puts it in “On Not Being Taught,” these are some of the “terrors of exchange.” Exchange being the thing we are left with after we realize that we are not our mothers. That the preternatural oneness we experience in the womb–and then fantastically project onto the first eight months after emerging from the womb–is over. How we reckon with this sudden paradigm shift (or in psychotherapeutic terms the beginning of “object permanence”), sets the stage for what will always be an unremembered and therefore unconscious picture about the risks and rewards of exchange and the possibilities and limits of our being.