One of the most interesting essays I came across this fall was from D.W. Winnicott in 1949, "Mind and its Relation to the Psyche-Soma." That became the focus of a very rich discussion with my students this past week, drawing on both their own experience but also that of their work in schools and clinics with autistic and abused children. Such children often seem to exhibit what Winnicott recognized as a precocity used as a defense mechanism and a form of adaptation that had certain benefits at the time, but which can later in life be found to be the source of problems. In its more extreme forms, it may even give rise to schizoid tendencies. Precocity, then, is often sign of trauma and a form of self-repair when regular forms of care and repair, from healthy objects in the child's world, are missing or are themselves destructive. This is commonly seen in the phenomenon of having to become parents to (or in lieu of) one's parents.
I came across Winnicott's essay when it was cited by the great Adam Phillips in his newest book, The Cure for Psychoanalysis (2019), which, strangely, seems to have appeared in print for about two days in as many copies and then disappeared again. I don't know why that would be. I had to order a copy from a Canadian bookseller which I heartily recommend. They are apparently the largest bookseller in North America devoted to titles in mental health.
The latest Phillips book, which I am reading (but saving as a treat for my Christmas break), in turn put me on to another volume, hard to find, of which I was also ignorant: E.G. Corrigan and P-E. Gordon, eds., The Mind Object: Precocity and Pathology of Self-Sufficiency (New Jersey/London: Jason Aronson, 1995). It is a goldmine of essays by some of my favourite people, including Phillips as well as Nina Coltart, Christopher Bollas, and Michael Eigen. Herewith some thoughts on several of the chapters.
The book begins with a clinical vignette of a patient quite self-consciously alienated from his own body, leading the editors to note that such experiences inspired the book: "Can a person relate to his mind as an object...idealize it, fear it, hate it? Can a person live out a life striving to attain the elusive power of his mind's perfection?" This leads to the first mention of the Winnicott essay noted above, which first highlighted for clinicians the danger of early trauma resulting in a turning away from the body's needs in order to prize the mind and its functioning above all else. Thus split, the mind dominates both psyche and body.
Winnicott's work was first amplified by his sometime analysand and collaborator (and highly controversial fellow analyst) Masud Khan, who spoke of a "rigid premature structuring of internalized primary objects." From them both we get the concept of the mind "having a life of its own."
After further clinical vignettes of high-achieving adults in therapy as well as children, the editors note that one key characteristic they all have in common is "startlingly high verbal IQs" but much lower scores on other measures, including performance. They also often lack spontaneity and expressiveness, but at the same time are often dependent and controlling to a high degree. They never "surrender to any relationship and thus leave the other feeling useless" (p.3). This reminds me of something Christopher Bollas said in his fascinating first book, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known, of a certain type of analysand (typically schizoid) who makes very little use of his analyst. For to do so would be to admit dependence on another, and this is the very thing not allowed: "Striving to disavow reliance on others, they have empowered the mind as the locus of self-holding and self-care" (3-4).
The editors note that while the bulk of these insights is indebted to object-relations theory, there are some early insights in Freud and especially Ferenczi, whose pioneering work in trauma led him to recognize that early trauma can sometimes result in an artificially advanced maturity in a person.
But back to Winnicott, for it was his insight into the failures of maternal adaptation and nurture that set the stage for seeing how the baby's mind can itself become a soothing object making up for maternal lack, though often only at the price of ego splitting, dissociation of affect, and intellectual primacy. All mothers occasionally fail to meet, either promptly or adequately enough, the needs of their children, but it those children who suffer from this cumulatively that experience enduring trauma.
The idea of cumulative trauma is Khan's. Also of interest from him is the idea of identification in an unhealthily diffuse fashion, so that "the human being can be everybody and is a nobody." One over-identifies with others in face of a lack of real object relating.
Other coping mechanisms may enter to help the child, but the mind as object dominates them all, allowing one to feel in control and even to feel a sense of triumph at seeing things others cannot see. This often outlives childhood. As the editors remind us rather grimly, "precocity is a disorder of adaptation much valued in our culture" (16).
How does one treat such patients if they present for therapy? It is not easy--Bollas recognized this more than thirty years ago, and others in this volume are also aware that, as the editors say, "the therapist [is] in the paradoxical position of offering help to someone who essentially needs to disclaim help" (17). They may nevertheless go on to be brilliant patients, always agreeing, readily entering into insights....until they suddenly and swiftly bring the treatment to an end when they have attained not healing but "repaired self-sufficiency" (17).
These are the patients who claim never to mind vacations or missed sessions, who can zero in on analyst-analysand dynamics with great speed and acuity but who in the end do all this in service of a need to be in defensive and omniscient control. One sees this in the counter-transference when the therapist often feels both dumb and useless. The use of silence with such patients can often be unnerving, leading them to greater heights of self-interpretation, self-criticism, or obsessive repetition.
Instead, what seems to work is for a therapist to be the kind of person to "risk not knowing, who can bear uncertainty, who can fumble and recover, who can be wrong, and be comfortable with difference" (19). Also the therapeutic environment and relationship are important here in the sense that they may eventually allow the patient to relax the grip of mind-control and discover two fully embodied people in the room who can play together.
Peter Shabad and Stanley Selinger in their chapter late in the book return to the question of therapeutic technique by noting that sometimes certain "radical" questions of accepted technique, and departure from them, may be enjoined upon the work with such precocious patients. E.g., it may be more important to work with a kind of "reflection in action," looking at the moment-by-moment here-and-now of the therapy (which Yalom makes much of) rather than bringing in carefully planned interpretations from a distance, especially if doing so reinforces the patient's problems. As these authors put it, referencing Winnicott, "the patient will not let his false self defenses down until the analyst has first done the same" (226).
I pass over Coltart's chapter as it is covered in her book Slouching Towards Bethlehem, about which more another time.
Michael Eigen's chapter is especially interesting insofar as he makes connections between precocity and mystical experience, as when he says: "mystical experience can be used to further or short-circuit personality growth," but often does both (122). Perhaps more mundanely and less threateningly, one can speak not just of mystical experiences as playing this unhelpful role, but advanced initiation into any sort of religious community. They may, as Eigen recognizes at the end, "save an individual...[but] also thwart her" (132).
Harold Boris' chapter, "Of Two Minds: The Mind's Relation with Itself" contains some succinct statements of the desires of the precocious mind. It begins by trying to "protect a breaking heart or a flagging will" and continues to manifest itself in, inter alia, the fear of: "junk, claptrap, cants, dissimulation, and above all, lies" (185). Such minds very much want to protect themselves and do so through such defenses as impeccable logic and reason by which they see through apparitions and mirages that bedevil lesser minds. For such minds, "nothing...is more precious than candor" (185).
Adam Phillips' chapter concludes the collection by appropriately returning to Winnicott's essay noted at the outset. Phillips notes that "in the absence of relatively reliable environmental provision the mind becomes a kind of enraged bureaucrat" (235) and that he notes in Winnicott language hinting at "political insurrection." In a healthy situation, the mind listens to and works with the body and its objects; but in an unhealthy precocity, "there is a military coup and a dictator is installed called a mind object, at once bureaucrat and terrorist....at its most extreme there can be no unconscious because everything has already been accounted for" (236).
Phillips by returning to the challenge of working with such patients in therapy, noting as others have the real knife-edge dangers that exist for by focusing on the mind in analytic therapy especially is one not actually reinforcing the very source of the problem? In the end Phillips turns to Ferenczi's famous saying that the patient is not cured by free-associating: he is cured when he can free-associate.
Finally, Phillips returns to a suggestion that will show up regularly in many of his books written after this chapter from 1995: the importance of learning to forget, or as he ends this chapter, the importance of a "mind on vacation."
