After reading and enjoying John Bowlby’s excellent, but brief essay “On Knowing What You’re Supposed to Know and Feeling What You’re Not Supposed to Feel”, I felt compelled to spend some time meditating upon its message, particularly as he highlights essential links between adverse childhood experiences and the capacity to think about them.
If a child is raised in an environment where the veracity of his/her thoughts and feelings are frequently called into question, then a widening gyre of unreality exponentially widens as she grows up. In the first part of this essay, I will explore the relationship between this early experience and its relationship to the capacity to think and create, using the metaphor of what I call “psychic exuviae”. In part two, I shall describe ways in which people who have experienced adverse childhood experiences can foster ways of being which can help them to make sense of their experiences, and within which anxieties felt to be hitherto unbearable, can be tolerated.
“Children not infrequently observe scenes that parents would prefer they did not observe; they form impressions that parents would prefer they did not form; and they have experiences that parents would like to believe they have not had. Evidence shows that many of these children, aware of how their parents feel, proceed then to conform to their parents’ wishes by excluding from further processing such information as they already have; and that, having done so, they cease consciously to be aware that they have ever observed such scenes, formed such impressions, or had such experiences. Here, I believe, is a source of cognitive disturbance as common as it is neglected” (Bowlby, 1979, italics my own).
Perhaps because of Bowlby’s partial rejection of psychoanalytic epistemology at the time, combined with his enthusiasm for cognitive psychology, he ergo placed too much emphasis on cognitivedisturbance due to environmental experiences, and, because of this “cognitive turn”, neglected to consider the role of intra-psychic dynamics, and their role in said disturbances. Let us begin though from this cognitive standpoint, and consider what it is that happens to a child’s nascent ego when she is told that something did not happen, or did not happen in the way that she experienced it. As Bowlby points out, the child needs to “exclude from processing” what has happened to her. Yet what I want to explore more fully here, are the actual mechanisms of this “exclusion”. I would argue that these cannot be accounted for at a cognitive level, because, as we will see, there is no cognitive apparatus available.
In the scenario which Bowlby adumbrates, the child must find a way to erase or evacuate the original thoughts she has had about it. This leaves a “gap” left in lieu where they formerly resided. This is a troubling confrontation with reality for the child, because she will come to understand that either a) this event did not happen at all (it was imagined and the gap remains), or b) it happened in a different way that the child perceived (a new substitute thought is placed in the gap). It is also important to consider what happens to this “gap” - the place in the mind which the original thought(s) inhabited (before the thought departed). For André Green, this gap becomes:
a “blank hole” in the mind, which not only acts as an inner void but also has a power of attracting all mental contents or thoughts that are linked with the main topic in the centre of the blank hole (Green, 1988).
For Bion, (whose ideas influenced Green’s), this “blank hole” is a “no-thing”, a negative space where thought is impossible, yet the absence of a thought or idea is also mentally intolerable. Importantly, as Green points out, there is a residue of what has been erased at the centre of the no-thing. This residue is analogous to the exuviae of the cicada or dragonfly; these discarded “exoskeletons” are hollow copies of the fully formed body they will go on to develop. Exuviae are found clinging to trees (cicadas) or on plant stems close to water (dragonflies), eerily holding on to life, sustained as a presence in absence, a reminder of what once was, until their translucent, brittle surface crumbles into dust between one’s fingers and disappears.
Unlike insect exuviae, their psychic counterparts remain at the centre of the “no-thing”, a pseudo space which appears to be a space of potential thought, yet paradoxically precludes thinking altogether; here the original truth however “clings on” as a failure in re-presentation. These psychic exuviae go on to haunt the sensible world, producing affects and sensations which cannot be digested, only evacuated, passing from the body directly into the outside world, looking for a new home.
Once insect exuviae are discarded, their carcasses no longer have a body to live them; their psychic counterparts do not have a mind to think them - or perhaps more appropriately - they cannot find a mind to think them. As psychic exuviae cannot be thought about, they are experienced as obtrusive and must be expelled. As Andre Green puts it, they remain paradoxically “permanently in the mind but is in a state of exclusion.” (ibid.) This is indeed a maddening paradox in terms of its relationship to adverse childhood experience: in this scenario it is an attempt made by the child to evacuate an uncomfortable truth, or one which is deemed to be unacceptable, yet the residual truth clings on.
This process essentially has a significant bearing on the individual’s capacity to hold thoughts and feelings about things in mind, and, perhaps most significantly, in terms of the development of the capacity to keep those thoughts and feelings about things alive in one’s mind: if a child knows – even an “unconscious knowing” such as procedural memory – that when she has thoughts, that they are vulnerable to attack, then she may lose hope and feel that she does not have the psychic and emotional apparatus to keep her own thoughts alive; to preserve her subjective reality. This has a significant impact on the belief and value of her own ideas which feel brittle, for she knows they can easily be destroyed, as she experienced when she was first told that an adverse event did not happen at all, or not as she experienced it. The outside world then becomes a threat – she learns that is not safe to put things out there, to find the courage to create, to breathe life into her thoughts and ideas for fear of negation (erasure), or substitution by another thought or idea, that is not felt to be true. Furthermore, there is an inherent fear that “putting thoughts out there” - a positive act of creation - is conflated with the negative evacuation of the psychic exuviae, and she then suffers from a foreclosing anxiety that even her most creative thoughts are toxic. As Winnicott put it, it becomes impossible “to populate the world with samples of his or her own inner life” (1963).
Another significant factor here which contributes to the development of these “no-thing” spaces in the mind and the residing exuviae, is the absence of a caregiver who was able to use what Bion calls hi/her “reverie” function in order to transform the exuviae into thinkable thoughts – analogous to the metamorphosis of the dragonfly from exuviae to living, fully formed body. For Bion, the caregiver needs to find a space in his/ her mind – a nothing, rather than a no-thing – where the primitive frustration of her child can be tolerated, as well his/her own. Bion further illustrates this ability to access states of reverie and toleration of frustration by invoking John Keats’ notion of “negative capability” – the toleration of “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts” (2002). Keats’ concept is also pertinent to adverse childhood experience, because children who were fortunate enough to have caregivers who had the ability to access states of reverie and negative capability, and did not either feel overwhelmed by dread themselves, or, instead, as Keats put it , were not “irritably reaching after fact and reason”, are more likely (but of course, not in all cases) to tolerate life when things do not seem to be going their way themselves, and able to think about their experiences and make sense of their feelings within a wider context of reality.
For those who have not benefitted from the reassuring mind of such caregivers, such events are rendered unthinkable as the exuviae continue to obstruct the space for reverie, and “negative” states such as mystery and doubt, are experienced as threats (no-thing spaces), rather than nothing spaces of fertile potential. In the second part of this essay, I shall consider the ways in which the exuviae can be finally mourned and their associated ghosts laid to rest, allowing negative capability to be nurtured, and concomitant states of mystery and doubt, not only tolerated, but perhaps even enjoyed.
References
Bowlby, J. (1979) ‘On knowing what you are not supposed to know and feeling what you are not supposed to feel’, The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 24(5), pp. 403–408.
Green, A. (1998) ‘The primordial mind and the work of the negative’, The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 79(4), pp. 649–665.
Keats, J. (2009) Selected Letters. Edited by R. Gittings and with a new Introduction by J. Mee. New ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics).
Winnicott, D. W. (1965) ‘From Dependence towards Independence in the Development of the Individual (1963)’, in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 83–92.