Why do we seek attachment with others?
Why, in a way, we need our patients to be attached to us?
Are we constantly trying to fix or repair a certain need as analysts by being “what they need”?
hile being loving to others we are living in instinctive sympathetic identification with the vulnerabilities and attractions of others, this is the life we are more inclined to live, and indeed is the one we are often living without letting ourselves know that this is what we are doing.
Living according to our sympathies, we think, will weaken or overwhelm us; kindness is the saboteur of the successful life. What is it about our time that makes kindness seem so dangerous?
Compassion is always hazardous because it is based on the susceptibility to others, a capacity to identify with their pleasures or sufferings.
“Any person foolish enough to deny the existence of human kindness had simply lost touch with emotional reality. He has forgotten the movements of his heart” Hume, D. 1741.
Being empathetic also means being involved in a narcissistic transference, being a vessel for others’ needs, bear the vulnerability of the other, therefore of oneself and for a moment being one body giving and receiving at the same time.
Kindness is an individual attribute that could never escape the prison of the ego.
Narcissism is a flight from pain, “We are never”, Freud wrote, “so defenseless against suffering as when we love”
One is never able to enjoy oneself without the cooperation of the other; self sufficiency is an impossible fantasy.
We often let ourselves be moved by pity by transporting ourselves outside of ourselves and identifying with the sufferer; by leaving our own being to take on its being.
This “pitying” imagination replaces the narcissistic cocoon of infancy with another self, born through desire and fantasy.
People happier than us are likelier to arouse envy than sympathy. Like if we don’t feel that they have the same ills as ourselves we don’t feel the need to identify with them.
The helpless dependence of the other generates rage and hatred, the components or erotic desire and aggression intertwine.
Identifying with other people risks obliterating them as separate beings. We must feel the sufferings of others as theirs, not ours, if we are to retain a sense of their differences.
What makes an analyst identify with his patients? Imaginatively identifying with them but as separate beings.
His vitality must serve to maintain the self/other boundary, even as fantasy leaps the divide.
Enjoying pity for others reminds us our own aliveness, which makes sympathy easier.
The individual’s capacity for kindness depends on the strength of his self-love. Only an energetic, self-caring child can afford to pity others without feeling overwhelmed by them and so ending up hating them.
“They don’t know how to love themselves; they only know how to hate what is not themselves” Rousseau.
An analyst has to be capable to bear his own frustrations in order to put the needs of his patients before his own inside the room.
There is a strange confusion here: On the one hand, we experience the feeling for others; our identification with our patient’s sufferings and pleasure, as among our own most immediate experiences, as though to feel for our patients is akin to an instinct or a reflex, as if we automatically know our patients to be essentially the same as ourselves. (Narcissistic Countertransference).
On the other hand, many of our most compelling accounts of ourselves are about our resistances or fear of this very experience. At its strongest we have to come to believe that feeling too much for others, being too sympathetic either endangers our lives or is against our nature.
Our capacity to identify with other people may be the aspect of ourselves that we find the most disturbing. Lacan once said, “is to escape from his desire; it may be also to escape from his kindness”.
Freud believed that the very thing that draws people together (erotic transference) also generates insupportable rivalries and antagonisms, of which love and kindness then become casualties. We must love, as Freud said, in order not to fall ill, and it is loving that makes us ill.
From a psychoanalytic point of view, what are the dangers or a fellow feeling?
The individual’s fear about himself is that his hatred is stronger than his love; that there is, as Ernest Jones’s says, “much less love in the world that there appears to be”.
Being vulnerable with another person implies that we are looking back in time. Our lives, from the beginning, depend upon vulnerability and love, and it is for this reason, it terrorizes us.
We begin literally as a piece of another’s body; we begin as part of the very body we grow out of. Growing out of two forms of absolute dependence, as through after the biological birth there’s another birth; the psychological, in which over time a person establishes herself as a separate, more or less independent individual.
The self-satisfaction of narcissism and the consequent rejection of others and hatred of our own need for them are never entirely given up.
In Darwinian terms one might say: the first task is survival, which entails dependence on parental love and care; and once that is established, the next is the creation of conditions for reproduction and sexual satisfaction.
There is the wanting of parents and then the limit set to the wanting of parents by what is called the incest taboo.
The child’s innocence and tenderness begins as a magical rescue or cure that invariably fails. Out of this failure genuine kindness emerges; or it does if the parents can tolerate the failure.
Understanding attachment is a hard task; it involves introducing ourselves to the deep pond of unconscious fantasy and having intense revelations that aren’t just an expression but an impression of our own psyche.
Embrace our Madness.
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