“One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void.” Jean Rostand

This paper is a recollection of several notes I took in 2016. I have been writing them on the subway, at coffee shops, on benches and ironically, never in school. 

What I want to explore is the meaning of attachment and what exists prior to it. I will propose a few observations on how a hypothetical parent responds to the child’s needs and how we as dependent beings are all defending ourselves from the one thing we know, which is the knowledge of death. 

We seek to attach out of desperation. It is important to remember that before the child is born -if everything goes smoothly- he is perfectly safe and comfortable in a non threatening environment which we call the womb. The child grows until he has to be expelled. This crucial event is repeated throughout our lives when we reach a certain point -in our career, a relationship, or within ourselves- where we are unable to grow anymore and become stagnant. This event is familiar to all because change can bring a lot of discomfort or even paralysing fear, we hold on to the familiar because of the uncertainty the unknown brings to the surface.

We have blindly believed that we attach to the first object simply out of our innate need to connect (our dependent nature) but if we examine this closely and reflect on what happens prior to the attachment, we can conclude that the need to connect comes from the first crisis in life, which is, the knowledge of death.

Birth brings out intolerable feelings of hopelessness and terror that precedes attachment; holding on to an object becomes the only way to survive. The real trauma is that birth is the loss of safety and the death of protection can’t be placed into words but is felt as unconscious knowledge. 

This is one of the many reasons we are ambivalent towards being dependent; we are born with an imprinted rejection which we all resent in different degrees. Our reality/our mother’s body “rejected” us, expelled us. This means we are destined to seek the sensation of oneness that was once felt as true.

According to Modern Psychoanalysis, it is the caretaker’s duty to contain these fears and make the child feel safe. I have written down three pairs of hypothetical “mothers” to demonstrate how the helplessness of a child can trigger a dynamic between mother and child that potentially creates the structure for future transference and attachment. Each pair portrays a narcissistic mother and its counterpart, who I named a neurotic mother and both are dealing with the same issue of handling their child’s needs. 

1. Rejection

The mother rejects the child actively and consciously (narcissistic mother) The mother sees the child as a real threat to her safety. His needs become too severe for her to deal with. She resents and disregards the child. She defends herself by actively demonstrating hatred or aggression towards the child as if his needs were imposed on to her. A reaction like this relates to a early preverbal wound. This mother might have been deprived from her needs as an infant and developed a psychotic defense that limits her ability to care for her child because it threatens her defense structure.

The mother rejects the child passively and unconsciously (neurotic mother) The mother is overwhelmed by the child’s needs but can’t access to her unconscious negative feelings towards him. She unconsciously rejects the child and enacts it by being harsh, punitive or judgemental and convincing herself this is her trying to impose order or rules. She tries to invalidate his feelings by “teaching” him through acts of withholding love/affection or delaying gratification as this helps her manage her own helplessness.

2. Terror

The mother creates more dread (narcissistic mother) The mother becomes paralysed when being confronted with the child’s needs. She regresses to a state of helplessness in which she becomes overwhelmed with fear and is unable to take on her responsibility as a parent. She becomes afraid of the child, might not want to have any physical contact with him, leaves him unattended. Her aggression towards the child transforms into paranoia where the child becomes the persecuting objects that threatens her safety.

The mother compensates for her own unconscious terror (neurotic mother) The mother can’t access her unverbalized aggression or fear, she represses it and projects it onto the outside world. The world becomes a threatening place in which her role as a mother is to protect her child from its dangers. Her need to make her child “safe” becomes an obsession, being aware of every single outside event that through her distortion of reality becomes dangerous. The mother becomes overprotective, seeks to control his environment, limits his ability to explore a territory in which she isn’t in control of.

3. Fusion

The mother fuses with the child’s needs (narcissistic mother) The mother becomes one with the child. Her needs and his needs merge and create a symbiotic relationship in which the child doesn't know what his needs are because they are undifferentiated with her own. This separates them from the outside world, provokes a deep feeling of helplessness when one is absent and potential separation becomes a real threat to their defense structure.

The mother oversees the needs of the child (neurotic mother) A mother that develops a strong defense against vulnerability and isn’t in tune with her emotional needs might oversee or reject the child’s needs. She will force the child to manage or self regulate his own emotions without her presence. She is emotionally or physically absent and will create a feeling of emptiness, a feeling of being unwanted or alone in this world.

After demonstrating how these initial reactions to helplessness play an important role in the child’s inner world, I now seek to explore the other side of the spectrum; the child’s response.

Are we constantly trying to fulfill our parents’ unmet needs? On the following chart I ask simple questions in order to understand how much do we know or how much do we engage with our parents’ expectations.

Do we ever satisfy them?  (parents’ unmet needs)	The simple answer is no. We do not satisfy them because we aren’t them. But, why have we taken on the role of finishing up what they haven’t themselves? This might be better explained with evolutionary theory. Our parents pass on to us physical and mental traits that we will -hopefully- make good use of them and become a “better” version of them and so on and so forth. Their unmet needs might unconsciously become the reason why they procreated in the first place.   With this in mind, there is an obvious expectation from them/society/the human race to fulfill what they weren’t able to accomplish. Now, why is this suddenly not so appealing? I think that if we live a life in order to unconsciously feed this illusion of fulfilling our parents needs we might derail ourselves from figuring out what might be our own paths. With that comes the task of choosing and choosing outside of our parents wishes is always a big challenge because are “rejecting” them at an unconscious level and this is hard because it forces us to feel the existential dread of being unprotected.
Do we even know them?	We aren’t born as free individuals. We are born in a house set with rules placed by people that have their own way of thinking, their own challenges, and often times parents seek to impose their worldview to the child as a form of protection. In other words, our “logic” is the combination of our parents worldview processed through a new set of eyes and sensibilities. We know our parents’ unmet needs, we might not distinguish them from ours because it’s sinked into our way of being but in terms of relating with the world we are constantly communicating and enacting them through a day to day transference.
Do we feel them?	Why is the question, “what do I want to do with my life” often times placed in the back burner? Our parents’ unmet needs become an impediment to answer that question, only because in order to answer that question one has to go through a process of separation with the internal parent.  When we transition towards being an individual we stop relying on the illusion that a parent will protect us forever and this process goes through a type of mourning. We feel our parents’ needs as an obstruction towards our own happiness because we have chosen to place what we think their expectation of us is while suppressing what we really want.
Do we enact them?	We project the unmet needs of our parents onto the external world. We recreate a repetition where the world becomes an “extension” of them. We unconsciously position this familiar dynamic in relationships (friends, partners, jobs) in order to continue suffering the same need of validation (which now comes from our dynamic with reality) while getting the same frustration and gratification.
Are we them?	Most of our defenses exist in order to incorporate our parents’ unmet needs into our world. The problem is that we’ve created a structure in which their needs exist before ours. Our defenses will allow us to tolerate this frustration so we use them as a shield that ultimately serves the purpose of protecting us but at the same time silencing our true needs.
Do we resent them?	Of course. We eventually resent having to constantly defend ourselves because we are giving priority to the internal object. Even though we incorporate their needs into our narrative we have developed a power struggle with our own internal authority figures.
Do we understand them?	We are only able to understand them if there is a sense of differentiation between the individual and his parents. (or introjects of them)
Can we change them?	As mature adults we struggle with individuating from our parents because no matter if they were good, bad, absent, present, they are the objects we have attached to and letting go of our internal objects means we are letting go of their place within ourselves. We are suddenly confronted with the fact of being alone in this world.

To conclude, I would like to add that it is important to be aware of the unconscious processes that are enacted in our daily lives. It might be impossible to be in sync with everything that goes on all the time. But, if we are all exposed to everyone’s unmet needs, how are we responding to them? Is the actual state of the world a result of not being in tune with our needs? Are we reacting to one another just as the hypothetical “mothers”?  How can we use this tool to benefit society? The only answer I have now is to sit with the feeling, listen to ourselves and let that be our compass. We might not change the world but we can change ourselves for the better. Living from the inside out might be the key to true happiness, or at least, the key to deciphering the void.

EMBRACE OUR MADNESS