The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2017  2017 Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis 0002-9548/17 www.palgrave.com/journals

I AM A MYSTERY TO MYSELF Joel Miller1

Throughout my lifetime I have had a vague sense of my identity. There were no distinct memories or stories from my childhood and adolescence to provide me with the recognition, much less an appreciation, for who I was in the world. It wasn’t until I entered psychotherapy that revelations about my family life came into understanding. This was not from any recollecting of actual events but from the indirect observations of families where being engaged with each other had occurred. Through psychoanalysis, reading a variety of psychoanalytic thinkers, and by taking up my own writing I was encouraged to discover myself, even at the cost of the sorrow of never having that encouragement in growing up, the cost that comes with the exploration. Where no childhood home was to be found a new one was to be created instead.

KEY WORDS: neglect; autobiography; inter-generational trauma; Winnicott; Ferenczi DOI:10.1057/s11231-017-9116-3

For much of my childhood I have been a mystery to myself. There were things others knew about their childhoods, memories and stories, but I had very few of either. Recollections did not come naturally to me. There seemed very few things to recollect. As an adult, remembering my not too distant childhood did not seem to matter. Instead I found myself trying not to feel a just-below-the-surface anxiety and insecurity. That anxiety broke through to consciousness after a breakup at the age of 30 and, for the first time, I spoke of my distress to a very caring male therapist. However, at that time the grief outweighed the need for insight so I don’t remember if any childhood memories surfaced as well. Continuing with therapy during medical school my therapist wanted to explore my childhood and innocently asked me if I remembered having been rocked in a chair by my mother. My reflexive answer to her was, ‘‘We’re talking about Irene here; she never rocked me in a chair.’’ It was an

Joel Miller, M.D is Supervising and Training Analyst, Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles. Private practice, Pasadena, CA. USA. Address correspondence to Joel Miller, M.D, 2810 E. Del Mar Blvd, Suite 9, Pasadena, CA, 91107, USA.

MILLER

answer that was noteworthy for its detached declaration rather than for the expected hurt or anger. It was also a revelation that suggested that some mothers rock their children in chairs, and if so, my mother was not one of them. It was a revelation but not a recollection. About the same time I was enlisted, through the Department of Family Medicine, in a project attempting to link the family structure and function surrounding a pregnant woman with the impact on her newborn’s health. One measure for representing family function was to draw a representation of the relationship among family members on a sheet of paper with dots representing each member. However, its number one goal was to subtly capture the subliminal sense of connectedness between members by measuring the distance between the dots. Before knowing this, I took the test myself and quickly placed four dots at the corners of the page. It became an unexpected but spontaneously produced visual depiction of my family’s degree of connectedness, or lack thereof. Again, there were no memories or stories to match this revelation. D.W. Winnicott seemed to understand this as he wrote, ‘‘…it is necessary to think not of trauma [in this instance] but of nothing happening when something might profitably have happened’’ (1970, p. 93). Felicitous that phrase, ‘‘might profitably have happened.’’ These revelations revealed a subjective truth about my family dynamic and my role in it, but they did not have the authority of memory. It wasn’t until a few years later that I remembered to tell my analyst about an event that actually did happen. In the third grade I brought home my report card with a note from the teacher which must have mentioned something about me being an anxious kid. My mother’s hand written response, ‘‘We’ll talk to Joel about his anxiety.’’ I’m sure I did my best to not appear anxious, but doing so would have been like putting a lid on a boiling pot of water to muffle the steam. There was also a joke I had remembered from my adolescence which also became noteworthy to share. It goes, ‘‘My family moved around a lot when I was a child, but I always managed to find them.’’ In reality, my family did not move around geographically when I was young, but they could not or would not establish themselves for my benefit. I wasn’t wooed or welcomed into the family home, but I wasn’t set free either. There was an enormous gap between recollections, which were sparse, and revelations, which were erupting with more frequency. Still, I was largely a mystery to myself, having to learn how to live with the insight and sorrow that there was no home for me. I have wished, and, with that, so much wanted, to sit down and write some kind of autobiography. Analysis was a shared experience and a coconstructed narrative. But as I sat down to my laptop alone and wrote as uninfluenced-by-another I needed to trust that something true would emerge, despite the lack of memories, so I could look at it, detached and

I AM A MYSTERY TO MYSELF

solitarily, which is necessary if it is to be a written work of art. Patricia Hampl writes of this, ‘‘It still comes as a shock to realize that I don’t write about what I know, but in order to find out what I know. Is it possible to convey the enormous degree of blankness, confusion, hunch, and uncertainty lurking in the act of writing’’ (Hampl, 1999, p. 27). In a sense, I have been writing my autobiography in partial disguise with my previous essays. In writing about my history of viewing, then collecting, art in the essay ‘‘Owning It,’’ (Miller, 2007), I challenged myself and the reader, via the writer Jeanette Winterson, to acknowledge that the seemingly small decisions of the day show us who we really are. Superficial choices reveal depth. In addition to recognizing and reflecting on these decisions, we must try to ‘‘own’’ them if we are to take ourselves seriously. This constituted a sober autobiographical statement for me to make in the face of the denial and dismissiveness of my upbringing. However, in writing about myself rather that quote Jeanette Winterson, I found that my day-today failings were more apparent and, therefore, harder to own. For my essay on Oscar Wilde, ‘‘The Wilde Analyst’’ (Miller, 2013), I wrote of his showing me the means to recognize and speak to the constricted, moralizing conventions and appearances of my home and societal life. But in writing about myself it became obvious that I had not escaped those conventions and appearances as completely as I thought. Would I be able to come from behind the curtain of using others’ words to display my personal thoughts? I worried that once I had deeply reflected on my childhood, I would put it in some literary form where both the details and the pain were genuine but rendered into writing-as-art rather than writing-as-reportage. Aware of that possibility and not wanting to unload on the reader these partially metabolized experiences, I took seriously the warning from Meghan Daum, (2014) in the preface of her collection of personal essays, Unspeakable; ‘‘I do feel completed to say again, that, as frank as these [essays] are they aren’t confessions, not even close. They’re events recounted in the service of ideas’’ (Daum, 2014, p. 6). Even though I knew the quote from Proust that ‘‘Griefs, at the moments when they are changed into ideas lose some of their power to injure the heart,’’ (De Botton, 1988, p. 72), I identified more with Oscar Wilde who, once he was released from prison and deep in the diminishment of physical and spiritual suffering, doubted if he could recapture the artistic mood of detachment from the accidents of life so necessary to resume the art of writing. Terrified as I was to reflect on my childhood I was also curious, obsessed really, at mining the gap between subjective revelations and sparse recollections; between ‘‘nothing all-that-bad’’ happening and feeling the undercurrent of anxiety and helplessness. For me looking at my childhood was like staring down the barrel of a gun aimed at me; an experience I

MILLER

actually had years ago when pushed up against a fence and held at gunpoint during a car-jacking. So fixed was my attention that when the police asked me to describe the assailant’s face all I could say was that he looked like a very large black, empty hole. As I try to write about my childhood, knowing little but knowing something went terribly wrong, I feel as though I am looking down the barrel of the gun. It would be looking down that barrel, but also, and ultimately, be a report from inside the barrel itself. Reading Sa´ndor Ferenczi is like hearing from a wise friend who already knows and carries, in empathy and experience, the impact of past childhood trauma. He keeps insisting on the reality of abuse and its forever complex and lingering repercussions throughout a lifetime. He speaks of splits in the ego, the resulting fragments, and the function of some of the fragments to remain unconscious or denied out of the necessity of survival. He gave me the first written account of the serious sequelae of parental neglect in stating, ‘‘One definitely gets the impression that to be left deserted results in the split of the personality. Part of the person identifies with the father or mother in relation to the rest, thereby undoing, as it were, the fact of being deserted’’ (Ferenczi, 1931, p. 135.) Later he adds a paradox that in addition to the brutally destroyed part of the ego there is also ‘‘a part which…knows everything but feels nothing’’ (p. 135). In my case I knew very little yet carried this mysterious sense of something having gone wrong in my home. Strangely, that I was a mystery to myself, that phrase, became a consolidating and crucial self-identifying symbol from which to build and believe (and own) a personal narrative. This is in line with what Marion Milner wrote that once she had given the word ‘‘chaos’’ to her experience, made her experience less chaotic (Milner, 1959, p. 75). I would say that once I had given the label ‘‘mystery’’ to my childhood, it took away some of the anxiety and insecurity associated with it. That I was a mystery to myself was not an inherent, global identity but the result of the history handed to me. Now, I could assert what Proust offered about griefs, that at the moment they change into ideas they lose some of their power to injure the heart. As a clinical aside, other tragic self-descriptors originating from patients, such as ‘‘non-existing,’’ ‘‘non-being,’’ ‘‘empty,’’ ‘‘void,’’ or ‘‘nothingness,’’ could also become powerful and integrating identifiers that allow the patient to see that these are not all-encompassing, and not originating from themselves, but from the assured sense of a past, substantial, external trauma. Broadening the concept of childhood trauma Michael Balint gives us his idea that ‘‘The trauma itself…is not necessarily a single event: on the contrary, usually it amounts to a situation of some duration caused by a painful misunderstanding—lack of fit—between the individual and his environment’’ (Balint, 1968, p. 82). Again, a felicitous phrase: ‘‘lack of fit.’’ Coming on the heels of Balint’s concept comes Masud Khan’s term of ‘‘cumulative trauma,’’

I AM A MYSTERY TO MYSELF

which is a breach in the parent’s role as a protective shield, on which the infant is dependent for his total well-being, ‘‘over the course of time and through the developmental processes [that] cumulate silently and invisibly. Hence the difficulty in detecting them clinically in childhood. They gradually get embedded in the specific traits of a given character structure in the adult’’ (Kahn, 1974, p. 47). I’ll remind us again of Winnicott’s timely thoughts on childhood neglect which ‘‘…is necessary to think not of trauma but of nothing happening when something might profitably have happened’’ (Winnicott, 1970, p. 106). He goes on to write, ‘‘It is easier for a patient to remember trauma than to remember nothing happening when it might have happened. At the time the patient did not know what might have happened, and so could not experience anything except to note that something might have been’’ (Winnicott, 1970, pp. 93–94). Finally, a psychoanalytic author on this side of the Atlantic whose evocation of the early mother-infant scene offers an observation which is close to my felt reality. Daniel Stern (1985), in The Interpersonal World of the Child refers to a case of a mother-infant dyad he and his team had observed over several months. ‘‘[The dyadic interaction] illustrates the almost complete lack of attunement that is possible even while the physical and physiological needs are being met. It implies that most observers of human behavior…so expect attuning behaviors to be embedded in other communicative or caregiving behaviors that we tend to assume their presence, and may read them in even when they are not there’’ (Stern, 1985, p. 207). For Stern it illustrates how the infant can temporarily adapt, via compliance, to the absence of inter-subjective interaction with the mother. ‘‘The future of such an adaptation would ultimately be disastrous for the child if the mother could not change and if no others were available to open up the inter-subjective world’’ (p. 207). I could go on with this passage from Stern as it foretells, in detail, what that future would be, which is shocking for me to read and ponder, and reminds me of the devastatingly honest inquiry Sa´ndor Ferenczi included in the last entry of his Clinical Diary, ‘‘Is a new solution to the personality problem possible after such a sinking into the traumatic?’’ (Ferenczi, 1932, p. 212). I have consciously excluded the description of my parents in this article even as they became more clear and human to me during my writing. My own understanding of them is more reliable than any description I could put on a page or image your reading mind could conjure. What piece I do want to convey is what I discovered once I decided to write about them for their memorial services. To do so, I did not write about who they were to me, but who they were from a few telling events of their histories; from the specific yet often unknown forces that shaped them as I had imagined. Their sociological histories and inter-generational biographies seemed to be the ones that I had

MILLER

some knowledge of but not really considered, had not taken the time to gain sympathy for but seemed profoundly predictive in retrospect. Theirs was a history which included living through the Dust Bowl era of the Great Depression. In walking to school my father had to wear cardboard in his shoes once the soles had given out, but he was the first in his family to go to college and then earn a doctorate degree. He was also the first of his professional male peers to wear a leisure suit during the seventies. My mother was the first female in her family to go to college, to own her own car, to make her own money and then go on to teach second grade for more than 30 years. To deny them my understanding of their surrounding shaping forces is to keep me stuck in blame, and deny any tendency I might have to pass along the familial inter-generational legacy of detachment and avoidance instead of connectedness and helpfulness, deny any tendency to avoid doing something for another when doing so might profitably be helpful. Is a new solution to the personality problem possible after such a sinking into the traumatic? Now, I don’t think so. Not really. Not within the bounds of reality of time, space, the body and consciousness. However much one remembers of one’s childhood is not the point. It is stored. It is held and has already made its contribution to the shape of the adult, conscious and unconscious. In a way I have been fortunate enough that I have been able, through some goodness shown to me, to retain enough sanity and emotional resilience about the reality of time, space, the body and consciousness that I have not wanted to destroy my link to these by severe dissociation or psychosis. I have not tried to destroy the link to these realties held in my temporal body via suicide. It has not come to that for me. There has been enough connection to these realties through what I experienced as a child from my family and the surrounding culture. I can be in the present, and I can experience the present not too overshadowed by the dread of the past or fear of the future. But, at times, I can be disconnected and bear the anxiety from the awareness of those things. In typing this last paragraph I noticed a misspelling of the word ‘‘destroy.’’ Switching two letters, ‘‘destroy’’ became ‘‘destory’’ or ‘‘de-story.’’ As in ‘‘the story’’ or better yet, ‘‘remove or reverse the story.’’ This is a vital beginning step to recognize, intuit, then evaluate, and possibly revise parts of the story that we already find in ourselves as children and as we grow and mature into adolescence and beyond. It is the beginning of a story that is consciously self-narrated and personally owned, relying on the creative unconscious within ourselves and from others. According to Alice Miller (1978), ‘‘This is not a homecoming, since this home has never before existed. It is the creation of a home’’ (p. 19).

I AM A MYSTERY TO MYSELF

REFERENCES Balint, M. (1968). Regression and the child in the patient. The basic fault: Therapeutic aspects of regression (pp. 79–91). London: Tavistock. Daum, M. (2014). The unspeakable; And other sects of discussion. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux. De Botton, A. (1998). How Proust can change your life. New York: Vintage. Ferenczi, S. (1931). Child analysis and the analysis of adults. Final contributions to psychoanalysis (pp. 126–142). New York: Basic Books. Ferenczi, S. (1932). The clinical diary of Sandor Ferenczi (J. Dupont (Ed.), M. Balint & N.Z. Jackson (Trans.)). Cambridge, Mass. & London: Harvard University Press. 1988. Hampl, P. (1999). Memory and imagination. I could tell you stories; Sojourns in the land of memory (pp. 21–37). New York: W. W. Norton. Khan, M. (1974). The concept of cumulative trauma. The privacy of the self; Papers on psychoanalytic theory and technique (pp. 42–58). London: Karnac. Miller, A. (1978). The drama of the gifted child: The search for the true self. New York: Basic Books. Miller, J. (2007). Owning It. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 67, 386–396. Miller, J. (2013). The wilde analyst. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 73, 84–97. Milner, M. (1959). On not being able to paint. Madison, CT: International Universities Press. Stern, D. (1985). The interpersonal world of the child: A view from psychoanalysis and developmental psychology. USA: Basic Books. Winnicott, D. W. (1970). Fear of breakdown. International Review of Psychoanalysis, 1, 103–107.