THE INTERACTIVE FIELD AS A CONTAINER FOR CHAOTIC STATES OF MIND

We can best approach the complexity of an analytic interaction, especially when the disordering affects of psychotic process are present, if we allow the field itself existing between analyst and analysand to be the analytic object. Then, the analyst’s attention attempts to hover within the analytic space; attention is not suspended evenly over the contents of discourse, or over the analysand’s or analyst’s inner world, but on the field itself. This imaginal process like the mysterious alchemical vessel, has a containing effect that allows us to process material which would be otherwise too chaotic and fragmenting of consciousness.

When an analysand’s psychotic area is constellated—which is to say, when it moves from a potential into an active state—it affects the structure of the field created by the analyst-analysand dyad. The countertransference will be the fulcrum upon which the possible success or failure of engaging that sector hinges. But psychotic processes, hidden within otherwise normal functioning, are extremely easy to sidestep. Generally, only through actively engaging this field can the analyst gather it up within his or her consciousness and fix it into a form stable enough to allow its existence to be pointed out to the analysand in a manner that can be effective. Anything less than an act of volition will generally result in the analyst’s attention wandering off into a dissociated state until the affect of the constellated psychotic area diminishes, and that area returns to only a

potential state. The countertransference then tends to recede into a hazy form, within which the analyst can perceive a lower yet significant level of dissociation and detachment. Such recession of the countertransference readily allows for the psychotic area to be sidestepped and its processes no longer to be perceived.

The most typical countertransference reactions which signal the constellation of the psychotic area and which, in turn, can alert the analyst to the need for a volitional act to engage the interactive field, rather than take the more instinctive, pain-diminishing path of withdrawal or dissociation, are: a fragmentation of his or her consciousness; a sense of the analysand’s strangeness; and a concomitant tendency to foreclose experiencing the states of mind induced by the analysand’s process by stressing his or her health and ego strengths.

While the psychotic area can manifest an intense fragmenting quality in the consciousness of the analyst and analysand, it can also manifest as a pair of annihilating opposites. For example, the analyst in the process of listening to the analysand may lose focus and have no recall of anything the analysand has just said. The analyst may mistakenly rationalize that this loss of memory is merely a result of being tired or distracted. Instead, the analyst is actually experiencing the annihilating quality of the opposites in psychotic process, which in turn has a very disordering effect upon the analyst’s consciousness and identity. Beyond that, the opposites may combine, but they do so not as a symbol, but in a bizarre way which, in turn, produces a sense of strangeness. The analyst commonly tries to avoid this experience of the analysand and tries to regain the person generally known outside of such moments.

The analyst’s countertransference reactions to the constellation of the analysand’s psychotic area bear significant resemblances, albeit of a mild variety, to the states of mind schizophrenics describe at the outset of a psychotic break. In his Madness and Modernism, Louis Sass has described these incipient features, noting that European psychiatrists give special diagnostic value to the ‘praecox feeling,’ a sense of radical alienness that accompanies the onset of a psychotic break. In this state the analysand cannot describe what he or she is experiencing; all usual meanings and coherence vanish.

‘Reality seems to be unveiled as never before, and the visual world looks peculiar and eerie, weirdly beautiful, tantalizingly significant, or perhaps horrifying in some insidious but ineffable way’ (Sass 1992, 44). Whatever the analysand experiences seems to defy communication, and a conjoint and contradictory sense of ‘meaningfulness and meaninglessness, of significance and insignificance, which could be described as “anti-epiphany”— an experience in which the familiar has turned strange and the unfamiliar familiar’ reigns (Sass 1992, 44). Countertransference reactions to an analysand’s psychotic area are not dissimilar to this ‘praecox feeling.’ They are surely less radical and less intense, but if the analyst actively enters into his or her own state of mind and tries to perceive the analysand’s process, amidst intense dissociative states, the analyst often will feel a ‘radical alienness’ as well as a tendency to grasp at a meaning that then dissolves into incoherence.

The process of containing one’s perceptions of psychotic areas has similarities to the logical pattern the analyst tends to follow for non-psychotic areas. But the analyst experiences a qualitative difference primarily through his or her countertransference reaction. When no psychotic area is constellated, the analyst will be capable of

experiencing a state of suspending anything known, and allow the free flow of ideas, images, affects, and the inductive affects of the analysand’s process to mix together forming what could be called chaos. And as the session progresses, the analyst will usually be able to process the Countertransference, dreams, and fantasies into pairs of opposites, for instance of states of mind split through projective identification, or related to one another as a conscious—unconscious compensation. As a result the initial chaos, what may be denoted as One, becomes Two. This ‘Two state’ is generally comprehensible as two sides of a larger whole, and when they are combined through the analyst’s imagination, they can lead to a new state: Two becomes Three, a state that can be an interpretation or an awareness of a symbol that combines the opposites. This sequence of qualitative numbers is part of ‘The Axiom of Maria,’ explicitly or implicitly found in centuries of alchemical thinking. In clinical practice, the analyst often stays within the first three levels of the axiom, but there are also clinical experiences, especially those which actively engage a field between analyst and analysand, in which the Three is a union state, the alchemical coniunctio that leads to a smaller or larger glimpse of a transcendent state of Oneness, now the Fourth of the axiom. But even without this movement in the here-and-now of the clinical situation to the Fourth, an engagement that leads to the Three as a new state can, in turn, result in dreams that further open to the Fourth as a larger, more encompassing or archetypal level.

Dealing with psychotic areas is different. One frequently will experience a high degree of fragmentation. But this initial, chaotic state—which often recurs throughout a session—can reveal a kind of order as a pair of opposites, even as these states of mind have the unsettling quality of totally destroying one another: the awareness of one tends to oscillate to the other and, in the process, to annihilate any memory or meaning of what had just transpired. The Twoness that the analyst can perceive in this instance is thus very different from what it is in normal processes, for each state does not fill out the other to create a larger whole, a third state. Rather, when the opposites combine, they create a bizarre object, a state that yields a feeling of being strange to oneself as well as a sense of the analysand being odd or strange as well. This mixed state tends also to be experienced as an inner deadness of thought, a state that is devoid of meaning and that does not produce a symbolic state. In psychotic process, this form of the Three can allow us to see more deeply, behind it, and to glimpse another state, the Fourth, which now is a terrifying Background Object. Rather than the One becoming the Fourth as a positive numinous level, in psychotic process, the One becomes something rather more demonic. There, we see the dark side of God. For example, we see images of abuse and abandonment so intolerable that they have become merged with deeply negative archetypal images which imprison the person in despair and hopelessness.

The interactive field can be remarkably containing of such chaotic states of mind. For example, another stockbroker consulted me about his difficulty with becoming disciplined in the market. Although he had the ability and intelligence to be a successful commodity trader, he barely survived economically in this endeavor. For him, the stock market was a ‘self-object,’ that is, the stability of his identity was tied to the upward or downward fluctuations in the marketplace. In analytical terms, he had a narcissistic character disorder. When I saw him, he was usually disillusioned, anxious, withdrawn, and despairing because he had failed to gauge the performance of the market accurately.

In such states, he would tell me about his difficulties, but it would be difficult for me to listen carefully for more than a minute at a time, for my attention invariably wandered because he was so internally dissociated. Yet when I regained my focus and recalled what he had said, I realized that, had I read what he had told me instead of having listened to it, my attention would not have wandered. In effect, the affective field he communicated shrouded his narrative in fragmentation and boredom for me, and indeed, for both of us.

At the beginning of one particular session, I allowed my attention to hover within the space between us, and after a few moments, I began to imagine that we were in a violent storm. I focused on this image throughout the session, with the result that everything he said was easy to listen to and to empathize with. The storminess was clearly related to his envy and intense anxieties; yet to interpret them would not have been helpful. Seeing that the storm had a containing influence not only for me but also for him, at times during this session, I reflected aloud upon his life as a terrible struggle to survive storm after storm.

He ended the session by telling me about a commodity trade that he had successfully completed in the stock market and about his hopes for the effectiveness of a new trading system he was planning to implement. He seemed to be unconsciously communicating to me that he felt more emotionally contained and more hopeful about embarking on a new beginning.

Another example of how the field was useful in containing psychotic processes concerns a woman with whom I had already established the existence of a strong psychotic part. At times, I had managed to perceive her psychotic part as violently attacking her, or I had helped her to see her inner distress as a result of her own pent-up fury and paranoid process. But this psychotic part still lacked any container. Then, I attempted to focus upon the field between us, even though my attention tended to fragment under the impact of the psychotic material. She began speaking about her boyfriend and aspects of his behavior that caused her concern. After she finished, she characteristically asked if her worries were ‘crazy.’ Even though the allusion to the transference was clear, I did not focus on it, for that would have foreclosed the field experience. Instead, I explained that I found her thinking to be clear yet did not know why she felt so much anxiety and fragmentation. Throughout this experience, maintaining attention on the field between us was like being lost in a fog. Still, I could attend to her process with some consistency. The sense of a fog between us remained until she told me about her dream involving a man who, to her surprise, was able to control her mother. In reality, the mother could be psychotic. Again, noting but not interpreting the transference, I began to realize that perhaps the field between us was dominated by her mother’s psychosis. The analysand had incorporated this psychotic process which, in turn, lived within her as an alien factor and dominated the field between us. If I tried to listen to her, this madness fragmented both my thinking and hers.

Attending to the field as the object seemed to help, as she ended the session in a way unusual for her: speaking about strengths she knew she had.

These brief examples illustrate what I mean by attending to the field as an object.

Usually, the field between two people, at the outset, will be felt as empty, like a modern scientific notion of space. If the analyst attends to the interactive field as the object, which means that he or she has the courage to carry out this seemingly absurd act—

imagining into empty space and assuming something may be there—the analyst may find

that the analysand’s form of communication becomes more cohesive. The space may then cease to feel empty. A clear image of the field process does not necessarily appear, but often the analyst and analysand can imagine a sense of texture and fullness, or a sense of fragmentation and torn fabric. Clearly, these are but two of the endless possible metaphors for the experience of the interactive space.

When psychotic processes are constellated, the field is extremely difficult to focus upon as the analytic object. The field is present but like the psychotic or mad area itself, it is not contained and has no working or workable structures or images. The experience of this kind of field is dominated by broken links and by extreme affects, notably deadness, and meaninglessness. At times, the analyst can process such material through projective identification, and this activity can have a containing effect which, in turn, allows the field to become the analytic object.

For example, an analysand entered my consultation room, threw down her purse and briefcase, quickly walked to a corner of the room, and sat on the floor. As I looked at her, I sensed that I had better say something or she would explode, as she had done in the past. Feeling unnerved by this possibility, I tried to hold my ground and wait until I could perceive something more spontaneous and pertinent to the moment. But I lost containment for a moment and began to combat her intense despair and self-pity over losing her job with an exhortation that she should not act out her hysteria. Yet I too, for the moment, had become hysterical. The air was tense, and a feeling of containment was absent. Then, I began to reflect upon my feelings. I wanted to get rid of her. I wanted her to stop asking me to fix her life. I wanted her to get well and become more optimistic. It was clear that I had become her mother. At that instant, she said: ‘You’re just like my mother.’ And I replied: ‘That is what is being created here, a situation in which you are not contained and are treated as a terrible problem.’ By virtue of having processed the projective identification (of her mother image), I could make this assertion and thus radically change the environment. She was no longer overwhelmed, nor was I. She sat down on the couch and the session progressed without her acting out or my acting in behavior.

In this case, this session initiated us into work upon her psychotic part. Having never engaged it before, the interpretation through projective identification was necessary to establish some way of approaching the disturbed field. By focusing upon the field as the analytic object, we could gain both a sense of containment and the imagination or perception that made it possible to perceive imaginally a ‘front-back’ split in the analysand, with a strong background component of a split-off exhibitionism. As part of an imaginal act to contain her psychotic parts, I encouraged her to portray her exhibitionistic fantasies through painting and to share these drawings with me. Engaging her unconscious material in this imaginal way helped to diminish her level of psychotic fragmentation.

By focusing on the interactive field as the analytic object, the nature of the psychotic transference and countertransference, which is ever so subtly acting behind the scenes, can fall into view, as can the ‘front-back’ split that often tends to hide the psychotic process. In the same fashion, the analyst can become sensitized to the existence of the other major splits that generally exist: the vertical splits that characterize dissociation and the horizontal splits that characterize repression, notably mind—body splitting. The

awareness of these splits and their mutual interaction is made possible by focusing upon the field, and the paradoxical experience that this focus implies is a significant advance in analytic work. An analyst who does not focus upon the interactive field can still discover some of these splits through, for example, projective identification; but this mode of discovery will be unlikely to gather up all of the dimensions of splitting within the analysand. However, the field, experienced as the analytic object, is in a way the Fourth that contains these three major dimensions of splitting. Unless the split opposites are combined along these various ‘fault lines,’ no fundamental change in internal structure can occur.

The usefulness of the field as analytic object was also evident in the case of a female analysand who was attempting to deal with severe early abandonment trauma. Through projective identification, we focused on deeply disturbing states of deadness and meaninglessness which covered paranoid levels of envy and rage. This psychotic material created an intensely disturbed field that was characterized by broken connections. While the projective identification approach revealed how her psychic defenses attacked any connection between us, focusing on the field itself allowed for a far more comprehensive understanding of the psychotic process.

For example, in a state of anxiety, my analysand felt the need to talk to me, but she resisted calling me at home on a weekend, even though we had arranged for this possibility. When I finally did meet with her, she offered the following explanation for her failure to telephone me at such a critical moment:

Maybe I feel I only take what I get and have no right to anything else. It’s like I live with the various pieces and nothing in between. I live going from piece to piece and never ask about what’s in between. To do so is too threatening. I may lose what I already have. I have no sense of what links one state to another, I just hold on to each state as if each were an island in a sea, entirely isolated until the next appears, but I have no way of getting from one to the other. It’s frightening to think of how they connect for if I want to know anything I might lose what I have. Each state is a potential catastrophe.

My internal response to her explanation was to feel attacked and distanced from her. I

My internal response to her explanation was to feel attacked and distanced from her. I