Читать книгу Faith Born of Seduction - Jennifer L Manlowe - Страница 18

Sexual invasion by a trusted relation goes beyond a physical injury; it is a narcissistic violation. Because these experiences occur early in the development of the child, her sense of who she is in relation to others—her world—is shattered. A core betrayal is imbedded in her memory from the onset of her interactions with her emotionally immature parents and caregivers.

When I use the term narcissistic, I refer to a formulation of self-psychologist Heinz Kohut. Kohut came up with the diagnosis Narcissistic Personality Disorder when he discovered that disturbed people in his clinical practice had problems that seemed to trace back to their self-structures (or their sense of self), which had not properly formed in the first few years of life. Almost invariably Kohut attributes the cause of such defects to be unempathic caregivers who fail to help the child achieve a cohesive self by mirroring the child’s accomplishments appropriately.³¹ He maintains that today’s typical patient is “Tragic Man,” child of an unempathic mother and an absent father.³² Kohut does not believe that this split, fragmented, or alienated self is an inevitable consequence of the human condition, rather, that it is a specific historical formation prevalent in the twentieth century.³³ He does not critique the patriarchal familial backdrop that makes for “Tragic Humanity” but feminists who use Kohut’s work often draw out these themes.

Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller has taken self-psychological and object relations theory³⁴—a theory which gives primacy to interpersonal relations (real and imaginary)—and applied it to children who have been abused or emotionally neglected in the home. Miller’s claim is that a child’s aim is to please her primary parent because her life depends on it “like a small plant that turns toward the sun to survive.”³⁵ Children look to their caretakers to meet their narcissistic needs: respect, echoing, understanding, stroking, sympathy, and mirroring. These are the same needs that their parents had when they were children. If these needs were not met for them then, they will look to their own children to meet them. Miller calls this dynamic of role reversal narcissistic wounding.³⁶ The adult’s narcissistic needs compete with the child’s and usually dominate over the age-appropriate needs of the child. In response to the demands that are placed on them, children learn to “take care of” their parents—to develop a false self or “little adult” to survive. In the case of incest, a child-victim develops a “little spouse” persona to survive. This pattern is passed from generation to generation.

Both Kohut and Miller see the therapist’s role as drawing out the troubled person’s “true self” through offering empathy and narcissistic reparations. The “true self” refers to the spontaneous aspects of one’s personality that would emerge if an environment were, more often than not, safe and affirming. The notion of one “true self” that we could reveal or conceal is a fantasy. More likely, we are a mass of social constructions in which particular situations are continually redefining who we are. We are relational beings who wish to be valued and to belong, and most of us go to various extremes to make such “mattering” feel real, depending on the degree of “not mattering” that we have experienced.

In cases of incest, even if parents are not direct sexual offenders, if they minimize, deny, or resist the knowledge of their daughter’s experience of being violated, they collude with the perpetrator in his traumatization of her. Because of this betrayal by parents, the child-victim has to develop ways of dealing with intimate physical and emotional harm and neglect.

In a paper on the “fate of bad objects,” W. R. D. Fairbairn, an object relations psychologist, addresses the question of why the child deals with bad objects (negative aspects/memories of the parents) by internalizing and then repressing them, imagining the objects good and the child bad. Fairbairn believed the potency of his answer would best be framed in religious terms, “for such terms provide the best representation for the adult mind of the situation as it presents itself to the child.”³⁷

It is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the Devil. A sinner in a world ruled by God may be bad: but there is always a certain sense of security to be derived from the fact that the world around is good—”God’s in His heaven—All’s right with the world!”: and in any case there is always hope for redemption.³⁸

When Fairbairn was asked, “But could not the child simply reject the bad objects?” he answered, “No, for however bad the parents may appear to be, the child cannot do without them; the child “is ‘possessed’ by them, as if by evil spirits.”³⁹ This claim is demonstrated in the experiences of Stephanie (one of the survivors I interviewed who was raped by her grandfather and ignored by her parents). Stephanie claims that her abuser inseminated her with evil through incest: “It has always been my firm conviction that you were not born sinful, that somebody had to plant a seed of sin deep inside of you.”

Fairbairn sees the task of therapy as one of releasing bad objects from the unconscious. For him, the psychotherapist is the true successor to the exorcist. “[The therapist’s] business is not to pronounce the forgiveness of sins, but to cast out devils.”⁴⁰ One among my many aims in this project is to help the reader see that adaptive coping behaviors emerge for the survivor of incest largely to repress the post-traumatic terror—which often feels as real as the atrocious abuse events themselves. A further traumatic sense is due to the terror of betrayal—having no social (outer) acknowledgment of or protection from such a horror. Such adaptive behaviors—as multiple personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, creating a false-self, self-injury, binging, starving, or binge-purging—are often adaptive aspects of surviving a traumatic childhood. Too often the aftereffects and the survivor of incest herself are quickly labeled pathological. Such easy dismissal is tantamount to denying her the integrity of her survival skills and the devastating impact of her incest history.