CHAPTER FIVE

On a patient's unconscious need

to have ''bad parents''
1963/1974

n the late 1940s I was asked by Paula Heimann to summarize

for discussion at a seminar the main points in Freud's paper on
technique, ''Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho­
Analysis''. When I came to the recommendation that analysts should
take as a model ''the surgeon, who puts aside all his feeling, including
his human sympathy, and concentrates his mental forces on the single
aim of performing the operation as skilfully as possible'' (Freud, 1912e,
p. 115), Paula Heimann, to my surprise, strongly disagreed with
Freud's emphatic recommendations. She formulated her point of view
later in the paper entitled ''On Countertransference'' she read in 1949 at
the 16th International Psychoanalytical Congress. In this paper she
stated that ''My thesis is that the analyst's emotional response to his
patient within the analytic situation represents one of the most impor­
tant tools for his work. The analyst's countertransference is an instru­
ment of research into the patient's unconscious'' (Heimann, 1950).

This paper was presented to a Scientific Meeting of the British Psychoana­

lytical Society in 1963 and then, in the same year, to the pre-Congress in
London before the IPA Congress in Stockholm. It was rewritten in 1974 as a
tribute to Dr Paula Heimann for her 75th birthday.

67
68 A PSYCHOANALYST AT WORK CLINICAL ISSUES

While accepting that the analyst must avoid the danger of becoming
preoccupied with any one theme, and must maintain an evenly hover­
ing attention in order to follow the patient's free associations so that he
can listen simultaneously on many levels, she suggested ''that the
analyst along with this freely working attention needs a freely roused
emotional sensibility so as to follow the patient's emotional move­
ments and unconscious phantasies''. Her assumption is that the ana­
lyst's unconscious is an important instrument for understanding the
subtleties of the patient's unconscious. She wrote: ''This rapport on the
deep level comes to the surface in the form of feelings which the
a11alyst notices in response to his patient, in his 'countertransference'.
This is the most dynamic way in which his patient's voice reaches him.
In the comparison of feelings roused in himself with his patient's
associations and behaviour, the analyst possesses a most valuable
means of checking whether he has understood or failed to understand
his patient'' (Heimann, 1950). She particularly empha.sized the impor­
tance of those feelings that the analyst experiences when there is a
discrepancy between the analyst's conscious understanding of the pa­
tient's communication and his unconscious perception of the pa·tient' s
unconscrous processes.
•

While acknowledging that there may be times when the unresolved

problems of the analyst can be evoked by a patient's material, she feels
that to dismiss all perception of feelings in the analyst as either 11eu­
rotic or poor technique excludes the analyst from an important source
of information, particularly that relating to the patient's preverbal ex-
per1ences.
•

Paula Heimann's point of view is now more widely accepted, but

when she first formulated it, many psychoanalysts considered it her­
esy. However, to those of us who were her students she had given
sanction to make use of a whole range of our affective capacities that we
had previously considered taboo. It was now possible to draw on these
sources of data not only to help discover how our patients were using
us, but also to explore the subtle distortions that take place in the
interplay between phantasy and reality, delusion and despair, as pa­
tients attempt to come to terms with both their good and bad experi­
ences with their actual parents and the psychic elaborations of these
experiences. I think that the majority of analysts would now agree th.at
both external trauma and intrapsychic factors are important. The real
clinical headache that confronts us is the problem of 110w to discri1rzinate
betcueen the ''return of the trau1natic experie11ces'' in tlie trarzsference in tl1e
 A PATIE r's UNCONSCIOUS NEED TO HAVE "BAD PARENTS" 69

a11alytic setting, where the main therapeutic task is the re-assimilation

by the stronger adult ego of experiences that were overwhelming to the
infantile ego, and the exploitation of tlzese traz,matic expe1-ie11ces for tl1e
n1ainte11ance of u11conscioits and infa11tile orr1nipote11ce. In this latter case,
tl1ey are not re-assin1ilated, bilt perpetitated.
I would like to describe how Paula Heimann's understanding of the
phenon1ena of countertransference and the importance of an analy t
using his emotional or affective response as a tool to elucidate a pa­
tient's material helped me to understand a particularly difficult clinical
phenomenon: a patient's unconscious need to maintain his belief in
''bad parents''. These parents appear to have provided such inadequate
emotional conditions for their children to grow up in that the child'
capacity for healthy object relationships seems permanently impaired.
In some uch cases, the damage eems beyond the capacity of analysi
to rectify. The use of the term ''bad parent'' raises a crucial question,
however. What is meant by '' good'' and ''bad'' in relation to early
parent-child relationships? It seems to me that as analysts we have to
be very careful not to let ourselves be biased by any ste1·eotyped no­
tions of'' good'' and ''bad'' parents. If we disapprove to ourselves of the
behaviot1r of a parent as reported by a patient, it is my experience that
a patient quickly picks this up. And while at one level we may be felt to
be supporting the patient against intolerable behaviour from an adult,
at another level we will appear as disapproving of that part of the
pa·tient which colludes with and perhaps made capital out of this
particular behaviour of adults. Nevertheless, with certain kinds of
patients, it is sometimes important to communicate to them one's own
awareness of the difficulties that reported behaviour of their parents
created for them. But it is also my experience that thi can be done
without taking sides or apportioning blame, thus still leaving the way
open for exploring the part played by the patient's unco11scioits in this
state of affairs, without which, it is my contention, tlze befiavioi-tr of t/'ze
parents woitld only have been 111inirr1nlly harrrifitl.
The material of the type I wish to discuss occurred in the analyses of
several patients. I do not think these problems are limited to any one
diagnostic group, though the patients whose material I have drawn on
would be classified as either schizoid personalities or narcissistic bor­
derline cases. One of their characteristics was that I had the impression
of analysing two different people instead of one; so that splitting was a
n1echanism that was grossly employed by them, resulting in multiple
di sociations. They eemed to have marked psychotic features in their
70 A PSYCHOANALYST AT WORK CLINICAL ISSUES

personality. Some had suffered periods of hallucination or delusion,

whereas others had developed psychopathic behaviour that seemed a
last defence from a psychotic breakdown and was characterized by
acute anxieties about disintegration. They all suffered from feelings of
unreality and lack of satisfaction when they did manage to accomplish
anything. While they felt too intensely, they could seldom acknowl­
edge any feelings of a relationship in the analytic situation or in the
present of a, relationship. This fear of the present see·med very important
as I came to understand them better, as did their relationships to tinie.
All these patients had experie11ced some gross disturbarzce in their relatio11-
ship with their niothers, as well as with their fathers.
There were periods in all these analyses when they felt like ordi­
nary neurotics to analyse, and when the patients would produce dy­
namic material from which it W'aS possible to help them to get insight
into their unconscious conflicts, which resulted in many changes in
their behaviour and improvement in their capacity for work, the qual­
ity of their relationships, and a diminution of psychotic anxieties and
symptoms. These periods were interspersed with other periods during
which the patients seemed out of contact with themselves and with all
analytic work and insight so far achieved, and extremely defensive,
and they put me in the role of the bad, malevolent, persecuting parent,
sometimes the mother and at other times the father. It seemed to me
that they felt I had really become the ''bad'', unsatisfactory parent of
their childhood and that there was no way of altering this state of
affairs. Nothing that I did or said was acceptable.
With such patients, I pondered much on the effect of ''real'' badness
and tragedy as a causative factor in personality development and the
chances of really affecting a change in their intrapsychic situation
through analysis. I began to realize that such patients were extr,emely
skilled in their capacity to describe a situation and to create a mood in
me that could result in my feeling sorry for them. From this it was only
a small step to my beginning to believe in those ''bad'' parents, the
''bad'' home circumstances, the neglectful mother, who misunderstood
the patient and who was missing at the crucial moment. Nor was it
difficult to interpret all this ''badness'' in terms of the transference and
of the patient's relationship with me.
Nevertheless, during these ''bad phases'' I often felt ''fixed'' and
helpless. I was, of course, familiar with the experience of being cast into
various roles by patients according to the ebb and flow of the transfer­
ence process. But there is a mood of fluidity about these experiences,
and as one becomes aware of the roles and makes the appropriate
 A PATIENT'S UNCONSCIOUS NEED TO HAVE "BAD PARENTS" 71

interpretations, the roles and the people concerned in the internal

drama of the patient change in mood and unconscious function.
In these cases I am referring to, there was an element offixity during
these phases. I seemed to be imprisoned in the role and unable to make
use of my own personality and to make the kind of interpretations I
would normally make in response to the type of material being pre­
sented to me. What struck me was their denial of anxiety, the blaming
of external persons and events (now overtly centred on me and analy­
sis), the almost complete inaccessibility of the patients to insight, and
the lack of capacity to see or permit relations between ideas or experi­
ences. I realized that I had ceased to be a person, that the analysis was
operating at a level of part-objects, and that I had to be kept de­
humanized, unfeeling, and treated ruthlessly.
Now, both the transference neurosis and the regression to a level of
experience when the patient feels the world is n1ade up of ''part­
objects'' is integral to the analytic process and is the analytic concomi­
tant of the process of emotional development in early childhood, now
re-lived in the analytic setting. While both these formulations ex­
plained some of the phenomena I was meeting with in these patients,
they did not altogether account for the feeling of impasse and hope­
lessness or, above all, for my inability to feel or be a person, with access
to my own sources of creativity. This feeling of being out of touch with
myself led me to wonder whether or not the patients were projecting
into me their false-self experiences, as a method of ejecting the experi­
ences from their personality or as a mode of communicating to me the
complexity and hopelessness of their situation (chapter 6). While this
hypothesis also made some sense of what was happening, I did not
altogether feel that these patients were only using the mechanism of
projection. I had, of course, experienced this type of projection before,
and while it was difficult to cope with, it did not seem intransigent to
access through interpretation.
I would now like to discuss one of these patients in more detail, as
I feel I can best make my points with reference to specific material.
This patient was a young man, about 30 years of age, with dark
hair, a fresh complexion, and a pleasant manner. On first acquaintance
he appears at ease, competent, and capable of making good social
relationships. He was the youngest child of an upper-middle-class
family of three children. The eldest was a girl, eight years his senior,
with whom he appears to have had little contact. The second was a
boy, who died of pneumonia when 1 month old. The stable figure in
his childhood was his Nanny.
 A PATIENT'S UNCONSCIOUS NEED TO HAVE "BAD PARENTS'' 73

of no proper training in that field or university education) in a large

commercial firm, which has given him steady promotion.
It was after he had been in analysis for three years when he was
settled in this job that he first broke off analysis. His psychotic-dissoci­
ated states or ''fits'' seemed to have stopped and we seemed to have
gone as far as we could, though his relations with women were still
unsatisfactory. After a few months he returned to analysis, reporting a
return of these ''fits'' again while he was cutting down a tree. He was
very frightened, and he realized he needed more help.
During this second phase of his analysis (which lasted about four
years), he developed a much more mature pattern of life and recovered
from his need to act as a compulsive beatnik with no roots. He got
married and made a relatively good relationship with his wife. He
bought a house and managed to accept the responsibility of being in a
male role. It seemed again that we had gone as far as it was possible,
although there seemed one Gordian knot we could not get at this was
the split-off part of himself that at times refused to participate in the
analytic process or to acknowledge any feelings of concern or gratitude
for his good objects or towards me in his analysis. It was only in certain
moods that he operated from this part of himself, which continually
criticized, in a jeering and triumphant way, what had been achieved by
the rest of himself.
As time went on, I began to see a pattern emerging in this patient.
He suffered anxiety attacks of psychotic intensity, accompanied often
by hallucinations and delusional beliefs, whenever he seemed to have
some success in external reality or when some parent-surrogate had
behaved unexpectedly well to him. One day I found myself saying:
''This patient needs to keep intact his myth of unsatisfactory parents.''
This led me to consider the various methods he used to achieve this
and to explore what would happen if this mechanism broke down. My
use of the term ''myth'' took my mind to the magical mechanisms used
by primitive peoples to protect themselves from the ''unknown'' in
nature and from the venom of their fellow creatures.
I realized that not only did this patient unconsciously choose peo­
ple to make relationships with who would fit in with this need to have
unsatisfactory parents, which is a fairly usual occurrence, especially
among neurotics, but that his own behaviour towards them made it
impossible for these parent-surrogates to behave in any other way than
the way he complained of. While on the one hand he had complained
of his father's behaviour, and that his father had left the family and had
74 A PSYCHOANALYST AT WORK CLINICAL ISSUES

not contacted him, it eventually became clear that his own attitude to,
and treatment of, his father was such as to ensure that this pattern of
behaviour continued, as he would on no account see him or let him
know that he wanted to see him. For many years during his analysis,
the onus and blame was placed on his father. It was only by chance that
the real truth came out that is, he would not let his father know
where he was. So when I agreed to stop his analysis the second time, I
was far from satisfied with the results.
After about eighteen months, he contacted me for a third time,
saying that he was again getting anxiety attack.s when he was in a
position to do something well, and he felt this was threatening his
career. He found himself withdrawing into himself, losing touch with
and control over ''external reality'', sweating profusely, and becoming
tongue-tied. This state we recognized as the residue of his ''fits''. He
asked if he could come and see me once or twice. This he did, but it soon
became evident that this was a postscript to analysis and that there was
still something vital we had not come to grips with, and which it was
essential to tackle if he were ever to carry on without analysis. As this
phase started off as a '' supervision'' of his analytic work with himself,
he did not lie down on the couch but sa.t in the chair opposite me, and
this, I think, helped to set the pattern for this last phase of his analysis.
At first he came once a fortnight and later, weekly. It lasted for about
another eighteen months. In many ways he re-lived crucial phases of
his analysis, from a different viewpoint. He said that he had often felt
that it was not his real self that lay down on the couch, and that in that
position a vital version of himself had sometimes escaped taking part in
his analysis. It seemed to me that he used his new position in space and
the change in his relation to me as symbolic of a different him making a
relationship to a different n1e. During this postscript period, many prob­
lems became clearer and he seemed to be able to own them and link
them with himself as a person with an adult ego and to feel his under­
standing of them as ego-syntonic, and therefore these insights became
accessible to current use by his adult ego.
It was during this period of his analysis that a session occurred
during which I began to understand what was happening during the
phases in his, and other analyses, when I had felt fixed and helpless. It
became clearer to me how these patients attempted to keep their image
of their ''bad parents'' intact, and why they needed to do so. I think I
managed to communicate some of this awareness to my patient, with
the result that qualitative changes did seem to take place in his uncon­
scious techniques of trying to maintain psychic equilibrium, and there
 A PATIENT'S UNCONSCIOUS NEED TO HAVE "BAD PARENTS" 75

seemed to be a decrease in his use of omnipotence to control his

relationships and his environment. I would like to describe this session
in detail so that those with different theoretical frames of reference may
more easily translate the ideas I am putting forward into their own
conceptual terms.

A session
I have tried to reconstruct this session from detailed notes that I took
immedia.tely afterwards, but my impression is that the patient said
more than I have been able to remember. My patient started by saying 1
''I feel that there is an irritable and cantankerous version of 1'1'1e that is
getting more and more active. This self is no longer satisfied with the
statits qi,1.0 that has been in force for years. This statits qito is based on the
assumption that I can't do things and this me keeps on challenging this
assumption. And that is not the only unusual thing that has happened
to me lately I have had some very odd experiences with regard to
space and time. I found myself at breakfast trying to do two things at
once, trying to pick up the toast and the butter at the same time, and I
found my hand going between the two objects, and unable to move
towards one or the other.''
I said, ''The p. art of you that is wanting to get better, and is in
alliance with me, is fed up with the way you are kept unable to move
towards what you want. This is the status quo that you spoke of, and it
seems to me that the reason why you can't move to grasp either of the
objects that you wish for is that you have put your own baby hungry
mouth into both of them, and as you unconsciously believe that there is
only enough food for one mouth i.e. you can only do one thing at a
time the other will starve and probably die. This is one reason why
you have had to preserve the status quo, because if it is upset, it would
mean that one part of you, or one of your selves, would be abandoned
for ever and die of starvation."
My patient continued, ''That reminds me of another odd experience
that I had with time. I was working at decorating my house one
evening, when it suddenly struck me that it was lunch-time. I felt quite
sure that it was. For a while I felt that I was 'out of time'. It was a most
reassuring and gratifying experience, and it came as a great relief. It
seemed very important that I could go back in time and feel it as the
present!''
I interpreted, ''What you have missed in the past you feel that you
can now have in the present as if it was present. I think that this meal
76 A PSYCHOANALYST AT WORK CLINICAL ISSUES

that you can go back to is the experience of the good feed from your
mother which you are now able to feel that I can give you in analysis,
even though it was originally in the past. When you feel that you ha·ve
access to me as this good mother, who can hold you 'out of time' that
is, in your unconscious inner world then the experience of having to
choose is not so devastating, and waiting becomes easier: the meal is
still there for the future."
''Yes," said my patient, ''it does seem like that. But the trouble is
that I feel that I present different versions of myself to different people,
based on what I think that each of them wan.ts, needs, or expects me to
be. I seem to feel that it is desperately important to please people, yet so
often when I want to please them I upset them.'' I remembered my
experience with him of being imprisoned in a role unable to make use
of my own personality and creative capacities, so I said, ''Perhaps you
do not succeed in pleasing these people because your image of the
person whom you are trying to please is not really that person at all."
'"That reminds me," he said, ''I saw my new boss today. We were
good friends before I joined his department, but I was horrified to find
that I was at a loss for words with him, just as I used to be with my
previous boss. It was just like finding myself fitting into a pattern of
behaviour and being unable to do anything about it!''
I began to feel hopeless about his capacity to change, and a mood of
irritation seemed to invade me, which I had often experienced in the
past, and which had frequently led me to the thought that he really was
beyond help. But he continued, ''I used to do this with my father. I
turned into a diffident, not very bright boy, when he spoke to me. Of
course, myfather woitld get fttrious as he could not standfailure or sti1.pidity.
But I must make a go of this new job. I was horrified to see the change
in my behaviour! Previously, I had been on good terms and quite at
ease with this man. The danger is that I am relying on magic to make it
work!''
It seemed obvious to me that unconscious forces were responsible
for this change in his behaviour. I had felt in the past, when he had
described his behaviour towards his father, that his father's behavioitr
had set the pattern for this behaviour. But now I realized how in current
situations his behaviour changed first, and I started to look at the
situation from another angle. I began to suspect that what he called
''his magic'' was related to the pattern of behaviour that he evoked in other
people. I therefore made the following interpretation in an attempt to
pick up the positive function of this mechanism as well as its defensive
function.
 A PATIENT'S UNCONSCIOUS NEED TO HAVE "BAD PARENTS" 77

I said, ''I think that by behaving to these bosses as you behaved to

your father you are trying to re-create the father of your childhood
with your magic in the hope that this ti1ne he will be turned into the
idea.I father you wish that he had been, who will be under your control
and will appreciate and support you."
He went on, ''Oh, talking of control, tha.t reminds me: my nephew,
George came to see me the other day. You know, I think that he destroys
people, things, and relationships by not carin g, by having no enthusi-
asm.''
This comment struck me immediately as a description of his own
behaviour in the past, both in analysis and with his parents and friends.
Furthermore, I was very aware how he identified himself with his
nephew, so I realized that he was commenting on one of his own selves.
''I have made several attempts to help him," he went on, '' and I
have tried to get jobs for him. The trouble is that he is always being
turned down. I found out that this was because he did not show up
very well at interviews. I told him that I would try to help him to
develop an interview technique, so that he could present a more fa­
vourable impression of himself to his prospective employer. George
would not show any enthusiasm, and he said that it was dishonest to
try to show feelings that he had not got. I could not see why he should
be so worried about honesty and so smug about it!''
In view of my ''affective response'' to the patient's similar behav­
iour to me, I said, ''I wonder how you were feeling when all this was
going on?''
''Oh, I was furious," he said, ''I sent him away. I did not want
anything more to do with him. He showed no gratitude that I was
trying to help him. And yet, I could see that he was also a child
screaming for help!''
I said, ''You know that in describing George's attitude and behav­
iour to you, I think that you have also been telling me how the sullen,
uncooperative version of yourself has behaved to me in analysis. It is
this version of yourself which has been irritating you, and of which
you were complaining at the beginning of the session, because it
worked on the assumption that you were bound to be a failure."
''I think that you are right'', he replied. ''It is true that there have
been long periods when I maintained that I hadn't any feelings and
that it was dishonest to pretend that I had, and that I could not be
helped and would never change. I must have made you really furious!
I must say that I am grateful to you for not getting fed up with me
and writing me off as hopeless. I realize now what I mi,st l1ave felt Like. I
78 A PSYCHOANALYST AT WORK CLINICAL ISSUES

suppose you saw the screaming child in me and realized that, what­
ever I said, I did need help. I think that my mother saw it, too. It makes
me feel both humble and sad.''
I replied, ''I think that you unconsciously needed to keep me use­
less by continuing to be a 'failure', so that you could feel that I was
under your control. You keep me as the bad, useless, analyst-parent
whom you were quite justified in hating and treating with contempt. If
I and your parents are bad, then who could blame the screaming child,
you, for the damage you may be doing with your attacks on us? It
seems from what you have said today that the magic whicfz you itse to
keep t/tze status quo goi11.g is th.e behaviour pattern which yoit desc·ribed George
as using, i.e. not caring, or feeling for others, lack of gratitude or enthu­
siasm. So that, even though I or your parents may want to help you, as
you did George, your behaviour is such that it is very difficult to help
you. I am fixed in a pattern of behaviour, and like you I cannot do
anything about it. When your father got fed up and withdrew from
you, you could feel that he really was bad, but what has not been clear
before now is your unconscious need to drive him away, to keep him
bad, and a failure as a father. This is your magic that you are afraid that
I will take away from you, because you feel that without it the scream­
ing infant part of you will be helpless. I think that it has been very
difficult for you to see what you were unconsciously doing to me, as
this father, because you also felt him to be so injured and starved by
your depriving behaviour that you dare not look at him. Furthermore, I
think that you felt that he and I must be as angry with you as you felt
angry with George. Perhaps you have been able to bring this material
to analysis today because you are beginning to believe that the good
experiences linked with good satisfying parents, from your past, are
also accessible to you now in the present, and that they survived your
angry and helpless feelings.''
My patient was thoughtful and then he said, ''You know, that
seems to make sense to me''. He was silent, as though he was trying to
assimilate what had been going on, and then he said, ''I am thinking of
the beauty that comes through strength. It is a kind of completeness.
There is something very satisfying about it.'' After another pause he
said, ''I feel that I have a sudden moment of lucidity, and I now have
the thought, 'I'd love to go to a museum'."
I asked, ''What kind of museum?'' and he replied, ''Oh, it's a natural
history museum. I suppose that it must be connected with my old
fantasies of 'the skeletons' and 'the Hide'!'' (The latter was a fantasy of
an animal skin, which was stretched out over an object that turned out
 A PATIENT'S UNCONSCIOUS NEED TO HAVE "BAD PARENTS" 79

to be the parental bed containing his parents in intercourse; the animal

skin vibrated, and he felt that it was ''death to touch it''.)
I said, ''I think that you feel that you have now found some place
inside yourself where you can safely put your images of the primitive
and archaic parents of your childhood, which then seemed like prehis­
toric monsters to the little-boy you. In this 'museum' part of you they
can be kept complete, not in bits, and safe, for they were also once
important to you in your natural history, when you were growing up.
I think that the feeling of satisfaction came because if you now have an
appropriate place to keep them within you, you will not need to deal
with them by turning other people into them, as you tried to turn your
boss into the father of your childhood. In choosing a museum, you
chose a place in which you can wander safely around and look at
objects from different angles, as I think you have been doing in the
session today when you looked at me and your parents from a differ­
ent point of view, and also you can see beauty and completeness in
what you have previously felt as retaliating and terrifying."
He said, ''I think that you have got something there. I now realize
why museums have been so important in my fantasies and day­
dreams. You can get the best from the past without being terrified ·by
it." As he got up to go, he said, ''I really feel that we have got some­
where today. Thank you!''

Comments on this session

I felt that in this session my patient became aware of how he had been
behaving towards me and, through me, in the transference, towards
his parents and friends in a way that he had been unable to do before.
It had seemed that, previously, he had unconsciously needed to keep
alive in his present the myth of unsatisfactory parents, so that he never
had to see the good (or bad) in his real parents, or in other parent­
surrogates, or to see that they were real people, who as well as failing
him at times, also had good feelings for him. If he saw them as good
parents at all, he might have to take responsibility for the real and
phantasied hurts that he had done them, as well as to accept his own
vulnerability, and this had, I think, been too painful for him to risk
with his weakened ego resources.
These images of bad parents were projected onto current parent­
surrogates, and they became a screen or a barrier between him and his
real parents and, indeed, between himself and any person with
whom he made a relationship. This screen inevitably resulted in their
80 A PSYCHOANALYST AT WORK CLINICAL ISSUES

being starved of satisfaction, as there was no feedback through it to

them. Looked at from this point of view, these images of ''bad'' parents
were a defence against the experience of gitilt, for he behaved in such a
way as to get the behaviour and reactions that he unconsciously
wanted, to make it possible for him to justify the continuation of his
attitude towards them, although he also wished to get sympathy and
help from his environment.
Thus the real parent figure has to be masked by this pitppet-parent
figure that comes into being in reaction to his behaviour. But the patient is
in a dilemma, for he also needs to be loved, cared for, and fed in order
to survive, and this is where he has to start developing a ''placati1ig-self'
to please the parent figure and to woo it into looking after him, in spite
of the patient having refused to give the parent any ''feedback'' or the
satisfaction of feeling that what they have done is worthwhile. It will
be remembered that my patient talked of the ''desperate importance of
pleasing people''. One of the difficulties that these patients get into is
that after a while, they really do start to convince people whom they
behave towards in this way that they are the cause of their continued
illness, or unhappiness. These people, in their turn, become guilty (and
they usually have something to be guilty about), and they react in
one of two ways; either they carry on with a sense of resentment and
because it is their duty, or else they do what my patient did to his
nephew, when he withdrew, not wanting anything more to do with
him. He felt that George was a danger to him, that he made him feel
helpless, and therefore he gave up the attempt to help him. My patient
was usually more skilful than his nephew and managed to steer a more
even path between having to give up his ''bad parents'' and being
absolutely disowned by them. I think that he managed to compromise
by splitting and by feeling himself to be two people, while George,
whom he often envied, was blatantly delinquent.
But these ''bad parent'' figures are held on to with such tenacity for
other additional reasons that are, I think, more fundamental. First,
these patients, both in their lives and in their analyses, are involved in
what feels to them like a life-and-death struggle to establish magi,cal
omnipote1it control over their objects and their environment, as they
really believe that this is the only way to survive and to maintain the
safety and coherence of their ego. Their unconscious assumption is that
if only they could establish this omnipotent control over their objects,
they would never again have to suffer pain, anxiety, frustration, or
fear. When they feel that they actually can control the beliaviour of these
 A PATIENT'S UNCONSCIOUS NEED TO HAVE "BAD PARENTS" 81

objects (parents), this is the first step towards the complete control of
them, and of the whole of the patient's world. So that by actually
affecting his parents and others, the patient builds up and reinforces
his belief in the potency of his own omnipotence. He must be all­
powerful because his parent actually does change as a result of his
wishes, thoughts, and behaviour. Second, they use omnipotent mecha­
nisms and beliefs to protect their '' good'' external and internal objects
and relationships, even when they consciously deny their existence, so
that they feel that the safety of their ''good'' objects can also only be
guaranteed by the use of omnipotent mechanisms. To give up the use
of these primitive infantile mechanisms would be to risk abandoning
these valued objects and parts of the self to the ruthlessness of their
own and other people's destructive impulses. Looked at from this point
of view, anyone analyst included who attempted to belittle the effi­
cacy of the patient's omnipotence was ''bad'', in that they were felt to
be threatening all that he unconsciously valued.
In the past, the experience of success in these activities had given
my patient a terrifying sense of power. He had moods when he felt he
was Christ, and much of the time he felt that he was superhuman. He
had to keep this powerfulness under control by means of massive
inhibitions and phobic behaviour that literally made any action an
enormous labour. Thus the elation that he experienced when he really
thought that he had got his object under control was followed by an
intense disillusion and depression, caused not only from the operation
of the inhibitory mechanisms, but due to the disappointment that he
was not, as he had unconsciously hoped that he would be, protected
from anxiety for ever.
Unfortunately for themselves, the motto of these patients is, ''If you
don't at first succeed, try, try, try again'' and not ''try another way''.
They rush to a renewed bout of placatory activity that is unrelated to
the needs and wishes of their true selves, so that any reparative or
loving behaviour that they may indulge in is felt as reactive or forced
on them from outside, and therefore they do not have the experience of
any integrative realignment of forces within their own inner world. And as
the parent-image that they believe they are placating is not their parent
or parent-surrogate as he or she actually is, but a ''puppet-parent'' come
into being in reaction to his behaviour, we get the situation where a
placating or false self of the patient confronts this puppet-parent or parent­
surrogate, and the resitlt is a stalemate. What should have led to immortal­
ity and a superhuman state of existence has actually led to a state of
82 A PSYCHOANALYST AT WORK CLINICAL ISSUES

existence in which he is denied the benefits of being human. He can

neither be hu1nan nor have a real parent.
These were some of the thoughts that came to me after the session
that I have reported. It now became clearer why I was having the
particular experiences that I described earlier in this paper, and which
occurred so strongly during the phases of his analysis when he was
withdrawn and out of contact with me and with part of himself. I was
being turned into this ''puppet-parent'', and, in the same way that his
parents and most of his women friends had been, I was really made to
feel like a puppet, cut off from access to my real spontaneous self, from
my own sources of creativity from which I could have helped him, and
from the patterning of my past experience from which I drew, among
other things, my analytic skills.
I now realized that it was not until we had uncovered this whole
process, and the patient had been able to see that he had used me and
other people in this way, that there was any chance of helping him to
give up operating on the basis of his belief in infantile omnipotence
and to operate on the reality prin.ciple, and so permit the basic split
within his personality to begin to heal. What struck me as particularly
interesting in this connection wa.s the patient's experience of confusion
with time and space, as well as the integrative experience of ''being out
of time'' and being able to relate psychically, and in a. satisfying way, to
what was in the past. In other words, I think that he was able to
experience the security that exists from a recognition of the reality of
psychic processes as an alternative to a magical omnipotent control of
phantasy and external physical reality, which had so far been the only
possibility his unconscious had been aware of. Furthermore, once pa­
tients can begin to relate psychically to what is in the past, they can
begin to give up feeling that time is a persecutor, merely depriving them
of what they have, and they can begin to experience time as a protector
that will also bring back to them that which they have temporarily had
to give up. They gradually change from expecting security from the
maintenance of the status quo to experiencing security from being part
of the process of living and growing. And, paradoxically enough, they
can then begin to appreciate the present, which they can only really
tolerate when they cease to be afraid of the past. This patient had had
particular trouble in dealing with separations. The absent person just
did not exist for him, and it was only very slowly during his analysis
that he envisaged me as existing during holiday breaks. I was therefore
particularly interested that this session started off with these changes
 A PATIENT'S UNCONSCIOUS NEED TO HAVE "BAD PARENTS" 83

in his relationship with time, which I think had to take place before it
was safe for him to start abandoning this last stronghold of his infantile
omnipotence, this archaic relationship between his placating self and
these puppet-parents.
He continued coming to analysis for another year after this session,
and much fascinating material emerged, particularly in connection
with the integration of his two selves. One interesting development
was when he dreamt that he was having one of his ''fits'' instead of
needing to somatize the anxiety and to act it out. It seemed to me that
he had become able to use intrapsychic mechanisms for discharging
and assimilating the tension. About six months after this session, his
father, who had not been in good health for some time, had a stroke.
He was taken to hospital, and my patient asked him to agree that when
he was well enough to leave hospital, he would go and live with his
mother again, as it was obvious that he would always be a semi­
invalid. His father said that he would do so if my patient wanted him
to. My patient was very touched and overwhelmed that his father
would give way to him on such an issue. Unfortunately, his father did
not recover, so that he never actually managed to unite his parents
under the same roof, though I think that he had permitted them, to
come together inside himself, in a loving relationship. He was able to
weep in his session following the news of his father's death, which was
something he had always felt was utterly impossible. His father left
him and his sister a large sum of money. He was most surprised and
able to be genuinely sad that he had been too ill to be able to appreciate
his father as a person in his own right. He now felt that they would
have got on well together.

Discussion of this mechanism

I have described this mechanism in some detail because I have ob­
served that many patients employ it from time to time, though not in
such a gross way as the patient whose material I have presented.
Furthermore, I have confined myself to a report of the phenomenology
of this mechanism and to the use of descriptive rather than metapsycho­
logical concepts, as I wanted to convey the ebb and flow between
process and mechanism, which might well have got blurred if I had
used only the language of metapsychology. There are, however, two
theoretical questions I would finally like to discuss: ''What are the
precipitating conditions for this pattern of behaviour?'' and ''What
84 A PSYCHOANALYST AT WORK CLINICAL ISSUES

intrapsychic changes are necessary before this pathological mecha­

nism can be safely abandoned?''
When my patient said ''Goodbye'' to his Nanny, he told me that
something snapped inside him and he decided that he would never
love again. This was obviously a repetition in later life of events in his
infancy, which included sudden weaning on account of his mother's
illness, when he was 6 weeks old. Thus I would postulate as a hypoth­
esis that these patients suffer from some early trauma, associated with
their relationship with their parents and that may well be cumulative
(Khan, 1963). One way these patients try to deal with this trauma is by
encapsulating within themselves an idealized ''good'' object/parent (with
whom no ordinary human being can successfully compete), which
must be kept inviolate from their destructive impulses. These ''encap­
sulated good parents'' are felt to be under their control and safe, all bad
or unsatisfactory experiences being attributed to the external figures.
This patient, having thus severed himself from loving parent figures,
finds he can easily evoke from his parents and his Nanny emotions of
anger and disappointment, and the pain of being disapproved of was
easily balanced by the conscious, as well as the unconscious, gloating,
at the moment of triumph, that his infantile magic could control his
environment.
But as external figures do not always fit in with the unconscious
needs of these patients, despite the behavioural manoeuvres to evoke
the required responses, these patients cathect a false or pathological ego­
stri,ctitre (mechanism) to ensure that only those facts are perceived that
fit in with these unconscious needs and phantasies. This faulty ego­
structure leads, inevitably, to impaired reality-testing. Thus a ''closed
system'' is established, which operates in a circular or sell-perpetuat­
ing manner. Reality, both intrapsychic and interpersonal, has to be
denied; the patient is thus cut off from the appropriate affect, so that
no ''feedback'' mechanism is available. With the denial of reality, he
withdraws his cathexis of external objects, and, instead, a cathexis of
phantasy life occurs. For years, this patient had maintained that his
day-dreaming and fantasy existence was much more excitin.g than any
experience he had had in physical reality. It is significant to note in this
connection that masochistic features were strongly marked in this
patient and were accompanied by a strange lack of concern and disso­
ciation from reality.
From a maturational standpoint, a certain capacity to repress, to
displace, and to use other defensive techniques is essential for normal
growth, because these are also mechanisms of adjustment and adapta-
 A PATIENT'S UNCONSCIOUS NEED TO HAVE "BAD PARENTS" 85

tion, which the infant uses to prevent itself being overwhelmed by

intolerable and un-assimilable impulses and conflicts. If the infant's
phase-adequate capacity to tolerate frustration is low, and if his own
impulses and conflicts are increased by parental anxieties, then what
were processes of perception and adaptation may become pathological
mechanisms.
Segal (1963) distinguishes between pathological and normal repre -
sion. Any mechanism of adaptation can become pathological when it is
not ''phase-adequate''. When anxieties of psychotic intensity motivate
these mechanisms of adaptation and defence, rigid structurization and
compartmentalization may occur within the ego. This condition is not
conducive to ego-growth and can only be dealt with by the denial of
the real self (which is severely impoverished under these conditions)
and the bttilding-up of compliant selves that have no relation to inner
growth needs, but only to defensive needs and the placating of external
figures.
To alter this state of affairs involves the re-acceptance of the dissoci­
ated and repressed aspects of the self. Tl1is is a difficult task, as they are
not only widely projected onto objects and persons in the environment,
but are composed of archaic objects and object relations that are con­
trolled by infantile magic and omnipotent mechanisms, awareness of
which usually arouses anxiety of psychotic intensity. These archaic
object-relations and affects have to be experienced within the transfer­
ence, and discriminated from mature object-relations. One occasion
when this happened in my patient was with the aid of his experience
with his nephew. He could now fruitfully use his adult ego functions
and processes to tolerate and understand anxieties that had previously
compelled him to take recourse to extremely pathological defence
mechanisms of a primitive type. This change entailed the sorting out of
two different types of psychic reality. The first was a psychic reality
based on a belief in infantile omnipotence which made it unnecessary
for the ego to distinguish between what is internal and what is external
to the patient, and which therefore enabled the ego to refuse to accept a
boundary or separateness. This has to be abandoned in favour of a
'' psychic reality'' that is an imaginative elaboration of instincts, as well
as of actual experiences in external reality. In my patient, this change
involved his giving up what he called ''his magic'' and learning the use
of his own body and perceptual capacities and accepting the limita­
tions and possibilities of being human.
When the parent-child setting is such that a warm, loving, parental
response can be evoked in consistent and understandable circum-
86 A PSYCHOANALYST AT WORK CLINICAL ISSUES

stances, and displeased responses also in appropriate situations, the

child can build up a pattern of expectations on the basis of which he
can gradually feel secure enough for his ego to participate in a creative
interaction with his setting. The experience of being understood, loved,
and fed in a relationship that he can rely on, even when angry, makes
it possible for the healthy infant to give up his reliance on and belief in
infantile omnipotence. The regenerative quality of actual experiencfJ-e -
actually loving and actually doing something is much more integra­
tive to the ego than thinking about it, and it gives a new experience of
a different kind of power that makes it no longer necessary to be
omnipotent. Parents, events, and objects become allies.
It is interesting that following each analytic advance, this patient
had some experience of intense clarity of perception, as though he
were discovering anew the world from which he had previously been
cut off. This would fit in with the hypothesis that the mechanism I was
describing could be seen in terms of a distortion of ego perception. The
perception of the object was distorted to fit these stereotyped images of
''bad'' parents, or an unsatisfactory environment, which would there­
fore perpetuate his unconscious belief in his unconscious phantasy
systems. One would therefore expect that as this and other patients
become able to give up this particular mechanism, changes in the
accuracy and extent of their perceptual capacities would occur, which
can reasonably be taken as evidence that changes were occurring in the
patient's ego-structure and that he was becoming able to cathect exter­
nal objects and object relationships. In this connection, the session that
followed the one I have reported is interesting, and I would like to give
the first part of it as a postscript.

Postscript
As he came into my room, he said, ''You have got a new picture''
(which I hadn't), ''or have I just noticed it? I am beginning to become
aware of all sorts of things I had not noticed before. I was worried
when I spoke to you on the phone (he had had to change his time). I
thought you said that someone had died, and I did not show any
concern. I felt after I rang off that I had been rather callous. You know,
I have really been able to be aggressive and stand up to my old boss, B,
and oppose him. It was at a selection committee, and B challenged my
statement about a candidate. I said that I felt intuitively that what I
thought about him was true, and if I thought this then other people
might think so too, as they will also judge him intuitively. B actually
 A PATIENT'S UNCONSCIOUS NEED TO HAVE "BAD PARENTS" 87

agreed that this was valid." (This kind of behaviour was almost un­
known before.) ''I felt I was a·ble to be aggressive because I had taken a
sleeping-pill the night before." I said that ''he would like to believe it
was the sleeping-pill because he could still feel that this was his magic
that was working for him, rather than that there had been any change
in him''. He replied, ''It all seems too neat and fits together too well. It
is very frightening to feel I might have changed that much." I said,
''You want me to know how frightening it is to think that you are not
having to use magical ways of getting angry in your mind to control
your boss-father. You can actually stand up against this boss-father
and find out that he respects you and changes his opinions because of
you. Instead of being annihilated as you expected would happen to
you in the past, you have been able to experience a new kind of power
and feeling of security.''

Summary

In this paper I have tried to show how, when treating patients of the
type I have described, I was able to use my perception of my own
emotional responses and changes in mood (chapter 6) as an important
tool for my understanding of the subtle distortions and double-binds
arising from their unconscious need to control their parents and par­
ent-surrogates by projecting onto them this mask-like image of bad
parents in which their objects were ''imprisoned'', with the consequent
retardation and impoverishment of their own emotional and ego de­
velopment. If I had labelled my reactions to these patients as counter­
transference phenomena (Heimann, 1960) which only related to my
own neurotic reactions to the patients' transference and which I should
not have been experiencing, then I would have cut myself off from a
source of understanding without which I would have been unable to
tease out this particular mechanism, which had been used so effec­
tively by these patients.