DEPENDENCE/INDEPENDENCE
It is wonderful to be able to rely on others, but the design characteristics of the normal human seem to favor independent action as well as the linked behaviors associated with caregiving and affective interchange. Although babies are born helpless, each system that “comes on line” during the process of growth and development brings them closer to their adult range of abilities and further from the era of dependence.
The “universal” fear of abandonment is a relic from our days of complete dependence on the caregiver. Modern researchers of infancy have observed that the awake, alert baby spends about half its time playing by itself and the other half engaged with the caregiver. When interested in self-generated activity, the baby is apparently unconcerned that it is alone. Only when the presence of another person is required to serve some need or wish does it appear that one has been forsaken. The terror linked with the “concept” or the “idea” of abandonment is really a complex assemblage of fantasies colored by our associations to previous, perhaps infantile experience of being distressed or frightened when alone. The state of being alone is called “independent activity” when we are happy and “abandonment” when we are upset.
Throughout the long period of growth and development one sees change in the systems both of self involvement and of self-other involvement. Any definition of the normal adult must take into account the need for people to handle both solitude and communion.
Infants are fascinated by things they cannot control. They want to touch, taste, smell, and handle objects to which access is denied simply because they are at a distance. It is adults—or at least larger and more skillful children—on whom they must depend for transportation to those desired objects. Fascinated by its odor or color, a child may develop a passionate desire for some special food, but that food is available only if a caregiver provides it. Similarly, whatever the child can visualize and desire is accessible only to the extent that the caregivers are willing to provide that access.
We can’t exactly tune in on the thinking process of infants, but, watching them and listening to their mothers, we can conclude that babies sure seem to know what they want and are not shy about telling us. The demands of children, always amplified to urgency by affect, are the wishes of little people who are dependent on others. This is not unimportant to the child. From birth to adolescence, every smidgen of growth and development moves the child from the position of one who needs others for the accomplishment of its aims to one who is self-reliant. An event that represents self-reliance will bring pride, while one that suggests failure to mature (and therefore maintenance of the level of dependence more typical of smaller children) will act as an impediment to excitement or contentment and bring shame.
Each increase in size or power, each developmental acquisition, permits the child new opportunities to test and perhaps savor its growing skills and abilities. Each success brings some measure of pride, while each failure is capable of bringing shame. Every venture is a chance for pride or shame, which will then be linked to each of the three scales we have discussed so far. Success—at any age—tells us something about our size, our skill, and our growing degree of independence from those who previously have performed these tasks on our behalf. In normal development, independence is inextricably linked with pride. It is a measure of competence. Failure—at any age—tells us something about our size, our skill, and our dependence on others. It is a measure of incompetence, and therefore a major stimulus to shame.
This is not to say that independence is by definition good and dependence bad. Most of us enjoy being at least somewhat dependent on somebody; we like having someone to count on. “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main,” said John Donne. Truth be told, we are all more or less dependent on each other, some more than others. We live, as John F. Kennedy said, in a world of interdependence. The adult must find some balance between the helpless dependence on the whims of others characteristic of infants and slaves and the splendid isolation of the renegade or hermit. These are the decisions of adult life, ruled by the emotions and cognitions of adults.
How each of us adults feels about our position on the axis of dependence and independence is the result of long years of emotional development. Such attitudes are the result of having grown up in a particular family that lived in its distinct neighborhood within one or another city of some country. That family represented some specific culture or confluence of cultures. It lived during an era that valued some styles and attitudes and disvalued others. For each of us, the adult sociopolitical concept of dependence/independence is based on all these factors. I can feel proud of the fact that my corporation houses and feeds me and that all my needs and wants are served by a huge organization. Equally can I feel chronic and deepening shame that, in the words of the song made famous by Tennessee Ernie Ford, “I owe my soul to the company store.” In the adult, pride and shame can become attached to qualities and experiences quite opposite to the principles that obtain early in development.
So our progeny are likely to experience pleasure when the application of a newly acquired skill produces a novel burst of independence. A parent who greets with pleasure the burgeoning independence of a child will reinforce the linkage between that group of skills and childhood pride. One who experiences the same skills as a threat, or who sees danger in these new actions, will convey this information to the child in the form of some negative affect, like fear, anger, distress, dissmell, disgust, or even shame. The face of negative affect will be a daunting impediment to the juvenile expectation of the rewarding smile of parental enjoyment. Thus, parents who, for their own personal reasons, are made unhappy by childhood independence will foster the linkage of independence with shame, the painful affect triggered by impediment to ongoing positive affect.
There is, of course, much more than shame involved here, for the child must deal with the specific affect emanating from the caregiver as well as its own shame response. When, for instance, a mother is frightened by the implications of her toddler’s ability to wander away, it is her fear or her anger that greet the child. What occurs inside the child is a combination of shame (a response to this unexpected failure of maternal attunement) and fear—for the child must deal with the implications of the specific affect she is exhibiting. Any child who grows up with a mother who is frightened and angry about matters of autonomy will be liable to develop a peculiar emotional state in which the affects of shame and fear are bound together and linked to the idea of independence. In the example I have just given, the child develops a linkage between shame and fear that Tomkins calls a shame–fear bind.
These linkages have profound implications for the development of the affect–experience assemblages we term emotion, which characterize what for each of us is called our personality. Since shame affect works to interfere with our ability to commune with the object of our interest or enjoyment, it is an intrinsic instrument of isolation and withdrawal. Shame affect produces an involution into the self. It distances us from the other person—indeed, it punishes us for wanting communion with or connection to the impeding other. The younger the child, the more primitive will be its explanations of this type of shame experience.
The most profound forms of rejection known to the infant are the mechanisms of dissmell, which keeps its trigger at a great distance, and disgust, which sends to a great distance that which had originally been desired and acceptable. Suddenly rejected by the caregiver for behavior the child expected might bring pleasure, the humiliated child often sees itself as a dissmelling or disgusting object. In such manner do our early experiences of socialization, of immersion in the emotional systems of our parents, produce many linkages between the affect auxiliary of shame and the drive auxiliaries of dissmell and disgust.
Just as the child learns to associate maternal dissmell and disgust with the shame of soiling and to link the concepts of self-dissmell and self-disgust to the very idea of shame, the child shamed by its rejection for any behavior will tend to build a lexicon of self-related negative affect states characterized by a fusion of dissmell, disgust, and shame. By the time we get to adult life, shame affect has been so thoroughly fused with these other affects of rejection that, for all practical purposes, what we think of as a deep and abiding sense of personal shame is no longer shame affect as such, but the complex result of such fusion.
It is to this fusion of affects and ideas that the child attaches the label “bad.” I know of few emotional experiences more toxic than to feel completely deserving of rejection. Children, whose affective experiences are of vastly greater sophistication and complexity than can be represented in their beginners’ verbal language, think and express themselves in more global terms. “Good” is how I feel and what I am when I experience competence pleasure or when I feel loved for some other reason, and “bad” is how I feel and what I am when in this state of shame/dissmell/disgust. We carry these labels into adulthood from our own childhood and teach them to our children. They know what it feels like to be called bad; they know what it feels like to be called good. In the simplest possible terms, “good me” equals pride, and “bad me” equals shame.
Such an understanding of the paths along which children develop brings with it a new opportunity to figure out the root causes and some novel approaches to treatment for a whole group of adult emotional disturbances. The very success of the psychoanalytic method in treating illness stemming from inadequate resolution of the family romance Freud called the oedipal phase of development served to highlight those conditions in which such treatment failed with regularity. Foremost among these are what are now (in the language of Kernberg) called the “borderline illnesses,” a cluster of clinical conditions characterized by severe emotional instability, terrible intolerance for loneliness, crippling difficulties in forming close personal relationships, a deep sense of emptiness, and a chronic incapacity to develop a solid sense of self.
They are people who make passionate but brief and unstable relationships, who vary between heartwarming displays of personal openness and spiteful rage at what one might think a minor request for disclosure. Most of us know one or two people whose life history leads us to suspect that they fit into this diagnostic category. Every therapist has been humbled by the attempt to treat these high-energy patients. Clinicians who write about their successful work with borderline illness take for granted that the duration of treatment may be measured in decades rather than years. Although for many of these patients the relationship with a therapist is as unstable as any other, the key issues of abandonment, loneliness, personal disclosure, and the nature of identity are well tolerated within the system of relatedness characteristic of psychotherapy.
It seems obvious to anybody who has studied shame that the so-called “borderline illness” is little more than an exaggerated result of the interference in development to be expected when a child encounters severe impediments to positive affect while learning to be independent. “Borderlines” are shame-bound people loaded with self-dissmell and self-disgust. Often, their entire character structure is so deeply entwined with these complex forms of shame that a large part of the time spent in therapy is devoted to meticulous reconstruction of life events made painful by shame. The importance of shame in these cases is rivaled by few clinical conditions encountered in the practice of psychotherapy.
Most therapists are still unaware of the nature of shame, the importance of shame-based psychopathology, and the modes of treatment that free patients from shame-related complaints, so “borderline” patients frequently go from one therapist to another in search of relief. While I have no intention of minimizing the difficulty of these cases, those of us who understand this new language of affect report far fewer problems in treatment and a considerably shortened duration of psychotherapy.
Not surprisingly, most of the books and articles written about “borderline illness” neglect to mention shame, while few if any of the writers on shame think to group these patients in a special category. “Borderline illness” seems to be a wastebasket term for severely shame-damaged people, an observation made with especial vigor by Helen Block Lewis (1987). I am supported in this belief by the frequency with which my colleagues who study psychopharmacology report that depressed “borderlines” respond to the same group of medications (the MAOI and the fluoxetine group of antidepressants) that I find effective in shame-based depression. The more we know about affect, the more we are forced to revise our standards of diagnosis and our methods of treatment.
Families vary in their attitudes toward dependence and independence. A child whose mother can tolerate with ease the normal interplay of closeness and distance, who can handle a wide range of oscillation between intimacy and solitude, may encounter surprising intolerance to his or her wish to achieve the new level of freedom implied by the right to drive an automobile. Some families hold their children closely, releasing them only grudgingly into marriage, while others send them off to boarding school or summer camp as soon as possible. We can fight for independence from a clinging family by using pregnancy to force marriage, or we can enlist in military service to escape our milieu.
The range of variation is infinite, the number of styles of personality development immense. Yet throughout the long period of growth and development we see the importance of shame and pride in determining the meaning of independence and dependence for each individual person. It is to the nature of our personal identity that we will turn next, for shame and pride figure prominently in the development of the sense of self. Who is it that has been growing and developing, and how does the individual establish a sense of a “me” or an “I”? Instinctively, we know that shame forces us to think about ourselves, albeit about a defective self. Why should this be? How does the child form a self-concept, and how does this self-concept get to be so involved with shame and pride?