. . . he who remains passive when overwhelmed with grief loses his best chance of recovering elasticity of mind.
CHARLES DARWIN, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
IN CONSIDERING THE theoretical implications of Geraldine’s case, a main feature to be noted is the strong contrast between the apparently composed and self-assured Geraldine of the first couple of years of therapy, a girl who expressed little emotion and gave little away, and the Geraldine of the later years who, after breaking down emotionally, described tearfully all the painful feeling she had experienced at the time of her mother’s death and after it, her intense loneliness and how, more than anything else, she now wanted someone to hold her tight and ‘really mean it’. Thereafter, instead of remaining aloof, she became intensely attached to her therapist, sought her love and company and was angry whenever she was away.
Of the many ways in which Geraldine’s original condition might be conceptualized the one closest to the data, I believe, is to regard her as being like Mr G (Chapter 12), namely possessed of two ‘selves’, or Principal Systems as I am terming them. During the first two years of therapy the governing system and the one having free access to consciousness was a system from which almost every element of attachment behaviour was excluded. Not only were all forms of the behaviour itself missing but missing too were all desire and longing for love and care, all memory of her bond to her mother, and all the disappointment, the misery and the anger that any ordinary human being feels when such desires go for long unrequited. Yet there is ample evidence that, coexistent with this governing Principal System, there was another Principal System, segregated from it and unconscious, in which belonged all the missing elements, including all her personal, autobiographical, memories.1 Although this segregated system was for most of the time in a state of deactivation, occasionally it found expression.
Almost always when Geraldine visited her therapist during the first two years this segregated system remained inert. There were, none the less, a few occasions when signs of its activity were to be seen. For example, there were two occasions during the early months of therapy when her therapist was away and Geraldine became angry. On the first of these occasions she directed her anger towards her father whom she accused of neglecting her, and on the second towards her schoolmates. On the second occasion, in addition, she became depressed and wept. Signs of the activity of the segregated system were to be seen also on the fourth anniversary of her mother’s death and at the time of President Kennedy’s funeral. Finally, on the fifth anniversary of her mother’s death Geraldine truanted from school, made a suicidal gesture, and finally, during her therapeutic session, broke down in tears. Thereafter the system previously deactivated and segregated came slowly to life again.
Whenever a system that has been deactivated becomes in some degree active, such behaviour as is then shown is likely to be ill-organized and dysfunctional. Examples are the outbursts of angry behaviour exhibited by Geraldine when her therapist went away which, instead of being directed against the therapist, were directed against third parties. Another and more dramatic example, it seems probable, is to be seen in the episode of her wandering which, following Stengel’s studies of fugue states, I am tentatively interpreting as having been an expression of her desire to find her dead mother.
The following account of one of Stengel’s patients, to whom I refer as Miss B, given mainly in his own words and taken from his paper of 1941, illustrates the thesis.
Miss B was a girl of seventeen when ‘she experienced for the first time an irresistible urge to leave the house and to stay in the open. She was always obliged to yield to this impulse unless she was locked up. This urge recurred four or five times a year for the next two years. As a rule she did not wander far, but lay down in a garden on the outskirts of the city and slept for eight to twelve hours, after which she returned home, apparently quite well. She obeyed this urge regardless of the weather, sleeping in the open in spite of snow or rain. On several occasions she entered a certain garden where she knew she would find an empty wooden trough. She would lie and sleep in this trough during the compulsive attacks, which usually occurred in the afternoon, leaving it for home just after dawn . . . The patient was of normal intelligence, and did not show any signs of organic disturbance.’
As a wealth of evidence showed, in these apparently irrational acts Miss B was still seeking her lost mother who had died 14 years earlier when she was aged 3.2 ‘Her mother has often appeared to her in stereotypical dreams at the onset of menstrual periods. In these dreams she sees her mother lying dead. The dreams occur more frequently but not invariably when she has been prevented from leaving the house in response to compulsion. This dream is a regular accompaniment of sleep in the open. When she sleeps in the open she usually feels as if she were lying on the grave of her mother. While wandering in the open she longs to be dead like her mother. She is given to daydreams in which she imagines that perhaps her mother is not dead but alive, and that she may find her some day.’
In terms of the concepts I am using, it can be said that in this girl, as in Geraldine, two Principal Systems of behaviour, thought, feeling and memory are present but segregated. On the one hand is a system, the one governing her everyday life, that takes for granted that she has neither mother nor, perhaps, any other attachment figure and that she therefore has no option but to fend for herself. On the other is a system, largely deactivated and with only marginal access to consciousness, that is organized on the assumption that her mother is still accessible and that, somehow, she can either be recovered in this world or else joined in the next. This latter system, to which it seems likely all her attachment desires, feelings and personal memories belong, provided only fragmentary evidence of its existence. Yet it was not completely inert. Not only did it influence all Miss B’s day and night dreams but from time to time it influenced also her behaviour; and it did so in ways that made her appear crazy to observers ignorant of its premises.
In each of these patients, it should be noted, the system that is segregated and unconscious is an organized one and no less self-consistent than is the system with free access to action and consciousness. Furthermore, the segregated system is characterized by all those cognitive and affective elements that qualify it to be regarded as mental, namely desire, thought, feeling and memory. From time to time, also, when it takes control of behaviour, the segregated system shows itself to be so organized with reference to persons and objects in the environment that it is capable of framing plans and executing them, albeit in rather clumsy and ineffective ways. A main reason for this inefficiency, it is postulated, is that the system, being largely deactivated (by means of the defensive exclusion of virtually any sensory inflow that might activate it), is denied access to consciousness with the many benefits that brings.
One feature of the Principal System that was segregated in Geraldine (and probably also of the segregated system in Miss B), and a feature of the greatest importance to clinicians, is the intensity of feeling aroused once the system becomes fully active again and obtains access to consciousness. When on the fifth anniversary of her mother’s death this occurred, Geraldine broke down in tears and expressed the strongest of desires for a close relationship with her therapist in which she would be held tight by someone who really meant it. To her therapist, for long kept at a distance, it must have seemed as though a dam had burst and that Geraldine was flooded with emotion.
Expressive though this type of hydraulic metaphor is when used in clinical discussion and valuable too in emphasizing the intensity of feeling aroused, it is extremely misleading when used as a basis for theory construction. On the one hand, the metaphor has encouraged theories which postulate quantities of psychic energy and quantities of affect as causal agents in mental life, and which I believe have proved scientifically unproductive; on the other, by concentrating exclusively on emotion (or affect), the metaphor has diverted attention from all the other features of the system being kept segregated, namely the specific patterns of behaviour that go to make up attachment behaviour together with the desires, thoughts, working models and personal memories integral to them. In the theory now advanced, therefore, there is no place for quantities of unstructured affect which are being kept dammed up.
It was noted that both in Geraldine and in Miss B a special feature of the segregated system is that it had virtually no access to consciousness. In other cases of disordered mourning, however, that is not so. In such people the system that continues to be oriented towards the person lost and seeks to recover him may be fully conscious and in a normal state of activation, although kept secret. An example is Mrs Q who, after her father’s death in hospital, organized her thoughts, feelings and behaviour in two distinct ways. On the one hand, she believed that her father was dead and organized her life accordingly. On the other, she believed that the hospital had made a mistake and that her father was still alive; and she made secret plans to welcome him home again in due course see (Chapter 9). Thus, within a single personality there were two Principal Systems, organized on opposite premises, yet both of them active and conscious. (As previously noted it is to this condition that Freud (1927) applied the term ‘split in the ego’.) As a result, in Mrs Qas in Geraldine and Miss B, any behaviour that was an appropriate expression of one Principal System was either irrelevant to or in conflict with that appropriate to the other.
At this point a reader may perhaps object that as a way of illustrating the concept of segregated mental systems I have selected special and fairly rare examples of mental illness and, therefore, that the concept is of only restricted application. I do not think this is so. On the contrary, I believe the concept to be useful for understanding many and perhaps all the examples of prolonged absence of mourning portrayed in this volume, as well as cases of compulsive self-reliance and compulsive caregiving, further examples of which will be found in the next chapter.
1 In Chapter 4 it is suggested that these memories are stored sequentially in a distinctive format, termed by Tulving (1972) episodic storage.
2 She had never known her father who had been killed soon after she was born: after her mother’s death she is reported to have been brought up by ‘various foster-parents’.