One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted –
One need not be a House –
The Brain has Corridors – surpassing
Material place –
EMILY DICKINSON
Do you identify at all with the idea of autobiographical incoherence?
I wonder: Does your own story add up? Is it freighted with idealization, or delusion, or fantasy?
What do we know about “autobiographical incoherence”? And what role does it play in our ability—or inability—to fully connect with ourselves and with other human beings?
It will help at this point to think back to our examination, in Chapter 2, of the scientific inquiry into the phenomenon of attachment—and attachment disorders—in the work of our friend Dr. John Bowlby. Well, in the early 1980s, two brilliant colleagues of Dr. Bowlby—Drs. Mary Main and Mary Ainsworth—made an exciting contribution to attachment research. They developed a questionnaire to administer to adults—a questionnaire that was meant to examine an adult’s attachment history and style, and to reliably determine whether his style was secure, anxious, avoidant, or disorganized. This questionnaire and the process of administering it became known as the Adult Attachment Interview (or AAI), and it is now considered an essential tool in evaluating attachment styles and issues. Over the last thirty years, the AAI has been through considerable refinement. It is now highly validated and considered an excellent tool for understanding attachment.
But here is what’s most pertinent to our conversation: Even early on in their work with the AAI, Main and Ainsworth discovered something fascinating. Adults whose attachment history is insecure have remarkably incoherent autobiographical narratives. (“Steve, your story does not add up.”) The stories they tell do not fit together in certain important ways: They are vague, inconsistent, and have large gaps. The stories they tell are strangely empty of believable detail. The stories they tell do not feel real to the interviewer.
The AAI is a semi-structured interview in which an adult is asked a series of questions about her own childhood: What was growing up like for you? How was your early relationship with each parent? Did you have significant experiences of separation? Were you often upset or fearful? Did you have significant early losses of love objects? Did your relationship with your parents change over time? How do you think these factors affected your own development?
The AA1 interview, once complete, is analyzed for a great number of factors, including overall coherence, unrealistic idealization of a parent, lack of recall of important details, anger, vagueness, fear, significant gaps in information, or obvious discontinuities. One important area of analysis is in the area of losses. Some individuals become extremely disorganized or even disoriented when talking about losses of family members by death or other means—especially, as it turns out, losses as a result of abuse. (Yes, abuse of various kinds triggers a complicated set of losses.)
A key component of the interviewing technique, say its developers, is “surprising the unconscious” of the interviewee by asking deep, penetrating questions about intimate attachment issues, including early memories and their interviewees’ reflections on the same. When confronted head-on, it turns out that interviewees themselves are often stunned by their story’s obvious lack of coherence. Just for a moment, they see the gaps in their recall. They feel dizzy.
In the safety of our chats, John had uncovered just what this more structured interview would likely have found about my own narrative: it was a grand cover-up.
Slowly, over the course of months of conversations in John’s study (with John reflecting me back to myself), I had to face a difficult and all-too-human fact: I did not understand myself at all. I didn’t understand my motivations, or many of my behaviors. In many important ways, I was a complete mystery to myself. For example, why on earth was I still in this relationship with David? This is an area John and I went over and over again. I was miserable. David was miserable. Our friends could barely stand the drama. What was the invisible force holding me in it? I didn’t have a clue. But I couldn’t leave. Nor could David. (This, of course, is powerful evidence for Fairbairn’s correction of Freud. Remember it? We are primarily object seeking, not pleasure seeking!)
And that was only the beginning: There was at that time also the question of my unresolved—and seemingly unresolvable—grief crisis, allegedly over the death of Uncle Bill. It slowly became clear to me that my body and mind were troubled with a grief I did not understand. It felt strangely as if the grief was not only about Uncle Bill, but about something else as well. Something much, much bigger. But what?
I cannot exaggerate how unsettling it was to grasp, even for a moment, the depth of my confusion. My own rendition of my life is a fantasy? Really? I cannot trust my own mind to get even the basic facts right?
“Ourself behind ourself, concealed – ” wrote Emily Dickinson, “should startle most.”
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The entire history of twentieth-century depth psychotherapy is, of course, based precisely on this discovery—the discovery that there is, indeed, “a self behind the self.” And that we have an epic capacity to avoid even the most obvious truth of things. We cannot see what is right in front of our faces. Indeed, it is not only twentieth-century psychology that made this discovery. All sophisticated psychological and spiritual traditions eventually must come to grips with the fact that we are driven by the movement of internal tectonic forces that we do not understand and over which we have no apparent control. The great teachers of the East knew it: “All men are quite deluded,” said the Buddha in the fourth century b.c.e.
Sigmund Freud understood that seeing through this murky world of hidden motivations is the powerful role of psychoanalysis. “Psychoanalysis,” he wrote, “is the study of self-deception.” As Freud pointed out, our lives have multiple unconscious tracks—tracks that often run in parallel, and not uncommonly actually run on collision courses. For example, we are capable of loving and hating the same person at the same time, of wishing for and fearing the same love object at the same time, of hoping for and dreading the same outcome. But here’s the catch, and it’s one you and I know well: In many cases, only one side of this polarity is conscious. That is to say, we are conscious of the fear, but not the wish; aware of the love, but not the hate; we see the hope, but not the dread. And it is, of course—always, always—the hidden parts that eventually trip us up.
Said Freud: We are all neurotic to one degree or another. And the very soul of neurosis is precisely these splits within the self. We have an alarming ability to deceive not only others, but—more injuriously—ourselves.
Emily Dickinson’s poem about the hidden self scared the hell out of me the first time I read it. Dickinson, the Belle of Amherst, had a way of getting her head around the darkest of human realities. (Freud himself never captured the potential terror—the “haunting”—of the hidden self as well as Dickinson did in this poem.)
One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted –
One need not be a House –
The Brain has Corridors – surpassing
Material Place –
Far safer, of a midnight meeting
External Ghost,
Than it’s interior confronting –
That cooler Host –
Far safer, through an Abbey gallop,
The Stones a’chase –
Than Unarmed, one’s a’self encounter –
In lonesome Place –
Ourself behind ourself, concealed –
Should startle most –
Assassin hid in our Apartment
Be Horror’s least –
The Body – borrows a Revolver –
He bolts the Door –
O’erlooking a superior spectre –
Or More –
As usual, Dickinson is dead serious. The prudent naturally carries a revolver, she observes. He bolts the door. But what about the hidden spectres already inside the room? The ghosts inside one’s own psyche?
Here, however, is some good news. As we mature, there is inevitably a slow awakening to the fact of this hidden self. It’s inevitable. The world itself unmasks us. We have glimpses of those parts of the self that we have been keeping under wraps. We are, in fact, as Freud so beautifully pointed out—really, finally, dramatically—incapable of containing these hidden and split-off parts. We are incapable of keeping a secret. If our lips do not speak it, Freud said, it screams out through our actions. Nietzsche famously observed the same psychological phenomenon, saying that those aspects of our self which we exile to the basement of consciousness, will come to us as fate—as the alien intruder. These hidden parts both startle and intrigue us. Our hidden parts sneak up on us. They reveal themselves in unaccountable behaviors.
For Freud, of course, these hidden parts were usually organized around sex and aggression. We exile our sexual desires from our awareness, and we inexorably end up acting them out. We have, for example, the preacher who is caught with his pants down in a motel room with a prostitute. He is aghast, and astounded at his own behavior. He faces the cameras, stunned. How did I get here? “I felt like there was an animal inside that I could not understand and I could not control,” he says in an interview.
Delusion! The self behind the self revealed. Startling.
John’s clear vision and his active mirroring had torn the scab off my delusion. This was unnerving to the young me.
But his confrontation had also revealed another truth. We can see the truth in others far more clearly than we can see it in ourselves. We—you and I—can readily see that the preacher’s behavior makes no sense whatsoever, can’t we? And, what’s more, we can see that it makes no sense well before he ends up in the motel with the prostitute. Why is he doing this, we wonder? Why in God’s name is he undermining his entire career?
Why can he not see?
Where do we even begin to unpack this mystery? How can we make sense of the hidden in our stories? And how can we reclaim these hidden parts?
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As it turns out, contemporary neuroscience has made headway in understanding the roots of incoherence in autobiographical narratives, and fractures in consciousness itself. We now know that coherence and integration, or lack thereof, have much to do with how we remember our lives, our experiences.
And what have we learned about this process?
Well, we now know that there are two types of memory: so-called implicit memory, and explicit memory.
Implicit memory is a kind of memory hidden deep in the body and the primitive structures of the mind. So deep and automatic is implicit memory, in fact, that it is available even before birth. The body encodes “important experiences” automatically, without being aware that it is having an experience, or that it is “remembering” anything at all. (“Important experiences,” by the way, are experiences that have an impact on survival, on continuity of the species, and on thriving.) But please understand: With implicit memory, there is absolutely no sense of time. No sense of sequence. No sense of memory. These memories are the waters in which our psyches swim. Do you see? Invisible.
Let’s take the child with an avoidant attachment disorder, for example. Repeated early experiences of deprivation and a lack of any fulfilling connection have left a deep impression on this child’s unconscious mind, and have contributed to the formation of a certain inner-but-unacknowledged model of the world, an expectation of how the world is. “Do not expect a satisfying experience of connection.” “People will abandon you.” “People cannot be relied upon. You will do better to rely upon yourself.” These mental models are completely unconscious. They are, as the theory states, implicit. They are the waters in which that avoidant soul swims.
Out of these unconsciously encoded experiences, the brain—the mind—creates unconscious mental models of the world. So the adult body of this child will automatically respond with a resounding no to any invitation to intimacy. No! Don’t want it! Not safe! The response is automatic—mediated by deep body memory. There is no sense of some earlier trauma being recalled. Let’s be clear here: There is no “Well, I had a tough experience with intimacy before, so I’d best be careful here.” No, it’s all automatic. Unconscious. These transactions happen outside of awareness. With these body reactions, there is no sense of time—of “then” and “now.” It is all happening now, just as it did before, but without any perspective, any subjective sense of recall. It just is the way things are.
Explicit memory is quite different. It is a later and more mature form of memory, not present until the second year of life. It has none of the qualities of automaticity and unconsciousness characteristic of implicit memory. Explicit memory is true autobiographical memory, which involves conscious awareness of the events being recalled, and includes a subjective sense of time and self. For example, Oh! I remember precisely how it felt that day at the beach when I was four years old—sitting with my mother, playing in the sand, and feeling the warmth of her presence next to me. Yes, I recall exactly how it felt. This was one of my first experiences of being alone in the presence of another. I remember it with a flood of emotions. It’s present now, but I remember that it happened before. There is a sense of time here. Of sequence. Of cause and effect.
As I have said, true autobiographical memory develops more completely during the second year of a child’s life, when he develops a kind of “cognitive mapper.” This “mapper” allows him to recall the order in which events in the world occur, and allows the child to develop a sense of time and of sequence. This cognitive mapper helps us to identify context and to create a multidimensional sense of a self existing in the world across time.
This cognitive mapper develops rapidly. Writes Dan Siegel, “By the middle of the third year of life, a child has already begun to join caregivers in mutually constructed tales woven from their real-life events and imaginings.” The self-knowing that results is enriched by the narratives that caregivers co-construct with the child. This is a critical point: The child’s sense of a rich internal subjective life, and an awareness of this internal life, is totally mediated through these co-constructed narratives. (We have already seen this in the chapters on twinship: the good-enough parent asks: “What was your day like? How did you feel when Bobby took that toy away from you on the playground? What did you do? What was effective? How might you handle this another time if it happens again, or something like it happens?” In effect, the parent or caregiver is asking, “Who do you want to be in the face of this kind of experience?”)
So, our relationships not only shape what we remember, but how we remember. Most dramatically, our deep human connections shape the very existence of a self that remembers.
True autobiographical memory, or “episodic” memory, then, both requires and contributes to a sense of personal consciousness, of “self-knowing” (psychologists call this self-knowing “autonoesis.”) Of course, this self-knowing is precisely what is not present in the context of the confused, disorganized, or dysfunctional family. What is not present in these families is precisely this quality of self-knowledge, of perspective, of a subjectively rich autobiographical memory—that is, in sequence, with a fullness of time and trajectory, and cause and effect.
Can you see the problems to which this might all lead?
Implicit memories—especially memories of difficult or even traumatic experiences—lead to an impairment and a constriction of explicit autobiographical memory. They restrict the flow of information. They impair the creation of life stories. They are not integrated. And worst of all, implicit memories constantly intrude themselves—unconsciously—into daily life, into daily decisions, into life choices, into our coping mechanisms. As in: Why am I in this relationship with David? What does this bottomless grief about Uncle Bill really mean?
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Let me try to make this even more real for you.
Imagine a family context in which true autobiographical memory and narrative are not at all fostered, a context in which memory is almost entirely implicit, hidden, and unconscious. We might take, for example, a family in which there are big, explosive secrets—secrets that everyone is keeping from themselves and from everyone else. This is very, very common. But I’m thinking of a particular example—a family with which I am very familiar. A family about which you already know some of the important particulars.
Let me adopt here a little clinical stance toward this family of mine. A little distance.
In this family of five children, the father did not actually want children so much at all. He was very talented, and immensely devoted to his career, and he often saw the children as a distraction from his true passion, his true purpose in life. Indeed, to tell the truth, these children were an obligation that he was not even sure how he got into in the first place. The mother, for her part, was overwhelmed by the children as well, and also tended to see them as an obligation and all too often not a delight. Too, the mother was angry at the father. He was not who she thought he was when she married him.
But these are all secrets. No one has ever said even a hint of them out loud. These parents are soldiering on. They are doing their duty. They are, in a way, heroic. But no one is having a whole lot of fun, and indeed there is a tremendous amount of suffering under the surface of this family’s life. There is something noble about the soldiering on—and there are certainly moments of sweetness. But everything feels strained. And strain is the water in which they swim.
And the most disabling part: It is all a secret! The emotional life of this family is entirely secret, hidden, underground. None of the powerful conflicts in the family are commented upon, made explicit, given context. There is no story about it. No commentary on it. The parents deeply wish things were not like this. And they are willing to pretend, indeed, that they are not. They are very, very willing to make the best of things. But pretending does not make it so. The truth is recorded—in spite of the pretense—in the unconscious mind of each of these children. All of this goes into the implicit memory of each of the children in this family. The children’s bodies and minds “remember” every bit of it, but they remember it behaviorally. Without awareness. Their bodies remember. And their bodies react.
Do you suppose that the children in this family are securely attached—or avoidantly attached, or anxiously attached? Well, at best they are anxiously attached, but most likely they are avoidantly attached. So, unaccountably, as these children grow, their bodies turn sour at the approach of attachment. Unaccountably, they grow up terrified of truly deep, intimate relationships.
It’s obvious, then, to any of us, that traumatic events that are not processed and given context and named remain isolated from the more mature forms of memory, and seriously impinge upon development. These events continue to shape our lives without conscious awareness of their origins. Said William Faulkner, presciently, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
And so, we become a mystery to ourselves. We are guided by implicit mental models whose origins we do not understand—guided by powerful mental models that create anxiety, fear, apprehension. These mental models create a profound learning disability, for they are not based on the reality of the present moment—but on an unconscious past reality that still lives in the present.
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What can be done?
Freud made significant headway here, in a life devoted to these issues. He discovered that these unconscious aspects of experience can indeed very often be made conscious. They can be felt, observed, named, understood, and at least partly integrated into true autobiographical memory. They can be brought from the timeless unconscious sphere into time and sequence and cause and effect. They can be made real. But here’s the key: We cannot correct these distortions by ourselves. We can only do it in the context of a trusted relationship—a Soul Friendship.
And one of the central features of these special friendships is the psychological mechanism called mirroring.