Exposed: phallic protections, shame and damaged parental objects¹

1. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Annual Conference of the Association of Child Psychotherapists, London, 2008.

Abstract

Using ideas derived from Dana Birksted-Breen (‘Phallus, penis and mental space’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 77: 649–57, 1996), this article explores the clinical experience with ‘Tommy’, a young boy who suffered multiple traumas and neglect. Birksted-Breen describes a phallic state of mind, which, amongst other things, serves to repudiate the potential for a creative link between internal parental objects and a capacity for thinking. In order to survive psychically, Tommy frequently turned to a phallic state of mind. The deficits in his internal and external objects meant that helpful parental qualities, linked with the development of psychic bisexuality, were not available for introjection and identification. The paper suggests a link between Tommy's employment of phallic (and at times perverse) ways of thinking, related to his intrusive attempts to expose and humiliate his psychotherapist, and to an experience of shame associated with inadequate internal objects. The serious compromise to the development of a creative psychic bisexuality in the patient is reflected in the countertransference strain on the psychotherapist's own internal couple.

Keywords:

• phallic functioning
• psychic bisexuality
• internal couple
• shame
• penis-as-link
• trauma

Acknowledgements

Particular thanks to Dr Robin Anderson, Margaret Rustin, Jannie Hollins and Lydia Hartland-Rowe for their various and much valued contributions to my clinical work and this paper.

Notes

1. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Annual Conference of the Association of Child Psychotherapists, London, 2008.

2. Roger Money-Kyrle helpfully articulates the links with guilt and shame:

• But while a superego is an ‘internalised’ and probably exaggerated aspect of a parental figure, which remains separate from the ego, perhaps we may say that an ego-ideal is a, probably exaggerated, aspect of a parental figure with which the ego has identified itself – in what is basically a hypo-manic way. Thus, while failure to please the superego arouses guilt, failure to live up to an ego-ideal arouses only shame. My point is that it is particularly those traits of ourselves which are liable to arouse either guilt or shame that are liable to be split off and projected into others.

  (Money-Kyrle, 1960: 357)