Airless Worlds: The Traumatic Sequelae of Identification with Parental Negation

Abstract

In this paper I propose the phrase “living in an airless world” to characterize the intrapsychic situation when a child has grown up in circumstances of extreme parental negation (non-recognition). Of the two major dynamics Ferenczi identified as the sequelae of early trauma—“identification with the aggressor” and “splitting of the personality” (dissociation)—the latter has received far more attention in the relational literature than the former. I seek to correct that imbalance by examining in depth the phenomenon of identification with the other’s response to the self—especially its most toxic form, identification with parental negation. Airless world syndrome involves a kind of identificatory bondage to the internalized negating other which is disabling to the senses of self and personal agency and impairs the capacities to think, feel in an integrated way, separate and grieve. Consequently, for patients living in airless worlds, the central unconscious need and preoccupation is to convert their actual parents into true parents who will finally recognize their subjective experience and needs, thereby allowing them, for the first time, psychically to breathe. This understanding, in turn, has implications for how we think about the analytic field in relation to the patient’s developmental, parent-child field. The therapeutic implications of this model are described and illustrated with three clinical examples.

Notes

¹ Throughout the remainder of this paper I use various terms to refer to the collection of clinical observations and conceptual formulations that constitute the group of ideas I am organizing under the rubric: “living in an airless world.” At different points I call it a “model,” a “syndrome,” a “theory,” and a “paradigm.” Probably the most accurate characterization would be to describe it as a particular conceptual lens or frame of reference, or, to use Bion’s term, a vertex through which a certain group of related psychic phenomena are illuminated and organized in a new and clinically useful way. It is also intended to be an evocative metaphor that captures the phenomenological quality of intrapsychic life that follows from a childhood defined by the experience of pervasive parental negation. Many of the elements of this model derive from or overlap with elements from other psychoanalytic frames of reference; and the model as a whole has convergences with “neighboring” theories, some of which I explicitly recognize throughout the paper, especially in the concluding section.

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Notes on contributors

Steven Stern

Steven Stern, Psy.D., is a faculty member of the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Maine Medical Center and Tufts University School of Medicine. He is a member of the International Council of the International Association of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology and was Associate Editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology until 2015. He has been a frequent contributor to the contemporary psychoanalytic literature, with a particular interest in theoretical integration. His first book, Needed Relationships and Psychoanalytic Healing: A Holistic Relational Perspective on the Therapeutic Process (Routledge) was released in March 2017. Dr. Stern practices in Portland, ME with specializations in psychoanalysis, psychodynamic psychotherapy, couples therapy, and clinical supervision.