Compliance, Defiance, and the Development of Relational Templates: What a Ballerina Taught Me About Myself and the Supervisory Process

Abstract

Children who have had their independent strivings subverted by their parents may opt to sacrifice their autonomy to achieve a form of conditional love or, alternatively, rebel and lose the loving connection to protect their integrity. For them, the love of the other and self-interest cannot coexist. This constitutes an area of conflict, because they are forced to choose between either having love (via compliance), or having their true selves (via defiance). In childhood, the repetition of compliant or defiant reactions to parental disinterest eventually becomes encoded as a relational template (a constellation of enduring interactive habits or reflexes). The treatment of an adolescent ballet student brought this issue into focus, as she would vacillate between the two positions when dealing with her teachers. In fact, both therapist and patient had defiant relational templates that were activated by supervision. Both shared the relational premise that closeness to an authority and the expression of an authentic independent self could not exist together. This limited the ability of the ballerina to have fully functional access to her teachers and therapy, and similarly limited the therapist from making effective use of his supervision.

Notes

¹ This is a good example of “role exchangeability” (Herzog, 2012, p. 480), where I was able to take on the role of either child or parent in the defiant template. There are always two parties in dyadic relating, and an activated template allows for the occupation of either role.

² I’m at a loss to find a better way to describe the customary Chaplinesque walk of a ballet dancer, which I found both humorous and endearing.

³ I have seen families where the parents actively encourage their child to be defiant—parents who dread their own desire to (break the spirit of the child), and react by sanctioning and indulging the child’s independent behavior, even if it involves the child’s being overtly disrespectful and rejecting of them. It makes me wonder if some parental approval of adversarial behavior is required for the defiant child to sustain a defiant position.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bruce Herzog

Bruce Herzog, M.D., is a Faculty Member at the Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and is a Council Member in the International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology.