RUNNING HEAD: SO THERE IS NO HELP
So There is No Help Save From the Witch
Keren Mintz Malchi
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By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
Open, locks,
Whoever knocks!
(Witch, Macbeth, Act IV, Sc 1)
The Bewitched
This Shakespearean quote comes to my mind when I think of one certain patient,
whom I treated over the course of three years at a public center for the treatment and
prevention of family violence. Each time she entered, like Macbeth, wickedness and the
wrongdoings of the past swept in with her. Like Macbeth, in search of self-cohesiveness and
the reparation of evil, she found a common discourse with witches. They, who symbolized
the darkness which had been injected into her heart and who represented the outward
manifestation of the evil which she had endured throughout her life.
From the beginning, wickedness became a familiar entity in our encounters. For
unnervingly, this patient had announced long ago that she was bewitched, cursed and
haunted. The world attacked her constantly. She knew in her heart, that out of hatred and
evilness, her husband’s family had put a spell on her, one which led to fatigue and decreased
energy, irritability and restlessness, states of confusion, and persistent aches and pains, as
well as relational problems with her husband, children and coworkers. They made sure she
would never get anywhere in life, never be loved or held tenderly. Permeable, she invaded
my own mental space with her rigid and concrete grasp on what she perceived to be her
bewitchment situation.
She was the kind of patient, who, from the beginning, succeeded in rattling me up,
submerging us both into a shaky, uncertain, and intensely penetrating therapeutic encounter.
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Given, each patient has a deep and tangible influence on me, from the very start, more so
since I deeply identify with surrendering myself, through relational enactment (Fosshage,
2007; Mitchell, 1988) to be used for patients’ psychic growth. This, in itself, is a powerful
experience which does not leave me unscratched. Furthermore, my understanding of any
patient is generated within the context of “the analytic third” (Ogden, 1994; 2004), the
product of the unique intersubjective dialectic generated by the interplay between the two
unique subjectivities of patient and therapist. So ultimately, I am quite accustomed to
experiencing and connecting internally to intense experiences with patients, as well as the
constant, mutual molding of both patient and myself that takes place within the therapeutic
relationship.
However, with this above mentioned patient, whom I will refer to as Mrs. R, my own
intersubjectivity was simply aflame, thoughts and affect initially came very much alive
within me, chaotically, with the introduction of the notion of curses, hexes and spells, as if
the mention of these magically sparked my own mental life and put it into motion. I found
myself simply at awe, enthralled and dumbfounded facing the flow of information coming
from this patient, listening to her describe in great detail the mad process of her bewitchment
and the pains she took to reverse such curses. Mesmerized, yet, regrettably disbelieving, I
soon found myself struggling with the materials this woman generated, oscillating between
trying to make symbolic meaning of her words as opposed to listening to her prenotions as if
they were hard fact. Sadly, I found that too quickly, the initial interest I had taken in her
presentation was replaced by an exasperated disregard and impatience for the subject of
witches and curses, and for this cursed patient. The initial pseudo-connection we had made
was replaced by an internal groan of having to deal with this “difficult patient”, with this
“difficult dyad” (Bromberg, 1992). For how was I to aid in bringing psychic change when the
curses, the bewitchment, were felt to be undeniable, concrete entities? All of the physical
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symptoms that would normally be regarded as a communicative expression of her psychic
pain (Mcdougall, 1989) and in such – the aim of our common work together- were regarded
as untouchable, out of her control, part of the matrix of her cursed world. Mrs R. presented
with a wide array of psychosomatic complaints, paranoid thoughts, fluctuating and
overwhelming affective states as well as low self-worth and ongoing relationship difficulties,
but these were all untouchable.
A Lifetime History of Trauma
Although captured in the ropes of a double-binding phobia, that of attachment (getting
“too close”) and that of attachment loss (getting “too far away”) (Van der Hart, Nijenhuis &
Steele, 2003), Mrs. R began to share with me her personal history, present and past. I was
taken aback by the intense traumatic materials that became known to us both, as well as the
desymbolizing (Freedman & Lavender, 2002) quality of her words, descriptions became
“thing-like”. She spoke about multiple sexual abuse encounters that were presented in
fragmented forms: an old man that would follow her, like a ghost, on the bus and on her way
home, having his way with her; dirty things that happened to children in school bathrooms.
Especially prominent, was the telling of a little girl’s gang rape by a group of university
students, recounted as an experience of a friend, but told in a way that gave me an eerie,
scary, and unmistakable feeling that a dissociated part of her was telling me about her own
personal violation and horrific abuse.
These accounts of exploitation were told alongside descriptions of the penetrating
hatred she felt coming from her mother as a child. It was a blatant hatred expressed by a
mother, who, in my patient’s eyes, knew of her daughter’s defilement and felt ashamed of it.
She recounted dinners at the table, in which mother would serve her, as the oldest child, the
biggest portion of food, but with a disgusted, menacing look on her face, as if Mrs. R did not
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deserve a “good” portion, being so bad. Other hurtful memories came up as well. The patient
described neglectful experiences in her home which centered around loneliness and an
independence that was thrust upon her too early. She felt that she had raised herself, as her
parents worked long hours out of the house, and were never really there to supervise,
converse, or for that matter- care. She recalled learning to sew and making her own dresses at
a young age, otherwise, she would have none. But most of all, she was haunted by the
suspicious, knowing stare of both her parents, following her secret dirtiness. She recalled an
incident which occurred in young adulthood, of her parents, reacting to a new ring that she
had bought for herself, hurling harsh words at her, saying she was a “kept woman”, a
prostitute, otherwise - where did she get the money for the ring?
This scene had occurred a few years after the family’s immigration to Israel in the
early 90’s from the former USSR, amongst the huge influx of Soviet Jewish emigrants
leaving to start a new life elsewhere. This change had brought temporary safety and relief
from the traumatic experiences of the past, on the one hand. However, the loneliness which
had marked her childhood now took on a new form, for as a foreigner, she was immersed in
otherness, or the loss of what was once familiar (Boulanger, 2004), the same loss of self
which was first encountered in the ruin of her body by a perpetrating other. She was expected
to adapt to Western freedom, a major stumbling block for an emigrant from a totalitarian
society (Goldstein, 1979), and even a greater stumble for one whose inner freedom was never
hers to begin with. Alongside the ghosts she had greeted in real life and in the parent-child
relationship of her nursery (Fraiberg, Adelson & Shapiro, 1975), she was forced once again
to live with the “ghostly presence” of the histories and identities left behind in the process of
immigration (Eng & Han, 2000).
She felt that the world continued to be one in which there was no “safe place” for her,
the whole world, she once told me, was contaminated. This contamination continued as she
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married, in a prearranged marriage, a disturbed man who brought her further pain and grief.
She felt her parents had known how troubled her husband was, but that they had agreed to the
marriage because they wanted to rid of her and cared nothing for her. When we started
therapy, in her mid-thirties, she had already suffered a 15-year-long martial relation with this
man whom she described as emotionally and physically abusive, a hopeless, recurrent
alcoholic who had never held a steady job, causing years of financial pressures and constant
stress to survive the day. Besides the explicit, physical abuse he inflicted upon her, he was
inclined to a constant flow of extramarital sexual affairs which devastated her. She often felt
a jealous rage and would obsessively seek out these women in that rage. This, while all the
while feeling relieved, as the extramarital encounters brought reprieve, for then he would
shower more than his regular once a week and buy her small gifts. Sadly, this stale, empty
relationship found fullness only in malevolent deeds and vicious arguments.
During the course of her marriage, she had given birth to three children; the two
oldest children were going through a stormy and troubling adolescence, and the youngest, a
toddler born out of an unplanned pregnancy, was reported by social services involved with
this troubled family as displaying disorganized attachment behaviors and disturbing
emotional problems. Her older children had strained relations with her and their father, and
each- a range of additional difficulties, including difficulties in peer relationships, adjustment
and behavioral problems, academic failures and low self-worth. They were described by her
in a terribly negative light, one which I felt to be a picture image of her own life failings.
Needless to say, her toddler was also in a state of ongoing distress due to the violent nature of
the relations in the home and the mother’s unavailability. As with her children, in her
occupational undertakings as well, she felt degraded and stuck, working at minimum wage in
spite of what seemed to be an innate talent for her vocation. She often fought with her
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coworkers, most of them men who were felt to be menacing and against her, she had no
friends or confidants, and felt a deep loneliness and emptiness.
After many years of suffering, Mrs. R presented at the public clinic I worked at,
following the ongoing violence she was coping with in her marriage. In the initial meeting
with her, it was decided that we would begin individual psychotherapy. From here, we began
to examine her current sufferings, which included a wide range of complex post-traumatic
symptoms that seemed to be embedded in a hysterical-borderline personality. We entered the
world of the wicked. Through the irruption of endless traumatic memories and the deadness
of body and mind that followed, I came to perceive the underlying dissociative processes
which I believed to be feeding the belief of bewitchment and which I felt were the actual
curse to be reckoned with. Regrettably, Mrs. R left the therapy abruptly, two-and-a-half years
into the treatment, such as happens when “crypts’ are opened; when injunctions to speak out
trigger an upsurge of shame and terror” (Rosenblum, 2009). At that point of time in my
training I had yet to learn how to work from an intersubjective frame of mind, one which was
of utmost important for the work with Mrs. R. Then, I felt her as one who was resisting the
opportunity for change. In retrospect, I understand she was doing what she could to protect
her fragile self from the loss of a massive internal structure she had built, a true memorial to
all that she had been through as a child.
Despite this untimely rupture, my experiences with this unique woman left with me
with many thoughts, particularly about the subject of bewitchment, and its relation to trauma,
dissociation and psychic change. The following paper emulates these thoughts, on
bewitchment as a reflection of the dissociative processes underlying the mental life of those
who faced chronic mistreatment and abuse by the hands of others. The live, mental demons
created by trauma.
Witches and Psychoanalysis – An old Romance
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Freud himself was known as having a long-standing interest in witchcraft, possession
and allied phenomena, tying these themes to psychic life (Strachey, 1953). Writing about his
experiences in Paris and Belin of 1886, Freud noted a historical tie between hysteria and
witchcraft: “… a hysterical woman… in earlier centuries… would have been certain to be
judged and condemned as a witch or as possessed of the devil” (Freud, 1956). In an
additional article, he expressed his belief that hysteria, a neurosis in the strictest sense of the
word, was at the heart of what was factual in the history of witchcraft and possession (Freud,
1888). These assumptions were actually not new, as the transformation of a bewitched
demoniac into a hysteric had already occurred at the turn of the seventeenth century, with the
publication of Jorden’s (1603) Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the
Mother. This text, traditionally hailed by historians of hysteria as a treatise reclaiming the
demonically possessed for medicine, understood hysteria to be a natural disease, removing it
from the domain of witchcraft (Levin, 2002; Su, 2004).
Following the work of Charcot and Breuer, Freud went on to develop the concept of
hysteria, exploring the connection between hysteria and sexual trauma in his earlier writings,
even though he would later redefine the sexual aspects he had noted as fantasies inherent in
the child’s mind (Herman, 1992). In “The Aetiology of Hysteria” (1896), however, he
explicitly specified premature sexual experiences in the early childhood years as the traumata
from which hysterical reactions proceeded. In an early, personal letter to his friend Fliess
(Freud, 1897), he tied between demonic possession, sexual abuse and psychic treatment,
asking: “But why did the devil who took possession of the poor things invariably abuse them
sexually and in a loathsome manner? Why are their confessions under torture so like the
communications made by my patients in psychic treatment?” This was the making of a
connection between demonic possession and intrapsychic pain born of trauma.
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Freud (1923a) went on to dedicate a full paper to demonic possession, following his
analysis of a manuscript which included the parts of a diary belonging to a seventeenthcentury impoverished artist, Cristoph Haitzmann, in addition to a report written by a monastic
scribe. These recorded the artist’s personal life as well as his “redemption” from the pact he
had made with the devil. In this paper, as in the paper on hysteria, Freud stated that what was
once believed to be demonic trappings or states of possession actually corresponded to the
psychoanalytic concept of neurosis. He stressed that from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, these
demons represented bad and reprehensible wishes, derived from instinctual impulses that had
been repudiated and repressed. Searching for a motive in Haitzmann’s diary for the pact
which had been with the devil, Freud showed how the artist was suffering from melancholy
over the loss of his father. In return for the devil replacing his lost father for a period of nine
years (through which he would also regain that what he had lost in himself), Haitzmann was
to become the property of the devil.
Commenting on Freud’s account, Fairbairn (1952), in his article on Repression and
the Return of Bad Objects (with special reference to the ‘War Neuroses, 1943), postulated
that from a psychopathology based object relations standpoint, the demonic pact stood for the
connection of the artist to his bad internal objects (indeed Freud brought forward the
hypothesis that the devil was chosen as a substitute for his father, reflecting the ambivalence
between a loved father and a satanic one). However, he was divided with relation to Freud’s
emphasis on repressed instincts in the genesis of the neurosis. Rather, he offered, that
Haitzmann was not seeking gratification, but a reconnection with his bad internal father
object.
In this, Fairbairn (1952) believed that traumatic memories represent a record of a
relationship with a bad object, one that was felt to be both intolerable and shameful. This
position demonstrated the primacy of external reality and the secondary role of unconscious
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phantasy (Ogden, 2010) in the creation of psychic pain. It is not only phantasies that shape
the way we feel, think and behave, but also our real encounters with the world. As a result of
the traumatic relationship and its subsequent repression, abused or neglected children take
upon themselves, through a process of identification and internalization, the burden of
badness which appears to reside in their object(s), consequently feeling themselves as bad.
Fairbain explained this processes as one related to control and potency, for although the child
may want to reject these bad parental objects, they are in fact needed, as they hold a power
over him or her. It is through the incorporation of these bad objects that the child hopes to
control them.
Ferenczi (1933) had taken a similar stance, theorizing that when a child felt physically
and morally helpless, in the shadow of an overpowering adult, he or she was compelled to
subordinate automatically to the will and desires of the aggressor. Consequently, he stated,
the child was emptied, oblivious of him or herself, left to identifying only with the aggressor.
In addition, as neither shock nor terror may be present without some trace of splitting of
personality, it was understood that the child was left to cope with a “picture of fragmentation"
(Ferenczi, 1933, p. 165). It was through this fragmentation of the individual’s psyche, that a
part of the self had become automatically imitative of the former aggressor (Howell, 2014),
clinging to the assailant’s subjectivity to maintain some grip on life (Schweidson, 1988), and
in this, torn from mental life. This fragmentary part, as in Mrs. R’s bewitched/possessed part,
could be understood as an identification bearing witness to the past, holding, in condensed
form aspects of the former relationship- malice, terror, and helplessness. Although a
paradoxical and desperate attempt to assure survival, in the end, it was understood that
annihilation was triumphant, as there is a price to be paid. For, as Fairbarn stated:
In attempting to control them in this way, he is internalizing objects which
have wielded power over him in the external world; and these objects retain their
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prestige for power over him in the inner world. In a word, he is ‘possessed’ by them,
as if by evil spirits (1952, p. 67).
In quest for a solution to the terror encountered, this split-off part maintains the
internal horror of persecution. The witch becomes a tyrannical and controlling bizarre object,
holding bits of the ego, the vulnerable self “in thrall” to prevent it from living, an annihilation
of the self (Kalsched, 1998). This is the only solution to massive and chronic childhood
trauma, “so there is no help, save from the witch” (Goethe, Faust, Part I, Scene 6, as cited in
Freud, 1937). The witch becomes a concrete symbol of the past.
The witch as a symbol
The concepts of symbol formation and symbolization were the cornerstone of Freud’s
theorizing. Seeking evidence for the existence and influence of the unconscious drives on
conscious life, Freud pointed to the mechanism of symbolization occurring in dreams,
fantasies, and waking thought as well as in folklore, popular myths, art, jokes and slips of the
tongue (Freud, 1900; 1901; 1910; 1913; 1916; 1939). Thinking, by way of symbolization was
understood as allowing for the legitimate expression of unconscious drives and wishes
(Barry, 2001). Further, the capacity for thinking and symbolization was understood as
emerging from the complex interaction between the physical body and its experiences with
the world, as the “ego is first and foremost a body ego” (Freud, 1923b).
In discussing the case of Fräulein Elisabeth, a patient diagnosed as hysteric, who
displayed pains in her legs and who had difficulties in walking, Freud (1893) proposed that
she had formed an association between painful mental impressions and bodily pains which
had been experienced at the same time, and that in her present symptoms, she was using her
physical feelings as a symbol of her mental ones. Put simply, her symptoms were looked
upon as a symbolic expression of her painful thoughts. In the same paper, Freud described
Frau Cäcilie, who recounted how as a girl of fifteen, she had felt a penetrating pain in her
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forehead which lasted for weeks. During the analysis of this pain, she relayed that at the time
of its first occurrence, her grandmother had given her a suspicious look so “piercing” that it
had penetrated right into her brain. Here again, Freud saw this process as occurring by the
mechanism of symbolization.
The witch, rich in folklore and early childhood fantasies seems to be a natural choice
for symbolizing the child’s complex interaction with the outside world, especially when this
interaction was one of malicious occurrences. Searching for the terms “witch” in Winnicott’s
(1971b) book on therapeutic consultations in child psychiatry yields over 50 references to
witches. In his meetings with children, the witch figure appeared in drawings, recollections of
dreams, and in conversations between children appearing in the consultation room and
Winnicott. For instance, one ten year old child, Alfred, shared with Winnicott a frightening
dream he remembered that he used to recurrently dream of as a smaller child, in the period of
time when his family had uprooted and moved to another town. Alfred recounted how
witches had come to take him away, describing a “dream full of symbols that belong to myth
and fairy-story: the three-legged stool, the fire, the tail, the witch with tall hat: the pots and
pans indicating something cooking or being concocted, and the darkness, indicating the
unconscious” (Winnicott, 1971b, p. 119). Winnicott expanded on the idea of the witch as a
symbol, explaining that society offers names, verbalization, fairy-story and myth to children
in order to help them deal with the “unnamed fears that belong to the unnameable”
(Winnicott, 1971b, p. 119), and that this is done through the symbolization that the witch
allows for.
Ferenczi (1952) theorized that a symbolization is born when a repressed unconscious
aspect has been identified with another thing (or idea). He stressed that identification, the
psychic function preceding symbol formation, is an essential need, born out of the baby’s
endeavor to find again in every object his own organs and their activities. He believed that
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every symbol has a physiological base, expressing in some way or another, the whole body,
an organ or its function (Ferenczi, 1922). It is in seeking to make meaning of the world
beyond his own corporeality, that the connections between the body and the objective world
are created, and these connections are called symbolic. First through gestures, and later on,
through the bodily means of speech, wishes and the objects that are wished for become
represented (Ferenczi, 1952). It is through this process that starts with the drive to find
something outside of the embodied self, meaning, an object, and object to relate to, that
humans thrive and develop.
Melanie Klein (1930), developing the concept of object-relations, built on Ferenczi’s
concept of identification as the forerunner of symbolism. In focusing on object-relations, she
brought symbolism to the front, and viewed it to be the foundation of sublimation and
phantasy as well as the subject’s relation to the outside world and to reality. She stated that
only through phantasies directed towards the mother, can the first and basic relation to the
outside world and to reality in general be created. Following the working through of adequate
anxiety, the mechanism of identification is set forward, and the emergent ego then becomes
able to establish a true relation to reality which gradually develops out of the unreal reality of
internal phantasy. Disagreeing with Jones’ (1916) view that symbols are formed when the
(overwhelming) affect attached to the primary idea does not allow for sublimation, Klein
demonstrated that children’s play (an activity of sublimation) was actually a symbolic
expression of phantasies, wishes and anxieties. The play-technique she developed followed
the child’s symbolic representation, gave access to the deepest repressed experiences and
allowed for the child's attitude to reality to reveal itself (Klein, 1927; 1929). Importantly, the
development of symbolism was viewed as a function of object relations, in which disturbance
of the earliest object-relationship led to a disturbance in symbolic function, and that
disturbance in turn led to the arrest of whole ego development.
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Modern relational thinking, drawing upon the process by which infants “fathom the
minds of others and eventually their own minds” (Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist and Target, 2002)
stresses the ways in which a sense of self, and the mind itself, emerge from the affective
quality of relationship with primary caregivers. Following this, interpersonal neurobiology
has defined the mind as both an embodied and relational process, regulating the flow of
energy and information” (Siegel, 2012), meaning that the mind, and its underlying symbolic
processes emerge from both the nervous system extending through the body and from the
patterns of communications that occur within relationships. Put simply, it is understood that
human connections shape neural connections, and each create the mind (Siegel, 2012).
Traumatic interactions have an actual effect on the developing brain, leading to inefficient
patterns of organization of the right brain, causing, amongst others, impairments in the
processing of socioemotional information and deficits in self-regulation which manifest in a
limited capability to modulate the duration and intensity of affects (Schore, 2003). These
functions are intricately associated with the capacity for symbolism, and Solms (1996)
described how a developmentally deficient or damaged right hemisphere is associated with
the collapse of internalized representations of the external world, a regression from whole to
part object relations.
These mechanisms could be the neurobiological explanation for the symbolic
equation described by Segal (1957) in her classic paper on symbol formation as a
pathological deviation of symbolism. She noted that symbolism is a relation between the ego,
object and symbol, so that when anxieties related to the object arise (fear of bad objects and
the fear of the loss of or unavailability of good objects), symbol formation activity would take
place. She understood that early symbols are not felt as substitutes, but as the original object
itself, and later pathology takes the shape of such concrete thinking, characterized by a
“symbolic equation” between the original object and the symbol, in the internal and external
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world. Such an example is that of a toddler deeply frightened by a loose sole that was
flapping about in the shoe belonging to her mother. This shoe was seen by the child as a
threatening mouth, capable of devouring her (Isaacs, 1948), so that fantasy was felt as real. It
is the disturbances in the ego's relation to objects, especially in the realm of differentiation
between ego and object (i.e. internal and external world) that are reflected in disturbances
of symbol formation, leading to concrete thinking (Segal,1957). Differentiation is pertinent
for symbolization, as more developed symbolic representation requires the ability to perceive
both similarities and differences between two representations, whereas in symbolic equation
the two representations are experienced as identical (Edgecumbe, 1988). In such cases where
symbolic equations are formed in relation to bad objects, an attempt is made to deal with
them as with the original object, that is by total annihilation and misapprehension of reality.
Rooted in the perception that symbolism originates in projective identification,
projections resulting in mutual damage or an excessively omnipotent identification leads to
the formation of excessively concrete, empty and bizarre symbols (Segal, 1978). In this
manner, and through the projection of internal reality, the witch and her curses become a
concrete reality, and symptoms that would normally be understood as embracing deeper
meaning become thinglike, as meaning cannot be assigned to them. Segal (1978) gives an
example of a patient reminiscent of the one presented, whose dissociated fragments of bits of
her experience seemed to function as Bion’s (1957) bizarre objects, in which expelled
particles of the ego lead an uncontrolled, independent existence contained by or containing
external objects that are felt to be hostile to the psyche that ejected them. Segal’s patient,
similar to the one described here, proved difficult to understand, her symbolism (actually an
equation) at times very concrete, with states of bodily excitement, bizarre bodily sensations,
and hysterical, hypochondriacal psychosomatic symptoms.
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Mrs. R functioned in a like manner, equating, reducing the symbol to a “thing in
itself”. In this, Mrs. R’s concrete grasp on the witch could also be recognized as representing
the unnameable, that which cannot be mentalized, that which is dissociated, a non-symbolic
symbol - more like a sign. It is the witch who becomes an equation for overwhelming terror,
a dangerous, demonic being who has the ability to control and sabotage her victim’s thoughts,
feelings and actions. The bad witch is evil, powerfully phallic (with a pointed hat, a peaked
nose, sharp fingernails and broom a between her legs) and has a distaste for marriage and
children (Lane & Chazan, 1989). It is natural for children to fear this powerful witch, and
their fantasies represent attempts to defend themselves against the early terror of being killed,
eaten by the witch. However, an unnatural, horrifying fear of infanticide can dominate the
child’s life in an unnatural manner if external, real traumatic events confirm the child’s wellestablished fears, that is- if his or her need for defenses is compounded by violence in
external reality (Bloch, 1978). It then occurs that the witch symbol, barren of symbolism,
void of meaning, becomes a concrete entity serving as a screen against true knowledge and
connection.
Concretism, Dissociation and the Bewitchment situation
It would probably be safe to say, that the gut of the work with this client had to do
with making connections, both relational and mental. She had been hurt so badly, that any
hope for a safe connection with a significant other, or with herself, was lost. I attempted to be
one who was willing to recognize her deep-buried need for human connectedness, caring
enough to make a connection with this lonely (and fairly difficult) soul, caring enough to not
give up on meaning-making, on mental connections. However, for the most part, in my
search for connection and knowledge, I was treated suspiciously, and my attempts to get
closer to her and her internal world were usually cast aside. I felt Mrs. R feared both
connection with me or with knowledge and understanding. I was regarded to be ominous and
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non-caring, and what I tried to create within a given session was incomprehensible to her,
barren, stripped of meaning, at times unsettling and even angering. I had to struggle
constantly to stay at a paradoxically close distance and to make meaning, amidst attacks on
linking (Bion, 1959), as well as attacks on the therapeutic relationship and on myself.
For instance, after a session, two years into her therapy, which stood out in her daring
to get close to me and to herself, she arrived at the following session, considerably late. At
the onset she berated me for not being able to give her a simple answer to a very complex
answer she threw at me once she sat down, specifically: “So tell me, what am I to do with my
stinking, cheating husband?” I felt an internal rise of pressure, not knowing what to do with
the words that were clunked down on me, but still attempted to think it out with her. Yet she
said, “You don’t have an answer, do you?”, laughing hollowly, ridiculing. She then went on
to talk about how people in her life were making her angry, and how, as a result, she felt the
need for revenge. I asked her if she felt the same with me, anger and a need for revenge for
what she presumed to be my withheld knowledge on solving her problems. My question
angered her, she felt I was twisting her words. This continued throughout the session, with
each of my attempts to make meaning experienced as an attack on her. Although she gave me
the feeling that nothing I was saying was helpful, on the one hand, she suddenly demanded to
make up for the time lost, as she had arrived late, on the other. After a number of such tiring
interactions, I shared with her my thoughts on what I perceived as her internal confusion,
attacking me on the one hand, but also desperately needing closeness on the other, as
amplified through her wish for making up for the lost time. More importantly, I shared with
her the sadness I felt for her predicament, for her oscillation between a protective distance
and the wish for closeness. Here, her eyes became tearful; this was followed by a state of
confusion and “tiredness in her head”, and then an additional retreat in which she attacked me
once more. I gently persisted, pointing again to the distance between us. Here, for the first
17
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time in the session, I felt a connection was made, in which she said, teary, “I am sad too. It is
true, I don’t get close, if you get close, people will hurt you, disappoint you.” I felt that these
few words represented an attempt to make meaning, of allowing herself to experiencing her
internal world, a stance that was in opposition to the way she normally functioned.
If the world is given to us in small doses, we can use the things of the real world to
make meaning and be imaginative about, and it becomes so that the inner world can be
legitimately on the outside as well as on the inside (Winnicott, 1964). But, if the difference
between what we call the child’s imagination and what we call “real things” is obscured,
when the fear of witch meets horrors inflicted upon the child, she finds herself entering the
world of “psychic equivalence” (Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, & Target, 2002). Normally, in a
state of psychic equivalence, fantasies or thoughts and reality are the same (the inner world is
both within and without). However, in the face of trauma, psychic equivalence takes on a new
meaning, in which thoughts become precise replicas of terrifying external events leading to a
psyche overwhelmed by “external horrors that find their equivalents in the unconscious”
(Boulanger, 2005), unutterable. Upon assault, the victim’s connection to the world is changed
forever, as the attacker transforms spirit (i.e. mind) into flesh, driving the victim into
nothingness (Rosenman, 2003). Flesh, concrete entities and thoughts become the only entities
to hold on to. Words cannot give rise to true meaning.
Mrs. R.’s reports of undoing the curses that had been cast upon her were laden with
this concrete mode of psychic equivalence, of trying to make meaning in a non-meaningful
way. She described to me in great detail, how she would stand in front her bedroom window
across from the moon, spilling whiskey on her body, thus ridding herself of the fatigue, aches
and pains that were cast upon her in a current hex. Coins scattered around the house were
ominous cursed objects planted by her husband in service of his mother and sister, these had
to be gathered and dealt with. It seemed to me that these compulsive rituals were her way of
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communicating her feelings of internal contamination as well as the need to cleanse or rid
herself from the corruption she felt, that of the past and of her husband’s various sins.
Contrastingly, she described how she enjoyed visiting the Old City of Tzfat, a city she
considered holy, just standing, in the ancient cemetery, by the graves of famous Rabbis,
basking in what she perceived as the holiness that emanated from these. Especially, she felt
connected to the burial place of Chana and her seven sons, who like Mrs. R suffered torture at
the hand of another.
In her mind, physically standing in a self-perceived holy place was enough to make
her less un-holy, at least for a time. The way she spoke about these day trips was so concrete
that it was difficult for me to empathize with her experiences. This concreteness felt to me
sticky, exasperating, casting me into helplessness - anything meaningful was cut off by her
great barren concrete wall. Looking back, I think that the moment which stands out most for
me with this patient, was when I found myself driving (literally) into this wall. On the
particular day in question, the client shared, in the session, her feelings of deep helplessness
and weariness, as well as the wish to put a literal end to her misery. Although she would not
take her life, for religious reasons, she spoke painfully about wanting to die. Later on that
day, I left my workplace, in my car. I got on the main street, and then- looking to my right, I
recognized Mrs. R. walking on the sidewalk ahead of me. I felt embarrassed at the situation,
shameful at the thought that she would see me in my new car, that is- my normal, hey! My
life is pretty-OK car. I slowed down, hoping that she would not spot me. I looked again to my
right, she had disappeared behind a whole mess of construction workers who were uprooting
the sidewalk. Seeing my chance, I quickly floored the gas pedal, and then, horrified, just as
quickly braked- a pedestrian had jumped right in front of the car’s hood. It was, of course,
Mrs. R, her face turned aside, apparently oblivious to my identity or her near suicide attempt.
She just walked on, making no sign of recognition, not once turning her head. I felt shock,
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SO THERE IS NO HELP
disbelievingly replaying this crazy drama in my head. Where did she come out from? How
did I not see her? How on earth did she do that? Indeed, something wicked this way comes! I
remember thinking, she is showing me, concretely, how she wants to die, floating by in her
cloud of not seeing, not knowing, brushing with death, a death that I (in my own dissociation)
would carry out for her. I, who was supposed to hold on to the symbolic, lost my own
capacity for reflection, so great was her grasp on concreteness that I simply blocked her out
of my sight, in my experience- almost killing her.
When thought and actuality become one and the same, “concretism” (GrubrichSimitis, 1984) takes charge, so that psychic space is not available for reflection; thinking and
perception turn into thinglike: memories, thoughts and affects are not something imagined or
remembered, they cannot have a symbolic or metaphorical quality. These oddly fixed and
unalterable concrete expressions take on a quasi-psychotic fashion. Speaking about death
becomes playing out the scenario of death. A witch is a witch is a witch. The unconscious
unfolds in a concrete drama, such as was noted in the lives of Holocaust survivors, for whom
the result of ongoing trauma became the lifelong feeling of being threatened by one’s own
unconscious and the undermining of symbolization (Grubrich-Simitis, 1984).
This psychic mode of living devoid of symbolic thought, in which painful meanings
are separated from symbols and language, has been termed desymbolization, representing an
impasse of the vital process of linking and meaning making (Bucci, 1997; Freedman &
Lavender, 2000; Freedman & Russell, 2003). Through this dimension of desymbolization,
occurring either interminably or in “pockets” of dysfunction, concrete thought prevails, so
that diverse aspects of experience are given one, singular meaning. The individual relies on
cues of immediacy and proximity, regarding events, such as psychosomatic pains, not as
possibility or “as if”, but as unwavering fact (i.e., the witch’s curses attacking the soma).
These “facts” are treated as forgone conclusion; multiple meanings cannot be assigned, self-
20
SO THERE IS NO HELP
reflection is not possible, and mental links are not made possible (Freedman & Lavender,
2000), resulting in destructive attacks on linking (Bion, 1959). Desymbolization is an
omnipresent psychic event, definable as the presence of the absent (Freedman & Lavender,
2002), a motivated act aimed to eject knowing, evacuate meaning, and disavow significance.
Instead of generating creative and life-promoting images, the witch symbol generated
out of terror represents the draining of mental life, the depletion of creativity. In
bewitchment, psychic energies are reversed and drained away, with ego-capacity for
awareness and purpose pouring away from consciousness into the unconscious, from rich
symbolic layers to the distinct flatness of obsessive repetition (Ulanov & Ulanov, 1987). This
obsessive repetition is the outcome of the child’s deepest anxieties becoming a concrete
reality- when the traumatic event thrust upon the child becomes a direct reflection of his or
her most terrifying thoughts, feelings, fantasies and nightmares (Boulanger, 2005). When this
happens, when trauma prevails, there is no room for the individual to look at oneself, to
examine and explore inner experiences, as these are perceived to be dangerous, threatening.
Like other survivors of severe trauma, Mrs. R was robbed of the innate human capacity to use
her inner world as a source of richness and productivity. Instead, mentalization was broken
down, with her inner experience of persecution and hate forming concrete entities through
which she was cursed, in malaise- ailment ridden, or, alternatively - cursing back in an
attempt to protect herself. These entities were the reflection of an inner world which could
not be known.
Where there is no observing self with the capacity to mentalize and reflect, when
traumatic events build a void in one's soul, a prolonged and accumulated absence results in
psychic trauma, with the absence felt to be a foreign body inside the self (Gurevich, 2008).
Discussing children of Holocaust survivors, Laub (1998) refers to the concept of the “empty
circle”, symbolizing the absence of representation, the rupture of the self, the erasure of
21
SO THERE IS NO HELP
memory, and the accompanying sense of void that are the core legacy of massive psychic
trauma (Laub, 1998, p. 507). I believe this empty circle to be an absence, but an absence with
great presence- that of the fragmented witch part, a part felt foreign to Mrs. R. This part, was
born out of void but also continued to generate further void, more so because the absence did
not receive recognition by the client and was regarded as a simple bewitchment situation.
Mrs. R could not engage in an internal dialogue with her internal feeling of badness or
contamination, between holiness-impurity, through the process of connecting and examining
her internal world and experiences. Rather, she communicated her psychic pain in concrete
forms, whether through identifying aches in her body- the somatic sphere or battling these
aches through acts directed at the outer world. Both, a distancing technique allowing her to
desymbolize that which could not be known.
Rather than a processing occurring within itself, desymbolization is regarded as
intricately connected with the mechanism of dissociation, as every instance of extreme
desymbolization may be seen as pointing to the presence of dissociative processes (Freedman
& Russell, 2003). The bewitched state, with its accompanying desymbolization, represents a
dissociated part, created at the intersection between the attacker’s infliction of abuse and the
parents knowing, hateful eyes. In the bewitched state, Mrs. R would say that she was in a
state of “not being herself”. But who was that self? A self, torn into fragments by a
terrorizing other. Paraphrasing a passage from Studies on Hysteria (Freud & Breuer, 1895 in
Freud 1955, p.250) which described the splitting of the mind with relation to possession by
the devil, one could equally say the following: The split-off mind is the witch superstitiously
believed to be cursing the patient; it is true that an alien part to the patient's
waking consciousness holds sway in her; but the part is not in fact an alien one, but a part of
her own. The witch, in actuality- a vertically split off self-part, possessed the patient through
evil curses, throwing her into a reenactment of prior subordination and submission. This
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newfound submission (Ghent, 1990), a superstructure of defensiveness which protected her
from unbearable feelings, such as anxiety, shame and anger was, in fact, a structure of
deception. For, although this submission represented an attempt to connect, come to terms
with and mentalize that which could not be mentalized, the actual result was one of
fragmentation, a mental avoidance of unresolved and painful experiences which left her with
only a façade of normality (Van der Hart, Nijenhuis & Steele, 2006). Tales of bewitchment,
like most fairy tales, tell us something about the collective sources of dissociated states
(Ulanov & Ulanov, 1987).
Dissociation, as defined by most contemporary definitions, is a normal capacity of the
mind, with each dissociated aspect of self displaying unique qualities and capacities of
psychic functioning (Bromberg, 1991). When evident in a relatively cohesive personality,
various aspects of self-experience will be bound together by a core of common quality and a
sameness of existence that will show continuity over time. Self-states will shift to fit
changing relational contexts, moving fluidly and smoothly between and within one another,
giving the illusion of a singular, cohesive “one self” (Bromberg, 1991; 1994). Normal life
experiences bring us about multiple situations, conflicts, needs and desires. Indeed, all
individuals go through difficult times situated along their developmental trajectory, times
which bring them face to face with demons. These will threaten their sense of self and “going
on being”, bringing about divergent aspects of living and experiences of self. Winnicott
(1964) reminds us that a baby going through weaning-time will be sad at times (a definable
self-state), as circumstances brought about the spoil of something good. At such a stage, the
baby will feel that the breast is no longer good, it will become hated, felt to be bad or
dangerous. This is why, he explains, there is a place in fairy tales for wicked women who
give poisoned apples to princesses. On the other hand, and in due time, she will also be seen,
once again, as the good mother. In this way, the child eventually grows up and gets to know
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SO THERE IS NO HELP
here just as she is- “neither ideal nor indeed a witch” (Winicott, 1964). Just as the mother is
internalized in her various positions, so is the connection with ones’ self- a multiplicity,
evident in normal development, giving rise to our own multiple selves.
In the case of traumatized individuals who have suffered chronic abuse at the hands of
another, the hurt and pain caused by such abuse cannot be known in such an integrative
fashion.
“the process of dissociation occurs not just between domains of self
experience but almost (and sometimes actually) between aspects of
self-existence. For these individuals, inadequacy of early object
relationships has so seriously impaired the normal development of
tension-reducing
mental
structure that
certain
constellations
of
presymbolized experience too intense to be cognitively processed by
the
forming
self
were
forced
to
be
retained
as
traumatically unbearable mental states that were then dissociated to
whatever
degree
possible
to
preserve other areas
of
adaptive
functioning and sometimes sanity itself (Bromberg, 1991).
Here too, multiplicity is born, but self-parts are lost, foreign, out of the realm of
consciousness. Torn in their battle for self-existence, seeking sanity, traumatized
individuals rely on dissociation - which becomes an “escape when there is no escape”
(Putnam,1992, p. 104). So it becomes that the “evil spirits”, residing in the traumatized
child as disavowed parts of the self, provide the child with a false sense of control, while
actually taking root in the psyche as divided senses of self and response patterns (Boon,
Steele & Hart, 2011). Built by violence, a dead space in the Ego, a crypt devoid of legal
burial place is born (Abraham & Torok, 1984; 1986), This dead, empty “grave” part, frozen
in time, is an attempt to bear witness to past atrocities, an attempt to hold on to the
24
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illusion of partial mastery over experiential helplessness, an obsessive clinging to pain and
manifest impotence aimed at masking and controlling a dreaded, deadened loss of control
(Eigen, 1985), of which no one was there to witness, not even the self. The therapist as
listener bears witness to an event that has not yet come into existence, that has not yet truly
been witnessed or mentalized. Through this joint recreation of the past, the therapist as
listener to trauma comes to be a participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event (Laub,
1992). Through this process, the trauma is known. Upon avowal, the patient may begin to
be known to him or herself.
Khan (1974) describes a boy who suffered cumulative trauma and served, in his
family, as a safeguard for family secrets. These were felt by the boy as ego-alien factors and
his escape from them occurred through the exteriorization of mad, restless and manic
behavior. The environmental intrusions on the psyche and inner reality of the boy had acted
like a foreign body, and this alien part could not be communicated, symbolized or open for
interpretation. Only true escape, or the safe removal from this environment, following the
constant witnessing by Khan, allowed the boy to become “dispossessed”. Similarly,
Winnicott (1989) treated a boy who also enacted massive incorporations appearing as egoalien factors. This child would suddenly go mad, giving the feeling that he was possessed by
madness, where it was no longer him, but his mad, unpredictable mother being objectified
through him. Winnicott understood that amongst other things, the child was seeking a witness
of his states of being possessed by a mother’s madness when she goes mad in front of him
(Winnicot, 1989). Indeed, these alien, abuser parts of the self (Blizard, 1997; 2001), also
viewed as malevolent ego states (Watkins & Watkins, 1988) seek a witness to the
malevolence suffered by the hands of others.
When experience overwhelms the capacity to remember or even believe the
experience, the need for a witness is of utmost importance, as this witness or empathic
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SO THERE IS NO HELP
listener holds the potential to contain the horrifying events which collapsed the self
(Boulanger, 2008). This witnessing gives rise to the process of narration, an attempt at
mentalization. It is only when there is an Other that we can mentalize and be born. Without a
“live company” (Alvaraz, 1992), reclaiming of the lost parts of the self, telling oneself the
personal story gone astray is not possible. When such empathic witnessing does take place, it
allows for less projection on the world as evil and a lessened binding to internal malevolence.
Such company was not available to Mrs. R. throughput her life. Without a container,
equipped only with malevolent pseudo-witnesses of past atrocities, Mrs. R’s incorporatedmad witness-system eventually became, in itself, a “chronic catastrophe” (Segal, 1972). This
chronic catastrophe did not allow to make real contact with oneself or others, potential for
growth was forsaken: life was now cut off not only because of the original trauma, but by the
traumatic system developed to bear witness to past trauma and to prevent its’ recurrence. In
Segal’s (1972) illustration, the patient depicted as immersed in chronic catastrophe lived with
an obsessional, omnipotent system. In my patient, it was mostly the flip side of the coin, an
obsessional impotent system, in which power was in the other’s hand.
For this patient, living was not option. Only by barely clinging to life could she
manage and protect herself from a catastrophic ending, the repetition of the past. To protect
herself from this catastrophe, she developed an omnipotent relationship with the bad objects
within, a relationship that was played out in the psychosomatic sensations caused by the
internal bad witch part. “But seeing is not knowing and hearing is not understanding. It is as
if the sensational discourse undermines true communication, and indeed as if the language of
the body is a substitute for mental representation and thinking” (Bollas, 1987, p. 193).
With Mrs. R, true communication was deeply challenged, and this challenge ended
prematurely, with an abrupt termination of the therapy by Mrs. R. A few sessions before she
disappeared, Mrs. R asked me if I could teach her to play with her daughter, if she could
26
SO THERE IS NO HELP
bring in a game that belonged to her youngest daughter so that I would show her how to use
it, and she could then play with her at home. At the time, I was just being introduced to
relational concepts, and intuitively felt that I was not to interpret her wish, but to allow her to
be in a certain type of interaction with me, all the while risking my not knowing what it
meant yet. I agreed. However, she never did bring the game. She stopped coming at this
point, perhaps the point where learning to concretely play could be followed by learning to
play mentally. As Winnicott (1971a) so beautifully reminds us, psychotherapy has to do with
two people playing together; when play is not possible, it is the therapist’s responsibility to
help bring the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play.
When we parted, Mrs. R. could not play, and I was yet unable to aid her in learning to play.
Every game, even the most creative one, has rules. However, Mrs. R’s internal world was
dominated by ancient rules- rigid structures for ways of being, the traumatic sequelae. These
included a binding to malevolent internal parts, parts that she was not able to depart from for
the sake of mental freedom. At the point of departure, she could not exchange her rules for
the rules of creative play, as her internal dangerous world was the only world which could
afford her an essence of security. The fact that she asked to learn to play, but could not follow
through demonstrated that her aspiration was more than she could stand behind, more than I
could support at that time for her.
I ask myself, did I make a difference in the chronic catastrophe of this individual or
was that too an impossible aspiration? Ultimately, I stood across from her impenetrable
fortress, but I remind myself that I did so as a witness, a true and caring witness. This paper
too, stands as a witness to that fortress and the pain within it.
27
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