Tony White

There is a big ongoing and at times heated debate in psychotherapy circles about “make feels”. Can one person make another person feel angry for example.

“He made me feel so angry” or “What she said made me feel so sad” are comments that one not hears uncommonly.

My opinion is to take somewhat of a middle ground position or to kind of jump laterally.

I think that one person make another person have a feeling but what they actually feel is up to the them. So you can’t make another person feel angry or sad but you can make them have a feeling of some kind. What that feeling is, is their choice. It is usually their racket feeling that they most commonly have.



If you go up to someone and insult them to their face then the normally functioning person will have a feeling reaction to the insult. What that feeling reaction will be is up to them.

In the two pictures all the people watching on are seeing exactly the same thing but from their faces you can see they are feeling quite different emotions.



Then there is the thorny question of can you feel what another person is feeling?. Some argue that when one person is feeling sad then they can actually feel that other persons feeling. That one person is feeling another person’s feeling, not that you are being empathetic or modelling the feeling but that you are feeling their feeling with them. So you are not feeling your own sadness you are feeling their sadness with them.

Graffiti

I think I need to take some stress leave. Over the past two months I have been doing other sorts of work that involves very intense thinking, writing and the construction of reports.

The other day when I got off my computer from some hours of such writing I was all sort of disoriented as I had been concentrating so hard for so long and hadn’t even realised it. Then later I was at the shops looking for a new front door mat and all of a sudden I felt light headed and like I was going to faint. That just does not happen to me.


Me as a teenager. I remember that look. At times a troubled young man.



Throughout my life I have always had the propensity to over work and have a few times almost collapsed from it. I remember once very early on in my career waking up at my desk where I had been writing. It was about 8pm and I had fallen asleep with my head in my open note pad on the desk.

It does not come from being driven to work like it does for many others. I don’t have to work really hard to feel OK about myself or to prove that I should exist, or because of some parental driver.

Its more that I forget to judge or perhaps listen to my Free Child. I don’t realise that I am getting exhausted because I don’t listen to it. It is a sort of disconnection from the self or the Child part that is getting exhausted. Its a bit like my dissociation that I felt in my adolescence.


The disconnection with the world (and me) that I felt.



I can look at the amount of work I am doing from my Adult and make an assessment based on the facts. I know if a client told me how much they were working (like me) and the symptoms that were beginning to form (like me) then I would easily diagnose over work. But for me I feel there is something different. That it some how does not really apply to me. Perhaps it is a bit of the specialness of narcissism, that for me it is somehow different.


Me with my mother in 1981. The look of hers is typical. I was the apple of her eye. I could do no wrong and the world was mine I was shown by her. Specialness.



But of course in the long run the same rules apply to me as everyone else.

Graffiti

Life’s not all beer and skittles for a psychotherapist I can reassure you. Who ever thought that one up - “beer and skittles”!

When I began as a psychotherapist I was 22 years old. That used to make me wonder at times, like when I was counselling people about their marriages and here am I all of 22 years old. Very few people actually mentioned it to me - about my age and my job that is. A couple did but mostly not. Obviously at age 22 one has limited life experience and in the counselling business life experience can be a help.



However the clients kept coming, so I kept counselling and it hasn’t stopped since. What was I supposed to do? I had the basic training and the supervision in place. Was I meant to stop and not do any counselling until I was 30 years old? So it’s not easy for the young psychotherapist in that way. There are those beer and skittles again.

In the state where I live to become a psychologist you have to do a psychology degree at university and then you have to be supervised by an accredited psychologist for two years whilst you work. Then you can get registration as a psychologist your self.

At the moment I am supervising two people who are actually very similar by coincidence. They are females in their mid twenties and they work in the same area of rehabilitation. Their clients are quite ‘low functioning’ as they say. They are not bad enough intellectually or with a mental illness to be fully looked after by the state but they really do struggle living from day to day. They are kind of caught in the middle which is unfortunate.



Well in my supervision of these two people’s counselling of their clients I have been a bit surprised at how often the client’s come on to them or make suggestive comments. Asked out on dates, told how pretty they look have a knee or shoulder touched and so forth. They kind of just have to live with it because the clientele don’t really know any better. There are those beer and skittles again.

Of course being a male I never had that similar experience. Female clients are less demonstrative in that way it seems fair to say. However as was mentioned in the previous post female clients can have an erotic transference to a male therapist just like male clients can to a female therapist as with my two supervisees.

Over the years I have had female clients raise such feelings and issues with me but I would not say that they have been as obviously solicitous as my two supervisees are experiencing. Some have been quite flirtatious but never as direct as the male clients cited before. However we now get back to the point where female clients may be happily married and yet they can fall in love with another person (a therapist). They can be in love with two people at the same time.



Whilst it might be wonderful for the psychotherapist’s ego to be fronted with these people who are in love with them unfortunately that is not the case. A client does not fall in love with me they fall in love with what I represent. They fall in love with what they have projected onto me and not actually with me, which brings the ego back down to earth a bit. Yes you guessed it, beer and skittles again.

Finally of course many psychotherapist’s have partners of some kind and it certainly is no beer and skittles for them I can safely say. What would you feel knowing that your partner is going off to work and will be dealing day in and day out with some clients who are in love with them, have sexual feelings for them and maybe even have fantasies about them? Not uncommonly a partner can at times have some difficulty with this particularly if they are little bit insecure in that way themselves. The psychotherapist needs to deal with these issues with great care so as to not cause trouble on their own domestic front. Bloody beer and skittles again.



Come to think of it, I need a beer after all of this!

Graffiti

I was talking with someone the other day about that time old question of can men and women be just friends. I recall it was mentioned on this blog some time ago so I thought I would give me two bobs worth about it.

Question: Can women and men be just friends?

Answer: Of course they can, it happens all the time. For instance in the work place a man and woman may develop quite strong romantic or sexual feelings to each other and not act on them because either one of both of them are married. If the feelings are not acted upon then they can remain just friends.



Perhaps the real question should be can a man and a woman be friends and not have romantic or sexual feelings develop in the first place. My answer to that is, probably not, assuming they are both of the approximate age and so forth.

Can an available man and woman be just friends? Again the answer is yes, as long as the romantic feelings are not acted upon. Of course in such circumstances they are more likely to be but not necessarily so with a common example being that one has just recently ended a relationship. Thus (s)he doesn’t feel ready to enter into another relationship even if there is an attraction there between both parties.

I have been working with this female client for some time and she is in quite a good and steady relationship. They plan to get married one day but they are not in any great hurry at the moment. As the discussion progressed in one session she mentioned a previous boyfriend and it became apparent that she still had quite strong feelings for him even though the relationship had ended 7 years ago.



She purposefully avoided going near to the place of his work - she knew where he worked because her sister told her. In her daily duties she would some times think she would see him in the street and then after a second look realise it was not him. She knew where he lived which actually was quite close to where my office is. So I offered her a drive by contract as I do in situations like this. That is for her to go and drive by his house.

Well she was horrified that I would suggest such a contract. Why? Because she knew the feelings that would come up if she did such a thing. She felt that she would be being disloyal to her current boyfriend by doing such a thing. To which I replied, for heavens sake I am not suggesting you have sex with him but just drive by the front of his house.

She is still in love with the ex-boyfriend ay least to some degree and as this became apparent to her it caused her much consternation. So I then set about to reassure her. She certainly was not alone in her conundrum. Indeed most people who have had a strong love relationship end rarely fully fall out of love with that person. Indeed her current boyfriend is probably in exactly the same boat. But this concept can cause some angst in some people’s psyches.



What is being said here is that a woman (in this instance) can be in love with two men at the same time. Some protest strongly against such a proposition but from what I have seen it is true. Indeed my client sitting right in front of me was a prime example. She was in love with two men.

Some see this as not right and it’s like having an affair and cheating on the current partner. Yes my client was having an emotional affair with her ex-boyfriend and in that sense was cheating on her current partner. In one sense this is worse than if she actually had sex with another man. Sex is just a physical act and in one way that is not as bad as having love and a romantic attachment for another.

Welcome to the human race was my response to her. Should she tell her current partner? Definitely not was my response. He knows it anyway because the same is happening with him.



Anyway she did the drive by and his car was out the front but he was not sighted. It shook her up emotionally a bit but she got over it. Indeed I gave her the same drive by contract for the next two sessions as she can easily drive past his house on the way home to hers. She did them and now she says at the end of each session, “I suppose you want me to do another drive by?” (eyes raised to the roof). I smile and say nothing and had no intention of suggesting such another contract to her. She is now making it for herself and she does a drive by each time she ends with me.

She is coming to accept that she is in love with two men and that’s OK.

Graffiti

When teaching an introduction to Transactional Analysis one teaches about contaminations of the ego states and you get a diagram like so:



In this case the Adult is contaminated by the Child or the Parent. So in a Parent contaminated Adult the person takes their belief systems and opinions as being facts instead. They thus have a faulty perception. They may be of the view that white people are superior to others, but they take this as a statement of fact rather than a statement of opinion. They often have some very dodgy reasons or scientific facts to back up their belief. But the main point is that they are of the personal view that such a thing is a fact and they cannot be swayed from that position by any type of argument.

When teaching this one often gets the question:

“So are you saying that religion is a Parent contamination of the Adult?”

My answer to that usually goes along the lines of it may be but is by no means necessarily so. A Parent contamination is a dogma. Some people do take religious views as a dogma. If that is happening then it is such a contamination. However religion, faith and spirituality is so much, much more than that.


Marianne Faithfull

What I am going to do now is look at faith and religion from a psychological perspective. I sort of don’t like doing this as in one way it is an insult to religion and faith. This is not a statement about religion but a look at the role faith or religion can have in the human personality.

With the amount or religions and faiths around the world and throughout history it seems safe to say that humans have a need for such a thing. It in some way is natural for them or meets some kind of psychological need in them. My own view is that a person who has no faith or spiritual belief system is missing a bit. They are less of a complete person if they don’t have a faith like belief in some thing.



I have my own beliefs about the grand plan, why we are here, where we have been, where we are going and what is the meaning of it all. It is not aligned with any particular religion of system of faith but I am glad I have it. If I didn’t have it I would feel a bit “soul less”. This has been articulated by many writers of psychology over the years, in many varying ways but they do tend to say the same type of thing. That if you have a faith or some sort of spiritual belief then you are more psychologically complete as a person.

What am I meaning by faith?. Well it is precisely what it says. I have faith in something. That implies things like trust because it cannot be proven. I believe in it even when I can’t prove it by some scientific experiment. Indeed if I could prove it then it would stop being a faith. No different to when someone says to another:

“I have faith in you that you will come through”

You don’t know if they will or they wont but you believe that they will. So that is how I am using the term faith here.


Does she have faith in herself?



Psychologically I find similarities between faith and love. Sometimes I ask clients if they are in love with so and so, to which they reply they don’t know and how will they know when they are. My response is, “you will feel it and you will just know when you are”. This implies a sense of trust in self. You are not going to try and find the evidence for the love or work out if you are or not. Instead you are going to trust that your own Free Child will know when it is and it will tell you then.

There is almost a quality of submission to it. One falls in love. One does not jump into love or drives their car into love. It is a much more passive process when the feeling of love simply arrives at your door step one day. Perhaps faith operates the same way and is also a psychologically passive process.


You can't make it happen it just grows on you - faith and love.



Indeed if one lacks a sense of faith then after reading this they will be worse off. If they accept what I am saying then their sense of psychological incompleteness is highlighted and thus they can easily be more motivated to go and get a ‘faith’. Like going to the shop and buying one. I think not. A sense of faith or having a faith in something is a passive process where one day you sort of suddenly realise that you do actually have a faith like belief in a grand plan or the meaning of life for you.

To conclude I would like to say again that I am not attempting to explain religion or spirituality. What I have done here is look at how religions or faith or spirituality can effect people psychologically. It seem safe to say that psychologically people have a ‘faith’ part of self. If one does not have a faith then that part of self is empty, they are incomplete in that way.

Graffiti

Not too sure if I actually want to write on this topic as it is one that has been done to death, but I have never really had my public say on it, probably just for the reason I cited. So I might have a brief say.

Cure in psychotherapy is a bit like talking about IQ, people tend to get hot under the collar about it. Why? Because what you think about IQ reflects an overall philosophy of life or view of the world. If one states that some have a higher IQ than others then that is a non egalitarian view of human nature and that can cause some heated debate for sure!!


Are all people equall?



What is cure also reflects ones personal philosophy about what is right and wrong in human nature, relationships and so forth. Another hot topic indeed.

When I was a young fresh faced psychotherapist the goal often cited was quite a behavioural one. You defined the problem behaviour and then applied the therapy until the behaviour had changed and then there was a cure. Over time that has changed for me and I suppose and I define cure now by what the client actually wants. If they want a specific behavioural cure then that is cure for that client.


Behavior change?



At the other end of the scale some come to therapy because their ‘issues’ will arise from time to time and they seek counsel on them. This is not so much about changing a ‘thing’ but just having some counsel while the person ‘works through’ what ever it is. Weather that be a specific event in their life like a relationship bad patch, a death of someone, or for some reason their Child ego state is just “arching up”.

This is much more of a relational therapy approach and the person is using the therapist as a sympathetic listener who can provide counsel if need be. So cure in this instance would be just that (being sympathetically listended to) and not related to a specific behaviour. Then of course there are all the spots in between these two ends of the continum

It is this sympathetic listener therapy that means therapy kind of stops being a therapy. The word “therapy’ implies there is something wrong and thus there needs to be therapy to change or cure the ‘wrong’ thing. The sympathetic listener therapy is more of a life style than a therapy.


If you don't have this support in your life you are not in a good way.



For psychological health we all need a sympathetic listener for all our life. If you don’t have one then your psychological state will deteriorate quite quickly. For many their spouse is their sympathetic listener but that has its difficulties as spouses always have their own agendas and thus their wise counsel will be biased by that. In addition sometimes it is the spouse that one wants the sympathetic listening about! But often a spouse can fill that role at least to some extent. Some people prefer to have their sympathetic listener as an external therapist and thus they will live a life style where they have that person in their life in that role.


Life style


So is this therapy?
If it is then there is not really a cure and thus it is not really a therapy in the first place.

Graffiti

The Australian Psychological Society (APS) has just sent out its most recent bulletin to all members. In it there is an article that looks at what has happened to the Australian population wth regards to their drug and alcohol use over the past 10 years. Is it different or has it been more of the same?.



Now this paper is done by APS substance use interest group. This is serious stuff. These guys are hard core scientists. They know the literature and they know the research and they will give the facts as scientists do. Yet they also have a political barrow to push and as we know health policy on drug use has very little to do with what are the actual deliterious effects of drugs and is dictated by politics.

Consider this quote from the APS in a previous blog post dated 12.5.08.

“In Australian history, laws regarding the legality or illegality of certain drugs have been politically driven, and had little to do with the level of use or possible harms that the substances themselves might cause. For example, the restriction of opium began in Queensland in 1897, with the Aboriginal Protection and Sale of
Opium Act (see Berkhout & Robinson, 1999). This Act made it unlawful for doctors, chemists and wholesale druggists to possess or supply opium, but only if it was intended for sale to Aboriginal peoples”


Consider this quote from the most recent APS bulletin, “Whilst it cannot be implied that cannabis use causes schizophrenia in people who would not have otherwise developed it, there is good epidemiological evidence of a significant association between cannabis use and the risk of meeting criteria of schizophrenia” (P9).

They would have hated writing that sentence and it is very well worded. It goes directly against what the government wants them to say and thus threatens lots of funding and research dollars. But they did give the facts in the first half of the sentence so I give that to the scientists in them.

They are saying there is no scientific evidence that cannabis can induce scizophrenia. There is no scientific evidence for a condition called a marijuana induced psychosis and these guys as I have said know their research and know their science and they have been researching this for many years now.

But then comes the ducking and weaving as the politics enters into the fray and they make the comment about epidemiological evidence. What is epidemiological evidence?

Plenty of bending and weaving here.




Epidemiological studies can only go to prove that an agent could have caused, but not that it did cause, an effect in any particular case. Epidemiology is concerned with the incidence of disease in populations and does not address the question of the cause of an individual’s disease.

In other words it is second rate knowledge and is not involved in the science determining if cannabis can cause a psychosis. They have tried to water down the prior fact they just made that there is no scientific evidence for cannabis inducing schizophrenia.

Finally they have another go to water it down in the last part of the sentence

“there is good epidemiological evidence of a significant association between cannabis use and the risk of meeting criteria of schizophrenia”. Take particular note of the statement, “...the risk of meeting criteria of schizophrenia”. It does not say, “the risk of meeting the criteria for schizophrenia”.

In the diagnosis of schizophrenia there may be 10 different criteria. For a person to be diagnosed as schizophrenic they have to meet at least 7 of those 10 criteria.


So what they are saying is, “there is good epidemiological evidence of a significant association between cannabis use and the risk of meeting at least one of the criteria of schizophrenia”, which is no where near a peson being diagnosed as schizophrenic or psychotic.

Finally they ask if the numbers of those who get addicited to drugs in Australia has changed over the years. And the answer is...

no

The numbers have not gotten more and the numbers have not gotten less. It has all remained the same. There has been a shift from heroin addiction to amphetamine addiction but the over all numbers are exactly the same now as they have been in the past.

So governments come and governments go and they change the drug laws this way and that way. Wars on drugs came and go and public commentators in the press talk about zero tolerance and mandatory sentencing for this and that. The only thing that does not change is the numbers of people addicted to drugs. We are warned in the media about a tsunami of drug addicts that are just about to descend on society and how our hospitals are now filling up with this huge wave of drug addicits.

There is just one problem, none of it is true.


Graffiti

A couple of weeks ago I was working with this guy who was about 30 years old. I had seen him about 10 times and he has a significant amphetamine problem. You don’t often see people like him in private practice because they have other things to spend their money on than counselling. However in this instance I had known his mother for a long time and she was paying. I would send her the account and she would send the money directly to me as one learns about these things over time!

Being at times a chronic amphetamine user he lived the lifestyle and had the girl friend who was also an intermittent user and so forth. Not an ounce of fat on him and his skin had that certain type of look and texture that speed users get. Almost a bit death like really. It looks like they really need a damn good feed!.



On a side note it is a similar look that very heath conscious people get sometimes. Those who have a very healthy diet and they only eat organic and everything is cooked in a very healthy way and so forth. They eat so healthily that they end up looking quite unhealthy. It looks like they need a damn good meal of fish and chips.

Anyway back to the topic. Being a regular amphetamine user he was prone to quite paranoid thinking and delusions at times. One of these was that the guy who lived next door to him was watching him and following him. My response to him, as it is sometimes to such paranoid thinking was:

“You’re not that important”.

Now whilst this may seem an unkind thing to say it is actually true. For one person to follow another person means that for some reason they are very important to them. To follow some one requires the expenditure of great deal of time and effort. The neighbour would have to stay at home constantly watching out the front to see if my user client was coming and going. When he went out the neighbour would have to drop everything and quickly get into his car and then engage in the difficult task of following him at a distance such that he was not noticed.



And my client believed that the neighbour had been doing this for at least the past few months. I am afraid he is just not that important. We had been dealing with this type of paranoid thinking in the last few sessions. After our last session, later that day I went to the supermarket to obtain some supplies for my dinner that night. I went to a shopping centre that I only ever frequent irregularly as I was wanting to get a special kind of fish that I have not seen elsewhere.

Well there I was shopping away and all of a sudden there was my client standing in the same shop. It was in the same suburb as he lived but not really all that close though. I had never seen him before out side the counselling room ever. So we engaged in a brief conversation and I knew what he would be thinking. That I was for some reason following him. We had been discussing that very topic only 4 hours before, of him being followed. What could I say! I didn’t mention any thing about it but I knew what would be going through his mind. I have never heard from him since.


Did this happen by accident?

Graffiti

Blank screen transference is the traditional view of transference in the therapeutic relationship. It works like so:



The therapist presents as an anonymous blank screen. Onto the screen over time the client makes her projections. She places her mother’s or father’s face onto the therapist as they say and then has the same emotional reactions to the therapist as she historically did to her parents.

For instance if as a child the client felt mother tended to ignore her and prefer others then she will tend to see the therapist do the same sort of thing. This would particularly come to fruition in group therapy where she could see herself as unfairly treated by the therapist when in fact he is not doing that.


The family of origin is very powerful. Look at the son standing like the father.

This type of transference was very much used and encouraged in the early days with Freud and psychoanalysis. The client would lie on the couch and free associate or talk about her feelings and so forth. The therapist would say very little and thus presents as a blank screen. Originally Freud sat down at the feet of the client until one day a female client with a strong erotic transference with him suddenly jumped up and “felt him up”. After that he sat behind the head of the client and thus the blank screen was even more pronounced as the client could not even see the therapist and any reactions he may have to what she was saying.


Sitting and the foot end can be hazardous!

The advantage of this is one gets a clearer statement by the client of their unresolved issues of childhood. As there is a blank screen any projections are less ‘contaminated’ by reality.

Over time some of this has changed, particularly these days when we have the relational. In the relationship with the client these days the therapist can be quite active and thus the blank screen is much less pronounced. The more a therapist interacts or communicates directly with a client the more reality the client is confronted with. For instance if in a group the therapist should seek out and talk with the client the harder it is for the client to maintain the belief or perception that the therapist favours others over her.



However not uncommonly it is still managed! Much to the therapist’s dismay at times as I can attest to from many a weekend residential therapy group. The client’s perception of events can get quite distorted which really does attest to the power of the life script.

For instance the client may have selective perception. Yes the client is aware that the therapist did speak to her but that sort of some how does not count:
“AND he also spoke to others more than he spoke to me”
“AND he only spoke to me because he felt sorry for me, he did not really want to speak to me”
“AND he only spoke to me because I had mentioned it in the group before”
“AND he looked bored when he spoke to me”
“AND he looked like he was having much more fun with others”
AND so on endlessly.

As I said before the degree that some clients can modify their perceptions of reality so as to fit with their childhood beliefs does attest to the strength of a persons life script. It can be very resilient indeed.

However it is a trade off. The less of a blank screen there is the more the inaccurate projections of the client have to struggle to survive. The other problem with the blank screen transference is one cannot have the client finally get their needs met via the therapeutic relationship. The blank screen is good for diagnosis but has no impact on treatment.

For instance a client may come from a background where she got little emotional support from mother or father. She was basically left to fend for herself. So she learns that you can never rely on people and trust big people in your life to be protectors and carers.


Belonging



If the therapist interacts with the client (an interactive transference) then this faulty script belief can be treated with in the therapeutic relationship. In this case the therapist may invite the client to become dependent on and rely on the therapist. To begin to feel what it is like living with a ‘big’ person in their life who they can go to with their troubles and difficult feelings. To begin to feel what it is like to no longer be living emotionally alone. Whilst this can be very appealing to some it can also be very frightening at the same time. “What if you do again trust and rely on them and then they let you down anyway” can be the thinking. The client craves it and fears it at the same time.

Whilst this can be a very powerful treatment much of the power in the transference relies on the misperception of the therapist by the client. The more the therapist remains a blank screen the more the client can imbue the therapist with the ‘potency’ that is so powerful for the treatment. It is precisely this that make the transference such a powerful tool in treatment in the first place.

The more the therapist interacts with the client the more ‘real’ they become to the client. The more real they become, the more of a ‘nobody’ they become. The less potency the client will bestow onto the therapist. The less potency bestowed means the less impact the therapist can have on the client.


Becoming real makes the transference useless.



So which one is it to be. The blank screen transference or the interactive transference? A fine line to walk indeed.

Graffiti

Mother-child attachment

It has long been recognised that human attachment is central to effective human functioning and development. Of course attachment occurs in all human relationships but it is in the attachment between a mother and young child where it achieves most prominence. Having worked in the psychotherapy business for 25 years I have earned a lot of my wages working with people on their attachments with their mothers. It is a very problematic area.

Why? It seems safe to say that of all attachments in all human relationships it is the mother-child attachment that is the most profound. Here we have one person growing inside another person, so there is a complete somatic, indeed one could even say a cellular connection or attachment. You don’t get much more profound than that. As adults there are not many of us who really ever fully break that original attachment and hence people often end up in counselling due to the problems that such an unresolved attachment can produce and there are many of them.



However at birth it is then the task of the child to form a psychological attachment to the mother and the mother to form a psychological attachment to the child. If that does not happen or the attachments are significantly disturbed then that usually leads to some deep seated psychopathology on the behalf of the child. That person will grow up with significant psychological disturbance if the basic attachment is appreciably damaged or malformed. This is a pivotal aspect of human development.

As we know Eric Berne developed his model of personality as being the three ego states as such:



Then in the early 1980s I came along and presented the two ego state model where the Adult was relocated as a subset of the Parent ego state. If you wish to read about this model go to

http://www.ausweblogs.com/users/ynot1/?p=63




At that time I had a trainee therapist who developed the four ego state model. This woman worked with mothers with very young children. She had two roles one as an educator to give the mothers information and the other as a counsellor of the mothers and the children. She devised the four ego state model to explain the attachment process of the mother to the child. It looked like so:





As we know when a child is born it only has one ego state, the Child ego state. Its Adult and Parent ego states do not exist but develop later in life. Her thesis was that for the mother to develop a successful attachment to the newborn she had to take on that single Child ego state as part of her own personality. An interesting way of viewing a mother’s attachment to a newborn.

Hence we end up with the 4 ego state model diagram where the mother has introjected the newborn’s personality as part of herself and thus the skin is drawn around the four ego states. She in essence ends up with two Child ego states, her own and the newborns. If done then there has been a successful attachment by the mother to the child and the mother has a sense of the boundaries between the two becoming blurry and the sense of the two identities merging.



This of course increases the possibility for intrapsychic conflict in the mother. We all have three ego states which can disagree and conflict with each other, but the new mother now has four that can conflict. Of particular importance is any conflicts between the mother’s original Child ego state and the new introjected one that she now possesses.

So when the mother has been sleep deprived for three days with a crying baby she can feel some resentment and anger at the newborn. With this 4 ego state model she can also feel anger at this new needy part of herself. Such a suggestion leads to some new and interesting treatment options for how to deal with a sleep deprived mothers anger in such circumstances.

*****

As mentioned before in the four ego state model the mother introjects the child’s personality into her self and this facilitates the attachment process. It can also be seen to have evolutionary basis or a survival of the species basis. For any species to survive it needs to have its new and young members looked after so that they can grow into adults and reproduce the species them self. The introjection of the newborn into the mother’s personality may help with this.

As the mother is tending to and looking after the young newborn she also has the same Child ego state in herself. Thus in the psychological sense she is also tending to her own Child ego state (number two). She has a self interest in doing such activities which of course means she is more likely to do it and thus the species is more likely to survive. Thus the noble pursuit of mothering becomes an act of self interest on the mother’s behalf.



This phenomena could also explain why parents tend to side with or believe their child over another. The ugly parent syndrome that we sometimes see on the sporting field. The father who abuses the umpire or another child in a game of football for unfairly dealing with his son on the field of play. Really he is defending his own Child ego state against perceived injustice as well as his son. He is said to be vicariously living through his son. He is nurturing his own Child ego state at the same time as protecting his son in the four ego state model. Thus the parent is more likely to do it and be more invested in doing it successfully.

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