Charles Misses the Middle Ground

There is so much in Marilyn Charles’ paper with which I agree that I find it hard to take a critical stance. My comments should be read in this light: not as criticism of any particular thing she says, but the way in which the middle range of experience, lying between large scale social change and intrapsychic experience, tends to get left out. Charles is a practicing psychoanalyst, and so one would expect her to take that perspective. Subsequently, she steps back and approaches social change as a historian and scholar, puzzling over the effect of large scale social change on the experience of growing up. One result is that the greater freedom of young people in recent decades has actually made it more difficult for many to achieve relative autonomy.

What I miss is the middle ground, the reality of parent-child interaction under the impress of social change. Perhaps this is impossible from an analytic perspective, but one longs for the teenage equivalent of mother-infant observation, in which the quality of the child’s interaction with parents and others is observed. In its absence, the inner experience of the child, often grown and looking back, is taken as a mirror of that reality.

This, of course, is not a problem unique to Charles’ perspective, but I was struck by the way in which her patients’ experience of the parents becomes the only possible experience. From a strictly analytic perspective it is, but it doesn’t help to connect the way in which large scale social change is mediated in its impact by families. We assume it, but we don’t know exactly how it works.

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, the intellectual founders of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, theorized that the diminishment of the father’s authority during the inter-war years, due largely to his absence at work, led to a “society without fathers.” Weak and absent external authority led to the premature socialization of the child by large institutions, such as schools. The Frankfurt School’s nostalgia for the Oedipus complex is both ironic and touching. Surely this is not the whole story. Nevertheless, psychoanalytic social theory, of which psychohistory is a part, would

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do well to explore the middle realm of social change: somewhere between the intrapsychic and the transformation of the developed West from a rural to an industrial, and in many places a post-industrial, society.

The virtue of the Frankfurt School’s approach is that it looked at the ways in which a strong ego was built, particularly the way in which the father separates the son from his mother while remaining an admired and loved figure for the son. It is out of the idiosyncratic resolution of this conflict that strong egos are built. This analysis, though focused almost exclusively on boys and men (a fundamental flaw), closed the gap between the intrapsychic and large scale social change. While I admire their method, I am not endorsing their conclusion.

Charles is surely correct that “current community mental health systems have streamlined service delivery in ways that fail to take into account people’s developmental needs.” But her solution seems to be one of better psychological support that promotes greater resilience and adaptation. I’m not quite sure what this means. What people at the margins need is a holding community: group housing that respects privacy, a place to go and be the other, as well as a place to be alone, the chance to cultivate friendships, and learn skills, including social skills. The intrapsychic perspective tends to ignore (not downplay, but ignore) the everyday needs of people for shelter, privacy, security, and friendship.

Charles is surely right to quote Wilfred Bion that “we are always at a crossroads between growth and evasion.” Growth takes security, a sense of being held, that the next step will not lead us over the brink to fall forever. If we think about psychoanalysis in terms of the provision of holding resources that would provide individuals the security to take the next step, then psychoanalysis becomes both a social theory and a social practice, one not quite so dependent on interpretation but more on meeting the human need to be held by people and institutions.

The influence of D. W. Winnicott on my account should be obvious, and Winnicott had a great deal of confidence that most people could grow up if they were held in an age-appropriate way, neither crushed nor dropped. Group housing and holding communities do this for those who were crushed or dropped (or both) along the way. See Winnicott’s Deprivation and Delinquency (1990) for more on this neglected aspect of his work.

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Charles says that “if we want independent children, we have to give them the tools to be able to think through complicated situations for themselves.” True enough, and I suggest that except in the extremely damaged person, the tools are already there if the individual feels held securely enough to take a chance. Mine is not an argument against communities organized around intensive psychotherapy. We need more, and more can surely benefit. But most people don’t need this, even troubled people. Certainly most people can’t afford it. Most people need a place to be, in which privacy and protection are provided in appropriate measure. This is the institutional equivalent of neither dropping nor crushing the infant and young child, and it applies to all the generations of men and women.

To repeat, nothing in Charles’ account is an argument against this approach. Much in her account supports it. But there is a tendency among those who do psychoanalytic social theory to move too quickly from the intrapsychic to large scale social changes, forgetting the importance of practical, everyday social support for those in need. In some ways this includes all of us, but some need extra help, and this is what a moral community possessing psychological insight, or perhaps just human insight, will do.

Finally, I would offer an addendum to Charles’ opening sentence, “Humans begin life utterly dependent on others.” Most of us end life this way too, and along the way we are never free of our dependence on others. This dependence may become less total, but it is no less urgent.

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