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Learn more about our last Open House in 2009, which brought to attendees a real-life clinical experience...
Self Sabotage: The Ghost of Unconscious Loyalties
Workshop & Open House on June 20th, 2009
Workshop Leader: Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler, Ph.D., ABPP, D.Litt.
As in all her workshops, Dr. Kavaler-Adler had both lecture and discussion in the morning, and a group experience based on the sharing of a guided psychic visualization in the afternoon. In her lecture section she focused on the contributions of key Object Relations theorists in relation to the topic of self sabotage. She particularly spoke of the work of Ronald Fairbairn (1952, collected papers) in relation to the idea of self sabotage being a manifestation of unconscious loyalties to those primal figures who reside in our internal worlds.
Dr. Kavaler-Adler discussed the “moral defense” in which children blame themselves rather than their parents when they need to maintain an illusion of being safe in an infant and childhood world, and where they are powerless in relation to the mother and the parents upon whom they are dependent. She explained how such conditions create prevalent dissociated and repressed identifications that bind the child to "pathological" parents, who continue to reside within their internal world.
She spoke about the primary tenet of Fairbairn’s Object Relations theory that the chief and primal human motivation is the desire to connect with another, which can block separation, differentiation, and individuation, when the primal available other who is the target of such powerful longings for connection, is a psychologically impaired or arrested parent figure. Given this primal striving, and its compulsive need to connect that gets perverted when the free motivation to connect in a healthy way with a healthy and related figure is blocked, Dr. Kavaler-Adler extemporaneously expounded upon the primal human need to mourn that accompanies the primal need to connect. She also pointed out that the need to mourn is as basic to the human condition as the need to connect, since connection and the resolution of object connection loss to renew the capacity for connection (for love and creativity) are intimately related. In doing so she referred to the work of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Margaret Mahler, Thomas Ogden, Michael Balint, Donald W. Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, Betty Joseph, Paula Heinmann, Herbert Rosenfield, Heinz Kohut, Otto Kernberg, James Masterson, Sheldon Bach, and her own work on “developmental mourning” and on pathological mourning in the object relations formulation of the “demon lover complex.”
During the course of Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s lecturing, workshop participants brought up their own clinical cases as illustrations of the points made and as pivotal platforms for asking pertinent clinical questions. Dr. Kavaler-Adler responded to these cases with explanations and ideas for participants to contemplate on their own. She also used her own case illustrations, as well as some of her articles and books, to provide necessary examples for the theoretical base she was providing. She made several theoretical points about the natural and organic view that Object Relations theory and “developmental mourning” (her own theoretical observation of development) provide in contrast to other theoretical models that may be more functional, schematic, or mechanistic. She offered the observation that through the developmental mourning process, which has been illustrated in her journal articles, books, and edited book chapters, an organic evolution of all the ego functions can be seen to emerge naturally. She spoke specifically of observing ego capacity, self reflection, psychic dialectic capacity (and she explained her own theory of “love-creativity dialectic”), interiority, capacities for symbolization and for being an “interpreting subject” (Ogden, 1986) that can receive interpretations, capacities for concern, compassion, love, and empathy, frustration tolerance, containment of erotic desire and aggression, and of the capacity for living in time, etc. all evolve. She spoke of different forms of psychic pain, referencing Betty Joseph and others. She spoke of Melanie Klein’s own shared in vivo mourning process in “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic Depressive States” in 1940, and declared the role of aggression in mourning.
In the afternoon, Dr. Kavaler-Adler led a guided psychic visualization with the group of 16 people, a guided psychic visualization approach that she employs with her monthly intensive Saturday mourning and therapy group (for 14 years). Many of those participants volunteered to share the nature of their internal dialogues with those internal others who emerged to speak with them about their own very personal forms of self sabotage. They spoke of how they were tied in with adult authority figures from the past who they were still painfully plugged into. One woman spoke of a first grade teacher who squashed her enthusiasm for life, and another of a teacher who discouraged her natural inclinations to write. Some tears were shed, and some rage was shared. Of course mothers and fathers emerged, along with siblings, and the teachers mentioned.
This form of insight led naturally into the Open House portion of the day, in which Dr. Kavaler-Adler asked for a volunteer to get inside the skin of a patient and role-play that patient while she played the role of the psychoanalyst. This led to a lively clinical experience for group discussion.
Bio of the workshop leader: Susan Kavaler-Adler (Ph.D., ABPP, NCPsyA, DLitt) is the Founder and Executive Director of the Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (since 1991). She is the author of three books and 56 articles (in journals and edited book collections). She won the National Gradiva Award in 2004 for her third book, Mourning, Spirituality and Psychic Change: A New Object Relations View of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2003). She has won ten other awards for her writing in psychoanalysis, seven from Postgraduate Center for Mental Health, and three from the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP). Her two earlier books are: The Compulsion to Create: Women Writers and Their Demon Lovers (Routledge 1993, Other Press, 2000), and The Creative Mystique: From Red Shoes Frenzy to Love and Creativity (Routledge 1996). To see Dr. Kavaler-Adler's books and articles, go to www.kavaleradler.com. Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s other Object Relations Institute workshops have included “Addiction to Self Righteousness,” “Envy,” “Mourning,” “Writing Blocks and Compulsions,” “Pivotal Clinical Moments in the Dance of Psychic Transformation,” “Time as an Object,” “Countertransference,” “Erotic Transference,” “From Neurotic Guilt to Existential Guilt as Grief and the Evolution of Compassion, Interiority and Agency.”
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