Temporal Disjunctions between Self-States: The Broken Dialogue between Child and Adult Selves in Male Analysands

Keith Haartman Ph.D. This presentation explores core temporal discrepancies and conflicts between developmentally younger and older self-state structures in male analysands. Psychoanalytic models that diverge theoretically share at least one element in common. Differing schools account for the complexity of mind by positing dynamic structures that crystalize usually via complex processes of identification. These developmental structures appear as “islands” of personality endowed with degrees of partial function (perception, cognition and affect, intentionality etc.), and capacities to engage with neighbouring structures (merging, co- operating, attacking, censuring and censoring, etc.). I refer to Freud’s structural model, Fairbairn’s endopsychic situation, the Kleinian/Bionian ego-destructive superego, the concept of self-envy explored by Scott, Lopez Corvo, and Searles. In the Relational schools, Davies and Frawlies describe the antipathy between a child and an adult self in survivors of sexual abuse, and Bromberg describes self-states alienated by differing degrees of linguistic formulation. Hans Loewald suggests that in conceptualizing psychic structures we replace concrete spatial conceptions with temporal ones. Psychic structures or complex self-states are radically temporal. Psychic structures tend to form as defensive responses to trauma. Trauma involves states of encapsulation where time freezes and recurs cyclically. When developmentally earlier traumatized states vie with healthier adult states in linear/episodic time, the traumatized state, trapped in an alternate repetitive temporality, fails to empathically comprehend the lived reality or umwelt of the adult. While themes of guilt and accusatory antagonism may occur at this interface, conveying a punitive ego-superego atmosphere, I suggest that a neglected yet crucial discrepancy is the problem of antithetical temporalities. This irreconcilable difference underlies the breakdown in the dialogue – the temporal confusion of tongues between developmentally younger and older structures. My awareness of this issue first arose working with two male patients who each experienced an unbridgeable gulf between an economically and emotionally bereft childhood, and, in adulthood, undreamed of success, wealth and fame. In their dreamlife, as well as in sessions, a fractured dialogue between younger and older selves manifests in the form of guilt, impostiture, and derealization. This presentation examines facets of the broken dialogue in male analysands between traumatized younger selves and socially adapted, yet compromised, adult selves. The clinical work attempts to create a “contact barrier” between the younger and older selves such that mutual intrusiveness gives way to integrative dialogue.