The importance of the therapeutic dyad as an echo of the original caregiver bond has become a commonplace of psychodynamic theory. Common to many therapeutic practices today is a basic assumption that human connection in a relationship free of obligation and contained within clear and specific boundaries has the power to heal psychic wounds. This position underlies Interpersonal, Existential, Attachment, Object Relations, and Self-Psychological theories. As a practitioner, I subscribe to this philosophy. I believe we are all born with the capacity to be self-regulating and self-actualizing. The false self emerges as we strive to assimilate and accommodate the deficits of our caregivers and place ourselves in the double-bind of jettisoning our inner authenticity and wholeness in order to protect those we cannot survive without. This false self that emerges is not contained within the realm of individual interpersonal relations. It negatively impacts institutions, damaging the landscape in which individual development takes place, and creating dysfunction at both the intergenerational and international level.
One of several theoretical models that supports this view is a systems-theory approach, which emphasizes the inter-relational field in which neurosis of the designated patient forms (Satir,1978). Less attention is paid to the sociological implications of the landscape, a view that lies at the origins of the psychoanalytic project and was only jettisoned in response to internecine conflict within the early psychoanalytic community itself. That this community should have evidenced the destructive patterns it identified within its own theoretical framework is one of many ironies in the history of psychoanalysis.
Social Theory or Psychology?
My world while coming of age was inhabited by people who had fled the Holocaust and many among them were psychoanalytic practitioners and political theorists. They inhabited a Zweistromland—a land between two streams. Their interest in the here-and-now of the moment was also a psychoanalytic living-in-the-moment, a focus on the here-and-now (Längle, 2012) so as not to dwell in the past. I spent decades working with concentration camp survivors in the U.S. and in former “Iron Curtain” countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic in the 1980s and 1990s. I was struck by similarities in markers for resiliency after trauma and loss that I have seen in other situations with individuals who are dealing with “ordinary” issues, such as failing health or aging. Those who focus on the present fare better psychologically (and physiologically) than those who dwell in the past, although it is often goals informed by the past that provide the motivation for the here-and-now stance.
Attachment, Identity and Survivor Mentality Across the Generations
Survivor mentality means loyalty to the story of suffering and survival. That loyalty is absolute. It employs shame, grief, loss, guilt, and anger. Those stories become intertwined with expectations about achievement, obedience, success and failure. Children raised in families with historical trauma feel the weight of responsibility for redressing the balance of loss and setting things right. We challenge the primacy of the oppressor or perpetrator through reenactment [unpack this statement]. This is not simply a Freudian reenactment. It is not just a replay in the hopes of finally “getting it right” amid the dangers that finally getting it right would expose us to—the annihilation of those to whom we are loyal. This is more complex.
