1.) How does this differ from/overlap with a mentalization model (MBT)?
2.) How does this differ from/overlap with a narrative therapy model?
3.) How does this differ from/overlap with a transference-focused model (TFP)?
4.) How does this differ from/overlap with a mind-map therapy (MMT)?
Would any of the above be explained by the outlines of Jewish historical narratives? Would any of the above explain the prevalence of borderline and bi-polar disorders and schizophrenia in Ashkenazi populations?
The structures of psychoanalytic inquiry themselves contain within them Jewish responses to modernity and also Jewish responses to intergenerational trauma that pre-dates the Holocaust by centuries. The question becomes: how does trauma inform the Jewish response to modernity? How does this in turn informed the structure of psychoanalysis? And how do these responses and metallization processes contribute to the degree of social and political compliance in the implementation of the Holocaust? The structures that determine the Jewish experience in modernity are the same structures that produced a reaction against the compliant responses. These questions and concerns reside, at the heart of any psychodynamic inquiry into a model of Jewish psychodynamics.
Attachment 101
The three forms of attachment most routinely recognized in the literature are secure, anxious/ambivalent, and avoidant (Baumrind, 1995). An additional attachment pattern, disorganized attachment, has been added to the list. Disorganized attachment, in which the reassuring parent is also the parent who is not reassuring, has been implied in a variety of psychological disorders including psychosis.
Environmental, biological, genetic and other factors carry weight in how attachment is formed. A direct correlation between a child’s or young adult’s schizophrenia, for example, and specific mistakes on the part of a parent was long ago abandoned. The concept of the “schizophrenogenic mother,” first codified by Bruno Bettelheim, was catastrophic for millions of mothers devastated by their child’s diagnosis of schizophrenia. In the Fifties and Sixties, the benighted mothers of those suffering with schizophrenia were filled with guilt and self-recrimination. We now know that schizophrenia and psychosis have far more complex and nuanced etiologies.
One way that an anxious/ambivalence attachment pattern is established is through a parental trauma pathway. This is in part due to the way that the relational needs of those who have experienced trauma are activated by fear. In such a model, the fear-inducing parent is also the parent who is called upon to soothe the infant/toddler/child from the fear-producing parent. This “schizoid” experience causes clinging and irrational relational patterns throughout life. Another component of this relational dyad is that the parent upon whom the child depends must be protected and retroactively rescued by the child from that which has already happened. The mourning that would elicit depression must be forever held at bay. We can continue to live in hope—but live in limbo, too—by refusing to integrate the all good and all bad aspects of the parent into a unified, if disappointing, reality. This unrealized reality includes the possibility of repairing the original trauma by holding out for the triumph of the all good mothering figure,.
