ABSTRACT
A parent carrying a history of unprocessed trauma will find it difficult to reflect on her child’s mind, particularly when the child is experiencing states of fear or despair. These parents are likely to evacuate their traumatic experiences into their child’s mind, to “write over” (Lyons-Ruth, 2006) the child’s experience providing “little support for the child’s elaboration of her own subjectivity and initiative” (Lyons-Ruth, 2006, p. 611). These are children whose minds are, in some instances, colonized rather than mentalized by the parent. These children often become comforters to their parents, acutely sensing their parent’s needs, and taking on what Lyons-Ruth calls a tend/befriend role. There is then a confused sense of who is carrying whose trauma, hence one’s needs, wishes and desires become difficult to decipher from those of an other. Ava’s dream illustrates this process. In her dream her mind is filled with toxic contents that come out of her body and go into the toilet. Ava’s maternal grandmother was violent with her children. One story Ava’s mother recounted was that her own mother, Ava’s grandmother, pushed Ava’s mother’s head into the toilet when she was angry. And here, a generation later, we have a dream of a brain in the toilet. Whose brain is whose in this dream? Whose mind is whose? Ava’s dream is, perhaps, indicative of her unconscious awareness that someone else’s mind is lodged inside her own mind, of the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Williams (2004) writes about the developmental consequences of carrying a “foreign body” inside the mind, describing something similar to Ava’s experience: “The individual who has incorporated an invasive object is likely to feel unstable, depleted of personal meaning and occupied or haunted by unidentifiable bodily perceptions” (p. 1345). My project in this paper is to explore what happens when a mind is not mentalized but colonized. By colonized I am referring to the lodging of another’s mind, another’s evacuated fears and traumatic history, in the developing mind of a child. I have chosen to use the word colonize because the colonized are not just invaded but occupied. The colonizer seeks to own and control in the unconscious hope of preventing the colonized from developing an independent and separate identity. Mentalizing is about making space, about creating room for thought and reflection, about “thinking together in relationships” (Seligman, 2007, p. 11). It is about the reflective space between one’s own mind and that of an other, between one’s intent and one’s impact, the creation of the space between being crucial. Colonization is about destroying space, about crowding an
other’s mind with the unprocessed contents of one’s own mind, about restricting the freedom to think. To colonize is to invade, inhabit and alter. It does not feel as if Ava’s mother just needed to get into her daughter’s mind but that she wanted and needed Ava’s mind as a place, a colony, to locate unbearable pieces of her own mind. I am interested in what it means if colonization happens in one particular area, in this case, gender and sexuality. Do some children have a greater inherent receptivity to a particular colonizing parent? How does a child, and later an adult, resist the feeling of colonization? What are the mechanisms for survival? In my work with Ava I came to know her unboundaried experience with her mother and how a lack of mentalization left Ava in a flooded, frightened and incoherent state. Ava’s attempts at expressing psychic pain were not recognized and she experienced both her body and her mind as sites of danger. As Ava’s use of the blindfold suggests, I have felt that Ava needed to blind herself to incompatible aspects of those around her, particularly her mother. I too have struggled with my sense of Ava’s mother. This mother felt loving, warm, and attached. At the same time, this mother felt traumatized and traumatizing, penetrating and yet impenetrable. Her own unprocessed trauma which was, at least in part, a trauma of what it meant to be feminine, was projected into her daughter, creating a colony in her daughter’s mind where the mother could store her unresolved experiences, particularly with regard to gender and sexuality. While projective identification, a term with many definitions, may be related to colonization it is not the same concept. Unlike colonization, projective identification is often described as a form of communication and as the wish to place something in the other person so that it can be processed and returned. In contrast, colonization is about the storage of unbearable and unprocessed psychic experience without any interest in it being transformed and then returned. Projective identification is certainly at work in the relationship between this mother and daughter but what I am discussing in this paper is not that aspect of their relationship but the ways in which the mother colonized her daughter’s mind, disavowing her own trauma and depriving her child of her own psychic space (Faimberg, 2014). Ava describes her mother as her ally. She tells me that she should have been more separate from her mother but she needed her too much. Early on Ava’s mother becomes central to our work where her father barely
exists. “He’s irrelevant,” Ava says, closing the subject. It feels to me as if a single mother raised Ava, as if her father was a periodic intruder on the intimacy of their relationship. I tell her as much and she agrees. She has nothing more to add about her father other than that he is a powerful and successful man. “I hate him,” she says, “I always have.” Over time bits of information come out about her father. He grew up wealthy, lived a wild and drug-addicted life in his twenties and was once psychiatrically hospitalized for months, the reasons for the hospitalization remaining unclear. He is now a high-powered businessman who is absorbed with his work. “He was jealous of my relationship with my mother,” Ava tells me. When Ava was an infant her father’s sixteen-year-old nephew lived in the family home. He had a history of mental illness and expressed jealousy of the new baby and so Ava’s parents had Ava sleep in their bed, between them. Her mother stacked dishes against the bedroom door so that if he opened the door the crash would awaken them. The nephew moved out of the house during Ava’s first year and then visited periodically, often getting into violent fights with Ava’s father. Ava remembers her mother taking her into the bathroom during one of those fights and then, after it was over, seeing broken glass strewn throughout the living room. I am struck by how many words Ava has to describe her mother and how few for her father. Ava’s mother is “beautiful,” “loving” and “sexy.” She grew up in a poor family, the oldest of five children, each of whom were born to different fathers. There was sexual and physical abuse in the mother’s home but Ava only knows fragments of information that her mother dropped from time to time. “Her mother’s boyfriends used to touch her,” Ava tells me in one session. “Her father called her a little whore when she was in kindergarten,” she tells me in another. Ava’s mother dropped out of high school and began working as a waitress when she was sixteen. Her looks helped her to survive. “I opened my legs for many men,” she told her preteen daughter. This mother’s femininity was in keeping with the culturally accepted views of female sexuality, making it easy to overlook how much trauma was embedded in her expression of her gender and of her sexuality both of which she used to survive. As Saketopoulou writes, “gender in both its normative and non-normative iterations can become an expression of psychic pain” (2011, p. 193).
