Analysis of a Narcissistic Wound: Reflections on Andre Green's "The Dead Mother"

MICHAL ADIV-GINACH

This paper examines the "dead mother complex," defined by Andre Green (1986), and gives particular consideration to the patient's seduction of the father in order to defend against longing and rage towards the "dead mother." The author provides vivid, in-depth clinical studies of two patients who grew up with such a mother. These studies offer insight into the patients' complex inner worlds especially as revealed through the author's countertransference experiences.

ndre Green's (1986) concept of the dead mother, a mother who is present in body but absent in soul, has been very meaningful to me personally. Having been raised in a Kibbutz where mothers were physically absent most of the time (parents were allowed only three hours a day with their children and often did not have even that much time with them), I often experienced feelings of longing for an absent mother. In reading Green's paper, "The Dead Mother" (1986), I felt his concept might apply to a wider scope of experience than that of a sudden loss of the mother's emotional connection. The early narcissistic wound Green describes can also be observed in patients with narcissistic mothers who were depressed throughout the patient's childhood or were otherwise consumed by life away from their children (as in the kibbutz).
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Further, I wondered if this wound is also inflicted when there is a complete absence of symbiotic attachment. Green's dead mother complex has provided me with an new way of thinking about some patients, perhaps a new explanatory tool. Green (1986) describes a dynamic that analysts encounter with patients who, in their infancy, have experienced a sudden loss of their mother's affection and emotional connection. The mother. Green argues, even though she is physically present, becomes emotionally dead to the child. Such a psychic situation, according to Green, might cause a narcissistic wound to the child's ego, leaving him forever consumed by his bereavement (p. 159). This kind of wound. Green tells us, "plays a formative role in the organization of [the child's] psyche" (p. 143). And since any wound is the result of destructiveness inflicted upon the child, the child's anxiety that accompanies the wound is destructive as well, bearing "the colors of mourning: black or white [blanc, the translator explains in a note, can also mean blank]. Black as in severe depression, or blank as in states of emptiness . . ." (p. 146). The clinical picture then is that of a patient who exhibits "impotence to withdraw from a conflictual situation, impotence to love, to make the most of one's talents, to multiply one's assets," accompanied by a profound dissatisfaction with life as a whole (p. 148).

Clinical Examples
Sasha is a patient with many such longings and an impotence about life. Although she is a talented artist, her professional life lacks focus and in her personal life she experiences disappointment after disappointment. A beautiful young woman, she dresses colorfully and has a soft, feminine, seductive quality. She moves like a cat with an air of sexual suggestion, but it is merely a "suggestion." In a group Sasha told with great sadness of another beginning of a relationship with a man that ended badlyanother triumph of seduction that went sour. The previous week she iiad discussed how sexually attentive her father was and how disgusted, yet special, he made her feel. So sex carries great ambivalence fbr Sasha. Donna is another patient whose father's sexual attention made her feel both special and repelled. Donna began treatment with me more than 10 years ago. She is a very attractive woman now in her early fifties who, when she first started analysis, dressed almost exclusively in black.

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looking bland with her clothes always tightly zipped up. Although she has branched out to pastel colors and often reveals some cleavage, at a deeper level she is still the same stubborn depressive she has been all along. As she walks into the session, she often makes a comment like, "I missed you so," or "I couldn't wait to see you." Yet in all these years she has never asked me one personal question, nor has she shown the slightest interest in me other than as an agent of hope. "You are supposed to feel hopeful for me. That is my last hope," she has told me repeatedly. Both patients project a feeling of depressed hopelessness. They both experience themselves as failures in their professional as well as personal lives. They are resistant to the analysis in a very stubborn, focused way, but at the same time they are seductive, insisting on how important the analyst is to them and needing to feel like her favorite. Both patients had depressed mothers, whom they experienced as indifferent to them, i.e., they share the experience of not feeling loved by their mother. Sasha had a very weak, almost invisible mother, while Donna's mother managed to dominate her family with her depression and overeating. "My mother used to brag about letting her babies cry themselves to sleep," Donna explained in a session. They both have had love objects with whom they were consistently unable to connect, ending one relationship after another with a deep sense of failure. They both always return to a sense of emptiness, to an inability to find pleasure in anything, to a lingering depression, which is their base line, and to a profound dissatisfaction with themselves and their lives. Both patients also struggle with similar issues regarding food. They use food as they use sex, coming to it with a hope that it will give them life, yet revealing an underlying destructive intention in the way they use it. On occasion both patients eat ad nauseam. Sasha used to be bulimic, but that symptom dissipated in the first few years of her analysis. Donna talks about her love life in the same way she talks about her sugar addiction: she says she cannot eat any sugar at all because, like an alcoholic, even a small amount is enough to throw her into a binge. Donna and Sasha's seductions have the same feeling to them as their food addictions. Their love lives proceed from one feeling-state to another where the objects (the men) are but instruments of those feeling-states. They both use food as they do sex: not to get the feeling of satisfaction but rather to repeat the feeling of emptiness. In Green's (1986) words each "relentlessly endeavors to retain the primary object and relive, repetitively, its loss."(p. 167) The addiction is to the repetition, to the black hole, the emptiness, the depression, and it is here that

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Green is so helpful in explaining the early cannibalistic impulses, the desire to consume the mother, to become her rather than to get something from her. The repetition appears to have a pre-object origin and to be inspired by the death drive. Sitting in the room with Sasha or Donna, one has the feeling that they actually long for a static, non-feeling state and that they are resolutely committed to this destructive course.

Seduction of the Father

It is my hypothesis that these patients are using a secret, seductive relationship with the father as a defense against rageful longing for the emotionally dead mother. The seduction of the father provides an escape for both father and daughter, yet it is not about the father but rather their longing for the dead mother. The seduction of early life is an empty seduction, a poor substitute for the real object of desirethe mother. Likewise the seductions of their present lives are empty as well. Both Donna and Sasha seem to prefer covert seductions that give the feeling of secretly being the chosen one. They tend to opt for being part of a hidden sexual liaison as opposed to being the legitimate love object of a real man. Their interest in the actual man is only in what he promises, not in whether he will ftilfill the promise. He is promptly discarded as soon as he becomes emotionally interested in them, and true to their unconscious intention, they are on the whole attracted to men who are incapable of connecting, thus leaving them in that familiar desert of longing. In line with this hypothesis, in both group and individual sessions. Donna and Sasha are unable to get interested in anything or anybody. They report feeling worthless and regress to depression. They can, however, talk endlessly about their feeling states, and they consume a big chunk of the air space in the group if not by talking then by sulking. Green's dead mother complex provided me with a context in which to understand the role of the seduction of the father. I see it as a defensive structure against the murderous longings for the dead mother. Applying Green's conceptualization, I hj^jothesize that a deadness of depression loomed over Donna and Sasha's lives from the starta deadness they were defending against and at the same time holding on to. Indeed it felt as if there was no replacement for the emotionally dead mother, no separation from her because they never had her. Was it because they were still struggling for their mothers' love that no other

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object was able to fulfill this need? Clearly, mature love was of no interest to them. It could not overcome the emptiness of the early, all-consuming depression of the mother, the ultimate love object of preverbal life. Because both Donna and Sasha felt sexually desired by their fathers, I thought that perhaps they found refuge from the mother's depression, albeit temporary and utterly unsatisfactory, in this conspiracy of the never-consummated relationship with the fathera conspiracy of the disenfranchised, both yearning in vain for the mother's love. Not really interested in each other, father and daughter settled for this conspiracy of seduction as a consolation for the object of love neither of them could have, the depressed mother. Both women's longings conceal an immense hopelessness. Sasha would often say: "I don't know what I want. Such emptiness and fear that it will never be filled up by something good. The good that I was promised will never come to me. It comes to everybody else but not to me." Or "I am empty and filled with shit, with feeling shitty." In the depressed monotone she commonly used in our sessions. Donna would often say, "I am empty; there is nothing there." Through their physical and psychical pain. Donna and Sasha express a longing for a particular feeling they cannot articulate and assign always to an unattainable object. Thus, every object that comes their way is, sooner or later, a disappointment and is useful only insofar as it can produce a particular feeling for them. Sasha begins every session by telling me how full her stomach feels. Preoccupied with preverbal states, she insists on keeping me posted during the session about the condition of her stomach: "It hurts," or "It feels empty," or "full," or "very uncomfortable." She also shivers often when she is overwhelmed and tends to express her feelings in body states. Both Donna and Sasha are very particular about the environment in their sessions: they both need an exact amount of light and level of noise, and frequently ask me to make adjustments. Their discomfort with the particulars of their environment in the session brings to mind their colicky states in life and their intense longing (or rather, demand) for a particular feeling they never actually get. Donna tells me, during times of despair, that it is up to me to keep her hope alive for her. It feels that in this role I am part of her narcissistic orbit. In the transference, then, the patient appears to be in a double bind between feelings of devotion to meor, as Green (1986) suggests, devotion more to the analysis than to the analystand feelings of dissatisfaction with the analysis, which she avoids expressing at all costs. Green proposes that this idealization of the analyst is in the service of the seduction. He also points out the patient's need to be admired

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by the analyst, but again the feeling here is that the analyst is not a separate object in spite of the idealization of her (pp. 161-162). Another aspect of Donna's narcissistic transference is the way in which she talks in our sessions. Her need to recount the occurrences of the week chronologically has a compulsive quality, especially when it comes to her sexual experiences, as if talking about them in her sessions is a part of the sexual experience. She discusses them with a subdued urgency that tolerates no delay, indeed with a sense of secret pleasure, suggesting this is where her energy goes. (She complains of having little energy for life.) Donna discusses her constant conflict between being the bad girl and the good girl as well as her conflict between hope and hopelessness. There is a confessional as well as a kind of demanding pleasure in her recounting of her sexual experiences, but above all, it feels stagnant. Indeed her discourse seems cleverly designed to avoid any progressive communication whatsoever.

The Dead Mother Complex

Green's (1986) dead mother complex helps us understand the destructiveness these patients bring to their love lives as well as to their analyses. He describes the patient's love affairs as projective actualization in an attempt to cure the narcissistic wound. But because of the drive intensity, the object has no significance or not enough libidinal power and is eventually wiped out by the counterpoising strength of the dead mother complex (p. 159). It is this core of emptiness, of blackness, indeed, a hole that Green (1986) depicts that seems to capture these patients' psychic state so precisely. The patient has the feeling that a malediction weighs upon him, that there is no end to the dead mother's dying, and that it holds him prisoner... Pain, a narcissistic feeling, surfaces again. It is a hurt which is situated on the edge of the wound, colouring all the cathexes . . . it is as impossible to hate as to love. (p. 153) Green (1986) does not explicitly discuss countertransference, yet in the tone of his paper one senses the profound devotion, might I dare say love, he feels for the patients he describes. Interestingly, I have felt neither depressed nor dead in my patients' presence. I find myself

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highly invested in them. I feel mostly loving towards them and deeply interested in every nuance of their moods. Even though they report feeling dead, I do not feel dead in their presence. I also sense their connection to me, yet it feels like a barren connection, a connection in the service of the repetition rather than an indication of their progress. With Donna, whose sabotaging of the analysis has been on the agenda for years, I have recently begun to experience different feelings, such as rage and exasperation at the tenacity of her attachment to her depression. And although I occasionally feel hopeless, I cannot give up on her. Green's (1986) words help explain what I observe: We watch the failure of the experience of individuating separation (Mahler) where the juvenile ego, instead of constituting the receptacle for cathexes to come, afler separation, relentlessly endeavors to retain the primary object and relive, repetitively, its loss, which on the level of the primary ego (which is melded with the object) gives rise to the feeling of narcissistic depletion, expressed phenomenologically by the sentiment of emptiness, so characteristic of depression, which is always the result of a narcissistic wound experienced on the level of the ego. (p. 167) There is "a hole in the texture of the object-relations with the mother" (Green, 1986, p. 151) because the physical presence of the mother and her emotional absence have left the patient forever longing for that lost life-giving connection. Green explains that, in the patient's failure to repair this hole, what remains is her desire to possess the object, to become it. It "is the condition of the renouncement of the object and at the same time its conservation in a cannibalistic manner" (p. 151). Green sees in these patients a negative primary narcissism that is attached to the destructive instincts, " a tendency of the ego to undo its unity and to proceed towards nought" (p. 167), which is the emptiness the patient fears and yet cannot relinquish. Here Green identifies the death drive ("proceed towards nought") as the dominant drive in these patients' lives, manifested by their utter destructiveness. Further, according to Green (1986), the patient is the "keeper of the tomb" in her identification with, or rather impersonation of, the dead mother; by thus keeping her prisoner, the patient maintains ownership of the mother, who remains her property. The patient is then paralyzed by ambivalence between keeping the dead mother dead yet present and reviving her, with the risk of losing her to other objects she might become attached to. The patient "is caught between two losses: presence in death, or absence in life" (p. 164).

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Secret Pleasures
Sitting in the room with Donna, I feel all she wants from me is to be depressed with her, while she keeps the dead mother dead so she can lie beside her as her favorite child and be with me as my favorite patient. It appears that the privilege of being the special one is central to the devotion to the mother's deadness that we see in these patients, i.e., a privileged position is the reward for their devotion. It also appears that the patients perceive their depression as the source of a special connection to the mother and, therefore, can never give it up as long as the desire for the mother is still alive. In other words, giving up their depression means that they will never have the mother, hence, they must hold on tenaciously to their depression. Donna puts great efforts into being the best patient. She is always a few minutes early, notes if I am a minute or two late, pays on time, talks throughout the session, and wants very little from me. Yet underneath, she has been stubbornly devoted to avoiding progress in her analysis and never complains about the lack of progress. At one point I admitted to her that she had succeeded in defeating me, that there seemed to be no hope for her and none for me as her analyst. Naively perhaps, I thought that emotionally evocative communication would bring about something new between us. For a session or two it did, but then she reverted to the old monotone depression. The deadness Donna brings to the analysis is that of no progress. She is stuck in this repetition and the destructive, secret pleasure it provides. It has been around the issue of raising her fees where a crack appeared in the tenacity of Donna's transference resistance. Whenever I have brought up the issue of raising her fees. Donna has always made it seem as if I have betrayed her. How dare I raise the fee of such a sweet, wellintentioned, hard-working patient as she? It felt like a break in the narcissistic transference, and all my prodding produced nothing but more protestations regarding the deprivation it would cause. Paying me more, she said, would take away her last chance of having leisure (pleasure) in life. I felt that she expected me to remain the depressive entity she could continue to consume with hidden satisfaction. I had been talking with Donna about a fee increase for a couple of months when, at the end of the last session of the month, her despair at an all-time high, she stood up and took out her checkbook to pay me. I asked, "So am I getting the new fee today?" With a gesture of utter discontent she gave me a check for the new fee, only to call me in the middle of my next session and ask that I not deposit it; she wanted to talk

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about it. In agreeing to not deposit the check, I suggested that we discuss it in her next session. In that session I said that rather than my joining her in her depression, how about if she were to join me in having fun and making money. She did not respond to my suggestion but instead began talking, in her compulsive style, about men. Getting up at the end of the session, she turned to me in tears and said, "OK, you can deposit the check, and I will try to join you in enjoying life." The depression lifted in the next session but, again, not for long. Addressing the destructive secret pleasures of these patients. Green (1986) argues that the secret of the dead mother complex is the fantasy of the primal scene (p. 158ff). On first reading, I wondered about the relevance of the primal scene to these regressed patients. Yet, interestingly, sex has been very present, or implied, in the sessions with both of my patients. Green explains that, in the case of these patients, the key to the primal scene is that "it has taken place in the absence of the subject" (p. 159). Fink (1999), in writing about Lacan, observes that the primal scene is a concept referring not necessarily to an actual scene observed by the child but rather to "a construction by the childperhaps based on numerous scenes observed, overheard, and/or imaginedthat is reconstructed" (p. 70). I felt the central role Green assigned to the primal scene might help elucidate the puzzling presence of sex in the room with my patients as well as the secret relationship each had with her father. Metaphorically, the primal scene can be thought of as the initial outline of the world one struggles against, defines oneself against. As the blueprint of the first primal relationship, its significance does not lie in actually witnessing the father and mother in a sexual act, but rather in the introduction of sex into the child's object field. Is the primal scene then the arena where we each learn to distinguish between reality and fantasy, between desire and order? If so, then our particular interpretation of the primal scene establishes the parameters of"our psychic world. Further, according to Green (1986), the infant, "being at the center of the maternal universe," interprets the absence of the mother's affection as a result of his drives towards the object, and as is often the case, this corresponds to the time when the third person, the father, appears in the child's universe (p. 150). The infant's drives towards objects then become a source of rage. In the case of my two patients, it seems that the initial rage was against the mother's failure to provide the right physical/psychical environment needed to satisfy the infant's symbiotic needs (cf. their need to control the light and noise in the session or intolerance of my being a minute or two late). It is an impotent, helpless, despairing rage at the failure of the mother to hold the infant and make her feel desirable, and sexy, too, in an orderly world, a world

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where the mother is also sexually connected to the father. The rage may also be against the impotent and disgusting father, who failed to revive the mother and keep her sexually interested in him and who secretly turned to the daughter as a consolation the daughter both desires and is repelled by. The daughter, it appears, really only wants the mother, and although the sexual attention she gets from the father is necessary for her psychical survival, it feels like it is not the real thing, i.e., not the feeling she really wants. Both father and daughter share in the failure to revive the mother, and the daughter experiences the father as the same impotent man he is to the mother, thus explaining the disgust she feels towards him. With the father, her success in seduction is a powerless and hopeless one, a seduction without consummation. In Sasha's words:
Daddy always made me feel that I am his beauty, and I should stay his beauty. And every fat person he saw he made disgusting comments about, and I was afraid to be one of those fat ones, and my mother with her erazy anorexia. So what am 1 supposed to do? My stomach aches, and I don't want to go.

The father, then, is a "secondhand" object for the daughter although she may find being his special, secret object of desire life-giving on some level since, in the mother's absence, it is the only libidinal connection she has. The secret, never-actualized affair with the father is a consolation for a daughter who sees herself as impotent as her father, but she must continue in her efforts to seduce the world with the hope that she will get the feeling she is seeking from the mother. Sex, then, becomes the only route to libidinal gratification and at the same time the source of all her hopelessness.

Case Vignette
Here is how Sasha talks about her desire for sex. She walks into the session complaining about her stomach. It is too full and hurting. "I ate too much," stie says. Later we discuss that she is constantly gazing at her stomach, always thinking about how her stomach feels. She says, "In the dream, I remember now that we [she and I] are not doing what we are supposed to be doing. You neglected me for somebody else, for Nadia. [Nadia is the woman who is now with her ex-boyfriend.] You defended Nadia and left me." She continues, with despair, "I cannot

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take this feeling and there must be something big that will correct it because if notI have no right to live. I am nothing. I have no place to go." She pauses, then says, "I need you to make it feel better." In the dream she is dissatisfied with the analyst (the archaic mother?) who is "not doing what she is supposed to be doing." The analyst in the dream leaves her for a competitor, and she is left with an unbearable feeling for which she thinks the remedy might be "something big that will correct it." I feel loving and very tender towards her and I talk to her as I would to a child. I tell her how beautiful and loveable she is to me. She then asks me to say that she is clever too, which I do. And then she says, "You make me want to sleep with you." 1 ask what it will do to her stomach if we sleep together, and she says, "It will make it feel better as if anybody I feel close to I want sex withit will fill me so. It's been a long time since I last felt it. I used to feel such pain when I couldn't sleep with someone I was close to, and then I wanted to sleep with girls because only if we sleep together I'll feel close to them. So I want somebody to give it to me, and then I can go back to Tommy. I need David [an old boyfriend] back." I ask, "What will David do?" After thinking for a moment, she replies, "I need somebody to let me be myself without inhibitions, to scream, to cry. Instead of sex, I'll cry without a stop, and he will hold me so I can let out all my aggression and sadness and joy, and then I'll purge, and that purging will do good to both of us . . . something to empty me clean and fill me." At some point I said that when she talks about her stomach, it feels as if what her stomach needs is something like mother's milkwarm fluid that fills the stomach slowly. She said that felt right and asked if that wasn't what people want to have sex for. She talked about Tommy's small penis and said as soon as she realized it was small, she wanted to run away because she wanted a big penis that would make her feel good in her stomach. The "something big" she requires to keep her alive is connected in her mind to a penis. In her fantasy this longed-for penis will both fill her up and purge her at the same time. It feels like a cannibalistic wish in which sex has become the vehicle for getting back the lost life-giving feeling by ingesting the dead mother, condensed into a penis.

Conclusion
How is the analyst to deal with all that? Green (1986) tells us, poetically.

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[Tjhe analysis induces emptiness. This is to say that, when the analyst succeeds in touching an important element of the nuclear complex of the dead mother, for a brief instant, the subject feels himself to be empty, blank, as though he were deprived of a stop-gap object, and a guard against madness. Effectively, behind the dead mother complex, behind the blank mourning for the mother, one catches a glimpse of the mad passion of which she is, and remains, the object, that renders mourning for her an impossible experience. The subject's entire structure aims at a fundamental fantasy: to nourish the dead mother, to maintain her perpetually embalmed. This is what the analysand does to the analyst: he feeds him with the analysis, not to help himself to live outside the analysis, but to prolong it into an interminable process. For the subject wants to be the mother's polar star, the ideal child, (p. 162) Technically Green (1986) suggests using the analysis as a "transitional space" and the analyst as "an ever-living object," interested in the patient, associative, and alive in the presence of the patient because the challenge for the analyst is to support the disillusionment of the patient through the analyst's emotional investment in her (p. 163). I started thinking about my patients as addicted to the seduction, as being the secret seductresses, the secret superior lovers, never wanting to move to the light of day and become the official woman in a man's life. Green has elucidated for me the complicated construction of this particular narcissistic defense in which my patients desperately search for the lost feeling of being loved by their mothers. Yet in the process of writing, it became clearer that what I have been observing is a preobject condition, and not even the lost mothers are the aim of this operation. Indeed, it is not love and life they are seeking although of course that is what they say they want. Or perhaps my patients, like Moses on the mountain, can see the world of objects from afar but in their longing can never reach it. Vacillating between narcissism and the longing to connect to an object world, between the pull towards life and the p^ull towards death, they have developed a narcissistic defense in which there is a profound commitment to the repetition of the deadness of their early lives. The fluctuation between hope and hopelessness that I experience with them is, therefore, induced, and the analysis is indeed that transitional space between their narcissistic world and the object world. Perhaps my devotion to them stems from my own need for hope. Yet I want to believe, because of the power and the passion of their torment, that they are capable of moving beyond this deadly repetition, that underneath this powerful, destructive deadness there is a spring of life waiting to be released, and, unlike Moses, they one day will reach the promised land of object love.

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REFERENCES

Fink, B. (1997), A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Green, A. (1986), The dead mother. On Private Madness. Madison, CT: International Universities Press. 19 East 88 Street New York, NY 10128 mginach@rcn.com Modern Psychoanalysis Vol. XXXI, No. 1, 2006