The Narcissistic state & the Death instinct

Contents

Aubade
And death shall have no dominion

1/ Introduction - a sketch of the territory

2/ The death of oneness - some theory

• The death instinct

• Primary narcissism

• Schizoid paranoia

• The myth of Narcissus

• Projective identification

• Failure to move on - melancholia and mania

3/ From narcissism to group mind

• Stages of encounter with death and disillusion beyond infancy

• The disappointed group - case vignettes

• Discussion

4/ A perfect ending?

5/ References

Thomas, 1952 p.68

1/ Introduction - a sketch of the territory

Phillip Larkin's and Dylan Thomas' poems, quoted above, offer two very different responses to the prospect of death. From the point of view of the former, the mind, terrorised and numbed by the bleak and certain prospect of extinction, 'blanks at the glare ... making all thought impossible'. Somewhere in that numbness might be a perverse fascination, such as one experiences in respect of horror in literature or film, or PTSD, as to how, and when, and where death might occur. Meanwhile, for Thomas, it seems desperately important to insist that 'though lovers be lost love shall not '; and even the heads of those characters who are lost continue to 'hammer through daisies', proclaiming death is not the end; something of the spirit lives on. Whether death is allowed to overwhelm or is denied, what is clear in both cases is that death - the destruction of phenomena and the phenomenon of destruction - is alarmingly and fascinatingly present.

Part of this experience, though, for Larkin, is contained in the line 'then I see what's really always there ... stay[ing] on the edge of vision', and, for Thomas, in the eternal quality to this process of 'break[ing] in the sun till the sun breaks down'. The thought thus conveyed I shall take as a starting point for this paper. That is, at some level, death is ever present before our waking mind - not only in major transitions: in the ending of millennia or lives, at the fall of empires and political regimes; but, more immediately, through the passage of each year's natural cycle, in the tranquillity or turbulence within the remains of the day and in this seamless succession of momentary passings , in the movement of each moment beyond our grasp, beyond the reach of our ability to choose how we might live it. Death is there, one might even say, from the outset: every phenomenon, beckoned by the void into which it will return, both contains within it the pattern of its future demise, and is thrown into relief by the spectre of what it has replaced. Death all-pervasive, everywhere.

It is in this context that I shall present an account of what is known as the death instinct . I shall demonstrate that, far from being an unlikely or controversial entity, the death instinct is a vitally useful construction, conveying a sense of our ambivalent relationship to the ubiquitous phenomenon of transience. Being in touch with the death instinct might not so much signify a perverse attraction to death, an over-identification with our primitively aggressive and destructive impulses, as some fear; and theoretical focus on the death instinct might not represent mere over estimation of the importance of the 'darker side of character and culture' (Berke, 1988). Rather, due attention to death as a constant phenomenological background to the objects of our awareness, and a keen analysis of our responses, both instinctual and considered, of both aversion and craving, as infants, adults and groups, to death in all its forms, opens up a number of possibilities: For example, that we might better appraise both the fearsome and also the attractive nature of death; that we might deepen our awareness of, and adjustment to impermanence; and that we might reach a middle ground and space between the two experiences - near suffocation and evident denial - outlined in the opening poems.

According to Freud, our instinctual responses to death hail from the vicissitudes of experience within our primary narcissistic state: Essentially, our nascent ego, unable or unwilling yet to acknowledge the world's separate existence and averse to the world's interruption of our wish for oblivion, repudiates all contact with external reality, wishes it destroyed. The subsequent development and the transformations of such aversive impulses constitute the death instinct , in its multifarious forms and manifestations. I shall be focusing in the coming pages, therefore, particularly on this earliest, narcissistic form of experience, the place of the death instinct therein and the vicissitudes of the psyche in trying to get beyond it. However, experience in groups being the ever present context to our being, even when we would consign others to oblivion, vignettes of clinical and other illustrative material from groups in which I play various roles will be presented to animate the discussion.

Inevitably, our preoccupation with phenomena is determined. My own interest in this subject is borne of a realisation, through a decade of group analysis, of the degree to which problems that brought me into therapy are related to the vicissitudes and interruptions in my development beyond the narcissistic state. My identification with and idealisation, then subsequent denigration of people, relationships, jobs, situations and other phenomena, finally developed to a point, during the course of this therapy, where my hunger for narcissistic identification with, and blissful absorption in something or someone new reached crisis proportions; it was evidently causing more problems than it solved. A quick succession of several unwanted and traumatic separations and losses connected with these processes forced me to consider more carefully what end such polarisation of experience served, how it continued to arise and what I might do to stop being so caught in its grip. This paper has formed part of that continuing endeavour. I am grateful to members of my year group (not only those whose writing is formally referenced) and to our seminar leader for their help in this project. I hope, in its final form, that this paper has developed from something blindly and aggressively pretending to perfection and lost in a belief in its universality, to something altogether more focused, and more grounded, both in reality and in recognition of its own separate being.

Enough preamble, then. What is the main thesis of this paper? It is that death, in the sense of an eternal succession of momentary and more substantial losses, impermanence or transience in other words, is inevitably part of the world that confronts us from cradle to grave. While our raw, instinctual affects occasioned by loss, or indeed by any form of uncomfortable change, are likely to remain constant, our bodily, verbal and mental response to such experience and affect may be tempered by insight, imagination and skill. Our response will depend in particular on the skill with which we have learned to negotiate a path from one state to another: from our primary state of wishing ideal, undifferentiated being, to a state of letting go such wishes and allowing the conscious experience of unsatisfactoriness, separation and insubstantiality. As individuals and groups we can learn to tolerate such experience. In so doing, paradoxically, we open a way through which genuine solidarity and relationship, and perhaps even the numinous experience of truly undifferentiated being might arise.

2/ The death of oneness - some theory

• The death instinct

Only part of us is sane
only part of us wants to die
In a house we have built
surrounded by our grandchildren
But part of us is nearly mad
loves pain and its darker night despair
And wants to die in catastrophe
that will take us back to our roots
and leave nothing of our house
except its charred remains ⁽¹⁾

Balancing his earlier reification, in the mythical figure Eros, of our primitive sexual instincts, Freud theorised in his controversial 1920 essay ' Beyond the pleasure principle ' a counter-force - Thanatos. This 'death instinct', put simply, is our natural aggression directed toward overcoming any frustration of desire. As Freud wrote some years earler, 'the ego hates, abhors and pursues with intent to destroy all objects which are a source of unpleasurable feeling for it.' (1915, p.215). Freud describes the ultimate target of this aggression - the very fact of our being alive and the interruption of our desire for oblivion:

'Hate, as a relation to objects, is older than love. It derives from the narcissistic ego's primordial repudiation of the external world with its outpourings of stimuli'

(op cit, p.216)

For Freud, the course of life is 'the organism['s] wish... to die only in its own fashion' (1920 p.247). It might seem paradoxical that the life force , 'Eros ... which holds all living things together [thus] works counter to the course of life and makes the task of ceasing to live more difficult' (op cit p.256 & 262). But it really is as simple as that - the id has a 'powerful ... desire to be at peace and ... to put Eros, the mischief-maker, to rest.' (Freud, 1923 p.478).

While we may want to challenge the speculative notion that 'hate ... is older than love', we might usefully accept that the death instinct is thus a sort of desire to expedite the process of psychic entropy, parallel to the 'urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things' (Freud, 1920 p.244); that the death instinct is, essentially, aversion, particularly aversion to those interruptions to our 'first instinct ... to return to the inanimate state' (op cit p.246), and it is aversion taken to a level of abstraction that can explain how our variously perverse forms of destructiveness arise.

It may still seem an assault on the innocence of childhood (or, indeed, on our adult humanity) to suggest that such misanthropy and malice are natural facets of infantile (or human) experience, but it was no less outrageous in Freud's own time to suggest that infants are consumed with the libidinal, gratificatory instincts we are today more comfortable to see captured in the metaphor of Eros (Berke, 1988). Indeed, Berke (ibid) has suggested that the hold exercised on our (U.K.) culture by the tyranny of malice is as complete as the tyranny of erotic preoccupations in Victorian times, and precisely because , in both eras, of the repression and taboo regarding the set of feelings in question. In any event, distinctions between erotic and thanatotic urges within our infantile psyche are barely relevant - both greed and hatred can be experienced as ways of annihilating that which is lusted-after or denigrated:

'The phase of incorporating or devouring [represents] a type of hate which is consistent with abolishing the object's separate existence. ... Love in this form ... striving for the object ... in the form of mastery ... is hardly to be distinguished from hate in its attitude toward the object.'

Freud, 1915 pp.215-6

• Primary narcissism

Meanwhile, the object of desire or hatred is still the object on which one depends - an unbearable predicament for the infant, no less than for the reader. In this earliest, primary form of experiencing, there is a considerable investment in maintaining a narcissistic view of that object (or at least its 'good' aspect) as 'just-part-of-me', to avoid countenancing the anxieties inherent within the impossible predicament described. Hence the term primary narcissism .

A scenario from my last workplace springs to mind. The workplace was a supported employment scheme helping those with a diagnosis of severe mental illness to access paid work in clinical positions within an NHS Trust providing mental health services:

Violet's accounts of her past experience of psychosis and borderline states, together with her current facility in accessing psychotic material, leave the team somewhat in awe, both at the degree of psychic damage she has evidently sustained from her past, also at the level of interpersonal and self-awareness displayed in her work - indeed, her clientwork reveals an astonishing ability to tune into people, variously empathising or becoming absorbed in powerful conflict with them, identifying closely, one presumes, if not with the patient then with a significant other from the patient's past relationships.

After almost a year of adopting a supervisory style attuned to Violet's perceived fragility, it seems to her manager time to attend more to performance issues than merely supporting her integration into the team, appreciating her work, and acknowledging the impact of her life outside. The increasing level of discomfort in a supervision session where the manager has challenged her on some aspects of her work is acknowledged and, finally, understood when, with customary authenticity, Violet ends the session in a display of raw distress at the emerging conflictual feelings between them, pleading: "Are we still ok? I just want us to be good."

Violet's need for perfect oneness and her dedication to attaining it makes the acknowledgement of conflict a source of unbearable dread, resisted first by beseeching the experience of difference to go away, and later by entering into a phase of extreme denigration of 'the bad boss' , at least as extreme as her earlier idealisation of him. His departure to take up a more senior appointment can only be met, finally, with relief.

It is important to recognise that '...within primary narcissism ... the individual knows of no environment and is at one with it' (Winnicot, 1982 p.283)⁽²⁾. This is a feature of her experience often productively harnessed by Violet, like many of us pursuing a career where the ability or eagerness to tune into others or empathise with them is at a premium⁽³⁾. It is also a feature of her experience, and ours, which can lead to extremes of idealisation and contempt.

As with Violet above, any feelings and experiences in the narcissistic state, likewise any images or thoughts or representations of people, other than good ones, are expelled, jettisoned outward, killed off, disappeared - or so it is wished. Such phenomena disturb us and we instinctively wish them destroyed, dead, banished outwith our experience. They are subsequently seen elsewhere, for example anger as an attribute of mother's once-idealised, adored, nourishing, but now irretrievably tainted and poisonous presence, or painful hunger as the sole characteristic of a particular part of mother's body such as the breast (at the stage, that is, where the infant is unable to apperceive the whole person), or malice as an attribute (later in our psychic development) of a class of people who are thereby transformed into enemies, evil ones. This presence(-that-was-also-me), or again, following the sequence of examples above, mother's very breast(-that-was-also-me), or yet again, people of another race (also previously in principle part of undifferentiated-other-me), magically become persecuting, alien and abusive things. In the case of the breast, for example, this is both as a result of its perceived abandonment of the infant; through the apperception by the infant of its own intolerable and therefore outwardly projected rage and hatred (as though these bad feelings were things within the now separate breast ); and also as a result of the imagined threat of retaliation by the breast to its malice. And in turn, the infant's hostile turning away from, or even biting the persecuting breast may well serve to elicit an angry response from the breast's owner, both confirming the infant in its fantasy about the location of the bad feeling, also serving to force the mother to feel the affect the infant wanted rid of - the anger has been projected into the mother's psyche, as well as onto the infant's mental representation of her.

Keeping with the example of this earliest phase of psychic development, the infant is now

'...consumed with [bad experience -] aggressive, envious possessive wishes and concomitant paranoid anxieties in relation to parts of its mother's body. [At the same time, there develops a complementary] mode of relating to the outside world [wherein good experiences of] real others in an infant's world are constantly internalised, established as internal objects, and reprojected onto external figures once again.'

(Neeld, 1999 p.4)

Thus, when the mother gets over her momentary pain and annoyance, she may magically revert in the infant's experience to the good mother once more, offering succour and thus modifying the infant's experience through having tolerated and let go of her own (as well as the infant's) bad feelings.

The arbitrary schism between good and bad feelings, or between good and bad aspects of objects and people in the world outside (such schisms are apperceived so clearly that people viewed in this way are said to appear as two different entities), together with the paranoia experienced in relation to the persecution expected from those objects or people apperceived as hostile, as described above, is what gives this earliest stage of development the descriptor in Klein's (1946) terms the paranoid schizoid phase (Segal,1973a )

The point to note here is the part played in these processes by our hateful repudiation of phenomena within our experience that do not suit us, our instinctive wish for their being outside our experience, their death, and the ensuing destructive warping of our own experience. Laing contends that

'Our behaviour is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things. If our experience is destroyed, our behaviour will be destructive .

'If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.'

Laing, 1967 p.28

Thus, in a sort of primordial 'cutting off our nose to spite our face', we experience some dissatisfaction and so would willingly destroy all our experience, everything. The best outcome is where our churlishness is tolerated and transformed, as above, allowing processes of introjection and the pooling of good experience to outweigh the mutual repudiation and drowning in bad experience.

Although it may not seem too far-fetched to suppose that very small infants' experience might be ravaged by the death instinct as described, what is perhaps more contentious is the claim that, as adults, we continue to employ such narcissistic, paranoid/schizoid and destructive mechanisms, and possibly most of the time. Perhaps a brief review of the mythical origins of our term for this state of narcissistic oneness, the state where we would experience only that which is good and hatefully repudiate all else, including hatred itself, will shed more light on why this is so. Narcissus was, after all, an adult and not a three month old infant.

• The myth of Narcissus
  

Contrary to the popular view of Narcissism as self-love or conceit, Narcissus in the Greek myth was actually the embodiment of something more like self- deceit or blindness. He had shunned every one of the near -perfect nymphs, seeking instead for an unattainable ideal. One such nymph prayed vengefully that he would someday know what it was like to love and feel no return of affection. Thus, it came to pass that one day, while Narcissus was leaning over a water bank, he saw the vision of perfection he had sought and fell in love. His affections though were not returned, as the nymph had prayed. He stayed there long hours and talked to this being of wonder and beauty, tried to embrace it, pined for it. There, gazing longingly, he died.

Significantly, Narcissus fails in the myth to recognise that the image he is looking at is his own. He is so taken up with his search for the ideal and with his wishful belief that he might find it, he can not see what is actually there. The beautiful nymphs are devalued by his schema and a mere reflection (the actual source of which, he keeps himself ignorant of) is overvalued to an extreme degree.

Where we fail, like Narcissus, to recognise anything in people around us that makes them good enough , we might try to compensate by manufacturing an external ideal, or even a falsely idealised self-image that reassures our desperate need to know that things, ourselves included, are good. It is from such desperate compensatory self-regard that comes, presumably, the common use of the term 'narcissistic' to convey a sense of vanity.

Such vanity, though, has been described as secondary narcissism. That is, in the absence of anything in reality approaching the ideal one desires, and blind as one remains to things (oneself included) as they really are, one settles for the empty reassurance of a falsely idealised self-image that one manufactures, as above. The state of secondary narcissism thus engendered is so natural that it appears, with minimum scrutiny, to be virtually ubiquitous, as acknowledged by one of a group of trainee group analysts:

"I always used to think, looking at other people, 'I'm normal; I'm the benchmark.' Ten years on, I'm changed, hopefully wiser, but still see myself in relation to others as the normal one. "

To a degree this might again represent successful harnessing of one's madness, a useful attitude to adopt, another of 'the analyst's ... most important tools for his work' (cf Heimann , above), if one is to withstand the impact of clients' transference and maintain a recollection of one's own being in the exchange. However, it is also clearly an ethical hazard, to the extent that one's own more or less unexamined values and prejudices are blindly role-modelled and commended in the encounter (Adshead, 1999). Vella (1997) captures well the spirit of such 'secondary' narcissism in saying it originates in the failure of 'psychic hatching from primary narcissism [and] a partial retreat from the impact of the external world ... back into ... the creation of [a false] self as its own ego ideal'.

In any event, primary narcissism is that state where we might fail, as argued above, to recognise ourselves, seeing ourselves (like Narcissus in the myth) as other and seeing the other as ourselves . It is quintessentially that state of being in which, like Narcissus, we would know of no environment, experiencing ourselves and others, and indeed the world around us, as undifferentiated one. Such differentiation as we do make in our attribution of 'self' and 'other' is based mainly on whether desire or aversion (and consequent idealisation or denigration) characterises our response to phenomena

• Projective identification
  

My own family experience offers countless examples of the processes described, and in particular the means by which more than one person may collude, either destructively or creatively, in interweaving affects and experience to sustain a myth of oneness and perfection, as the following vignette of an aspect of my relationship with my mother demonstrates.

In an unusually mellow state following her 80^th birthday party, and considering the diversity of experience and lifestyle of her four children and seven grandchildren, a mother acknowledges finally, to the relief of her youngest son, that her own experience and his are not one: "After all these years, I suppose I have to admit that you're just not me, are you?" Full of admiration and love, he muses on how the opportunity for insight and growth must be as perennial as the Spring. But she adds, to his discomfort: "You should realise you don't really start to understand yourself until you're at least eighty."

She appears thus to be doing three things: firstly, she is acknowledging, unusually, the difference, separation and aloneness between them; secondly, she is advising her-son-the-novice-group-analyst that he might have a further forty years to go before properly emerging from primary narcissism, the state into which they both frequently regress; and thirdly, she is also displaying, in her assumption that the very timing of any personal development on his part will always be the same as hers, the ever presence of a pull toward over-identification.

He is doing something with these affects and beliefs too: he is allowing a considerable degree of permeability in his psychic boundaries, when he feels so curiously hateful, entrapped and threatened by her advice, at the same time as such pride and love within their mutual identification, and simultaneously an undifferentiated, mild contempt for those outside the family circle and even outside their relationship.

The form of experiencing here elaborated corresponds in reverse to that described earlier, where the mother whose infant has angrily bitten her breast is made by such actions to share in his angry and rejected feelings. In the example above, it is the son who is swept by his mother's actions into identifying with her aggression toward difference ("you don't really understand yourself, I do"), while also sharing with her in a wishful identification ("you'll be like me in finally understanding yourself when you're eighty"). This form of experiencing, where identification between people is induced by the projection and introjection into and from each other of experiences, affects and beliefs, and in particular the process by which it is possible for experience, both pleasant and uncomfortable, to interpenetrate across psychic boundaries, is known as projective identification . The recipient comes to identify with, and even own the experience projected into them. Although the schismatic dividing line between what is 'me' and what is 'other' is herein drawn using a very different rule to how we as adults like to think we construct interpersonal reality (ie it is drawn according to whether it is 'good' experience - me ; or 'bad' experience - not-me ), the analytic community believe increasingly that our collusion in this subliminal interweaving and redistribution of our shared experience is also the cement that binds us as couples, families and groups. What were previously seen solely as psycho-pathological mechanisms are now both normalised and valued (Roitman, 1989). Projective identification is thus essentially a defence, shared by people amongst whom the process takes place, against the knowledge of twoness. Such redistribution and merging of experience is also a remarkably adaptive way of coping with the terrifying prospect of termination of the dream that we are one, and acceptance of contamination by our poisonous, destructive instincts.

• Failure to move on - melancholia and mania
  

Freud's (1917) work, Mourning and melancholia , makes some tentative proposals as to how we can get beyond the states of narcissistic identification, schizoid/paranoia and malice described. However, an interesting focus in this work is the way in which loss can occasion the transformation of narcissism to mania, rather than catalysing, as might ideally be the case, the transformation of narcissism to self-awareness.

When one loses something one is attached to, there emerges, or continues, a narcissistic internalisation of the object of love in order to keep it alive, all the while feeling hateful towards it as the source of one's abandonment. The upshot of this intensely ambivalent set of feelings, this hatred of the introjected and idealised object of love with which the self is currently identified, is a melancholic self-loathing, understood by some as 'clinical' depression. If this state persists for too long beyond the point at which 'the ego [should be] persuaded by the sum of its narcissistic satisfactions in being alive to sever its attachment to the non-existent object' (op cit p.265), then at the point finally when the state of melancholia does pass, there can occur a quite extreme 'liberation from the object which was the cause of ... suffering, by seeking like a ravenously hungry man for new object-cathexes' (op cit p.264).

'Surely,' argues the ego, 'it is not a mater of such great importance if this particular object is destroyed. There are so many others to be incorporated.' This disparagement of the object's importance and the contempt for it is ... a specific characteristic of mania and enables the ego to effect this partial detachment which we observe side by side with its hunger for objects.

(Klein, 1935 p.134)

Klein describes how 'triumph, closely bound up with contempt and omnipotence [are elements] in the manic position' (1940 , p.154). 'The utilisation of the sense of omnipotence for the purpose of [fantastically] controlling and mastering objects [is ordinarily necessary] in order to deny the dread of [losing] them which is being experienced' (Klein, 1935 p.133), and 'death, however shattering for other reasons, is to some extent also [ordinarily] felt as a victory' (1940 p.157). In other words, such feelings are adaptive, at least to the extent that they enable the ego to take its first, uncertain steps toward appreciation of its attachment to the object or person lost, recognition of that person's separate being and concern for him or her.

A problem can arise though, in that

The desire to control the object, the sadistic gratification of overcoming and humiliating it, of getting the better of it, the triumph over it, may enter so strongly into [these manic preliminaries to an] act of reparation [and reconciliation] that the objects which were to be restored change again into persecutors ... the ego has to resort again and again to [such] defences

(Klein, 1940 p.153)

In successful mourning 'the subject goes through a modified and transitory manic depressive state and overcomes it' (Klein, op cit p.157, italics mine). In contrast, where mourning is incomplete, we have failed to overcome this state of manic depression, remaining instead dominated by denial of the attachment felt toward objects of our unacknowledged love and dependence. In our failure to transcend such narcissistic or manic tendencies, the ensuing experience of oneness, mastery and self perfection will leave us as adults no doubt self-satisfied, competent in realising ambition and comfortable in expressing conviction, but sorely lacking in genuine adeptness in relationships.

It is characteristic of the hypomanic person's attitude towards people, principles and events that he is inclined to exaggerate valuations: over-admiration (idealisation) or contempt (devaluation)... to conceive of everything on a large scale... all this in accordance with the greatness of his omnipotence, by which he defends himself against his fear of losing the ... irreplaceable.

(Klein, 1940 p.155)

3/ From narcissism to group mind

• Stages of encounter with death and disillusion beyond infancy
  

The 'projection-into' one another of our affect and belief, the over-involved interweaving of experience originating in our primary, narcissistic state described above, likewise the manic assertion of independence of our attachments, offers a means of transition through an otherwise too traumatic change of perspective. This change of perspective, recall, involves the burial of our dreams of ideal oneness and perfection, and burial also of our wishful ego-idealisation (primary and secondary narcissism), so that the bit of us that craves to sustain such dreams might also die into a state of separation, imperfection and aloneness. Allowing death to be, rather than trying to kill it off, is a massive thing to accept, and requires the 'softening of the blow' afforded by such mechanisms as projective identification and 'transitory' mania described above.

In any event, if finally successful, our letting go will allow a process of 'sobering' to ensue, where we are able to feel both good and bad, all at the same time. Our nurturing and our abandoning mothers, similarly, may be transformed into one and the same person, giving pause for thought and a considerable degree of sadness that the sometimes idealisation of self and other that went with the splitting of good and bad can no longer be sustained. We might come to accept, instead, ambivalence, accept too the passing of the dream that we are all-good, or that we are all, or that our lives might be free from minute-by-minute anxiety and guilt in respect of our intentions and conduct toward others. This is in essence the beginning of Klein's depressive position or phase (Segal,1973b), progression to which is a crucial aspect of development. Winnicot (1962)⁽⁴⁾ calls Klein's depressive phase the stage of capacity for concern , which presumably we might contrast with the indifference to others borne of ignorance at their separate being in our narcissistic state, and contrast also with the contempt and triumph felt toward others that is borne out of denial of our attachment to them, in the manic state.

The infant psyche will thus gradually move from a position of maximum dependency, through 'a series of negotiable separations, each leading to a greater distancing from the mother' (Vella, 1997). In so doing, the realities and demands of this largely unwelcome phenomena of more-than-two-people, family, make themselves felt, occasioning en route a great deal of rage at our loss. The moral demands brought in the wake of our developing sense of conscience are doubtless also met with murderous impulses, according to the strength of our wish to revert to the fantasy of idealised oneness, or at least to a fantasised Oedipal connection with mother.

The Lacanian analyst Bernard Burgogne is cited by Vella (1997) as the originator of a simile for this state of Oedipal attachment to mother, where two exquisitely polished, flat stones are in perfect contact, sealed together by the surface tension from a sheen of moisture between them. The task at hand is a scouring of their perfectly glazed surfaces, to break the adhesion. The agent par excellence of this scouring is, of course, father, or what he represents: the world outside the mother-child unit.

The adhering stones simile is equally apposite for the earlier task above, recognition by mother and child of their separateness and ultimate aloneness. It is as if the two stones, in perfect contact, were imagined actually as one and the task in progressing from a primary narcissistic state was for them to be split in two. The only difference perhaps between these two developmental tasks is the extent to which the agency of another person in this splitting or 'prizing' apart is recognised. The myth of oneness might be exploded by awareness of mother's turning-away-from being-with-me; the death of twoness is likely to have its source in the growing awareness of its being another, third person claiming mother's attentions (Vella, 1997).

Let us now turn to that state of awareness of more-than-three-people, society. Death is ever present in 'group mind'⁽⁵⁾, just as it is in the consciousness spawned within individuals traversing the stages of development detailed already, as a phenomenological background to the objects of our awareness. Indeed, Freud (1913)⁽⁶⁾ wrote that the 'group originates in murder', at least in mythical terms, insofar as 'the band of brothers, a primal horde, become[s] group through [guilt at] the act of murdering their father' (Kauffman, 1984 p.150). The process of mourning in a group (in contrast to a primal horde enacting their destructive responses to loss through a self-perpetuating cycle of marauding and mayhem) is conceptualised by Hinshelwood (1994) in terms of the emergence of a reflective space in the group, where unwelcome experience, particularly loss, can be countenanced. Such mourning 'can be tracked in the group process [by] the therapist ... turn[ing] the spotlight onto the processes going on between members[, thereby] enhancing [their] containment of one another's experience [and] capacity to link emotion to emotion' (Hinshelwood, 1994 p.103-4). In this context, again, one can see how processes of projection, introjection, projective identification and so on play an important role in moderating experiences of imperfection and lost ideals. Such processes offer the chance of destructive urges being shared around a group and thus contained and finally re-integrated, rather than being enacted by the group as a marauding horde.

Thus, while

'The confrontation with death is one of the most fundamental requirements ... groups are exquisitely well suited for this discussion.'

Grotjahn, 1971 p.144

At the same time, the ever presence of the death instinct within groups has been detailed extensively by Nitsun (1996) in his challenge to Foulkes' (1983) naive position that groups are inevitably healing. Loss can be both overwhelming and/or evaded in groups (just as within individuals as described above and in the opening poems), leading to an assumption by the group of the defensive positions detailed by Bion (1961)⁽⁷⁾, or leading to other manifestations of 'anti-group', which parallel the essentially narcissistic or manic defences detailed above.

• The disappointed group - case vignettes

Thus, while we imagine groups of adults coming together for therapy, we might more realistically expect at times both individuals in the group, and the group as a whole, to operate from a point around the infantile transition from narcissism to disillusioned appreciation of separation and ambivalence, with concomitant tendencies toward omnipotence, enraged malice, triumph and mania en route .

The series of group sessions to be described, demonstrates just such a phenomenon. It is a group where I am a therapist. It is two years old, meets once-weekly and is based in an out-patient psychotherapy clinic within an NHS Trust. Five of its eight members were lost during the first six months of its life. The remaining three original members have been joined by four others, two of them joining together eighteen months back, and the other two staggered, arriving a few weeks apart, about a year ago. It is finally at a point, perhaps, where the terror of annihilation is over, where the therapist's need to hold everyone together in a viable (if not exactly perfect) whole is beginning to pass, and where the sense of disappointment and bitter rage is at last palpable.

Group # 86/87/88

Jeannie's move (announced to the group 2½ months earlier, initially giving us just four weeks' notice after 2 years' membership) is no longer to a perfect, newly-built house, free from ghosts of the past. Following slight damage to joists and ceilings, resulting from a water leak, the property is 'irretrievably spoilt', and the purchase is now a 'death sentence'.

Gerry's relationship with his long-term partner Jim, too, is sullied, beyond repair, following his partner's admission of interest in other men. This has been discussed in the group several times over the months since Gerry came to a session in turmoil and told us the relationship was over. The two of them are experimenting with family therapy: "Ten years, and now its worthless," says Gerry. "Jim loves it, the way our counsellor keeps focusing on my problem, the depression I'm still in. The counsellor won't acknowledge, neither of them will, that it's him whose ruined our life together; it's him who's spoilt things."

Calum's forlorn resignation at the latest psychiatrist to have mislaid his records hardly requires articulation - it is a familiar refrain. Four months earlier the registrar had forgotten both his notes and his name. But, as ever, his affect gets expressed by way of an entertaining and biting cynicism, directed toward the psychiatrist and other representatives of the system, including me; "I think we should meet without you next week Ben; we can have a good bitch about you behind your back."

Dianne, swinging, as ever, between forlorn longing for her idealised deceased brother and an affected state of individualistic self-reliance, comes into the group her standard half hour late. Picking up the thread that I will not be there next week, she suggests a party and offers to bring the booze.

Wilf's sullen fury at me is eloquently conveyed in his verbal shots about my planning to miss next week's session to "speak at some conference to boost [my] career, to go off on one of [my] little chats; obviously that's more of a priority than being here for the group". Wilf has been in the group one year. "I was told," he had said some three months earlier, "commitment to regular attendance was important. I was sold a pup. I also thought this hospital was supposed to be a centre of excellence in treating post traumatic stress disorder. No one has even picked up on mine." These sideswipes regarding my prospective absence follow Wilf's gleeful announcement of his own imminent absence, also the following week, to run a week-long men's workshop in Wales, a long-term commitment on which he had embarked in the context of a considerable degree of anger last time, six months earlier, when I had had the group meet without me.

Siobhan complains once again about the appallingly dismissive and patronising bedside manner of the brain surgeon to whom she had entrusted her life a few years ago, how he would not hear her or attend to her experience, and how scared she was left about the imminent operation after she had taken him to task about his rude tone.

I then remark that the group finds it hard to stick with the quality of listening we are all experiencing here, now. I point out how, instead, we get preoccupied with all these individuals and situations that have disappointed, as though that is all there could ever be.

Calum says angrily that this is the only place he can share his experience of disappointment and failure. Siobhan criticises me for being silent and unresponsive, looking bland and indifferent when she describes her pain.

Comment

This session, like subsequent ones, is characterised by an increasing awareness of disappointment and experimentation with responses to it. Each group member experiences some loss of ideals - the ideal break from the past and the ideal new house (Jeannie), the ideally nurturing relationship with a loving other who offers only succour and reassurance (Gerry) or who knows you (Calum's simple wish), who listens to your experience (Siobhan) or who offers constancy and reliability (Wilf's wish of the therapist - me); all such ideals turn out to be illusory, and the resonance between group members on this theme facilitates its amplification until that is the only experience to be heard. There is, in response, a sense of pained dejection (Jeannie's death sentence and Gerry's irretrievable spoiling), and jealously ("your career is more important than we are"), also an increasing attention to blame ("it's Jim who spoilt things") and vengeance ("we'll bitch about you when you're absent"), in addition to a certain mania and omnipotence (Wilf's triumph at his new role facilitating a therapeutic men's event, as if to say 'Why should it bother me you've left me to attend to your career, when I can be just as good a therapist - possibly better - to and for myself"). And in this mania there is denial (Wilf's denial of dependence and Dianne's denial that I am any more valuable to her than a drink). Finally, as well as angry disillusion, there is some paranoia about that anger. This is captured well by Siobhan, in describing her anxiety about trusting the surgeon whom, prior to the brain operation he was about to perform on her, she had angrily taken to task about his interpersonal skills. Such paranoia returns a few weeks on:

Group # 91

Two weeks after my absence Jeannie acknowledges her continuing anger toward me. Last week, the session immediately following my absence, her anger and subsequent anxiety about trust had been evident but less directly expressed, when she criticised Gerry and Jim's family therapist as "one of these inexperienced counsellors stomping around your head with their hob nail boots" . She now addresses my hob-nail booted stomping around her psyche, taking me to task more directly for having "humiliated [her] in front of everyone" when I objected to her precipitous plan to leave the group on the grounds that it might be self-destructive. Her anger toward me has apparently occasioned a degree of anxiety: She tells me that since then, and particularly since the fury she felt at my inadequate notice about my recent absence, she has lost faith - "Even six months ago I would have trusted you with my life. Now I wouldn't trust you with the weekend shopping - you've become a law unto yourself."

This was not the first time anger and paranoia had surfaced together. Three months earlier, soon after she had first announced her intention to leave, and I had sounded a cautious note, encouraging her to maintain her place in the group through the transition, Jeannie had told me "You've no right to invade my life outside the group, asking me what time I'd have to get up to come to the group on time from where I'm moving to. It pushes all my buttons, like my mum trying to control me. You're just angry at me for not following the rules and giving two months notice. You've made me feel like I won't be given any support or encouragement because you're pissed off with me. You're insisting only disaster can come of my move." Gerry voices the ultimate fear of retaliation from me: "The way Jeannie's leaving is going fills me with dread; when I think about leaving some time in the future, it feels like I'll be trying to get out of a concentration camp."

At another point during this period of the group, a sense of manic disdain is affected by its members, in a way that might be seen as an attempt to induce in me (projective identification) the sense of defeat in which they seemed so often to be immersed:

Free-associating to Gerry's use of the word 'prehistoric' , and imagining pre-history in personal terms, I tell him that the word pre-Oedipal had come into my mind, a term meaning the period in our experience before we know ourselves in any historical sense. I say that I am left thinking about how some disappointments are experienced before we have the language with which we can know ourselves; these disappointments are then remembered in our bones rather than in words and memories. Perhaps his depression is like that. Gerry looks at me almost pityingly, calmly holding eye contact with a slight look of defiance while making as if to sweep back his hair. His hand glides away from me, slowly above the surface of his scalp, in a gesture I realise is saying my interpretation is useless, right over his head.

Calum and Johan share the experience that while the group is good so far as it goes, what has it really given them? Solidarity, certainly; support, sure enough; a sense that others too felt as bad as they did, well ok. But it really offered little for them to really need, or value. My 'linking intervention', suggesting everyone had been touched in their various ways by the main theme of the group these days - disappointment and anger at imperfection - is met with derision at my "always trying to sum up".

Discussion

We are born 'astride the grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more' (Beckett, 1990). In these circumstances, reflexive experience can emerge, wherein we are able, metaphorically, to watch ourselves experiencing, watch ourselves responding, and know that between the two is free choice, rather than inevitability. Such a form of experience throws us into a vision of certain facts of existence: our ultimate freedom to act any way we want; our essential aloneness; our ultimate responsibility for our actions, for example, as well as our impending death. The existential philosopher,

Heidegger's analysis ... does not[, however,] have fear of death as its subject. It would be more correct to say that [his] subject is fear of life , of a life that one suddenly becomes aware of in its whole contingency.

(Safranski, 1998 p.163 emphasis mine)

Awareness of this contingency is terrifying and we are drawn ever by the fear of it to 'root ourselves' in restricted and ever-repeating forms of relationship and activity, such as the style of narcissistic engagement described, by which we might enhance a sense of certainty, security and control (Heidegger 1962).

The states of narcissistic idealising, schizoid paranoia, angry disillusion and manic disengagement described above, all belie a difficulty in countenancing death, particularly perhaps what I have called the death of oneness . They belie also Heidigger's fear of life in its dreadful contingency, and a more or less unconscious retreat into the wish to hold out, against all odds, for the world to deliver us some sort of perfect experience.

4/ A perfect ending?

Awareness of death, then, begins early. Loss and hatred of the womb, with its broken promise of perfect sustenance, oneness and peace, may be its earliest instance, murder of or by the persecuting absent breast, or indeed the father, at least in fantasy, following soon after. Experience of loss in one or another form is, indeed, perpetually before us. Development through these earliest and subsequent stages of our psychological, social and also perhaps our spiritual evolution, involves adapting to, transforming and transcending such loss. Our ability and willingness so to mourn determine the form of our development and the nature of any problems therein.

The two theses of this paper, ie that negotiation of such losses are the key to development and that development encompasses a wide span of states and forms of being, are not original (see, for example, Kauffman, 1994). I hope that this paper builds on Kauffman's ideas on thanatropics , though, by elaborating the negotiation of loss, particularly the loss of oneness and its manifestation in the group, in greater detail. I hope also that I have grounded some of Kaufmann's ideas through drawing explicitly on experience close to home in the vignettes used to illustrate the material.

If I am to keep good faith with the theme of authenticity developed above, I should acknowledge the personal difficulty in finishing, letting go, this paper. One might say that my struggle to focus the discussion on a case study of narcissism and disappointment in a group (rather than, as in previous drafts, cover in detail the manifestation of death at every stage of our psychological, social, political and spiritual development) could represent some development. But there is still a tendency to revisit, review and revise the material presented again and again. Perhaps, in these circumstances, it is necessary to let go any remaining security afforded by the notion that somewhere might be ideal wholeness and narcissistic bliss, and forgo a neat ending. The best conclusion may be that few things in life, perhaps least of all endings, are perfect.

5/ References

Adshead, G. (1999) People like us - the values of psychotherapy Theory paper submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Institute of Group Analysis Qualifying Course I.G.A., London

Beckett, S. (1990) Waiting for Godot. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Berke, J.H. (1988) The tyranny of malice: exploring the dark side of character and culture Simon and Schuster, London

Bion (1961) Experiences in groups, London, Tavistock

Daniel, J. (1998) Sex, Spirituality and Prozac; unpublished work

Foulkes, S.H. (1983) Introduction to group-analytic psychotherapy Karnac, London

Freud, S. (1913) Totem and taboo, Standard edition vol. 13

Freud, S. (1915) Instincts and their vicissitudes pp.198-217 in The essentials of psycho-analysis - the definitive collection of Sigmund Freud's writing (Anna Freud, ed) (1991) Penguin, Harmondsworth

Freud (1917) Mourning and melancholia pp.251-268 in Pelican Freud library On metapsychology: the theory of psychoanalysis Harmondsworth London

Freud, S. (1920) Beyond the pleasure principle pp.218-68 in The essentials of psycho-analysis - the definitive collection of Sigmund Freud's writing (Anna Freud, ed) (1991) Penguin, Harmondsworth

Freud, S. (1923) The ego and the id pp.439-483 in The essentials of psycho-analysis - the definitive collection of Sigmund Freud's writing (Anna Freud, ed) (1991) Penguin, Harmondsworth

Grotjahn, M. (1971) correspondence with S.H. Foulkes, published in Group Analysis 4(3) p.144

Heidigger, M. (1962) Being and Time (trans J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson) Basil Blackwell, Oxford

Heimann, P. (1950) On Countertransference International Journal of Psycho-Ananlysis Vol. 31 pp 81-89

Hinshelwood, R. (1984) Attacks on the reflective space pp.86-106 in Ring of fire Shermer, L., Pines, M. & Kernberg, O. (eds.) Routledge, London

Kauffman, J. (1994) Group thanatropics pp.149-173 in Ring of fire Shermer, L., Pines, M. & Kernberg, O. (eds.) Routledge, London

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Klein, M. (1946) Notes on some schizoid mechanisms Int J. Psych-Anal vol.27

Klein, M. (1940) Mourning and its relationship to manic-depressive states pp.146-174 in Mitchell, (1986) (ed) Peregrine, Harmondsworth

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Laing, R.D. (1967) The Politics of Experience, Ballantine.

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1. cited in Daniel, 1998; attributed to Rebecca West

2. Cited in Neeld (1999, p.6)

3. See Lionel Kreeger's (1987) and Paula Heimann's (1950) discussions of sensitivity to such phenomena as among 'the analyst's ... most important tools for his work' (Heimann, 1950 p.81).

4. Cited in Pedder, 1982 p.332

5. 'Group mind' will be taken to be a valid phenomenological entity insofar as affect, cognition and other mental entities and processes can be shared and 'con-fused' amongst individuals as described above.

6. Cited in Kauffman, 1994 p.150

7. Cited in Hinshelwood, 1984

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