mother-infant relationship, for he literally could not ‘take in good things’ without
risking choking to death.
In psychoanalysis, one does encounter individuals who have been so
traumatised that they cannot take in anything from others that they have not
already thought of themselves. If in order to preserve the coherence of the self
one must exclude other versions of reality, one’s ability to learn from others
will be impaired.
(Modell 1993:179)Yukio found it extremely hard to learn in the therapy group. Until his trauma repeated
in the analytic space, with a different outcome, he could neither ‘put out’ how he felt
or ‘take in’ interpretations. What went in came straight out. This was repeated many
times, during which I often felt severely nauseated. He ‘made me feel sick’ by
projecting sensations.
As we amplified his dream about incest and he spoke to me, his ‘analytic mother’,
in his ‘mother tongue’, then a body-memory, an encapsulated experience, came back,
overwhelming and terrifying. As Winnicott (1990: 140–53) says, ‘the original
experience of primitive agony cannot get into the past tense unless the ego can first
gather it into its own present time experience.’
Yukio couldn’t suck. And it was as though his emerging ego kept on seeing his Self
as a mother who contains all good things but who deliberately chokes him when he
expresses his most basic needs. A physically embodied complex formed, centred round
feelings of rejection and starvation. In any relationship, he expected always to ‘lose
face’ and be punished. He relived this, having a severe choking fit on my couch. Time
stood still, what happened before happened again.
Beverley Zabriskie (1997) calls this the ‘thawing of a frozen moment’. Ajahn
Sumedho (1984:109–15), Abbott of Chithurst Monastery in Hampshire, says karma
is a memory pattern, a habit which only ceases through recognition; neither striving
to change it, nor not striving, will ultimately work. Or, as my first analyst once told
me, ‘its being able to say, “there I go again”, and accept it’. It is being able to survive
shame.
As recognition of his complex increased, his attacks on himself diminished. The
most powerful of these was an intense persecuting belief in his ugliness, denying the
possibility of intimacy or ordinary sexuality. Also, he’d always known he’d need more
surgery. However, the surgery also felt like betraying the tough kid who’d struggled
so hard with the face he’d got from his ‘bad karma’.
As the complex changed his energy became available—for martial arts, for music,
for friends, for concern about social and environmental issues. Attacks by his ego on
his Self (and on me) moved into the background. Exchanges between psyche and
physicality became easier. A few months after the choking incident, Yukio turned up
with his eyebrow pierced. He did it, he explained, to show himself he owned his face.
It fitted him in with his new ‘gang’ (the eco-warrior lads). He felt he needed to do
this to remind himself of who he’d been after surgery.
KARMA AND INDIVIDUATION 213