Marvin Lifschitz

This paper will focus on constructing a psychology of addiction based on Winnicott's theory of Absence and Bion's concept of No thing. I will also discuss two cases I'm currently working with concerning alcoholic addiction.

The focus will be to understand their psychology, related to absence and the no-thing, as well as exploring other psychological dynamics related to their addiction. Finally, I will discuss what's needed to work through the particular addictive behavior in the case of Walter.

Absence and loss occur in the human experience early on. Lacan and Rank point to the early dissatisfaction and trauma when the baby is separated from the mother at birth. Joyce McDougall asks, "How do we manage to bind the wounds to our narcissistic integrity caused by external realities - the impossibility of being one with the mother: the failure of the illusion that one can control another's thoughts and actions; the realization that we must accept to be one sex or the other; the fact of aging and, finally, the inevitability of death?

Most of us manage to make unstable adjustments to these realities, but there is little doubt that in our unconscious fantasies we are all omnipotent, bisexual, eternally young and immortal." The use of the "imaginary" in Lacan's terms attempts to undo and foreclose any gaps and ruptures in one's experience.

Mack, a 40-year-old patient, revealed that since the birth of his new five-month-old son he is feeling more joy in life. This is new for him since he has been consistently depressed, feeling he didn't deserve to have good things, and needed to be liked so much he would become what he thought the other person wanted of him. He realized he was transferring onto others what he did with his mother. He would become his mother's slave to get her love and affection. She could not tolerate his individuality. Separation and absence was too great a price to pay. With the birth of his child, he started to feel he deserved being alive and even dared to celebrate his own birthday. He stated, "There is a great deal of pain in being an individual and a separate person. My need for merging is an addiction."There is a desire to close the gap and space between us. There are, indeed, pleasurable moments of at-onement. Watching a beautiful sunset, witnessing and experiencing the birth of a child, listening to music, falling in love, childhood memories of being rocked to sleep with a mother singing lullabies are momentary experiences of being at one with nature, people, and feeling closer to God; but, just as quickly, there is a rupture - a gap - absence the next moment.

Freud (1920) was attuned to the fear of "absence" in 1920 when he described a one and a half year old boy throwing a wooden reel with a piece of string tied around it. He called it the Fort Da experience - "Fort" is the German word for gone, and "Da" is the word for there. The child threw the reel until it disappeared and then he pulled it back by the string. Freud concluded that the child was attempting to master his mother's absence. The mother is under his control and he can turn the gap created by mother's absence into an imaginary triumph. Another interpretation by Freud is, "Throwing away the object so that it was "gone" might satisfy an impulse of the child's, which was suppressed in his actual life, to revenge himself on his mother for going away from him. In that case, it would have a defiant meaning: All right, then, go away! I don't need you. I'm sending you away myself."

The theme of absence and its psychological horrors are manifest in Winnicott's writings. How does the infant deal with the experience of the absence of mother. Winnicott explores the mother's coming and going in interacting with the infant. There is a continuity - discontinuity cycle that is experienced. If mother comes back in some tolerable time, the infant's deprivation and bad experience is mitigated. If, on the other hand, the mother does not come back within a tolerable time, the infant is so distressed, and the waiting time so painful and intolerable, that it is hard to hold his belief in his mother's existence alive in his mind, or for that matter, belief in his own existence. Winnicott (1967) writes, "The baby is distressed but this distress is soon mended because the mother returns in X+Y minutes. But in X+Y+Z minutes, the mother's return does not mend the baby's altered state. Trauma implies the baby has experienced a break in life's continuity...madness means a break up of whatever may exist at the time of a personal continuity of existence. After "recovery" from X+Y+Z deprivation, a baby has to start again, permanently deprived of the root which could provide continuity with the personal beginning!"

For Winnicott, what was registered for the baby was an interruption and an absence on a massive scale. The baby does not have the ego or inner resources to deal with such a stimulation of utter absence, gap, interruption, rupture.

There is a blanking out of the person's self-experience. Where do these experiences go? For Winnicott, these experiences of deprivation and absence are housed in the unconscious, or as Adam Phillips (1987) suggests a "place where deprivations are kept." For Winnicott, one of the ways a child deals with mother's absence, the absent mother who is withdrawn, depressed and feels dead to the child, is to look after mother and make her feel alive, at the expense of one's own spontaneity and sense of self. In his life, Winnicott recounts writing a poem at seventy-years-old called, "The Tree" (Phillips, 1987)

Mother below is weeping, weeping

--------I knew her

Once stretched out on her lap

As now on Dead Tree

I learned to make her smile

to stem her tears

to undo her guilt

to cure her inward death

to enliven her was my living.

Another way a child deals with mother's absence is to create an addiction.

The addiction involves a state of mind whereby one can't think or feel in ways which can lead to suffering one's experience. Any disappointment and pain is turned into a place where no meaning is found. Any meaning or experience which can link up to one's sense of self is destroyed. No further fall into a gap of horror and emptiness is possible. In Bion's terms, one doesn't have to experience a "nameless dread". Hate relationships, to oneself and others, self-deception and deceiving others, and perverse scenarios, are preferable to experiencing a fall into nothingess. Exacerbating matters is the infant's inability to process stimulation from his inside world, and external impingements. The infant shuts off and blanks out. It may cry itself to sleep. He loses his ongoing being. Usually with good enough mothering the baby comes out of his blankness and nothingness with new vigor and aliveness as his faith in life is restored. If, on the other hand, it comes out of its lapse into blankness with the same toxicity prior to blanking out, it may come to structure itself about the need for self-obliteration.

Bion (1970) addresses the phenomenology of absence. He calls it the no-thing - or no breast. Like Winnicott, Bion addresses what happens when the object is absent and isn't there for the person - there is an absence of fulfillment for the desires of the infant. There is pain over this absence, and this absence is experienced as a "no-thing." One then attempts to close off absence by keeping oneself out of contact with inner reality. What's really present is absence. Instead of experiencing the absence and representing it, that is to symbolize what's missing; i.e. how do I feel it's not there, the person evacuates psychic reality and substitutes another emotion. As Bion writes (1970), "the emotion is replaced by a no-emotion - In practice this can mean no feeling at all, or an emotion, such as rage, that is an emotion of which the fundamental function is the denial of another emotion." Bion links hallucination as a way one fills up the absence and the missing gratification. We may feel deprived or feel a sense of loss and hallucinate one is attached or merged with the breast. "I want the breast all the time." If the person is unable to represent the no-thing, that leads to mindlessness. Bion (1970) states, "the patient may be seen as facing a choice; either he may allow his intolerance of frustration to use what might otherwise be a "no thing" to become a thought, or he may use what might be a "no thing" to be the foundation for a system of hallucinosis."

I believe that hallucinating the missing gratification is linked to psychology of addiction. That is one is addicted to fill up the space where absence should be. The filling up can be excessive sex, self-hate, rage, deadening processes, alcohol & drugs, food, envy of what I don't have, wanting to be liked, etc. There is no space for thinking and meaning: one is not interested in the truth about one-self. Yet, one needs more than survival, eventually one deteriorates without emotional truth. Bion writes (1970A), "I am reminded that healthy mental growth seems to depend on truth as the living organism depends on food. If it is lacking or deficient, the personality deteriorates." With emotional truth one fears falling into nothingness.

Addictive scenarios keep the personality out of range for the time being. Further complicating the situation is the deficits of being human. Bion focuses in his work on deficits of being human. That is, we do not have the adequate resources to process too much stimulation. We are not built that way. The infant's being is threatened by the onslaught of stimulation for which he lacks a frame of reference. Intense pangs of hunger, the rush of blood through his head, disrupt and overwhelm one's sense of self. Our equipment is insufficient. The intensity of experience in itself is catastrophic.

In constructing this psychology of addiction, I have been exploring the avoidance of absence and the no-thing. I also believe that the addictive personality utilizes the opposite polarity of identifying with nothingness.

In the addictive scenario, one has a double psychology, to avoid nothingness on the one hand, and not to let go of nothingness on the other hand. One can't let go of no-thing and absence. I will link these concepts with the case presentation of an alcoholic patient, Walter. But first I want to describe a clinical vignette of a recovered alcoholic, Dennis.

(clinical material omitted here)

It's the human dilemma and human tragedy that each of us in our own way have to face absence, loss, and the no-thing and tolerate so much stimulation, especially when our psychic equipment is unable to handle absence that is too great. We also are never enough for ourselves. There is always more; desire is infinite. There always will be something we don't have, some gap and absence to ourselves. One finds ways to tolerate the horrific absence and no-thing.

The addictive personality is a testament to this ability in human beings to tolerate the horrific, by evacuating the horror of absence and loss. Yet, no matter how one tries to evacuate and obliterate one's experience, the addictive personality can't fully get rid of oneself. As Bion (1980) writes, "So few people think it is important to be introduced to themselves but the one partner the patient can never get rid of while the patient is alive is him/her self."

The Kabbalists write about zim-zum, whereby God contracts himself and so makes it possible for something which is not God to exist. Some part of the God-head withdraws and leaves room for the creative process to come into play.

The gap and absence is created, in this sense, for us to exist and have life.

References

Bion, W.R. (1970). Attention and interpretation. New York: Jason Aronson. 1977.

---- (1970A). Transformations. New York: Jason Aronson. 1977.

---- (1980). Bion in New York and Sao Paulo. Ed. F Bion. Pertshire, England. Clunie Press.

---- (1987). Clinical Seminars and Four Papers. Abingdon, Oxon: Fleetwood Press.

Eigen, M. (1996). Ongoing Seminar on Bion. New York.

Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle: Trans. by J. Strachey. New York. Norton Books. 1961.

McDougall, J. (1985). Theaters of the Mind: Illusion and Truth on the Psychoanalytic Stage. New York. Basic Books.

Phillips, A. (1987). Winnicott. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University Press.

Winnicott, D.W. (1967). The location of Cultural Experience in Playing and Reality. 1971. London: Tavistock Publication.