Oedipus in Gethsemane

185

van der Post, L. (1977). Jung and the Story of Our Time. New York.
Random House.
(1978). Jung and the Story of Our Time. Harmonds>vorth. Penguin.

Journal of Analytical Psychology 1992, 37, 187-210

LOOKS THAT KILL THE

CAPACITY FOR THOUGHT
SHIRLEY WHEELEY, Lichfield, Staffordshire

INTRODUCTION
My area of concern in this paper is the complex interrelationship
between innate life and death forces on the one hand and, on the
other, impulses projected from external objects which are internalized
by the subject as unconscious life and death wishes. I shall be exploring ways in which a fundamental balance between life and death
forces is portrayed within the Oedipus myth and I shall be showing
how there are times when, as theorists, we are blind to the on-going
dynamic polarities contained within the myth.
The crucial question which binds the polarities is: 'What gets constellated and in whom in the interaction between nature and nurture?'
When, years ago, I attended my first seminar on Freud's theory of
the Oedipal conflict, I read the myth itself in preparation. At the
seminar I was surprised to find that the beginning of the myth had
been entirely omitted from Freud's theory. Puzzled by this, in the
discussion following the lecture I asked this question: 'In the story,
the parents want to kill the child first. Why did Freud leave this part
of the story out?' The unsatisfactory response which I received was
that it was omitted because it was not relevant. This question continued to haunt me intermittently but I never seriously focused on it
until the time was right for me to confront the infanticidal impulse,
and the child's fear of it, and its painful implications for me in my
own analysis. Once I became aware of this I was able to see more
clearly its emergence in certain cases in my clinical practice.
The Greek myth begins with the conspiracy of the parents of
Oedipus to do away with him in order to defeat the prophecy of the
Oracle that, when he grows up, he will kill his father and marry his
mother; it is their act of abandoning him on a hillside to die, in
order to outwit the prediction, that sets in motion the events which
subsequently lead to the fulfilment of the prophecy. This story underwent a dramatic transformation in Freud's hands. His theory omitted
the murderous act of the parents and focused on the deeds of Oedipus.
oo2i-8774/92/3702/i87/$3.oo'i

1992 The Society of Analytical Psychology

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S. Wheeley

It treated the murder of the father and the marriage to his mother
as universal drives, isolating them as inevitable stages in a child's
development. Had Freud applied the same principle of inevitability
to the entire myth, the parents' wish to kill the child would then also
have been universalized as the inevitable first step in the Oedipus
conflict and as the precipitating factor in the child's preoccupation
with incest and murder (cf. Bloch 1984).
Melanie Klein's clinical fmdings modified Freud's theory of the
Oedipus complex. Through her work with very young children,
Klein came to consider the origins of Oedipal feelings to be located
in the first year of life. They are instigated by disruption in the
connection between the baby and the mother through frustration and
anxiety evoked in weaning and toilet training, which precipitate a
turn to the father in the form of genital phantasies and, in the boy,
a subsequent retum to the mother on a genital rather than oral level.
Klein extended the role of phantasy in psychic life, positihg the view
of phylogenetic inheritance which provides a reservoir of unconscious
images and knowledge for phantasy to dra^w upon. By emphasizing
the phantasy content of the instinctual impulses, Klein showed
especially the pre-genital components (oral and anal) of Oedipal phantasies (mainly sadistic phantasies concerning the parents and evoking
paranoid anxiety regarding retaliation) which she took as evidence of
the early, and pre-genital, origin of the Oedipus complex. Klein
attributed to envy a central role in the formation and functions of
the human personality. She conceived early, primitive envy as representing a particularly malignant and disastrous form of innate
aggression which attacks the good, and as an oral and anal sadistic
expression of destructive impulses in operation from birth and constitutionally based (cf. Greenberg and Mitchell 1983).
Klein postulated that beneath the classical Oedipal complex lies the
very early terrifying and 'psychotic' phantasy life of the child. She
also took the view that the fear of being annihilated is part of the
unconscious phantasy experiences with which the infant is endowed
at birth, that central to the earliest experience is the fear of personal
annihilation similar to that felt by psychotic patients and that this is
the way the death instinct is experienced as working within the
personality (cf. Hinshelwood 1989). When writing about the terror
that invests children's phantasies she said:
We get to look upon the child's fear of being devoured, or cut up, or torn to
pieces, or its terror of being surrounded and pursued by menacing figures, as a
regular component of its mental life. (Klein 1933)

Regarding the source of that terror she went on to say:

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189

I have no doubt from my own analytic observations that the identities behind
these imaginary, terrifying figures are the child's own parents, and that these
dreadful shapes in some way or other reflect the features of its father and mother,
however distorted and phantastic the resemblance may be. . . . How does it come
about that the child creates such a phantastic image of its parentsan image that
is so far removed from reality? (Ibid.)

While Klein did not in fact repudiate both benevolent and malevolent
factors coming in from without, nevertheless her main emphasis was
on what came up from within the child, i.e. from nature. She understood these phantastic images to be the instinctual and projected
manifestations of the infant's own aggressive impulses. She states for
example:
the child's sadistic attacks have for their object both father and mother who are
in phantasy bitten, torn, cut up or stamped to bits. The attacks give rise to
anxiety lest the subject should be punished by the united parents, and this anxiety
also becomes internalized in consequence of the oral-sadistic introjections of the
objects. (Klein 1930)

This statement takes on another dimension when we consider it

from the perspective of a fearful defensive reaction to the infantiddal
impulses of the parent(s).
The landmark of the work of Melanie Klein came with her paper
'A contribution to the psychogenesis of manic-depressive states'
(Klein 1935) in which she replaced the centrality of the later Oedipus
complex with her concept of the depressive position. According to
Klein, this position is reached when the infant realizes that his or her
love and hate are directed to the same object, usually the mother.
He is thus beginning to experience ambivalence and also his own
effects upon another object. Klein was the firs't to point out the
importance of the unconscious impulse to repair objects felt to have
been damaged by the destructive attacks of hate and envy. However,
because of the pain of depressive anxiety, defence mechanisms are
evoked, namely, paranoid defences and the manic defence. In this
paper, Klein omitted the mother's contribution to the child's organizing of a manic defence. The implications of the terror of a murderous
mother and/or father in the infant's phantasies were apparently as
difficult for her to confront and define as they had been for Freud,
and have continued to be for others.
Later that same year, Donald Winnicott responded to this paper
by Klein with a paper of his own entitled 'The manic defence' (Winnicott 1935). While affirming the value for him of Klein's new insights,
he also differentiated his own position from Klein's. His theoretical
w^ork shows his distinctive preoccupation with the impact of the
mother's feelings on the infant. Winnicott added to Klein's contribution a manic defence organized to cope with the mother's inner

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S. Wheeley

reality. He spoke of children who in meeting the depressed mood of

their mother thereby become 'caught in with the mother's contradepressive defences' (Winnicott 1948). His concept of the false self
covered the child's collection of ways of dealing with the mother's
intrusive reality. According to Winnicott, envy has no deep root in
the infant's nature. For Winnicott, the infant's envy of the mother
for something good about her can appear only if the mother is
'tantalizing' in her presentation of herself to him or her. 'Tantalizing'
here means that the mother adapts just well enough so that the
creative element in the infant is met and the infant begins to perceive
that there is something good external to the self, and yet, as it is not
fully sustained, the infant feels to some extent deprived. Where the
good qualities in the mother are available to the infant, then envy
has no place and the question of envy does not arise (Wirmicott
1989). Winnicott also changed the significance that Klein gave to the
experience of annihilation: instead of an internal destructive object,
Winnicott saw the destruction as the effect of an external agent,
believing that the experience of annihilation derives from impingement of the environment on infantile omnipotence, which destroys
the infant's sense of 'continuity of being' (cf. Hinshelwood 1989).
Over time, the original Kleinian preoccupation with the destructive
aspects of envy and aggression in the internal world of the infant
lessened, moving to^vards a more interactive world view, with many
of the people engaged in infant/mother observation repudiating the
idea that it is always the child's inherent destructive aggression per se
that is operativebut rather that it is often a primary process of
necessary defence against the aggression, uselessness, or failures of the
parents. Can we really say that the rage and the aggression of
the infant are solely destructive, even though in observation we sometimes perceive the infant experiencing them as if they were? As
therapists there are times when we can think of the infant in the adult
as the dynamic carrier of new life, and new life forces which necessarily are aggressively defended. The child embodies the archetypal
murderous phantasy, and this applies to both the internal child and
the actual child in relationship. An adult with a deeply unconscious
wish to annihilate the child could experience this impulse through a
projective identification as if it came from the child. An adult in that
state is relating to the child as if it were the parent and would
therefore not be able to hold the infant's anxieties. Following Michael
Fordham's theory of deintegrative-reintegrative processes, the infant's
capacity for retaliatory rhurderous rage could thus be activated and
mix with the deintegrative-reintegrative experience of the annihilating mother, who w^ould then become an internalized anti-life object.
Thinking of it in this way w^ould not rule out the possibility of a

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constitutional element. Not everyone is the same. The question is,

what gets constellated, and in whom, in the interaction between
nature and nurture?
Considering the tiny size and defenceless vulnerability of the human
infant bom into the world, literally at the mercy of every living
being, it is easy to contemplate the fear of infanticide within the
infant. The psychoanalyst Dorothy Bloch draws attention to how
difficult it has been to approach both the infant's fear of infanticide
and the parent's wish for it and she suggests that the enormous
difficulty may be measured by Freud's avoidance of it. According to
Bloch, in the light of her concept that the child's central preoccupation
may be his fear of infanticide, and his major investment in maintaining an idealized image of his parents, nothing could have been more
predictable than that Freud should have ignored the role of the parents
in the story of Oedipus. Although in his self-analysis he had the
courage to confront the taboos of incest and murder and to declare
such wishes as universal, when it came to infanticide, without the
aid of an analyst, it seems that he too needed to draw a magic circle
around the parents. That he was unable to approach the wish for
infanticide or the child's fear of it may therefore have been a natural
consequence of his being the first analyst (cf Bloch 1984).
Through her work with children, Bloch concluded that they are
universally predisposed to the fear of infanticide by both their physical
and their psychological stage of development and that the intensity
of that fear depends on the incidence of traumatic events and on the
high degree of violence and love they have experienced. The intensity
of the mother's or the father's murderous wishes is increased by being
unconscious and unacknowledged. Often the opposite is claimed: 'I
loved you and did everything for you', usually as a compensation
for the unconscious and unacknowledged murderous, envious hate.
But underneath it all the child knows and carries this knowledge in
what Christopher Bollas would call 'the shadow of the object' as an
'unthought known'.
'Unthought known' refers to any form of knowledge that as yet
is not thought. Genetically based knowledge (that which constitutes
instinctive knowledge) is that which has not been thought out. Infants
also learn the rules for being and relating that are conveyed through
the mother's logic of care, much of which has not been mentally
processed. Children often live in family moods or practices that are
beyond their comprehension, even if they are partners in the living of
such knowledge. Therapists receiving patient projective identifications
come to know something, and analysis of the countertransference
becomes the effort to think this knowledge. Using Bion's idea, Bollas
says that if all goes well, beta elements, undigested mental facts

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S. Wheeley

that have not yet been rendered psychic, are converted into alpha
functioning, i.e. sense impressions are converted, through the mating
with preconceptions, into usable thoughts (Bollas 1987).
The area of unthinkable thoughts named beta elements by Bion,
Jung called 'psychoid processes', the psychoid unconscious being the
area where 'both psychic image and physical instinct mix together,
where they unite' (Jung 1946).
The case material which follows exemplifies the clinical use I have
made of these theories and ideas which have enabled my capacity for
thought when so much of what was taking place was unthinkable.
The selection of this presenting material concentrates upon the ways
in which this particular case exemplifies the vicissitudes of the theme
of infanticide.
I have the consent of the patient to include this part of her story
and some of our richly shared experience of it in this paper. When
the time was right we discussed the content of the paper together,
although it could not have been done during the period here portrayed. My main concern about using her material has been that in
so doing I might be reproducing some of her mother's extractive
traits and narcissistic usage of her. We have been able to talk about
this. Having further expanded her above-average capacity for insight
and having a very real and creative internal self working within her,
she is in a different place now, both in her internal and interpersonal
world and also geographically. She has secured for herself a much
sought after professional position abroad and has a home of her
ownin itself a feature of great relevance, as you will see later. I
respect and admire her.
The family history I am about to present represents not only the
external family 'out there' (as far as we therapists can ever know the
'accuracy' of that) but also her inner family, that is, the way in which
the patient has internalized these features and uses them, or they her,
intrapsychically.

THE CASE
Mary is an intelligent, articulate, softly spoken Irish woman in her
thirties. Her family w^as, and is, an extremely malignant one. She
described her family thus:
Maternal grandmother, whose image seemed, for a long time, to
be predominantly in the background: a heartless, hateful, envious
woman who suffered from intestinal problems all her life and who
compulsively set family members one against the other. In terror of

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death, she lived to be an old, embittered woman who finally died of

heart failure at ninety-four. She died a widow in self-inflicted isolation, having alienated her family and having no one speaking to
her. The cause of death of both her husband and her only son was
cancer of the larynx.
Mary's mother was the middle child of three siblings. She was not
on speaking terms with her brother or his family at the time of his
death and she has a very strained and empty relationship with her
own younger sister. Like her mother, Mary is the middle child of
three siblings. Her brother, who is six years her senior, suffered a
massive heart attack in his thirties necessitating by-pass surgery.
Mary's sister, who is three years younger than Mary, has leukaemia.
Mary described her mother as being a domineering, possessive,
clinging, and invasive woman who gave up everything to devote
herself to her children, and expects them to devote themselves to
her. She is smothering while being at the same time strangely absent.
Professionally she was a nurse and the pivot of her whole world is
illness. The family myth was that, in her younger days, mother
always needed to have a 'sick' child to nurse. She has always been
prone to dramatize everything and used illness, even minor ailments,
her own and those of her children, as a means of getting people to run
around after her. As she has grown older, she has become increasingly
hypochondriacal. In her fear that she would 'become' like her mother,
Mary went to the other extreme, masochistically waiting until she
was in extreme pain before she sought the medical help that she
needed.
When we first met, Mary felt that, in her interpersonal relationships, everyone she knew always ended up needing her in a maternal
way, and she resented the fact that she was always fmding herself
moved into the role of caretaker, mother-substitute. Men in particular
always wanted to turn her into a mother figure, but everyone wanted
her to be the carrier of their problems. Although this apparently
came from outside, it was actually an internal process. She in fact
unconsciously invited this in her re-creation of her own relationship
with her mother on the one hand (as I came to realize by the pressures
exerted on me in the transference) and, on the other, in her attempt
somehow to have a caring mother inside her who would meet her
needs.
In our early meetings, Mary spoke of having no sense of where
her home was. When she left her home town in Ireland she left
behind her not only her family but also monetary debts. She had for
some time been living a nomadic existence, while pursuing training
for a career in the arts. Materially, money slipped out of her grasp
and her seemingly sound property investments turned into fmancially

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disastrous, 'stuck' situations which she was unable to get out of,
continually losing money 'as if into a black bottomless pit'. She was
only just able to avert bankruptcy in the material world about a year
after we had begun our relationship and had started to find ways to
think about these things. Although I appreciate the anal characteristics
as a component in the money problems (and especially in view of
familial patterns indicated), I understand Mary's relationship with the
material world to mirror her early relationship with her mother. This
was a powerful metaphor of how she experienced her mother as
draining her of all her reserves and of her self-worth, which she has
always felt compelled to pour into mother.
These elements are encapsulated in a childhood memory. Mary
recounted with anguish how, as a little girl, she hated being at the
breakfast table where terrible rows took place (usually about money).
Her mother would scream at her father, who always remained passive
and silent. Mary would pray for her mother to stop attacking her
father but also for her father to stand up to her mother, thus showing
he could protect himself and Mary from her. Mary had learned early
on that to protest, or to become openly upset, led only to denial and
the accusation that she was wrong to act so. Mary recalled one scene
^vhen she w^as on her mother's lap when a screaming ro^v began.
Her spontaneous and silent weeping drenched the table cloth in front
of her with her tears. When her mother noticed, the row was turned
against Mary for 'crying for nothing'. Thus, her own natural
responses were extracted from her, stripped of their meaning.
Bion investigated the vicissitudes of the containing relationship by
describing the quality of the link between the containing mind and
the contents put into it. These links have three potentialities: 'L', 'H',
and 'K', which represent loving, hating, and wanting to know about
the content. Thus, the mother will at times love her child, hate him
or her, or fmd herself trying to understand how he or she is experiencing, feeling, and thinking. For the purpose of the development,, of
thought, the 'K' link is the most important. Mother's linking with
the infant in this way develops the capacity of the child through the
introjection of the 'K' link (Hinshelwood 1989). However, there are
disturbances to the 'K' link (ibid.). In Mary's case the predominance
of the 'H' element and the disturbance of 'K' are crucial and are most
fittingly described thus:
The stripping of meaning from the object's projected experience, leading to a
denuded and meaningless experience which gives rise to the infant feeling an
internal terror from an introjected envious object that deprives it of meaning for
its experiences. This is referred to as minus 'K'. (O'Shaughnessy 1981, quoted in
Hinshelwood 1989)

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Mary described her father as placid and passive, which is also how
she described herself and how she appears to be in the world. A
country doctor, father was rarely at home. He was an 'absent father
rendered impotent by mother'. Father was either physically or
psychologically absent or not available to her, a situation which has
continued into her adult life and has permeated her unconscious partner choice in her relationships with men. Although she has had some
relationships, they have always been of little substance or constancy,
with either another woman in the background, or another woman
causing the break-up of the affair. She longed to have a baby of her
own and for a time dreamed of phantom pregnancies by invisible
men. There had been one planned pregnancy which she spontaneously
aborted in the fourteenth week. The father of the baby was absent
from the knowledge of it. He was not there for her and he never
knew. I understand this pregnancy and the abortive result to be a reenactment of her experience of both the earlier and the later Oedipal
phase. On the night she conceived the baby she dreamed that she
had two wombs. The first one was healthy and was receptive. The
second one was behind the first and was closed up and non-receptive.
Jung wrote about the 'dual mother' and refers to splitting in the
image ofthe mother. This phrase can be understood on several levels:
as the duality between the personal mother and the pre-personal
psychological patterning of the mother archetype, or as the duality
between the good and bad images of mother (Jung 1912). There has
to be a 'good-enough' mother for idealization in order to give form
to a good mother imago. Donald Meltzer has talked about the initial
experience of an aesthetically beautiful mother whose impact has a
profound emotional effect upon the baby, and this becomes an aesthetic conflict when natural disillusionment sets in (Meltzer 1988).
This dream may show how for Mary the beautiful, good-enough,
life-giving mother was lost and obliterated right from the beginning,
from within the womb and at birth and in all her new beginnings.
Developmentally, this dream could be thought of as an image of her
internalized experience of her non-receptive mother, or of grandmother in the background. Or, according to Michael Fordham's
theory of deintegration, there can be a failure in a deintegrative
process of an aspect of the archetypal mother from within. This
means that the infant's primary integrate self affects the humanizing
of an archetypal potential, creating a freezing of a 'self state'an
autistic barrier (cf. Fordham 1976). From the classical Jungian viewpoint, in the myth Oedipus was an adopted child, a child of two
mothers.
The parental couple in Mary's internal world pursued her into
hellish death zones where they formed an awful triad, as depicted in

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S. Wheeley

the following dream which encapsulates her Oedipal conflicts and

experiences:
It is night. I have passed through a squeaky, black iron gate into a foggy, cold
place, like a cemetery, but there are no graves. I am being followed by two
dangerous people, a man and a woman. I feel terrified, but also full of fury. I
become enraged! 'So you want to see me, do you? ! !' I scream. 'Well look then!'
I rise up into the air as my black wings spread open. I look down at my cloven
hooves and then swoop down towards the couple, beating my wings. I am evil
incarnate. One touch of my wings and they will go to hell! I feel supremely
powerful and very blackblack in the sense of dark, evil, vengeful. Then, beyond
the couple I see the EVIL ONEsmiling and empty-eyed, sipping a portion out
of a goblet that leaks drops of its contents onto the man's arm and he begins to
disappear. The dream made me feel sickand totally uselessas though the
outcome was inevitable. I realized that it was only after I passed through the
black gate into the place of the dead that the metamorphosis occurred. Thoughts
of my grandmother . . . I don't know who the couple were.

Mary's mother was depressed throughout her unwanted pregnancy

with Mary and for several months after Mary's painful and protracted
birth. In the first months of our knowing one another, underneath
her calm and placid exterior, Mary was full of measureless rage and
wordless guilt. In her early adult life as a nurse, when her duties
took her into the maternity ward, she worked very hard to alleviate
the pain of the delivering mothers and she felt that her work involved
rescuing babies from the womb. Her dream life had a recurring
pattern of w^omen in labour passing fluids indicative of foetal distress,
of babies born in the amniotic sac covered in distress fluid, and of
doctors who were absent when needed or insensitive to their pain.
In therapy it was many months before Mary could contemplate
using the couch. In the therapeutic container of the consulting room
the couch represented the womb of the therapist (which in the transference was experienced as the womb of foetal life) and this is how
I interpreted it to Mary.
According to Jung, 'Certain parts of the personality which are
capable of development are in an infant state as though in the womb'
and he stated that therapy might have to support regression even to
a pre-birth level (Jung 1912). Jung held the view that the soma has
its psychic counterpart, and in an earlier work of mine (Wheeley
1989) I refer to the unconscious as the psychic uterine environment.
It is in the fertilization of creative discourse that new thoughts can
be con.ceived.
FoUow^ing Bion's idea of the breast as a thinking object, the analytical psychologist James Astor puts it thus:
The mind of the analyst is in effect the breast, providing the food for thought
that is part of the experience of the analytic upbringing of our patients. (Astor
1989)

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Mary was devastated by the loss of the baby she had conceived
and has spent a great deal of our time together in mourning for it.
As our work progressed, I came to recognize the resurgence of this
mourning to be an indication that an insight conceived of between
us, a psychic baby, had been spontaneously aborted. I have been
continually shocked by the ferocity of the way in which the internalized murderous mother, re-evoked in the transference, attacked these
psychic babies in her envious, spoiling, destructive rage.
Continuous countertransference analysis was particularly crucial at
these times, as her denigratory, envious, spoiling attacks on my
psychic babies often left me feeling robbed of my capacity to think.
I felt helplessly impotent, useless, and questioning my own capacity
to provide the containment she needed, and was always faced with
the question: had I unconsciously attacked her? I do not think that
Mary's experience of me in the transference as wanting at times to
get inside her and attack her was altogether a reversal of her own
destructive impulses towards me. I think that this was also her internalized experience of her mother, which, without adequate countertransference analysis, could be blindly re-enacted. In our work as
therapists we are committed to try, through the dynamics of the
relationship, to facilitate health and growth (whatever that might
mean for any individual) not to hinder or sabotage the process. The
recognition of the infanticidal impulse in humanity inevitably leaves
us with the uncomfortable realization that, on some level, we may
at some time have infanticidal impulses towards our patients (all the
more powerful if they are unconscious to us). In therapy this could
take the form of attacks on the patient's creativity. If that happens
and is recognized by the patient, then it is vital that the therapist
responsibly acknowledges it to the patient. Not to do so would be
extractively to introject the patient's perception and cause further
^vounding.
The depressed mother, as Mary's mother was, is often unable to
emerge enough from her own narcissistic wounds to offer her baby
affirmation of its own selfhood. If the mother has not detached herself
from the image of another person to whom she was ambivalently
over-attached, then she fails to grant the infant boundaries, otherness,
individuality, and aloneness. This appears to be the case with Mary's
mother who tied her infant into a false closeness based on her unconsciously identifying with her own abandoned self which she has
projected into the infant. A depressed mother who cannot bear or
bring to bear her own self may fmd her baby unbearable. The killing
qualities of the mother's angry depression overdevelop the infant's
negative potential and too many and too strong negative archetypal
images are absorbed by the infant (cf. Hubback 1988).

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From the outset, there was a split need in Mary for, on the one
hand, incestuous involvement, fusion in a boundless state and, on the
other, a desperate need for containing boundaries. As we progressed,
the formation of necessary boundaries was a crucial element in our
relationship. It became vitally important for Mary to see my capacity
to contain myself within my own boundaries and outside her omnipotent control while at the same time maintaining an empathic attitude
and facilitating her regressive incestuous needs; in other words, to
allow incestuous involvement but to know when to draw the line. I
am speaking here of a necessary regenerative regression and incestuous involvement in the Jungian sense, that is, in order psychically
to re-enter the womb of mother. The analytical relationship provides
the opportunity to repeat and return to a pre-object state as in the
final months of foetal life and in the primordial relationship with
mother. Hence the therapist's body-pangs and pains. These necessary
countertransference positions, both psychic and physical, helped me
to enable a humanizing of the archetypal good mother inside my
patient. The French analyst Elie Humbert says that in a regression
such as this, the 'Return to the Mother' is experienced with a partner
who is different from the mother, putting the patient back into the
initial experience in which the object takes shape through a dual
relationship (Humbert 1988).
When she was two months old Mary contracted whooping cough
and was very ill. Her mother was terrified of nursing her and,
although she was medically qualified to do so, she could not bring
herself to administer the injections necessary for Mary's treatment as
she was obsessed with the idea that if she did so, then that injection
would cause Mary to die. It is likely that this obsession of the mother
was a manifestation of the infanticidal impulse and her resistance of
it an expression of the conflict between the life and death wishes she
held for her baby. Mary's infantile experience of this conflict in her
mother may be linked to her dream of two wombs and could be an
indication of how Mary internalized the split in her actual mother
and her mother's ambivalent duality. The administration of the injections was taken over by Mary's father. Her mother became ill too,
and a nurse was brought in to care for mother and child.
In the first few weeks of our meetings Mary absented herself for
half of her sessions by getting lost en route and arriving late. She
developed quite severe chest pains and a harsh cough. Several times
after the session she had a problem starting her car and on two
occasions, while in the car, her breathing became so difficult she
thought she was going to haye a heart attack. Yet she always managed
this by herself and never sought my help, assuming an 'out of sight,
out of mind' attitude on my part and that anyway there was nothing

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that I could do. In other words, I would be heartless about her

difficulties and her illness. In complementary countertransference, I
felt robbed of my own responses, as if my capacity to care had been
extracted from me, leaving Mary as the only caring person in the
room, and feeling as if I had somehow behaved towards her in a
cold and sadistically uncaring kind of way.
'Extractive introjection' is a process formulated by Christopher
Bollas which he describes as an intersubjective procedure that is
almost exactly the reverse of projective identification. Extractive
introjection occurs when a person steals for a certain period of time
(from a few seconds, or minutes, or a lifetime) an element of another
individual's psychic life. Such an intersubjective violence takes place
when A (described by Bollas as the violator) automatically assumes
that B (the violated) has no internal experience of the psychic element
that A represents. At the moment of this assumption, an act of theft
takes place, and B may be temporarily anaesthetised and unable to
'gain back' the stolen part of the self. If such extraction is conducted
by a parent upon a child it may take many years of analysis before
B will ever recover the stolen part of the self (Bollas 1989). Through
the transference and through such stories as the scene at the breakfast
table, I came to recognize that Mary's parents, particularly her
mother, behaved towards her in a very extractive way. This phenomenon became manifest between us, sometimes robbing me momentarily of my own responses, my own thoughts, as illustrated above,
and I sometimes found myself with the urge to pre-empt a response
of Mary's.
The initial dream of the therapy was:
I was with seven doctors in a surgery who were giving me medicationventilationvapours and oxygen. I asked 'why are you giving me all this?' They
replied, 'You had a massive heart attack when you were an infant'. They then
gave me an ECG which confirmed this.

This dream had frightened Mary, but she couldn't think about it. So
she made a clay sculpture which, when I first saw it, evoked in me
the same feelings I experienced when she told me about the scenes
at the breakfast table. When I looked at it, its impact flipped me
straight into the grip of a concordant countertransference, my eyes
spontaneously filled with tears, my chest ached and I began to cough.
It took me a while to recover my capacity to think. Mary is a talented
sculptress and has used this art at the most unthinkably painful times
in our work together. It is worth noting here that, since I first knew
her, the only sculpture she did of a male figure was one which was
a requirement of a sculpting class that formed a part of the training
she was doing. Her male figure turned out to be anorexic with a

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fatal disease which worried her a lot. I understand this as an image

of a starved archetypal masculine elementan animus figure which
was later to be fleshed out by experiencing, thinking about, and
coming to understand the psychic happenings between us through
the transference.

EYES AND WOMBS

The exceedingly powerful initial sculpture following the dream was
of a mother and a child. The mother had a huge hole where the chest
and heart should be. The head of the mother was turned away from
the child. Mary called her the 'Belsen' mother. The eyes were hollow
in the emaciated face and the mouth was wide in a 'silent scream'.
The infant, though very dejected-looking, was a little plumper than
the mother and looking down and away from her. 'I was not able
to put them in a position where they could look at each other', Mary
said. Although Mary sometimes looked at me in the early days of
our relationship, she very rarely allowed our eyes to meet.
From one fundamental perspective the Oedipus myth is about
seeing and about knowing. It is also about turning a blind eye on
what we see when what we see is unacceptable. Tiresias, the seer in
the myth, had been unsighted for seeing the unacceptable. Oedipus,
when he can evade the truth no longer, faces his guilt in a truly heroic
moment of self-know^ledge which he found impossible to sustain and
his self-blinding has been considered (by Steiner 1985) as a partial
retreat from the truth. There are things we cannot bear to see and
there are times when seeing can be much harder to bear than blindness. This is also true for the therapist in the analytical situation and
can result in a defensive reaction such as an inappropriate blind optimism. By using the brooches he tears from the breast of his hanging
dead mother to pierce his eyes, Oedipus intrinsically links his selfblinding to the mother.
As we know, what cannot be symbolized is sometimes somatized.
Without losing sight of the complexity of the relationship between
psyche and soma and follow^ing Giles Clark (1989), it may sometimes
be valuable to suspend the idea of causality within psychosomatic
models since causality presupposes two different entities rather than
two aspects of the same thing. Bearing this in mind, I have been
interested to find that one of the recurring features in patients who
have experienced infanticidal impulses most acutely is that either they,
or one of their parents, have developed a problem with their eyes.
Mary's father's eyesight started to fail fairly early on in his life.
The eyes of the mother are of vital importance to the nursing

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201

infant. It is through her eyes that the infant can see the affirmation
of its selfhood and thus internalize a sense of self and home, homecoming into the world. On the other hand, the infantiddal impulse
of the parent(s) is likely to be conveyed to the infant most powerfully
through their eyes. A recurring dream, not only for Mary but also,
as I have come to recognize, for other people who have experienced
the infantiddal impulse most acutely, is a dream of persecutory figures breaking into their home through the windows, with the intention of butchering them. We could think of the eyes here as the
windows leading into the body and whatever vulnerabilities there are
held or hidden inside the body. For the infant in the early feeding
relationship there is the likelihood of an eye-nipple pre-symbolic
equation. When describing the part-object breast as the non-thinking
breast, James Astor gives as an example: 'the child who latches on
to the mother's eyes as if they were the nipples that kept the child's
mind in order after a feed' (Astor 1989).
In developmental psychology, perception is considered to be the
link between the eye and the brain. Our theories are metaphors about
how we think about and see thingsour visions of reality which can
be communicated. The pupil of the eye opens to receive light and it
also opens when it wants to take someone in, and narrows when it
does not. Eyes that are full of love bring life and give vitality, while
the glare of the green-eyed monster of envious hate freezes life,
blights the child, transfixes, or makes an end out of a beginning.
Then there are the eyes of depression, to which 'all things look dead'.
I Avas reminded of Bion's concept of container and contained when
I read that Jung considered the meaning of the eye itself to be the
'maternal bosom' and the pupil its 'child' (Cirlot 1962). The pupil is
also the black hole in the centre of the eye. Frances Tustin tells us
that the psychotic child has a gap or a hole at the place where there
should have been a point of contact or a bridge from you to me
(Tustin 1986).
It has been noted that some victims of the Holocaust, Jewish people
who survived the camps, do not look people in the eye when they
tell their stories of their experiences. The reason for this is not only
because they do not wish to see the reflection of their pain, it is also
because they fear that by eye contact they will transmit to the listener
the evil of which they were the victims. They also fear that by eye
contact they will re-constellate the evil intent in the other, or project
it into the other, or that the other will see in their eyes their own
capacity for evil. Himself a survivor of the camps, Bruno Bettelheim
(i960) tells us how some of the victims developed a capadty to get
so far behind their eyes that they became invisible to the guards.
They did not do this by fl-voiding looking at the guards, they did it

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S. Wheeley

by looking at them with void eyes. By vacating their eyes, by turning

their eyes into black holes to be seen throughthey were themselves
seen right through and they became as if nothing. At the time of the
Holocaust, the whole world turned a blind eye on genoddegenodde, the unconsdous collective force of unacknowledged infantiddal
impulses? That would be slaughter of the innocents.
Winnicott suggests that there is a historical process in the individual
which depends on being seen:
When I look I am seen, so I exist.
I can now afford to look and see.
I now look creatively and what I apperceive I also perceive. (Winnicott 1971)
Not to be seen by mother, at least at the moment of the spontaneous gesture, is
not to exist. (Phillips 1988).

According to Winnicott an absence of a holding response, experienced as a gap stretching infmitely, may be more catastrophic than
a persecutory presence. We conceive of the experience of 'gone' either
as a black hole of infinite extension into which we might fall for ever
(the basis of the autistic defence), or as a looming dark presence. In
Kleinian thought, emptiness, or the 'absent breast', is experienced as
persecutory, i.e. the 'good breast absent' is experienced as 'the bad
breast present' (O'Shaughnessy 1964).
Mary brought a picture she had drawn when she came for our first
session. This picture was a stark, visual representation of her internal
Belsen Jewish mother. I was struck by the incongruity of the horror
of the eyes with the pleasant, slightly smiling mouth, a chilling
contrast. As well as the Jewish victim, this image also embodied an
element of the Nazi persecutor. Theoretically, we can think of this
as an image of the interplay between internal and polarised sado/
masochistic impulses.
At times in the therapy, Mary spoke of experiences in her life of
non-relatedness, isolation, detachment, and invisibility. She described
an inddent when she was about six years old
It ^vas Saturday because father was there. I was in bed in the room I shared with
my sister. Mother called for us to get up for breakfast. I had a sheet over me so
no one saw me. I felt invisible. They searched the house for me. I felt very
powerful and waited until everyone got quite upset before I made myself visible.
They were very angry and I was hit when I showed myself.

Although this inddent indicated her capacity to withdraw into quite

sadistically manipulative and omnipotent power zones, it was a
defensive manoeuvre which also illustrated the poignancy of her
internal dilemma. Not to be seen enabled her to hide her self while
at the same time being effective; to show her self reaped punishment.

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203

On the one hand, this withdrawal to invisibility can be seen as a

defence of the self against potential annihilation (Fordham 1974). On
the other hand, we can think of it as a re-enactment of her experience
of her depressed mother who looked at her with void eyes and to
whom, in those moments, she was invisible. I fmd myself remembering father's failing eyesight and thinking how he failed to see her as
she needed him to. His vision of her was a weak one and mixed up
with ideas of death as depicted in her male figure sculpture.
Quoting Clark playing on Winnicott:
Because I see that I am looked at Oedipally and excitedly,
therefore I see that I am exciting,
therefore I exist sexually. . . .
I have gender identity and I am vitally powerful,
not an Oedipal orphan. (Clark 1989)

Another recurring somatic feature in women who have internalized

these infanticidal mothers is that they have had womb-related illnesses, in particular endometriosis which often necessitates their
undergoing a hysterectomy. Over a period of seven years I have seen
this happen in five different cases from my own private practice and,
in discussion with colleagues and in talks I have given, many people
have confirmed such cases within their own practice. This of course
is not to say that all women who suffer from endometriosis, or have
to have a hysterectomy, do so because they have an internalized
infanticidal mother.
Towards the end of the first year in therapy, Mary developed
abdominal pain which increased with time in its intensity. Eventually
this was diagnosed as endometriosis and was at first located in the
space behind the womb which is medically referred to as 'the patch or
pouch of Douglas'. With her family background and her own earlier
medical training to draw upon, Mary immediately understood this
to represent a displacement of growth at a cellular level. She became
interested in the cyclical nature of her condition. What intrigued us
both was the question that, if we were to understand endometriosis
as the growth of renegade cells, what is it that triggers off this growth
in the wrong placewhich in this case could be considered as growth
at a cellular level in the absence of psychic growth? Because of the
meaning Mary attributed to this illness and through her associations
about it, especially when linking it to her dream of two wombs, I
came to consider the endometriosis as her somatization of the murderous mother complex, given visual representation in a picture she
painted at this time.
This picture powerfully portrayed the embodiment of the murderous mother. The cold eyes and the smile of the central figure showed

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-S. Wheeley

the unconscious part of Mary that is her sado-masochism and her

identification with the mother who gets her own way through illness.
This illness brought her eventually a lot of attention from 'doctor
fathers' through the medical attention she has received. In her view
they were all ineffectual and nothing they did alleviated her pain,
mirrored in therapy at that time by her experience of me as the
'father therapist' who could not think of anything that would effect
change. There was a venomous toothed snake emerging from the
vagina, visualizing, as Jung puts it, 'The terrible Mother who devours
and destroys, and thus symbolizes death itself (Jung 1912). There
was a second, snake-bound figure to the right of the picture giving
birth to a wide-open mouthed baby, depicting negatively her bound
softer feminine nature and the emergence of her silently screaming
infantile terror.
In the ensuing months Mary suffered a great deal of physical pain
as well as mental anguish. She refused to accept the specialist's opinion that the only possible effective treatment in her case was a
hysterectomy. She experienced this prognosis as if he wanted to rob
her of her womb so that she would never be able to have a baby of
her owna displacement, an acting out of her transference feelings
towards me, but this enabled us to analyse her Oedipal phantasies.
After a variety of alternative treatments were ineffectively tried, her
pain became so unbearably acute that she was left with no other
alternative than to seek the hysterectomy she had fought so hard
against. Waiting for this operation instigated a period of mourning
and, with it, an increasing capacity to integrate some of the painful
insights gained.
However, my experience has taught me never to underestimate the
sheer power of an envious, attacking, destructive internalized mother,
the witch who spoils relationships, with one's self, one's body, and
with others too. As depicted in fairy tales, the more the witch is
defeated the harder she fights. As people progress against destructive
internal parts, moving forward in the therapy w^ith insight making, it
feel that the bad part inside one has been de-potentiated, and when
things are getting better and therefore worse for the witch, she then
uses stronger and cleverer offensive defences and her attacks get more
vicious, more somatic, and more subtle. Accidents happen, illnesses
happen to wreck the process. Depression sets in, often in the form
of destructive doubt thrown up by the envious, spoiling, witch
mother. These are tests of the therapist as well as the patient. It
was at this point, when Mary was suffering so much, that in the
countertransference I identified with the infanticidal mother and found
parts of me thinking 'Yes, you would be better off dead than suffering
all this pain. I cannot bear to watch you and I cannot help you, no

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205

one can.' In other words, I was embodying that part which is to do

with the destructive doubter and with defeat and destructionthe
killer of hopethe anti-life object.
The turning point came in an intense session when Mary struggled
to answer her own question about why she could not bear to look
into my eyes and my reply that it might have something to do with
being afraid that she would see the same response coming from my
eyes as she had seen coming from the eyes of her mother. After a
long silence, during which I felt an almost unbearable sense of sadness
and isolation and my eyes spontaneously filled with tears, she was
able to say that she was afraid that if our eyes met she would either
see that I wished she was dead, or else she would disappear. She
became very frightened and asked me to hold her. The impulse to
respond to her request literally was almost overwhelming, but I
managed instead to fmd a space inside myself in which to remain
still and hold her metaphorically in my mind's eye, knowing somehow that to have actually touched her at that time would have
been like touching someone without skin, so raw was the moment.
Eventually she turned her head so that she could see me and looked
directly into my eyes enabling me to hold her in my gaze. As it was
then the end of the session, she got up and quietly left.
In the following weeks, which were prior to the operation, Mary
became almost obsessed with fears of being abandoned and left starving to death. Significantly, she was living in a temporary home at
this time and so would be on her own after the operation. I understood this to be a resurgence of her infantile terrors and interpreted
it as such. I linked it back to such events as when she had whooping
cough and her mother, afraid that she would cause her baby to die,
handed her over to her father to administer her injections and to a
nurse to care for her. These fears can be further linked back to the
archetypal realm as expressed in the myth of Oedipus, when Jocasta,
having been ordered by Laius to destroy the unwanted infant at birth,
gave the newborn Oedipus to a domestic who pierced his feet with
a nail, bound them together, and abandoned him to die suspended
from a tree on Mount Cithaeron.
In the subsequent sessions of this period .came the emergence of
Mary's capacity to 'know' that there is a level in which she 'needed'
and obtained masochistic gratification from her pain and to confront
agonizingly her own question: 'Have I had to destroy my own womb
to get this mother out of me?' Although I was afraid that she would
become despairingly depressed by focusing on this question, I felt that
to avoid confronting a question she had asked would be analogous to
turning a blind eye on her selfa self-blinding, so I responded by
saying that 'this question has come from a point of realization in you

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S. Wheeley

where you are becoming aware that you have had to do this'. This
led her to acknowledge that 'since birth, or even before, I have always
been either in a crisis or a void. I am now terrified at the prospect
of living without a crisis'. She had used pain itself as her internal
container and as her defence against her terror of the void.
The Oedipus myth illustrates the effectiveness of parental attitudes
on the on-going dynamic polarities between life and death forces,
both intrapsychically and interpersonally. The meaning of the term
'Oedipus complex' is a symbolic one, a metaphor working on many
levels, portraying among other things the profound importance of
the role played by the sexual drives in our development and the deep
conflicts that these drives evoke, including the unconscious patricidal
and incestuous desires, and the infanticidal impulses. However, the
emphasis on sexuality as fundamental to the Oedipus myth
seductively blinds us to one of the most important crises we can face:
the possible outcomes of having given birth to an autonomous human
being. The sexual hfe-force with its inherent hope for the future is
also riddled with death. Psychologically, sex is linked to giving birth
to a threatening autonomous human being. Quite simply, it is ari
Oedipal question of kill or be killed. For every birth there is a series
of deaths: the death of the couple's controls, over each other and
over events. There is the death of the dyad as a third comes into
their lives. In parenthood, if the child can be seen as a narcissistic
extension of the parent, if the parent is identified with the child, then
the child carries for that parent the promise that their hfe will go on,
their death can be avoided. The parents' fate is assured and unless
there is in the child a strong epistemophilic desire for knowledge,
then the child's life is fated, doomed, at least in part, to live out
parental unlived life and phantasies. But if the child is weak or sick,
or if the child's autonomy is too recognizable, if there is too much
otherness, too much life, then speaking from the fearful and envious
parental position, the infanticidal impulse is evoked as a means of
coping with the fear and envy. One of the most important questions
we face is: 'Can we hold the tension, manage our controlling impulses
and destructive tendencies in the face of a threat to the established
order, and so enable the next generation to create their own life and
develop their own autonomy?' Autonomous individuals create their
own destiny. This is an inescapable fate.
The infanticidal impulse evoked in the face of autonomous new
life also has wider implications than in our family life. It permeates
our politics, our institutions, and our trainings. The threat and the
ensuing problems of autonomy are age-old and universal.
In Greek mythology infanticide can be traced back further than the

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207

myth of Oedipus to the pre-Zeus divinities and is therefore fundamental to Greek creation myths and a background to our civilization.
Uranus repeatedly and defensively killed off several of his children
but was eventually castrated by Cronus, the strong son who survived
his father's attack and turned upon him. Because of the prophecy
decreed by the dying Uranus and Mother Earth that one of his sons
would dethrone him, Cronus annually swallowed the children whom
Rhea bore him. For both Uranus and Cronus there was an element
of denial and of wish-fulfilment in the means they used to dispose
of their children: Uranus by pushing them back into Mother Earth
from whence they came as if pretending that they had not happened;
Cronus by taking them back into himselfre-incorporating them by
eating them and thus denying that they had ever existed. Cronus'
son Zeus was saved by Rhea when she wrapped a stone in swaddling
clothes which Cronus swallowed, believing he was swallowing the
infant Zeus. Here we can see another ramification of infanticide, i.e.
the mother who saves her son from the murderous impulses of the
father and in so doing participates in bringing about the father's
death. The whole story of Heracles, son of Zeus, pivots on the fact
that he murders six of" his children while being beside himself in a
blind, mad rage. This rage was inflicted upon him by Hera in her
jealousy of his relationship with his father and in her envy of his
successes. When he realizes what he has done, his disgust, shock,
grief, and remorse are not enough. He has to have his labours, both
as the revenge upon himself and as his atonement.
In Judaeo/Christian mythology we have in the background to patriarchy Abraham's attempt to sacrifice Isaac; in the story of Moses,
the hero of the saving history of the Jews in cast into the bulrushes
to save him from death at the hands of the old king. There is the
repeated motif of the slaughter of the innocents, and the ultimate
hero, Jesus, is crucified, nailed by his hands and feet, to a cross on
a hillside. James Hillman (1988) postulates Jesus's cry from the cross:
'Eli, Eli, la'ma sabachtha'ni?'My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me?'as the great archetypal cry uttered by all victims of
infanticide in humanity.
The complex interrelationship between nature and nurture is also
the crucial element in the relationship between therapist and patient,
where once again the question is: 'what gets constellated and in whom
in the interaction between the two?'

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S. Wheeley

CONCLUSION
I have found this a particularly difficult paper to write, partly because
of the subject matter of the infanticidal impulse and partly because
in writing it I encountered the same countertransference phenomena
I had experienced with the patient.
Throughout the therapy Mary produced dramatic images of exceptional force which were insidiously effective and at times evoked
countertransference feelings of despair, depression, and destructive
doubt with a predominance of defensive splitting of affect. I experienced phases of losing self-confidence and wondering if I were any
good at all as a therapist, let alone being the right therapist for Mary.
My capacity to think was affected, I experienced blanks and voids
and felt emptied of my own creativity. At times, as in the sessions,
I could not see ways forward and I had problems with my contact
lenses. I sometimes felt out of my own element and ill in a way that
felt quite foreign to my own bodyfull of beta elements struggling
to be converted into alpha functioning. In working with this patient,
I could only be of 'use' (in the Winnicottian sense) to her in so far
as I was able to tolerate the experience of the terrible murderous
mother inside me, not only projected, but also, because we all have
these areas in us, in the overlap betAveen us. I believe this overlap to
be one of the most crucial features of our w^ork. As Judith Hubback
reminds us, our own sickness is part of our personal totality and we
are doing well as therapists when we act, in sessions with our patients,
on a genuine working belief that sickness and shadow, integrity and
integration, are parts of a continuous spectrum (Hubback 1988). But
while the overlap of woundedness is vital for empathy, recognition
and use of the points of difference are also crucial. What I have learned
to do, to prevent my being over-identified with the patient in the
countertransference, is to draw upon these differences. Having been
a patient and still having wounds (but nevertheless having a healthy,
good-enough parental imago inside me that isn't confused in any way
with Mary's) enabled me to use these inner parents in my therapeutic
parenting of her. The therapist needs to have a 'well established
coniunctio of intemaL images' (ibid.) to draw upon.
I conclude with the reminder that infanticide and attempted infanticide (the impulse to kill off those whose destiny it is to take your
place and therefore become the object of much envy) is something
we kno'w about, have aWays written about, yet often fearfully avoid,
not daring to look it in the eye.