SELF-STATES AND THEIR TRANSFORMATION

The following essay borrows from "Ibsen: Criticism, Creativity, and Self-State
Transformations," by Frank M. Lachmann and Annette Lachmann, published
in The Annual of Psychoanalysis, vol. 24, 1996.

My use of the term self-state draws on contributions from several sources:

Stern's and Sander's discussions of state transformation and the self-
regulating other and Kohut's discussion of self-states as noted in self-state
dreams.

When used by infant researchers, state refers specifically to variations in

sleep and wakefulness that occur as the infant passes between crying and
alert or quiet activity, drowsiness and sleep, wet discomfort and dry
discomfort, hunger and satiation. Different states affect how things are
perceived, how those perceptions are integrated, and how such
information is processed.

State transformations in early life accrue to both the child's self-regulation

and to the expectation that mutual regulation with the caretakers will
facilitate or interfere in regulating one's affects and states. Thus, early state
transformations are associated with mastery or control over one's own
experience, and expectations that affect regulation can (or cannot) be
shared with the self-regulating other.

With the advent of symbolic capacities and increasing elaboration upon

one's subjective experience, self-states in the child and adult include the
domain of the self in a psychological sense. Post infancy self-state
transformations may increase a sense of control, mastery, or agency, but in
the case of traumatic self-state transformations, such states as devastation,
outrage, or fragmentation may become dominant.
The subjective discomfort of painful self-states provides an impetus for
finding means by which such states can be transformed. A creative
endeavor, one means of transforming one's self-state, enhances the range
of the self-regulation. Furthermore, in the context of mutual regulations,
expectations of a responsive environment shift the state of the self along
the dimension of fragmentation-intactness toward greater cohesion and
along the dimension of depletion-vitality toward an increased sense of
efficacy.

Kohut described self-state dreams in which the imagery is undisguised or

only minimally disguised, depicting the dreamer's sense of self. Kohut
likened these dreams to Freud's discussion of dreams in traumatic
neuroses, in which a traumatic event is realistically depicted. For example,
a self-state may be depicted in a dream as a barren countryside, reflecting
a sense of devastation and such self experiences as depression, despair, or
hopelessness.

My use of self-state is broader than Stern's since I extend my perspective

into adult life, and my use of the term is not confined to the dream
imagery described by Kohut. Dream imagery provides a glimpse into a
person's feelings of devastation and outrage, but the imagery of narratives
can also convey self-states.

MODEL SCENES
To construct the model scene that depicts the self-state that I attempted to
recapture after I was subjected to devastating criticism in the form of job
harassment and job termination, I combined facets of my life history.
For the first several years of my development, I experienced a childhood
characterized by an overprotective but unempathic mother and a distant,
but at times harsh, father. My father was a highly intelligent man who
settled for far less in life than he was capable. He had quit an academic
high school restricted to college-bound students in the tenth grade and
worked at a factory job. Though he was raised in a strictly Orthodox
Jewish family, he was the only one of seven children to marry outside the
Jewish faith, in 1946. My mother was a Polish-Catholic whose father, an
immigrant coal miner, died in the great swine flu epidemic following
World War I. My father suffered both overt and covert anti-Semitism from
my mother's family during the marriage -- itself a form of criticism. My
father coped with the attacks directed at him by relying on a deeply rooted
sense of his cultural and religious superiority.

My mother doted on me, but paradoxically, had a tendency to negligent,

even reckless, caretaking. At age three I developed scarlet fever, an unusual
bacterial disease. I was late in being weaned from the bottle. Though I ate
solid food by age three, of course, my mother indulged my desire to drink
milk that had gone sour in the bottle. The pediatrician, Dr. Bloom, who
diagnosed the illness attributed it to the sour milk. "And why is he still
drinking from a bottle? He's too old to be drinking milk from a bottle,"
the doctor said. (Dr. Bloom! "Just who does Dr. Bloom think he is?"). My
father was very angry and chastised my mother bitterly for "spoiling" me,
in the doctor's presence. I felt humiliated and helpless in the face of the
charges leveled at me. My secret oral perversion had been discovered! The
secret was out! The doctor advised my parents that scarlet fever was
considered a serious public health concern, and that he was bound by law
to report my illness to the city health department. Several days later, the
health department posted a quarantine notice on the front door of our
home (1957). My private act led to unforeseeable consequences in the
form of intervention by a government authority. In effect, at age three the
government had determined that I was already "potentially dangerous."
The scarlet fever incident contributed to the centrality of solitary self-
experience for me. From an experience of pleasure (in drinking sour milk
from the bottle), I was suddenly transformed to a state of loss and an
inexplicable sense of guilt. I felt like a felon and, if you will excuse the
hyperbole, "would hide when the constable approached the house." The
illness ushered in transformation from a positive, pleasurable, self-
absorbed state to a secret state marked by guilt and a personal blame for
wrongdoing. I did not find solace for my loss. On my own, I bore both my
guilt and the surprising, disturbing impact I could have on others in my
immediate world and beyond: indeed, reaching out to a world beyond my
imagination, in the form of governmental authorities. The illness also
signaled another transformation in the direction of having to regulate
painful states on my own without the support of others. Both parents
were concerned with public embarrassment, rather than with the state of
their child. I propose that the model scene I have constructed organized
my experience as a solitary, impactful onlooker: someone whose private
actions could even trigger the intervention of government authorities. It is
an experience that few three-year-olds have. An emotionally porous three-
year-old who is "hypersensitive to the goings-on in his environment," cf.
Freedman v. D.C. Dept. of Human Rights, DCCA 96-CV-961 (Sept. 1998),
will be affected by that experience.

This letter, and particularly the above anecdote, is a metaphorical bridge

of speculation that connects mystery to mystery, the known with the
unknown. That bridge is like a single plank that requires the support of
others to form a firm foundation. I offer the following thought. My age
upon contracting scarlet fever, which resulted from my mother's
indulgence of my dependency needs -- age three or three-and-a-half -- is the
same age my mother was when her father died of a communicable disease,
influenza: in an influenza epidemic that, because of its magnitude, had
evoked a vigorous public health response by government authorities
nationwide. Is it possible that my "good" mother was instrumental in
setting me up for serious illness? Was my mother's seeming indulgence
really an expression of a strong unconscious ambivalence toward me that
was a derivative of her emotional reaction to her own father's death?

Incidentally, the anecdote above parallels themes in several plays by

Henrick Ibsen. In Ghosts a mother provides poison to her son to enable
the son's suicide in expiation of his father's sins; An Enemy of the People pits
a truth-fanatic (who discovers that the waters of a spa town are polluted)
against the town's mayor and its citizens; and in The Master Builder a
mother, out of a perverse sense of duty, kills her twins -- she contracted a
fever because she could not stand the cold, but, despite the fever, she
insisted on breast-feeding the twins, who died from her poisoned milk.

Note that I was the only male child in the family. Oddly, when I was a
young boy, my older sister created the fiction that my middle name was
"Stanley," my mother's father's name. I actually came to believe at one
point in childhood that my name was "Gary Stanley Freedman."

Be that as it may.

My mother had a passionate interest in motion pictures and, in

childhood, was fond of playing with dolls. I picked up on these interests
in a way. In early adolescence I developed a fanatic attraction to the
Wagner operas, and I had an interest in the craft of play writing. In high
school and college I took elective courses in drama and theater. At age
thirteen I staged (after a fashion), in the basement of our family home, a
highly-abbreviated version (to say the least) of Wagner's four-opera Ring
Cycle for the entertainment of my parents -- though, in reality, my parents
were uninterested, if not hostile to my effort.

My father was subject to bouts of depression and sometimes became bitter

and brutal toward my family, but he took no steps to change his situation,
other than threatening, from time to time, to leave my mother. He was
frequently morose and withdrawn. I reacted to my father throughout
childhood with a range of irreconcilable emotions: idealization, sympathy,
anger, and fear.

Taken as a unity, to be spelled out below, these accounts suggest that, for
me, self-states and affects had to be regulated alone, by myself. In later life,
I transformed my despondent state after my critical rebuff at Akin Gump
by drawing on the themes encapsulated in the model scenes.

In psychoanalytic treatment, analyst and patient construct model scenes to

convey, in graphic and metaphoric forms, significant events and repeated
occurrences in the analysand's life. The information used to form model
scenes can be drawn from a variety of sources, including a patient's
narrative and recollections. Model scenes highlight and encapsulate
experiences at any age, not only early childhood, and are representative of
salient conscious and unconscious motivational themes. The concept of
model scenes is broader than and includes screen memories, which Freud
equated with the manifest dream content dream, in that they point
toward something important that they disguise. The memory itself and its
"indifferent" content are to be discarded as the analyst recovers and
reconstructs the significant, concealed childhood event or fixation.
Whereas screen memories focus on reconstructing what has happened,
model scenes pay equal attention to what is happening, whether it is in
the analytic transference or in the person's life. For me, the model scene is
based on recollections that capture my solitary self-regulation, self-
restoration, and my triumph over my detractors.

MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY: SIGNIFICANT MOMENTS

The book is unusual in structure. It is drawn exclusively from published
literature -- it is a collection of quotations, really -- with the quotes woven
together to form a cohesive narrative, comparable in a sense to the
structure of T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland." A single, cohesive narrator or
hero does not appear in the book. Rather, the author manipulates the
quotations; he hovers overhead, as it were, like a puppet master, pulling all
the strings. I am represented, through my identification with various
literary and historical figures, by identity elements or identity fragments,
which are the quotations. The themes of the book are numerous and
diverse. The themes include anti-Semitism, the craft of writing, opera
production, communicable disease, genetics, inheritance, the discovery of
a secret that brings ruin on the discoverer, scientific discovery, truth
seekers, critical response by peers, defiance of peers and authorities,
banishment and social isolation, the absence of an empathic or supportive
environment, the self-regulation of affects, the death of fathers, the
intervention of government authorities into the private domain of
citizens, the seductive or destructive mother, alleged corruption and cover-
up, among other topics.

CRITICISM AND RESPONSE

The negative response I received upon my job termination and its
aftermath was diffuse. It came from the employer, psychiatrists (doctors),
and government authorities. If I were asked why I began to write my
autobiography in April 1993, four months after I had received the
employer's responsive pleadings in a legal action I had initiated against the
employer, I would have said: "I had to write my autobiography."
In Significant Moments, "the hero" (who appears in various guises, or is
represented by various identity elements) makes a discovery that results in
his being pitted against "the powers that be." The detractors of "the hero"
are mocked and exposed as mean-spirited and unprincipled. I thereby
expressed my distrust of the capacity of the "majority" to discriminate the
"true" from the "false" and to exercise sound judgment. I showed "the
powers that be" to be swayed by self-interest and incapable of
distinguishing scientifically backed findings from self-serving
rationalizations.

There is no decent, supportive public in Significant Moments. "The hero"

naively values the support of "the powers that be" at the opening of the
book. He believes that they will be responsive to truth and evidence.
Before the book's end, "the hero" could rightly say that the most
dangerous enemy of truth and freedom amongst us is the solid majority.
"The majority is never right! . . . The minority is always right!" The
minority to which "the hero" refers is himself. By the end of the book, he
can trust nothing but his own values, perceptions, and beliefs.
Wounded by the shortsighted managers at Akin Gump, I asserted that the
creative artist stands alone, a minority of one, to maintain his integrity
and the purity of his vision. In Significant Moments I spoke with one
uncompromising, solitary voice clearly depicted in "the hero," who loses
all support and ends alone. "The strongest man in the world is the man
who stands most alone." Increasing isolation drives "the hero" to proclaim,
"I want to expose the evils that sooner or later must come to light."

To explore and to react aversively are dominant motivations for "the hero."
He is uncompromising to the end, a man who does not mean to settle for
rapprochement with the majority. He was ready to bring ruin upon
himself and others rather than "flourish because of a lie."
In my response to the critics, I presented my hero as totally decent and
honest, but naive with respect to political wheeling and dealing. His
decency and goodness are contrasted with the narrow-mindedness of the
majority. They are devoid of a sense of morality of their own and led by
authorities who are rigid, unimaginative, self-serving, and bureaucratic --
banal at best and corrupt ("poisoned") at worst.

CREATIVE TRANSFORMATION: FROM JOB TERMINATION

TO SIGNIFICANT MOMENTS
I had to write Significant Moments. The themes of that book, father-son
tensions (real or symbolic), living a lie, the effects of learning "the truth,"
inheritance (in my case, the transmission of parental strengths and
weaknesses), all manifestly rooted in my early life, are taken up in my
book. In so doing, I addressed my compelling, burning, residual issue
from my past and depicted it as a metaphor for my society as
well. Significant Moments thus combines painful memories with a
devastating social critique. Personally, I expressed my disillusionment at
my father's legacy of academic, occupational, and marital failure, as well as
my quest for an idealizable father of whom I could be proud.

Apparently, I felt compelled to bare myself in a barely disguised form. I

gathered my past grievances and projected them on to "The Freud
Archives Board." In them I embodied the lies, hypocrisy, deception, and
duplicity that I hated in society. So long as they typified "the powers that
be" and its "opinions," there could be no compromise. My
uncompromising depiction of the "sins of the father," the "ghosts" that
demand placing duty and public appearances above self-expression and
individual freedom, expresses my long-held convictions in the purest,
boldest form.
At the center of Significant Moments lies my determination to explore two
sides of deception. Some self-deception is held necessary to maintain
hope and to survive, yet there is also a pernicious self-deception that
erodes ethics and undermines morality. Both Nietzsche and Jeffrey
Masson were compelled to counter, respectively, Wagner's and The Freud
Archives' deceptions of themselves and others. "The Heroes'" (Nietzsche's
and Masson's) duty-bound rejection was felt by "the powers that be"
(Wagner and Dr. Eissler) as both a rejection of their ideals and a personal
betrayal.

I was shocked by my sudden job termination in late October 1991; but

later (in April 1993), within four months of receiving the employer's
responsive pleadings in the agency complaint I filed, I began work
on Significant Moments. With my self-confidence shattered, if there was a
moment when the capacity to transform shattered narcissism into artistic
creativity was called for, this was it. The book became my response to the
devastating experience of my termination and its aftermath. Note that it
was only upon my receipt in late December 1992 of the employer's
pleadings that I learned that the employer had allegedly determined that I
was potentially violent -- that is, a physical danger to others: an allegation
that must have resonated with my memory that at age three I had been
determined by a municipal authority to pose a public health risk.

In Significant Moments moral integrity on one side is pitted against

deception, greed, and narrow self-interests on the other. The battle lines
are drawn clearly. Perhaps in outrage, all gloves are off. I myself step upon
the stage and drag my enemy, conventional wisdom, front and center with
me.

The hero pays the price for his naive belief in truth; he is socially totally
isolated, but he remains undaunted. Throughout the book, he remains
loyal to the idea that truth will win the day. He utters the line (through
playwright Arthur Miller) that embodies "the hero's" defiance of the
"majority" and defines the state in which he feels himself to be:
independent, invulnerable, and exquisitely self-contained. "The strongest
man in the world is the man who stands most alone!"

To me, the artist's strength lays in an undaunted capacity to maintain a

vision in the face of opposition and to "cleanse and decontaminate the
whole community." I must disturb, be perpetually misunderstood, and
walk alone. Yet I would call Significant Moments an expression of the
"comedy of life" in that it expresses my recognition that the creative artist
cannot totally stand alone. Ultimately, he needs an audience to respond
to him.

CREATIVITY IN SELF-STATE TRANSFORMATION

The artist accepts isolation as a consequence of his superior, unique vision
of the world. He depicts his ideal, to follow the dictates of his artistic
integrity, irrespective of the consequences. Compromise means
accommodating to societal pressures, hypocrisy, and deception.

In Significant Moments the tyranny of conventional wisdom, the legacy of

father to son, and the strength inherent in one's solitary loyalty to the
"ideal" of truth appear on an unadorned stage.

It is always risky, when discussing an artist, to draw inferences about his

life from his creative output. Nonetheless, parallels do exist between the
artist's life and his creative work.

Traumatic, painful, or humiliating life experiences sometimes provide the

context for an artist's work. To some extent, the creative product is the
transformation by the artist of the effects of his painful past and
narcissistically injurious experiences. Here, transformation refers to self-
regulated alterations, the capacity to alter one's self-state, when, for
example, it is characterized by guilt or shame, stirred by feelings of defeat
and, when exposed to contempt, derision, or ridicule. To turn painful self-
states into a sense of triumph requires transforming narcissistic injuries,
often though not invariably, via narcissistic rage, into a sense of having
righted a wrong, avenged a slur, or seized self-"intactness" from the jaws of
injury.

Significant Moments is a self-revelation. As the book proceeds headlong

toward its tragic denouement, the passages that describe the weather and
the lighting are psychologically revealing. Thus, the portion of the writing
that describes the high point of the Wagner-Nietzsche relationship refers
to the brilliance of the sun. While the last meeting of Wagner and
Nietzsche takes place on a cold, drizzly evening -- the night of a dinner
party. Artists, including myself, often depict self-states of the characters
through, for example, reference to weather. Changes in the weather
foreshadow, just as a dream of a barren countryside may reveal and
foreshadow, the state of the self.

The book also contains numerous biblical allusions and quotations. In

adult years I have stood alone against my critics, who have usually been
stronger and more numerous than my defenders. The source of my
strength -- my ability to stand alone, undaunted -- I believe, is ultimately a
positive inheritance from my father: namely, my father's ego-strengthening
identification with the historical struggle of the Jewish people for survival.
My ambivalence toward my father now becomes more understandable. My
"inheritance" did not only include my father's failings but contained a
substantial quantum of support from him as well. My solitary faith in
myself and my eventual triumph, coupled with my memory of my father's
loyalty to the best in the Jewish tradition, may have provided the strength
that has enabled me to stand alone and continue my struggle without the
aid or presence of another.

After my disappointing job termination in 1991, my self-state could be

characterized as enraged by new disappointments, as well as the revival of
the old hurts and disillusionments. I sought refuge through the
transformation of my painful state to one that may also have been an
enduring legacy of my childhood, a state devoid of impingements from
others and free of the disappointment I felt in my father. I sought a sense
of supremacy, alone and at peace. Akin to a puppeteer, I longed to be
above the critics and the mundane world, without concern for social
status, economics, or prestige.