Filip
Maj
Life
as a Problem of Love, Freedom and Anxiety
Note on the book: Tadeusz Kobierzycki (2009), Beyond Love and Freedom. The Psychological Dependency Syndrome, Warsaw: MUZAIOS, 158 pgs.
In a system of a repressively organized society, which the family and the school were subject to in Poland between the years 1945 and 1989, it was possible to acknowledge all the occurrences of the child's defiance, revolt and contestation as actually being healthy (normal) reactions. They often assumed the form of drug-addiction, alcoholism and suicide.
The psychological dependency syndrome, as Tadeusz Kobierzycki writes in his book "Beyond Love and Freedom" (1992), exists between hidden acceptance and overt social discrimination. It is a system which confirms itself because of its commonness and the secrecy of its existence. His book is a "tale" demythologizing the child's position in its family, how it is entangled into procedures of self-destruction in order to save the arrangement, and how it copes with substitute healing methods, which are considered to be its main problem.
In Dr Kobierzycki's conception of psychological dependency, the human being is steered by three main developmental forces: love, freedom and anxiety, which are accompanied by three time variables birth, life and death. They are genetically
inherited and they determine the direction of personal development what will dominate the psychical integration and what will be the source of personal crisis.
The point of departure of Dr Kobierzycki's analysis of dependency is an existential-evolutionary psychological perspective, above all of Kazimierz DΉbrowski (19021980), the creator of The Theory of Positive Disintegration, with whom the author worked during the last ten years of his life (19701980). This line of thought especially appreciates in man his instinctive, emotional and intellectual abilities, which
make him capable of developing, transforming and shaping his personality in spite of obstacles (J. Piaget's stages, from heternomy to autonomy).
Dr Kobierzycki's conception of the "psychological dependency syndrome" can by compared to Alice Miller's perspective of family pathology, which unmasks the parents' practices of enslaving the child. Taking into account the wars of the previous century and the totalitarian regimes that accompanied them, the procedures of addicting people
had to find cultural, religious and legal sanctions to be able to determine such a fate for people in Europe.
The weakening or even destruction of the child's "Self " (I) and its will that it becomes a submissive object of manipulation, thanks to which it is accustomed to "negative freedom" (Kobierzycki 1992, p. 35). It executes what it does not want to do and becomes someone or something it does not want to be.
In Miller's analyses one can notice a stronger accent put on the negative father, who is usually the overt perpetrator of the abuse of the child. In Dr Kobierzycki's
perspective even the negative' father is a healing figure for the child. It is important to restore his place in the family system which in Poland is deprived of the father and "pseudo-motherly".
Dr Kobierzycki's approach to the problem of the autonomy of the child's "Self " is closer to Donald W. Winnicott's conception, where the analysis of the relationship between the child and parent (especially with the mother) is less biased and more systematical. Winnicott emphasized that the separation of the child's "I" from the mother occurs when the child realizes that the mother is neither absolutely good nor bad what is important is that she is a "good enough mother".
Dr Kobierzycki also draws attention to the problem of identification with the negative picture of itself taken from the parent, which is also pointed out by Melanie Klein. A relation based on negative emotional bonds attaches the child to such an object (the bad mother) and makes it look for similar negative relations with other people.
An important dimension of Dr Kobierzycki's theory, which is usually omitted in psychopathological analyses of dependency, is the differentiation of what is masculine and feminine in the child and the parent. Distinguishing the gender, just as the recreation of the entire and correlative structure of the figure of the father and mother, has a healing effect because it discloses the projections of mixing gender roles, also that
of the parents in relation to the child (e.g. through incestuous practices) making it a substitute husband or wife.
When the child identifies (and unidentifies) with its parents, with its own gender, this allows it to return to its own identity, it reactivates vitality, development and creativity. This is also the direction pursued at present by Bert Hellinger's constellation theory, which comes out of a systematic perspective. According to Hellinger, dependency comes into being when the mother disrespects her husband.
She informs the child that there is nothing good that comes from the father, and everything which is good comes from her. The child then takes so much from the mother that it begins to be harmful to it. Dependency is a revenge on the mother due to the fact that the child cannot "take" anything from the father. That is why the child is cured when it begins to "take" from the father in the presence of the mother. Hellinger sees the so-called mental disorders as entanglements. Entanglements consist of the mixing of family fates in such a way that its members live submissive fates.
Dependency is formed in the absence of the father and the over-presence of the mother. It consists of identifying "pressure, abuse and enslavement" with love, while identifying "indifference, anxiety and escape" with freedom. The syndrome of dependency is connected with an overvaluation of the mother and an undervaluation of the father (Kobierzycki 2000, p. 11). A closed family system sentences the child to be lonely while being in the family. A certain way of resolving dependency issues is establishing peer relationships by the parents and the child.
Alice Miller's perspective has a certain systematic flaw to it, since it does not refrain from the position of the child as a victim. She has defined the mother's and the father's blame too negatively, leaving no space for the adult's point of view. Because the child will become an adult, maybe a parent, it awaits a similar or worse fate. Such an approach, full of noble intensions and observations, seems psychologically false.
The questions that arise when considering the psychological dependency syndrome are How can one break away from the family, not excluding oneself? How can one remain in the family and not identify with the wishes of its members, as well as maintain one's own individual identity? How does one break off the dependency bond without destroying, sacrificing neither oneself nor others?
I.
Love, Freedom and Anxiety in the Psychological Dependency Syndrome
Dr Kobierzycki states that it is important to differentiate dependencies according to the way the child copes with love, freedom and anxiety in a concrete family. He distinguishes:
1) Regressive Dependencies they are symbolized by psychical underdevelopment, autism, narcissism, alcoholism.
2) Transgressive Dependencies they are symbolized by anorexia nervosa, workaholism, neuroses and psychoneuroses.
3) Destructive Dependencies they are symbolized by drug addiction, psychosis, suicide.
According to Dr Kobierzycki's conception three types of bonds differentiate and strengthen the dependency. They are:
1) The Symbiotic Type the Parent strengthens the Child's regression, inclines him to toxicomania, illnesses, underdevelopment, through the practice of incestuous rituals.
The Child "plays the stupid". This type of dependence is the most difficult to overcome in psychotherapy.
2) The Separational Type the Parent and the Child are engaged in mutual strengthening, which assumes the form of the "game of the rejected". The Child practices compulsive
returns to the house from trips, after running away, splitting up for ever, caused by abuse, quarrels, etc.
3) The Alienating Type the Child easily leaves the family home and the Parent. Th e Child plays the "game of a stranger", it acknowledges that its Parents are not real, that it comes from an orphanage or from another father or mother (or born out of wedlock).
II.
The Negative Factors of the Psychological Dependency Syndrome in the Family
According to Dr Kobierzycki the family profile of the psychological dependency
syndrome assumes the following form:
1) The Negative Position of the Woman:
overburdening with professional or maternal work (workaholism, momism, the totalitarian mother),
defensive, regressive or aggressive rejection of the mother's role (anxieties, intense psychosomatic reactions, rejecting the off spring),
masculinization of the behaviour and the personality (devaluation of femininity, accepting substitute identification or a complete withdrawal from the feminine
role).
2) The Negative Position of the Man:
pathogenic dependence from the workplace (excessive mortality, workaholism, intra-family marginalization),
regressive or aggressive resigning from the father's role (devaluation of masculinity, accepting substitute identifications or a complete withdrawal from the masculine
role).
3) The Negative Relation between the Man and the Woman:
a lack of contacts and emotional agreements (pseudomutuality),
annihilation or paranoidization of sexual projections
(ambivalencies),
fear of the Child (abortive thoughts and actions),
a tendency to transform a dyadic arrangement into monadic one.
The dependency syndrome also has its beginnings in the disorders of self-imaging and in the disorders of family relations of people living in incomplete or schismatic, or in some way deficit arrangements.
III.
Compensational Elements of the Psychological Dependency Syndrome:
The family with the psychological dependency syndrome creates procedures and structures compensating the negative position of its members. What occurs is a division of the family between the Parents, a non-diversity of marital roles and parental roles, oblique emotional dyads and abortive rituals, conflict and subordination of the family to the father or mother, cold, irrational, chaotic or schismatic structure of bonds. The specific causes of this state of things is as follows:
a) The Father degraded to the role of a worker and cashier etc., passive, marginalized, hidden, depressive, he confronts the wife and Child through a lot of aggression
and regression, he plays the role of someone who is absent, ill, infantile or demonic.
b) The Mother promoted to the role of a super-parent and super-worker, active, central, seizing, manic, she confronts her husband and Child by humiliating them
or herself, she plays the roles of the almighty, but lonely and abandoned or indifferent.
c) The Child dependent on one of the Parents or fighting, confronting the Parents through physical or psychic illnesses, substituting the absent Parent, thus saving
the marriage and the family arrangement.
IV.
The Systematization and Pathologization of the Dependent Psychological Defence
According to Kobierzycki psychological dependency evolves from the level of a healthy psychological defence to a level of an ill psychological defence. Such a pathological evolution creates the following psychodynamics:
1) increase of defense through ego enlargement, a feeling of annihilation (evolution toward paranoia), defense through the splitting of the ego, a feeling of the world bursting inside (evolution toward psychosis),
2) increase of the feeling that the real world is false while the imagined world is real,
3) increase of the need and inability to positively separate oneself from others, symbiotic-separational ambivalencies,
4) increase of the somatization of the anxiety, which is shown by autosexualism, alcoholism, devaluation of the body,
5) increase of the feeling of inner emptiness and outer pressure, need to be absorbed and inhibited,
6) increase of the fear of development, lack of autonomy, experiencing a conflict between the I and not-I,
7) increase of the fear of non-existence, death, life, lack of ontological
safety,
8) increase of the will to self-mutilation, will to commit suicide, ritualization
of death, etc.
V.
The Masks of Anxiety in the Psychological Dependency Syndrome
What is usually institutionally considered by psychologists and psychotherapists as a dependency (alcoholism, drug addiction, nicotinsm, workaholism, sexaholism,
etc.) is according to Dr Kobierzycki an unsuccessful way of stopping psychotic or psychopathological tendencies, by means of special and extreme ways of their controlling, weakening and breaking. The dependency reaction weakens but at the same time systematizes ("celebrates") the child's anxiety. The child identifies with the anxiety, gets used to its high and acute forms to achieve autonomy, that is to say, break away from the parent, at the same time demonstrating to the parent its pathological loyalty.
A characteristic trait in Dr Kobierzycki's diagnosis and therapy of dependencies is concentrating on the shaping of autonomy, understood as an ability to be self-reliant and appropriate to one's state of consciousness and level of development, use of one's body, thoughts, decisions and actions. In Poland, it is still an alternative conception compared to the prevailing purely sociological ones or those based on traditional psychopathology.
VI.
Theoretical Sources of the Conception of Psychological Dependency
Sigmund Freud (18561939): Dependency is formed on the basis of the principle of pleasure (with the mother), in separation from the principle of displeasure reality (with
the father). It is a normal occurrence in children which usually spend most of their fi rst years with the mother.
Wilhelm Stekel (18681940): The structure of human gender manifests itself in three forms: male, female, child. Dependency is connected with early childhood experiences
of sex, to which a person is attached and obsessively returns
to in regressive states.
Ιdouard Claparède (18731940): The child develops according to the following laws: 1) law of genetic succession, 2) law of genetic-functional training, 3) law of functional
adaptation, 4) law of functional autonomy, 5) law of individuality. The period of childhood is a time of maladaption to the needs of the surrounding life, and man who stands on the highest rung of the "animal ladder", has the longest childhood. This is the cause of his tendency to dependency.
Carl G. Jung (18751961): The primary model of dependency can be seen in the influence of the archetypes and the collective unconscious. Religion is a form of dependency and consists of giving in to the irrational facts of life.
Melanie Klein (18821960): The projections of good feelings and sections of the ego onto the mother is important for the infant's ability to develop good object relations and integrate its ego. Dependency can develop when a child excessively projects good feelings and sections of its ego onto the mother. The good sides of its personality can be lost and the mother takes on the role of its "ideal ego". This weakens the child's ego and impoverishes it. It can be transferred onto relations with other people and take on a form of an overly strong dependency on representatives of its good sides.
Anna Freud (18951982): Defense mechanisms are used by people to mask, but above all to help them cope with the distress encountered in life. They develop on the basis of early childhood relations with close relatives. Concentrated forms of psychological defence become constituents of the psychological dependency.
Donald W. Winnicott (18961971): The dependency is based on a primary dependency when the child's ego is united with the mother's ego. It is formed when the child cannot
detach its ego from the mother's ego.
Jean Piaget (18961980): The model of dependency is the anomic attitude of the child towards the parent. Together with the development of a more flexible intelligence, and also thanks to peer relations, the child develops autonomy in its
cognition and behaviour.
Kazimierz DΉbrowski (19021980): Dependency is connected with syntony, ambivalencies and ambitendencies, a lack of a fully developed inner milieu, directing-disposing centre. It is connected with negative adaptation and the lack of positive maladjustment (II level of development in the Theory of Positive Disintegration).
Erik H. Erikson (19021994): The basis of dependence and independence is the shaping or not of the will (free choice) between 18 months and 3 years of age (2nd cycle). This cycle determines if the person becomes autonomous and creative, dependent, with inhibitions, embarrassed and doubting himself. The toilet and eating training play an important role here. Autonomy is characterized by stubborn rejections, mood changes and a "yes-no" syndrome.
Alice Miller (1923): The source of the dependency (drug addiction, alcoholism) and other disorders (prostitution, mental disorders and suicide) is a dissociated reaction to wounds received from the parents. People feeling anger, helplessness, desperation, longing, fear and pain are destructive toward themselves. It consists of destroying the child's will in the first three years of its life while its character is being shaped.
Bert Hellinger (1925): The dependency develops when the mother disrespects her husband and tells the child that nothing good comes from the father, and that everything that is good comes from her. The child then takes so much from the mother that it starts to be harmful to it. Dependency is a revenge directed toward the mother because the child cannot take anything from the father. That is why the child can be helped when it starts to take from the father in the presence of the mother. Hellinger discusses dependency in the context of the concept of entanglement. Entanglement consists of mixing up family fates, in such a way that its members do not live their own lives.
Ronald D. Laing (19271989): Dependency is the result of procedures of identifi cation and interpersonal relations. The following procedures favour it: compulsion of introjection, mystification, double bind, ascribing, induction and order. They occur simultaneously or individually in human behaviour.
Tadeusz Kobierzycki (1947): Dependency forms in a family structure in which the father's physical, psychological and spiritual absence is ritualized while the mother's physical, psychological and spiritual presence is ritualized. Dependency on the existential plane consists of identifying an intentional or real abortion as well as pressure, beating and enslavement with love. Various forms of the child's self-defense, fear and death are identified with freedom. The dependency syndrome is connected with giving an overvalued position to the mother and an undervalued position to the father.
Conclusion
The problems of psychological dependency are becoming more and more acute. A healthy relation between freedom and love in society and the family has not been clearly defined. The main mechanism of manipulation in the family is still anxiety.
Dr Kobierzycki's new observations and diagnoses illuminate once again the rising problems of dependent people connected with dignity and the meaning of human life
For many years now Dr Kobierzycki has focused his attention on the problems of people with cancer (as a member of Onco_Life Team).
Bibliography
Claparède E. (2003), "L'ιducation fonctionnelle", Paris
Erikson E. (1979), "Childhood and Society", New York
Freud A. (1937), "The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence", transl. by C. Baines, London
Freud S. (2000), "Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning", SE, Vol. 12, New York
Hellinger B. (2001), "Love's own Truths: Bonding and Balancing in Close Relationships", transl. by M. Oberli-Turner & H. Beaumont, Phoenix, AZ
Jung C. G. (1971), "Psychological Types", Princeton, New Jersey
Kobierzycki T. (1992), "Beyond Love and Freedom. The Psychological Dependency Syndrome", Warszawa
Kobierzycki T. (2000), "The Psychological Dependency Syndrome": Heksis 1-3/2000, p. 8-37.
Laing R. D. (1960), "The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness". Harmondsworth
Miller A. (1981), "Prisoners of Childhood", transl. by R. Ward, New York
Klein, M. (1987), "Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms: The Selected Melanie Klein", New York
Piaget J. (1960), "The Child's Conception of the World", transl. by J. & A. Tomlinson, London
Stekel W. (1949), "Compulsion and Doubt", transl. by E.A. Gutheil, New York
Winnicott D. W. (2000), "The Child, the Family and the Outside World", London