24 Feb ATTACHMENT AND THE DAIMONIC MOTHER: MATRICES OF THE SELF-CARE SYSTEM
Attachment theory, notably established by John Bowlby and further developed through object relations psychology, by Donald Winnicott and others, revealed that an infant’s sense of security and developmentally increasing ability to self-regulate originates in a secure bond with their primary caregiver. These theories posit that if secure attachment is established and sustained from the beginning of a child’s life, it builds lifelong emotional resilience.
In “Modern Attachment Theory: The Central Role of Affect Regulation in Development and Treatment” (Schore & Schore, 2007), the authors made the case that primary attachment shapes more than just resiliency and self-regulation. Remarkably, the attachment bond becomes the foundation of the baby’s developing identity.
“In 1994 Schore offered a large amount of existing interdisciplinary data to propose that attachment communications are critical to the development of structural right brain neurobiological systems involved in processing of emotion, modulation of stress, self-regulation, and thereby the functional origins of the bodily-based implicit self.”. (Schore & Schore, 2007, p. 1)
Therefore, selfhood develops in infancy within the relational matrix between the minds and bodies of the child, their caregiver, and their social and natural environments. Attachment, the interconnection between the infant and their parent, is woven with the threads of attunement and coregulation, and becomes the tapestry of the child’s original world. The baby then develops its individuality in relation to its primary attachment figure(s) and begins to know itself as separate from them through the parent’s affective responses.
“The essential task of the first year of human life is the creation of a secure attachment bond of emotional communication between the infant and the primary caregiver. In order to enter into this communication, the mother must be psychobiologically attuned to the dynamic shifts in the infant’s bodily-based internal states of central and autonomic arousal.” (Schore & Schore, 2007, p. 3)
Psychobiological attunement is not a cognitive process; rather, it is an unspoken, right-brain to right-brain exchange between mother and child, expressed through eye contact, vocal prosody, body language, and touch.
“The dyadic implicit processing of these nonverbal attachment communications are the product of the operations of the infant’s right hemisphere interacting with the mother’s right hemisphere. Attachment experiences are thus imprinted in an internal working model that encodes strategies of affect regulation that act at implicit nonconscious levels.” (Schore & Schore, 2007, p. 5)
“Right brain transactions also mediate the relational unconscious as it is expressed in the psychoanalytic encounter” (Schore & Schore, 2007, p. 5). Nonverbal communication, mutual right brain relating, unconscious to unconscious—between child and mother in the primary attachment relationship, and client and therapist in the therapeutic relationship—establishes mutual intersubjectivity, or attunement, a perspective of embodied empathy, in which each person in the pair can nearly feel their partner’s experience. “Just as the left brain communicates its states to other left brains via conscious linguistic behaviors so the right nonverbally communicates its unconscious states to other right brains that are tuned to receive these communications” (Schore & Schore, 2007, p. 8).
Considering Schore and Schore’s (2007) theory archetypally, throughout childhood, while the child is developing a sense of self in their right brain hemisphere, they are, at the same time creating an image of their mother in their unconscious mind-body via their mother’s affective responses. This unconscious image of mother could be likened to an intrapsychic caregiver template. Regardless of the quality of maternal care, the mother becomes imprinted into the child’s unconscious as the original coregulating figure via the patterns of her affective responses. The grown child, therefore, continues into adulthood, to unconsciously coregulate with their archetypal mother as an unconscious self-care program, with varying degrees of functionality.
In Kalsched’s (2003) article, “Daimonic Elements in Early Trauma,” he wrote about the daimonic foundations of the self-care system in the context of childhood trauma:
“When trauma strikes the developing psyche of the child, annihilation anxiety appears to threaten the continued existence of [the] innocent nuclear core of personal selfhood. Its extinction must be prevented at all costs, and so, as Winnicott said, “primitive defensive operations” come into play to prevent the traumatic anxiety from being experienced.” (p. 146)
Kalsched (2003) noted an example of primitive defense operation; daimonic appearances in dreams, typically occurring when clients have established a rapport with their therapist and are beginning to attend to their attachment wounding through transference. “[T]rauma is an attachment disorder—it’s about a rupture in a life-sustaining early relationship now being ‘remembered’ in the transference” (p. 149).
According to Kalsched (2003), daimons commonly manifest in dreams as either punishing or protective entities that serve to keep their host safe from potential further attachment trauma with someone who is perceived as potentially harmful to the defense system, such as a therapist. “These ‘daimonic’ Beings provide a container for the trauma victim’s annihilation anxiety and in this way serve as archetypal defenses of the personal spirit” (p. 148).
Bringing Schore and Schore’s (2007) and Kalsched’s (2003) works closer together, one can see that children without adequate attunement in infancy, and those who experienced abuse or neglect, lack the functional unconscious image, or archetype, of the good enough mother to coregulate with later in life. In such cases, the self-care system might adapt by unconsciously developing imaginal daimonic figures to take the place of absent primary coregulation figures. The daimonic mother as an archetypal defense can change her appearance from beneficent to malevolent, from Great Mother to Death Mother, and uses her omnipotence to keep her child safe from perceived existential threat. At the same time, her interventions, like all unconscious defenses, can prevent deep wounds from being exposed, even for the purpose of healing.
The therapeutic relationship, being an auxiliary attachment relationship, is the ideal context for attachment defenses to arise so that they can be observed and healed through human connection. Following Schore and Schore’s (2007) premise that primary attachment is the foundation of one’s identity, it seems plausible that right-brain to right-brain attunement between client and therapist can result in altering the client’s implicit self-care program, and thereby also transform their identity.
“[The] stormy process of wrestling with daimonic energies ‘unlocks’ the inner trauma complex and, through projective identification, gets its energies into the world of relatedness where they can be transformed. Only the human connection transforms daimonic energies, because only the human connection makes the ego’s dis-identification from the daimon worth it.” (Kalsched, 2003, p. 166)
Catherine Brooks, 2023
Photo: Breastfeeding Goddess in the Vatican, Catherine Brooks, 2023
References:
Kalsched, D. (2003). Daimonic elements in early trauma. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 48, 145–169.
Schore, A., & Schore, J. (2007). Modern attachment theory: The central role of affect regulation in development and treatment. Springer Science Business Media.
Sharf, R. (Ed.) (2020). Theories of psychotherapy & counseling : concepts and cases. CENGAGE LEARNING CUSTOM P.