Thoughts on Mania from an Intersubjective Viewpoint
George Atwood and David Klugman
What follows is a series of ideas about manic states. These ideas, interrelated and overlapping with one another, arose from extensive clinical studies of the phenomenology of mania, conducted collaboratively over the last two decades. Our work builds most importantly upon the observations of Fromm-Reichmann (1954), Winnicott, 1958; Atwood, Orange, & Stolorow, 2002; and Brandchaft (2010). It is our hope that sharing our conclusions and conjectures will advance the psychoanalytic understanding of mania and its correlates.
1. In the same way one refrains from confronting the objective falsity in a delusion in order to respond to the core of subjective truth contained within it, one must avoid overly focusing on the potential or even actual danger of a manic enactment in order to mirror and validate the lonely remnant of personal agency surviving at its heart (this thought was originally coauthored with Dorthy Levinson).
2. When one’s personhood has been thrust into the dark realms of negation, with a slow slide toward the horrors of annihilation (Atwood, 2011), the result is sometimes the emergence of a counter-drive, a kind of reaction formation against surrendering to ontological erasure – the resistance fighter, fatally allergic to all things counterfeit, no longer free to be ‘phony,’ thereby becomes locked within the prison house of his/her own uncompromising authenticity.
3. The so-called manic defense, described by Winnicott (1958) as a protection against psychic death, is both a protest and a plea: the former against not being seen, or better, of only being seen as a thing, to be made use of in an emotionally exploitive family context (Fromm-Reichman, 1954) and/or in a pathologizing psychiatric diagnostic system; the latter a desperate cry for the human understanding that will imbue the suffering one with a fully dimensional subjective life, and shield against the onrushing, terrifying Blackness.
4. One of the tragic features of the manic state is that the explosive counter-drive against psychological erasure itself (Brandchaft, Doctors, & Sorter, 2010) usurps the affective center of the Freedom Fighter, as an accelerating quest for validation and understanding is perceived and defined by others as madness running wild - and once pathologized by others, this explosiveness takes on the very negating and destructive force of its original oppressors: To wit, Catch me if you can at my rate of speed, for to slow down to yours (or to anyone’s but my own) spells my surrender to annihilation.
5. When the creative eruptions of mania are consistently seen as dysfunction and disorder, when the protests and pleas inhering in this subjective state are viewed as symptoms of an illness, when there is no sheltering island of human understanding making possible a releasing of the need to be heard and understood from its drivenness, the only way of containing the runaway streaming of emotion and thought is to suppress it by means of medical violence.
6. If, early in life, there has been a smothering of one’s soul in accommodation to the social surround (Brandchaft, Doctors, & Sorter, 2009), an explosion may eventually take place, bursting the ancient boundaries of self-expression that have been set up - and if this explosion is met by uncomprehending and pathologizing objectification, it assumes the classic form of a manic episode: ever-accelerating speech in a desperate search for understanding, limitless euphorias within which the newfound freedom is celebrated and preserved, and radical disengagement from enslaving sensitivity to the needs and feelings of others (Atwood, Orange, & Stolorow, 2002).
7. At what point is so-called mania just what will happen to anyone who steps that far off a norm in any given norm-structured context, as the forces of conventionality gather power and seek a constraining dominion over the creator’s soul?
REFERENCES
Atwood, G.E., Orange, D.M., & Stolorow, R.D. (2002) Shattered worlds/psychotic states: a post-Cartesian view of the experience of personal annihilation. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 19, p.281-306.
Atwood, G.E. (2011) The Abyss of Madness. New York: Routledge.
Brandchaft, B., Doctors, S., & Sorter, D. (2010) Toward an Emancipatory Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge.
Fromm-Reichmann, F. (1954) Twelve cases of manic-depressive psychosis. Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy: Selected Papers of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Chicago, Ill., University of Chicago Press, p.227-274.
Winnicott, D.W. (1958) The manic defense. Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books, p. 129-144.
1. In the same way one refrains from confronting the objective falsity in a delusion in order to respond to the core of subjective truth contained within it, one must avoid overly focusing on the potential or even actual danger of a manic enactment in order to mirror and validate the lonely remnant of personal agency surviving at its heart (this thought was originally coauthored with Dorthy Levinson).
2. When one’s personhood has been thrust into the dark realms of negation, with a slow slide toward the horrors of annihilation (Atwood, 2011), the result is sometimes the emergence of a counter-drive, a kind of reaction formation against surrendering to ontological erasure – the resistance fighter, fatally allergic to all things counterfeit, no longer free to be ‘phony,’ thereby becomes locked within the prison house of his/her own uncompromising authenticity.
3. The so-called manic defense, described by Winnicott (1958) as a protection against psychic death, is both a protest and a plea: the former against not being seen, or better, of only being seen as a thing, to be made use of in an emotionally exploitive family context (Fromm-Reichman, 1954) and/or in a pathologizing psychiatric diagnostic system; the latter a desperate cry for the human understanding that will imbue the suffering one with a fully dimensional subjective life, and shield against the onrushing, terrifying Blackness.
4. One of the tragic features of the manic state is that the explosive counter-drive against psychological erasure itself (Brandchaft, Doctors, & Sorter, 2010) usurps the affective center of the Freedom Fighter, as an accelerating quest for validation and understanding is perceived and defined by others as madness running wild - and once pathologized by others, this explosiveness takes on the very negating and destructive force of its original oppressors: To wit, Catch me if you can at my rate of speed, for to slow down to yours (or to anyone’s but my own) spells my surrender to annihilation.
5. When the creative eruptions of mania are consistently seen as dysfunction and disorder, when the protests and pleas inhering in this subjective state are viewed as symptoms of an illness, when there is no sheltering island of human understanding making possible a releasing of the need to be heard and understood from its drivenness, the only way of containing the runaway streaming of emotion and thought is to suppress it by means of medical violence.
6. If, early in life, there has been a smothering of one’s soul in accommodation to the social surround (Brandchaft, Doctors, & Sorter, 2009), an explosion may eventually take place, bursting the ancient boundaries of self-expression that have been set up - and if this explosion is met by uncomprehending and pathologizing objectification, it assumes the classic form of a manic episode: ever-accelerating speech in a desperate search for understanding, limitless euphorias within which the newfound freedom is celebrated and preserved, and radical disengagement from enslaving sensitivity to the needs and feelings of others (Atwood, Orange, & Stolorow, 2002).
7. At what point is so-called mania just what will happen to anyone who steps that far off a norm in any given norm-structured context, as the forces of conventionality gather power and seek a constraining dominion over the creator’s soul?
REFERENCES
Atwood, G.E., Orange, D.M., & Stolorow, R.D. (2002) Shattered worlds/psychotic states: a post-Cartesian view of the experience of personal annihilation. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 19, p.281-306.
Atwood, G.E. (2011) The Abyss of Madness. New York: Routledge.
Brandchaft, B., Doctors, S., & Sorter, D. (2010) Toward an Emancipatory Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge.
Fromm-Reichmann, F. (1954) Twelve cases of manic-depressive psychosis. Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy: Selected Papers of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Chicago, Ill., University of Chicago Press, p.227-274.
Winnicott, D.W. (1958) The manic defense. Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books, p. 129-144.