There was annoyance expressed by a reader last week when I was perceived as saying that something was “just a metaphor”. I didn’t say that, and I plan to not say it again today. In the study of mental health and other aspects of psychology, metaphors are extraordinarily important because they can guide our thinking into useful-- or useless—channels. A useful metaphor is one in which the psychological event can accurately be “mapped” onto the better-understood event we’re comparing it to, so a lot of things about the psychological event are like aspects of the comparison event. A useless or even harmful metaphor is one where the reality of the psychological event is very different from the reality of the comparison event.
Why am I bringing this up? I’m interested in the metaphor of symbiosis, so much bandied about in discussions of adoption. I believe this is a useless, even a harmful, metaphor. It was used by the psychoanalytically-oriented infant-toddler expert Margaret Mahler, and later by Daniel Stern as well as by others. They used the term symbiosis to describe a period of early life, beginning not at birth but at a few months of age, and going on until about the time that attachment behavior begins. For these authors, the word “symbiosis” was chosen to express the deep intimacy, physical and emotional, that often prevails between mothers and babies at this time in the baby’s life.
The word symbiosis, literally “a living together”, deceives us by looking as if it might be a good word to describe the best mother-infant relationships between about 2 and perhaps 6 or 7 months. But it’s not a word that was invented for this purpose. It describes another, more easily understood phenomenon, and because of this introduces a metaphorical usage into the discussion. Symbionts, or animals that live in symbiosis, are not uncommon in the natural world. They belong to different species but live near each other and behave in ways that are mutually beneficial. For example, pilot fish and sharks benefit each other and contribute to each other’s survival, as the fish eat the parasites that can infest the shark’s skin.
Real symbiosis does not provide a good metaphor for any stage of the mother-child relationship, because mothers and babies are not mutually beneficial to each other’s survival, either before or after birth. Mothers take care of babies; babies do not take care of mothers. On the contrary, aspects of motherhood are so potentially damaging to the mother that we have to look to evolutionary advantages for the species before we see any survival-related reason for having children. (I’m not talking about love, fun, or cultural pressures here, just plain survival of the kind that symbiosis aids.) Aside from a few possibilities like reduction in breast cancer caused by breastfeeding, we see virtually all the benefits of the relationship going to the baby, while the mother serves as an auxiliary immune system as well as an auxiliary ego.
What would be a more suitable metaphor, drawn from the natural world, to guide our thinking about young babies and their mothers? If we’re going to choose a comparison to animals living together, a better choice than symbiosis would be parasitism. A parasite, like a tapeworm living in a human gut, takes what it needs from the host, but usually does only slight damage, as it benefits from the host’s continuing life. Unborn babies function like parasites to a considerable extent, sometimes endangering or even killing their host[ess]. During the first year, or even longer, the long slow maturation of human beings makes them require constant care which they are completely incapable of reciprocating and keeps them in a parasitic relationship to adults.
Well, this is really an ugly metaphor, isn’t it? Babies as tapeworms is a pretty disgusting idea. But they’re not pilot fish either, and look at the problems we get into with the symbiosis metaphor. That way of thinking leads us to believe that the early mother-baby relationship is mutual, a two-way street in which the feelings and needs of one partner reflect the feelings and needs of the other one. We can make a lot of mistakes with that metaphor. One is to assume that anguish of a mother separated from her baby is necessarily mirrored by the anguish of a young baby separated from the mother, though observation of babies of a few months tells us this assumption is false. Another is to confuse the mother’s and child’s feelings as attachment develops and to think of “bonding-and-attachment” as if they meant the same thing. The parasite metaphor actually works much better as a description of the early mother-child relationship because it protects us from making mistakes about mutuality.
Of course, one of the difficulties of choosing a good metaphor for mother-baby relationships is that, like other aspects of development, those relationships don’t follow the same rules throughout life. Babies function in different ways at different points in their development, and within the second year will become less parasitic and more capable of reciprocating care and affection in a faintly adult-like way. Mothers, too, operate differently at different times in their own and their babies’ lives. As time passes, new metaphors need to be chosen to help us understand social and emotional development. It’s possible that symbiosis could be a good metaphor for some kinds of adult relationships, but I doubt that it ever works well for relationships between parents and their children of any age.
Showing posts with label metaphors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label metaphors. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Using and Abusing Metaphors: Attachment, Bonding, and Primal Wound
Several posts ago, I referred to ideas like the “Primal Wound” (a posited psychological injury caused by separation of a baby from its birth mother) as metaphors that could be helpful in therapy or in thinking through personal problems. One reader felt insulted by this statement and equated it with saying that proponents of the Primal Wound approach are “stupid”. I certainly didn’t intend to say that, although I think that if they considered the facts of infant development they would be aware that the Primal Wound is a socially constructed concept rather than a “natural kind”. I did mean just what I said-- that thinking metaphorically can be one of our best ways to figure out puzzling and complicated problems.
If any readers are old enough to remember the comic strip “Pogo”, they may recall the time when another character disparaged Rabbit by saying, “Huh! You ain’t nothin’ but a rabbit!”. Incensed, Rabbit declared, “I am not”. When Pogo Possum gently reminded him that he actually was a rabbit, he explained, “Yeah. But not a Nothin’ But A Rabbit!”. When I say the Primal Wound concept is a metaphor, I don’t mean a Nothin’ But A Metaphor.
To say that something is a metaphor is by no means to belittle it. In psychology, especially, it’s so common to deal with events that can’t easily be observed, events that we infer on the basis of other events, that metaphors are a large part of our stock in trade. The Greek root of the word metaphor means “transfer”, and metaphors transfer the characteristics of things we know well to things we don’t know well, in an attempt to understand the latter. Whether this is useful depends on the extent to which the characteristics of the known thing “map onto” (or match with) the characteristics of the unknown thing. Obviously, if the choice of metaphor is not good, this comparison will not be of much help in understanding the unknown, and this can easily happen because, by definition, we don’t really know the characteristics of the unknown.
We can’t do without metaphors, as the work of people like Hacking, Lakoff, and Johnson suggests. But we need to use them cautiously and watch out for misunderstandings that emerge from the metaphor itself. Two good examples of such misunderstandings are the use of the terms “attachment” and “bond”. Transferring all the characteristics of physical “attachments” or “bonds” to psychological relationships (that is, mapping the psychological onto the physical) is useful in some ways, but makes for misunderstandings in others.
When we consider a physical attachment, like a boat tied to a mooring with a rope, or an electronic one like a document sent with an e-mail, we are looking at a situation where each thing is equally attached to the other thing. The boat is tied to the mooring, and the mooring is tied to the boat. The document accompanies the e-mail, and the e-mail carries the document. These situations map onto emotional attachment in the sense that there is a special relationship between the boat and the mooring, and there is a special relationship between a child and an adult caregiver. However, while the boat and the mooring are equally and identically connected, this is not true of the younger and older human beings. The attitude, motivation, and behavior of the child toward the caregiver are much difference than those of the caregiver toward the child, and the two respond very differently to the breaking of the connection. The same is true for “bonding”; Epoxy bonds two pieces of wood equally to each other, but the attitudes of the “bonded” adult are vastly different from those of the child for whom the bond is experienced.
Using the “attachment” or “bond” metaphors is helpful for understanding, but it also carries the danger of misunderstanding. This is evident in the many inaccurate claims made by people who assume that adult and child experience identical and mutual emotional events, and who also assume that once the knot is tied or the glue set, attachment and bonding do not continue to change with development, but retain their original characteristics.
The language of the Primal Wound metaphor maps emotional experience onto a physical phenomenon. The first, second, and third dictionary definitions of “wound” all refer to injury to a physical body, and only the fourth gives the [metaphorical] meaning of an injury to one’s feelings. Characteristics of physical wounds are that they had an onset caused by some external event, that they hurt, that they are potentially dangerous to physical functioning or even to life, that they provide opportunities for infection or further injury-- but also that they usually have at least some capacity for self-healing. How do these characteristics map onto the Primal Wound, as the term is used by Nancy Verrier in her books, The Primal Wound and Coming Home to Self? Verrier and her followers use "Primal Wound" to refer to adult adoptees’ sense of being abandoned, alone, and grieving, and to the events that they believed caused these feelings, just as “wound” might be used to mean both a lingering injury and the initial damage.
The nature of a physical injury does map reasonably well onto the psychological experience reported by some adult adoptees. There is pain, there is potential danger of further related injury, there are reasons why a sufferer might have his or her pain exacerbated by other experiences. But there are some ways in which physical wounds do not seem to map onto this type of psychological pain. An important one is that while a physical wound has an observable onset and cause, the adoptees’ psychological pain does not have an observable onset in infancy; babies separated from their biological mothers at birth do not show distress, slowing of growth, apathy, or any of the other characteristics that signal grief in older children. It’s the use of the “wound” metaphor that implies that there must have been such an onset, rather than an observable onset that supports the use of the metaphor, and this demonstrates another way that metaphors can hinder our understanding--- by leading us to cherry-pick among evidence for the material our metaphor seems to demand. Someone in thrall to the Primal Wound metaphor may say, “Newborn babies must show distress when separated, because that’s what a wound would cause, and if no one has found any evidence of this it must be just because they haven’t looked the right way.”
Abuse of analogies is not just a trivial logical error. By fostering misunderstanding, it can lead to abuse of infants, children, and adults as well. In my opinion, the Primal Wound metaphor, a much-abused analogy, has done exactly that by encouraging mistaken treatments.
If any readers are old enough to remember the comic strip “Pogo”, they may recall the time when another character disparaged Rabbit by saying, “Huh! You ain’t nothin’ but a rabbit!”. Incensed, Rabbit declared, “I am not”. When Pogo Possum gently reminded him that he actually was a rabbit, he explained, “Yeah. But not a Nothin’ But A Rabbit!”. When I say the Primal Wound concept is a metaphor, I don’t mean a Nothin’ But A Metaphor.
To say that something is a metaphor is by no means to belittle it. In psychology, especially, it’s so common to deal with events that can’t easily be observed, events that we infer on the basis of other events, that metaphors are a large part of our stock in trade. The Greek root of the word metaphor means “transfer”, and metaphors transfer the characteristics of things we know well to things we don’t know well, in an attempt to understand the latter. Whether this is useful depends on the extent to which the characteristics of the known thing “map onto” (or match with) the characteristics of the unknown thing. Obviously, if the choice of metaphor is not good, this comparison will not be of much help in understanding the unknown, and this can easily happen because, by definition, we don’t really know the characteristics of the unknown.
We can’t do without metaphors, as the work of people like Hacking, Lakoff, and Johnson suggests. But we need to use them cautiously and watch out for misunderstandings that emerge from the metaphor itself. Two good examples of such misunderstandings are the use of the terms “attachment” and “bond”. Transferring all the characteristics of physical “attachments” or “bonds” to psychological relationships (that is, mapping the psychological onto the physical) is useful in some ways, but makes for misunderstandings in others.
When we consider a physical attachment, like a boat tied to a mooring with a rope, or an electronic one like a document sent with an e-mail, we are looking at a situation where each thing is equally attached to the other thing. The boat is tied to the mooring, and the mooring is tied to the boat. The document accompanies the e-mail, and the e-mail carries the document. These situations map onto emotional attachment in the sense that there is a special relationship between the boat and the mooring, and there is a special relationship between a child and an adult caregiver. However, while the boat and the mooring are equally and identically connected, this is not true of the younger and older human beings. The attitude, motivation, and behavior of the child toward the caregiver are much difference than those of the caregiver toward the child, and the two respond very differently to the breaking of the connection. The same is true for “bonding”; Epoxy bonds two pieces of wood equally to each other, but the attitudes of the “bonded” adult are vastly different from those of the child for whom the bond is experienced.
Using the “attachment” or “bond” metaphors is helpful for understanding, but it also carries the danger of misunderstanding. This is evident in the many inaccurate claims made by people who assume that adult and child experience identical and mutual emotional events, and who also assume that once the knot is tied or the glue set, attachment and bonding do not continue to change with development, but retain their original characteristics.
The language of the Primal Wound metaphor maps emotional experience onto a physical phenomenon. The first, second, and third dictionary definitions of “wound” all refer to injury to a physical body, and only the fourth gives the [metaphorical] meaning of an injury to one’s feelings. Characteristics of physical wounds are that they had an onset caused by some external event, that they hurt, that they are potentially dangerous to physical functioning or even to life, that they provide opportunities for infection or further injury-- but also that they usually have at least some capacity for self-healing. How do these characteristics map onto the Primal Wound, as the term is used by Nancy Verrier in her books, The Primal Wound and Coming Home to Self? Verrier and her followers use "Primal Wound" to refer to adult adoptees’ sense of being abandoned, alone, and grieving, and to the events that they believed caused these feelings, just as “wound” might be used to mean both a lingering injury and the initial damage.
The nature of a physical injury does map reasonably well onto the psychological experience reported by some adult adoptees. There is pain, there is potential danger of further related injury, there are reasons why a sufferer might have his or her pain exacerbated by other experiences. But there are some ways in which physical wounds do not seem to map onto this type of psychological pain. An important one is that while a physical wound has an observable onset and cause, the adoptees’ psychological pain does not have an observable onset in infancy; babies separated from their biological mothers at birth do not show distress, slowing of growth, apathy, or any of the other characteristics that signal grief in older children. It’s the use of the “wound” metaphor that implies that there must have been such an onset, rather than an observable onset that supports the use of the metaphor, and this demonstrates another way that metaphors can hinder our understanding--- by leading us to cherry-pick among evidence for the material our metaphor seems to demand. Someone in thrall to the Primal Wound metaphor may say, “Newborn babies must show distress when separated, because that’s what a wound would cause, and if no one has found any evidence of this it must be just because they haven’t looked the right way.”
Abuse of analogies is not just a trivial logical error. By fostering misunderstanding, it can lead to abuse of infants, children, and adults as well. In my opinion, the Primal Wound metaphor, a much-abused analogy, has done exactly that by encouraging mistaken treatments.
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