Understanding Male Responses to Abortion: Contributions of Control-Mastery Theory

• Control-Mastery theory and negative sequelae of abortion in males by Michael Simon, 4/25/97
  • Tell us more.... by Jessica, 4/27/97
    
    

Jessica, thanks for your interest. Below is a brief segment from a longer manuscript (approx. 200 pages) on Male Partners and the Psychological Sequelae of Abortion. It suggests that the psychological sequelae of abortion are often overlooked or underrepresented because current research fails to appreciate the intersubjective, interpersonal nature of the abortion experience for men and women. Control-Mastery theory is utilized to help explain the discrepancy between clinical and other anecdotal reports of significant negative psychological sequelae of abortion and those research studies which report mild or no significant negative sequelae.

A Focus on Guilt and the Development of Pathogenic Beliefs

Rooted in a belief in the intersubjective context of abortion, the present study adopts a focus on abortion as traumatic largely because of the effects on engagement (both with oneself/affective world and with others, which are by no means separate processes).

In an intersubjective view of traumogenesis, painful affect becomes traumatic for a child when the requisite attuned responsiveness needed for tolerating, containing, modulating and alleviating that affect is not present (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992). Injurious childhood experiences of loss are not necessarily pathological, but in the absence of adequate attunement and responsiveness, they can become a source of traumatic states and psychopathology. The development of self-esteem and a “sense of being real” is thus dependent upon, from an intersubjective perspective, validating attunement of the caregiving environ to the child’s emotional experiences. A child who is not met with an adequate response from the caregiving environ may conclude that, in fact, his own unmet needs and emotional pain are the result of self defects, and should be disavowed from conscious experience. The child can come to blame his own reactive states for the injuries that produce them and is warned off against experiencing painful affective states (for fear they will lead to similar traumas). By a similar process, the child can form organizing principles which preserve ties to the injurious caregiver (or caregiving environ) and (seemingly) protect him from further traumatization. It is important to stress the interpersonal nature of this process, because from an intersubjective psychological perspective, a person cannot autonomously regulate their own affective states; this regulation is always dependent upon another who attunes to you. Given the enormous difficult of parenting, it is not difficult to imagine the pervasiveness of organizing principles which predict malattunement.

In essence we have a descriptive process of the formation of pathogenic beliefs, as elucidated by Joseph Weiss, Harold Sampson and members of the San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group (Weiss et al., 1986; Weiss, 1993; Sampson, 1992). A belief is termed pathogenic if it warns a person that pursuing highly adaptive and desirable goals (which are in each instance, person-specific) would be dangerous to oneself or destructive to others (Weiss, 1993, p. 3). Pathogenic beliefs are thus maladaptive, grim and fairly intransigent. We also have a closely analogous description of the formation of what Stolorow and Atwood (1992) have called “invariant organizing principles.”

Once organizing principles or pathogenic beliefs are formed, they usually operate nonconsciously, although the person is usually testing these beliefs against reality and is exquisitely sensitive to the onset of experience which lends itself to being interpreted as an impending repetition of some original trauma. The efficiency and ubiquity of such a nonconscious assessment process makes intuitive sense and facilitates the mobilization of defensive activity directed against retraumatizaiton.

Retraumatization occurs, according to Stolorow and Atwood (1992) when: 1) a similar experience to an original trauma occurs or 2) when a sustaining bond is lost which had provided an alternative mode of organizing experience, and without which the old organizing principles are brought back to the fore.

In this context, abortion can be seen not as a primarily or somehow fundamentally (morally) traumatic experience but as a retraumatizing experience by virtue of the amount and intensity of earlier conflicts it can recapitulate around loss, affect attunement, threatened relational bonds (as in the resolution of the Oedipal complex), self-image, and the acceptability of complex affective states derived in relation to others. These earlier developmental challenges are once again stimulated in relation to the male partner’s response to the woman, her pregnancy, the imagined loss of a child, the consideration and possible rejection of the father role, and numerous other relational dramas. The male’s need to isolate his own affectivity in relation to earlier traumatic experience (see Chapter 4) while desiring connection with his partner, represents a complex network of (conscious and nonconscious) processes. It is thus difficult to pinpoint the specific impact of abortion on the male partner, in part because the effects may be subtle, may represent the stimulation of earlier pathogenic beliefs or may crystallize new ones that do not soon take shape in observable behavior post-abortion. One such result may be the stimulation of intense unconscious guilt, bolstered by earlier pathogenic beliefs, which warn the male partner against the pursuit of important normal developmental goals (Weiss, 1986). An inhibition of goals may be in relation to the female partner or any significant other (like the parents) for whom this inhibition may constitute a form of loyalty in the face of their perceived suffering. And unconscious guilt is a particularly powerful means for maintaining loyalty and attachment, and for restoring lost or threatened attachments (Weiss, 1986; Lewis, 1981; Baumeister et al., in press). For that matter, the withholding or walling off of affect can represent the resolution (albeit pathological) of a loyalty conflict between self and other. Modell, Weiss and Sampson (1983) put the point succinctly, and echo Stolorow and Atwood’s (1992) emphasis on the traumatic nature of non-attunement: The relationship between the self and the human environment is in part mediated through the sphere of affects; states of non-relatedness are one type of manifestation in response to disturbances in the holding environment. We are aware of whether someone is relating to us or not through the medium of affects. States of non-relatedness may be characterized by the non-communication of affects or the display of essentially false affects that serve not so much as a communication but as a manipulation of the affective response in the other (Modell, Weiss & Sampson, 1983, p. 2).

In Control-Mastery theory, varieties of guilt responses, especially those derived socially/interpersonally are often the precipitate of such struggles to balance the needs and wishes of significant others and our own perceived and unperceived needs. When negative sequelae of abortion are cited for male partners, conscious guilt is most often cited. The present study will address these findings, but concentrate on the phenomenon of unconscious guilt, and its role in the creation and maintenance of pathogenic beliefs and related psychopathology (e.g., Weiss, 1986).

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