Sole? Entirely?

• A Different Slant on CMT, Part II by Vic Comello, 11/27/98
  
  

Vic, you wrote:

"There are many people who live their entire adult lives behind barriers of their own creation that have the sole purpose of shielding themselves from becoming highly motivated to face those feelings ever again as the price of realizing their aspirations."

On behalf of the general postion taken by CMT, I would like to respectfully entertain the possibility that your above stated postion places exlusive emphasis on intra-individual conflict and is thus not so much an addition to CMT but rather an alternative. The phrase "barriers of their own creation" is, if I understand it correctly, not the way CMT would look at the matter.

According to my understanding of CMT, I would rephrase this as "barriers not ENTIRELY of their own creation." What early caregivers do and what they fail to do regularly act as pressure and influence determining the kinds of views of installed reality we adopt and then adapt to. The child also participates in the process but always from within his or her social matrix which also has a potent causal role in determining the views of reality a child takes on.

As Winnicott playfully put the matter, "there has never been an individual human child." He meant, of course, that every human being grows up in a social matrix and thus we are both motivated by self-interest and by other-interest. I certainly believe, as you may surmise, that Winnicott was of course correct, regardless of the ostensible "axiomatic" assertions by economists, and by those in psychology and mental-health professions who unwittingly emulate them, about the hegemony of self-interest in determining all of human motivation. The child adopts the beliefs s/he adopts because of self-interest and because of a self-sacrificing interest in his or her cargivers and other loved ones.

I would also wish to revise your phrase "for the sole purpose of shielding themselves." The word "sole" seems to overlook what I reagard as one of the most powerful and important features of CMT--it's incorporation of survival guilt and other self-sacrificing aspects of human motivation in which persons can adopt altruistic beliefs in childhood for the purpose of protecting OTHERS' feelings as well as one's own. These beliefs are nontheless misguided to the extent that they are self-immolating and cause tormenting symptoms of psychological suffering. They are misguided because of a child's limitied understanding and cognitive skill and because of limitations in the caregiving environmnet (what there may be of it) to support the child in finding anything less misguided.

Your wish to place emphasis, Vic, on the intra-individual dimension is important, by all means. However, I think if the intra-personal dimension is introduced as a replacement for the hard-won gains CMT has made in being able to get us to attend more fully and carefully to the importance of altruistic self-sacrifice, survivor guilt, and the residual effects of our early inter-personal conflicts, then the intra-personal perspective would be used to obscure rather than amplify and clarify the whole picture of human motivation. And there are many patients for whom the CMT interpretation (that they keep their installed reality views because of loyalty to their early caregivers) is the sine qua non of their successful therapy.

Thus for some patients it is precisely their overwhelming feelings associated with guilty shame about their imagined disloyalty that ARE IN FACT the feelings they shield themselves from--a shielding that you correctly identify as the obstacle to achieving more satisfying aspirations. I think the source of those shielded feelings with so many barriers around them is often more a matter of misplaced loyal altruistic self-sacrifice creating guilty shame for even HAVING one's aspirations (much less for trying to achieve them!) than it is a matter of a solely self-interested avoidance of disagreeable feelings entailed in risking new behaviors to fulfill one's aspirations. Certainly the more tormented and painfully symptomatic a person is in not being able to achieve his or her aspirations, the more I would favor explanations using the CMT inter-personal perspective.

• Ouch! by Vic Comello, 11/28/98