convex and concave, part ii: images of emptiness in ...

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 60, No. 2, 2000

CONVEX AND CONCAVE, PART II: IMAGES OF EMPTINESS IN MEN1 Marilyn Charles The theme of emptiness had been most salient for me in my work with women (Charles, 1999), for whom reciprocal experiences of internal emptiness and external void are often highly charged, evoking images of creation and birth. These themes are particularly at issue for women who have not felt ‘carried to term’ by their own mothers, and search, often with little hope, for ways in which to feel ‘held’ within the object world. In my work with women, images of emptiness have been evocative of the contours of my own physiology; the consulting room becomes the womb within which the self might be newly delineated in this precarious cocoon of care set within the larger, and often terrifying, void. As I have continued to reflect on this theme, however, I have become more aware of similar images in my work with men, images that evoke the physical feel of being unheld in an uncaring universe, thereby configuring an internal world that cannot hold the self safely or lovingly. For men, too, the counterpoints of full versus empty and touch versus absence evoke this intertwining pattern of convex and concave. There may be no experience that poses a greater challenge to the analyst than to sit with our patients in these vast, fathomless, unfound spaces. As I have done so, I have become intrigued by similarities and differences in men’s and women’s depictions of their experiences of what have been characterized by Balint (1963) as ‘internal emptiness’ and ‘external void.’ The void appears to have its origins in early deficits between infant and caretaker, when holding is absent or unresponsive to the developing child (Stern, 1985). For our patients, the internal void becomes fashioned in the image of the external one, and vice versa. To imagine filling either is to invoke images of excruciating pain as the rawness of unsheathed flesh is revealed. To admit internal emptiness is to acknowledge need, whereas to acknowledge the external void is to affirm one’s inherent unlovability in the face of a disinterested or actively hostile universe. Early experiences with caretakers that alternate between hostility and an appalling lack of Marilyn Charles, Ph.D., Private Practice, Analyst, Michigan Psychoanalytic Council. Address correspondence to Marilyn Charles, Ph.D., 325 Wildwood Drive, East Lansing, MI 48823. 119 0002-9548/00/0600-0119$18.00/1  2000 Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis

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interest or care, evoke persecutory anxiety and empty idealizations (Klein, 1952). This type of experience knows no gender boundaries. As described more fully in Part I, the primary dyadic relationship becomes the paradigm for all later ones. Maternal containment provides the basis for feeling held within the object world, which in turn provides the basis for symbolization and ‘meaning making’ (Bion, 1962; Segal, 1957; Winnicott, 1974). Insufficient containment impedes the ability to know both self and other, and increases vulnerability to experiences of emptiness (Grotstein, 1991), as the external void becomes translated by the child into an internal sense of insufficiency in desperate attempts to retain some sense of being held within the object world (Fairbairn, 1952; Guntrip, 1989). The experience of internal emptiness may pose particular problems for the man—who must move himself out into the world to create—as opposed to the woman, who may more easily create within the confines of her own being. Many traditional religions reflect the disparate challenges entailed in being male versus female. Whereas the female may find God and salvation through procreation and caretaking in this world, the man is left to fight for salvation within the abstract regions of prayer and ritual. For the man who has been given too little, power often appears to reside in affirmations of needlessness. In contrast to the woman, who seems to be able to struggle with issues of needlessness without necessarily foreclosing on affect so completely, many men seem to build a defensive wall around the core feeling self in an attempt to deny potentially overwhelming feelings of vulnerability, sorrow, and rage. In this way, emptiness becomes a valiant, primordial determination to defy need. One variant of this wish may be found in the desire to transcend the bounds of the flesh and move into the realm of the mystics. This is the grand void of the Eastern religions in which fullness is but illusion and emptiness contains within it the possibility of all things. This notion is evocative of Bion’s (1967) ‘saturated idea,’ in which there is no room for meaning to become manifest, or Lacan’s (1964) distinction between the signifier and that which is signified, lest meaning be condensed and collapsed beyond perceptibility. This disjunction between feeling and reason tends to be more pervasive in men, severely impeding their ability to know self and other. I have found that women are less likely to be so thoroughly cut off from their affective core; they exhibit more of a tendency to move back and forth between feeling and not feeling, shutting down when overwhelmed and yet maintaining some capacity for differentiation and registration of affect as such. For men, in contrast, there is a greater prevalence of more chronic feelinglessness. For the infant, whose early origins are contiguous with the physical presence of the mother in profoundly different ways than that of the father, the father’s greater distance may be experienced as void. The male

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child is under greater injunction to differentiate from the early rhythms of attunement through which the affective self, most particularly, becomes known, and to identify with the more remote father. In this way, for the male child the void may loom larger and with greater imminence. There is both a maternal and paternal nature to the void. That holding presence which carries both the sense of ‘mother,’ as primary containment, and the sense of ‘father,’ who connects us with the world, becomes a prototype for the Divine (Grotstein, 1979, 1991). The mother and father together provide the primary holding that both reassures us of our own presence within the world, and also gives meaning to our experiences of ourselves in the world. Meaning is built within the linkings of object to object, idea to idea, and self to other, developed in the interactions between mother and infant in their reciprocal relationships as container and contained (Bion, 1962, 1963). Without the feeling of being held within the object world, we are more vulnerable to experiences of emptiness or nothingness, which Grotstein (1990, 1991) terms the ‘black hole.’ The black hole is both that which holds and supports, and also that with which one longs to make contact but cannot. More terrifying still are images of black hole as that which would engulf and annihilate us—should we dare to come too close (Eshel, 1998). The absent parent often becomes a demon god whose very absence becomes an affirmation of our worthlessness, to whom we pay homage, and to whom we attempt restitution (Kavaler-Adler, 1995). The absence of the mother in early childhood may be the most intolerable narcissistic injury, predisposing the individual to experiences of emptiness and the void. For one young man, his mother’s recurrent absences during his childhood left a sense of unutterable emptiness. ‘Nick’ is a young man in his mid-twenties, who tries valiantly to be self-sufficient. He appears to be haunted by the dual terrors of his tantalizing/devouring mother and his more available, yet ineffectual father. Nick tells me, “It’s odd, because when I think about my childhood home, I think of her being there; she seems to be a part of it. But when I think about my childhood itself, I think of her being gone. She was never there.” Nick has been tormented by tremendous anxiety and violent aggressive urges that permeate his dreams and waking life. At the end of a recent hour, I had referred to his anxiety. “Anxiety?” he pondered. “What makes you think of anxiety?” “You seem to be worrying a great deal,” I replied. When he returned for the next session, this interaction had been pressing upon him. “When you said that, about worries,” he said, “it really bothered me. You were right, I worry all the time, but somehow I never connected it with anxiety. I’m noticing it now, and it’s different from being nervous. I feel

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dizzy and my head perspires. I was buying some gum this morning on my way here and someone came up behind me and I could barely stand it.” His anxiety was also appearing in his dreams in the form of a great white shark who had already eaten his grandmother (another worrier) and was in the process of eating him when he awoke. I wondered about the person behind him in the store. I had a sense of a male presence. Nick identifies most with his father, and yet rejects this identification with the man who was in many ways his only functional parent, but who had also failed, dramatically and repeatedly, in both his personal and professional lives. In Nick’s depictions, his father stands uncomfortably close behind him, threatening to become him. Nick feels terribly conspicuous when he is with his family, and is afraid of being identified as one of them. He has writhed against the image of his father’s failure by trying to surpass him. At age fifteen, Nick began his own business, an endeavour in which he still is engaged. And yet, in counterpoint, he also pursues his own dreams, which are in many ways thwarted by the ongoing need to affirm that he can succeed in the domain in which his father failed. In this way, he assures himself that he is not his father by becoming/overcoming him. In a sense, he becomes God, thereby usurping the territory of God. There is terror in that, as well as mystification and awe as one moves into that space of conflict and conquest. Fantasies of emptiness become fantasies of becoming the masculine God who will find a vehicle for his needs, a container for his fears, and a conduit toward his immortality. Can he hope to fill a woman in that way, or would he be engulfed if he were to try? Nick comes up against images of woman as goddess, always too large, too vast, for his small self to be able to interpenetrate, much less to fill. His vast smallness at times seems ludicrous, and becomes hidden, masked by his murderous rage. Despite suggestions that women more often report feelings of emptiness than do men (Balint, 1963; Erikson, 1950), I find this theme to be salient in my work with men, as well, although it may take somewhat different forms. For Nick, it became important to be the father he had not had, so that he might rescue the mother who had not been able to be there for him. This may be one facet of the ‘rescue fantasy,’ in which one rescues oneself from one’s own sense of vast and utter emptiness, both within and without. In this way, Nick also appears to rescue himself from his guilt for having wished to replace his own absent mother with the very present and available mother of a friend. In Nick’s family home denial reigns king. It is not permitted to speak to the vast failures perpetrated by one family member on another, nor to the immense hurt suffered by each at the hands of the others. The pain seeps out in psychosomatic symptoms and lightning crashes of anger. The lies

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leave Nick reeling in a surrealistic play on existence. And so, Nick writes about what could never be said directly, creating a world of true fantasy to combat the incoherent reality he endures within the family circle. For Nick, the void had its origins in a lack of acknowledgment of the actuality of his experience. This type of disconfirmation of the child’s reality is devastating to the developing sense of self, and also inhibits the child’s ability to perceive and sustain meaning, resulting in what Balint (1963) has described as the reciprocal experiences of internal emptiness and external void. Nick describes his enjoyment of small spaces in which he would confine himself as a child. For a long period, he had an appliance box in his closet, which would become his world, his ‘psychic retreat,’ as Steiner (1993) put it. Even now, Nick longs for some small space within which he can both confine and ‘fit’ himself, leaving out the rest of the world. He now creates these spaces within his writing. It is as though he must have some small space within which to give birth to himself, in place of the abortive attempts of his mother many years before. Within the paucity of the parenting he received, he has been forced to become his own parent, and struggles through his own awkward attempts to bring himself to life, constrained by the parental failures. It appears to be only within the confines of his relationship with his wife, and within the analytic setting, that his own realities are capable of being endured. Even though he has gone through great trials to remain in analysis with me, through changes in location and finances, he creates in the work a largely empty space within which I am suffered to travel along with him. He can only allow me in to the extent that I do not demand entry. Nick has both the capacity and the need to be in relationship to another. However, this need is accompanied by great terror of loss and abandonment. For Nick, the loss appears to be the loss of meaning via the loss of the positively valued aspect of the other—much as has happened in his relationship with his father. In contrast, the sense of abandonment inheres in his relationship with his mother. In this way, his primary sense of relatedness is linked to both chaos and emptiness. He recurrently looks for ‘home’ within his family, but cannot tolerate what he finds there. And so, he finds himself caught between his tremendous yearnings for a home and the terrible reality of what ‘home’ has meant for him. This space becomes, for Nick, the void, which he can never resolve. He fills his mind with his ‘worries,’ working them like rosary beads within his consciousness, poring over them silently and relentlessly like some half-remembered mantra, holding them in his mind to ward off the unrelenting void, ever at his heels. Nick finds what safety he can with his women. These most often come in pairs; his wife, who is real, and safe, and solid, and some other woman, who is mysterious, seductive, and dangerous. I have played that latter role

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for him for several years. For Nick, the role of the seductress is entwined with images of his absent mother, convalescing in her bed, nestling close to her son. No matter how I fail him, it has been essential for him to have me here, where he might find himself in my presence. It is as though I fill some gap that is more safely filled by an ‘untouchable’ analyst than by the more dangerously seductive others who had previously filled this role. Men and women each seem to entertain the fantasy that their emptiness should, and somehow must, be filled by an other who becomes in fantasy a ‘transformative object’ (Bollas, 1987) who can save us from ourselves. Most often the other is of the opposite gender, as though there is some portion of ourselves that is, indeed, ‘other,’ and cannot be filled from within. Within the cultural illusions of masculine, active aggression versus feminine, passive reception, both men and women suffer. Men are depicted as the active intruders, devoid of emotion, and fearing the contamination of the other as though vulnerability to the affect of the other would drown them completely. The heroes in our childhood tales are impervious to pain; they move out into the world to cut down the overgrowth, save the princess, and reclaim the castle. They are never penetrated; they never acknowledge pain. This may be the other side of the emptiness, in which one moves fearfully yet unrelentingly out into the void, needing to slay whatever dragons may come, with only a child’s sword to hand. As I have tried to understand experiences of emptiness in men, I have been struck by its less palpable nature for me. Both anatomy and destiny may impede my view. However, one facet appears to be the man’s developmental task of identification with an absent parent. When the mother is unable to bring the father into the early parent-child dyad symbolically through her ‘holding’ (Winnicott, 1971a) or ‘reverie’ (Bion, 1967), the ‘father’ may become the void. The capacity to symbolize—Ogden’s (1994) vital ‘third’—is created in the interweavings of mother and child. Symbolic thought permits the transformation of archaic anxieties, becoming a buffer from both the engulfing/annihilating ‘mother’ and the absent, disintegrating void of the ‘father,’ in this manner, both separating and linking the child to ‘other’ (Arvanitakis, 1985). Arvanitakis (1985) suggested that it is the thought of the father that opens up the potential space of the Symbolic. In the construction and destruction of the other, the self is held, thereby becoming able to hold both self and other (Ogden, 1985; Winnicott, 1965– 1969, 1971a). For men, it may be particularly important to destroy the mythical proportions of the subjective object (Grotstein, 1997; Winnicott, 1971a) without destroying the real other, in order to be able to be connected to both other and to self. In many ways, this is the task of analysis—to disrupt one’s habitual version of the thing and move beyond one’s expectations toward

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greater potentialities (Grotstein, 1997). However, for those for whom the void seems imminent, there is both terror and the urge to destroy the ostensible originator of that terror. One phantasm within the darkness is the image of the vagina dentata, in which our rage at the mother threatens to engulf us. Whereas for a woman there may be the comforting feel of a lack of teeth in our inner regions, the man has no such internal reassurance to obviate the necessity of surviving the ravages of excoriations of claws and teeth. The task becomes to be transformed through suffering. Men are caught between the siren’s lure and the terror of engulfment; the siren’s comb tears the flesh, evoking images of Christ’s passions. Within this rubric, the notion of emptiness as void may become a reassuring refuge in which there are no harsh teeth with which to be shredded. Much as the child assuages his fears through enactments in play, we work toward absolution of the sins of both separateness and symbiotic devouring need by ‘reclaiming’ the self through the object (Krystal, 1988). This ritual is most notably epitomized in the sacrament of the Eucharist, in which the absent ‘other’ is eaten and internalized. The sacrament becomes the sacrifice of self to other that one might ultimately survive in some fashion. This both reaffirms our sin and absolves us of it; we are eaten and reborn via the ‘communion’ between self and deity (Freud, 1913; Andresen, 1984). As Grotstein (1997) has put it: “In ritualistically recommitting the destructive act on Christ, the synecdochic sacrifice for all mankind, the sinner becomes absolved and is restored to innocence” (italics in original, p. 202). Within this notion inheres the idea that man can be transformed—reborn— through his own ingestion of the male deity. The man becomes his sole parent through this reenactment of the virgin birth. Both the pain and the power of the mother are thereby denied, reaffirming her position as void and ultimately, as terror. The theme of emptiness has been salient in my work with another young man, whom I will call ‘Simon.’ Simon’s mother committed suicide when he was 15 months old, and he has searched for her echoes ever since. His world resounds with people who might have been holding him in their minds, but their images of him degenerate and he is left alone, self-conscious in his humiliation. His eyes lower as he recalls his father’s disavowing stare at young Simon’s inability to fight off the rageful attacks of a new stepbrother. The silence of the other seems to reverberate against the well of emptiness within himself. Simon has not found the right words from which to create the echoing response that will leave him feeling held within the object world. In the analytic hour, the analyst’s silence can coalesce with the existent emptiness, compounding it to intolerable levels. At those moments, Simon asks for some sign from me that I am with him in some way, any way, even if this means provoking my anger.

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Simon’s depressed mother was unable to sustain his illusion of being able to evoke her. To the contrary, she disappeared completely at just the point in his development when he would have been moving out into the world more separately, needing her echo to assure him of his safety. In the transference, Simon struggles with his need for my echoes, and with how he loses himself when I can’t find him. We are in that precarious world in which he can only truly find himself through others and yet cannot tolerate his tremendous dependency when it reveals itself to him. For Simon, that is the distinguishing sign emblazoned on his forehead, marking him as too needy to be loved, leaving him wandering alone in a desert. He fears and denies the tremendous yearnings for love, comfort, and affection that rise in him, as though those would be the very things that would condemn him to a life of loneliness. This young man must have known love, for he recognizes it and is pulled toward it, but he also fears its lure and tries to subdue it with rules and doctrines of abstinence and moderation, perhaps to atone for whatever sins have brought this curse upon him. At the age of 15 months, a child is learning to find himself in space. He achieves this through the reverberations of himself on his world, engaging the responding echoes of primary caretakers—for this young man, his mother. When the echoes become silence, as when Simon was passed from the hands of his mother to those of his grandmother, there abides a resounding emptiness that is never quite filled. Simon’s grandmother (s)mothered him, trying to fill her own emptiness as she attempted to fill the void that had been his mother’s love. However, his grandmother’s love, in contrast, became an enforced filling of his world with herself. The price was the exclusion of his primary objects; not only was his mother lost, but his father was lost, very profoundly, as well, through his inability to find his son through his own hurt and anger, and through the grandparents’ need to denigrate the son who had turned away from them. The son, my patient’s father, had become lost in the smothering love of his own mother, leaving him little means for being found, or for being truly present with another human being. This resulted in a series of lost ‘mothers’ for my patient, as he was dragged backward and forward in a bitter war for his custody that lasted his entire childhood. No ‘mother’ can be truly trusted, and yet, the hope of each new mother arouses intense and overwhelming yearnings from within, followed by the pain of betrayal as his needs become overshadowed by those of the ‘mother.’ This manifests in the transference as intense engagement alternating with periods of distance and disorientation as he tries to get his bearings within this relationship, which in some ways promises the hope of fulfillment of his childhood fantasies, and in others affirms that these will never be fulfilled. For Simon, the struggle has been to not-need what he cannot have. To be found wanting

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is the awful humiliation that annihilates the fragile structure he has created of himself. The world is replete with promise; female figures populate the landscape of his soliloquies, but are either available, devalued, and pathetic (like his grandmother), or, alternatively, appealing and seemingly out of reach (like his mother[s]), leaving himself as the devalued and disparaged empty object. He tries to create order through prohibitions and proscriptions; he tries to become need-less—one who is empty with no need of being filled. In this way, he valiantly responds to the cry of the mystic, striving to reverberate to the echoing silence. For an infant with no responsive parent to soothe him, any feeling may be experienced as too much, or ‘bad,’ as the child becomes overwhelmed by his own affect (Schore, 1994). Krystal (1987) has noted how empathic failures in attunement make it difficult for meaning to be shared and sustained. At a more fundamental level, they also impede the establishment of a coherent sense of self, developing instead what Winnicott (1956) referred to as a ‘pseudo-self,’ depicted as a “collection of innumerable reactions to a succession of failures of adaptation” (p. 386). For Simon, the yearnings for holding are quite palpable and have been particularly confusing for him. These had been exacerbated by the warm, playful interactions between his second stepmother and oldest stepbrother, which his father termed ‘incestuous,’ in this way barring Simon once more from the intimacy of a mother’s holding. To deny the yearning, he aligned with his father’s revulsion, thereby further distancing himself from his own experience (Shabad, 1993). It is difficult for him now to be touched by any woman without the feeling that it is wrong. With older women, in particular, the condemnation is swift and severe, and yet he longs for contact and imagines how it might be obtained. In many ways, the father becomes lost for Simon as well. In a recent session, the discussion focused around his struggles to hold on to the good aspects of his relationship with his father while letting go of his unrequited wish to be parented. He was silent for a while. I found myself wandering off, and wondered where he had wandered off to. When I asked, he seemed a bit embarrassed, as though ‘caught’ somehow. “I wasn’t thinking about anything that had to do with anything,” he said. “And yet, it must, in some fashion,” I replied. Somewhat reluctantly, he began to tell me where he had been: “Your flowers caught my attention from the periphery of my vision,” he said. “Then I was looking at the glass sculpture you have there and here, and how carefully everything is placed, and wondering if you ever let your kids come in here and wondering what they would make of it all. It would seem so mysterious; I imagine them wondering what goes on in here—why two clocks?—or the box of tissues.” “Perhaps you wondered what it would be like for you?” I suggested.

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“Yeah,” he said. “When I was a kid, my parents had a friend who was Chinese-Japanese. She was a Buddhist and had a shrine in her basement, in the far room. You had to go through two doors to get there, and it always smelled of incense. She had a big black box in there, and every once in a while I would catch a glimpse of her at prayer and smell the incense and hear the tinkling of the bells. It was such a mystery then.” “I’m wondering if you wish you could find the mystery again,” I said. “What do you men?” he asked. “I wonder if you miss the part of you that found it all so mysterious and enthralling,” I said. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah.” For Simon, the world seems in many ways to be ‘off limits.’ He is bright and perceptive and eager to learn, but is also frightened of encountering once again the limits imposed by what he experiences as vast ongoing deficits. For Simon, the question of whether meaning can be sustained is a vital one. He does not know whether he can sustain the meaning of his thoughts and words in the face of potentially opposing views. He finds abstract symbols and signs particularly difficult to take in and utilize. They are seen by him as ‘not-me,’ the province of those ‘healthy’ others who are able to metabolize the pieces. Simon speaks longingly of his wish to know something that will please/appease his father. In the needing to know for the other comes the annihilation of meaning for self, that becomes, in turn, the annihilation of self. He becomes unable to maintain the links that connect one thought to the next, or one person to another (Bion, 1967; Volkan, 1981). “I’ve been losing the point of things,” he says, “I’ll be talking about something I know about in class and I’ll lose a word and be afraid I don’t really know anything.” As his meaning opposes that of the other, it loses substance and becomes impalpable, unknowable—literally imponderable in the moment. As the space collapses, meaning becomes void. It is difficult for Simon to affirm his own sense of things in the face of differing opinions of others. He tends to lose himself and finds it particularly difficult to imagine that anyone will ever reliably be there for him. Recently, he began to talk about how much his lateness and procrastination are bothering him. He has been late to work a great deal, he said, but no one has said anything. “I almost wish that they would. Then I would be able to get myself there.” “I’m wondering if you do this as a way of making sure that someone is there,” I said. “Is this some sort of symptom with people like me?” he asked. “I see it more as you playing with the whole issue of people being there and being gone, as a way to master it,” I said. “You were so young when your mother disappeared; you had no way of making sense of it. At that

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age, it must have been unclear whether it was you or she who disappeared.” Simon said that he had always been uncertain about his feelings in childhood, particularly his tears. His father, in particular, had become very remote when Simon would cry. In those moments, Simon would feel as though he were collapsing entirely. He went on to speak about an incident from his childhood, when he had been at school late, and had come outside to find that darkness had fallen. I had never ridden my bike home in the dark, so I waited for my (step)mother to come. But she never came. So I started to walk home, and I was crying, and some policemen stopped and gave me a ride home. My mother was angry for being put on the spot. She said I should have just ridden home. When my father came home, I fell apart completely. All I could say was, ‘I screwed up. I screwed up,’ as though I was retarded, as my mother often intimated. After that, I didn’t wait for her anymore. But I knew that my father would respond to my crying, though he didn’t often. He would just kind of look at me like he was ashamed, usually. It was only my grandparents who would respond to my distress, so that sometimes it was hard to tell if it was really real, or just something I did.

Recently, Simon came for a session on the wrong day. It was early in the morning and my waiting room door was still locked. I saw him riding his bicycle away from the house, and wondered how it had felt to him to have my office door shut to him. He wondered the next day whether I had seen him, and talked about how it had felt to be closed out. He said he comes into my waiting room as though it is the door to another universe. At times when he arrives late, it is difficult for him to get his bearings. He tells me that he needs some time to leave the facade of that world behind, to divest himself of his protective skin in order to truly enter this world. In the moment, he must also begin to distinguish between the fantasy of the relationship and that which he encounters when he steps through the door. Simon tries to hold the space within his mind, configuring it internally, as though to preserve its power within. As he moves into the space, the painfully acknowledged emptiness opens into an intolerable mourning for that which cannot be filled, for the void that cannot be subdued, and for the yearning that can neither be soothed nor quieted. Within the work, in the interplay between analyst and analysand, the need is held. Its edges are smoothed, its depths are sounded and resounded, and the echoes become the hope of being held. The hope that one’s interminable intolerable need might be bounded, might be contained, becomes the hope that we might one day contain it within our self: that we might become the self that soothes the self that sorrows.

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The theme of emptiness has also been prominent in my work with another young man, whom I will call Aron, after a young boy in a story who spent his childhood reappearing before his parents, hoping to finally catch the sparkle in their gaze that would truly hold him in the world, and thereby enable him to finally grow (Grossman, 1991). My ‘Aron’ is in his late twenties. He is single and lives alone. He works in a large bureaucracy and feels extremely alienated within that setting. His stories are reminiscent of Kafka’s tales of being lost in a cold and meaningless machine. Aron has not heard of Kafka. This was to be the first of myriad metaphors we did not share; our internal landscapes appear to be configured too differently, impeding the sharing and sustaining of meaning. Aron was adopted as an infant. He has visible deformities and conjectures that he may have been a thalidomide baby. His sister appears to have been the one person who tried to soothe him and to interpret to him the family drama. However, both of his siblings were substantially older and were gone from home by the time he was 7. Aron has few memories of childhood; his mother was hospitalized frequently (he depicts her as psychotically depressed, extremely reclusive, and paranoid) and his father, a physician, worked long hours. Aron’s late childhood and early adolescence were set within the vacuum of a darkening room with only the flicker of the television for company, until his father’s spark of irritation at returning home to find young Aron unprepared once again, with no dinner waiting. Aron was not allowed to acknowledge physical limitations or differences. As I sit with him I wonder what it was like for him to have been not-seen, and to insist, even now, on being not-seen. When I asked Aron how his physical handicaps had affected his childhood, he was distressed by my question, and let me know that most people did not appear to notice them. It was as though I had failed a very basic test, in which people who care about him do not see those parts of him, nor their absence. I wondered what else I was not supposed to see, and also what this whole issue of seeing and not-seeing has meant for him in other ways. I wonder how his parents looked at him, and whether anyone, aside from his sister, ever really caught his gaze and held it. For the first year or so of our work together, Aron made little eye contact aside from brief instants wrought with painful and terrified determination. It was as though his eyes were black empty holes through which I might divine his utter shame at being seen. Aron’s mother appears to have viewed other people as hostile, critical, and dangerous, a view she bequeathed to her son. He has felt very rejected by his parents. He says that when they talk, he feels as though he might be anyone, as though he has no substance, no value beyond filling the space, a feeling he certainly evokes in me. His grandiose, hostile fantasies make it difficult for him to make any contact with others at all; in our work, one

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of us must be stupid and reviled in the face of the other’s greater knowledge. He repeatedly points out to me my failures; I have nothing of any substance to offer him. He enjoys these momentary triumphs, but then is devastated by the ensuing loneliness. Those few times when we do work collaboratively have been inevitably followed by vast distance. Looking at this pattern together has helped to temper it; there is some acknowledgment that I might possibly be helpful in some fashion, and yet he finds me inherently untrustworthy. If I really knew anything, I would attack him with it. Relying on me is beyond imagining. Unlike Simon, for whom there had been holding and then withdrawal, for Aron there is little sense of ever having been held lovingly in the world. He carefully and methodically annihilates any care he might receive from me, and reworks me into an automaton or remote ‘doctor,’ thereby creating of himself the automaton. I become one more obstacle in his path, the siren luring him with empty promises toward certain destruction. I am envied for my lack of pain, hated for my lack of compassion. The lack of compassion is important, for compassion would be experienced as demeaning, and therefore cannot be allowed to exist. The only safety comes in keeping the other at bay—where one may safely hate and envy and deplore—leaving us each lost in the vacuity of the space, like two empty planets that occasionally collide and then ricochet wildly, as he watches with terror his world becoming ever more empty and remote. In the darkness of the emptiness that surrounds Aron, there are unseen and unnamed monsters lurking and circling, biding their time, waiting to pounce. Perhaps that is better than the other side of the emptiness, when he is alone and there is only the unremitting void that threatens to engulf him. He tells me in subtle ways of his fears of going mad like his mother. He is terrified of going over some edge from which he can never return. For Aron, being with others appears to be an impossible task. In our hours together, he often excludes me by talking over my words, or ending a silence just as I move to speak. Paradoxically, he also yearns for my words, asking me to tell him what I see, so that he might see things differently, as well. However, even when he hears my words they tend to dissipate quickly; he often cannot recollect them seconds after their trace has left the air. This experience is accompanied by an inevitable sense of loss, as he laments his inability to hold on to that which he experiences as important or meaningful in his life. My words, as connecting links, appear to combust spontaneously within the toxicity of the atmosphere, much as his developing comfort within the session is annihilated and dis-remembered by the time he once more enters the space. In this way, our relationship— and nonrelationship—is created anew in every hour. In the ebbs and flows of our sessions over time, there is this coming together and being propelled

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explosively apart, as though we had never been together at all. Aron complains of losing information; what had been known in one moment is no longer known in the next. I become responsible for keeping the fragments, and yet, in the moment, I do not know what he does not know, only that he loses pieces and that this act of losing and being lost telescopes backward in time and outward toward infinity. I find this young man tremendously difficult to follow. His stories tend to be overly detailed without clear referents. I become lost in an austere jungle of undifferentiated managers, family members, and auxiliary players, with no connecting links, signposts, or milestones along the way to help me get my bearings. This appears to me to be the patterned chaos of Aron’s interpersonal world. He is lost in a labyrinth of deconstructed and ominous portents of indecipherable meaning, counterpoint to the empty spaces we inhabit together. At the end of a recent session, Aron announced that he had succeeded in setting things up so that I am unable to help him; he had immobilized me. I told him that I found his remark very interesting, and he wondered why. I replied that it was one of the few times he had given me any indication of how he viewed our relationship, or indeed, that we had one, and that I thought it would be worth discussing further. He seemed both interested and pleased, and left. When he returned for the following session, however, I could find no sign of this particular thread. I am certain it must have been there in some form, and yet I failed to detect it. Perhaps what was there of it, most profoundly, was its absence. What shifted to the foreground was the utter futility of speech. He had nothing to say, he said; it was just the same things over and over. In this way, I am called to account repeatedly by this man. He is in pain. He is miserable. He needs help and is certain that I could provide it if only I would. Yet, for some reason of my own, whether stupidity or sadism, I refuse him. I leave him in his misery, searching hopelessly for some key that might open the door. And yet, he has none. Only his internal dialogue, which he puts before me over and over, to no apparent end. Speaking becomes the seemingly endless, and apparently useless, reiteration of his tribulations at work and at home. At times he speaks, at others he is silent, as though it is of no consequence whether he speaks aloud or to himself. I experience this hopelessness as a commentary on my lack of helpfulness, his utter aloneness, and his relief at the lack of contact. One image in particular stands out from our work together. It was from the only fragment of a dream that Aron has reported to me. In it, there was a black mask which was very lively and animated. He was drawn to put it on, but resisted. He had the sense that he had not resisted in the past. How difficult it is for this man to stand naked before me, without the mask of

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pretense he stood behind for the first year and a half of our work together. The emptiness inside mirrors the emptiness outside. Recently, he was despairing over his utter lack of self-esteem. I said that I had the sense that when he looked for affirmation from outside, he was faced only with a hall of mirrors that echoed back his own internal self-loathing. It must have been so hard for him to learn to esteem himself in the absence of the joy in his parents’ eyes that would have mirrored for him their delight in watching him grow. “I always had the fantasy of being found,” he told me. There is more eye contact these days. He settles into his chair with less discomfort, and does not seem quite so banished at the imposition of the end of the hour. For Aron, the possibility of a nonjudgmental mirror is a remote one, and yet is one for which he searches in our hours together. For many, many months, as each new hour came and he began to tell me of his utter hopelessness, I imagined that this would be the time when he would quit. Although he has been disappointed that our work has not resulted in palpable changes in his life, he has been unable to express any anger toward me. Recently, I asked him what it would be like to express his anger. He looked at me helplessly. “I can’t even imagine it,” he replied. “I could talk about it in the abstract, but I don’t feel anything.” I realized in that moment that I had been imaging capacities within this man that he could not find within himself. And so, I said, “What would it be like if I were to tell you how angry you must be towards me, now that you have wasted so much time and money on this work which seems to be taking you nowhere?” Aron began to respond as though he were me. He caught himself, and smiled. “Now I’m saying what you would say,” he said, and would go no further. My attempts toward empathy may take away Aron’s ability to be with his own feelings in the moment. In searching for him, I may hold him at bay. I told him that I was reminded of his comment about immobilizing me; it has been important for him to be able to assure himself of his own ability to control the process, in order to keep at bay his terror at moving into the unknown. Although he could make it hopeless, it didn’t have to be hopeless. If he wanted to engage in the struggle, I was willing to struggle with him. Perhaps what leads Aron to persevere in spite of the awful paucity he has found in our work together is the threat of the void, which is lessened in some measure by my willingness to journey through it along with him. What was yearned for and not found in infancy becomes the void. It is both familiar and ineffable, and often has the feel, as Novick and Novick (1996) have described in another context, of ‘home.’ It therefore becomes difficult to move beyond the safety of the encompassing womb—no matter how toxic or empty it might be. The void has many textures, many dimen-

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sions, and many meanings. It interplays between internal and external experiences of vast and utter emptiness. At times, it carries the imprint of a lost parent, recurrently un-found; at times it echoes the keening for lost time, lost opportunities—the unlived moments and years of a lifetime (J. S. Grotstein, personal communication, October 1997). It can be extremely arduous to sit with our patients in these dark, empty spaces. However, it is often our silence in those moments that offers the patient the opportunity to discover his or her own truths (Winnicott, 1971b). This can necessitate an inner struggle on the part of the analyst to maintain “an undefensive, open attentiveness to the emotional reality of a subject, his truth, [that] comes in fierce conflict with inclinations that fight against it” (Eigen, 1981, pp. 430–431). Acknowledging the emptiness by moving into the void entails making contact with the harsh edges of our own smallness and envy, and the desperation of utter unfillable need. The austerity of this barren landscape may be dark and chilling, or flooded in the harsh light of unforgiving judgment. Whatever its form, our own ability to sit with it becomes a vehicle for moving within it, which becomes, in turn, the hope of metamorphosis into a space with greater resilience and capacity for holding. As I struggle to understand the differences between the images of emptiness that come into my work with men versus women, I am struck first, at a very primitive level, by the sameness; we all come into a world in which we are filled and emptied according to the rhythms of others who may be more or less attuned, available, assaultive, or intrusive. As the experience of emptiness becomes more differentiated, I am struck by its more palpable nature, for me, with women. The internal sense of it is alive; it has heat, whereas with men it feels more remote. Perhaps that speaks more to my lack of connection to their experience than to their own; I look to the voices of men to help me better understand this issue. But, perhaps, part of what is different is the terrain upon which the narrative is patterned. For women, avoidance of the void is often enacted through the body, as in the anorexic’s abstention from taking in. Alternatively, like the bulimic, we may be sated in our emptiness, vomiting up the chaos of intolerable affect into the vastness of the void. In contrast, for the men I have described, the body becomes that which might fill the space (or dares not), evoking images of a sacrament in which the hero is eternally consumed, and in which the labyrinth that obstructs is, at the same time, the very path toward salvation (Campbell, 1988). The focus within the work is somewhat different; it becomes about whether one might fill the space without becoming lost, engulfed, or annihilated. This may manifest, as it did for Simon, as an abstract intentness upon organizing and finding a place within the mysterious maze of the object world, in

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enigmatic symbols and signs, enticingly redolent with the potentiality of unknown meanings. Alternatively, Nick attempted to create a world in which the players were all merely figments of his imagination. He has been disturbed by the growing awareness of the emptiness of the object world he has been complicit in creating. “I never think people understand what I’m saying,” he said. “I’m never really there in the conversation. I’m always looking on, evaluating. No one ever seems to really understand. But then, I think that it’s really a stretch to imagine that no one, in all this time, has ever understood me. I think about my friend Kathy, and how she would say she understood. And maybe, in retrospect, she did. Maybe I just couldn’t hear it. And now she’s gone.” Simon and Nick, each in their own way, search for whatever codes will unlock the secrets of the universe. My female patients also search for these elusive understandings, though perhaps in somewhat different ways. The male and female elements would seem to exist in all of us, in our movements toward the outer and the inner spaces. To the extent that either pathway is blocked, we are diminished in our attempts to know both self and other. The path to real fullness of being may lie in the acknowledgment of our essential aloneness (Eigen, 1981; Winnicott, 1963). Kristeva (1986) posits the locus of the true self in this essential aloneness, which she sees as the point where emptiness and narcissism meet. When we are willing to abstain from precipitously filling the void with the refuse of our own anxiety, we offer up the possibility that it might be filled with something of real value. As we become the context of our own understanding, we create the possibility of meaningful communication, thereby bringing our selves into the outer world. It may be relatively more common for the female to become lost inside herself and for the male to become lost outside. However, wholeness entails the elaboration of both interior and exterior, and an understanding of the interplay between the reciprocal experiences of convex and concave. Both men and women appear to search in one another for the codes that might unlock the secrets within, much as we have searched without for that which should have echoed and resounded throughout our earliest moments, yet were too often still or speaking in some harsh and jarring counterpoint. For children who have become lost in his endeavour, there are ongoing attempts to try to create order and melody from cacophonous streams emanating from an unresponsive environment. The order is often bizarre and contingent upon presumed deficits within the creator/child. There is no one with whom to play, and no one with whom to interplay one mind, one melody, on an other. The analytic enterprise becomes the laborious construction of a dyad between two individuals who, initially, do not even speak the same language and have little means for touching one

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another without intense pain. For the analyst, it entails the ability to sit with all the storm and havoc of uncontained early years; the ostensible aridity becomes a gateway against all the mess that could never be sifted through, all the rage and the despair (Wrye, 1993). As we begin to define shared words and meanings—to find and re-find them anew—our attempts to hold meaning also represents our attempts to gird and reassure ourselves against the impending chaos of the unexamined void. Emptiness is an integral part of being human. Perhaps, optimally, we learn to encapsulate this emptiness and move on in spite of it, or alternatively, to sublimate it toward some greater goal that, in some sense, justifies our existence and obviates the need for despair. In another sense, however, emptiness is also our destiny. It is that toward which we move inexorably; it is our future. With each passing day, we move closer toward that unknown and unknowable void that waits beyond the world we know. We come from emptiness, and move toward it, carrying its essence within us. It is that which waits to fill or be filled—with another, with ourselves, or with great works, wisdom, or actions. And yet, very profoundly, this filling must always remain an illusion; there will be a part of this emptiness that by its very nature cannot be filled. The extent of the emptiness may determine its scope; too much deprivation makes it very difficult to skirt the edges and not fall in, over and over and over again. It is as though in our infancies we must absorb enough love, warmth, and soothing into our tissues to cushion the blows we take over the years; those of us with less cushion can only look on in envy at those more fortunate, and work overtime to pad our meager resources, or perhaps try to remedy them. And then, as analysts, we look toward those struggling before us, and continue the slow and painful work of titrating molecules of moisture into dry and parched tissue in our attempts to sit with the emptiness and hold for our patients the potentialities within. NOTE 1. Revised version of a paper presented at the monthly meeting of the Michigan Psychoanalytic Council, Ann Arbor, Michigan, November 16, 1997. The author wishes to acknowledge, with gratitude, Kathleen Koepele, Edward Gibeau, James Grotstein, and an unknown reviewer for their thoughtful readings of, and comments on, earlier versions of this paper.

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