The Fantasy Bond - Structure of Psychological Defenses

INTRODUCTION

Emotional Deadness

Years ago I began searching for answers to a mystery, a seemingly perverse phenomenon about people, that had me deeply puzzled: that is, why most people choose an emotionally deadened, self-limiting mode of life. I first focused on this problem when a small group of select patients decided to meet in a rural setting to explore their deepest feelings.

To accomplish this, we came together in the summer of 1971 for a weekend in the wooded mountains near Lake Arrowhead. Our surroundings were peaceful, the atmosphere invigorating. We started talking around 8:00 p.m. Friday. As the hours passed, we began to feel the stress of being continuously with other people. Challenging each other’s defenses and remaining in an emotional situation for a long time period were part of this stress.

The exposure of defenses was vigorous and intense. At one point, a young woman, Jane, talked about her rage toward her friend, Mike, who was withdrawn and unresponsive. She confronted him in strong language because she was infuriated at his refusal to reciprocate her feeling for him. Other individuals with similar emotions also attacked Mike’s indifference. Mike, a man who could not remember ever crying in his life, finally broke into sobs. In this unfamiliar emotional state he felt terribly disoriented. At first, he did not even know that it was he who was sobbing. He thought the sounds were coming from someone else. But before the night was over, Mike, who had denied his feelings all his life, felt a depth of feeling and a tenderness toward himself and others that he had never experienced.

During subsequent meetings, as I became more skilled in breaking down defenses and creating an accepting atmosphere where people could be themselves, people revealed more and more of their inner pain. Many relived feelings that had been pent up for a lifetime. Occasionally they sobbed or moaned or vented explosive anger. These primitive emotional reactions were followed by dramatic relief and clear insights. The participants were very excited by the encounters and the results, and they expressed appreciation for what they felt had been a remarkable experience. They said they felt closer to themselves and to other people and perceived their lives with unusual clarity.

Those times together were very meaningful to me. I have always been deeply touched by people expressing personal honesty and being loving and accepting toward one another in a truly democratic way. These moments brought me close to myself and made me feel calm and strong. I gave a good deal of thought to the weekend experiences, and I knew that the people’s lives during those days together had great value and significance. Their faces changed and their bodies relaxed. They seemed more multidimensional. They felt invigorated and excited, yet when they returned to the city, they lost, sometimes slowly and sometimes very quickly, this edge of feeling and communion with themselves. They resumed their defensive posture and closed off their emotional reactions and sensitivity toward others.

Many of the men and women who traveled to the mountains for those weekends came without their spouses. They came as independent, separate persons, not as one-half of a couple. They were recognized as such, and they flourished for a few days for they were treated as individuals and their sexual identity and attractiveness were confirmed verbally. As a result, they felt better about themselves and had a more positive image of their bodies and sexuality. However, when they returned home, they gave up this good feeling and went back to being half of a couple once more. In returning to their families, they were in fact going back to the “security,” the “togetherness,” that was more familiar to them than the aliveness and genuine closeness they had experienced in the unfamiliar atmosphere of the mountains.

Mike stayed feelingful and alive for several days upon returning home. Often he would find tears coming to his eyes as he talked with his wife and son. However, it became more and more difficult at the end of a long, tedious day for him to get back in touch with his feelings because these emotions were so new and fragile to him. He looked forward to evenings at home, hoping that there he would regain that relaxed, alive state. But his wife, Ann, was threatened by the changes in her husband, by his burst of energy and his tears. She unconsciously wanted him to return to his typical defended state. She was inadvertently helping him cut off his feelings. In the months that followed, it was painful to see Mike become more hardened and more exclusively involved with Ann in a desperate, possessive manner. Mike preferred to cling to an illusion of safety and security with his wife. Mike and Ann were not really hanging on to each other; they were clinging to an imaginary link between two people—a fantasized connection, which we call the fantasy bond. They were not running the risk of losing something real; they were only protecting a fantasy of love.

There was a great deal of disappointment, because, in spite of these powerful experiences, people soon lost much of the therapeutic value of what they had gained. There was pain in the fact that these feeling people of the weekend, who felt so good and so real, had reverted to so-called normal life in such a short time. I was saddened that all they had left was their memory of having had a profound and meaningful experience and a few important insights, which eventually paled as well.

One thing was clear to me: these people of the weekend were, for the time being, a different breed. They had been emotionally alive whereas in their everyday lives they masked themselves in role-playing, hardness and toughness, paranoia, and other cut-off, nonfeeling states. These people were not in touch with themselves or their real existence most of their waking lives. On the weekend, however, they had pierced the shell of their defenses, and under their facades were deep unresolved feelings of richness and pain. This was not a group of abnormal individuals or patients; it was obvious that these people in their deadened and cut-off states were typical of the mass of humanity.

The fact that people were willing to give up so much of themselves in order to avoid feelings of sadness perplexed me, especially since they obviously felt so good after they expressed the sadness. In a sense, they had committed emotional suicide in order to protect themselves from the painful truth of their experiences. Why did they close off again after opening up and feeling such exhilaration? This was much more than an academic question to me because I, too, wanted to retain this level of interaction.

There was a deep desire on my part to live and experience life in an honest social context on an everyday basis. I wanted to be alive and close to my feelings and to learn more about these mysteries of human behavior. I knew that I had but one life and I valued it. I wanted to live it to the fullest, whether painful or joyous. The closeness and camaraderie of those shared weekends were a vital part of what I desired.

The alive faces and the warmth of those people could not be forgotten. One could not help contrasting their expressions with those of people in the larger society. The defensive posture of most people is etched into their faces and bodies. They live their lives as though they will live forever and can afford to throw away their most precious experiences. Their hardness and insulation make them capable of truly immoral and disrespectful conduct toward one another. Yet these people were essentially the same as the people of the weekend, only under normal environmental conditions. What characteristics of the weekend made possible such an important difference in people’s capacity for feeling? How could these elements be incorporated as a style of living?

Since those weekends, I have spent a major part of my life and energy tracing the answers to this puzzle. This book tells the story of my search for understanding the all-encompassing problem of emotional deadness, which characterizes the way the majority of people give up their lives and vital experiences.

Without realizing it, most people become deadened to their emotions. Early in their lives they turn their backs on themselves, their real desires and wants, and substitute self-nourishing habits and fantasies that only serve to deaden them. They have ceased to want what they say they want because real gratifications and accomplishments threaten the process of self-nourishment through fantasy. Because they have been depending since childhood upon these fantasies to give them a sense of accomplishment, they cling to these fantasies rather than relinquish them for anything real. They shy away from success, both interpersonal and vocational, and limit themselves in countless ways. They act as their own jailers, and when they project this attitude, they become paranoid that others are depriving or victimizing them. They are the victims of their own self-denial and withholding. In a sense, people are at the mercy of the defense system that they originally constructed to protect themselves when they were little.

Most individuals are damaged in their psychological development during the earliest years of childhood. In the process of being mishandled and misunderstood, they suffered pain and fear that caused them to spend the rest of their lives in a defensive posture. Because people cannot defend themselves selectively against “bad” feelings, they also lose their ability to feel good. All of us have been hurt to some degree, and to the extent that we insulated ourselves from our feelings of pain and sadness, we...