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74 SPIRIT AND THE MIND
Love in the form of a calm, balanced, insightful therapist response helps the healing. As A.T. was tied up verbally, I encouraged her to express her anger physically by yelling or hitting a pillow. The suggestion just made her feel more foolish and ashamed, and she refused to try.
A.T. defended against feelings vulnerable by attempting to regain a sense of mastery and strength with more vigorous workouts at the gym, more frequent vacations to the mountains, by being late and even missing appointments and by falling silent and not producing material. And at this point, I could see the anal determinants of her intellectual defenses; her descriptions, explanations and verbalizations, devoid of emotional content, were used here to provide a sense of mastery, control and strength in the face of her vulnerability – without revealing deeper feelings.
Within the safety of a caring therapeutic approach, A.T. developed a growing awareness and acceptance of her feelings, desires, fears and defenses, and a lessening of her need to struggle with underlying conflict. A.T. began to experience the freeing-up of valued personality attributes such as energy, innocence, spontaneity, joy and love—and a clearer, more immediate grasp of reality.
With her broadening consciousness we could both see the anal determinants of her intellectual defenses, and began to see newer reactions, signaling even earlier conflict. Deeper still, she opened into an awareness of the early oral stage of childhood experience, when the helpless child is fully dependent on the parent. Rather than a sign of illness, opening to this level showed an inherent strength, a faith in her ability to bring into awareness the earliest, most helpless stage in her life. Here the child can feel frightened, confused, overwhelmed and utterly lost if parents are distant, inconsistent, absent or show a lack of understanding and love.
This level of oral pain is very difficult to face openly, and we began to see how A.T. used her mind to block it out, and to create the illusion of being safe and certain. Her mind became like a parent, creating a sense of protection and certainty—providing nurturing by using ideas as food, to thwart loneliness and helplessness and to attract attention, support and solace from others.
This state of suffering was early in her mind’s intellectual development, and to return to it again, she had to have the courage to lay down mental defenses all together. A.T. had begun to recognize that her intellectual defenses, although useful in the past, didn’t help fulfill oral needs and was now willing to try to find