On Castaways and Some Effects of Early Experience

What is the fate of early external experiences, in the internal world? In posing the question I am not suggesting that experience is a one-way process. Early experience does not mark or damage development in a direct manner, like a mechanical mark which extends or heals as time progresses. Its effects are more complicated, and one reason for this is that experience, consciously and/or unconsciously, carries certain meanings which affect the way representations are organized internally; and this in turn affects how further experience is perceived. Throughout development, these meanings are capable of altering and developing; which may produce difficulties for the child based on a previously innocuous experience (‘deferred effects’ of trauma, for example) or may conversely be reinterpretations which help the subject, so that a more primitive and anxiety-provoking meaning is overtaken by a less threatening one.

Here I will concentrate on the meanings of experience in terms of relationships with others and with the self (relationships we are always reinventing, though sometimes in a form very similar - or all too similar - to that which went before). I have selected material from the treatment of one boy, Jimmy, to illustrate some of these processes. The treatment material also illustrates the fact that we have no direct access to our patients’ earlier models of relationships, any more than they do. We must be content with what we can reconstruct; reconstructions which, we hope, will themselves get taken into the process of reinterpretation and reinvention.

Jimmy was eight and a half when he was referred, his adoptive parents finding him an exhausting child to live with. They impressed us at the Centre as warm, caring, and undoubtedly committed to Jimmy, though his father found him easier to bear than did his mother. They said he was provocative and that he would then become furious and distressed once his parents were driven to react. Similar concerns had been expressed