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Our attachment needs are the most fundamental and powerful elements in our makeup. They can bear little frustration and, if and when they are frustrated, they become split off and dissociated, yet remain embedded in insecure and disorganized patterns of relating which can have a defining influence on our lives.
Our attachment comes essentially from our need to relate, connect with others, and to form a secure base, and I will be exploring how this overlaps with the need to develop, unfold and express one's self, which I see as the essence of Jung's understanding of the process of individuation. Expressing ourselves is fraught and difficult because it is essentially an expression of our sensitive core self which opens that self up to rejection and narcissistic wounding; it is for good reason that Fordham called such self expression a ‘deintegration of the self’. I will be looking at the work of Ed Tronicki and the Boston Change Process Study Group which I think throws vital light on these relational processes.
In this paper I will describe my work with ‘Eleanor’ and explore her disorganized attachment pattern and, in particular, the way that her unmet attachment needs led her to extremely chaotic and at times dangerous behaviour such as getting into physical struggles with the police, taking overdoses and other suicidal behaviour.
I am grateful to ‘Eleanor’ for her permission to discuss our work; the account that follows is necessarily abbreviated with only certain themes drawn out due to constraints of time and space.
Eleanor was the eldest child of very proper middle-class English parents. They were kind, but emotionally unexpressive and distant. Her mother described Eleanor as ‘clingy', a description with which Eleanor herself readily agreed. Eleanor was 4 years old when her brother was born; he had severe physical, emotional and intellectual needs and required an enormous amount of care from her parents and healthcare professionals. Eleanor was expected to ‘be