In 2007 research on my still-face infant-mother paradigm was featured on the “Cage” episode of Law and Order, Special Victims Unit. Certainly I had never entertained the idea that my laboratory research would make it to prime time. Yet there it was. For the program, it was used to illustrate the damaging effects of poor parenting on children. For me, it illustrated how children try to make sense out of the senselessness and the lack of shared meanings they may experience growing up. I thought about something Arnold Modell has said, “The vitality of the private self depends on the capacity to generate meaning; the inability to generate meaning is a psychic catastrophe.” I also associated something my analyst said to me: “I have never experienced someone before whose personal and professional life is so much of the same piece.” I will leave it to you to make further interpretations, but in my work I have tried to understand the relations between meanings and experience.
For me how individuals make meaning is related to growth and development, creativity and pleasure as well as to fixedness, lifelessness, and suffering. The relationship is explained by principles that govern the operation of open biological systems. These principles teach us that as open, complex systems, we humans connect with one another to maximize the organizational complexity, coherence, integration, and flexibility of our sense of ourselves in the world. We thrive in the messiness of human connection and without it, we wither. In this regard, for example, I see Psyche's story as a canonical myth because she acts in the most human of ways: as a seeker expanding the complexity of her sense of herself, according to Carol Gilligan. She understands that striving for and creating the new requires risking the old and that it may bring deep and abiding pleasure and simultaneously loss.
The link between systems theory and pleasure is provided in Jerome Bruner's beguilingly simple assertion that humans are meaning makers. As meaning making open systems, humans utilize energy to create complexly organized, coherent, integrated, and flexible states of consciousness. States of consciousness are psychobiological states that contain the private meanings individuals give to their place in the world. The meanings may be in or, more likely, out of awareness, nonetheless they function to organize and anticipate the future based on the immediate present and updated past.
Ed Tronick, Ph.D., is a developmental and clinical psychologist with faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School, University of Massachusetts, Fielding Institute, and Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. His research has been funded by NIDA, NICHD, NIMH, NSF, and the MacArthur Foundation.
A first principle of open systems is that systems that successfully gain energy and resources become more complex and integrated, as stated in The End of Certainty by Stengers and Prigogine. By contrast, systems that fail to gain sufficient resources lose complexity, dissipate, and move toward chaos and death. Gaining resources is always a struggle and the human struggle for resources is the struggle for meaning. Though humans can self-organize states of consciousness, one of the most robust ways of expanding an individual's state of consciousness is to create what I call a dyadic state of consciousness. It is the joint creation of two or more embodied minds bringing elements of meaning from each of their separate states into a shared dyadic state. As participants in this dyadic state, individuals appropriate new meanings into their own state of consciousness, and as a consequence the complexity of each individual grows.
Paradoxically, though systems principles suggest that organisms strive to maximize the coherence of their sense of the world, the shared states that human beings seek to nourish their existence are always unpredictable and messy, and may be contradictory and incoherent. This messiness is inherent to the process of meaning making because of the many kinds of meanings to be integrated, limitations in the capacity of meaning making systems, and the many kinds of meaning making processes (affective, cognitive, memorial, linguistic, and bodily processes, and psychodynamic meaning making processes such as a dynamic unconscious, projective identification, and transference). Nonetheless, the messiness of meanings is essential; it is the ooze from which new meanings are created.
I am left to wonder if some of what is heard from analysands on the couch is not generated by a lack of shared meaning making and their having to make meaning on their own.
To explore meaning making, I created an experiment to disrupt meaning making in infants, children, and adults: the face-to-face still-face paradigm. With young infants, we ask the mother to freeze while en face with her infant—to hold a still-face and refrain from talking or gesturing. Initially, in response to the still-face, infants act to reinstate their exchange of meaning by smiling at and gesturing to their mothers. But with the mother's continued lack of response the infants disengage, look away, become sad, and engage in self-organized regulatory behaviors, such as thumb sucking (see illustration below). Though we cannot directly know the meaning which an infant makes of the still-faced mother, it must be something like, “This is threatening,” or perhaps “I no longer exist” or echoing André Green, “She is dead.” As the still-face continues, the infant's state of consciousness is likely to change to something like, “must try to hold myself together.” For the infant in the still-face there is meaning expressed in his or her posture, actions, and affects, but the meaning is one that precludes gaining complexity.
More recent work by my group with toddlers in a still-face paradigm and adults in a role-playing still-face paradigm found that they react similarly to the infants. Importantly and in keeping with their greater meaning making capacities, toddlers attribute states of mind to the mother (e.g., “Are you sleeping? Wake up!” or “Don't be afraid of the [toy] alligator!”). There is meaning in their words, in their affect, and their actions that reflect their capacities for pretend play, cognition, language, mentalization (according to Fonagy and Target), and complex affects. Their impelling certitude is one of fearfulness and confusion at the break in connection. But the need for making sense of the world is so great that when play is resumed after the still-face some of the toddlers ask questions that attempt to make coherent sense of what happened with the mother (“Why didn't you talk to me?”) even though it brings back the painfulness of the experience. Perhaps their seeking has some relation to insight. For the role-playing adults, the “infant-persons” reported feeling anxious and vulnerable, angry, frustrated, sad, afraid, confused, even “panicky.”
The still-faced, “mother-person,” reported feeling guilty, distressed, anxious, depressed, shamed, vulnerable, and confused. One reported, “It felt terrible to be so closed off from the infant. It made me feel depressed and I'm sure the ‘infant’ did too after our interaction.” I am left to wonder if some of what is heard from analysands on the couch is not generated by a lack of shared meaning making and their having to make meaning on their own.
What then is the link between open systems theory, meaning making, and pleasure? I believe that when humans are seen as experiencing meaning making systems, the systems phenomenon of an expansion or dissipation has powerful experiential consequences. Dissipation is experienced as shrinkage, anxiety, a loss of self, and a fear of annihilation. One's sense of self in the world begins to come apart. René Spitz's infants, for example, were chronically deprived of the possibility of making meaning, and every level of their systems failed to grow and expand. Their experience was one of apathy, fearfulness, and sadness, and this experiential state further amplified their failure to make meaning. I think it is noteworthy that in the adult still-face study the reported experiential effects occurred in role-playing adults who were fully aware that the situation was set-up and unreal. Nonetheless, the effects were powerful, because the experiment taps into a basic primordial experience of a dissipation of self-organization because of a failure to form a dyadic state.
Joy, interest, curiosity, and exuberance… we see this in adults when an interpretation takes hold.
By contrast, when new meanings are self-created or cocreated the individual experiences an expansion of her own state of consciousness, a feeling of being bigger and a connectedness to the action, idea, or person on which or with whom the new meaning was made. When creating new meanings, individuals—infants, children, adults—grow in every possible way and experience joy, interest, curiosity, and exuberance. We see this in adults when an interpretation takes hold. Ultimately I believe there is an embodied elemental experience of fulfilling a basic life-governing principle: the success of making sense of one's place in the world and becoming more complexly organized. Often this feeling of wholeness, completeness, safety, and exuberance is out of awareness. Occasionally it is in awareness, and when it is, it is special indeed. But whether in or out of awareness it is the experience of a deep, abiding pleasure.
Humans as meaning makers have no option but to strive to increase the complexity of their states of consciousness. Were we to stop we would dissipate and experience the terror of annihilation. Successfully creating new meanings increases our complexity and brings pleasure. However, it is not as simple as either success or failure, because striving to create something new requires taking apart something old. Taking apart the old organization to create something new reduces complexity in the short run, and the reduction is experienced as anxiety, a threat to one's self. This anxiety is increased because of the implicit knowledge that there is no guarantee of ultimate success in the creation of new meaning. This anxiety is not the same as psychodynamic defenses, it is an inherent experiential quality of humans as systems. One apparent way to prevent the anxiety is to remain fixed and not to change, but of course such fixedness precludes the pleasure of expanding and the fulfillment of systems principles. Thus the dilemma of striving to grow in complexity while risking dissolution is to either experience pleasure tinged with terror or to not strive to grow and never experience pleasure. Healthy humans choose pleasure and terror.
Psyche has all the pleasure one could imagine yet chooses to look at Cupid because she must strive for the deep pleasure of expanding her knowing of him and her relation to him, even at the risk of dissolution of the complexity she has already achieved. It is something she must do to be human. Her greatest pleasure comes when she dissolves the old and expands her state of consciousness even though much is lost, including immortality. Thus the myth captures the momentous and the everyday nature of meaning making, the experience of pleasure and, yes, it even embeds systems principles. To create the new is to risk the old for the possibility of a greater pleasure, but not to create the new is surely to perish. And while I recognize that analysts do not give advice even to mythical figures, my myth is that there was an analyst at Psyche's bedside—perhaps even my analyst—who conveyed to her the message: “Take the candle and look, it will change how you see yourself in the world.”
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