Quotable Quotes
"Play is in fact neither a matter of inner psychic reality nor a matter of external reality.”
Winnicott
Bion describes progressive forces in a family that include the need to balance the needs and desires of all the family members, and is also dominated by concerns with reality, drawing from science to direct actions.
What is Work Group Functioning?
It may sometimes have to take precedence over why something is being felt.
What is being felt.
When it goes well, it goes unnoticed and is experienced as a continuation of the prenatal state.
What is maternal care?
This psychic defense mechanism is involved when the moments of disappointment accrue with mom, a process of responding to her needs emerges, and force a new priority over the baby or child’s perceptions.
What is splitting?
“At times when I see your face thinking, I am thinking as well.”
Williams
The group characterized by dependency, pairing and fight/flight.
What the Basic Assumption group?
The level of offering of alternative meanings.
What is the explanatory level?
This represents a child’s first use of a symbol and the first experience of play.
What is a transitional object?
The port of entry in dyadic work with parents and babies.
What is focusing on the infant, not the parent?
“These things we call interpretations are really ‘imaginative conjectures’ about the missing pages.”
The denial of the use of projective identification as a means of communication results in this.
What is attacks on linking?
The level of ascribing or amplifying meanings.
What is the descriptive level?
The infant’s concept of an inside and an outside.
What is “me” and “not-me?”
This intrapsychic compromise covers over despair, disappointment, anger, helplessness.
What is premature ego development?
“When this state of affairs persists chronically, not only does the infant take back his own undigested fears, but some of the mother's fears as well, resulting in what Bion called a 'nameless dread.'”
Mitrani
This is the link between patient and analyst or infant and breast.
What is the mechanism of projective identification?
The capacity for introjection along with the capacity for a complex level of cognition.
What is two-tracked thinking?
An alternative to being that interrupts being an annihilates.
What is reacting? One of the main functions of the holding environment is to reduce the number of impingements to which the infant must react.
Premature loss of this central experience results in states where little can “flow in or out”
What is the aesthetic experience of being submerged in the environment.
"Perhaps a sense of emotional agency and intelligence are linked, and perhaps both are linked with an intelligible, interested caregiver who feels that both the infant and his interests are intelligible, interesting, and worth attending to, respecting, and sometimes, sitting out.”
Alvarez
The two characteristics that play a part in producing attacks by the infant on all that links him to the breast.
What are primary aggression and envy?
Alvarez posits this deficit that can occur in addition to deficits of the self.
What is a deficit or impairment in the internal object? Objects that are experienced as uninteresting, unvalued, useless and possibly mindless.
The transitional object is a symbol of this.
What is baby and mother “at the point in time and space of the initiation of their state of separateness?”
According to Mitrani, the process where the therapist must “feel herself to be the unwanted part of the patient’s self or the unbearable object that is identified with” is important to treatment.
What is unconscious introjection?