From the beginning of my clinical career, a psychoanalyst named Neville Symington and his books have been upon my office shelves and incredibly impactful on me as a young therapist. It seems to me that his mission in the hard work of psychoanalysis is to make emotional contact from one human being, with another, in order that a healing conversation might emerge. Within this healing conversation are the conditions for which the (re)creation of a person, of a life, can occur.

Of course, this is easier said than done—for all of us.

I had the fun delight of consulting with Neville just a few short weeks ago. Despite my giddy—quite nerdy, really—enthusiasm of being able to speak with him, he helped me better understand a long time patient I’ve been working-with in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. However, what I am most indebted to him is his reworking of an old word and disorder in the human mind: narcissism.

Narcissism is that all-too-familiar psychiatric term that is strongly alive and present in our culture today; perhaps you’ve heard it or even used it yourself to describe someone? (I know I certainly have!) However, the way this word is thrown around is, in my opinion, divorced and misunderstood from the severity of what it actually stands for and symbolizes and means to the personality. Which is to say that narcissism has all too easily been separated from its context—trauma, shame, and defense—and used as a flippant, degrading word to describe someone that we most likely don’t like.

In his highly insightful book, , Neville explores and redefines the ways in which narcissism reveals itself in patients and in our own selves. His thesis is that narcissism is an unconsciously chosen defense against trauma or, in more ordinary language, overwhelming and shocking emotional experience. While this defensive organization protects one from knowing or feeling that appalling pain, it also envelops (traps) a person in a position of psychically-closed passivity, deep hatred of the other/an-other/relationship, and an obliteration of intimacy and vulnerability with the real self, and therefore the world. It casts the mind into an extreme rigidity.

Narcissism, in this light, is a deeply personal problem.

Narcissism, in this context, is something that we all hold the responsibility of addressing within ourselves.

“Narcissism is a deeply personal problem.”

For as Neville suggests, we all have trauma and we all have opted—in certain pockets of psyche—for the narcissistic protective strategy. In this narcissistic situation, the other represents, re-presents, the original trauma—the uncontrollable and overwhelming pain that’s already there inside. A great shame swells as a result, indicating that everything is not well within the personality and must be covered up and hidden. The only apparent relief for this terrible shame is to fully alienate, to withdraw, to refuse having to know this internal situation. Hence the defense, and the structure that gets chosen and built without the person even really being aware. (Of course, this is simply a sketch of the complicated wholeness that Neville unpacks throughout his theory.)

A mutual analyst and artist Neville and I enjoy—Marion Milner— writes, “It will be a sore fight letting go and letting the sea in.”

Regarding the healing of narcissistic currents running throughout the self and choosing to deal with our pain— yes. It will be a sore fight.

Yet, I believe, as Neville suggests, that this is our creative work to be done; this is our context, our calling—for each one of us to let our seas in. Our seas of pain, our seas of despair, of shame and salty tears. Our wave after wave of what has happened, of what it has been like to be ourselves in this world, of all that we have lost and endured.

When we are able to do that, our world and the world shift and transform. We are then able to go beyond simply surviving—the basic purpose of all of our mental defenses and structures—and live.

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I remember when I opened the doors to my private practice back in the fall of 2013, secretly thinking that there would be no way the thing would ever fly. As a recent graduate, I was struggling to understand what the mind even is—what my mind even was—let alone the task of being able to help others build theirs. I was certain that even if I did acquire a handful of patients, they would inevitably leave upon discovering that I had no idea what I was doing. It’s fair to say that, in my opinion, I was doomed before I even sat with my first person.

Coincidentally, and unrelated in my young mind, this was a similar feeling I had towards other areas of my life—friends I would make, potential partners I would date, even towards my own therapist and cat! That, at the core of my heart, a serious, rooted belief existed that said nothing I would dare want in the world would find me valuable enough or lovable enough to stay. I had carried that inclination and psychic certainty around with me for 27 years—terrified of it, constantly looking for signs of it, keeping it hidden and smothered from notice through a charming disposition, the latest fashion, and the never-ending upkeep of being likable and funny and accommodating and easy and “straight” and gregarious and safe and attentive. Anything the situation called for, really, I would be.

In psychological life, what I’ve described from a page of my own life can be known as the transference. It is this odd and theoretical word that tries to sketch an experience and phenomenon that occurs in each and every one of our lives, much of the time.

Its make up? Transference is controversially and complicatedly known as all sorts of things—a fixed set of beliefs, a predetermined and projected attitude, a redirection of an experience onto something or someone completely new—or, quite simply, the feelings one has toward a therapist, lover, friend, pet, and on and on. It’s been described as an unresolved drama from early life, a medium through which internal psychic objects get located outside, and an obstacle of the ‘real.’

All of this is merely beginning the scratch the surface, of course.

Its purpose? Transference makes the brand new, the unknowable, more familiar. It makes the strange, the stranger, more recognizable so that the mind isn’t overwhelmed with a truly naked experience again and again, moment by moment, day after day. In many ways, we as humans couldn’t flow and move throughout our days and throughout the world without this essential function that the mind employs. Transference makes the world navigable and not entirely foreign.

Transference makes the world navigable and not entirely foreign.

However, as my story illuminated, it has its limitations and problems.

Transference is both real and not real at the same time. Within a person’s internal world, within this person’s experience and psychic reality—the transference feels entirely and unquestionably true. There were moments I would sit in a classroom as a boy, as a teenager, as a young man, and really feel that if people truly knew me, I would be abandoned. Those feelings about my early work weren’t inserted for the purpose of essay writing—they were real to me, they haunted me.

Yet, the transference is incomplete. It’s assumptive. It is often mistaken and arresting and limiting to the nourishment and growth of the mind, therefore, the person. Transference as possible tyranny. Transference as traumatic. Which can blot and suffocate an experience that actually is new and unknown, and needs to be known for the first time.

The truth is that we all need help to grow our capabilities of working-with our psychic equipment, our minds. We all need help with our projections, our mistaken beliefs, our transferences positive, negative or otherwise. Because when we don’t, we carry burdens around that needn’t be carried. Because when we don’t, we recreate the traumas that have been real to us again and again and again. Because when we don’t, we identify others—whether people of color, or women, or LGBTQ, or families, or churches, or Republicans, or Muslims, or Buddhists, or children or the vulnerable or pets—as the primary sources of pain and trouble and fear, instead of looking inside.

In September, my private practice will turn four years old and I will continue everyday going to work. My cat Jake is currently snoozing, twitching a bit from his dreams, as I write this essay. I’m in some of the best relationships I’ve ever had the privilege of participating in now; ones where I get to be exactly as I am—without all of the protective and exhausting facades. And? I think it’s fair to say that my therapist enjoys (dare I say loves me), as I wholeheartedly enjoy and love him.

My point? Transferences need worked-though, not transferred. Transferences need cared about and understood and, if we’re lucky, resolved and opened up and let go. And strange situations, strangers, need to be strange-enough so that they can be known uniquely and exactly as they are, rather than what we fabricate them to be.

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I remember reading once this bold, exuberant notion that suffering unites us. That on deep, often unknown levels, we are actually drawn to the pain that we witness in someone else. Unconscious seeing of unconscious attraction. Unknown longing of unknown contact. That is, if we are able to let ourselves. That is, if pain has been relatively tolerable for us in our past experiences to be able to witness. More often, mental gymnastics and protections get executed to, in a way, deal with this problem of pain in the psyche. We tell stories. We make excuses. We turn away, become blind. We—in opposition to unification—isolate.

Working in analytic psychotherapy, both as a patient and as a clinician, I’ve been privileged to the innumerable and creative ways the mind copes and defends against pain. Too often in my experience, feeling gets associated with unbearable pain and we become closed. What has the opportunity to inform, to open, to bring together, to teach, gets shut down to preserve the person. Psychic catastrophe averted for psychic life to endure. As a result, we do indeed endure—but our personalities become smaller as a cost.

This is the intersection I’ve become most interested in, most passionate about upon my 2013 graduation—the complicated crossroads of psyche and pain.

For, to talk of suffering, or protective avoidance against suffering, is to talk about what we do with pain. While pain does not define us, it is in my opinion a mistake to think that it does not matter, does not need cared about or faced. Pain, as the Buddha knew, is inevitable. Pain, as Jesus knew, we don’t often know what to do with. The interesting question then beckons, what do we do with pain?

Pain as teacher? Pain as expansive, as conduit, as something to nourish.

Or—pain as obstacle? Pain as blindness, as blockage, as clot.

Psychoanalyst Jeff Eaton wonders what the fate of pain is in every session. What does this particular psyche, this psychological organization, do with pain on a moment to moment basis? Can it be tolerated, better yet, welcomed, long enough for personality to feel united, joined-with someone else? Or, more often, is it evacuated, ditched, abandoned, to try and shield from painful feeling? Pain-full awareness of painful feeling. In you and in me. In my mind and in your mind and in America’s mind and the collective culture and world’s mind. All of us, doing our best to deal with all of our pain in all of the best ways we know how. And not just dark or negative pain, but light and joyful pain as well. The pain of someone’s touch, the pain of the contact of eyes. The pain of a kiss, or a word, so full of tenderness and beauty and kindness, personality doesn’t quite know what to do. Abort or nourish? Fight or Flight? Take in or keep out? This kind of feeling, of pain, can feel too much as well.

It seems to me, then, that is a crucially significant intersection to stand at.

It seems to me, then, that we are talking about our moments, yes ipso facto, our very lives. That, to defend or protect or throw away or become blind to pain means to do these things to our very selves. That, we are our symptoms.

It seems to me, then, that in order to be able to unite and join with the other—we must first be able to do so with our selves.

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The minutes and seconds and moments, both key and not so much so, all seem to happen so quickly; so instantly; so irretrievably wonderfully fast, don’t they? Our selves are born (thrown, I would say is more accurate) into relationship with this paradox known as life and helped to survive it; and if we’re lucky, maybe even live it.

Those around us show us: this is your hand, this is friendship, this is macaroni and cheese, this is death, this is IRS form 1040 (death in another form), this is seventh grade humiliation. Those around us do their best (sadly, they fall short as we will with our children) to prepare us: this is anxiety, this is despair, this is happiness and sadness and confusion all intertwined.

The years.

One moment, you’re a third grader nervously awaiting the first day of school, dressed in your most prized Roadrunner t-shirt. Another, you’re driving up the Highway 101, your 2004 Pontiac Aztek filled to the brim with all of your life’s belongings—you, anxious in that captain’s chair, feeling anything but captain.

That last Polaroid describes my voyage across the United States from Nashville, Tennessee, to begin my life’s next chapter at a graduate student at Mars Hill Graduate School. I can still feel the storehouse of feeling my self endured to make that move—the panic, the fear, the excitement, the shame, the doubt. Those affect-packed moments happened almost four years ago. Four years. 1,460 days ago.

The years.

Now, in these liquid current seconds, I’m a full calendar (525,949 minutes) out of what we have come to know as ÌìĂÀÊÓÆ”, as a psychotherapist in private practice. Even as I pen those words, I am kind of laughing at where the times and my one-and-only self have ventured.

The truth is, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been across the span of my life. Well, most days. Most minutes. Someone special just asked me the other day, “Michael, would you say you’re living your dream?” I stalled, and eventually answered the question with a kind of surreal, surprised, (maybe even disbelieving inflection at the end) response of, “Yeah
 I really am.”

This past year, these postgraduate moments, have been those packed feelings aforementioned in my SUV captain’s chair. Storms of nervousness, uncertainty, and doubts—betwixt clouds and rays and simple rain showers of joy, excitement, hope, and indescribable love. I think a lot of life’s instances are these kinds of emotional weather fronts that come in, sometimes forecasted, most times not. For all of us.

But, you know, the thing that’s been so transformative and helpful about my navigation through ÌìĂÀÊÓÆ”, coupled with my own personal analysis, is learning how to see and bear these inevitable life storms. Which is to say, those good-enough mommy and daddy professors at ÌìĂÀÊÓÆ” taking us by hand and showing us: this is sexuality, this is race, this is uncertainty, this is pathology, this is pain and transference and faith. Inviting us to understand and relate to these big categories with our vast, ever-changing, universal yet one-and-only selves.

Then, learning how to go out and be an instrument in the symphony of the world. How to relate and work and play, eat and drink, fight and love with everyone else, who’s caught up in battening down the hatches in their lives as well. How to really pay attention, as best we can,
to the moments,
the seconds,
the minutes,

the years.

(image: Michael Louderback with Dr. Dan Allender at 2013 Commencement)

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