Abstract
This paper expands upon Ferenczi's concept of the wise baby and explores the dynamics of ignorance and compensatory ideals of wisdom as reactions to trauma and as manifestations of “double conscience,” shame dynamics and Oedipal shame. Focusing on feelings of ignorance, of knowing and not knowing and their relation to trauma, the author elaborates on the dynamics of fantasies of wisdom, adumbrating implications for psychoanalytic technique.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Such figure/ground relationships are commonplace in discussions of perception ever since the gestaltists, but are distinctly less so in the realm of psychoanalytic knowledge.
Ignorance turns out to be a fruitful subject for reflection. Consider, for example, the novel of Milan Kundera Ignorance. Kundera writes of illusions generated by what one does not know. For example, consider the following passage: “During what I call their first 20-year span (between 1918 and 1938), the Czechs believed that their republic had all infinity ahead of it. They had it wrong, but precisely because they were wrong, they lived those years in a state of joy that led their arts to flourish as never before. After the Russian invasion, since they had no inkling of Communism's eventual end, they again believed they were inhabiting an infinity, and it was not the pain of their current life but the vacuity of the future that sucked dry their energies, stifled their courage, and made that third 20-year span so craven, so wretched.” (Kundera, 2000, p. 13)
This is particularly true if the anxiety over being alone persists into adulthood and stands for other kinds of anxiety.
The Leningrad Blockade began on September 8, 1941 and lasted for 867 days until January 29, 1944, including years of brutal winters. During the blockade the city, encircled and under siege by the German Army, was entirely severed from connection to the rest of the country. The roughly three million inhabitants of the city suffered horribly from shortages of food, water and energy. The ration of food during that harsh winter was 125 grams per person per day, or about ¼ pound. Hundreds of thousands starved, just in the 2 months of January and February 1942 over two hundred thousand died of starvation. Some put the total toll of the blockade at over 800,000, nearly 1/3 of the city's population. In 1942 the population was roughly three million, and at the end of the blockade, it was barely 500,000. For a magnificent and thoroughly horrifying portrayal of the Leningrad Blockade, see The 900 Days by Harrison Salisbury. Salisbury writes: “Nothing can diminish the achievement of the men and women who fought on despite hunger, cold, disease, bombs, shells, lack of heat or transportation in a city that seemed given over to death. The story of those days is an epic which will stir human hearts as long as mankind exists on earth.” (Salisbury, 1969, p. vii)
“The disappearance of one's own person, while others are still present in the scene, would thus be at the deepest root of masochism (otherwise so puzzling), of self-sacrifice for other people, animals, or things, or of the identification with outside tensions and pains that is nonsensical from a psychological or an egoistic point of view, if this is so, then no masochistic action or emotional impulse of the sort is possible without the temporary dying of one's own person. Hence, I do not feel the pain inflicted upon me at all, because I do not exist. On the other hand, I do feel the pleasure gratification of the attacker, which I am still able to perceive…” (Clinical Diary, p. 104.) “If all hope of help from some third person is abandoned, and if one feels that all one's own powers of self-defense have been completely exhausted, then all one has to fall back on is hope for mercy from the attacker. If I submit to his will so completely that I cease to exist, thus if I do not oppose him, then perhaps he will spare my life; at least if I abstain from offering any resistance, I have a bit more hope that the attack will be less devastating…”(Clinical Diary, p. 104).“This mode of explanation presupposes, however, that at moments of extreme danger, it is possible for the intelligence to detach itself from the ego, and even perhaps from all affects…” (Clinical Diary, p. 105).
Kierkegaard writes in Sickness unto Death “The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, and so on, is bound to be noticed.” (p. 62)
(After trauma and non –response) “The individual gives up all expectations of outside help, and a last, desperate attempt to adapt, perhaps analogous to the feigning of death in animals, occurs. The person splits into a psychic being of pure knowledge that observes the events from the outside, and a totally insensitive body. Insofar as this psychic being is still accessible to emotions, it turns its interests toward the only feelings left over from the process, that is, the feelings of the attacker. It is as though the psyche, whose sole function is to reduce emotional tensions and to avoid pain, at the moment of the death of its own person automatically diverts its pain-relieving functions toward the pains, tensions and passions of the attacker, the only person with feelings, that is, identifies itself with these.” (Clinical Diary, p. 104.)
p. 10 Ferenczi explains further that one must assume that whatever you do not want to feel, know of, or remember is far worse than the symptoms you escape into.” Neurotic suffering is relatively less painful than the suffering of the body and soul that is thus avoided … Great pain, in this sense, has an anesthetic effect: pain without ideational content is not accessible to the consciousness.” (Clinical Diary, p. 30)
“It is not impossible,” Ferenczi muses, “that the ‘wise baby,’ with his wonderful instinct, accepts the deranged and insane as something that is forcibly imposed, yet keeps his own personality separate from the abnormal right from the beginning, (Here an access to the permanent bipartition of the person). The personality component expelled from its own framework represents this real, primary person, which protests persistently against every abnormality and suffers terribly under it. This suffering person protects himself, by forming wish-fulfilling hallucinations, against any insight into the sad reality, namely that the evil, alien will is occupying his entire psyche and physical being (being possessed).” (Clinical Diary, p. 82).
Ferenczi writes in his Clinical Diary, “The withdrawal of love, and being totally alone with one's demands for love against the compact and overwhelming majority, produce shame and repression (neurosis) in so-called normal children.” (p. 104.)
References
Azam, E.E. 1887 (2004). Hypnotisme, double conscience et altérations de la personalité. Paris: L'Harmattan.
Bion, W.R. (1959). Attacks on linking. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 40, 308–315.
Borgogno, F. & Vigna-Taglianti, M. (2008). Role-reversal: A somewhat neglected mirror of heritages of the past. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 68, 313–324.
Boschan, P.J. (2008). Childhood and trauma. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 68, 24–32.
Ferenczi, S. (1923[1955]). The dream of the “Clever Baby”. In J. Rickman (Ed.), J.I. Suttie et al. (Trans.). Further contributions to the theory and technique of psychoanalysis (pp. 349–350). New York: Basic Books.
Ferenczi, S. (1931[1955]). Child analysis in the analysis of adults. In M. Balint (Ed.), E. Mosbacher et al. (Trans.). Final contributions to problems and methods of psychoanalysis (pp. 126–142). New York: Basic Books.
Ferenczi, S. (1932a[1988]). The clinical diary of Sándor Ferenczi. Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press.
Ferenczi, S. (1932b[1955]). Exaggerated sex impulse and its consequences. In M. Balint (Ed.), E. Mosbacher et al. (Trans.). Final contributions to problems and methods in psychoanalysis (271–272). New York: Basic Books.
Ferenczi, S. (1932c[1955]). On Lamaism and Yoga. In M. Balint (Ed.), E. Mosbacher et al. (Trans.). Final contributions to problems and methods in psychoanalysis (p. 274). New York: Basic Books.
Ferenczi, S. (1933). Confusion of tongues. In M. Balint (Ed.), E. Mosbacher et al. (Trans.). Final contributions to problems and methods in psychoanalysis (pp. 156–167). New York: Basic Books.
Ferenczi, S. (1994). First contributions to psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Books.
Ferenczi, S. (1994). Further contributions to the theory and technique of psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Books.
Ferenczi, S. (1994). Final contributions to the problems and methods of psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Books.
Frankel, J.B. (1998). Ferenczi's trauma theory. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 58, 41–61.
Freud, S. (1905). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. Standard Edition (Vol. 7, pp. 123–243).
Freud, S. (1909). Analysis of Phobia in a five-year-old boy. Standard Edition (Vol. 10, pp. 115–156).
Freud, S. (1910). A special type of choice of object made by men. Standard Edition (Vol. 11, pp. 163–175).
Janet, P. 1889(2005). La medicine psychologique. Paris: L'Harmattan.
Kierkegaard, S. (1843). Either/Or, L. Walter (Trans.). New York: Anchor Books (Doubleday), (original work published in 1959).
Kierkegaard, S. (1844). The sickness unto death, H. Alistair (Trans.). London: Penguin, (original work published in 1989).
Kilborne, B. (1998a). Ferenczi, regression and shame. International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 7, 225–228.
Kilborne, B. (1998b). The disappearing who: Kierkegaard, shame, and the self. In J. Adamson & H. Clark (Eds.), Scenes of Shame; Psychoanalysis, Shame and Writing (pp. 35–52). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Kilborne, B. (1999). When trauma strikes the soul: Shame, splitting, and psychic pain. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 59 (4), 385–402.
Kilborne, B. (2002). Disappearing persons: Shame and appearance. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Kilborne, B. (2003). Oedipus and the oedipal. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 63, 289–297.
Kundera, M. (2000). Ignorance: A novel. New York: Harper Collins.
Salisbury, H.E. (1969). The 900 days. The siege of Leningrad. New York: DaCapo Press.
Sophocles (1949). The Oedipus cycle, F. Dudley & F. Robert (Trans.). New York: Harcourt Brace (Harvest).
Sophocles (1991). Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, D. Greene (Ed.), D. Green (Trans.). Chicago University of Chicago Press.
Sophocles (1992). Ajax, The women of Trachis, Electra, Philoctetes, R. Lattimore and D. Greene (Eds.), J. Moore and M. Jameson (Trans.). University of Chicago Press.
Vida, J.E. (2005). Treating the Wise Baby. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 65, 3–12.
Acknowledgements
This paper has been immeasurably improved by the contributions of Kathleen Kilborne, Giselle Galdi, Gianni Guasto, Carlo Bonomi, Franco Borgogno and Alexei Odollamskiy to whom I am ever so grateful. My gratitude also to the Italian Ferenczi Society whose members also provided thoughtful perspectives.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
1holds a Ph.D., is a training and supervising analyst, International Psychoanalytic Association. Visiting professor, Moscow State University. Associate editor, American Journal of Psychoanalysis.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kilborne, B. Trauma and the Wise Baby. Am J Psychoanal 71, 185–206 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/ajp.2011.14
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ajp.2011.14