#nancy mcwilliams

[illusoryfem]

Near to the Wild Heart, Clarice Lispector // Some Thoughts About Schizoid Dynamics, Nancy McWilliams

[eternalgaylord]

Finally, I want to comment on a subtle social effect of categorical diagnosis: It may contribute to a form of self-estrangement, a reification of self-states for which one implicitly disowns responsibility. "I have social phobia" is a more alienated, less self-inhabited way of saying "I am a painfully shy person." When its patent on Prozac expired, Eli Lilly put the same recipe into a pink pill, named it Serafem, and created a new "illness": premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) (Cosgrove, 2010). Many women become irritable when premenstrual, but it is one thing to say "I'm sorry I'm kind of cranky today; my period is due" and another to announce "I have PMDD." It seems to me that the former owns one's behavior, increases the likelihood of warm connection with others, and acknowledges that life is sometimes difficult, while the latter implies that one has a treatable ailment, distances others from one's experience, and supports an infantile belief that everything can be fixed. Maybe this is just my idiosyncratic perspective, but I find this inconspicuous shift in communal assumptions troubling. -- McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis 2nd Ed. (2011)

[quietnqueer]

[odettecarotte]

A very paranoid patient I worked with for a long time, whose sanity was often at risk, had an uncanny feel for my emotional state. She would read it accurately, but then attach to her perception of it the primitive preoccupation she had about her own essential goodness or badness, as in "You look irritated. It must be because you think I'm a bad mother." Or "You look bored. I must have offended you last week by leaving the session 5 minutes early." It took her years to feel safe enough to tell me that was how she was interpreting my expressions, and several more years to transform the conviction "Evil people are going to kill me because they hate my lifestyle" into "I feel guilty about some aspects of my life."

Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis

One of the lessons I have taken away from McWilliams is her observation that mentally ill people are often correct in their/our observations of other people's distress, however, their attribution of WHY that person is distressed is often skewed.

[odettecarotte]

The countertransference with psychotic-like people is remarkably like a normal maternal feelings toward infants under a year and a half: They are wonderful in their attachment and terrifying in their needs. They are not yet oppositional and irritating, but they also tax one's resources to the limit. I should not work with a schizophrenic, a supervisor once told me, unless I was prepared to be eaten alive.

Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis.

It's really and truly not fair that it's so much easier to be in therapy when you're not mentally ill

[odettecarotte]

Two book pairings I have enjoyed recently:

Britney Spears, The Woman in Me, followed by the chapter on Hysterical (Histrionic) Psychologies in Nancy McWilliams's classic Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process, 2nd edition.

Two wildly different takes on consent, both life-changing: Betty Martin will teach you how to feel consent in your body with The Art of Receiving and Giving: The Wheel of Consent and Avgi Saketopoulou will fuck up all that you didn't want to know about consent with Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia.

I will be quote-blogging these for my own pleasure, edification and future reference, and maybe yours as well!

For my thoughts on these and other subjects, look at the #mywriting tag.

[odettecarotte]

I share with many analysts the view that it is also useful to conceive of some people who may never become diagnosably psychotic as nevertheless living in a symbiotic-psychotic internal world, or, in Klein's terms, in a consistently "paranoid-schizoid" state. They function, sometimes quite effectively, but they strike one as confused and deeply terrified, and their thinking feels disorganized or paranoid.

Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis

[odettecarotte]

Developmentally, Freud (1925, 1932) and many later analysts (e.g., Halleck, 1967; Hollender, 1971; Marmor, 1953) suggested a dual fixation in hysteria, at oral and oedipal issues. An oversimplified account of this formulation follows: A sensitive and hungry little girl needs particularly responsive maternal care in infancy. She becomes disappointed with her mother, who fails to make her feel adequately safe, sated, and prized. As she approaches her oedipal phase, she achieves separation from the mother by devaluing her. She turns her intense love toward Father, a most exciting object, especially because her unmet oral needs combine with later genital concerns to magnify oedipal dynamics. But how can she make a normal resolution of the oedipal conflict by identifying with and competing with her mother? She still needs her, and she has also devalued her.

Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis, 2nd edition

Picture from Bonnie Burstow, remember when this was doing rounds on Twitter on Mother's Day?