the activation of maternal representations

Infant Mental Health Journal, Vol. 15, No. 4, Winter 1994

The Activation of Maternal Representations

STEPHEN BENNETT Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Harlem Hospital Center

ILENE SACKLER LEFCOURT Sackler Lefcourt Center for Child Development

WENDY HAFT St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center

PATRICIA .NACHMAN New School for Social Research

DANIEL STERN University of Geneva

ABSTRACT: While a mother watches her infant or toddler during everyday life, there is a moment-by- moment triggering of thoughts, feelings, memories, and trajectories into the future. To access this inner experience as it emerges, a micro-analytic interview technique was devised. Through a series of probes this interview repeatedly guides the mother between the concrete details of her child‘s behavior and the subjective responses evoked by these observations. This window to the mother’s subjective world allows a rich scrutiny of its architecture and dynamic process, permits cross-fertilization with recent developments in cognitive science, and serves as an entry point for therapeutic efforts.

RGSUMI?: Alors que la mtre regarde son btbt ou son jeune enfant dans la vie quotidienne, il existe un dkclenchement stquentiel de penstes, d’kmotions, de souvenirs et de trajectoires dans le futur. Cette expkrience subjective peut B son tour dtclencher le comportement maternel. Pour avoir accts B cette exptrience inttrieure telle qu’elle tmerge, une technique d‘entretien micro-analytique a t t t concue. A travers une strie &investigations cet entretien guide ;i plusieurs reprises la mtre entre les dttails concrets du comportement de son enfant et les rtponses subjectives tvoqukes par ces observations. Cette fenetre dans le monde subjectif de la mtre permet de trts bien scruter son architecture et son processus dynamique. Elle permet aussi une trans-fertilisation avec les rtcents dtveloppements en science cognitive et sert de point d’entrte pour des efforts therapeutiques.

RESUMEN: Mientras la madre observa a su infante durante la vida de cada dia, hay una motivacion de pensamientos, sentimientos, recuerdos y trayectorias hacia el futuro, que ocurre a cada momento.

A short version of this paper was presented at the World Association for Infant Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines: Fifth Congress, Chicago, September 11, 1992. We wish to thank Jackie Cohen, Joenine Roberts, Carla Massey, and Allison Locker for their help in accomplishing this study. Address correspondence to Dr. Stephen Bennett, Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Harlem Hospital Center, 506 Lenox Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10037. This study was funded in part by Warner Communications.

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S. Bennett e t at. 33 7

Esta experiencia subjetiva puede determinar el comportamiento materno. Para tener acceso a esta experiencia interior a medida que va surgiendo, se ha creado una tecnica de entrevista mircoanalitica. A traves de una serie de sondeos, esta entrevista repetidamente guia a la madre entre 10s detalles concretos de la conducta de su niiio y las respuestas subjetivas evocadas por estas observaciones. Esta ventana al mundo subjetivo de la madre permite un examen de su proceso arquitectbnico y dinamico, permite interfertilizacih con desarrollos recientes en la ciencia cognitiva y sirve como punto de entrada para esfuerzos teraptuticos.

Over the past decade developmental psychology has entered enthusiastically into the subjective world of adults and children, while mainstream American psychiatry has triumphantly moved out of the mind (Wilson, 1993). Most of the research done on subjective experience has been an outgrowth of attachment theory. Main and her colleagues (Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985) have provided a methodology, especially through the Adult Attachment Interview, that passes muster as objectively verifiable and has been used productively by many researchers.

At the same time, psychoanalytic insights into the inner world of mothers with young children, which began with Selma Fraiberg’s 1975 classic Ghosts in theNursery (Fraiberg, Adelson, & Shapiro, 1975), have led to the explorations by clinicians, such as Cramer (1987) and many others, which have continued the emphasis on the mother’s subjective experience. Cramer and Stern (1988) describe what they call representation- oriented psychotherapy for mother-infant pairs. Stern-Bruschweiler and Stern (1989) believe that an ultimate impact of every infant-mother therapy is on the mother’s representational world.

Seligman (1 991), while praising this burgeoning of attachment research for making respectable and scientific the study of subjectivity, nevertheless feels that there has been too narrow a focus on attachment and an overemphasis on the quantitative and empirical approach. Although attachment categories possess a diagnostic usefulness, he feels they lack the immediacy, the fluidity, and metaphoric intensity necessary for clinical work. Zeanah and Barton (1991) reply that the clinical-theoretical approach to subjective experience has held sway for most of this century, but that it is the recent attachment research that has led to new and rapid advances in the study of internal representations.

There has been some attempt to bridge the two approaches (Lieberman & Pawl, 1988). Bretherton (1987) has provided a thoughtful review of the roots of attachment theory in object relations theory. Zeanah has described the clinical applications of his Parent Perception Interview (1993). Derived from the Adult Attachment In- terview, it is designed for clinical assessment and as a springboard to intervention. It can be thought of as an attachment interview with a human face.

The approach to the representational world described here is an attempt to understand the phenomenology of subjective experience. The assumption made is that while a mother watches her young child during everyday life there is a moment-by-moment

338 Infant Mental Health Journal

triggering of thoughts, feelings, and memories by daily events. The subjective experience activated may in turn determine maternal behavior. The clinical studies of Selma Fraiberg and her associates provide a foundation for this work. A major and seminal idea is that the baby’s presence- “the baby in the room”-elicits parental memories and associations that would not occur in the usual retrospective recounting. “The physically present baby touched off a chain of emotions in the parent which often led to revelations of feelings in words” (Fraiberg, 1980, p. 50). The current work represents an attempt to study this internal experience as it emerges.

To access subjective maternal experience, a.micro-analytic interview technique was devised. Through a series of probes this interview repeatedly guides the mother between the concrete details of her child’s behavior and the subjective responses evoked by these observations.

This window to the mother’s subjective world allows a scrutiny of the as-it-happens process of activation of a representation, permits cross-fertilization with recent developments in cognitive science, and can serve as an entry point for therapeutic efforts.

THE INTER VIEW

This interview was administered to two groups. One was a well-educated, middle- to upper-class population seen in a prenursery and nursery. The other group, which was less advantaged economically and educationally, was seen in a child psychiatry clinic. A total of 50 interviews were conducted.

The mother is asked to observe her child for 15 minutes and is told that following the observation period she will be interviewed for approximately an hour. Following the observation period the mother is asked to describe the sequence of events she observed with questions such as “What happened?” or “Describe it blow by blow.” After the mother relates what she has observed, the interviewer reads back her report and asks for any corrections or additions.

The mother is asked to pick, from all the events reported, the event that stood out. Questions are asked such as “What struck or leapt out at you, grabbed or moved you?” An event can last for sevelal seconds to several minutes and is given significance by its selection by the mother.

The event, or what happened, is the referent for her subjective experience. The interviewer frames the event by asking the mother specifically when the event began and ended. The mother is then asked to parse or divide the event into scenes. She is asked for her response to each scene with “What happened inside you?’’ and then with the more specific inquiry about what she was thinking, feeling, doing, remember- ing, or anticipating in each scene. The link between the objective and subjective experience is probed. These ideas, emotions, and memories are shaped and reshaped by the unfolding and detailing of the observed event.

The mother’s thoughts, feelings, and images from her immediate life and personal past that occur during the event are identified. This subjective experience evoked by the event draws not only on the present, but on memories triggered by the event and also upon her imagining of the future. She can be in all these places simultaneously.

The combined experience of the observed event (what was perceived), with the mother’s subjective experience (what was evoked), has been named the lived moment.

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There is in the creation of the lived moment a dialectic between the external perceptual world and inner experience.

Once the reported subjective experiences that took place during the event are ex- plored, the ideas, feelings, and memories that first come to the mother’s mind during the interview are examined. Glimmers and presentiments of memories can occur during the event that find verbal expression and narrative structure during the interview. We attempt to differentiate clearly between what is event triggered and what is interview evoked and constructed. We realize that the memories are context dependent and the context here is the interview. That the memories are true is not our claim, only that they are believed by the subject and are clinically useful.

This interview is different from the usual structured or psychoanalytic interview, even one where the focus is on the child, in that the subject is directed repeatedly to the relation between the observed event and the subjective experience (i.e., the “lived moment”). We are not interested here in following a train of associations, but return always to the subjective experience that was elicited during the external event. From the exploration of the subjective experiences evoked in the event, a theme emerges during the interview and can be followed back and forth over the sweep of time. Questions asked are, “Is this theme a familiar part of your life?” “Can you recognize this theme in your past?” “Are you able to place this theme in the future?”

The themes possess great personal meaning and are a repetitious part of the everyday life of parents. They draw from the past and figure in visions of the future. The activation of themes by the lived moment is the process by which representations imbedded in the themes are replenished, revised, and revitalized. The theme as it evolves during the interview is considered a narrative co-construction between mother and interviewer.

Although most themes can be reduced to some psychological generalization, such as separation anxiety and Oedipal conflicts, to do so loses their personal richness, variety, and vitality. Recurring themes are often related to concerns about development and adaptation. Themes of separation-individuation are prominent. Assertion, distance, and individuality themes can be given values by the parent that range from dangerous to wonderful. A prominent theme is wanting the child to be different from herself, both as child and adult; not to suffer as she did.

EXAMPLES OF INTER VIEWS

The following examples illustrate the observed event, the lived moment, and the themes that follow.

Example # I

The mother created a lived moment from a short interaction between her child and a teacher. Her child asked the teacher a question, and upon hearing the answer, simply returned to the task (a puzzle), without referring back to the teacher. When the mother stated that the child‘s response was not what she expected, the interviewer asked about the unexpectedness triggered inside her. The mother went on, “I felt surprise that she did something that I didn’t expect. She took up the challenge without


a verbal response to the teacher. She seemed in control, was taking charge. The surprise is that I can’t always read her, so she’s really complex.”

In returning to the details of the event between child and teacher, the mother stated that her daughter was “spunky,” and that she liked seeing that. When the interviewer probed the connection between the spunkiness and the mother’s surprise, the mother stated that the issue for her was more her own experience of surprise and not the fact that her daughter had been so assertive. As the interview probed where the mother’s mind might have wandered during the “surprise” she stated, “It really wasn’t so much what happened (the spunkiness). I was surprised that she did something that I didn’t expect, so I can’t always read her, so she was different from me, and she’s not me.”

When queried about how that felt, she said “sad,” but expressed some concern about her sadness and then a specific memory came to mind that was “small but specific . . . me on the outside, I could be whatever I wanted to be on the outside. I could dance . . . I could be vivacious . . . that was the small feeling . . . the inside was very small and uncertain. Now I’m not sure how I connect that to being sad about her. It may have been that I want her not to be that way. That’s like my whole goal in life, for her not to be that way.”

She was asked if she felt the sadness while observing the event and she said she first felt it during the interview, and that while watching the child, “. . . the surprise was the first thing I felt. That was definitely everything I felt . . . and the surprise was the connection to me.”

This interview progressed from the child’s spunkiness to the mother’s surprise then sadness, from the other to the self, and from the objective/external to the subjective/ internal. In this constant back and forth what was portrayed is how central and pervasive this theme is in the mother’s everyday life.

Example #2

The mother watched her daughter as she came into the nursery, hung up her coat in her cubby, then entered the class to talk to her friends. There was a 60-second period when the child danced with her coat and 10 seconds when she said, “Look, I’m dancing with my coat.” The rest of the interview found its basis in those 10 seconds (i.e., the event). The agreed-upon event was the child’s communication. The mother stated, “It was when she interacted with me.” She described what was in her head then as “She seemed like a rather precious little girl at that moment. There was a kind of sweetness and sort of mixture of shyness and exhibitionism that was kind of touching.”

The interviewer asked if memories were evoked. “It made me wonder, well, I guess it might of reminded me of a time when I might have done that myself as a little girl . . . I sort of imagine myself doing that.”

During the interview she was asked about the intimations within the event that this had happened to her as a child. “As we’re talking about it, it brings up a memory now of then . . I was dancing around the lawn . . . my father made some comment to me, about how I wanted to be the belle of the ball.’’ The theme that emerged was her joy in her daughter’s uninhibited pleasure with simultaneous awareness that as a child this kind of pleasure was squelched and replaced by humiliation. There was

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a determination that entered into every response not to let the latter happen to her own child.

This interview illustrates that what is evoked is the descriptive details of the idiosyn- cratic and richly metaphoric quality of subjective experience. Also, as in the first example, a memory that traveled back to childhood was triggered in the lived moment and found full expression during the interview.

Example #3

The foster mother of a 3-year-old autistic child watched him float about the therapeutic nursery. She identified as the event a 10-second period when he made fleeting eye contact and allowed her to kiss him. “I felt the love flow from me into him and his love flow back into me.” She cupped her hands as she shoved them back and forth to demonstrate that this love was a palpable thing. When asked if these feelings and ideas occurred in her day-to-day life she said that at home they took place about every 15 minutes. She was asked about the role of this in her past life. She said that there had been little time for love growing up because she had to work long hours in the field. She was aware of the flow of love when she was nursing her husband who was dying of cancer. It was then she decided that she wanted a foster child. She expressed hope that this love would be curative in the future.

Until recently, this interview was used only with economically advantaged and highly educated women, but as is demonstrated it has a wider socioeconomic range. The universality of these abilities is more apparent than any differences. Limits on describing subjective experience follow from verbal skills and psychiatric status. This caretaker, a sturdy woman without psychiatric diagnosis, was seeing a social worker for help with child-rearing. This is an example of where this interview could introduce inner experience into ongoing casework treatment where for the most part the emphasis is on overt behavior.

Example #4

A mother chose as the event a 1-minute period where her child hesitated in choos- ing between going to the playroom and staying with her mother. In response to the question “What jumped out at you?” this mother stated, “I guess the thing that I see is the tugging in her between being with her mommy and being in the playroom.”

In this example, the mother began by picking up the internal feeling of the child, then the interview proceeded to tie this feeling to the observed behavior. The mother described in painstaking detail how this “tug” in the child has ever-changing mean- ings. Together with the interviewer, the mother came to term the emotional high- point of the lived moment “the 50-50 moment . . . when I walk away and she drops the puzzle and she realizes that mommy’s not going with her . . . and I think that’s the point where the most intense conflict comes into play” (between being with mommy and playing in the playroom).

The mother was asked to describe her thoughts, feelings, and memories at this moment, and she described her concerns about facilitating her daughter’s separation. “How best do I get her to come to this decision (to play) without making it seem that I’m pushing her away from me? I let her sit on my lap and observe for a little while. I let her sit on my lap and say to her, ‘Mommy loves you, thank you for the hug,


oh, mommy loves you.’ Then I pick up on one of the teacher’s suggestions for playing, and ask, ‘Do you want to paint?’ I don’t want to initiate it. I would rather some- one else do the initiating so it doesn’t seem that I’m pushing her away from me.”

When probed about the feelings that came up for her during that rather excruciating lived moment, the mother placed them in the context of her own history and talked about identifying with her child, who had a new baby brother. The mother felt dis- placed in her own mother’s affections by a younger sibling. Currently she was very concerned not to recreate that experience with her daughter. Returning to the lived moment, the mother stated that she rarely felt relieved of the anxiety evinced. It was pervasive in her life and she was always aware of the “gradations and shifts” of how her daughter experienced the “tug” between being with mommy and not.

This interview brings into stark relief this mother’s constant and relentless monitor- ing and measuring of the subtleties of the separation process as she moves between observation of her daughter, into her own head, and back again.

These interviews, by means of the constant back and forth between observed and subjective experience, provide a vivid sense of how pervasive and central these themes are in the mother’s everyday life.

This interview quickly yields metaphoric details of internal experience that can be clinically useful. Although not the original focus of this work, what can have clinical worth is the uniquely personal and detailed narrative, the intimate drama and vividness, that emerges. This interview is an experienced-based window into the everyday “how-it-works” of core themes and conflictual issues.

DISCUSSION

Introspection

Detailed phenomenological descriptions by means of introspection have been out of fashion since the beginning of the century. This old work is hard to get a feel for at first because of its unfamiliar references and distinctions. However, the basics are clear. First of all, introspection needs be distinguished from egotistical self- absorption and also the metaphysical psychologizing of the 19th century. For Titchner (1912a, p. 440), introspection is “an interrogation of experience . . . a way of getting the facts” from the standpoint of descriptive psychology. It means an attention to phenomena from a scientific view and the taking of a record (Titchner, 1912b).

The formal introspective technique using highly trained observers faded away with the onslaught of behaviorism but, as Boring (1953) points out, persisted in new guises such as the verbal report of psychological experiments or the verbal productions of psychiatric patients. Certainly, introspection is a vital part of psychoanalysis. Kohut (1959) believes that the crucial observations come not through free association but through introspection or empathy with another’s introspection. Analytic observers have periodically reconsidered the importance of introspection and have found it to be powerful.

The introspective technique described here is neither the old method nor is it free association, but is rather directed association. Subjects are repeatedly directed to the interaction between the observed event and the evoked subjective experience. Boring -

(1953) concludes in his historical review that the meaning of introspection for a

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particular time follows from the spirit of that time. Although this particular method is not traditional introspection because it is interview prompted, the ideas that emerge in this consideration are useful in the attempt to understand mental representations. The kind of subjective experience that emerges from this exploration of the architecture of a representation follows what the current cognitive models of mind, such as parallel distributed processing, would predict.

Lived Moment

This particular directed introspection allows scrutiny of the uniquely personal representations as they are triggered. The term lived moment catches the vitality and immediacy of this experience.

The lived moment is not a creation of the interview, but is an experience ubiquitous in parent-child interaction. Selma Fraiberg’s Clinical Studies in Infant Mental Health (1980) provides numerous illustrations of lived moments. One chapter, by Lieber- man and Blos (p. 249), gives a portrait of a mother, who, after describing her 16- month-old daughter’s illness, stated, “The worst part was when Abby looked at me with a pale and sad smile, as if looking for relief, and I could not give her any.” The therapist asked what she felt when Abby looked at her with that “pale and sad smile.” The mother replied that she felt incompetent, unable to meet Abby’s expecta- tions. The therapist asked if she had experienced those feelings before. With sadness the mother recalled that her parents always pressured her to achieve. Her mother, she felt, was irrational and unpredictable. The theme of “I can’t please her” recurred again and again. “As treatment continued, it became clear that [the mother] feared that one day Abby would disappoint her.” The linkage of the event, that “pale and sad smile,” with her sense of incompetence and the memory of the mother’s unpredic- tability, created a lived moment and joined a theme of “I can’t please her” that swept from past to present. In our current work the interview enables us to identify and explore the components of this process. Our material comes from what have been in the great majority normal mothers and is the result of a one-time interview, whereas Fraiberg’s cases are mother-infant pairs that demonstrated major pathology and were in ongoing therapy.

The Past

The immediate visual and auditory perception of the event evokes ideas, emotions, and body sensations that simultaneously or in quick succession link up with the present, past, and future. That the past intrudes is no surprise. Proust believed that it was recollection that gave direct experience its color and meaning (Krutch, 1924). Contemporary concepts of memory describe how we continually reinvent the past (Edelman, 1989). Parallel distributed processing suggests for us a system of double bookkeeping that allows us to be in many places and times all at once (Rumelhart, McClelland, et al., 1986).

Marcia Johnson’s conception of memory, what she calls the multiple entry, modular memory system (Johnson, 1983; Johnson 8z Hirst, 1991), distinguishes two aspects of memory. One is for the consequences of perceptual processing. This includes not only specific modalities such as seeing and hearing but the amodal qualities that are out of awareness. The second is the reflective processes that constitute what is planned


and imagined. Important for the purpose of this discussion is not her theory in a narrow sense but rather all the cognitive research that goes with it that offers one way into the processes that concern us.

The more exciting studies of language and narrative describe the constant retelling of old stories and the fermenting murmur and weave of many voices into new nar- ratives (Bakhtin, 1981). Although the approach described here must stand on its own, it can be enriched with ideas from contemporary cognitive, connectionist, and narrative studies.

The Future

The color, energy, and immediacy of the lived moment draw from the mother’s memories of herself as child with her own parents. The past leaps into the lived moment and the future does as well. Some parents are flooded by the future, not only from the awareness of the consequences of the trajectory beyond past to present to future, but from vivid pictures of their child in a specific place in the future. A child showing a troublesome behavior in nursery school evoked for a mother a pic- ture of the child in grade school where real demands would be made alongside the mother’s vivid memory of herself in grade school or, if you will, back to the future. This time travel, this tangle of tenses, relates to mental activity that is traditionally discussed in terms of repression, displacement, projection, and identification. A careful analysis from our transcripts of the shifts in time that take plaqe during a lived moment is required.

A major premise in Bowlby’s concept of internal working models is that animals need a plan in their head so as to anticipate their next moves in the jungle (1980). Contemporary cognitive research makes this idea minutely explicit. Studies where predictions are made about the future position of an object have led Freyd (Freyd & Johnson, 1987) to the idea that perceptual representations are not static or mental things but rather are dynamic (Freyd, 1987), “are an emergent property of processes enfolding over time” (Freyd, 1992, p. 321). Freyd believes that for survival, the animal not only needs to be sensitive to change in real time but also needs to anticipate it. She suggests that representations of the external world emphasize future time, such that these representations are sometimes “ahead” of external time (1992, p. 309). She speculates that we anticipate the future in time intervals that vary from the fractions of a second to days and years, and that “our ability to anticipate the future may be a hallmark of our species” (1992, p. 321).

Representations

The integration of many disparate external and internal elements into coherent representations is how the mind works. Contemporary neuroscience has provided evidence that distributed processes occurring in parallel at different sites are the basis of many cortical functions. It is still not clear how these distributed neuronal activities are pulled together into representations. It is believed that rather than converging on one cell or area, representations take place by assemblies of interconnected neurons. This integration is called “binding” and various explanations have been offered (Crick, 1984; von der Marlburg & Schneider, 1986). Recent work suggests that there is a temporal code or cortical synchronization that is responsible for this integration (Singer,

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1993). “Recent experimental studies support the proposal that synchrony may be the ‘glue’ that binds distributed neuronal activity into unique representations” (Engel, Konig, Kreiter, Schillen, & Singer, 1992).

Units of Interpersonal Experience

The ideas presented in this paper are based on interviews of adults but have been influenced by Stern’s theoretical conceptualization of the infant’s basic unit of interpersonal experience (Stern, 1994). He calls this unit the “emergent moment” or “proto- narrative moment.” First, the moment is constructed by the mind as it is being lived. The multitude of events registered are organized into a whole. Second, this moment has a duration in real time and this temporal structure consists of “continuous analogic changes in feeling during the ‘moment.”’ This temporal contour is called by him a “feeling shape” and provides the backbone for the moment. Third, the moment, using the feeling shape for its structure, is organized around a motive or goal and takes on a narrative-like form.

That the mind gives meaning to its experience by organizing it into stories is an idea developed by many writers. Bruner’s work provides one clear example (1986). The concept of feeling shape has been around for a long time under various guises such as discrete patterns of neural firing (Tompkins, 1962, 1963) and activation con- tours (Stern, 1985). The prosodic elements of language, the dynamic flow of pitch, intensity, and duration, its meter, its rise and fall-“trochee trips from long to short”- provide the structure that allows the changing words and images to carry the story back and forth in time but keep the pattern and meaning. Although the subject of some exploration (Stern, Hofer, Haft, & Dore, 1984), it is an idea that can be furthered by this particular research.

Further Directions

Research that follows from the interview transcript analysis continues to be in the direction of the micro-structure and process of representation. Under study are the shifts in time, the process of identification, and the many narrative voices.

Another direction for research is the use of this interview with a clinical population, whether it be the caretaker or child who possesses the diagnosis. One project underway consists of a short-term therapeutic approach to disturbances of mother-young child interaction that centers on the mother’s representation of her child.

SUMMARY

The assumption made in this paper is that while a mother watches her infant or toddler during everyday life, there is a moment-by-moment triggering of thoughts, feelings, memories, and trajectories into the future. This subjective experience that is activated may in turn determine maternal behavior. To access this inner experience as it emerges, a microanalytic interview technique was devised. Through a series of probes, this interview repeatedly guides the mother between the concrete details of her child’s behavior and the subjective responses evoked by these observations. The thoughts, emotions, memories, and anticipations of the future that are triggered by


the observed event have been called the “lived moment.” The image of the mother’s representational world that comes out of this interview is that it is not a singular and concrete thing. Although maintaining a continuity of theme, it is constantly being revised and replenished. Time, people and place, emotion and image, not only flow back and forth but can exist side by side. This window to the mother’s subjective world allows a rich scrutiny of its architecture and dynamic process, permits cross- fertilization with recent developments in cognitive science, and serves as an entry point for therapeutic efforts.

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