Positive and Negative Interferences With Ideas

Modern neuroscience amply confirms many of Freud's discoveries about the human mind. Far from being a static, one-thought-at-a-time entity, it displays a bewildering degree of complexity. Not only do ideas compete and conflict with one another constantly but the same idea frequently, Freud would say "inevitably," attracts positive and negative emotional evaluations simultaneously. Psychoanalysis vividly describes how people attempt to deal with such perpetual conflict. One strategy involves "splitting" positive emotional contents away from the negative. A more mature strategy involves bearing the conflict and learning from it.

Splitting, Integration and Parental Love

• According to psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, small children's minds are too immature to hold conflicting ideas together and attempt to "split" them apart. Distressing, painful ideas are expelled outward, leaving the person imagining that all negative experiences lie outside the self and only good, comforting ideas and experiences remain inside. Klein showed that young, immature minds depend upon other more mature minds for growth. In infancy, she argued, babies take in parental love and understanding at the breast as well as milk.

Internalizing Parental Love

• Learning from a loving mother's understanding, developing babies gradually build up an inner model of her that becomes a vital element in the growth of intelligence and reality-testing in later life. For example, psychoanalyst Hanna Segal says that for an infant, hunger "gnaws"; small babies will scream and cry when hunger strikes as though attacked by a malevolent animal. The mother who calmly responds by understanding the baby's distress and remedying it helps build similar understanding in the child's mind.

The Growth of Understanding

• The infant or small child who screams is trying to expel distress; but it's what happens next that really matters. If a calm and affectionate human presence receives the distress, psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion argues that it gets translated into meaningful, useful action. For example, a cold, wet diaper gets changed; a scraped knee gets lovingly nursed; frightened loneliness gets becalmed by affectionate company and a nightmare is soothed away by holding and comforting. Both the distress and the understanding response get internalized and integrated into the growing mind.

Internalizing Parental Panic

• But things can go wrong. An adult who panics or who remains impervious to a child's distress produces a very different effect in the child's mind; instead of receiving understanding and love, the distress just bounces back. According to Bion, this makes it much, much worse. A child displaying distress reaches out to others for help; when fear meets indifference or panic, it comes back stripped of whatever communicative value it had originally. Bion movingly describes this as a mutation; distress may get sent out in hope, but nameless dread returns instead of understanding and relief.

Integrating Positive and Negative

• Such unfortunate children internalize parental panic and incomprehension with terrible consequences for their ability to learn and grow. Positive and negative interferences with ideas are an inevitable and valuable part of human learning. But individuals must learn to tolerate both the positive and the negative simultaneously -- whether from within their own minds or from others -- to benefit from the precious truth of an idea or experience. When people split good from bad, they impair their capacity for understanding; but they need parents or mentors capable of modeling this ability for them if they are ever to acquire it.