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Review
of Community Relations Professional Seminar and Public Program
Peter
Fonagy, Ph.D. and Stuart Twemlow M.D.
Preventing
Mass Murder in Schools:
Understanding Violent Children
from "Peaceful" Families
BY
Myrna Little, Ph.D.
On March
15th DSPP's Community Relations Committee, chaired by Ms. Cheryl
Martin, was privileged to host one of this year's most relevant
programs: The Prevention of Violence in Schools. Drs. Peter Fonagy
and Stuart Twemlow, co-directors of the Peaceful Schools Project at
the Child and Family Center at the Menninger Clinic, presented in
tandem a psychoanalytic explanation of violence - its social
context, research findings, and methods of intervention - to a
professional audience of more than 100 in the afternoon, and in the
evening to a smaller audience of interested parents, teachers,
students, and others from the community.
The
Psychoanalysis of Violence
Dr.
Fonagy opened the forum with a discussion of psychic reality, which
extends Bion's model of the mind, and yet which demonstrates his own
clinical powers of observation and synthesizing. In his model Fonagy
proposed that play has a pivotal role in the development of thinking
as well as in emotional experience, and especially in their
integration. Between the ages of two and five two modes of psychic
experience are believed to prevail. One is a serious frame of mind,
which he terms psychic equivalence, in which internal aspects
of the child exactly correspond to external reality. The second, pretend
mode, occurs in play and the child knows that the internal
experience does not equal the external. The reflective mode
is an integration of both psychic equivalence and the pretend mode.
Normally occurring by age five, this is a mental state in which
mental life is experienced as representations of inner and outer, no
longer either equated or split off. Lastly, mentalization
occurs as a result of the mental states being reflected upon,
usually through experience of secure play with parents and/or older
siblings in which the child finds credence with their ideas and
feelings, and thus forms a necessary link with reality. Neurotic
children, in contrast, have failed to achieve this integration, so
that the pretend mode of functioning becomes undifferentiated from
psychic equivalence. If the inability of self-reflection persists
into adulthood, psychic equivalence and the pathological
pretend-mode (dissociation) have a vital role in acts of enraged
violence. Fonagy also argued for the necessity of the therapist to
function as does the parent, i.e., thinking thoughts as
representations, rather than as replicas of either external reality
or internal fantasy. Psychoanalytic therapy, in this way, is itself
a "pretend" experience, where play is essential to the
developing of the mind. Dr. Fonagy has been presenting this model
since 1996, and the interested reader my pursue papers on
"Playing and Reality I, II, and III" in Fonagy and Target
(1996), Target and Fonagy (1996), and Fonagy (2000).
A
Psychoanalytic Treatment of a Murderer
To
illustrate his model and the clinical evidence of psychic
equivalence, Fonagy presented the analysis of a woman who murdered
her boyfriend. He demonstrated from the patient's comments that in
equivalence she felt emptied, that thoughts were not owned by her
mind. As the treatment progressed he came to understand that for her
genuine feelings and ideas were abhorrent, that mental states had to
be repudiated (Bion's reverse of alpha function and cannibalization
of thought). She was adapted thus to trauma by blocking all symbolic
thought, so that he was prevented from introducing any alternative
through play and pretending. This, Fonagy believes, is what all
therapists face when engaged with violent patients. Describing his
countertransference as "brimming with discomfort and
confusion," threatened with danger, litigation, enactments, and
complaints of his incompetence, he began to recognize - primarily
through her dreams - the presence of an alien self. Like the
Chinese boxes of which she dreamed, the patient experienced an inner
world within which was contained another and alien self. This alien
was the infant who found herself in the mother's mind, a mother
whose image of her baby came to colonize the self of the patient,
and who lived there as embodied vacuousness. Fonagy found she would
learn nothing from his interpretations, yet gradually the mental
language of his communications began to birth her own nascent
reflective capacities.
It was
within this field of powerful projective identification, and in a
moment of evacuation of unthinkable shame, that the patient - who
had survived for years by finding vehicles to contain her torturing
as well as vacuous self - was recognized in her murderousness by the
analyst/container. In that shocking moment she was able to tell him
the truth of her lethal act, one that, Fonagy said, was truly an act
of self-defense.
Understanding Murderous Violence
Fonagy
cites three processes that link violence to failure of mentalization:
1) absence of awareness of one's mental states, which results in
failure of responsibility for one's action; 2) failure to anticipate
the consequences of acts upon others; and 3) failure in the
representational system, so that thoughts are unreal, insignificant,
or dissociated.
Failure
of mentalization turned into violence in this patient's case because
the alien self - which was her mother's image of her as terrifying,
unmanageable, meaningless and vacuous - was continually projected.
When the boyfriend, however, did not identify with this projected
alien self, and instead returned it to her with mocking and
revulsion, she became fatally violent and had to mindlessly destroy
what that which she externalized. Thus, in violence a deficit of
mentalization both creates and reveals the alien self; violence
becomes a destructive actuality as humiliation and shame are
experienced in the mode of psychic equivalence.
Fonagy
strongly argued that the therapeutic goal of intervention is the
recovery of mentalization by clarification of moment-to-moment
changes in the patient's mental state (Fonagy, 1999). With deficits
of mentalization, enactments cannot be interpreted, as they carry no
symbolic meaning beyond wishing to create a specific state in the
therapist. The therapist's respect for minds, however, generates
respect for self, respect for others and ultimately for the human
community. It is this respect, Fonagy insists, which drives and
organizes the therapeutic endeavor with violent patients and speaks
with greatest clarity to our psychological heritage.
A
Crucible for Murder: The Social Context of Violent Children
Following
Dr. Fonagy's account of the violent mind and his conclusion that
crime is a developmental issue, Dr. Stuart Twemlow addressed the
social context within which this defective mind - in Bion's sense -
is cultivated. "Clearly," he stated, "if crime is
primarily developmental then families must be involved." It is
the level of parental conflict, however - not divorce or family
structural change per se - that correlates conduct problems in
children to research findings of disorganized attachment. In
Bowlby's terms, children unable to see themselves as thinking,
attentional beings because of the absence of early recognition of
their separateness do not develop an appropriate "internal
working model." Children thus impaired cannot identify their
own feelings or imagine consequences of their behavior, thus in
psychic equivalence destruction of the physical object may be seen
as the only solution to a problem.
The
Social Context for Psychoanalysis
While a
social context incapable of social bonding obviously might include
the family, the school, the media, and the world at large, Dr.
Twemlow's psychodynamic formulation of social context includes a
convergence of three perpspectives which are themselves derived from
the social context, and which together define, shape, and in-form
the current impingement upon psychoanalytic thinking.
Twemlow's
first perspective - like many psychologies - is drawn from Hegel's
notion of binary opposites, terms which are the positive and
negative of each other, and which also are the dominant and
subordinate of each other (e.g., white/black; good/bad;
male/female). Just as Fonagy's concept of the self is a function of
otherness, Twemlow argued for a dialectally determined interaction
between individuals and their social milieu.
Second,
from Alfred Adler Twemlow perceives social context to be understood
according to the means by which a group creates its membership.
Whenever membership is exclusionary, power struggles for inclusion
tend to result in pathological interactions. If these are
unsuccessful, a new group develops which then invents a place for
itself through illusionary superiority. Psycho-analysis itself arose
as a new group, destined, the early analysts hoped, to provide the
self-knowledge that would promote healthy and peaceful communities.
A third
perspective folded into Twemlow's operational understanding of
social context is Fonagy's conceptual synthesis of attachment theory
and social systems. By comparing healthy social systems to securely
attached families that enable children to develop self-reflection,
empathy, and group cohesion, defective social systems (including
schools) - by the neglect of children's unique subjective experience
- foster undeveloped minds and psychopathology. Both Twemlow and
Fonagy have found evidence of behaviorally oriented, mechanically
managed schools that simulate disorganized attachments and breed
climates of reward-punishment, neglect of the subjective mental
states of students, and emphasis on control. These schools are
characterized by the bullying of students as well as by the bullying
of teachers, and promote the machine-like environment of security
checks, presence of armed police, police dogs, and other
paraphernalia which accompanies power and punishment dynamics within
prison-like environments.
Studies
conducted to investigate bullying have revealed two types. The more
sadistic type is found to enjoy the humiliation and hurt of others
and seems to be based in envy and/or pathological transference. The
second type is the teacher who fails to set limits, allows chaos to
develop in the classroom, and then reacts with sweeping punishment.
From a securely attached school perspective, the necessity for
teachers to become socially and emotionally literate is apparent if
the development of friendships, in an atmosphere of non-coercive
power dynamics, is to foster group cohesion as well as academic
learning.
Pathological
Contexts in Families, Bullies, Victims, and Bystanders
To
illustrate that crime is a developmental achievement that occurs in
a pathological family context, Dr. Twemlow reviewed a case of
disorganized attachment in a double murder by an adolescent boy.
Besides the grim, self-mutilating which reestablished a feeling of
boundedness as well as grandiose strength and power in this boy,
Twemlow noted a lack of mentalizing in which he, like many other
murderers, was unable to recall the moment of lethal violence. This
lack of mentalizing he attributes to autistic-contiguous functioning
(Ogden, 1989), a mental state in which sensation and concrete action
predominates exclusively over thought.
For this
boy the same pathological patterns that existed in his family
existed in his school context. Twemlow and Fonagy have found that
these same pathological, bully patterns existing in families to also
exist in schools where social control is not gained by abstraction,
thinking through, and negotiation, but rather by anxiety, malignant
narcissism, and aggressive drive. Family bullying patterns are
further aided by violent mindset in the community, not only through
the media, the Internet, and in print, but also through
institutionalized violent bullying behaviors such as black listing,
hazing, excommunication, and elitist clubs and groups.
Bullying
is defined as "a sadomasochistic ritual in which repetitive and
deeply regressive attempts are made to fetishize the victim and to
inflict continuing, humiliating and undignified attack." The
sadistic bully by definition must be paired with a masochistic
victim. The social effect of the bully upon the victim, however
belongs to the bystander. Thus a triangle of danger consists
of the bully, the victim, and the bystander.
Bystanders
are of three types: those too frightened to resist the recruiting
bully (present in most schools); the avoidant-bystander, best
exemplified by school personnel, especially principals who deny the
existence of problems; and third, the power-hungry bystander
children who act as puppet-masters and set up victims to commit
crimes for which they do not wish to be blamed. The crucial aspect
of the danger triangle as well as the major point for intervention
is this: without an audience, bullies have little motivation to
continue reenacting bully-victim roles. While these roles are
interchangeable, the juvenile criminal is one in whom the bully role
has become fixed. Thus the bully dynamic defined by Twemlow and his
team of investigators consists of an autistic defense, a repetitive
sadomasochistic fetishizing of the victim object, and a voyeuristic
bystander component which then intensifies the manic, triumphant,
exciting organismic bully-ritual. The bystander multiplies the
humiliation and loss of social face of the victim, which then
potentiates the violent revenge.
The
Copycat Phenomenon
The
copycat phenomenon, which is gaining a rather extensive attention by
the FBI and others, was also discussed and conceptualized by Dr.
Twemlow within a psychoanalytical dialectical social systems model.
He believes the copycat child is a bully-bystander, one who
voyeuristically, perversely, and vicariously identifies with the
bully, is simultaneously excited and triumphant in this vicarious
way, and avoids responsibility and consequences of lethal violence.
The typical type in a school yard sets up the beatings, warns the
teacher, and makes sure everything goes smoothly to ensure the
perverse, sadomasochistic humiliation of the victim.
In the
Menninger research, children exposed to clips of violent movies were
found to accommodate to their normal fear responses by suppression,
or numbing-out. Such children begin to manifest inappropriate humor
and dissociation. In the researchers' opinion, such pathological
sublimation leads to the victim-victimizer dialectic in which fear
elicits debilitating, primitive defensive ego reactions,
pathological transferences, and splitting, which in turn potentiates
disconnections from the peer group because their behaviors have
become alienating. To this notion is added the concept of kindling,
a form of behavioral desensitization which implies the brain has
become sensitized to recurrent cycles of anxiety, and therefore
requires less and less to respond pathologically. Twemlow proposed
that the bullying sadomasochistic ritual causes deeper regression
than does either suppression or kindling because it is fueled by the
bystander.
Intervention
In both
the controlled pilot study and research reported (Twemlow, Fonagy,
et al, in press), psychoanalytically informed intervention focused
on coercive power dynamics and psychodynamically informed methods of
redressing these imbalances. They report dramatic reduction of
school-suspensions, disciplinary referrals, and a highly significant
increase in mean standardized academic achievement test scores as
compared to the control school. To illustrate the potential for
either good or bad outcomes, Dr. Twemlow discussed two case
vignettes, which support the theory and research findings of the
Peaceful Schools Project of the Menninger Clinic (these vignettes
may be read in their entirety on the dspp.com web site where both
the Fonagy and Twemlow text are reproduced). While not claiming that
seriously disturbed children can be cured by school climate only,
these researchers note that some children do make lasting changes if
their school environments are favorable.
In the
evening forum for the public Dr. Twemlow reiterated the inner life
of homicidal/suicidal children, the safety needs of the school
culture, exclusion rituals which elicit power struggles, the early
signs of trouble, and emphasized the key to intervention, which is
knowing when the danger-triangle roles require action. He presented
a continuum of responses of children to threat, from the reaction of
healthy egos to the bully-victim-bystander ritual attack. He listed
the prevalent parental assumptions to include: that teachers know
what they are doing, that kids can deal with each other, and that
any problem is believed to indicate mental illness. The core
elements of their treatment program devised by their research team
was presented in graph form; it includes a "positive climate
campaign," a discipline plan which teachers must model, and a
"gentle warrior" concept from Marshall Arts which teaches
children control, defensiveness, and targets how to manage bullies.
In addition the program incorporates a "Bruno Honor" adult
mentor system and a peer support plan.
In the
discussion periods that followed both the afternoon and evening
sessions, the above contents were clarified and other issues
addressed, e.g. addictions, the attachments of murderers who killed
victims they did not know, and whether this approach is applicable
to sociopaths. One of the most delightful responses came from Dr.
Fonagy when asked how his theory of psychic equivalence and pretend
mode compare to Bion's alpha and beta elements and to Ogden's
dialectics. Embodying his own theoretical emphasis on play, he
delighted his audience when he playfully replied, "Because I
thought of it!" More seriously, he shared that he and all
British analysts are steeped in Bion, that his own writings are
dominated by Bion, and that none of us ever create a really novel
way of seeing personality. He distinguished himself from both Bion
and Ogden, however, by his developmental, psychoanalytic
perspective, which is linked to cognitive developmental findings. He
believes that the only truth any of us know is what we experience in
the consulting room, and if some people find Bion, Ogden, or others
to be freeing, this is exactly as it should be - pluralistic.
In the
evening Dr. Twemlow responded to many questions from teachers and
parents. Significant to this reviewer in light of the relatively
small audience, is the resistance the researchers found in adults,
parents, and bullies, which, he believes, is offset by the efficacy
of the program with the children and teachers. Addressing a question
regarding the "puzzle of violence," he referred again to
the disinhibiting required in order to injure others, such as occurs
in the military, and closed by emphasizing once more that the
primary inhibitor of violence is the social context, the influence
of other people, in other words, attachments.
References
Fonagy,
P. and Target, M. (1996). Playing with reality I: Theory of mind and
the normal development of psychic reality. IJPA, 77, 217-233.
Fonagy,
P. (1999). Memory and therapeutic action. IJPA, 80, 215.
Fonagy,
P. and Target, M. (2000). Playing with reality III: The persistence
of dual psychic reality in borderline patients. IJPA, 81,
853-873.
Ogden,
T. (1989). The Primitive Edge of Experience. Northvale, NJ:
Aronson.
Target,
M. and Fonagy, P. (1996). Playing with reality II: The development
of psychic reality from a theoretical perspective. IJPA, 77,
459-479.
Dr.
Little is a training analyst of the Inter-Regional Society of
Jungian Analysts, long-standing member and Immediate Past President
of DSPP, and maintains a private practice in Dallas.
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