Symbiosis

            In the 70s, I spent a lot of time studying Margaret Mahler’s The Psychological Birth of the Infant.  Together with her psychoanalytic colleagues, she carefully observed the behaviors of newborns through their first thee years.  They identified a time of symbiosis that mother and infant shared in the first year.  With the advent of crawling and then, upright walking, the infant, with the mobility of getting some distance from the mother, begins to experience a “separateness” from the mother.  Panic and pleasure soon follow.  The pleasure turns out to be the experience of one’s own will to act autonomously.  The pain: the great anxiety of losing the safety of the omnipotent mother.  Perhaps this anxiety is actually present as part of birth as Otto Rank believed.  It’s enough for us here to note that from early on, freedom and anxiety show up as twins.

Love and Dependency

            Rollo May, one of my favorite thinkers, once said that if someone could do nothing except love him, he’d be suspicious.  “That person will cling to me,” he concluded.  Dependency is surrendering freedom to avoid the anxiety of abandonment.  Yet that word, abandonment, glosses over too much.  With Mad, I do monitor my tendency to dependency, not so much because I fear a physical abandonment; after all, we are just newlyweds.  For me, there’s just a very unpleasant feeling I experience when we’re not aligned; that we were not “right” with each other.  I can imagine the angst of a global loss, like the infant’s loss of the symbiosis, irrational as that may be in my adult reality.  Sacrificing freedom for love ends up with you not having love or freedom.

Autonomy and Intimacy

            For me, freedom is an ultimate value.  It’s right up there with courage and maybe, if properly understood, freedom and courage belong together.  Freedom without courage languishes and becomes an insipid intellectualization.  Courage without freedom is not courage at all, but rather, compliance, obedience, conformity or dependency.  Having so declared freedom as particularly important to me, let me now only add that the aim of my own psychotherapy has been the great wish and dream to be part of a great relationship.  By great relationship I mean being able to share my rich inner life with a partner who could feel with me; come to know me deeply even as I discovered who she might be in a similar way.  I want both my freedom and I want to be profoundly intimate.

My Manly Fear

            When I experience any loss freedom, I rebel, and quite frankly, not always in an emotionally mature way.  I’ll rant and (more likely) withdraw and brood silently.  Now, having created sufficient distance to insure that I will not be overwhelmed by Mad (“I love having power over you” she earnestly declared at the last Gathering), I then begin to feel the loss of our connection as more dangerous that the loss of my freedom.  I want us to have harmony between us.

            It has become something of a cliché to think of courage as the province of men and nurturance as the domain of women – that men protect and face the dangers of the world and women create the haven of safety in the home.  But my view is that this is a matter of weight, rather than something exclusively masculine or feminine.  I think Mad prizes her freedom with as much if not more passion than I do mine; she speaks of it as “liberation.”  At the same time, this is the woman who said to me, “There is no conversation we can’t have” suggesting a huge capacity for intimacy. 

Tension by Intention

            I’m remembering the Everyman gathering of a couple of year’s ago where the theme was “tension by intention.”   It just seems to me that polarity and conflict are inevitable if not an essential part of life itself.  More than a simple fear that can at least be confronted and dealt with because it has an object, anxiety as the thrown condition of the human is the central issue here.  In life, we can be thrown out of life, out of relationships, can run out of money or run out on our families.  The nature of danger is that it can come from anywhere, at any time and in this, the potential is present at every moment to lose our center, our sense of self or even our very lives. 

If we can, by intention, embrace our freedom, if we can move in our lives with some degree of courage, we may find that it will be possible to both surrender ourselves in physical, emotional and spiritual intimacy even while managing to preserve our autonomy.  In this self chosen conflict or tension, we will choose to create and then, re-create again, the possibility best expressed by Jean Robertson of The Collaboratory (http://collaboratory.nunet.net ): “Everyone wants closeness with others and autonomy—and these are compatible”.