CV
Psychiatrist and a candidate psychoanalyst. She continues her psychoanalytic training under Psike Istanbul and International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). A graduate of Cerrahpaşa University Faculty of Medicine, she completed her residency at Erenköy Psychiatric Hospital. She works in private practice in İstanbul.
RUTHLESS LOVE
According to Winnicott, there is no baby in the beginning, only the mother-infant dyad exists. The development evolves from the mother-infant to a mother and an infant. In this process, Winnicott speaks of the role of primary aggression in making differentiation possible. He refers to primary aggression, which he sees as an element of love, also as ruthless love, maintaining that the baby bites the breast to express his/her love and appetite but the motivation is not to cause harm. He argues that how the mother responds to this situation plays a role in making sense of aggression. If the mother responds as if the baby has done a very bad thing, the aggressive element, which is a part of love, is separated from love and left outside of integration. Winnicott thinks that this is what leads to destructiveness. However, if the mother does not succumb to this aggression and is able to survive, she allows the baby to destroy and create the mother over and over again in fantasy. He underlines that apart from the survival of the real mother during this process, accepting the reparative gifts of the baby is also of particular significance. The discovered external object, unlike the created one, is the object that can be used. The relation with the discovered object is a relation with an object that is rooted in the real world and is outside of the baby’s omnipotence.
In analytic work where the treatment processes of the patients undergoing severe psychic difficulties are concerned, the attitude that the analyst will adopt in working with primary aggression holds great importance. The analyst’s ability to be aware of and bear his/her own hate, to not get caught up in the intensity of his/her affective reactions, and continue to understand his/her experience through the identification with the patient offers some kind of a holding function. Winnicott mentions the difficulty of maintaining the analytic stance without resorting to retaliation. He likens this to the task of tolerating the hatred that the mother feels for her baby without making the baby pay a price. In a similar vein, if the analyst can continue to survive even if s/he feels hatred in countertransference, the analysand can begin to settle and take root in the analytic setting. In this presentation, I will attempt to illustrate this process through clinical examples.