2 The symbiotic illusion 共生的错觉
In families of today the mother is the most influential person and is therefore held responsible for everything that might go wrong in the rearing of the child. Because ideal mothers are just as rare as model children, the two can easily become disappointed with each other.
当今的家庭中，母亲是最有影响力的人，因此，要为育儿中可能犯的每一件事承担责任。因为理想化的母亲就像模范的孩子一样稀缺。两者很容易让对方失望。
Mothers may pay too little or too much attention, and as a result children may feel neglected or burdened. However, parenthood does not consisit merely of conscious interaction with children. Even more important are the messages that are unconsciously transmitted. Moreover, the 'repetition compulsion' -- patterns repeating themselves in successive generations - plays a large role as well. A mother who is disappointed in her own mother will be more than likely to have an unusually ambivalent relationship with here daughter. An anxious mother will be less able to keep the fears of her child within bounds.
母亲如果过多或过少的关注孩子，孩子就会因此觉的被忽视或被拖累。然而，为人父母不仅仅在于与孩子有意识的互动，更重要的是在不知不觉中传递的信息。此外，强迫性重复，父母们不断的在代际间复制自己的模式同样扮演了很重要的角色。一个不满意于她母亲的妈妈更有可能与自己的女儿产生不同寻常的矛盾关系。一个焦虑的妈妈将会缺乏在一定范围内克制自己对子女担忧的能力。
Depending on the experiences in their own childhood, parents will reflect or distort reality and have a coloured view of that reality. In that sense, grandparents may be rediscovered as an important influence two generations later. Many experiences of the parents are projected automatically onto the next generation, on the children. A father who feels rejected by his father may have a tendency to reject his son. The stamp that parents imprint on the child will induce similar patterns in subsequent generations. This is particularly true when a family endured experiences that are traumatic in nature. As the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy expressed it in Anna Karenina: ’All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’
父母会根据自己的童年经验，反映或歪曲事实，并对事实存有偏见。在这种意义上，祖父母也许会作对后两代有重要影响之人被再次发现。父母的很多经验会自动的投射到下一代孩子身上。一个感觉到被父亲拒绝的爸爸或许会有排斥其儿子的倾向。
Aida
Aida is a vastly overweight student who suffers from severe headaches and always feels on edge, She explains that her mother calls her every day and always wants to see her more than once a week.They then have long discussions about how to live, a topic on which her mother has all kings of theories and ideas. During these conversations Aida ask for advise and help with her
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problems. this way she provokes her mother to give advise that she can reject in an adolescent way, thereby staying over-inolved.
Aida tried to build a similar relationship with me as her theraist.She always sits on the edge of her chair,cannot relax for a minute, and constantly picks at her lips.At the same time she tries to provoke a discussion in response to every remark I make.She impresses me as someone who is in need of excessive interaction:something has to keep flying back and forth between us,as if she cannot be left to her own devices for a second when she is around me.I have to offer my opioion on everything,and when I occasionally do so, I have to prove that I am right - and so on, as infinitum.
Any time I say anything, Aida interrupts with a 'but'.This is followed by an argument that expressed doubt about what I had just said, which in turn is followed by a plea to remove her doubts.Or else she starts to argue for the opposite to my suggestion. It produces a sense that nothing is ever right,is ever sufficient,and that there is never room for pause or monent of contentment.Everything continues to be one long line of pure frustration.It is as if she can never be fully satisfied.
Her role within the family was,and still is, that of meeting the needs of the others.She was always the obedient daughter who,in contrast to her three brothers, never caused her parents any problems, In addition, Aida has always taken care of her paternal grandmother as well.He studies are going well, while her brothers are neighter working nor studing - they are living on welfare with their wives and children. Rather than independence and self-reliance, dependency seems to be the life theme of the children in this family.If aida is not constantly in touch with her mother ,she feels guilty, just like her mother, who always feels she is remiss in her duties towards her daoughter.Neither of them is able to loosen the reins and let the other be.
Aida's father had been in hiding during the Second World War,and her had lost own father at an early age. Her grandfather was killed in Auschwitz, makeing her a second-generation victim of war trauma.Her father was raised by her mother and grandmother.His mother is a true survivor,who leans heavily on Aida while urging her to ever greater accomplishments. Aida feels responsible for this grandmother, who is by now very old and rather diffcult, especially because her own parents do not want to bother with her too much and leave most of the care to Aida.
Aida's father keeps a safe distance from the family by burying himself in his work. He has married a woman who tries to patch up her own unhappy childhood she completely succeed in this.She wants to know everything about her doughter and to meddle in all her affairs. Aida involuntarily fuels this attitude.These two, mother and doughter, behave as if they were married to one another instead fo to their male partners.The symbiotic illusion that binds them is detrimental to Aida's development as an independent woman
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and creates problems that comtribute to her compulsive brooding and to headaches from which she suffers.
Emma
Another example is Emma, a woman in her fifties, widowed, with two children, and now happily remarried, Her children are grown and she lives an extremely comfortable life, and yet she complains that she cannot find any peace. She has to achieve, study, work, travel. She has to improve herself constantly, worry whether she is handling her children, her stepchildren, and her husband properly. She is tried and wants to be rid of this attitude to life but is unable to let go of it all.
At the age of 3 Emma had lost her mother and was raised by a detached father and a hostile stepmother, both of them extremely demanding strict Calvinists. At least, that is how Emma experienced it. She escaped from the parental home when she was 18, went to work, married, and had children. However, She felt as if she was imprisoned in a cage, she seemed to be suffocating.She was never able to show any true emotions to her husband, so that sexuality became problematic as well. Her husband had became the replacement for her cold and distant stepmother. She never realized that it might all have to do with the lack of a loving mother - a lack from whick she had suffered deeply.
During one summer vacation Emma suddenly fell madly in love with another man who, according to her, was the love of her life. Coincidentally or not, her husband became severely depressed soon thereafter and committed suicide.Emma felt incredibly guilty and ashamed, a feeling that has remained until today. Not long afterwards her secret friend died as well.For the second time she lost the most beloved person in her life.
In her own eyes, Emma's first husband resembled her stepmother, while the bond she had with her lover was more of a representation of the primal emotion she must at one time have had with her mother. Her present husband is a survivor of World War II, and, as happens quite often in marriages, through a mechanism called projective identification, his losses come to represent her own loss of a mother. Being with him, she experiences what she has never dared to admit to herself - that she has husband and need not dwell on the great loss on her life.
What struck me most in Emma was that she nver really emphasized the fact that her mother had died so young. He grief about that was so much a part of her prehistory that she was incapable of dealing with it untill we were able to bring it to light during her treatment sessions, I surmised that the main had spent her entire childhood among strangers, as it were, without any sense
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of intimacy, with me, by contrast, she felt at ease with remarkable and surprising speed. After a few sessions she began to weep, saying that she was deeply moved by her visits to me although she did not quite understand why. In fact, though she was always trying to be as distant and as rational as possible, I felt that she radiated great affection.
After we continued to work through her mourning and made connections with her current life, her emotions grew more recognizable to Emma, and she became calmer, less driven. It was no longer so urgent that she seek intense activity in the outside world just so she would not notice what was really going on inside her. I felt very strongly that via her transference to me in treatment she had retrieved an old emotion that originally belonged with her little-girl's feeling for her mother. That bond, which had been severed before she was old enough to be aware of what was happening, was found again in the present monent; the wish for symbiosis was thereby resolved, and she could leave me with a feeling of satisfaction.
In love with the therapist
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