Mourning the Negative Transitional Object: Toward a Winnicottian Theory of Recovery

Hitting Bottom

Caroline Knapp’s memoir, like others of its genre (Carr, 2009; Cheever, 1999; Sheff, 2009), starts at the ending, or at least, close enough for the ending to be in plain view. By the standards of the 12-step rooms—car accidents, broken homes and futures—her moment of truth is relatively mild. Drunkenly playing up the role of the rambunctious auntie on a walk near a friend’s house over a holiday, she engages in a wobbly dance with the friend’s two young daughters (the “double marsupial hold,” one child clinging to the front of her, the other to the back) and takes a plunge that skirts very close to catastrophe—a bone-exposing gash in her knee that, she reflects, could just as easily have been a “five-year-old skull [hitting] the pavement” (Knapp, 1996, pp. xv–xvi). That near disaster, barely averted, continues to echo as Knapp the journalist returns to work the following Monday. Even as she does her best to gloss over it (making a joke about her clumsiness to explain the bandaged knee, omitting any reference to alcohol), she continues silently to reel. This experience seems, on some visceral yet perhaps not yet fully formulated level, to have upended the way this 36-year-old is accustomed to being in the world. It has surprised her, and that surprise continues to reverberate as she goes through her daily routines, signaling a transition from a state of morbid enmeshment with alcohol (little or no reflective thought) to what addiction theorists have come to describe as the “contemplation” phase, when the heavy costs of one’s relationship with substances become momentarily open to introspection and change, in a flash, becomes a possibility (Miller & Rollnick, 2002; Prochaska, DiClemente, & Norcross, 1992). Though Knapp’s formal commitment to sobriety and to Alcoholics Anonymous is still several months in the future, it behooves us to linger on this signal moment, not just for the obvious psychoanalytic reason (there’s no such thing as an accident), but because the surprising event contains a residue of the person she has been since infancy, and of how she came to enact her place in the world in this way.

What would one make of this story if it were recounted in session with a patient? Out of numerous possibilities, three elements would call out to me ⁹ : the desire for holding of a parental type, fully enveloping (one child on each side), an embrace so intimate and urgent as to be almost a symbiosis; the madcap energy of the alcohol-fueled dance, a garish approximation of joyfulness—a kidnapping almost—but manic and over the top (bristling with disavowed aggression); and the shock and bewilderment of the fall, the rustling of unseen, perhaps lethal wings over one’s head, as a seemingly enlivening impulse turns into its opposite. To these three obvious elements, I would add a fourth, an algebraic symbol, x, denoting alcohol—not just the substance itself and its well-documented physiological properties, but its specific and as yet unknown meaning within the narrator’s life history, and within the family context in which she was raised.

Knapp, an award-winning journalist and long-term psychotherapy patient who at the time of the accident had already published extensively on her teenage struggles with eating disorders as well as her parents’ recent deaths, 2 years apart, from different forms of cancer, would likely have been able to elucidate some of these elements without hesitation. The accident occurred over the Thanksgiving holiday in the recent aftermath of her mother’s death, and thus in a season of bereavement. The desire to cling to her friend’s children, to squeeze them tight and not let go, can be seen as responding to these recent events—the devastating effects of cancer and the permanent rifts it has wrought. The same holds true for the disavowed aggression. Such comforting, marsupial merger is of course not literally possible for humans except in the state of pregnancy, a seemingly unlikely possibility for Knapp, given her propensity for fraught romantic entanglements (at the time of the fall she is dating two unavailable men)—a fact that, whether she desires children or not, might be cause for a fair degree of wistfulness and perhaps envy.

While these proximal concerns explain some parts of the scenario, others are less readily traceable. Although not present with her siblings or her biological parents, now deceased, the narrator is very much at home with her friend and her children, in a warm, familial setting that might possibly (if she allowed) be its own form of comfort. The impulse to cavort with the children seems to come from a genuine place of longing and playfulness—if it didn’t, would the shock of the fall reverberate so profoundly? And yet the results of the accident—a bandaged knee, an inner reeling—suggest that the scenario itself, for all of the surprise that accompanies its dénouement, is neither play nor metaphor, but something else. ¹⁰ The rambunctious scenario at the core of Knapp’s jolting accident with the two children—let’s play together! I am a lively and irreverent Auntie who will lead you on an adventure!—is undermined by other elements in the story, most notably alcohol. Knapp believes she is involved in cheerful hijinks with the two children, but, because she is quite drunk, is in fact all the while standing outside of the experience, at a significant, even parlous distance from the promise of a playfully mutual, intimate interaction. The nexus of these contradictory states of experience—bodily presence and numbing, connection and distance, playfulness and lethality—is alcohol, the x factor whose properties and precursors will now be examined in some detail.

Efforts at Integration and Dissociation

Most clinical theories of addiction—from Karen Horney’s (1937) early psychoanalytic concept of narcotization to the “disease model,” common in 12-step programs (Jellinek, 1960) to more contemporary constructs like Khantzian’s self-medication hypothesis (Khantzian, 1997; Khantzian & Albanese, 2008) and Dodes’s (1995, 2003, 2010) reflections on shame and powerlessness as psychological dynamics in the genesis of addictions—understand the role of alcohol and substances primarily within the envelope of the individual psyche and soma. Less common by far have been efforts that see addictive drinking as a relational script worked out (cocreated) between individuals or family groupings, an unformulated or implicit agreement to filter closeness and other bodily and relational needs through its alternately integrating and dissociating prism. Knapp’s (1996) evocative recollection of her parents’ nightly cocktail hour—a constant throughout her childhood—gives a vivid sense of this sort of everyday ritual:

My father had a particular fondness for martinis. He’d come home late after seeing patients—seven o’clock, seven-thirty—and he’d take a bath, change out of his jacket and tie, then go into the living room and make up a pitcher. My mother set up the cocktail tray every night—a small bowl of raw carrots, a small bowl of unsalted peanuts, a tiny glass dish with his twists of lemon—and they’d sit together on the sofa and he’d drink the first one. . . .

I liked that ritual long before I started to drink myself. Without realizing it I learned to look forward to it. My parents were normally so quiet: they’d sit on the sofa, my mother knitting and my father staring out the window, and a tension would hang over the room like fog, a preoccupied silence that always made me feel wary, as though something bad were about to happen. My mother would say something about her day—how she’d ordered some new curtains, say, or taken the dog to the vet—and even though my father didn’t ignore her in any obvious way, you’d get the sense that he wasn’t listening. . . . Five minutes would pass like that, or ten. Then he’d drink his martini, perhaps pour the second one. He’d begin to loosen up, and within a few minutes it would feel as though all the molecules in the room had risen up and then rearranged themselves, settling down into a more comfortable pattern. (pp. 37–38)

A typical addiction-theory view of this type of interaction, drawing either on the disease model or the self-medication hypothesis, would look closely at the father’s motivations—intrapsychic, genetic or historical—for drinking habitually and excessively in this way (the narrator makes clear that he is in fact the only one enjoying that pitcher of gin and vermouth each night). A family systems or relational reading would also likely start with him—musing about his discontent with the marriage, perhaps, or his preoccupation with matters at work or elsewhere—threading these hypotheses together with parallel thoughts about the mother’s inner state. While not parceled out as such, that inner state is hinted at slyly by Knapp through repeated, bell-like details in this passage—the two “small” bowls of peanuts (“unsalted”) and carrots (“raw”), the “tiny” glass dish of lemon peel—coupled with halting gambits at conversation (“small talk”) so banal and untaxing as to barely register in her husband’s attention. These details beg the question: Is Knapp’s mother also unhappy? Is she ambivalent or perhaps worried about her marriage, as expressed in this nightly ritual and her meticulous, arms-length participation in it?

These types of questions, which scan for motivations and story lines within such prototypical childhood scenes, are vital to the craft of the writer and to the work of the psychoanalyst. While they most certainly have merit and are fleshed out to great effect by Knapp at other moments in her book, they have one crucial limitation: They remain focused on the narrative dimension, the symbolic through line, that accompanies the ritual, yet stop short of considering the sensory (embodied, not yet symbolic) aspects of experience. Turning down the narrative volume for a moment, looking closely at the bodily choreography, what jumps out immediately is the awareness that this nightly cocktail ritual unfolds at a moment of homecoming, a transition where both parents put away the preoccupations of the workday and pick up the threads of their domestic life and marriage. Within psychoanalytic developmental models—from Winnicott’s theories on transitional objects to Bowlby’s (1969) work on attachment security (Karen, 1998)—such moments of transition are hugely important, as babies and families cope with the roiling impact of bodily separation and reunion and the excitement and anxiety that these moments engender. An axiom of these theories is that such anxieties reach a kind of peak in the first 2 years of life (as the awareness of separation comes most sharply into focus), and then quiet down as cognitive structures—working models of attachment security, a positive experience with transitional phenomena and growing capacities for self-reflection—take root within the membranes of the emerging self. In normal circumstances, the growing child (later adult) is able to draw upon a wealth of inner resources and lived practices to negotiate moments of departure and reunion in forthright dialogue with herself and others, and also to withstand and perhaps come to enjoy moments of aloneness (Winnicott, 1958/1965).

In Knapp’s description of her parents’ nightly cocktail hour, however, one encounters a markedly different, stunted version of this kind of adaptation. Not only do these educated, well-spoken adults fail to acknowledge the reunion, or indeed their earlier separation over a lengthy workday, they seem almost comically inarticulate as they sit on the sofa, unmoored, as if in the presence of strangers. Only very gradually, under the sway of the increasing presence of alcohol, does the unspoken tension, the sense of mute separateness, begin to subside. With this lightening in the ambiance, of course, comes a paradox: The looser banter here comes at the expense of a sensory and affective rootedness in the moment. Like his adult daughter at the moment of her drunken stumble decades in the future, the progressively tipsy father in this typical childhood scene achieves a seeming intimate communion—an ordinary experience of being with his wife and children at the end of an ordinary day—that is in reality (also, simultaneously) a growing absence. As he ventures out from the enclosure of his own body and mind to engage with them, and to receive their responsive gestures of engagement, the father experiences a species of comfort—a physical unclenching. This soothing moment, the blurring of discreet selves into a temporary and easygoing state of amalgamation, is however not mainly the product of a linking-up with those beloved, familial figures—a shared holding; a meeting of minds and hearts—but of a careful algebra of integration and dissociation (renewed relationship, plus or minus the x factor of alcohol) that precludes a more authentic, unmediated togetherness. (What was that earlier tension about? Narcotized in this way, we may never know). As an organizing principle or NTO, however, that x factor undeniably works; the stresses of the transition home are negotiated, each member reckons with the return to the nest and in time repairs to bed. Yet other dimensions of experience (emotions, physical sensations, thoughts and reflections) remain fragmented, isolated—atomized within each body.

Organizing Principles

Before going any further in this discussion, it seems important to mention that both Knapp and her father also have other, healthier ways of organizing experience. Knapp’s most obvious gift is writing, a core creative endeavor that she takes pains to shield from the impact of her drinking. At the alternative urban weekly where she writes a column, the narrator keeps a compulsively organized, immaculate workspace—“you could fly a plane over the desk and it would look like a map of the Midwest, everything at perfect right angles” (Knapp, 1996, pp. 11–12)—that reflects the lucidity and ambitious sweep of her prose. Knapp’s father’s daily experience, similarly—the invariant, at times urgent rhythms of patient sessions in his psychoanalytic practice—exists in a realm apart from his nightly drinking. It is as if both daughter and father have made a pact: Daytime is devoted to the strains and pleasures of the symbolic, while evening allows a ritual collapse into physicality, a tumbling toward the taproot of experience whose stress is mediated by the medicinal warmth, the sensory-existential blur of drink.

Of course, in practice the two realms of experience intermingle to a much greater extent than this schema might suggest. While never beginning the workday with a cocktail, Knapp finds ample occasions for drinking as the hours progress. In the antechambers of her work life—a dash out to lunch with colleagues, a mid- or late afternoon happy hour—she is seldom without it. These moments of reprieve from the labors of the symbolic gradually coalesce, becoming the dominant method of managing experience as the workday, with its sustaining rhythms, draws to a close.

One of the central conceits of Knapp’s memoir as a literary work is her careful evocation of her dawning awareness of how very similar her father’s routines are to hers. His days, like hers, unfold on a split screen, with the dominant, public mode of experience—his career as an Ivy League–educated psychiatrist and psychoanalyst—unspooling alongside a more unbridled private realm where drinking and related yearnings (i.e., a long-term affair)—are driving principles. This bifurcation works on many levels for both daughter and father—witness their gifts, their many tangible contributions to their respective fields—yet exacts a steep price in terms of the continuity and overall savor of experience. At random, interstitial moments, Knapp (1996) gets a glimpse of her life’s unsettling deficits:

In between, for five or ten minutes at a stretch, the real version [of herself] would emerge: the fearful version, tense and dishonest and uncertain. I rarely allowed her to emerge for long. Work—all that productive, effective, focused work—kept her distracted and submerged during the day. And drink—anesthetizing and constant—kept her too numb to feel at night. (p. 17)

Knapp’s conversations with Jack, a colleague of her father’s, several years after the latter’s death, reveal that the elder Dr. Knapp faced similar periods of reckoning, most notably at the end of his life, in the months when cancer and its grueling treatments put a final stop to his relationship with alcohol:

When I sat down with Jack, I talked generally about some of the ways my life had changed [since entering recovery], how I felt less depressed and stuck than I used to, and then I asked what I’d come to find out: “Do you think my father was an alcoholic?” Jack looked surprised, as though the answer was obvious. “Oh, yes,” he said. “He thought so. He knew it.” (p. 257)

In the context of the memoir, this revelation—minutely prepared, unveiled at the eleventh hour—lands like a bomb. It upends our view of her father—a daily drinker, perhaps, but surely never an alcoholic—and pulls together fragmentary clues about his past (his troubled first marriage, and the unstable son, Knapp’s elder half-brother—born with fetal alcohol syndrome) into a coherent whole. It humanizes the elder Dr. Knapp, but also decenters him, revealing the damaged person in whose footsteps the adult memoirist can no longer afford to follow.

Speculating on questions of recovery—about the specific factors that allowed Caroline Knapp to make a lasting break with drinking while her father, Peter, never could—is a topic I will take up in this paper’s conclusion. What is crucial to tackle now is the question of origins, and specifically, the ways in which drinking—the activity that most clearly binds the two Knapps together—belongs to a broader effort at organizing experience (and at self-regulation) at work within their specific family context. A simplistic developmental view of such matters might posit a direct causal link between Knapp’s alcoholism and that of her father: Peter Knapp drank in an alcoholic manner throughout his life, and through his example in effect taught his daughter to do the same. While Knapp’s memoir does contain evidence for this kind of assumption—most especially in the passages where Caroline describes her first forays into drinking with her father as a teen (Knapp, 1996, pp. 39–41)—it brims with other data that suggest a more complex and deeply rooted picture. Three memories from Knapp’s childhood, rendered here in reverse chronological order, flesh out an abiding “hunger” that dwelled within Caroline long before she had her first sip of alcohol (p. 60). The first, from adolescence, describes the family’s almost comically self-denying relationship to physical hunger and food:

When [as a teenager] my sister and I started bringing boyfriends over for dinner, we became aware that there was never enough food at the table. There was no financial reason for this, but it wasn’t something we questioned. Dinner was simply served the same way every night and even when we had company, the family seemed to adhere to some unspoken rule about portion control: my mother would stack the plates in front of my father and he’d put a dollop of food on each one and the boyfriends would sort of blink down at the plate, as if to say, “That’s all?” . . . I learned the acronym F-H-B from an early age: it stood for “Family Hold Back,” and it was the rule we employed when we had company for dinner. (p. 73)

The second memory, from a decade earlier, comes as the school-aged narrator becomes aware of a difference between her family and others on the question of physical holding and demonstrations of affection, most evident at moments of transition:

I remember being at a friend’s house in second grade and seeing her father scoop her up when he came in from work, scoop her up and give her a big hug. I was startled and envious and also a little put off by that; it seemed so odd [italics added]. (p. 43).

The third, most wrenching memory, comes from infancy, as a disturbing ritual in the realm of self-soothing takes root starting in Caroline’s first half year of life:

As soon as I could sit up in my mother’s lap, I started rocking, rocking myself back and forth, and I did this for years. When I was a child, my parents had to put a mattress against the wall in my bedroom because I’d sit against the wall during nap time and rock back and forth and bang my head into it. Later, I developed a more elaborate system: I’d get on my knees and elbows and curl up in a ball on the bed, facedown like a turtle in its shell, and rock away, for hours sometimes. In pictures of me at age five and six and seven, my hair is a matted mess, rings of knots framing my face. It got all tangled when I rocked on my head like that and the tangles became so hopelessly knotted after a while that my mother gave up trying to comb them out. I looked like a tiny blond Rastafarian. I can see the rocking now as a first addiction of sorts. It calmed me, took me out of myself, gave me a sense of relief. I don’t know what I needed relief from at that time—age five? age six?—but I clearly needed relief from something and the rocking worked. I did it daily, sometimes several times a day. I also did it for a long, long time, although when I got old enough to feel self-conscious about it, I kept it secret from everyone. . . .

The truth: I did this until I was sixteen.

The rocking was just like drinking. (p. 61)

Finding the NTO

What is one to make of these three disparate memories? What is their relationship to transitional objects of infancy, on the one hand, and Knapp’s adult experience of alcoholism (and related difficulties, like her teenage eating disorders), on the other? Answering these questions requires one to go back a bit, to put aside the most common image of transitional objects—the beloved Teddy or soft toy used as a soother and play object—and to recall the specific functions that Winnicott lays out for such common nursery items, mindful of his admonition that transitional objects have no intrinsic power as such, but acquire their value only from the place they occupy in children’s (and families’) imaginations and lived experience at a developmentally crucial moment. That watershed moment starting in the first 2 years of life, which unfolds as infants grapple with the alternatively thrilling and fearful awareness of bodily separation and loss, becomes a developmental opportunity only to the extent that babies, with their parents’ support, are able to find (or more properly, create) a contiguous mental reality, a world of illusion centered on play with the transitional object, in the widening gap between themselves and their caretakers. This subjective zone—a playspace on the cusp of “me” and “you”—becomes both an absorbing refuge from the terrors of separation, and a medium through which a new kind of contact and a new kind of thinking ¹¹ —about relationship, need, creation, loss—begins to unfold.

There is no indication in Knapp’s memoir that the narrator ever kept a transitional object in this classic sense as a child. Like her parents, she certainly developed immense gifts in the realm of symbolic thought. Her prose—disarmingly intimate, lyrical, at times plaintive—emphasizes the degree to which childhood prepared her for a rich participation in life as an observer and chronicler of experience. Far from underdeveloped, her ability to conjure up relationships verbally, including the unvarnished self-portrait of her eating disorders, seems by the time we encounter her to be prodigiously, almost excessively developed, a kind of hypertrophy in the realm of self-expression that Knapp (1996) acknowledges in places (p. 14) even as she mostly takes it in stride. ¹²

In the three examples just noted, however, Knapp the mature writer reveals a hidden cost, a pall overshadowing her bourgeoning symbolic capacities. For all of her powers of description and insight, Caroline as a child and adolescent is unable to rely upon—or even to think about—herself or other people as sources of comfort (comfort as such comes mostly from dissociative rituals). This explains her bewilderment at scenes that many other children might regard as ordinary—that is, a friend’s father scooping her up affectionately at the end of the day—while accepting others that many outsiders might frame as bizarre. Knapp mines this discrepancy for comic effect in her description of the incredulous teenage boyfriends “blinking down” at the diminutive mounds of food adorning their dinner plates, yet, in other passages, she evokes the deep pathos accompanying that seeming lightheartedness. The lack of adequate nourishment in the Knapp home, the rigid policing of bodily indulgence manifested in the decorous standard of “Family Hold Back” (a “custom of the country,” nearly)—is accompanied, offstage, by our awareness of Knapp’s anorexia and bulimia, as well as her father’s chronic drinking. In a similar way, the lack of physical affection in the home—of holding both in the literal and metaphorical sense (“it seemed so odd”)—is intertwined with the solitary scenes in the infant Caroline’s nursery, as she attempts, in an “elaborate system” not so very far removed from the grim contortions of Spitz’s (1952) babies—to achieve in isolation a degree of physical soothing and emotional integration that in many other families would come through familial interactions.

Within the analytic literature, including Winnicott’s writings, self-regulatory activities such as infant Caroline’s head-banging or rocking are generally framed as belonging to the “autoerotic” or “autistic” trends of early childhood, their continued prominence bespeaking a failure to adapt to the realm of the dyadic, a kind of hunkering down in a primal state of detachment. Such rituals are generally thought to stem either from endogenous difficulties within the growing child or perhaps—as Winnicott (1960) and Green (1986, 1997) emphasize—from a near-traumatic degree of parental absence or negation. In a recent reappraisal of a late Winnicottian case write-up on this topic (Winnicott, 1972), I revise the notion of negation from a static un-mooring to a far more active and persistent negating presence (Pauley, 2018b). This conception, which sees the child’s seemingly “autistic” or detached behavior as one that is cocreated nonverbally with the caretakers in keeping with dominant family practices and unconscious needs—the encapsulation of the parental “no”—is suggested in one revealing detail from the scene in the infant Caroline’s nursery: the upturned mattress, placed by her mother against a wall. The mattresses’ cushioning presence, far from a transitional object in the good-enough sense, nonetheless suggests both a degree of parental presence and care (they do not wish their daughter to injure herself) and a tacit, if ambivalent, participation in her efforts to regulate herself through behaviors that do not make demands on their bodies and minds.

While as previously noted there is no evidence in Knapp’s memoir to support the presence of a positive transitional object in her childhood, the NTO, in contrast, is readily apparent. Not uncommonly, it appears as a shape-shifter—the head-banging and rocking of infancy through adolescence, blending into eating disorders of adolescence and early adulthood, blending into adult alcoholism. These seemingly disparate activities, tacitly endorsed by Caroline’s parents, have the common function of quieting the awareness of the body and its anguished needs—a form of self-regulation—while keeping alive the connection to the negating object. As I suggest in my paper introducing the NTO, these addictive rituals also over time acquire a partially conscious narrative overlay, one that tends to emphasize the shameful nature of the efforts to self-regulate. In Knapp’s memoir, this kind of narrative appears in particular in the random interstitial moments, like the drives noted above, where, alone and temporarily without the distractions of work or drink, the author reexperiences and begins to think about the bewilderment and shame that have since earliest childhood accompanied her efforts to comfort herself. Although her alcoholism becomes something of an open secret—both her late mother and her sister caution Caroline to moderate or stop drinking toward the end of the story—Caroline does not grapple forthrightly with the implications of her NTO until the drunken stumble with her friend’s children described at the outset.