In my hometown, amidst a lovely garden, sits a psychoanalysis institute.
One day, while volunteering at a community festival, a tiny, slim woman approached us and asked if we knew any pregnant women – or mothers of young babies – who would like to support a psychoanalysis student.
She, the student, was required to conduct weekly observations on a mother-baby dyad for a year as part of her training program.
I pointed to my belly: “How about me?”
I was heavily pregnant then. The baby was due in six weeks. With my firstborn, I was a new immigrant, who had recently moved to Australia, lonely and isolated, and ended up with a diagnosis of mild post-natal depression. Frankly, I thought it was stupid: my distress was social rather than ‘mental’, caused by being disconnected from the workplace I liked – and away from my family when I most needed them. If my doctor asked me, I would have told him it was immigration devastation with post-natal isolation.
Not that he would have listened to me: although research indicates the cross-cultural importance of social factors in the post-natal gloom, some Australian experts prefer to completely ignore it. For example, The Centre of Perinatal Excellence (COPE) gracefully tells me that one of my symptoms – hidden somewhere at the bottom of their list – is ‘feeling isolated, alone and disconnected from others.’ Feeling, hey? As if it is not a real issue, stemming from real-life situations! Their proposed solution: psychotherapy, medication and electroshock. Not one word about mother-to-mother support. And they have the guts to call it ‘Excellence’.
As one woman told me, after approaching useless professional help: “They asked me all these weird questions, like, if I want to hurt myself or hurt my baby; but never once did they ask ‘do you have somewhere to go out with your baby? Do you have enough friends you can meet? Is your family supportive?’”, which, of course, wasn’t the case.
Luckily, my friends know better. Both old and new, they drilled into me the importance of hanging out with other mothers, having someone holding my baby for a second, juggling together food preparation and toilet breaks; how it is better for both parent and child. Quickly, I learned: being at home alone with a crying baby was a recipe for despair, dread and madness. But holding the same cranky baby in a friend’s house, sitting on the floor together with her bub (while she addressed a mess or two in the kitchen), suddenly felt perfectly normal – and easy.
So, during this pregnancy, I laboured to cultivate enough friendships and meaningful engagements to occupy me after birth, so staying at home wouldn’t drive me nuts. Some people call it social prescribing. The student’s offer sounded like a good deed that also served my needs as well.
Besides, I love learning. My Mum always says: milk your lecturers; don’t wait for them to teach you. So that was the plan: my bub will milk me, and I’ll milk the student for knowledge and tales.
The following week, she came over. We went through the details. Then I gave birth, let her know, and two weeks later, the student came for her first observation.
What can I say? She stepped in, said ‘hello’, sat down and waited for something to happen.
The problem is, nothing much happened with my two-week-old Bub. Either he slept or he suckled… I am a touch-based mother. I don’t talk with them much at this stage. Correction: we do talk. A lot. We exchange impressions through movement and touch. Even the famous eye contact is much less important than the reaching hand. And especially with a second child, communication happens almost absentmindedly while I do my chores and chatter with adults.
But this one didn’t want to chat. She wanted to sit down and watch.
Fine. That’s what I’m here for. But if you want to see me behaving, I want to behave normal. You know, like my usual self. To behave normally, I need to feel normal. And to feel normal, I need to relate normally to a normal woman who’s come to my house.
So, I sat with her, trying to feel normal, to chat, to tell her something about my son…how is today, what’s for tomorrow. She nodded, whispered the shortest response possible, and kept watching me in silence.
Who said that the observation act changes the observed? Trust me, they’re tremendously right. She sat still like a plant in a pot, and I tried, well, to live.
But living with a bub at 10:00 in the morning usually means loading the washing machine and scrubbing a few dishes, going out for a walk, or surfing in mothers’ discussion groups. But how could I do any of these when this shadow is stuck in my living room? It’s not polite to open the laptop; it doesn’t feel right to stand up and go. Taking her with me to do the washing is also hard. There’s not enough space. But really, I can’t spend the day looking at her watching me.
I offered her a cup of tea.
“No, thanks.”
No worries.
One hour is fine. Not a big deal. I had done weirder things as a student to make a quick buck at the Faculty of Psychology’s experimental lab. But over time, with a baby in my lap, it’s harder and harder to get along with someone who sits and breathes in your lounge, pretending to be wallpaper. (Wallpapers, mind you, don’t tend to breathe. And they lack buttocks to sit on).
Nevertheless, I gave my word. So, I let a few weeks come by, giving her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe we’ll get used to each other; something will thaw, she’ll warm up.
After a couple of months, I told her straight: let’s make some tea.
Sitting in the kitchen, cups in our hands, I opened: “Look, it’s not working. It’s too artificial, I can’t feel comfortable. Also, you can’t see the typical me, the way I really am with him. It will be very hard for me to keep going like this for a year.
“I understand that you need to observe, but there are several ways to do it. If we have a cuppa, have a chat, and relate to one another like two human beings, it will be much easier for me. True, it’s harder to observe like that, but it’s a learnt skill. You’ll get the gist of it, learn to swap your attention, to register things from the corner of your eye. Doing it long-term (a whole year! 52 hours!), even if you’ll miss a few things to begin with, you’ll notice enough later on. And you can ask questions. I love talking about motherhood. It will help you to understand where I come from.”
“No,” she said, “We were clearly told that we need to sit quietly, not intervene and not interrupt. I am sorry. I know it feels awkward.”
My friend Fiona, an international disability researcher, was astounded when I told her.
“You’re telling me she has never heard about participant observation?”
“Apparently not,” I nibbled gloomily on a biscuit. “Or they don’t approve of the concept.”
She tightened her jaw and bit into her peach.
My tolerance level kept dropping. Meanwhile, I realised I wasn’t as lonely as with my firstborn. My older child went to school, I made friends with the school mothers, kept volunteering in the community centre and was appointed the resource coordinator. The observations became more and more daunting. A good deed, but not good for me.
I called her in for another talk. “Look,” I said, “it doesn’t work.”
This time, she shared a bit more. She told me about growing unhappiness in her training group. A few mothers complained about the method; many trainees felt uncomfortable, but the trainers insisted: this is how it should be done – stick to it. No negotiation.
When my baby turned four months old, I overcame all the courtesy clauses, called her and said: no more.
She was sorry to hear it and asked if everything was ok.
Life taught me (the hard way) not to rub the truth in people’s faces. So, I said something about other commitments and family challenges. She latched hard on the ‘family’ phrase, inflating busy family life into difficulties. I sighed quietly. So be it.
“Don’t feel so bad,” tried my husband to console my guilt. “It might be for the best. If the interaction was so disrespectful, you did a great deed to interrupt her studies and postpone the release of a poor clinician to the field for a whole year, and maybe forever.”
Two years later, I sat with a friend on a slide in the playground and told her the whole story.
“No way!” she exclaimed. “I had a psychoanalysis student too!”
“Well?? How was it?”
“Great. She was sweet as. She said, ‘Do whatever you want, I’ll adjust myself, don’t worry about me’. We had beautiful chats, she accomplished her observation, and we’re still friends.”
“Hooray!” I cried out with a pang of envy. At least one of them dared to break the rules.
So, what did I learn from this episode?
In my hometown’s psychoanalysis institute, trainees are systematically taught to be rigid, inflexible, ignore feedback, and prioritise their professional method over people’s emotional well-being.
And what did the student learn from it?
I am not sure. It’s hard to assess.
But I’m afraid she internalised the wrong lesson……..
“Come on! Don’t cut it so short,” protested one of my draft readers. “You can’t leave it like that and go. What was the wrong lesson?”
“In one word? Disrespect.”
“And in more than one word?” she pressed.
I sighed. How could I put it in words? For many years, I had a nagging feeling of ‘something is wrong here’ whenever engaging with psychoanalysis. But I couldn’t pin it down to anything concrete. This poor student and her trainers helped me understand: psychoanalysis is strongly dogmatic. It is theory-driven and tradition-driven, and the theories and traditions are not necessarily in touch with the people they aim to explain – and help.
Here are a few of the wrong lessons my student and her obedient classmates might have learned:
- Do what your trainers tell you to do. They know better. Don’t argue, it’s pointless.
- People’s discomfort with psychoanalysis practices is not a good reason to stop, change or even critically reflect on the practice. (Empathy? Dignity? What’s that?)
- If your future client – sorry, patient – raises concerns about the way therapy is conducted, don’t forget they are there for a reason. Surely, it has something to do with their initial issues since our methods are just fine. Dig into their internal tendency to feel this way.*
- There is no need to be in touch with and learn from empirical fields such as anthropology. There is no need for grounded theory Participant observation is not legitimate. The psychoanalytical observer should keep neutral and not interact with the subject.
But this neutrality is non-existent! The observation completely altered my natural behaviour. Hence, surely, it would have greatly changed my interactions with my son – which is what she was there to learn about.
I wonder why, in our initial meeting, we didn’t talk about her accompanying me in my outings, watching me in my natural environment; as I said above, being at home alone with a baby is not exactly natural. Not for social animals like us. I had hoped to take her to one of my volunteering activities, but her unnatural behaviour quickly put me off from suggesting this.
On reflection, I find it disturbing that both the psychoanalyst institute and the Centre of Perinatal Excellence embrace mothers’ isolation from their social context and delude themselves into believing that they can understand us at all (not to mention help us) from this stance.
If I could deliver one lesson to the organisations and their students, it would be this:
- Watching a mother in an artificial situation, isolated from her occupations and social network, is not an adequate nor a legitimate way to learn about her intimate interactions and relationships with her child.
Instead I would encourage them to see the truth from a different perspective:-
We are the mothers; the life-givers. Respect us above and beyond. Our collective wisdom is precious. Embrace it. See us as the social creatures we are. Give us spaces and means to support one another the way we wish, to develop our mothering skills in social environments instead of dictating our practices from above. Ask yourselves – then ask us – how modern society pushes us off track, and what we can do to regain our stance. And by all means, sit down and listen.
And then the people will come back and say: ‘Thank you!’
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*Stephanie Foo describes in her memoir What My Bones Know how her legitimate complaints about a therapy course were dismissed by her therapist and blamed on her childhood trauma. Such experience is not unheard of.
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Mad in the UK hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.