Negative Maternal Attributions, Projective Identification, and the Intergenerational Transmission of Violent Relational Patterns

Robin C. Silverman, Ph.D. and Alicia F. Lieberman, Ph.D.

This paper discusses one family's struggle with domestic violence involving three generations. In this case, coercive negative maternal attributions interacted with parent-to-child projective identification, which resulted in the child's internalization of parental perceptions involving confusion around danger and protection from danger. Projective identification occurs as readily from a parent to a child as from a child to a parent. As is illustrated, when the parent's use of projective identification is excessive, it has severe implications for the whole of the child's psychic development (Lieberman, 1992, 1994, 1997,

We extend our deepest appreciation to Maria St. John for her significant conceptual and editorial contributions at every stage of our writing of this paper. We also thank Patricia Van Horn and the editors, Stephen Mitchell and Neil Altman, for their thoughtful readings of and assistance with the preparation of the manuscript. Robin Silverman was the therapist in this case, and Alicia Lieberman provided clinical supervision.
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in press; Seligman 1993, 1995, this issue; Silverman, Lieberman, and Pekarsky, 1997 ). The case presentation is followed by a theoretical discussion based on Bowlby's (1980) construct of internal working models and their relationship to the child'sattachment system and the mother's complementary caregiving system. The concept of parental attributions is then discussed as a specific aspect of the parent's internalrepresentation of the child and is considered together with the psychoanalytic concept of projective identification as put forth by Wilfred Bion. The discussion traces the application of the theoretical constructs within the relationship between Laura and Isabelle and examines Isabelle's inability to think in relation to aggression as the link to the intergenerational transmission within this family of violent relational patterns. MANY FAMILIES EXPERIENCE VIOLENCE ACROSS GENERATIONS. AS important as this observation is, it is an empty one in and of itself. The forms, experiences, and expressions of violence vary infinitely within families and among individuals. The means of transmission of these violent patterns are equally diverse, reflecting thecomplex individuality of transmitters and receptors alike. These particularities notwithstanding, our clinical findings suggest the possibility of identifying some common elements of experience and transmission. The mechanics involved in the carrying over of violent patterns from a parent to a child come into focus through an articulation of the relationship between concepts from attachment theory and Kleinian theory. Certain phenomenological aspects of these theories, considered together, are helpful in delineating both the processes by which parents transmit traumatically based internal representations to their children and the child's assumption of the parent's experience, which is then secured at the level of fantasy and manifested in costly cognitive, affective, and behavioral patterns. 1

1 Much of infant research is dedicated to the further explication of shared experience between the mother and the

infant and the ways in which such shared experience becomes part of who the infant than is. See, for example, Trevarthen (1979), Stern (1985), Massie et al. (1988), and Braten (1987), Murray (1991).
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The case presented involves a 29year-old divorced woman, Laura, and her four-year-old daughter, Isabelle. Having experienced extreme violence in her family of origin and in subsequent relationships, Laura felt an urgent need to impress on her daughter the dangerousness of the world in general and of Isabelle's intermittently incarcerated father in particular. Laura believed that if Isabelle could learn to be vigilant and self-protective, she might evade the fate of victimization and abuse that had befallen her mother. In an attempt to teach Isabelle to become self-protective, Laura exposed the child to painful and frightening situations, repeatedly traumatizing her in an effort to protect her. Laura's exaggerated concern for Isabelle's safety represented a conscious attempt to provide for her child the care that she felt her parents had not provided for her. Yet her inability to protect Isabelle

without at the same time assaulting her psychologically revealed the conservative nature of Laura's unconscious traumaticattachment to her own parents, which involved uncontained rage and resentment as well as disorganized terror. It was under the guise of protecting her daughter that the most direct repetitions of Laura's violent childhood experiences were reenacted with her own child. Laura's confusing assaults impeded Isabelle's development of a reliable system of recognition of and response to potential danger. Throughout development, childrenregister a continuum of experiences ranging from mild concern, through concerted worry, to alarm, fear, and even terror, although under optimal circumstances, they are protected by their caregivers from dangerously frightening situations. A child's ability to differentiate and manage these emotional responses to perceived danger is developed in part through the internalization of the caregiver's protective and reassuring attitudes and behavior. For Isabelle this paradoxical juxtaposition of messages created in the child a troubled and troubling pattern of relating to danger. Isabelle had difficulty both recognizing and responding to situations that other four-year-olds could identify and manage either on their own or by enlisting the help of trusted adults. For example, Isabelle wandered away in public places, interacted with strangers without relying on her mother as a source for social reference, and spaced out in response to her mother's expressions of alarm at these behaviors. This spacing out, in turn, enraged the mother, who berated her child for being what she called densei.e. unable to understand and cope with obvious risks to her safety.
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Case Illustration
Treatment Approach
Treatment took place at the Child Trauma Research Project, a mental health program providing childmother psychotherapy to children who have witnessed the physical battering of their mothers. (For a more complete description of the program, see Lieberman, Van Horn, Grandison, and Pekarsky, 1997.) Based on infantparent psychotherapy as developed by Selma Fraiberg and her colleagues, therapists in our project treat the mother and the child together using a flexible, psychodynamically oriented treatment approach that can include home visiting, advocacy, and nondidactic developmental guidance (Fraiberg, Adelson, and Shapiro, 1975; Fraiberg, 1980; Lieberman, 1992, Lieberman and Pawl, 1993; Seligman, 1994; Seligman and St. John, 1995; Pawl and Lieberman, 1997; Silverman, et al., 1997)2 Childmother sessions often consist of a combination of three-way play involving child, mother, and therapist and some discussion about issues or events that are affecting the family. In addition, we hold regular collateral visits with mothers in order to exchange impressions about how the child is doing and how the therapeutic process is unfolding. A basic premise of classical infantparent psychotherapy is that the child's presence in treatment evokes immediate and deeply significant transference phenomena for the mother (Fraiberg, 1980). The meanings that the child holds for the mother and the interactions between them offer a window onto the mother's internal worlda window that could remain inaccessible in individual treatment. In using this joint psychotherapy with high-risk mothers and young children, the therapist gains the opportunity to attend with immediacy and specificity to the ways in which the child is at risk and simultaneously to address the mother's history and psychological experience.

History and Background

Four-year-old Isabelle and her mother, Laura, were referred to our project by the San Francisco Family Court because of concern regarding the effects on Isabelle of having witnessed extreme violence between

2 See also Stern's (1995) review of infantparent psychotherapy.

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her parents. Isabelle spent the first two years of her life living with her mother and father in a small twobedroom apartment. She witnessed ongoing fights including physical battering and rape; on several occasions, she stayed with her maternal grandmother while her mother recovered from a more-severethan-usual battering.

Conscientiously committed to preventing Isabelle from going through what [she] went through, Laura insisted that Isabelle had never been hit and explained with pride that this was one way in which she had protected Isabelle. Laura also said that she had used drugs early in her relationship with Jake but had managed to stop in time to avoid intrauterine drug exposure while pregnant. Isabelle was a healthy, full-term baby who reached developmental milestones on an age-appropriate timetable. She was two years old when her mother left her father, and she did not see or hear from her father until six months later, when she watched from the window of her grandmother's home as he physically assaulted her mother. Isabelle's first two years recapitulated her mother's childhood, which was fraught with unpredictability and violence. Laura's father was an alcoholic prone to fits ofjealousy, which resulted in relentless interrogations of Laura and her mother about their whereabouts. In one instance, when Laura was eight years old, she was sitting between her mother and father in the front seat of a car. Her father became convinced that her mother was flirting with the man in the car next to them, and he hit her motherin the face with the back of his hand, inadvertently hitting Laura in the mouth with his elbow. He then intentionally drove the car into oncoming traffic, causing a severe accident that led to hospitalization of all three. This incident occurred against the backdrop of many less dramatic and yet, from Laura's point of view, equally confusing and terrifying moments. Her father hit hermother regularly in Laura's presence. Laura knew that her mother feared her father, and Laura described her own fear at not knowing what in particular would make herfather angry from one moment to the next. The final incident between Laura's parents occurred when she was 11 years old. Laura's father forced her to sit on the couch and watch as he held a gun to hermother's head. He pulled the trigger slowly two times, unloading empty chambers and taunting that he knew there was at least one bullet in the gun. This game of Russian roulette was interrupted by the arrival of an unexpected guest. The next day, Laura's mother changed the locks on all of the doors and obtained a restraining order. Laura decided that day that she would never see her father again
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and kept her promise in spite of his repeated efforts to make contact with her. However, her resolve did not protect her for long from the violence in relationships that she sought to avoid. Laura met Jake after a turbulent adolescence during which she used drugs and engaged in promiscuous sex and gang-related activities. Jake was much older than she was and held promise as someone who could provide her with care and stability. This sense of Jake as Laura's rescuer persisted over a few years, but the feeling began to change after they were married and Jake became increasingly possessive and controlling. Laura was considering leaving him when she became pregnant with Isabelle. It was soon after she became pregnant that Jake hit Laura for the first time. Laura believed that she stayed with Jake for as long as she did in spite of his battering her because they had a child together. She wanted her child to have a father. Laura reported that from the time she became pregnant until the time she separated from Jake, he repeatedly hit her, forced her to have sex with him against her will, isolated her from friends and family, and prohibited her from getting a job. 3 Laura saw no connection between her childhood experiences and her relationship with Jake until she actually experienced it through Isabelle's eyes. Jake came home one night drunk and laughing loudly. He was sporting a handgun, which he tossed about freely while boasting about having intimidated a man in a bar. Laura was taken in by Jake's antics and was excited by his story until she noticed two-year-old Isabelle standing in the doorway, watching quietly. The memory of her father holding the gun to her mother's head startled her, and Laura suddenly felt horror stricken at the thought that she had allowed Isabelle to witness this scene. Laura decided in that instant that she would leave Jake. Within a week, Laura and Isabelle moved in with Laura's mother. Laura quickly found employment, obtained a restraining order, and began divorce proceedings. As the divorce was being finalized, Jake followed Laura home from work, attacked her on the lawn of her mother's home, punched and kicked her, and told Laura that he wanted to kill her. It was at that point that the police arrived in response to Laura's mother's phone call. Isabelle, 30 months old at the time, watched the beating from the

3 This is a common pattern described by women who are abused by their partners.

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living room window until her grandmother noticed her and took her into another room. Laura and Isabelle began childparent psychotherapy in our project 18 months after this event.

ChildParent Psychotherapy with Isabelle and Laura

From the very first meetings, Isabelle appeared a talkative, playful, curious four-year-old child with many ideas and interests. She was creative in play and appeared competent and comfortable in the realm of symbolic expression. She awaited the therapist's arrival eagerly, reaching for the bag of toys as the therapist walked through the door. In every session, her pattern was to remove the toys from the bag, set them up, and dictate to the therapist and her mother her agenda for the session. Her play themes indicated verbal and intellectual proficiency and involved detailed descriptions of experiences that combined fantasy and reality. Laura also participated eagerly in the sessions, working hard to have household chores finished in time for the therapist's arrival. She was sometimes relaxed and well able to join in and appreciate her daughter's imaginative play as well as the therapist's observations. In sessions, Isabelle often became excited by the play and jumped up to run to get a toy. At such moments, Laura lectured Isabelle about safety. She pointed out all the ways in which jumping or running could result in an injury and what such an injury might be like. In response, Isabelle often forgot what it was she had been excited about and went off on long tangents, adding more and more confusing detail to her stories and play themes. At these times, the therapist had the experience of being held at a distance. Isabelle resisted interruption and left no room for inquiry, interaction, or other forms of relatedness while she walked about aimlessly. Laura responded with irritation and impatience to her daughter's distancing responses. In order to teach Isabelle how to take care of herself, Laura subjected her to situations that were frightening or dangerous. She set up test situations for Isabelle and then became exasperated and angry when the child did not come through with the desired response. In one instance, Laura asked a stranger at a playground to offer Isabelle a toy while Laura stood at a distance and watched. Isabelle eagerly accepted the toy only to have it abruptly taken away by Laura, who then reprimanded Isabelle harshly and lectured her for several minutes, telling her in graphic detail what terrible things could happen to
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young children who accept gifts from strangers. Isabelle responded by becoming emotionally diffuse or spacing out, a response that infuriated Laura. Laura reported this example to the therapist with pride, expressing her commitment to protecting Isabelle as Laura had never been protected. In Isabelle's presence, she then explained that, even though she had not seen or spoken with Jake in two years, she could never be certain that he would not appear and steal Isabelle from her. Laura then proceeded to describe the ways in which Jake had beaten and raped her. When the therapist called attention to Isabelle's increasing agitation and efforts to interrupt her mother, Laura responded by insisting that it was important for Isabelle to understand just how horrible her father was.4 Isabelle's confusing and painful encounters with her mother, in which she was attacked under the guise of being protected, were graphically depicted in her play themes. The session to be described immediately followed another motherdaughter interaction in which Isabelle was left terrified and helpless. While shopping in a mall, Isabelle became interested in another child and wandered off from her mother. This occurred after Laura had repeatedly reminded Isabelle that she had to pay attention and be aware of Laura's location at all times. When Isabelle became distracted, Laura stepped behind a wall and then watched as Isabelle looked up to find her mother nowhere in sight. Isabelle panicked and began to cry while searching about frantically. Laura then stepped out from her hiding place, took Isabelle firmly by the arm, and said, You see, that's how long it would take for someone to steal you away from me forever. Do you understand? Your father could come and take you, and you would never see me again.

4 One clinical difficulty in treating mothers and children together is the potential for traumatizing or retraumatizing

the child by exposing her to the details of her mother's painful experience. We find in our project, however, that mothers who have been severely traumatized have a great deal of difficulty using discretion or containing their preoccupations and that the child's exposure to the mother's trauma is an everyday occurrence and, as such, a central clinical issue. Three- and four-year-old children exposed to violence incur this trauma as they are starting to use language. Their newly acquired verbal and symbolic capacities are infused with the atmosphere of the mother's experience, as evidenced in verbal exchanges and play. By meeting with the parent and the child together, we become witnesses to ways in which the mother's experience permeates the child's psychic life, and we can address this issue

directly. Abbot Bronstein's (1992) paper was helpful to us in clarifying the implications of such exposure for the infant or young child.
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In the session that followed three days later, Isabelle picked out from the therapist's bag a dragon and a family of human figures. She initiated the following play scene and doled out the figures, assuming for herself the role of the babies, assigning the therapist the role of the dragon and her mother the roles of both the mother and thefather. Isabelle: The bad man comes into my room. [Isabelle directs Laura to move the male figure along the table.] No, first he comes down the hall, and then he comes into my room. [Laura moves the figure down the pretend hall and into the pretend room.] Laura: Okay, Isabelle, he's in your room. Isabelle: The bad man comes into my room, and then I run away and call 911. He's my daddy. Therapist: Your daddy? Isabelle: No, my daddy saves me. Okay, Robin, you have to be the dragon. Pretend you're the dragon and you're looking for the babies. [Therapist begins to walk the dragon down the hallway.] No, you have to say, [whispers] I'm a mean, mean dragon, an d I'm gonna eat those babies. Therapist: [While walking the dragon down the hallway] I'm a mean, mean dragon, and I'm gonna eat those babies. Isabelle: [Makes the babies scream from fear, then instructs Laura] Now my daddy saves me. [Laura uses the male figure to attack the dragon.] Okay, Robin, now you're dead. [Therapist lays the dragon down on its side. Isabelle takes the dragon and walks it into what now becomes the garden.] He's gonna plant a flower, Robin. He digs a hole in the dirt, and then he plants a flower in it. He uses his tooth. [Isabelle stands the dragon on its head and makes a digging gesture.] Therapist: First the dragon was gonna eat the babies, and now he's using his tooth to plant a flower. Isabelle: He came looking for the babies and the father and the mother. Then the mama dragon ate the babies. I had to wake the babies up and hide them under the bed and wake the mama up and the daddy up so the dragon wouldn't get them. Therapist: What happened to the babies? Isabelle: The mama and the daddy hid the babies and then pulled them up from the dirt. Then the mama and the daddy ate them.
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Laura: The mama ate them, Isabelle? The mama takes care of the babies, Isabelle. She doesn't eat them. Therapist: [to Laura] You're worried that she thinks the mama is dangerous too. Laura: Just checking. The mama takes care of the babiesright, Isabelle? [Isabelle averts her eyes and then trails off into a rendition of Jack and the Beanstalk that includes many innovations and elaborations but that does not include Laura or the therapist. The story persists for more than 20 minutes, until the end of the session, despite efforts on the therapist's part to reengage with Isabelle.]5 This sequence represented the patterning of the confusing and traumatic interactions that had come to characterize Isabelle and Laura's everyday exchanges. In such exchanges, Laura insisted that Isabelle's father was bad and dangerous and represented herself as good and protective; at the same time, she subjected Isabelle to painful and frightening ideas and situations. During this session, Isabelle attempted to work through this predicament via symbolic play. She worked at a frenzied pace that reflected, we believe, the seriousness of the task and the felt dangerousness of the subject. Aggression circulated among the figures in her play at a dizzying rate, reflecting the instability of her internal worldand the urgency of her problem of not knowing from which direction an assault may occur. She invoked a protective daddy to kill the dangerous dragon that, an instant before, had been the daddy. Switching from the mean, mean dragon who was going to eat the babies to the protective dragon who used his tooth to plant the flowers (babies) in the garden demonstrated her

confusion about danger and safety under the guise of the perennially ambiguous question of whether eating is an act ofaggression or an act of love. Isabelle turned the dragon into the baby-eating mama dragon. Then, in an act of undoing that seemed reminiscent of awakening from a bad dream, she woke thebabies and hid them under the bed. The mother and the father were reinstated as seemingly benign figures. Ultimately, however, the mama and the daddy together ate thebabies. In the resolution, Isabelle's confusion about her parents being separate people

5 We thank Maria St. John, Milton Schafer, Marion Birch, and Lori Case for their generous, lively, and creative

associations to this vignette.

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was revealed most dramatically, and the transgendered dragon could be understood to represent both parents at any given moment. During this first part of the session, Isabelle was somewhat pressured, controlling, and nonreciprocal in her play, but she was interactive and making use of her motherand the therapist. By contrast, in her Jack-and-the-Beanstalk story, she became diffuse, tangential, and impermeable. This shift occurred in response to her mother'sinsistence that she was Isabelle's protectoran insistence that was profoundly untrue from Isabelle's point of view. Before this exchange, Laura had succeeded in suspending her need to see herself exclusively in a protective role and had even allowed herself to assume the role of Jake as a hero. Laura had also tolerated the image of herself as a dangerous and devouring mother. As long as Laura could allow herself to be a locus of aggression, Isabelle was freed to explore with authenticity and determination. When Laura reinstated herself as the all-good parent, Isabelle became lost. When Isabelle was presented with the problem of a mother who directedaggression her way yet claimed that the danger actually came from other quarters, her solution was to move in the world as though there were no such things as emotional causality and directionality; she became disoriented and confused. How can we understand what transpires between Isabelle and her mother? It was Isabelle's need for and attachment to her mother that left her vulnerable to the intergenerational transmission of her mother's traumatically based internal representations. We propose, therefore, that Isabelle's internal working models of attachmentand of the self in relation to attachment incorporated her mother's negative attributions as dense and infuriatingly ineffective in coping with danger. The concept of negative maternal attributions, considered together with the psychoanalytic theory of projective identification, can be helpful in tracing the particular dynamic interchange between Laura and Isabelle, illuminating the process by which Isabelle came to manifest confusion or diffuseness in response to coercive interactions with her mother.

Discussion
Internal Working Models of Attachment
We discuss maternal attributions as a more or less conscious cognitive and affective manifestation of the mother's internal working model of caregiving in relation to the child (Lieberman, 1992, 1994, 1997).
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Bowlby (1969, 1973) postulated that biologically based attachment and caregiving systems underly an evolving and complementary representational system of innate relationships. He believed that the child's experience with the mother becomes organized as psychological structures that he called internal working models ofattachment. Such models originate in the infant's biological need for safety and develop in relationship to the caregiver's capacity (or lack thereof) to provide the infant with a predominantly reliable sense of security. Internal working models of attachment arise in the context of the child's experience with the mother or primary caregiver and evolve throughout the child's lifetime shaping perceptions, anticipating future events, and prescribing associated modes of relating with others. Influenced by ethological studies, Bowlby postulated attachment theory as a conceptual framework in which mental life cannot be considered as separate from the adaptational or evolutionary motivations of the species. In his view, the dependent infant's survival-determined needs to remain within close proximity to the mother and to be cared for by her are expressed through instinctive attachment behaviors that include eye contact, cooing, smiling, crying, clinging, approaching, and following. These behaviors

in turn elicit in the mother protective and caregiving responses toward her infant. The mother's caregiving system has an instinctive basis but is ultimately expressed through the filter of her own representational templates, which derive from her sense of being cared for and protected in her relationship with her own parents. When the infant's attachment system is met by an adequate maternal caregiving system, the infant's affective experience of the mother's care and derived meaning from interactions with her (and others) coalesce into flexible maps or internal working models that influence future interactions. These cognitive/affective maps continue to be created, altered, modified, or further reinforced depending on confirmations or disconfirmations from the environment.6 Internal working models are mental references providing a sense of continuity

6 In typical development, the child is an active participant in these processes. The infant's temperament, health,

responsivity, soothability, regulatory capacity, and so forth affect the nature of parentchild relational experience and include the child from birth as a partner in shaping the quality of this experience. In addition, the child's forming working models ofattachment interact with the parent's caregiving system, and each influences and modifies the other. In families in which parent-to-child projective identification is excessive, and parental attributions are rigidly imposed, the child's experience is eclipsed by and subordinated to parental impingements. Little if any of the person of the child is recognized. Over time, and withrepetition of imposed experience, the child's character develops in ways consistent with parental needs and expectations. Winnicott has poignantly described the way in which a child'sactive participation in interactions and self-expression may be corrupted in response to gross misattunements.
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between experiences; they become a part of the child's sense of self in relation to attachment. In normative development, working models become increasingly fixed over time but remain to some extent flexible and responsive to interactions with others. One account of psychopathology within attachment theory is the trauma-based rigidifying of maladaptive working models, which results in the loss of their openness to new influences. A rigid, inflexible set of interpersonal assumptions then predominates in mental life and constricts a person's mode of relating to others. Within attachmenttheory, security is the most essential psychological necessity for the human infant. Psychopathology can result from repeated and prolonged failures in protection andcare or from situations in which the person to whom the child turns for protection and care is also the one who subjects the child to physical or psychological injury (Bowlby, 1969, 1973, 1980). Reminiscent of W. R. D. Fairbairn's (1943) theory of the repression of bad objects, Bowlby believed that it is psychologically essential for the young child to preserve a perception of the parent as benign and protective. The child of a predominantly harsh, punitive, or rejecting parental figurehaving to rely on this figure for security and careis forced to cope with anxiety-producing encounters by engaging in cognitive distortions and psychic defensive maneuvers so that a basic belief in the parent as benign can remain unchallenged. Fairbairn believed that traumatic childhood occurrences resulting from parental malice or neglect had to be repressed because they represented a relationship with a bad object that was intolerable to acknowledge consciously. Fairbairn added that traumatic experiences with a parent are often felt to be particularly shameful. Because self and object representations are always linked, the childunconsciously believes himself to be involved in his parent's badness. Fairbairn (1943) suggests that infantile relationships are based upon identification (p. 109). When interactions with a parent produce representations of a relationship
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with a bad object, the already established identification leaves the child helplessly implicated. These unthinkable representations are relegated to the unconscious but make themselves felt in the form of repetitions that continue to organize relational experiences. The external object is thus protected while its badness is perpetuated in theinternal world. This theoretical paradigm can be applied to both Laura and Isabelle. Laura's internal working model of attachment and its complementary caregiving system were encapsulated in her belief that Isabelle should be able to protect herself. This belief stemmed from Laura's unconscious sense that, had she been able to protect herself as a child, she would not have incurred such injury. In assuming this psychological stance, Laura was blaming herself for the harm she experienced rather than taking in and grieving her father's abusiveness or her mother's failure to protect her.

This sense of personal responsibility and self-blame was in turn imposed on Isabelle so that Laura could continue to consciously protect her image of her mother and now of herself as all-good and allloving and to avoid grieving the loss of a fantasied benign father. Laura's insistence on dismissing her father as a son of a bitch and casting her mother as a saintly survivor represented her finding in (projecting onto) the external world a solution to her urgent internal problemher experiencing of danger as forever threatening any sense of safety. The split served to protect her from her own unconscious identification with both parents merged together and the resulting confusion of her own implication in the painful experiences that characterized her childhood. She was now involved in an effort to meticulously reproduce this same confusion in the constellation of persecutor victimprotector in Isabelle. The extent to which such confusion did in fact manifest for Isabelle was evident in her play, in which she was unable to keep what was harmful and what was helpful clear in her own mind. Additionally, Isabelle's own identification with both parents merged into one was demonstrated in her rapidly fluctuating representations of each parent and then both parents together as the dragon. Laura's basic confusion of danger, safety, persecution, and protection prevented her from mourning, a process that requires the capacity to make basic distinctions and to identify losses.7 Laura's inability to mourn her father and to experience the complexity of her loss forced

7 Descriptions of psychic phenomena involving the confusion of good and bad are abundant within psychoanalytic

theories of psychopathology. Perhaps the most relevant for this paper is Judith Herman's (1992) description of traumatic bonding, in which prolonged confinement in fear of death and isolation reliably produces a bond of identification between captor and victim (p. 384). Such bonding is evident in hostages who come to view their captors as their saviors and to fear and hate their rescuers (p. 384). Donald Meltzer (1973)understands this confusion to be central in perverse psychic organizations and does not necessarily link this experience to trauma. In addition, Herbert Rosenfeld's (1971) paper focuses on the psychological ramifications involved in the idealization of bad objects.
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her to perpetuate the split between her parents and to maintain a rigid internal experience in relation to both Isabelle and Jake. Laura's stance, that her father was a terrible person without whom she was better off, was indicative of a moral position that she assumed instead of mourning. As for Isabelle, her sense of her mother as a persecutor appeared in her play as she represented both the mother and the father as eating the babies. But her attempt to sort through her conflicting experiences of both parents evoked too much anxiety for Isabelle because of her need to preserve an image of a benign parent and because of her mother's inability or unwillingness to recognize Isabelle's negative experience of her. Mama takes care of the babies, Isabelle, she doesn't eat them, Laura responded to Isabelle's frantic attempt to sort out from which direction she could reliably anticipate danger. Isabelle knew that what her mother was saying was grossly inconsistent with her own experience. However, to register the inconsistency would have required that Isabelle reckon with the knowledge that she has a dangerous mother on whom she is dependent. Instead, Isabelle abandoned her attempt to sort through her experience and became disorganized. This interaction is an example of the way the stage was set for Isabelle to repeat (as part of her unconscious attachment system) interactions in which she is taken by surprise and confused by attacks that come from a person she feels she can trust.

Parental Attributions and Projective Identification8

The concepts of parental attributions and projective identification derive from vastly different paradigmatic origins and depict two different levels of psychic experience. As expressions of working models of attachment, parental attributions and their attendant behaviors are

8 We thank Abbot Bronstein, Stephen Seligman, Peter Goldberg, the 1996-1997 Mount Zion group, and the Friday

meeting group for discussions that were particularly helpful in thedevelopment of the ideas presented in this section.
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often observable within clinical material and are understood to represent the more conscious manifestations of experience. Projective identification is considered to be afantasy-level process remote from consciousness. We suggest that these concepts, considered together, are the

fundamental mechanisms for mutual involvement; they lay the foundation for the child's inner emotional life and relational capacities. Interestingly enough, it was Anna Freud (1960) who, in her paper, Discussion of Dr. John Bowlby's Paper, suggested that, by locating attachment as primary topleasure and focusing on actual events as opposed to the repercussions in the mind, Bowlby underestimated the complexity of mental life (p. 55). This criticism coincided with the theoretical polarization between Bowlby and Klein. Whereas Klein emphasized unconscious fantasy in the formation of the representational world, Bowlby emphasized actual events that occurred within the parent infant relationship. In the debates that ensued, Klein was said to privilege psychic reality to the exclusion of actual events in the etiology of psychopathology. Bowlby, on the other hand, was said to have postulated a theory that was simplistic and irrelevant to psychic life insofar as it did not include fantasy as a primary motivational force (Holmes, 1993). Projective identification was first named by Klein (1946). As Klein described it, projective identification is a primarily unconscious process that occurs in fantasy and involves both structure and content. Donald Meltzer (1967) regretted the difficulty of the search for the right words to describe the process of projective identification. He said that the term would need elaboration if only someone could find a word to express a fantasy function so remote from consciousness, save in fairy tales (p. xi). Numerous attempts at this elaboration have been made; some of the contributions of Wilfred Bion and Thomas Ogden are discussed next. Klein (1946) proposed that projective identification occurred in fantasy and had little if anything to do with the actual mother. Bion's theory opened up the space to consider an interplay between the internal and the external in the formation of the infant's representational world. Bion believed that projective identification was a necessary process that provided the earliest method of communication between an infant and his or her mother. Realistic projective identification involves a successful infant-to-mother communication that enables the mother to make use of her capacity to use her mind in
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order to help the infant. For example, a baby may cry to alert his mother to his hunger. The mother then understands what the baby is communicating and responds in such a way that the baby is soothed and satisfied. In Bion's framework, thinking is a mental function that allows for the tolerance of stimulation, so that inchoate, sensory experience can be transformed into material for thought and feeling. The mother uses her mind (maternal reverie) to transform the baby's experience of stimulation into meaningful experience. This transformationallows the baby to begin to tolerate stimulation and to develop within himself the necessary mental apparatus with which to build a psychic life. If the mother consistently fails to provide such a transformational function, the baby becomes repeatedly overwhelmed by what is now unmanageable frustration. The tendency to get rid of intolerable experience through evacuation into the object then becomes a defensive process that impedes rather than facilitates the development of an autonomous psychic life. Thus, defensive projective identification can be understood as a fantasy of getting rid of intolerable experience by evacuating it into an object and then asserting control over the disowned parts, which are felt to now reside within and be a part of the other. In these instances in which defensive projective identification is relied on excessively, and the capacity to use one's mind to transform inchoate sensory stimulus intomaterial for thought is impaired, Bion described alternative processes that occur in place of thinking. One such alternativeassuming omnipotenceis particularly relevant to the case of Laura and Isabelle. As discussed later, assuming omnipotence may give way to an experience of pseudo-thinking, which Bion referred to as moral ascendance. We believe that this theoretical framework is crucial to understanding the nature of negative maternal attributions and to what occurs in the interaction between Laura and Isabelle. Bion was the first to introduce the actual mother into Klein's theory of projective identification as an active and essential participant in the development of the infant's emotional life. He believed, however, that the mother is present insofar as she functions as a container for the infant's projective identification from within the realm of the infant's fantasy life. In this sense, although Bion's notion of the container and the contained lends itself to an intersubjective theory of psychic development, he maintained Melanie Klein's emphasis on a
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one-person psychology in the formation of the infant's representational world.

Ogden (1982) elaborated on Bion's inclusion of the actual mother in Klein's theory of projective identification. Ogden detailed the process of projective identificationin the clinical setting, and suggested that it occurs in three phases. The first phase involves ridding one self of unwanted or intolerable internal experience by locating the experience in an other. In the second phase, the projector puts pressure on the recipient of the projection to accept the projection and to act in ways that are consistent with it. In the third phase, the recipient begins to think, feel, and behave in ways consistent with the projection. It is as if these thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are truly one's own. Ogden proposed that the recipient's capacity to tolerate and manage these difficult thoughts, feelings, and behaviors is critical in the resolution of a projectiveidentification. The therapist's ability to manage difficult feelings determined whether the patient could reinternalize what had been projected, thus facilitating a maturational process. In this 1982 reading of projective identification, Ogden departed from a conventional Kleinian and Bionian perspective by emphasizing interactions that are thought, felt, and enacted. He made this departure in order to describe a two-person model of development, psycho-pathology, and therapeutic change rather than consider projective identification only as an intrapsychic phenomenon. Hinshelwood (1991) reviewed criticisms of Ogden's account. These criticisms suggest that Ogden lost sight of the primitive nature of projective identificationdowngrades the subjective experiencing of the subject and his unconscious phantasyin his attempt to describe it as an observable exchange between two people. Ogden's interpretation and implementation of projective identification as a clinical tool have since been elaborated (Ogden, 1997). Lieberman found Ogden's (1982) account of projective identification relevant to her work with parents and infants. Projective identification was most often understood to describe a developmental process that is present from birth and that occurs in the direction of infant to mother. Lieberman, in her work with severely disturbed motherinfant dyads, recognized the extent to which the mothers in these cases relied on projective mechanisms involving their young children in order to organize the mothers' internal experience. This, in turn, had significant psychological implications for the child. In her paper, InfantParent Psychotherapy with Toddlers, Lieberman (1992) bridged Ogden's early
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two-person model with Bowlby's emphasis on actual parentinfant interaction in the genesis of psychopathology: The concept of projective identification is a useful point of departure for organizing some of the clinical observations that emerge in infantparentpsychotherapy with troubled toddlers and their parents. In particular, the concept helps to understand the intricate process by which children come to enact their parents' fantasies of who they are and who they will become [p. 563]. This change in emphasis suggested the intergenerational nature of unconscious fantasy from parents to children and the primacy of sociorelational influence in the formation of the infant's fantasy life. In exploring intergenerational transmission further, Lieberman (1992, 1994, 1997) made use of Ogden's three-phase account in describing patterns of psychopathology evident in very young children patterns that stem from particular parentchild interactions. In keeping with Bowlby's model of development, fantasyorganizes itself around actual experience and the attendant affects such as pleasure, displeasure, danger, and safety. Lieberman proposed that rigid parental attributions and their complementary behaviors coerce compliance in the child at the level of cognition and behavior and affect the child at the level of representation and fantasy. As vehicles for the expression of internal working models of attachment, both positive and negative parental attributions involve the assigning of a quality, an idea, or a whole set of ideas to the child. Attributions are endemic to all relational experience, but their quality and intensity differ from person to person and, within one person, from relationship to relationship. Attributions range from flexible to extremely rigid and may vary in terms of the specificity of content as well as affective tone (Dix and Grusec, 1985). In the case of Laura and Isabelle, rigidity and content specificity of attributions went hand in hand with an inflexible parenting style and increasingly coercive parent child interactions. Particularly when imposed from an early age, inexorable, parental attributions and their attendant behavioral manifestations constrict the child's range of possible psychic and behavioral responses and coerce a compliance with these attributions because of the child's developmentally appropriate need to please the parent and to preserve the parent's love.
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The process by which Laura ensured a complementary parentchild experience with Isabelle could be understood as occurring via the three stages that Ogden (1982) delineated in his description of projective identification. First, Laura perceived Isabelle in a biased way directly linked to her early childhood traumatic experience. In particular, Laura saw Isabelle as dense and had the unshakable conviction that the child was unable and at times unwilling to protect herself. As discussed in the previous section, this conviction stemmed from Laura's own inability to acknowledge her own failures in selfprotection. Second, Laura responded to Isabelle in ways that corresponded with her negative attributions. Laura became increasingly preoccupied with coercively teaching Isabelle the importance of knowing how to protect herself. She scolded Isabelle for being dense, conveying to the child that this was an integral yet unacceptable part of herself. She then reinforced this message by exposing Isabelle to dangerous situations that were well beyond the child's developmentally appropriate coping capacities, so that the child was bound to fail her mother's test. The third stage of the process is that Isabelle behaved in a distracted and un-self-protective manner for example, by accepting a toy from a stranger without hesitance and wandering away from her mother without checking back for her. She also became resistant to her mother's admonishments, confirming Laura's belief that Isabelle was intentionally ignoring her. In fact, Isabelle now behaved in ways consistent with her mother's attributions. In doing this, Isabelle helped Laura to relocate her internal conflict into a reliably verifiable other. In effect, Laura vitiatedrendered ineffectualIsabelle's mind, leaving her helpless to use age-appropriate judgments of danger, just as Laura herself had been during her childhood and most of her adult life. Isabelle's compliance with her mother's coercive negative attributions allowed Laura to believe that she was accurately perceiving rather than impelling Isabelle's troubling behaviors. By doing so, Laura found release from a sense of herself as persecutory and from the intolerable feelings associated with helplessness, vulnerability, and loss. In this three-phase process, Isabelle was left in the same state of fright and helplessness that her mother had experienced frequently in her own childhood. Laura was not conscious of the link between her own history and the present exchange with her daughter, but her rebuking of Isabelle gave her momentary relief from her own internal experience of dire helplessness and despair. Laura's attacks on Isabelle and her persistent, misattuned negative attributions came over time to define Isabelle's internal reality. As Lieberman (1997) wrote,
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Gradually, the maternal attributions shape the child's sense of who he is. When this occurs, children come to see themselves and to behave in the ways their mothers see them and expect them to behave (p. 286). In both Ogden's initial two-person model and Lieberman's parent-to-child model of projective identification, however, fantasy-level experience is subsumed under the more cognitive, affective, and behavioral aspects of the parentchild interaction. Stephen Seligman (1993, this volume) characterized projective identification as a specific form of asymmetrical influence, with both internal-structural and behavioral-communicational aspects, in which one person is more or less controlled by the other so as to experience something that the other cannot allow within his ownsubjectivity (1993, p. 17). Related to this idea is Seligman's observation that projective identification can occur as readily from the parent to the child as from the child to the parent: Parents are always influencing their infants and attributing meanings to them, and so there will always be a dynamic interplay of parental projection and infantidentity and autonomy (p. 17). Seligman goes on to suggest that such asymmetrical interactions from a parent to an infant influence the formation of the structure of the infant's internal experience. We believe that the process Seligman referred to as asymmetrical influence has implications for the parent and the child simultaneously at two levels of psychic experience. Rigid parental attributions, complimentary behaviors, and the child's compliance with such attributions describe the cognitive, affective, and behavioral manifestations of coercive parentchild interaction. Projective identification, however, describes the inchoate, preverbal, psychic experience attendant in such interchange between a parent and a child. In making this distinction, our hope is to preserve projective identification as describing a primarily unconscious, fantasy-level experience that is outside of cognitionand language in mental life.9 Such a distinction is important for theoretical specificity and for clinical intervention. Because parental fantasies are predominantlyunconscious, clinicians are presented with infants, toddlers, or children who exhibit troubling behaviors that have meanings for the mother and the child together, but the meanings may be impossible to fully


9 Bion made the point of conceptualizing functions (e.g., alpha function) to avoid the premature imposition of

meaning on the mechanism for the transformation of primitive psychic stimuli (Symington and Symington, 1996, p. 61). Such mechanisms underlie the material that presents itself to one's mind in an intelligible form.
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comprehend. Attributions and their associated affects constitute more or less elaborated systems of meaning that organize both individual and combined parent childexperience. Attributions are the primarily conscious manifestation of projective identification and involve cognitive structuring that functions to provide one with comprehensible experience. In order not to feel crazy, the adult must have the sense that what he or she thinks and feels is objectively reasonable. In view of this, parents who rely on excessive projective identification also rely on complementary cognitive biases and behavioral reinforcements that force child compliance in order to effect within themselves and their child more congruent internal and external experience. Laura's unconscious fantasy that she was loved, protected, and cared for was maintained by locating in Isabelle the contradictory feelings of terror, helplessness, and despair. The splitting and projective mechanisms on which Laura relied in order to protect this fantasy were represented in Laura's attempt to teach Isabelle a lesson about the importance of paying attentionhiding from Isabelle behind a wall and then further terrorizing her with a threat of permanent abandonment. Laura justified herbehavior by the attribution or conscious logic that Isabelle's denseness interfered with her ability to adequately protect herself. Isabelle's response first of terror and then of diffuseness made no sense to Laura because, from her point of view, she was behaving in a protective and loving manner. Her daughter's response, therefore, only confirmed Laura's attribution that Isabelle was dense or would not learn and provided a justification for Laura's internal split. Thus, the attribution was the bridge to a congruent internal and external experience for both the mother and the child.

Omnipotence
Bion theorized that one's capacity to think and, in effect, to answer an unmet need with a thought allows for meaning to emerge. Meaning that arises in absence allows for distinctions between truthfulness and falseness that are necessary for engagement with reality.10 Such

10 Bion's (1962) notion of truthfulness and falseness, as put forth in our paper, refers to the structure of psychic

experience as opposed to any particular content. He is describing an achieved capacity to distinguish between inner and outer occurrencea capacity that lies at the heart of the menot-me demarcation.
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distinction involves the ability to acknowledge and accept what occurs beyond the boundaries of one's own psychic experience. As discussed in the previous section, in the absence of the other's mindfulness, the infant relies on excessive projective identification in order to manage frustration. If tolerance for frustration is enough to avoid activating the process of evacuation (psychosis) and yet is insufficient to allow for thinking, assuming omnipotence emerges in place of thinking. Omnipotence involves the capacity to tolerate frustration to some degree, but this occurs through resistance to the demands of reality by narcissistically controlling one's objects. One manages frustration by eluding distinctions oriented toward objective reality. In this way, omnipotence involves the ongoing undermining of the constrictions placed on one by reality. Although this results in immediate diminishment of frustration, thus reducing the need for evacuation of psychic experience, the process is essentially nontransformative and psychically self-defeating. In this way, Bion's theory makes a significant contribution to understanding intergenerational transmissions. Laura's own early environmental failures left her reliant on assuming omnipotence as a way of managing painful, unresolved traumatic experiences. Her incapacity to think and therefore to manage difficult feelings not only left her unable to provide an essential container for Isabelle but necessitated Laura's use of Isabelle as a container for her internal distress. Thus, in place of openness to learning who one's child is through experience, one's omnipotence imposes an image of the child onto her. The child, feeling unrecognized by the mother except insofar as she conforms to the mother's

attributions, complies with them and then internalizes the experience so that the boundary between selfexpression and external imposition erodes. Laura's attributions to and controlling of Isabelle were characteristic of omnipotence as expressed through what Bion (1962) refers to as moral ascendance. Laura replaced distinctions of objective truthfulness and falseness with absolute notions of right, wrong, good, and evil. These absolute notions persisted regardless of evidence to the contrary or clear indications of their injurious implications. In response to Laura's recounting of the department store incident, the therapist commented that, if Isabelle were to attend fully to her mother's concerns, she would be afraid all of the time. Laura responded selfassuredly, That's right. The painful feelings associated with fear were disregarded and replaced with an impermeable moralistic
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insistence that Isabelle needed to be afraid all of the time in order to be safe. Moralizing, as Bion describes it, finds expression through organized, value-laden judgments. Pathological maternal attributions invariably involve whole systems of meaning organized around an idiosyncratic and rigid sense of good, bad, right, and wrong. Moralizing can pass as thinking in that one can appear to be involved in reality-based distinctions. It does not necessarily appear as psychosis in which one's ideas would be bizarre but instead is expressed through sometimes rather subtle misappropriations of ethics in order to fit one's particular narcissistic need to exert control over one's inner and outer worlds. Laura appeared to be involved in questions of truthfulness and falseness with Isabelle for example, while actually obfuscating such distinctions through unrealistic demands, persistent negative attributions, and double-bind interactions. Although Bion (1961) does not explicitly make this connection in his paper, On Thinking, the capacity to make such distinctions seems to us to be closely bound up with one's capacity to mourn one's limitations and the limitations of others. Laura's incapacity to mourn her relationships with her father and mother and her extreme, prolonged painful childhood experiences forced Laura to rely on projective fantasies in order to manage intolerable experience and consequently made it impossible for her to be available to assist Isabelle in managing her own internal distress. Laura's reliance on projective identification was not so excessive that psychosis occurred, but it was enough to allow her to be rid of and stay rid of intolerable experiences at the expense of recognizing and treating Isabelle as a separate person with her own needs.

Summary
We have discussed maternal attributions and projective identification as the vehicles for the intergenerational transmission of familial violence. Projectiveidentification has been described as an unconscious fantasy of ridding the self of intolerable experience by locating the experience in an other and then attempting to control the split-off parts, which are believed to now reside within and belong to the recipient. Crucial to our application of this construct is the observation that projectiveidentification can occur as readily from a parent to a
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child as from a child to a parent and that excessive parent-to-child projective identification has serious implications for the young child's psychic development. We also discussed the distinction between normative, development-facilitating reliance on this process and its excessive, defensive developmentconstricting deployment (Bion, 1961; Goldberg, 1997). Whereas projective identification has been considered primarily as an unconscious fantasy-level process occurring outside of language and cognition in mental life, attributions have been conceptualized as elaborated systems of meaning that are represented in cognitive, affective, and behavioral manifestations and that serve to organize experience. When excessive parent-tochild projective identification is in operation, parental attributions must be diligently forged and coercively applied in order to bring about internal and external congruency for the parent. Children assume such attributions at great psychic and developmental cost, thus participating in therepetition of the past in the present on behalf of the parent and burdening their own future. In the case of Laura and Isabelle, Laura enlisted Isabelle in the persistent locating of her experience outside of herself and in an other, and she relied on moralizing (articulated in negative attributions and totalizing proclamations) in order to have her experience feel reasonable to her. Isabelle's capacity to think was then in turn severely compromised by her mother's use of her as a receptacle for her own intolerable experiences. Under these conditions, Isabelle did not have the opportunity to be helped in the

realm of managing frustration and developing a capacity to think on her own. As a result, Isabelle could not engage in reality-based distinctions. Furthermore, she contended with a painful and confusing internal experience of a protectiveassaultive parental figure that continued to traumatize her even when hermother was absent. These circumstances, considered together, left Isabelle extremely vulnerable to assuming her mother's faterepeating an experience without thetransformation, or learning, that comes with thinking.

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Article Citation [Who Cited This?]

Silverman, R.C. and Lieberman, A.F. (1999). Negative Maternal Attributions, Projective Identification, and the Intergenerational Transmission of Violent Relational Patterns. Psychoanal. Dial., 9:161-186