Letter to Psychologist: Lisa Osborne, Ph.D. (1998-1999) 11/4/98

November 4, 1998
3801 Connecticut Avenue, NW #136
Washington, DC 20008-4530

Lisa Osborne
Community Mental Health Center
Washington, DC

Dear Ms. Osborne:

I submit a paper that, I believe, provides insight about an important area of my personality, the issue of guilt; the particular type of guilt discussed, as well as the source of that guilt in parental blaming behavior, seems apt. See Friedman, M. "Survivor Guilt in the Pathogenesis of Anorexia Nervosa." Psychiatry 48: 25-39 (February 1985). Incidentally, one of my previous treating psychiatrists, Stanley R. Palombo, M.D., serves as an editorial adviser to this journal.

The author observes that survivor guilt arises out of interpersonal processes in the family and, therefore, orthodox psychoanalytic theory is inadequate to understanding the phenomenon (p. 36-38).

I am intrigued by the connecting link one can make between the stresses placed on a subject by family members who suffer from extreme narcissistic disturbance (particularly narcissistic disturbance rooted in percocious ego development that itself may have its origin in the child's adjustment to a defective mother) and the development of guilt in the subject.

Beren outlines various forms of narcissistic disturbance rooted in preciocious ego development:

Precocious ego development. This can be observed in the extreme unevenness of development, where certain capacities and functions may be highly matured or overdeveloped while others lag behind. This uneven development usually dovetails with the parents' inability to see the child as a whole in a developmentally appropriate way, and with their overemphasis on certain of the child's functions that fit in with their own narcissistic needs.

For example, the parents may give a good deal of praise and encouragement for independence, at the expense of emotional and physical closeness. Thus the child discovers that the parents will not accept his dependence, and learns early on to take care of himself. Or the parent may overvalue one particular ego function such as speech, so that speech becomes overvalued and used for defensive purposes rather than for communicative or thought clarifying purposes (citation omitted). What happens to these children is that they tend to use intellectualization and become emotionally removed and aloof. Another outcome may be the child who functions emotionally and physically as a little parent in the family, i.e., when there is an extreme form of role reversal in the parent-child relationship (citation omitted). Beren, P. "Narcissistic Disorders in Children." In: The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. Vol. 47: 265-278 at 276 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

I have reported that two persons in my family showed marked signs of extreme narcissistic disturbance, namely my maternal aunt and my brother-in-law. We can see that these indivdiuals' own interaction with their respective mothers fostered disturbed attitudes about mother-child relationships in general--attitudes that these individuals as adults actively, or propagandistically, promoted in the family as reflecting a salutary ideal of parenting, but which attitudes were, in fact, disturbed and guilt-promoting.