The Silent Patient

by Alex Michaelides

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive, and will come forth later, in uglier ways. Sigmund Freud

It was the psychoanalyst W. R. Bion who came up with the term ‘containment’ to describe a mother’s ability to manage her baby’s pain. Remember, babyhood is not a time of bliss; it’s one of terror. As babies we are trapped in a strange, alien world, unable to see properly, and in a constant state of surprise at our bodies, alarmed by hunger and wind and bowel movements, overwhelmed by our feelings. We are quite literally under attack. We need our mother to soothe our distress and make sense of our experience. As she does so, we slowly learn how to manage our physical and emotional states on our own. But our ability to contain ourselves directly depends on our mother’s ability to contain us – if she had never experienced containment by her own mother, how could she teach us what she did not know? Someone who has never learned to contain himself is plagued by anxious feelings for the rest of his life; feelings that Bion aptly titled ‘nameless dread’. And such a person endlessly seeks this unquenchable containment from external sources – he needs a drink or a joint to ‘take the edge off’ this endless anxiety – hence my addiction to marijuana. I

We leak all kinds of information about ourselves unintentionally – by the colour of my socks, or how I sit or the way I talk – just by sitting here with you, I reveal a great deal about myself. Despite my best efforts at invisibility, I’m showing you who I am.’

‘Choosing a lover is a lot like choosing a therapist,’ Ruth had said. ‘We need to ask ourselves, is this someone who will be honest with me, listen to criticism, admit making mistakes, and not promise the impossible?’ I

‘About love. About how we often mistake love for fireworks – for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still. It’s boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm – and constant.

Sometimes it’s hard to grasp why it is that the answers to the present lie in the past.

As Winnicott put it: ‘A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.’