Intimacy and Alienation: Memory, Trauma and Personal Being

205 Pages·2002·1.43 MB·English

by  Russell Meares

Intimacy and
Alienation
Lucidly written and trenchantly argued, Intimacy and Alienation proposes
both a therapy and theory of human consciousness. Russell Meares posits
a duplex self in the William James model of an ‘I’ and ‘me’, but extends
it to include a third realm of being which manifests itself in a kind of inti-
mate conversation, which is non-linear in form and brings into being an
‘inner’ life or self. When the fabric of such self is damaged by a traumatic
experience, the resultant sense of an inner void leaves the individual without
a voice other than one that is externalised and environmentally directed.
The traumatic event is ‘unconscious’ both in the sense that it is not repre-
sented in an imaginative linguistic form and is recorded in a memory system
not that of ordinary consciousness and not immediately accessible to patient
or therapist.
It is the task of the therapist to foster the emergence of a form of conver-
sation which shows elements of ‘the stream of consciousness’ and which
will allow the integration of the traumatic memory into the patient’s experi-
ence of self.
Russell Meares’ unique exploration of the relationship between self and
language bases itself on evidence from child development studies and
memory research, while at the same time using illuminating clinical exam-
ples. At once invaluable to professionals in the field of psychiatry and
psychotherapy, Intimacy and Alienation is an elegantly written work of wide
interest to anyone interested in theories of memory, language and human
consciousness.
Russell Meares is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Sydney, and
Director of Psychiatry at Westmead Hospital, Sydney.
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Intimacy and
Alienation
Memory, trauma and personal
being
Russell Meares
With a foreword by Thomas Ogden
First published 2000
by Routledge
Published 2013 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2000 Russell Meares
Typeset in Garamond by
Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Meares, Russell.
Intimacy and alienation: memory, trauma and personal being /by
Russell Meares; with a foreword by Thomas Ogden.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Self. 2. Counseling. 3. Psychotherapy. 4. Alienation (Social
psychology) 5. Intimacy (Psychology) 6. Self (Philosophy)
I. Title.
BF697.M42 2000
155.2–dc21 99–36239
CIP
(cid:64)(cid:74)(cid:57)(cid:69)(cid:23)(cid:48)(cid:46)(cid:47)(cid:36)(cid:39)(cid:36)(cid:43)(cid:40)(cid:44)(cid:36)(cid:41)(cid:41)(cid:39)(cid:42)(cid:40)(cid:36)(cid:45) (pbk)
Cover design by Leigh Hurlock
Cover illustration by Amanda Meares
In memory of Robert Hobson (1920–1999),
my teacher and great friend, with
affection and gratitude
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Contents
Foreword ix
Acknowledgements xi
1 The self in conversation 1
PART 1
Self and development
2 I, me, myself 7
3 Conversational play 15
4 Two forms of human conversation 22
5 Memory 32
PART 2
The trauma system
6 Uncoupled consciousness 43
7 Disrupted maturation: the dissolution hypothesis 55
8 A theory of value 64
9 Feeling creates reality 76
10 Malignant internalisation 84
11 The evocative context 93
12 Priming and projective identification: on being constructed 101
13 Satellites of trauma 112
viii Contents
PART 3
Integration
14 Transforming the chronicle 121
15 Flights and perchings 129
Epilogue
16 The death of Narcissus 141
Notes 146
References 166
Author index 183
Subject index 187
Foreword
If a book or an article is able to manage even once to create a feeling of
surprising freshness of thought, I feel well rewarded for the time and effort
that I have put into grappling with the ideas and the writing. That Russell
Meares manages to achieve such freshness and originality on many occa-
sions in this volume leads me to feel daunted by the task of doing justice
to the energy of his work in this brief foreword.
For Meares, an understanding of human psychology in general, and the
psychotherapeutic enterprise in particular, must be built upon an adequate
conceptualisation of and way of speaking about what we mean by the experi-
ence of being ‘myself’. He discusses this form of self experience in terms
of an enormously complex interplay of such elements as language, memory,
early cognitive and motor development, ‘conversations’ with ourselves and
with others (which begin at or before birth), bodily sensations, the emer-
gence of self-awareness, and the experiences of intimacy and alienation. In
approaching this network of qualities of experience, Meares skilfully and
creatively draws together in new ways aspects of the work of turn-of-the-
century psychologists and psychiatrists including William James, James
Mark Baldwin, and Pierre Janet; the neurologist Hughlings Jackson; early
to mid-twentieth century philosophers such as Russell, Wittgenstein and
Gilbert Ryle; a panoply of mid- to late twentieth century research psycho-
logists including Trevarthen, Tulving, Schacter, Nelson and Bartlett; as
well as aspects of the psychoanalytic work of Freud, Winnicott, Bion,
Melanie Klein, Kohut, and others. Rarely will a reader find discussions of
projective identification, the characteristics of various coexisting memory
systems, and the outcomes of neuroimaging studies in the same volume.
Meares is without peer in his ability to elaborate, integrate and signifi-
cantly extend this rich and broad body of thinking.
One of the most original contributions of this book is contained in
the elegantly executed discussion of what we mean when we speak of ‘I’
and ‘me’ and ‘myself’. It is in this discussion that we have an opportunity
to begin by listening to William James speaking of the experience of
self which he thought of in terms of the experience of the continuous