“Hello object!”
“I destroyed you”
“I love you”
“You are valuable to me because you survived even though I did not destroy you”
“While I love you, I am also constantly destroying you.”(Winnicott)
Which mother has not had the feeling that she failed in her motherhood experience and was destroyed as a mother. A mother can experience countless devastations during the motherhood process. For example, when she cannot calm her restless baby, when she thinks that she is not suitable for motherhood and is not affectionate enough, when she tries to breastfeed her baby and feels unsuccessful because her baby behaves aggressively and wants to tear off her breast, when she cannot help her baby who needs sleep to sleep, when she even thinks that she is deprived of all the sources of pleasure before her baby is born and feels that she hates her baby. Any kind of destruction that can destroy the belief that she is sufficient as a mother can be mentioned.
The baby must destroy the object in order to establish a relationship as a separate person from the object (the mother or the caregiver instead of the mother) that is a pile of projections. Winnicott discussed the baby's desire to destroy the mother as an external object (the mother's feeling of being an adequate mother) and how the mother becomes the real object only by giving up on her in this destruction process. He argues that the baby does this not to attack or destroy its mother, but simply because it is a baby – a baby with brutal physical and emotional demands that no one but the mother can meet.
Thomas H. Ogden (2017) In addition to these ideas of Winnicott, the survival of the object - the living, breathing, emotionally responsive real external maternal object - in the process of "being destroyed because it is real, and becoming real because it is destroyed" is of critical importance and the development that brings the baby to object use. He mentioned that the mother was inevitably destroyed in the process.
So what is this destruction and destruction?
This destruction is the situation that takes place in the baby's unconscious fantasies. The destruction of the object is the destruction of the omnipotent inner mother (giving up one's dependence on her) and experiencing the reality of the external mother.
Ogden sees the baby's mother as intact, moreover, thoughtlessly, from the beginning. He mentions that it is a form of great pleasure and relief felt by the baby, who can behave in a casual, superficial, indifferent, playful, stubborn, angry and reckless manner, while trusting that the object will survive. The subject destroys the object, and then this surviving object becomes usable.
The mother not only plays a facilitator role in helping the baby feel the mother externally and developing the baby's inner world, but is also the person sacrificed for this development to occur. The mother cannot do anything but allow herself to be destroyed.
Ogden explains: As the object is destroyed, that is, as the mother begins to feel unfit to be a mother, the baby registers the pain felt by the mother. The baby's emotional response to this pain is an important point of the "intermediate position" between object relationship and object use. Thus, it becomes real because the mother is destroyed, and while being destroyed, it becomes "real" for the baby because the mother transmits to the baby what she feels. The mother, who has become a real person, survives destruction because she is an adult with mature emotions, ideas, and psychological capacity of her own, and who can apply this capacity as a mother to the experience of being destroyed and surviving while being destroyed.
This destructiveness is similarly used in therapies. It is also possible to see. This time, “Which mother has not had the feeling that she failed in her motherhood experience and was destroyed as a mother?” Let's ask the question by changing it. “What therapist hasn't felt like they're screwed up?” and “Really, what patient/analyst hasn't tried to destroy the therapist/analyst by wanting to see him/her alive and there for him/her, and hasn't waited anxiously and rejoiced when he/she found it?”
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