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Discussion of Slade “Imagining Fear”Adrienne Harris Ph.D.a

a New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy andPsychoanalysisPublished online: 10 Jun 2014.

To cite this article: Adrienne Harris Ph.D. (2014) Discussion of Slade “Imagining Fear”,Psychoanalytic Dialogues: The International Journal of Relational Perspectives, 24:3, 267-276, DOI:10.1080/10481885.2014.911603

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Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 24:267–276, 2014Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1048-1885 print / 1940-9222 onlineDOI: 10.1080/10481885.2014.911603

Discussion of Slade “Imagining Fear”

Adrienne Harris, Ph.D.New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis

This discussion addresses the importance of fear as a key feature of attachment, examining some ofthe implications of Slade’s argument both for clinical work and for understanding of developmentalprocess. The discussion also is focused on the kinds of genetic and evolutionary theories most usefulin thinking about interactive effects, namely epigenetics, the study of genes in context. Finally thediscussion identifies relational theory, which focuses on fear as an implicit dimension of attachment.Bromberg’s work on dissociation is cited as an example of work in which fear plays a prominent role.

In reminding and also teaching an analytic audience about the centrality of fear in the attachmentsystem, Arietta Slade (this issue) opens a number of intriguing lines of investigation. Her paperis an exploration of the primacy of fear in the attachment system and of why fear has been sounderrepresented throughout the history of clinical applications of attachment theory to analyticprocess. She offers demonstrations of the clinical utility of considering the particular place offear. Finally, Slade offers a number of reasons, clinical and theoretical, to put fear at the center ofattachment and aggression as a derivative.

Slade is an ideal commentator on this problem by virtue of the double sides to her schol-arly, clinical career. She has an interest in experimental research and in developmental theory,which gives her a window into evolutionary theory in order to anchor her claims about fear’sfunctions. In her clinical orientation, she is more Winnicottian than Kleinian in seeing aggres-sion as an outcome of distress and fear, a conclusion I agree with, with some reservations, whichI discuss.

I am going to approach Slade’s paper through five points of interest and inquiry. First, I wantto look at the use of evolutionary theory in underpinning these arguments and to argue thatthe newer forms of these theories—epigenetics, or “evo-devo” (to give this approach its short-ened designation)—allow a very powerful integration of evolutionary models and psychoanalyticthinking. Second, I want to consider the question of why Bowlby (1969, 1973, 1980), as an indi-vidual, and fear, as an underlying force in attachment outcomes, have been so underrepresented.Third, I want to turn to work on dissociation, in particular the contributions of Philip Bromberg,which, I argue, are built on a deep appreciation of the potency of fear, although his explicitlanguage is different. Fourth, I want to offer some clinical work with an eye to the deepening

Correspondence should be addressed to Adrienne Harris, Ph.D., New York University Postdoctoral Programin Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, 80 University Place, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10003. E-mail:adrienneeharris@gmail.com

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understanding that a focus on fear can bring. Finally, I want to think about the potential for inte-grating ideas about attachment and infantile sexuality in the light of Slade’s comments and alsoto look at the intersect of fear and aggression

EVO-DEVO

The ground for Slade’s treatment and attention to fear and response to threat as the engine ofattachment is evolutionary theory. Her first account of the evolutionary argument seemed to bethe draconian law of Darwinian theory, which too often leads out of a two-person scene into aone-person psychology and to a biologizing of psychic life. I need to say up front that I am only aconsumer of work on evolutionary theory, not a practitioner, but I would like to take up the workof Myron Hofer, who presents a somewhat different picture of modern evolutionary theory thanthat quoted from Bowlby, Main and others. It may be an artifact of drawing on Bowlby and the1950s that Slade’s initial presentation of evolution leaves out the great move of modern evolution-ary theory towards the ideas of evolution in context: evo-devo. Later in the paper, Slade amendsher initial presentation by referring to “evolutionary theory (where environmental influence isprofoundly linked to every aspect of development) as well as biology and ethology” (p. 258), butthe idea goes by too quickly and is not sufficiently unpacked. Slade’s initial claims about fear’srole in attachment are anchored on Darwin, but this biologizes the place of fear in developmentin a way that does not do justice to the complexity of her later argument.

Myron Hofer, in a seminal lecture given in 2008, outlines the epigenetic perspective. I think itbrings particularly good news for psychoanalysts. The differences between classical evolutionarytheory and the modern developments are both subtle and large. When Slade says developmentemerges as a lawful function of the individual adaptation to the exigencies of actual lived rela-tionships, I believe Hofer and others would want to have development and evolution as morepowerfully interactive terms. None of this modern move diminishes the potency and centrality offear, but it shifts the terms and focus of observation. Perhaps inevitably in looking at Bowlby’sideas in historical context, Darwinian theory is predominant. Yet, even at the beginning, waybefore the revolution in thinking about infancy, Bowlby had a revolutionary understanding thatthe child’s experience of danger incorporates the experience of threat and the parental response.From a relational perspective this is already the kind of two-person experience that is centralto our thinking and opens a complex and powerfully mutative spot for fear’s effects and func-tions. Evo-devo allows the move Slade (and others) has made in examining the fallout when, insome developmental circumstances, the site of safety is the site of danger. This developmentalmoment (many moments of course) seems the archetype of that conflict or interaction betweenevolutionary forces and developmental ones.

Hofer’s account of evo-devo notes the rather astonishing return of Lamarckian ideas to evo-lutional theory. Not only is genetic process contingent on development and context but alsodevelopmental experience is seen to have impact on genetics. We are approaching a momentwhen transgenerational effects, so often debated and rejected, revive again in the contemporaryunderstanding of the regulation of gene expression in development.

One of Hofer’s important insights in reviewing the history of animal behavioral studiesof attachment is that the separation in conceptualizing development and evolution retarded asophisticated understanding of the emergence of complex interactional patters, different levels of

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DISCUSSION OF SLADE “IMAGINING FEAR” 269

organization, a concept that recognizes “events taking place simultaneously at molecular, cellu-lar, organ systems, cognitive/emotional and experiential levels” (2014, p. 7). The “psychology”of animal and infant is radically complexified through these developments in science and theory,which become, as Hofer suggests, natural partners for psychoanalysis.

THE ECLIPSE OF FEAR IN OUR CLINICAL AND THEORETICAL DISCOURSE

Slade rightly points to the antagonisms to Bowlby and the rigidity of the Kleinian perspective onthe primacy of aggression and “the death instinct” as forces occluding our modern appreciationof fear. But I also found myself thinking of another huge shift in our understanding of infantmind and capacity. Slade is one of the chief figures in a revolution in understanding infancy (nowperhaps 40–50 years on). I think this is an important element in understanding the consequencesof fear and its early dyadic mismanagement, and I would have liked to hear more of how shesees the transformations in our understanding of infant life via what we have learned about infantmind and the implications of that for fear systems in attachment.

Again, I would turn to Hofer’s (1994, 1995) work on reactions to loss and separation at anunconscious and often metabolic level. We can appreciate at this point in our history how power-ful and nuanced infant reactivity is. Susan Coates’s (2008) paper on early trauma details the quiteamazing shifts in medical understanding of infants. There is the shocking fact of how, late in the20th century, anesthetic for infant surgeries was inaugurated (Coates, 2008). The first time I heardthis, I suddenly remembered a long-forgotten phrase from a textbook on motor development, lastread in the 1960s in graduate school. The infant, it was said, is “spinal animal” (Magoun, 1958).

For me, there is a sharp irony in thinking of the exquisite care with which Bowlby unpackedthe developmental unfolding of attachment, fear, and separation, looked at against the Kleinianaccounts where processes of aggression and early anxiety are seem as innate or intrinsic. By rea-son of having repudiated what Bowlby was offering and by virtue of the undeveloped state (in the1950s) of the study of infant mind, Klein seemed observationally acute and theoretically dense.Lacking any way to think of early experience as subtle or psychologically meaningful, conceptswere installed as innate and instinctual. The split between the Kleinian psychoanalytic work andBowlby and his contributions is yet another of these horrid beheadings of dissidents (Bergman,2004), which have deprived our field of many potential points of productive exchange. Our ongo-ing (and perhaps currently less rigid) intolerance for difference is one of psychoanalysis’ mostglaring problems.

FEAR AS A SILENT ELEMENT IN MODELS OF DISSOCIATION

Reading Slade’s recap of the history of attachment theory, we see immediately the centrality offear and can wonder why it has been so underserved in the psychoanalytic attachment litera-ture. One answer to this absence, I think, is that fear is actually present in the relational workon early trauma, including intergenerational transmission of trauma, but more implicitly thanexplicitly integrated. Fear is central to ideas about dissociation (Bromberg, 1998). Dissociationis a phenomenon, as Bromberg (and others) have noted, triggered by danger set off for a variety

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of reasons, environmental and intrapsychic, but in development the danger is set off explicitly byperturbations in the securing parental base.

Dissociation is a far-reaching concept appearing in the developmental ideas and ideas oftrauma, in many theorists work. I am focusing on Bromberg’s development of this concept andits clinical application because he has been central to the relational project since its inceptionand because some of his ideas about the power of fragmentation and its function seem useful inthinking about problems of attachment.

Bromberg’s increasingly complex evolution of ideas about dissociation, its function, its inter-subjective function, and its fallout for character and relationships accords, very neatly withSlade’s attention to the power of fear and its management in the ongoing and indeed long-termconsequences for attachment experiences and self-regulation. If I might summarize the implica-tions of what Slade argues for, it is that since fear and a consequent need for safety is the primaryunderlying motive in attachment, the mismanagement of safety provisions has grave and long-term consequence. Ironically, but often tragically, the neglect in providing solace or containmentfor fear produces fear in its most virulent forms. I think also that we can see clinically that theinternalization of intense regimens of assaultive, or frightening experience evacuated out of amaternal/parental figure may yield powerful internal objects in which fear of one’s own mind viafear of introjects becomes prominent.

I would say that trauma theory, more generally, (with which Bromberg’s ideas aboutdissociation intersect), establishes the centrality of fear in a wide number of developmental crises.I would add to this the intergenerational transmission of trauma in which fear states linked oftento unrecognized experiences of disrupted safety in one generation leak into and terrorize the next,often in nonverbal and early unmetabolized forms. Fear, it seems, is a central aspect of thesetransmissions, making the parent as anchor an impossible site of containment, with dissociationthe sole mode of self-protection.

To be fair to Slade’s argument, the element of fear is implicit and not explicit in discussionsof dissociation and drawing out the explicit links to fear and safety open important clinical andtheoretical areas. I am reminded of a recent dream of a highly dissociative patient whose patternsof dissociation and fragmentation stem from overtly violent paternal actions. In the dream, she isin a house or a structure. And, as she notes, in the dream, she is in her 20s, the actual age at whichshe fled from home. She is now in her 50s. Only her father is present. His violence towards heris acute, physical, terrifying, worse she initially imagines than she remembers. Her brother offershelp but warns that help cannot come immediately. She must wait, and inexorably she beginsto freeze. In the dream report, she takes pains to tell me that in the beginning of the freeze, sheimagines that she is pretending to freeze. She begins by thinking she is performing paralysis andblankness and then, to her horror, she comes to realize that the freeze has become truly so. Thereare dead spaces in her. Her affect in the dream is sheer terror. Her mother is absent, as she wasin life. In her treatment the appearance of this dream is actually a good sign. Something inchoateis heaving into awareness. Thinking through Slade’s lens of fear and safety, I pay attention tothe affect fear with a new degree of interest. But I would continue to that that this dream andthis patient are driven by dissociative strategies to stay with and yet safe in an unsafe universe,dominated by an unsafe parent. We looked closely at her sense that he was worse in the dreamthan in life and could wonder if the capacity to dream and a safe person to tell the dream to haverendered her memory more accurate.

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For me, one of the signature moments Bromberg theorizes arises when a child sense/knowsthose in order to maintain some tie to a precious other, he/she must fracture mental life. Splitsin thought or affect allow some fragile link. Safety trumps sanity and mental coherence. Andas Slade notes, the long-term sequelae of this is a massive amount of dysregulation and anoften lifelong struggle with the management of fear. This is, I think, an illustration of Slade’score idea, regarding the centrality of fear, in instances when the source of fear is the attach-ment figure her-/himself. We are very accustomed to noting the prominence of dysregulation.So it is important that Slade captures for a clinical readership the prior presence of fear asa producer of dysregulation, lasting well beyond the moments or periods of dysregulationsestablishment.

These ideas have had great and extensive impact on clinical work—in trauma patients, butcertainly in understanding the disruption in attachment that life with a dangerous object brings.Where Slade’s attention to fear and Bromberg’s model of dissociation intersect beautifully itseems to me is that Slade points to the continuing potency of fear over time and the unsettledstates, hyperarousals and anguish that lurks beneath the dissociative freeze. As both Brombergand Slade would agree, splitting and fragmentation solve and don’t solve an intolerable dilemma,the child’s need to be linked to a primary object that has proved to be dangerous and frightening.This process is manifest and visible in marked degrees in the clinical and observational work ofBeebe. Tapes of a very young infant with a looming intrusive parent show a baby that appearsalmost to have lost consciousness in the presence of such intrusion. Fear and dissociation seemco-terminus

In the service of preserving an attachment in some form, however pathological, a child, aperson, anyone would fragment his/her own mind rather than give up the tie. Sanity, continuity,and mental freedom, are, in situations desperate and seminormal, abandoned in order to maintaina tie to another. Coherence and presence are, from early on in childhood, easily sacrificed toa circumstance in which the child learns with deep, if unconscious, clarity that erasure is theprecondition for presence and link. Mental integration is sacrificed to links that all too often arebeing made to dangerous or dying objects.

We are used to thinking of dissociation as an act of separation or splitting of self and self-statesand an experience of splitting off links to the other. The paradox in this is worth savoring. Themaintenance of a link necessitates in certain children and certain situations, an attack on theirown mind, and on the potential for integration. Internal disconnects to maintain the tie to fragilefigures.

I find this idea useful, even necessary, in the context of many treatments in which tenaciousattachment to dangerous objects persist without remitting, and often in the face of all appealsto reality. Jean Henri Rey (1988) was talking about such patients when he began to notice thesecret project of many analysands—to bring damaged internal objects into treatments so theycan be healed, a project inevitably necessary to the patient if they are to get better. Rey goes onto speculate on the presence of dying objects, dying parts of the self, and for many patients theconfusion on who to save and who to kill off. But over and over, the splits and dissociations,which maintain a hidden tie, fracture and derail the patient. Hidden attachments dominate andfundamental fears of separation (leaving either the object of the self in isolated danger) trump anyprocess of change. Ferenczi has identified this project in his concept of the “teratoma.” In thisconcept, Ferenczi is building an image of the child’s maintenance of a dead internal object (like a

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twin who dies in utero and is carried in the living child) something lost early in development andcarried hidden and burdensome through adulthood, split off and yet maintained in a secret halflife.

I believe one sees this in the strategies of handling disorganized attachment in which radicalsplits in the child’s functioning, the creation of omnipotent bulwarks and the evacuation of manyneeded and cherished affects is undertaken to maintain this fragile tie to the disrupted and disor-ganizing parent. Dissociation in this sense is a deep aspect of the complex project in which peoplelive fractured lives but lives also “mortgaged” to strange objects. Half dead. Dying. Murdered.

Slade’s account of the importance of Bowlby’s work in the postwar period with de-domiciledadolescent or children disrupted in wartime, made me think of Heineman’s (in press) work onchildren in the foster-care system. I have had the privilege of reading Heinemann’s manuscripton her work and both Bromberg’s work on dissociation and Slade’s account of the impact of dis-rupted attachments on the potency of fear in children seem highly relevant. Heineman describesboth an inner emptiness in multiply abandoned and displaced children and a powerful terror ofnew attachments and links, often begun in treatment. Recently, in lecturing on the Barangers’work on the consulting room as a field holding crucial psychic material, a young cliniciandescribed working with a child who was in foster care. The consulting room had been changed,with furniture and objects moved and removed. As the little boy entered the room with his ther-apist, he looked around and promptly fainted. As Slade theorizes, the immobilization generatedby fear was overwhelming.

REVIVING THE CONCEPT OF FEAR IN CLINICAL THINKING

I found that Slade’s attention and exploration of the role of fear and its primacy in attachmenttrouble was immediately helpful to me clinically. It has made me agree, as I said before withreservations, that the greater attention to aggression and intrusion in the study of disorganizedattachment has been at the expense of attention to the presence and role of fear and terror. Slade’spaper turns a bright spotlight on these phenomena

I think of two different patients where I think it is extremely useful to attend to the dimensionsof fear in psychic structure. They have organized a management of fear in radically differentways. In one case, a very long history of neglect and then deeply dangerous practices aroundfood restriction, inaugurated by a parent, produced a very schizoid structure. K lives in a maskedfrozen state, performing personhood over a lifetime. As we have unpacked this history, we dotalk a lot about buried anger, about the fury that needed to be masked in the face of hunger, andneglect and parental fragility. But increasingly and certainly, after reading Slade, I feel that muchof this defensive structure is a way to manage terror, which would have had no safe harbor forprocessing. Dissociation allows K not to notice pending losses, difficulties, hurts from friendsand families. I am not real, she frequently says.

Thinking of such cases, I am grateful to Slade for this reattention to fear as a crucial elementin attachment difficulties. I was struck by Slade’s quote of Ledoux: “Not only is fear conditioningquick it is very long lasting. The passing of time is not enough to get rid of it” (p. 257). In thispatient’s situation, the fear of imminent death from starvation and the dissociative collapse thatensued remain over decades absolutely unmediated. Slade’s use of Porges seems extraordinarilyuseful for many clinical circumstances. Slade, Porges, and Bromberg, for me, line up in a very

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potent way: immobilization generated in reaction to and through fear. With a quite horrible irony,the mimesis of death creates a kind of psychic death from which recovery of a regulated state isextremely difficult.

My other example, my patient L, handles the impossibility of safe attachment and the atten-dant fear in a radically different way. Her mind is a boiling cauldron of self-hatred and self-attack.Internalized malignant introjects pour bile and loathing and shaming into a mostly aching over-wrought mind. There is no question that anger plays a role in how debilitated the patient feels.If she contacts any anger explicitly at some external source—like her analyst—she becomesalmost stuporous, sleepy, dazed. But I think it has been useful to think of the patient trappedin a fear-driven system. There is no comfort from the objects that make clear to her that she isonly and always failing. To remain attached, she must echo their attacks on her. She must findtheir judgment plausible and right. There is no safety anywhere: either making an effort in theworld or collapsing. She fears abandonment constantly. She will fail to perform as wished forand will be discarded. There is also no place to be safe with another. As I have thought of thiswoman’s predicament—and mine as her analyst—I feel quite divided in considering the relativeinvolvement of fear and aggression. Sometimes it is necessary and helpful to attend more to theanxieties about transitions, about separations that are very acute. Going from light to dark, warmto cold, inaugurates massive anxiety. But the patient is powerfully disregulated by her own anger,whatever its developmental origins (and they involve both an identification with an aggressorand internalization of a violent maternal voice) along with many experiences of fear where thereseems to be no point of safety. And as Slade suggests, the hyperarousal and presence of exces-sive fear is powerfully tenacious. But so is aggression, and I am not sure of the clinical utility ofprivileging one over the other. Context and mood and conditions of the field seem more usefullyto dictate clinical understanding and clinical choices.

In this patient’s circumstance, the anxiety and terrors in the primary parent were substantialand accompanied by some violence from early infancy. Bromberg’s description of the phenomenaof dissociation is viscerally and palpably a description of a fear state, a fight-or-flight responsewhen neither are technically available, so flight is internal, mental, emotional, a kind of mentalgymnastics whereby the endangered child mentally evacuates body for space on the ceiling orsimply goes online. From Hofer’s work, we know this is mammalian. Animals freeze.

ATTACHMENT, SEXUALITY AND AGGRESSION: INTEGRATION OR SEPARATELINES OF DEVELOPMENT

There is a long and contentious history of debate around the relation of attachment and sexuality,waged in two directions.

It seems to me that this epigenetic model in evolutionary theory, in its neat fit withpsychoanalytic aims, might allow us to think of different aspects of development as bothinteractive and integrated. It is perhaps the core mark of psychoanalysis is to see that manyexperiences—feelings, thoughts, bodily states—partake of both multiple streams of psychic lifeand levels of conscious and unconscious experience. It is the intermingling of sex and aggression,love and fear, erotization and shame, that is perhaps the defining attribute of a psychodynamicapproach. Freud’s project, at base, was to see how one kind of experience was leaning on another.The revolutionary insight of psychoanalysis is surely to see the use of one process for other

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purposes. Sexualizing aggression, sexualizing fear. We don’t seem to have difficulty seeing theerotization of violence in contexts of abuse, yet one pathway that has been hard to consider withincontemporary psychoanalysis is that it would be important to pursue interconnecting attachmentand sexuality.

It is hard to know how or why the attention to infantile sexuality is so eclipsed and so oddlyand yet completely sequestered from attachment. I would want to argue that a psychoanalyticdevelopment theory cannot be true to an inquiry into unconscious life and at the same time holdon to an old model of lines of development as though complex phenomena like thought andspeech, or evolving affect states, or sexual life and fantasy unfold in isolated atomistic solitude.

The erotization of aggression, the infusion of drive or energy or excitement into many otherpsychic processes, is the hallmark of a psychoanalytic approach—whatever the orientation, oneperson or two person.

None of this argues for the collapse of one process into another, attachment and sexualitywould overlap, not be co-terminus. But could the kind of fear induced by ruptures and exigenciesin attachment become erotized or libidinized under any number of different developmental cir-cumstances? How could they not? Andre Green blamed empiricism for the decline of interest ininfantile sexuality. On the relational and self-psychological side, the objection often seems moretheological or ideological. Early infantile life is suffused with sensuality; sexuality comes later.

I think in this regard I am interested in lessening the splits among kinds of developmentaltheories (Seligman, 1993) or perhaps opting to explore and elaborate more along Seligman’sdescriptions of “mixed models.”

In contrast, the “relational baby” is oriented to the outside world from the beginning, and particularlyprepared for human interaction; social relations are a primary motive. Although very dependent, thisbaby’s mind is organized, becoming increasingly complex and integrated as it meets a supportivecaretaking environment. Attachment relationships, self-object functions, and the various autonomousego structures are all examples of such phenomena. Thus, early development is continuous with laterdevelopment, since these same processes organize adult personality. Primitive psychopathology isnot the same as infancy, because normal infants are not disorganized or primitive, just less organizedand more dependent; psychopathology is a variant of development rather than a fixation to an earlydevelopmental stage. Direct observation of infants and children is given more weight. Interpersonalpsychoanalysis, self psychology, attachment theory, and the ego-developmental side of Hartmannian(1956) and Eriksonian (1950) ego psychology are all in this camp.

Mixed models preserve both images of the baby, to varying degrees and with different integrations.Winnicott’s (1960a) developmental scheme is the most subtle and extraordinary of these, capturingthe distinctive, bodily based frailty and interdependency of the infant’s world without sacrificing asense of the baby’s social nature” (Seligman, 1993).

Slade, in this paper, both has added fear to the mix of what triggers and dominates attachmentand perhaps also charts a developmental line in which fear predates aggression. My questionwould be how or in what way any of these affects as aspects of attachment experience do ordo not tell us anything about the evolution of sexuality, in particular infantile sexuality. Thisseems to me (and to others) a key developmental process to explore in regard to attachment, andI would be interested in hearing Slade’s sense of these phenomena, both their independence andinterweaving.

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FEAR AND AGGRESSION

Another question raised for me in Slade’s approach is the linearity of unfolding of fear andaggression. The question of aggression as primary or derivative is one crucial underpinning ofdiscussions of Winnicott and Klein’s different models of the function and evolution of aggression.I am not sure what would count as an argument about primacy and exactly how to parse fear andaggression, given both as early reactivities to experience. This may be a distortion or unwarranted,but I have always thought that the Kleinian focus on innate death drives or primary destructivenesshad to do with contemporary (1950s) construal of infant life where early experience seemed sounimaginable as to lead to innate as the only possible conclusion. Now our view of the infant’scapacities allow for very early constructions of intersubjective experience, in the style of Loewaldor others.

Slade’s clinical suggestions regarding the use of interpretation around safety and fear ringvery true to me. Patients do seem to find it more soothing to think about a need for safety andconsequent fear than explore aggression. But it is not, in the context of Slade’s discussion, exactlyclear to me why this should be so. If fear is the primary terror, why is not annihilation anxietymore unsettling than fear of one’s aggression, a developmental later emergence, in Slade’s view?

Bion (1959, 1962) is an interesting figure to think about with regard to the interaction of fearand destructiveness. In his description of experiences with psychotic persons, he seems clearly tobe thinking about internal and interpersonal experiences of extreme primitivity and early devel-opment. Fear and destructiveness seem both very close and very potent. Annihilation anxiety,which I would see as a very stark experience of fear and unsafety, is linked to destructiveness.Why do we have to propose a monolithic developmental line? When is aggression a reaction tofear so acute and immediate as to make developmental sequence perhaps not so interesting? Orto follow Ghent’s thinking on sadism and aggression: When is this an attempt to hurt and whenan attempt to find a reaction to a dangerous separation and its attendant fears? I think we have alot to gain in thinking integratively.

Many people reading Bion, note the deep terror at change, a feeling of change as a momentright on the abyss. This strikes me as possibly linked to the idea that fear is a crucial elementin the success or failure of attachment. If change is at base always some form of separation ordifferentiation, often some loosening of a tie to primary objects, perhaps this deep and potentaffective reaction is triggered even as growth and positive outcomes seem on the horizon. Thedoing and undoing of growth and maturation is one of the most difficult phenomena to integratein learning to do clinical work. Perhaps this focus on fear and its primary presence in earlyattachment experiences is partial explanation

CONCLUSION

We live in exciting times. There is more room for increasingly complex and nuanced modelsof subjective and intersubjective life, beginning in the earliest months of life. There are emerg-ing flexible and promising intersections of evolutionary biology, developmental psychology, andpsychoanalysis. Slade’s paper and her body of work locate us at the heart of these complexities.

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REFERENCES

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psychoanalysis. (ed. M. Balint). London, UK: Karnac Press, 1994. (Original published work 1929)Heineman, T. (in press). A home within. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis.Hofer, M. A. (1994). Early relationships as regulators of infant physiology and behavior. Acta Paediatrica Supplement,

397, 9–18.Hofer, M. A. (1995). Hidden regulators: Implications for a new understanding of attachment, separation and loss. In S.

Goldberg, R. Muir, & J. Kerr (Eds.), Attachment theory: Social development and clinical perspectives (pp. 203–217).Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.

Hofer, M. A. (2014). The emerging synthesis of evolution and development: A new biology for psycho-analysis. Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Psychoanalysis and the Neuroscience. doi:10.1080 �=15294145.2014.901022

Magoun, W. H. (1958). The waking brain. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.Rey, J. H. (1988). That which patients bring to analysis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 69, 457–470.Seligman, S. (1993). Infant observation and psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 62, 274–278.

CONTRIBUTOR

Adrienne Harris, Ph.D., is Faculty and Supervisor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program inPsychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. She is also Faculty at the Psychoanalytic Institute of NorthernCalifornia. She is an Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and with Lewis Aron, Eyal Rozmarin,and Steven Kuchuck, she edits the Relational Book Series.

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