The Trauma of Everyday Life

bed. Yet she showed not a trace of her anger or fear to anyone as she moved into her adulthood. She was ultracapable but suffered, in her thirties, from what seemed to her to be irrational bouts of intense anxiety about her children’s safety and well-being. This capacity for dissociation is a survival mechanism. It allows us to go forward with our lives but in a compromised condition. The shock of trauma sits outside awareness like a coiled spring. The emotions aroused—which by their very “unbearable” nature cannot be imagined—are left unexplored. The self that moves forward is restricted by its failure to integrate the traumatic impact, by its failure to process its unbearable feelings. In its attempts to “ensure that what has already happened is unlikely ever to be repeated in the same way,” 8 the defense of dissociation splits the self into a fiefdom of incompatible states. “The price for this protection,” says Bromberg, “is to plunder future personality development of its resiliency and render it into a fiercely protected constellation of relatively unbridgeable self-states, each rigidly holding its own truth and its own reality ‘on call,’ ready to come ‘on stage’ as needed, but immune to the potentially valuable input from other aspects of self.” 9 One of the consequences of this defense is that the self is depleted of emotional depth and fluidity. “Dissociation shows its signature not by disavowing aspects of mental
contents
per se, but through the patient’s alienation from aspects of
self
that are inconsistent with his experience of ‘me’ at a given moment. It functions because conflict is
unbearable
to the mind, not because it is
unpleasant.
” 10
    In the second chapter of Ashva·ghosha’s
Buddhacarita
there is a single verse about the demise of the future Buddha’s mother that speaks directly to the defense of dissociation. Written in Sanskrit, the verse was recently translated as follows:
But when queen Maya saw the immense might
of her son, like that of a seer divine,
she could not bear the delight it caused her;
so she departed to dwell in heaven. 11

    I was startled when I first came upon this verse. “The immense might” of the infant! His mother’s inability to “bear the delight it caused her”! The verse seemed to support Winnicott’s descriptions of the merciless way an infant loves his mother, the way he beats her like a drum with a mix of what we in hindsight would call need, hunger, love, aggression, and entitlement but that in an infant comes all in one package, undifferentiated, like a force of nature. As Winnicott explained in an early paper, “The normal child enjoys a ruthless relation to his mother, mostly showing in play, and he needs his mother because only she can be expected to tolerate his ruthless relation to her even in play, because this really hurts her and wears her out. Without this play with her he can only hide a ruthless self and give it life in a state of dissociation.” 12
    The translation of the Buddhist verse hints at a very similar psychodynamic. What kind of message did the infant Buddha receive from Maya when she died? Did he need to hide his ruthless self in deference to his mother’s reaction? Was this what his father covertly demanded of him by structuring his subsequent life to have no reference to old age, illness, or death? Is this what made him feel so delicate? If Winnicott’s musings apply, in what later state of dissociation would he have been able to give life back to his ruthless self? As we shall see, there is evidence to suggest that his six years in the forest after leaving home provided him ample opportunity to dwell within just the sort of dissociated state Winnicott envisioned.
    I was moved, however, not only by the thought of the infant Buddha without his mother to absorb his love but also by the image of a mother unable to bear her delight. Having fathered two children myself, I felt a vague sympathy for Maya. In psychoanalysis these days, the emphasis is so often on the psychic state of the infant that the intensity of adult experience is commonly shortchanged. And it seems easier for psychoanalysts to talk about negative feelings—aggression and its derivatives—than about ordinary ecstatic ones that evoke fear as well as pleasure. The delight of the parent seems a wonderful thing to highlight.
    Ashva·ghosha’s biography actually makes another reference to the Buddha’s parents’ delight, in