The Trauma of Everyday Life

slowly let in, or out, the un-worked-through unpleasantness of the past. In Winnicott’s language, the therapist creates a holding environment, a field of awareness, that mimics that of the early parent-infant bond. It does not duplicate it, but it is close enough that a sense of safety is reestablished and one’s defenses are allowed to relax. In the Buddha’s experience, the relational aspects of Winnicott’s therapy were collapsed into meditation. In his case, the capacity to make the mind into an object of mindfulness, to know the mind knowing, created a holding environment for the entire range of his emotional experience. To return to the metaphor of the sky so favored in the Buddhist tradition, the Buddha’s recognition of the background presence of the luminous emptiness of awareness allowed him to hold the splinters of his emotional life in a new way. While the splinters did not disappear, they lost their special status. They could coexist with his knowing mind just as the clouds coexist with the sky. In discovering his knowing mind, the Buddha demonstrated that there is an ongoing rapport that continues, within the individual, long after he or she emerges from the infantile parent-child matrix. The relational capacity that begins in infancy when we are totally dependent on our caretakers endures. We have the ability to be both subject and object to ourselves, and this capacity of reflective self-awareness has the potential to enlighten us, to ease the burdens we all carry.
    In the Buddha’s self-analysis, and in his later teachings on mindfulness, we can see his relational self in action. It is as if he were reproducing the parent-infant dynamic internally but taking it to a higher level. Listen to one of today’s foremost researchers on mother-infant rapport, Peter Fonagy, to have a sense of how close the parallels are. He uses the word “affective” in his writing in the place of “emotional,” but he is talking about the same thing, about how babies are helpless in the face of the onslaught of their own feelings.
We suggest that the infant only gradually realizes that he has feelings and thoughts, and slowly becomes able to distinguish these. This happens mainly through learning that his internal experiences are meaningfully related to by the parent, through her expressions and other responses. These habitual reactions to his emotional expressions focus the infant’s attention on his internal experiences, giving them a shape so that they become meaningful and increasingly manageable. . . . The parent who cannot think about the child’s mental experience deprives him of the basis for a viable sense of himself. . . .
Within a secure or containing relationship, the baby’s affective signals are interpreted by the parent, who is able to reflect on the mental states underlying the baby’s distress. For this reflection to help the baby, it needs to consist of a subtle combination of mirroring and the communication of a contrasting affect. The nature of the object’s mirroring may be most easily understood in the context of our description of the parent’s pretend play with the child: thus, to contain the child’s anxiety, the mother’s mirroring expression will display a complex affect, which combines fear with an emotion incompatible with it, such as irony. . . . We believe that the infant is soothed (or contained) through much the same process. 6

    Fonagy is describing the way a parent helps a child make feelings tolerable. He is evoking the means by which an attentive parent creates a field in which feelings can be known. In his view, this is an ongoing process, in which the parent attends to what is going on in the child, reflects upon it, and interprets it for him. Young children or infants have no idea what their feelings are. They are moved by them and possessed by them, but their minds do not yet have the capacity to hold or symbolize or name or understand what is going on. For this they are totally dependent on the adults who care for them. Fonagy describes what he has found in his laboratory, where he and his colleagues have observed infants with their parents. The good-enough parent senses what is going on in her child and mirrors it back with a slight twist. She lets the child know that she knows what is happening and she lightens it a bit with her combination of ironic detachment and sensitive attunement. The parent knows that whatever is happening is not the end of the world. If