I talked to a worker at another agency about a client of mine. Often revealing. She said of the client's mother, calling her "Mom" the whole time which I find is a thing you either do or find extremely grating, "she's doing a lot of splitting," which is, o god, o Montreal, so true.
It's one thing to be on the business end of splitting when you're a therapist...well ok and since not every one of the vast hordes who read me is all "and then you won't believe what Melanie Klein said to little Richard*," I will pause to mention that by splitting I mean the habit of people who are for whatever reason of stress or personality disorder regressed beyond the ability to tolerate much ambiguity to cast the people they're interacting with as either all good or all bad, on my side or against me. If it's not something you've thought about it, I am betting you will next time you're around it.
Because who among us goes through the day without dealing with Axis II disorders? Who indeed?
Right so anyway when it happens to you as a therapist, it's fine or even good because 1) you're sort of in the right stance not to be knocked over by such things and 2) it's useful, at least if you put any stock in these things. (Say, did anyone read the thingy in Harper's about psychoanalysis? Me neither! I mean I didn't finish it. I've been talking to my shrink about my failure to follow through on things, though, so I'll get back to you.)
When you are subject to splitting as a non-therapist, it's just disconcerting. If you're the good guy*, you can feel a little skeeved by the twenty-foot wave of positive transference, unless you're any of us in their second year placement and you get to briefly enjoy the sensation of "oh wow, I don't know what I did, but I'm the best therapist EVAR" until the other shoe drops. And when the other shoe drops (and, again, in the current paragraph, you are not a therapist. Keep up!) it just feels like the client is being an asshole you are not paid enough to put up with.
Client's Mom was sort of a good person to deal with on our first meeting, from my explicitly limited perspective where good=gives good copy for a two-hanky Pre Plea report. Two thumbs way up for eloquent mitigation! Better than
Cats! And I was the good breast and she was forthcoming, focused, and appreciate of my help. Who can ask for more?
What always happens here is that you turn into the bad breast because public defenders are hard to reach--lots of cases, in court most of the day--and as this crazy but interesting prof I had once said "sometimes the breast has to answer the door." And in this increasingly strained metaphor, which is a danger of psychoanalytic thinking actually, the breast is actually the entire organization so when the lawyer is bad, I am bad.
What can one do but make a valiant attempt to understand why it's happening? And have a milkshake, maybe, because self-care is important? Ekh, sorry to bring up milk, probably not the best idea after all that. I mean right, what one can do is try to make sure that Client's Mom*** is in therapy herself, and hope that the therapist is good, and hope that therapy really can do something about the gestalt that conditions overmuch splitting such that Client's Mom does not come off as a raging asshole to too many people, and keep it in perspective that there are bigger problems than the possibility that none of this will happen.
I once watched a woman I worked with at a library win what could have been a yelling match with an angry patron (q: who could be angry at a library? a: lots of people!) by just nodding and agreeing and "Oh gosh I that does sound frustrating"ing until the person calmed down enough just to be a category 1 pain in the ass. It is good to keep in mind that the social worker's task is, in some situations, not to fix anything just because it's presenting, but rather to do whatever works to keep everyone more or less friendly while the bigger picture stuff gets worked out.
[For anyone who is all "why are you blogging about social work but not saying anything about the actual goddamn cases?" I would say, 1) watch your language, but also 2) I keep wondering the same thing. I think maybe it's because I'm obviously not going to share actual details because, duh, gigantor ethical fuckup, but I've noticed that when I anonymize things, they sound fakey. So, we'll see what happens with that...]
*note capitalization. Not Little Richard. Though Mahler had a session with Freud once, so I guess there's no reason Little Richard shouldn't have talked to Melanie Klein except that he almost certainly did not.
**or to be Kleinian in the way my shallow knowledge of MK allows, the good breast. I reserve for another time tales of my imaginary FreudCore band Bad Breast.
***to the tune of "Stacy's Mom"
