Below is a published paper on psychological resilience. I describe mental functions associated with resilience, and use Barack Obama's emotional development, as elaborated in his published reflections, to illustrate my ideas on resilience within the context of real characters and lives.
Karim G. Dajani. Paper submitted to IPSO. December 2008. Elements of Resilience A Theoretical Contribution with a Concrete Instantiation
Psychological
Resilience is a compelling but elusive phenomenon. It has received
considerable empirical attention in the past two decades. Most of the
research findings, however, are not properly grounded in a theory of
mind, making it more difficult to mine their full meaning. Recent
developments in Object Relations theory provide powerful insights into
developmental sequences and mental activities that, I will argue,
underlie manifestations of resilience. Once a basic foundation for
awareness of self, awareness of other and the ability to organize
thoughts generated from an awareness of emotional experience in self and
other has been laid, resilience, I suggest, can be cultivated by
engaging in a set of mental activities that build psychological
capacity. In order to ground abstract theory with concrete human
experience, I will use Barak Obama’s psychological development as an
instantiation of this theory. In his autobiography, Dreams from my
Father, Obama recorded, with his own words, what he actually did with
his mind to evolve his character. The set of functions he engaged can be
organized into a method for the use of thought to evolve character and
solve emotional problems – hallmarks of resilience.
Findings on Resilience: The
literature on resilience, regardless of discipline or methodology, has
produced essentially similar findings. In every cohort studied, a
subgroup always managed to beat the odds and develop into competent
caring adults. Additionally, resilient individuals have emerged from
cohorts across the spectrum of diversity. The elements of resilience are
basically similar in all human beings (Benard, ‘04). Resilience has
been typically conceptualized as a dialectical tension between risk
factors and protective mechanisms. The idea being that protective
mechanisms mitigate the effects of risk factors, raising the probability
of continued positive development. Findings across studies have
identified a fairly small number of variables that reliably correlate
with on-going developmental achievements in risk-laden populations
(Benard, ‘04). A recent compilation and synthesis of the literature
on resilience identified a constellation of protective factors that
captures the essence of findings across studies (Benard, ‘04).
Protective factors are organized in two categories – external
(environment/other) and internal (self) – with each category
containing three assets. The external protective factors (other)
identified were the availability of 1) caring relationships that support
the development of 2) high expectations and provide opportunities for
3) meaningful participation in the person’s environment. The development
of 1) social competence along with a 2) capacity for self-direction and
the 3) experience of purpose in one’s life were identified as internal
or self-assets. External assets protect and develop internal assets in a
process that mitigates the negative impact of deficit in self and
other. The mechanics of how that happens remain somewhat obscure.
I
suggest protective factors correlated with resilient development are
manifestations of the capacity to regulate emotion (internal assets) and
build sustaining relationships (external assets). These capacities are
derived from the development of particular mental functions. Object
Relations Theory illuminates developmental sequences that generate
mental functions correlated with resilience in adults (Stein, H; ’04).
Here are the key ideas.
Object Relations, Mentalization and Emotional Regulation: An
infant’s mind comes into existence through a sustained engagement with
other minds. Repeated contact with care-takers who receive and transform
the child’s experience into useful sequences of thought and care, sets a
process in motion that culminates in the development of similar mental
functions in the child – the ability to transform raw emotion into
meaningful sequences of thought and expression (Bion, ‘62). Roughly
stated the material being transformed is emotion. Emotions, in their
incipient form, are bodily experiences (Ekman, ‘94). They pass through
quite a few levels of refinement before being transformed into
information that can be thought (Bion, ‘62). Just like food is the raw
material a stomach must transform to generate energy, raw emotion is the
material a mind must transform to generate meaning. Shifts in bodily
states produce various forms of sensations and mental products (Klein,
‘58/’75). Bion used the term Beta (β) elements to refer to incipient
emotion, the sensory substrate of experience. A working mind converts
raw emotion into meaningful sequences of thought or action. Meaningful
thoughts, products of transformations, are referred to as Alpha (α)
elements (Bion, 62). Bion named the function that transforms sensory
experience into meaningful thoughts - Alpha (α) function. Beta (β)
elements (raw emotions) are converted by Alpha (α) function into Alpha
(α) elements (symbolized emotion). Alpha (α) elements, transformed bits
of experience, are then organized into meaningful narratives (Ferro,
’02). In sum, I am describing three distinct levels of experience.
First, we have emotion without thought, whose products are known as Beta
(β) elements. Second, we have Alpha (α) function, a process that takes
raw experience (Beta (β) elements) and symbolizes it, converts it into
bits of thought directly linked to present experience (Alpha (α)
elements). Third, an apparatus for thinking organizes emerging discrete
thoughts (Alpha (α) elements) into meaningful sequences of thoughts and
action (Bion, ‘62). Alpha (α) function develops in three distinct
movements. The first movement is initiated through contact with other
minds that receive and transform an infant’s experience into meaningful
sequences of thought and action. Its consequences are the awakening of a
rudimentary capacity for awareness and thought. Contact with the
capacity to transform raw emotional experience into thoughts that can be
thought about (Alpha (α) function), initiates the development of that
same capacity (Alpha (α) function) in the child. In a second
movement, a child’s dawning capacity for awareness and thought
synthesizes an elementary realization of herself as an entity with her
own separate body and unique independent locus of experience (Winnicott,
‘45). This perception signals the emergence of a function that
transforms elements of her experience into meaningful sequences of
thought and expression. At this point, a child is aware of her body and
can begin to self- express. As a child negotiates a third
developmental movement, the awareness of herself as a discrete entity is
extended to include other people’s separate existence. At this point,
self and other begin to differentiate. The child’s evolving mental
capacities can now hold the realization that other people are separate
entities who exist outside her area of control (Winnicott, ‘45). A child
can now consider emotional experience in self as well as in other. The
capacity to think about emotion in self and other has been recently
identified as a developmental achievement of huge consequence. It was
named mentalization and formally defined as “the process by which we
implicitly and explicitly interpret the actions of ourselves and others
as meaningful on the basis of intentional mental states (e.g., desires,
needs, feelings, beliefs, & reasons) ... we mentalize interactively
and emotionally when with others. Each person has the other person’s
mind in mind (as well as their own) leading to self-awareness and other
awareness”. Mentalization has been reliably correlated with emotional
regulation and relationship building (Fonagy et. al, ‘02).
Transformations in Mind: Thinking
is partly determined by the degree to which we can transform emotional
experience in self and in others into meaningful sequences of thought.
The function that determines how and what we think, α function, is
partly composed of internalized elements from another’s mind along with
our own. Research on attachment has demonstrated how a parent’s
attachment style is usually passed down to the child. An insecurely
attached parent is likely to produce a child with an insecure attachment
style (Maine, ’90). The reverse is also true in that a securely
attached parent is likely to inculcate a similar attachment style. This
is a clear example of how elements in the parent’s mind tend to find
their way into the developing child’s mind. On a level of early
object-relations, the other’s limitations in awareness and thought (α
function) are initially replicated in the child’s mind. Without further
transformations, internalized limitations in thought and consciousness
become enduring mental structures. Resilience in this context refers
to the process of transforming mental capacity. These types of
transformations produce an increase in the range of self-other awareness
along with an increase in capacity to organize experience into
meaningful sequences of thought (Bion, ‘62). As a person absorbs
constituent features of the characters that made up her early
environment, limitations and assets find their way into her developing
mind. From a perspective of resilience, the aim is to consolidate asset
and transform limitation. How are mental functions that are highly
associated with overcoming emotional difficulties and transforming
character developed?
I have identified four
movements that, I suggest, contribute to a person’s resilient
development. These movements transform limitations by modifying mental
structures that perpetuate them and they consolidate asset through a
process of internalization and integration. The first movement in
this process is the use of thought to engage emotion. A psychoanalytic
theory of thinking posits that thoughts are the mind’s response to
pain/limitation (Bion, ‘62). When faced with a problem a person’s mind
can either think about it until some sort of transformation occurs or
generate distractions to move consciousness away from the pain and its
causes. Building on the first, the second movement involves the
imaginative elaboration of mental states in self and other. An evolving
empathic understanding of the people that shaped us provides access to
important structures in our own mind. In thinking about father, we are
thinking about the real father (objective father) as well as the father
that is part of our mind (object father). Access to object-father, a
potentially undeveloped function of mind, is a crucial step in
transforming it. Third, unprocessed pain that concretized into
limitations of thought and consciousness in self and other is engaged
and transformed. Limitations in the [m]other have a corresponding
structure in the self. It follows then that internalized limitation that
migrated from the other can be restructured within the self. The
working through of unprocessed pain is achieved through an empathic and
evolving elaboration of the environmental failures and subsequent
psychological limitations that shaped the other’s mind and by extension
important dimensions of the self. The fourth movement aims at the
consolidation of asset. The good in those who shaped us is identified
and sequenced into an evolving narrative. Good in this context refers to
mental functions in the other that provided helpful sequences of care
and relatedness. This movement consolidates assets through positive
points of identifications that are woven into one’s character and
developed over time.
BARAK HUSSEIN OBAMA’S DEVELOPMENT: In
this section, I will examine Obama’s emotional development. What is of
most significance is not the fact that he fits general criteria for
resilience, but the psychological work he engaged to transform his mind.
The processes he followed are identical to the ones I am suggesting
constitute a method for cultivating resilience. In his autobiography,
Dreams from my Father, Obama chronicled his psychological development,
the journey he took to transform himself. He described what he actually
did with his mind to build psychological capacity and resolve difficult
emotional realities. On the risk side of the equation, Obama’s life
was rife with conditions that could have derailed him. He is the product
of miscegenation at a time when miscegenation was illegal in many
states. His father abandoned him when he was two years old; his mother
remarried when he was five and took him to live with her in Indonesia
for a period of 6 years. He was subsequently separated from his mother
during most of his adolescence. Before he left for Indonesia, the color
of a person’s skin had no particular meaning. In
Indonesia, he
became aware that white and black Americans lived under radically
different conditions. Black Americans faced considerably more difficult
social, political and economic conditions than white Americans. When he
returned to the U.S., he was a black skinned teen-ager who shared an
unbreakable bond of affection with a white parent and two white
grandparents. The daunting challenge of harmonizing the multiplicities
inherent in racial identity weighed on him. On the protective side,
Obama was fortunate to have been cared for by people who were basically
kind and thoughtful. His potential was recognized and developed with the
provision of important opportunities for growth. He was aware of their
unshakable love, of the solicitude and emotional stability they
provided. He often found himself counting his good fortunes. He tells us
that despite long separations from his mother and father, the bonds of
love remained unbroken. The existence of loving relationships that
provided stability and opportunity were powerful protective factors.
People consistently received and transformed his experience into
sequences of thought and care that initiated his capacity for self and
other awareness. The dynamics of his early environment gave him a strong
mental foundation; they established Alpha (α) function and helped him
synthesize a rudimentary apparatus for thinking. Despite this richness
of love and opportunity, he faced realities and emotions that, he felt,
surpassed what he or members of his family could process. I will
juxtapose two difficult moments in his development and the way he dealt
with them. After the first moment, he did not engage a process of
transformation. He managed to contain the effects, but did little more.
His development did not derail but was rather unremarkable. After the
second moment, he engaged himself and his environment. He began the
arduous journey of building mental capacity and transforming emotional
realities that limited him. His response to the second moment initiated
remarkable developments in his character. He chronicled the first
moment the realities of race overwhelmed his mind, a condensed moment it
was. Like most eight year olds he was encased in a protective innocence
– he believed adults could make sense of anything that overwhelmed him.
While his mother was engaged in official business, he wandered into the
library of the American embassy in Indonesia hoping to find something
to do to break the tedium. Magazines with shiny pictures drew his
attention. Leafing through the pages he found himself guessing the
emotion depicted in the scene. Then, a picture of a weird looking man
appeared. As he focused on the picture his thoughts came to a
screeching halt. The man’s hands had “a strange, unnatural pallor, as if
blood had been drawn from the flesh... his heavy lips and broad, fleshy
nose, all had this same uneven, ghostly hue” (Obama, ‘04). The man, it
turned out, had purchased and ingested chemicals that promised to turn
his skin white. He had hoped to pass as a white man so that he could
escape the life of a black American. The implications for a child with
dark skin, a white mother and absent African father were overwhelming. With
a knotted stomach and overheated head he suppressed the urge to jump up
and demand an explanation from someone who knew better, who could think
it through and do something about it. He realized, without being
entirely conscious, that his mother was not capable of finding the right
words and actions (symbols) to transform the complex pain he felt. He
had nowhere to go. His father was absent and his stepfather Lolo’s
recent war trauma had damaged his ability to think about emotion.
Overwhelmed by the weight of the experience, he took refuge in solitude. His
development following this moment was unremarkable. He kept to himself,
got high frequently, did well in school with minimal effort and avoided
getting in trouble. He was superficially engaged with his life, going
though the motions. Emotionally, however, he was rather rudderless.
Transformations In Obama’s Mind: Obama
moved to New York when he was twenty years old to complete his
undergraduate degree at Columbia University. He wanted to live in
Harlem. With no real idea of how to do it, he was looking to engage the
issues of race and identity that plagued him. It was during this time
that he received a fateful call announcing his father’s untimely death
in Nairobi. To the second important moment, Obama responded by
actively engaging his environment and emotional experience. The first
movement in the process of resilient development I suggested above.
Concretely, he established contact with his brothers and sisters and
began cultivating deep attachments with his family and a chosen
community of people. Psychologically, he built on his existing capacity
for awareness and thought by focusing his attention on the rocky shores
of his inner life. Determined to emerge from his solitude and define a
life of purpose, he took on the task of evolving his mind by working
through overwhelming emotion. Unlike the first moment, where he
retreated into a world of solitude, his development following the
activity of engaging his inner world in a process of transformation took
on remarkable speed and significance. In Dreams from my Father,
Obama recorded his engagement with the four mental movements I
elaborated above. The psychological work he did consolidated his
strengths and transformed limitations in his character. The memoir is in
part a meditation on the people that made up his origins – his mother
and Grandparents with whom he grew up, his father and stepfather Lolo.
He focused his thinking on understanding their minds. This is the second
movement in the process of resilience. He thought through key
limitations in the people that shaped him meditating on the
environmental forces and developmental failures that structured their
character. He organized the products of his imaginative elaborations
into coherent and evolving narratives of how their minds worked,
especially limitations in mental capacity that underlay their
difficulties. In doing so, he transformed limitations in his own
mind. This is the third movement in the process of cultivating
resilience. Concurrently, he wove a narrative of his mother as
disciplined, charitable, and dreamy. She was a natural leader with a
life long commitment to learning. His stepfather Lolo taught him to stay
calm in a fight and to engage problems with pragmatic solutions. His
Grandfather was a trailblazer who was fair and bold. His grandmother was
a private woman with platinum strength. She inculcated constituent
values of hard work and humility. This is the narrative he wove
regarding the goodness in the characters that shaped him. He tells us:
“I know that ... what is best in me I owe to her/them.” We see how he
internalized these assets and integrated them into his evolving
character. This is the fourth movement in the process of cultivating
resilience. For a more elaborated example of this transformative
process, I will focus on the psychological work Obama did with his
object-father. Barak Obama Sr. was a character of enormous psychic
significance but with whom he spent very little actual time – two years
and one month to be precise. His importance in Obama’s mind and
development cannot be overestimated. For one, he was a constant presence
in his mother’s mind. More importantly, it was his legacy that he
inherited beginning with his name, ambition and the color of his skin.
Lastly, transformations in his own mind related to his father’s
limitations are the ones with the most significance and consequence in
terms of his resilience. Barak Sr. cohered in Obama’s mind as a
complicated man with high standards, an unquenchable thirst for
knowledge, an unshakable discipline, an exacting moral compass, an
unending capacity for hard work and big ambitions. Again, these are
assets that Obama internalized and integrated into his character. In
relationship, however, Barak Sr. was limited in his capacity to regulate
emotion. He was volatile, unpredictable and unable to think through the
emotional consequences of his actions. Despite his expansive intellect
that earned him a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Economics on a full
scholarship, he lived in a contracted emotional world where he often
failed to consider other people’s realities. He was limited in his
ability to build and sustain relationships. This is illustrated in a
history of turbulent attachments littered with divorces, separations
from his young children, broken promises to his family and a number of
personality driven professional failures. He evinced serious limitation
in his capacity for mentalization, a core deficit that derailed his
development. In an effort to understand his father, Obama engaged in an
imaginative elaboration of the forces that shaped his father’s mind,
especially his limitations. In doing so he transformed internalized
deficit in his own mind that freed him from a life of thwarted potential
and undeveloped relationships. A dramatic example of Barak Sr.’s
limitations is depicted in a story Auma, Obama’s African sister who knew
her father well, related. In Africa, she explained it is all about the
quality of the relationships you cultivate. People depend on people.
Keeping negative emotion from corroding the feeling of good will between
people is essential for a life well lived. The Old Man she mused “came
back to Kenya thinking that because he was so educated and spoke his
proper English and understood his charts and graphs everyone would
somehow put him in charge. He forgot what holds everything together.” Upon
his return to Kenya with a Ph.D. from Harvard University, Barak Sr. was
given opportunities in which he excelled. But as his relationships
became more complex and demanding, he could not figure out how to
navigate emotional experience in himself and others. Unable to adapt, he
clung to his beliefs, beliefs that no longer corresponded with
objective reality. His out of step behavior infuriated the people in
power. They eventually cut him off. For years, Barak Sr. was forced to
live without a job or proper income. During this period he spent much
time at home drinking scotch and nursing his wounds. One evening he
asked Auma to go fetch him a pack of cigarettes, but he had no money to
give her. He ordered her to tell the storekeeper that Dr. Obama would
pay him later. When the storekeeper refused to give her the pack, she
borrowed money from a cousin and returned with the cigarettes. The
Old Man’s response was quite illustrative. He scolded her for taking too
long before asserting: “I told you that you would have no problems.
Everyone here knows Dr. Obama.” Barak Obama absorbed these stories
and directed his thinking, both conscious and unconscious, to
understanding his father. What made him this way? He engaged in an
imaginative elaboration of the environmental deficits and developmental
failures that structured limitation in his father’s mind. As he
meditated on deficit in his real father he was simultaneously
transforming related deficits in his father-object, a process that
evolved his mind well beyond his father’s dreams. Here are the key parts
of his meditation. When Barak Sr. was nine years old, his mother
abandoned him. Apparently, she was irreconcilably unhappy. Before she
left, she instructed her then twelve-year old daughter that in a few
weeks she should take her brother and come search for her. Soon
thereafter, nine-year old Barak Sr. and his twelve-year old sister set
out on foot to find their mother. They were lost for almost two weeks in
Kenyan jungles and barely survived the ordeal. They did not find their
mother. When they returned to their father’s house they did not try to
run away again. Barak Sr. never forgave his mother’s abandonment. He
told everyone that his stepmother was his real mother. Eradicating his
real mother and the crushing pain associated with her abandonment
required he shut parts of his mind off, parts that never overcame the
trauma and never resumed their normal development. The result was a
blatant deficiency in the use of his mind to elaborate other people’s
mental states. Imagining what it was like for his father to be a
nine-year old boy wandering in search of a mother he would never find,
Obama wrote: “The hunger is too much for him, the exhaustion too great,
until finally the slender line that holds him to his mother snaps,
sending her image to float down, down into the emptiness... he will find
a new mother. He will lose himself in games and learn the power of his
mind.” This is the moment Barak Sr. disassociated himself from his
[m]other, a process that derailed his development. The unresolved effect
of the trauma mangled his capacity for awareness and thought about the
other. Thoughts about other people’s experience were no longer rooted in
genuine perception but constructed from projections of his own mind
(Winnicott, ‘69). Barak Sr.’s strong intellect, ambition,
resourcefulness and determination brought him to the edge of success, to
a point his own father could never have hoped to reach. But without the
use of important parts of his mind he could not evolve properly. Obama
tells us: “that the Old Man remained trapped on his father’s island,
with its fissures of anger and doubt and defeat, the emotions still
visible beneath the surface, hot and molten and alive, like a wicked,
yawning mouth, and his mother gone, gone away...” With his mother gone,
parts of his mind were also gone. Obama’s effort to understand his
father’s deficits resolved important limitations in his own mind,
propelling him far beyond the edge of his father’s success. He could now
do what his father could not: use his mind to think about other people. Barak
Obama engaged in the four movements I suggest are integral components
of resilient development. He used his thinking to address difficult
emotional realities. He did it through an imaginative elaboration of
mental states in self and other. The assets in those who shaped him were
internalized and developed into evolving narratives regarding their
goodness. More importantly limitations in thought and consciousness
internalized from the minds of others were engaged in a process that
transformed their related structures in his own mind, propelling his
development beyond his father’s wildest dreams. Incidentally, Obama’s
ascendancy to the presidency of the United States was not beyond the
dreams on one particular man. In his1961 inaugural address, president
Jack Kennedy made a prescient call to elect “a black man to the white
house within forty years.” That same year, in an act of dreamy love that
transcended the bigotry of the time, Ann Dunham a white woman from
Kansas and Barak Obama Sr. an African man from Kenya married and
conceived a son – Barak Hussein Obama – who some forty years later
realized Kennedy’s redemptive dream of becoming the first black
president of the United States.
Summary: Existing
findings on resilience are best understood as manifestations of mental
functions that generate capacity for emotional regulation and
relationship building. Recent contributions from Object Relations theory
and Attachment theory are clarifying how awareness of self and other is
initiated and how thoughts about emotional experience are produced and
developed. These mental functions are firmly associated with emotional
regulation and relationship building. This is one way existing
findings on resilience can be grounded in a theoretical framework that
expands their meaning. Furthermore, I elaborated a constellation of
four mental movements that constitute a method for cultivating
resilience. Engagement with the mental movements I described above will
expand awareness and increase capacity for thinking about emotional
experience. I use Barak Obama’s psychological development, as chronicled
in his autobiography, as an instantiation of this theory. Obama engaged
in the movements I described, an activity that transformed and
fortified his mind into increasing degrees of resilience.
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