Ghosts in the Nursery: A Review
When I was in graduate school, a particular article caught my attention with its interesting name, and then kept my attention with its meaningful findings. Ghosts in the Nursery: A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Problems of Impaired Infant-Mother Relationships by Selma Fraiberg, Edna Adelson, and Vivian Shapiro, was the article. This article continues to resonate with me as I have now been a practicing psychologist for eleven years, and the findings ring true for infant-parent relationships and so much more. I have seen time and time again how remembering and recovering the repressed emotional experiences of the past (what the article encourages) can lead to significant changes in relationships, self-perception, and overall quality of life. I have witnessed clients experience the discovery of repressed emotions, and thereby become the person who ends their family’s multi-generational cycle of trauma. I am reviewing the article in this blog post, as the findings from this research hold important meaning for parents who want to give their children a different/healthier life than they had as children, adults who want to better understand their childhood experiences with their parents, and anyone who wants to lead a life that is free from the burden of unhealthy repetition.
“Ghosts” in the nursery refer to “the visitors from the unremembered past of the parents.” The unremembered past refers to instances of trauma, loss, and tragedy that may have occurred several generations in the past and are passed down through the unconscious. This is similar to the idea of multi-generational or intergenerational trauma, which implies that parents can pass down unresolved tensions and conflicts from their own families of origin onto to their children.
In an ideal situation, “the unfriendly and unbidden spirits are banished from the nursery and return to their subterranean dwelling place.” “The baby makes his own imperative claim upon parental love and, in strict analogy with the fairy tales, the bonds of love protect the child and his parents against the intruders, the malevolent ghosts.” The authors go on to explain that, it is not uncommon for ghosts of the past to “break through the magic circle (of the family) in an unguarded moment,” and for a parent and child to reenact a scene from another time (e.g., when a parent says something to their child and suddenly realizes they sounded just like their mother/father/grandparent, etc. saying something they always disliked). These small reenactments do not typically have a major impact on the bond between parent and child.
Sometimes, unwanted ghosts can take up more selective space in the nursery and have an impact on things such as feeding, sleep, toilet training, or discipline, “depending upon the vulnerabilities of the parental past.” The authors explain that, even if the bond between parent and child is strong, parents often feel “helpless” in these situations and seek out therapeutic support. They found that these parents willingly formed a strong alliance with their therapist in order to “banish the intruders from the nursery.” They add that “it is not difficult to find the educational or therapeutic means for dealing with the transient invaders.”
Some parents appear to be “possessed” by their ghosts, who take up residence in the nursery and claim rights of ownership. While no one has invited the ghosts, they “conduct the rehearsal of the family tragedy from a tattered script.” When the authors saw these parents and babies in therapy, the baby was typically showing early signs of “emotional starvation” or developmental impairment. Parents may not see the need for therapeutic support, however, particularly if the ghosts have been present for three or more generations.
The authors questioned why some parents who have experienced tragedy, cruelty, and sorrow in their own childhoods do not inflict the same on their own children. They stated, “History is not destiny, and whether parenthood becomes flooded with griefs and injuries, or whether parenthood becomes a time of renewal cannot be predicted from the narrative of the parental past. There must be other factors in the psychological experience of that past which determine repetition in the present.”
From their work with families in these situations, the authors made the following conclusions.
· Of the parents whose ghosts of the past took possession of the nursery, there was a strikingly uniform pattern: “these are the parents who, earlier in the extremity of childhood terror, formed a pathological identification with the dangerous and assaultive enemies of the ego.” This is the psychological defense known as “identification with the aggressor,” and involves a child molding their sense of self to the needs of the adult as a way to seek emotional and physical safety. Identification with the aggressor can occur in the context of abuse, neglect, rejection, and emotional unavailability.
· The parents who experienced identification with the aggressor could provide explicit details of memories related to childhood abuse, tyranny, and desertion. “What was not remembered was the associated affective experience.” Because a child molds their sense of self to the needs of the adult, they often develop empathy for and attunement to others, but lose contact with their own emotional life.
The authors explained that clients could describe the abuse, desertion, and rejection they experienced as children, but could not remember the terror, helplessness, anxiety, shame, and worthlessness that accompanied these events. Importantly, when these feelings were recovered and reexperienced in therapy, clients no longer needed to inflict their own pain on their children. Every client became able to say that they would never want what happened to them to happen to their child.
The authors found that parents who did not inflict the pain of their past onto their children explicitly said things like, “I remember what it was like…I remember how afraid I was when my father exploded…I remember how I cried when they took me and my sister away to live in that home…I would never let my child go through what I went through.” For these parents, the pain and suffering had not undergone total repression. “In remembering, they are saved from the blind repetition of that morbid past. Through remembering, they identify with the injured child (the childhood self), while the parent who does not remember may find himself in an unconscious alliance and identification with the fearsome figures of the past. In this way, the parental past is inflicted onto the child.”
The authors concluded with the following hypothesis: “Access to childhood pain becomes a powerful deterrent against repetition in parenting, while repression and isolation of painful affect provide the psychological requirements for identification with the betrayers and the aggressors.”
I have seen these concepts apply not only to repetition in parenting, but to repetition in all parts of life. I have also seen dramatic change that can come from remembering and uncovering repressed emotional experiences. If you have ghosts from your past that are too present for your comfort, I encourage you to consider working with a therapist who can guide you along this journey of important discovery and growth.
References:
Delboy, S. (2024, January 26). Identification with the aggressor and complex trauma: how we may need to become someone else to feel safe after childhood trauma. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/relationships-healing-relationships/202401/identification-with-the-aggressor-and-complex
Fraiberg S, Adelson E, Shapiro V. Ghosts in the nursery. A psychoanalytic approach to the problems of impaired infant-mother relationships. J Am Acad Child Psychiatry. 1975 Summer;14(3):387-421. doi: 10.1016/s0002-7138(09)61442-4. PMID: 1141566.
