"Controlled Panic": Mastering the Terrors of Dissolution and Isolation in Elizabeth Bishop's Epiphanies

Style, Fall, 2000 by Martin Bidney

The best way to clarify the psychological implications of Bishop's epiphanic paradigm is provided in Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality by W. R. D. Fairbairn, a preoedipal theorist of mother-child dynamics in the tradition of "object relations" founded by Melanie Klein. [7] This kind of theorizing stresses early ambivalence toward the maternal "object" (a word used to mean either the breast or the mother herself, since in early developmental stages the child has no sense of the mother as a whole person). The breast, like Mother herself, is sometimes available and sometimes not; the child develops both idealized and resentful portrayals of the maternal "object." In cases of traumatic frustration, the child may experience guilt not only for desiring the breast but also for the aggressive greed arising when breast, love, or attention is withheld. As Fairbairn's theory (in Guntrip's summary) makes clear,

The more the need to love is frustrated, the more intense does it become and the unhappy person oscillates between an overpowering need to find good objects and a compulsive flight into detachment from all objects, under pressure mainly of the terror of exploiting them to the point of destruction; for the destruction of the love-object feels then to involve also the loss of the helplessly dependent ego which is in a state of emotional identification with the object. Love-object relations are the whole of the problem, and the conflicts over them are an intense and devastating drama of need, fear, anger and hopelessness.(287) [8]

The subject, paradoxically, is drawn, in hopeless dependence, to extreme identification with the maternal object, but at the same time, as a result of past disappointment and guilt, compulsively fears identifying with such an object. It is as bad to be overwhelmed by the flood of identity-canceling oneness with the object as to be banished from the object into love-starved separation. The love-frustrated, traumatized child cannot escape this threatening dependence, whereby child and mother-object are either unhappily merged or unhappily disunited. In the epiphanic terms of Bishop's "In the Waiting Room," the babies' heads are "wound round and round" with string; the mothers' necks are "wound round and round" with wire; mother and child are miserably separate and bounded, yet miserably one and blended. Breasts are desired, yet "horrible."

When Aunt Consuelo's voice rises up inside the child, is the aunt swallowing the child, or the child swallowing the aunt? When the final flood falls, is the child "blacking out" the aunt, or the aunt "blacking out" the child? Fairbairn's thinking, as Guntrip summarizes it, can show how the two options merge. Often, people who

suffer from strong feelings of identification in their infantile dependence on parents lose all trace of any personality of their own when they are in the presence of the parent [cf. Aunt Consuelo as parent surrogate] with whom they feel identified. They report that [...] they become lifeless, silent, tired, and a nonentity.