Unintegration

She could hold herself together or fall apart, but she could not do the third thing: She could not go into the lion’s den and relate honestly … Lucy was experiencing a major obstacle to unintegration: anticipation of the past.

Epstein identifies unintegration as a distinct, generative third state between rigid self-holding and total collapse, and locates its chief obstacle in the patient’s unconscious superimposition of historical fear onto the present.

Epstein, Mark, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness, 1998thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

and unintegration in infant, 44 as ego-support to infant, 37–41 concern achieved through, 74–8 failure of and ‘false self’, 46–7

Winnicott’s index explicitly links unintegration in infancy to the maternal holding function, situating it as a normal developmental state that adequate ego-support makes possible and whose absence contributes to false-self formation.

Winnicott, Donald, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Integration matches with holding. Personalization matches with handling. Object-relating matches with object-presenting … Integration from what? It is useful to think of the material out of which integration emerges in terms of motor and sensory elements, the stuff of primary narcissism.

Winnicott theorizes integration as emerging from an undifferentiated substrate of motor-sensory experience, implying that the prior state of unintegration is the normative ground from which a unit self gradually forms through adequate holding.

Winnicott, Donald, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

sometimes they are predominantly stable (integrated), sometimes they are unstable (deintegrated) … Fordham understands Hillman to be arguing for the inclusion of deintegrated states within the individuation process and he is in agreement with this.

Samuels documents Fordham’s position that deintegrated — loosely synonymous with unintegrated — states are not pathological aberrations but necessary oscillations intrinsic to individuation and to the polycentric nature of psyche.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The capacity to be alone is a paradox since it can only be developed with someone else in the room … People are able to experience the simultaneity of closeness and separation at such times and often permit themselves a floating that they would not ordinarily.

Epstein elaborates Winnicott’s concept of ego-relaxation in the presence of another as the adult analogue of unintegration, a condition of non-anxious floating that presupposes a secure relational container.

Epstein, Mark, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness, 1998supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

See Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts … D. W. Winnicott, ‘Fear of Breakdown,’ International Review of Psycho-Analysis 1 (1974)

Epstein’s bibliographic apparatus points toward the Winnicottian theoretical lineage — particularly the concept of breakdown and its relation to ego-relaxation — that underpins his treatment of unintegration throughout the volume.

Epstein, Mark, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness, 1998aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →