But first more should be said about Schore’s concepts of “relational trauma” and “interactive repair”. As he reminds us, infant and child development consists of transforming external into internal regulation, with mother the main source of interactive attunement or lack of it. During the infant’s pre-linguistic phases of life, mothers communicate feeling states which are neurologically tolerated or not, that is they are compatible with the organism’s capability of processing mood information, or they somehow exceed it. ideally, “she allows for the interactive generation of high levels of positive affect in co-shared play states, and low levels of negative affect in the interactive repair of social stress, that is attachment ruptures”.17 At the other extreme mother, or persons close to her, traumatizes her infant causing massive mis-attunements in attachment relations. Hitting, shaking, yelling, sarcasm and mockery, outright physical and emotional neglect, or deliberate over-stimulation including sexual, are all possible features of the cumulative trauma that disables normal development of the attachment system. These social stressors can cause actual maladaptive physiological brain changes that do not easily respond even to sustained therapeutic treatment. We are not concerned here with such flagrant child abuse but with the less dramatic, or sustained types that often have unexpected, even subtle, nuances. It is within that range where mother-child interactive repair is defective, yet not destroyed, that our interest lies. Apprehension of risk in attachment leads to anxiety and hence to self-protective defences, one of which is the avoidant means of maintaining mood at tolerable levels. This adaptive strategy carries with it high imaginative potential but also liability to strife in actual erotic, romantic and other relational ventures.
Schore points out that dissociation is a possible result of traumatic infant and care-giver interaction, quoting Tronick and Weinberg, “When infants’ attempts fail to repair the interaction, infants often lose postural control, withdraw, and self-comfort. The disengagement is profound even with this short short disruption of the mutual regulation process and break in intersubjectivity. The infant’s reaction is reminiscent of the withdrawal of Harlow’s isolated monkey or of the infants in institutions observed by Bowlby and Spitz”.18 “Conservation-withdrawal” is the term used to describe the self-protective regulatory process of helpless and hopeless experimental monkeys, as well as human infants and children. The stressed individual simply withdraws from intolerable situations which cannot otherwise be regulated into a sort of pseudo-death or regressed state in which, hopefully, energy may again be recouped and redirected to life events. Such dislocation of the attachment bond, dysregulating normal homeostasis and profoundly affecting moods, has permanent implications for the person’s social interaction, including romance, partnership sexuality and parenting. It also bears upon whether he or she will have the urge to create “reparative” esthetic objects.
In the more normal range of mother-infant relationships, interactive repair especially by eye contact is the rule. Seeing and being seen are more powerful affective communications than words or gestures alone. It is through looking and seeing that repair of disrupted attachments are transacted. When a mother’s words or actions cause anxious misattunement in her infant, reassurance and reconnection are most immediately re-established by eye contact, the principal means of “interactive repair”.19 Trauma and permanently dys-regulated affective states are prevented by mutual interactive gaze, by making and averting eye contact in predictable and unforced ways. While skin contact and physical handling are certainly important, the most vital communications are thus visual, with signals of acceptance and sometimes rejection encoded sub-verbally by the infant.20 The patterns of interaction laid down enable long-lasting auto-regulation of mood (not requiring the presence of a primary care-giver) in the growing infant and child. Repair by secure children of briefly broken affectional attachments is instantaneous and effortless, whereas children who have had attachment trauma find restoration of attachment much more effortful, unpredictable and filled with anxiety. Adult uses of visual esthetic objects follow suit, as “seeing” and “feeling” are so closely connected.
As Schore concludes, “The problem of affect regulation is now seen as a common mechanism in all forms of psychotherapy” and, we might add, affect regulation is fundamental to the creative impulse wherever it appears, most notably in the arts.21 It is the most likely origin of the universal quest for esthetic experience, rapt, intransitive moments of esthetic delight in created configurations replicating the infant’s original blissful fusion state at its mother’s breast. Mutual gaze transactions and verbalizations between mother and infant are made, broken and repaired, as is tactile contact with the breast. Pleasure is attained and lost, only to be renewed and reinforced more or less unconditionally; “empty” and “full” reach some sort of equilibrium, with more or less attendant soothing or lasting distress. This experience of life-giving contact, loss, recovery and repair within the attachment gap produces reminiscences and longings served later in development by created and “found” esthetic objects. Of course replication of early attachment using surrogate objects can never be perfect, which is why esthetic questing is life-long. Security can never be what it was even in less than ideal infant-mother interaction, and esthetic configurations originated or chosen in later life inevitably carry the affective signatures of early unresolved attachment distress. In other words, they are affectively coded by the wish for perfection tempered by the reality of affective experience, including defensive strategies by which the individual controls insecurity.
Thus, the art of portraiture (most notably in this study, Picasso’s of women) is variable, dependent upon the portraitist’s security or insecurity with reference to his subject. Every female face seen by the male portraitist takes projections from his own inner sense of whether she, his subject, is to be trusted, feared or avoided. These reactions revert back to the earliest interactive attachment with mother, carrying forward all their developmental ramifications. Adjustment of distance, levels of comfort and reassurance or threat, operate automatically outside the artist’s awareness and may give remarkably expressive results without our realizing their origin. There are bound to be reverberations from any anxious feelings from having been mothered. What a male artist will make of female subjects in visual terms cannot be predicted in advance, but knowing something of his earliest maternal relations, and what typically avoidant defenses have been built up, will help to clarify the work he makes public. its reception depends on whether his public shares, in some measure, the artist’s destructive-reparative construction of his subject. This construction reverberates back to primary experiences of seeing and being seen, to what was seen in the mother’s face when she looked at him, what was felt in what degree and for what duration, and what adaptations were possible to anxious mis-attunements. Were there lasting unrepaired failures of attachment? If so, creation of an alternative esthetic reality is necessitated, announcing and addressing distress in imagery. How daring and disturbing this imagery may be depends on the pain filtering back from avoidant attachment.