 Psychoanalytical illustrations of depression, self-harm and
suicide
- The phrase Keeping Mum can be used to mean concealing
a secret, hiding something that may be confidential or experienced
as shameful:
- The phrase: ‘mum’s the word’ means ‘say
nothing’.
- The word ‘mumble’ may mean an indistinct
utterance, someone or something that is hard to hear.
- The word mum also means mother
in British colloquial use and it is the play on the double use of
the word mum, as something secret and hidden, and as
mother, that inspired the following psychoanalytic
link.
- The psychoanalytic view of Keeping Mum
would include a refusal or inability to relinquish the Oedipal tie
with mother.
The Oedipal achievement of accepting the painful
reality of exclusion from the parental couple is a crucial part of
development. From a psychoanalytic perspective it is the father,
the third, who comes to interrupt the Oedipal fusion between the
dyad of mother and infant. In the same way the patient and
professional couple require a third perspective to help to contain
their disturbance.
In psychiatric phenomenology elective mutism, a chosen silence,
can be an anxiety provoking state for the psychiatrist who wishes
to understand the patient through what they say. The deliberate
withholding of information excludes the listener, leaving them
feeling excluded or in a disempowered position.
What people say accounts for only a small
proportion of their communication: far more is conveyed by non
verbal, unspoken communication, in behaviour and in the traces of
the unconscious which are like the tracks left by an animal no
longer present. The traces of the unspoken unconscious are
ephemeral, like footprints in the melting snow. But the traces of
the unconscious experience of the other are not seen, but felt in
the emotional experience of the observer, who through observing and
reflecting on their own feelings, may discern what is hidden from
view.
Brick mother
The ‘Brick Mother’ was how the psychiatrist and
psychoanalyst Henri Rey described the Maudsley hospital. The
concrete containment afforded by the bricks and mortar of
psychiatric asylum could hardly replace the arms of mother but in
some way the poignancy of the inadequacy of the Brick Mother to
meet regressive need for such holding is underpinned by the
hardness and incongruity of the image. In this sense access to
regressive asylum acts as a symbol of Keeping Mum and the
route to this expressed through the threat to life posed by
depression, self harm and suicide.
The threat to life is both an attack on self and
other, the maternal object that is also subject to violence which
makes manifest in the body hidden feelings of hatred which
threatens to overshadow and destroy the loved object.
Keeping Mum embodies
the attempt to hold onto what is lost and at the same time disavow
the hatred towards what is lost, so a shadow of what is not mourned
is expressed as a grievance which takes the place of grieving.
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