Abstract
“I gave you a part of me that I knew you could break – but you didn’t.”
Patients who have never fully confronted and grieved the pain of their early-on heartbreak will often cling tenaciously to their hope that perhaps someday the “object of their desire” will be forthcoming. But there are others who, in the aftermath of their early-on heartbreak, will find themselves withdrawing completely from the “world of objects”—their hearts shattered. To protect themselves from being once again devastated, these latter patients retreat, withdraw, detach themselves from relationships, from the
world—only then to find themselves overwhelmed by intense feelings of isolation, alienation, and emptiness. The competent, accomplished, cheerful, compliant “false (public) self” they present to the world belies the truths that lie hidden within—namely, their private turmoil, harrowing loneliness, and annihilating terror as well as their stymied creativity and desperate (albeit conflicted) yearning for authentic engagement with life. Instead of “relentless hope” and, when thwarted, “relentless outrage,” the experience of being- in-the-world for these latter patients will be one of “relentless despair”—a “profound hopelessness” that they conceal behind a self-protective “false self” armor that obscures their underlying brokenness and the “thwarted potential” of their “true self.” Clinical vignettes will be offered that speak to how the therapist, ever attuned to the patient’s intense ambivalence about “remaining hidden vs. being found,” can facilitate the emergence of “moments of authentic meeting” that will restore purpose, meaning, and direction to an existence that was otherwise desolate, impenetrable, and empty.
Learning Objectives
At the end of this presentation, participants will be able to:
1. Highlight the primary difference between relentless hope and relentless despair.
2. Elaborate upon the patient’s intense ambivalence about entering the world of objects.
3. Explain the relevance of the concept of dreading surrender to resourceless dependence upon another.
Biography
Martha Stark, MD, a graduate of Harvard Medical School and the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, is a holistic (adult and child) psychiatrist and integrative psychoanalyst in private practice in Boston, MA, and Clearwater Beach, FL. Sheserves as Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies at William James College and has previously held faculty positions at Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. Martha is the originator/developer of The Stark Method of Psychodynamic Synergy: A Multifaceted Approach to Deep Embodied Healing. She has authored nine highly acclaimed books on the integration of psychodynamic theory into clinical practice, including Modes of Therapeutic Action: Knowledge, Experience, and Relationship, which received Jason Aronson's prestigious Book of the Year Award in 1999. Several of Martha's books have become required reading in psychoanalytic and psychotherapy training programs in the US and abroad. Board Certified by the American Association of Integrative Medicine, Martha also contributes chapters to integrative medicine textbooks and articles to peer-reviewed toxicology/environmental medicine journals.
References
Isaacs, D. Hope and despair. Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, 52(10), 917-918.
Song, J., Kang, S., & Ryff, C. D. (2023). Unpacking psychological vulnerabilities in deaths of despair. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20(15), 6480.
Stark M. (2019). A heart shattered, the private self, and a life unlived. International Psychotherapy Institute. https://www.freepsychotherapybooks.org/ebook/a-heart-shattered-the-private-self-and-a-life-unlived/
