Introduction: Babies, “Ripped” and Jarred

At the time of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I was working as a psychotherapist on a community mental health team in NYC. Our team visited families and individuals at their homes, schools, and sometimes in hospitals or institutional settings. We provided therapy, medication-prescribing, peer counseling, and case-management services (e.g., connecting people to job training and housing). The day after the election of Donald Trump, our thoughtful and caring team leader wisely asked if we wanted to have an impromptu meeting to talk about our reactions. Gathered in our modest staff room, we shared our feelings of shock, despair, depression, and fear in the wake of what seemed to be not only a disturbing but also anomalous public event, not unlike the 9/11 terror attacks fifteen years earlier. How could so many millions of our fellow countrymen, and women, pick such a person for such an important a job?

As we commiserated and supported one another, one member of our team conceded that she had “voted for him,” meaning Trump. She was an immigrant who had grown up in modest circumstances and eventually attended graduate school. As an adult, she had raised kids and, after finally exiting a long, difficult and likely abusive marriage, continued with her training in the field of psychiatric nursing. Usually soft-spoken and demure, my colleague sometimes talked about her admiration for “holistic” nursing, an approach that takes the entire client and their life situation into account rather than simply focusing on obvious or inflamed symptoms. I knew her as a caring, conscientious practitioner, one who had a sense that our clients, a vulnerable lot, needed to feel safe in order to heal.

In general, this professional person fit well into a mental health team whose core values included acceptance of clients’ autonomy, and which employed a noncoercive/non-pathologizing approach based on “open dialogue” and “collaborative” treatment models (Seikkula & Olson, 2003, p. 403; Cooke, 2017, p. 98). This colleague even shared that members of her family had pleaded with her—alas, to no avail—not to vote “for him.” I found myself almost as shocked over her electoral choice as I was at the election results, and I had the sense that some of my colleagues felt the same. This was a time of rupture and discontinuity on many levels. Our colleague answered a question that no one had actually put to her, about which we were all deeply curious: why—why had you “voted for him”? As if on cue, she said, “I don’t know,” staring at a point somewhere beyond the walls of the room, “I just remember seeing a baby in a jar when I was in grad school and, I don’t know… I just know… we can’t do that. I can’t do that. I’m not… okay with that.”

She was of course expressing her feelings and perceptions about abortion. It was now clear what had motivated her decision when she voted. I was especially struck with the imagery she chose to share and its compelling, provocative, and highly-charged nature. Her vote felt to me like a jolt. Of course, there were likely many feelings below that, and it would have required an authentic dialogue to find out what they were. Though I didn’t personally know a lot of people who felt as she did about abortion, I was of course well aware that similar impulses had motivated many voters and have served as a binding theme for many in the conservative, Trump-supporting groups since the 1970s and 1980s—groups which were now poised to assume political power. I recalled the TV sequence in which candidate Trump drifted broodingly from his spot on the debate stage, hovering menacingly near his opponent, Hillary Clinton, close enough to suggest a connection and to invade her space, a microcosmic example of his macrocosmic “moving against” posture (Horney, 1946, pp. 63–72), hardened into a compulsive need to dominate others, balancing a presumption of superiority against a nagging fear of ever being thought a “loser” (Horney, 1950, pp. 197–213).

My colleague’s words, summoning a “baby in a jar,” and the tone with which she delivered them, activated my own psychic process. Presently, my thoughts associated to Trump talking about abortion. During his presidential campaign I heard and saw him protesting about babies being “ripped” from their mothers’ wombs at nearly the moment of birth. Indeed, the Republican candidate had often spoken to crowds who “cheered with delight” as he inveighed against imaginary “legislation that would allow a baby to be ripped from the mother’s womb moments from birth” (Green, 2019, np). Like many a mass agitator, Trump had a way of coming across as devastatingly present while largely dissociated—what might be called the rageaholic's paradox. His words suggested dreadful images of small, helpless children cleaved cruelly from their places of nurturance and all but flung into an abyss. My colleague seemed to hold in her mind a similar brand of disturbing image, that of a “baby” confined to a specimen jar, lifeless yet utterly exposed, while seemingly uncaring, emotionally indifferent clinicians milled about like visitors at a curio museum.

This powerful matrix of feelings, images, inductions, and counter-inductions—a deluge of what might be called “cotransference” (Orange, 1995, p. 63)—cued my curiosity. Something was definitely up here, psychoanalytically speaking. Not just with me, but in the group mind as well, from our mental health team to swaths of the electorate. Like wishes and impulses attaching themselves to dream imagery, powerful psychic impulses were finding form in the so-called abortion debate and its terminology of “killing babies,” and “ripping them from the womb,” or confining fetuses in “jars.” Candidate Trump may have demonstrated what Hannah Arendt (1951) called the “leader principle” (p. 404) by giving voice to shared emotional energy. But he did so within a psychic economy that had already attached strong affect and unambiguous meaning to signifiers of helpless, fetal babies; to the activity of ripping-from-wombs; to medico-scientific authorities subsequently tossing children away; and to a fantasy of somehow counteracting it all via the will of one man. Candidate Clinton called Trump’s verbiage “scare rhetoric” (Tinker, 2016, np) which of course it was. But as we know, political discourse, particularly in our era, has long appealed to primary-process thinking even when masking itself—in Trump’s case, not even that—as secondary-process-led (Freud, 1938). (Also see: Frankel, 2022; Koritar, 2022; Prince, 2018, 2022.) Sitting in our office talking about the election results and abortion left me (and I suspect, my colleagues) feeling flooded: in our emotions, of course, but also beneath an onrush of powerful, incompletely-organized psychic energy. I continued to wonder what psychoanalysis might have to say about all this.

It was only after reconsidering clinical material from my own work with a patient that I began to form a potentially helpful thesis regarding the “abortion debate,” this struggle of wills that has been called the most “toxic” issue in American politics (Kristof, 2017, p. 11). Aided by analytic and political theory, as well as input from colleagues,2 I started to develop an idea of how various, largely unconscious wishes and fantasies might be making use of abortion symbols and rhetoric, and how this activity, very similar to Freud’s “dream-work” (Freud, 1938, p. 319), may provide an emotional or affective payoff. It should go without saying that a phenomenon as massive as the struggle over abortion rights is multiply-determined and historically-situated, and I in no way mean to reduce the issue to a single or even a few psychological drivers. However, amid so much argumentation and its effect on the material lives of millions of women, I think it also essential to at least try to home-in on core psychic and emotional factors. For such purposes, there are few better tools than psychoanalysis. My aim here, then, is to suggest how the imagined fetus/baby receives status and value and becomes constructed as a compelling site of meaning which can serve psycho-political agendas. It will be helpful to start with some historical and legal context before exploring the case content that helped shape my thinking.

Abortion in Historical and Legal Context

As many will know, in November 2022, in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the United States Supreme Court reversed Roe vs Wade, a 1973 Supreme Court decision that asserted the fundamental right, without the interference of the state, to terminate a pregnancy prior to the viability of the fetus. In his majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito argued that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start” (Liptak, 2022, np). Alito, unsurprising for a jurist of conservative provenance, wrote that it was now essential to “heed the Constitution,” which does not confer a right to abortion, and confer that right to the respective states. (Nearly as predictably, another justice, Clarence Thomas, with a complicated history towards women, wrote a concurring opinion arguing that this new ruling had also opened the door to reversals of rights regarding same-sex marriage, contraception, and other sexual and gender freedoms. Meanwhile, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in another concurrence, said that the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision ought not prevent individuals from traveling to other states to obtain abortions.)

The 1973 Supreme Court Roe vs. Wade decision that had ensured the right to pre-viability abortion in the United States came about when “Jane Roe”—whom, it was later revealed, had been the victim of a group rape—sought an abortion in Texas but could not have one because that state’s law, like many similar statutes of the time, forbade pregnancy termination except when necessary to save the life of the mother. The case eventually proceeded to the U.S. Supreme Court where a seven-to-two majority agreed that the Texas abortion statute was “violative of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment” and that, furthermore, such laws, whether in Texas or elsewhere, interfered with individual sovereignty over bodily regions and functions (mostly related to procreation) known as “zones of privacy” (Goldman, 1982, p. 235).

Interestingly, Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority Roe opinion, noted the that the assortment of “criminal abortion laws” (Goldman, pp. 232–233) then on the books in the U.S. were of “relatively recent vintage” and did not reflect longstanding historical or legal precedent. In fact, looking back over the ages, Blackmun observed widespread disagreement on when life began, when it might be permissible to end a pregnancy and under what circumstances, and whose voices informed such matters. The original Hippocratic Oath, for example, which included refusal to “give to a woman a pessary [device] to produce an abortion,” reflected only a portion of Athenian opinion rather than widespread, cultural values. This ought not be surprising since, as Gentile (2016) points out, the Attic “polis” was predicated on women’s “excision” (pp. 172–173); as she puts it, in forging the public sphere, the men of ancient Athens “totally excluded women” (p. 69). Women were consigned to the so-called private sphere of home and family. One might suppose that this private sphere would cover decisions about conception, but that matter got outsourced to the public, male sphere. Aristophanes (classical Greece’s most famous author of “Old Comedy” [Brockett, 1991, p. 21], an artform that trafficked freely in political and social debate), addressed this clumsy paradox in his 411 B.C.E. satire Lysistrata. In the play, the title character famously convinces her fellow Athenian women to refrain from sex and procreation until their warmongering husbands give up the futile Peloponnesian War. “We must refrain from every depth of love,” argues Lysistrata, “Our whole life's but a pile of kisses and babies” [Aristophanes].) In any case, whatever Hippocrates and the Greeks had determined about abortion in the fourth century B.C.E. would continue to be debated if not altogether ignored well into the time of celebrated Roman-era physician Galen six hundred years later. Eventually, under English common law, noted Blackmun, it was “undisputed” that abortions could be freely performed before “quickening” (Goldman, 1982, p. 233), which is to say, when movement could be detected, usually about seventeen weeks into pregnancy (which, importantly, would be after the Dobbs deadline).

It was only during the second half of the nineteenth century that many U.S. states began banning all abortions except those clearly saving the mother’s life, part of a larger biological/political project that reached its apex by the 1950s. “It is thus apparent that at the common law, at the time of the adoption of our Constitution, and through the major portion of the 19th century, abortion was viewed with less disfavor than under most American statutes currently in effect,” wrote Blackmun (Goldman, p. 233). In other words, it seems unlikely that the so-called Framers or Founding Fathers thought abortion problematic or worthy of Constitutional debate. After the excesses and liberalities of the 1920s—at least for many in the white, middle class—and the stunning economic collapse and seeming strength of Communism in the 1930s, powerful classes drove what George Chauncey (1994) has termed a “heterosexual counterrevolution” (p. 118) and many changes correlating to it. Openly authoritarian regimes in the 1930s and 1940s had in fact already concluded that pregnancy “termination” was “at variance with the meaning of the family,” to quote a Nazi party newspaper from 1931 (in: Reich, 1970, p. 107).

It is also significant, legally and psychoanalytically, that Justice Alito cited what he posed as a twelfth-century English royal law forbidding termination of a “quick” fetus—from what in fact turned out to be an ecclesiastical writing. According to this Medieval church code, a woman who aborted a quickened fetus would be made to do seven years of penance “as if she were a murderess” (Boyle, 2022, np). Alito left the religious context and its nuances out of his Dobbs ruling, though others were quick to notice his editorial sleight-of-hand. Something was compelling enough for Alito to have reverted to the protective authority of the Catholic Church even as he at some level understood it to be inappropriate in a putatively secular context. He was relying on the authority of a powerful father analog, the church. Significantly, at the time of Alito’s 2005 Supreme Court confirmation, his mother, Rose, told reporters that “of course” her son was “against abortion.” (Feminist Majority Foundation Blog, 2005, np). In that episode, the media, the news-consuming public, and other potential watchdogs colluded with avoidance and/or magical thinking, perhaps wishing to believe that mother-son discourse is private and apolitical, instead of considering how a man apparently dutifully-bound to parents and parental/patriarchal structures might actually feel about reproductive freedoms. In any case, by 2005, Alito’s views on feminine agency were already a matter of open record: in 1991, he had been the lone dissenter in a Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruling which ruled that a woman did not need her husband’s consent to get an abortion. Alito’s dissent, of course, made him a perfect Supreme Court pick for President George W. Bush fourteen years later.

Ideal Children and Abandoned Parents

As I continued to think and read about the abortion issue, listening to various voices, and engaging with relevant literature, I found myself returning to a case from my therapy practice. Aspects of my work with a former patient suggested a clarifying light, allowing me to synthesize and theorize about what might be going on in this ferocious contest over infants, children, fetuses, and parents. Here are the details3: An individual to whom I provided psychotherapy—let’s call him John—and his twin sister had been literally abandoned at a country fair when they were five years old. Their mother was twenty-two, raising her children without a partner, spouse, or family support system. They lived in a rented trailer in an area with few social resources, and my patient believes his mother suffered from severe depression and anxiety, used alcohol and other substances to self-medicate, and had undergone serious traumas—physical abuse, neglect, financial anxiety, and class oppression—during her own developmental years.

Abandoning your two young children at a country fair may seem a cliché of tragic neglect, among the worst crimes a parent may commit. But it is hard to ignore the near-impossible weight of responsibility which burdened this young, unwell mother. I can imagine someone in her position visiting a place with so many seemingly “normal” children and families and wishing that maybe her offspring could get a redo, and she could be relieved of a task she could not adequately perform.

Left at the country fair, the twins had only themselves to cling to and, in an episode of heart-touching resilience, quickly realized the necessity of locating a grownup. Mom was gone and they knew it. They made a sheriff’s deputy aware of their plight and were soon in the care of child-protective services. The twins were eventually adopted by a young couple who “loved children,” as my patient informed me, and wanted nothing more than a family of their own.

John, a cisgendered, hetero-identified white male in his early thirties, had come to treatment after years of what he described as motorically-driven sexual affairs and brief encounters—i.e., “hookups”—of which his live-in fiancée had only recently, and with great shock and distress, become aware. He had spent five years with a previous therapist addressing a vague but persistent dysthymia. When I asked him what sense he and his former counselor had made of his patterned sexual behaviors he said, “It never came up.” They had colluded in avoiding the most centrally-organizing mental and physical behavior of my patient's adult life.

Though John had come to treatment after his fiancée discovered his history of sexual betrayal and deception, with me he was earnest, truthful, and often relieved to discuss his behaviors, thoughts, and feelings. I found myself inclined to believe him as we built our rapport, and I never felt lied-to or that my questions were elided (Shulman, 1999)4.

After establishing a clinical alliance, including sincerely positive transference/countertransference, John and I were able to create room for him to identify and articulate the following: it was not the sexual act, climax, secrecy, or even variation of partners that satisfied him. Rather, this individual—a highly intelligent, thoughtful, and curious young man—was able to recognize that it was the arranging and securing of a tryst or liaison which he found by far the most gratifying element of his clandestine erotic activity. “The sex was almost secondary once I’d gotten there,” he’d say of his liaisons, reflecting a hyperfocus on maintaining what has been called “supply” and the management of one’s “procurement strategies” by some who identify as sexual “addicts” (Sex & Love Addicts Anonymous, 1986, p. 108). The strategizing, logistics, and corresponding lie-narratives to make it all work took up a significant portion of John’s mental energy, and the payoff from it—queuing-up an unending succession of available partners—left him exhausted but secure in his power to summon as much intimate contact as he could handle, and then some.

In psychoanalytic terms, John’s behaviors had a quality of undoing. His perpetual effort to ensure the presence of sexual partners could be seen as a compensatory action aiming somehow to counteract or “magically erase” (paradoxically, here, by accretion) what had been done to him long ago (McWilliams, 1994, p. 128). His compensatory sexual strivings could also be seen as a trauma-informed attempt at “negation” (Wurmser, 1996, p. 18) of the original catastrophe which had communicated to him in toddlerhood: you are not wanted; you are disposable.

As early as 1945, Fenichel likened rigidly-patterned, maladaptive behaviors to conventional substance addictions—thus identifying what we might today call “process addictions” (Hilton, Jr. & Watts, 2011, p. 2). According to Fenichel (1945), kleptomaniacs, for example, compulsively steal to “ward off” a danger or “reassure against a danger” whose psychic seeds trace back to an early-developmental time “in which striving for security and striving for sexual satisfaction were not yet differentiated from one another” (pp. 200–201). Fenichel would soon become the first psychoanalyst (Goodman, 1998) to specifically consider sex and “love” as forms of “addiction,” noting that people may become “hypersexual” as a result of hungering for “confirmation” that another will be intimately present (Fenichel, 1946, pp. 381–382). Working-through this syndrome, John was able to cease his problematic sexual activities and restore his relationship with the partner to whom he felt truly connected. (When he terminated, after three years in treatment with me, his partner was pregnant with their first child, and they had decided to marry. They had also bought and remodeled a home together.)

But it was what happened after his and his twin’s adoption at age five—that is, over the next ten-to-fifteen years of his life—that is of even greater importance to the current inquiry, as it informed further feelings of rejection he experienced while approaching and transitioning into adolescence. As noted, after a relatively short time in state custody, John and his sister were adopted by a young couple in a sizable city in the US Midwest. The adoptive couple had been unable to conceive biologically and strongly desired children. The twins seemed to be an answer to their prayers. From being left in peril, John and his sister found themselves in a household where they received loving attention; the meeting of their material needs; and the security, structure, and resources that accompanied conventional family life. Several years later, the couple adopted another child, a girl, also then aged five.

Yet, as John and his twin sister became older, something began to happen: their adoptive parents, by now simply “mom” and “dad” as my patient regarded them, seemed increasingly annoyed and displeased with their children. Where once they had attended easily and playfully to their kids’ hurts, joys, wishes, and wonderings, mom and dad now responded with a sometimes strangely oppositional energy or conscious indifference. They were often irritable, particularly mother, agitated for seemingly no reason. John, who by early adolescence had discovered reading, indie rock music, and other interests to feed his inquisitive mind, began to feel like an encroachment, or worse, a source of distress, to his parents. Somehow, the picture of a childless couple taking in two needy orphans, resulting in the happiness of all parties concerned, had altered. What had felt like an integrated family system had become an assemblage of separated, sometimes conflictual subunits. It was disconcerting to John and his twin sister. Mother began suffering prolonged bouts of depression and anxiety; resultingly, she took to bed for prolonged periods. “I’d knock on the bedroom door and beg and cry for her to come out or at least tell us she was okay. But sometimes, she couldn’t or wouldn’t do even that,” John recalled, his normally subdued face wincing. His twin sister was his only truly reliable partner in life, and the two began to feel like persona non-grata in a household where once they had been prized possessions. Ferenczi (1929), in his moving “Unwelcome Child” paper, describes how some unwelcome children are at first received with enthusiasm and with love, but then get “dropped” (p. 106). John and his sister were “dropped” (also see Csillag, 2018).

Using a psychoanalytic lens, it is not difficult to imagine these adoptive parents suffering a dystonic experience as the twins passed from childhood to early and middle adolescence, approaching what Blos (1967) has famously termed “the second individuation process” (p. 162). From a period of middle-childhood classically associated with latency, in which youngsters are still needfully joined to their parents, idolizing of the parents, and reflective of the parents’ wishes and fantasies in a way that is narcissistically pleasurable for many caregivers, things had changed dramatically. As tweens and teens, John and his sister (and as would soon happen with their younger sister as well), were discovering and cultivating their own individual personalities and respective senses-of-self. They loved their parents and their home but were exploring ways in which they themselves might be different and unique (Miller, 2011). John was more prone to introspection and cogitation than his parents. Bookish and intense where they were not. Given to an interiority that would mark his adult self almost as much as his teen self, while his parents strongly preferred extroversion in others. Simply, he often wanted certain things, didn’t want other things, and was generally guiding his vessel-of-self through the stormy waters of teenhood, as waves of peer-comparison, social-status anxieties, and bio-sexual flux buffeted him.

For his parents, though, and his mom in particular, these vicissitudes and modulations of self were experienced as a narcissistic rejection, what Loewald (1979) might term a “parricide,” wherein “parental authority is murdered” (p. 755). No doubt, John’s adoptive mother had her own unmetabolized individuation/abandonment wounds. But without proper help and support, she regressed into symptoms which included performative re-abandonment (not-responding to her kids’ knocks and pleas at the door) and the unspoken threat, feared by many an adoptive child, that they are in imminent danger of being discarded or returned. In other words, by leaving the seemingly idealized state of dependent childhood, at least as far as the parents were concerned, the now-teens-soon-to-be-young-adults had shattered the psychic need structure which made the couple eager to adopt in the first place, a rupture which likely had been staved off for a few years by the parents’ adoption of a third child. Eventually, though, the individuation-separation dynamics of both the twins and their growing younger sister turned the children into psychic rebels in the house. The notion that, as Furman (1982) has written, “Mothers have to be there to be left” (p. 15), was anathema in a family culture authored by these parents (and informed by certain larger, social norms). It was not the end of childhood per se that distressed mother and father; rather, it was the jarring emergence of adolescent personalities with qualities irreconcilable with those of the parents’. Moreover, entering puberty meant John and his sister could psychically (and, implicitly, physically) defend themselves more robustly.

What is Wanted of Children?

Thus, the case material. Let me now connect it to the abortion debate. When I refer to the contest over “abortion” I am referring to discursive, rhetorical, and material practices which aim to influence or convince the polity of a point of view. As such, the discursive/rhetorical practices may be understood as propaganda even if they take the form of “journalism” or “reporting,” or even “science,” at times. “Material practices” refers to legalization, debarment, and obtainment of pregnancy-termination services. Certainly, the discursive affects the material, and vice-versa, all of which in turn affects the ways in which women may think of abortion and their wishes and desires surrounding it. In particular, I hypothesize a link between some of the “pretty graphic language” (Green, 2019) marshaled by prolife partisans—“ripping,” etc.—and unconscious needs and fears which are of central interest to psychoanalysts. For the present purposes, I want to suggest that it is possible to see a wish to protect the fetus or the unborn child as deriving from, or residing psychically adjacent to, the wish for a child who never grows up, psycho-biologically, individually, or culturally. There are at least two interrelated reasons why such a child or child-fantasy is wished-for. First, the "child" is that unique being who can always be psychically recuperated as perfect, a situation aided by the fact the human young are so utterly dependent on their caregivers, and for so long, compared to other species; human offspring are famously subject to a “prolonged period of relative helplessness” (Connors, 1997, p. 476). Part of what makes a child “perfect” is their unique status as never fully culpable or blameworthy. Psychically, and in many instances legally, a child is never blamed because they cannot, by definition and nature, contrive adult intent. No matter what acts they may engage in, children are understood to be ultimately nonsubversive, ultimately always loyal, and therefore incapable of destabilizing an adult ego. (Unfortunately, highly dysregulated adults may still surrender this belief and attack children verbally, physically, or both in a futile attempt to subdue not just the offspring’s behavior but their will.) The child can therefore be posed in fantasy/phantasy as perfect and idealized—that is, the child is inherently idealizable—because it is not a psychical threat. (Even a severely disturbed child who acts-out with aggression that might harm or distress a parent and overwhelm family resources is rarely a harm to a healthy parent’s overall psychological structure or ego apparatus.) The preoedipal and particularly the latent child never has agency derived from adult libidinal energy. A tween or teen on the other hand is semiautonomous—one might say, politically distinct—and therefore threatening to a parent who cannot tolerate otherness (often masked as a hyper-valuation of “loyalty.”) The psychologically unthreatening child is thus the perfectly loveable being, and the fetus—the “unborn” (i.e., agency-less) baby—in turn, the perfect “child.” It is unchanging, an image frozen in minds, on ultrasound printouts, and sometimes suspended in specimen jars. It is not meant to separate-off and of course, it can’t. It is the symbol, signifier, and standard of that which can never do harm or be disloyal, each quality—each lack-of-threat, respectively—collocated in the other.

But pushing back against a colony seeking its natural independence creates bigger problems down the line. Fairbairn (1941) has written of perils that may ensue when “identification persists at the expense of differentiation” (p. 42). It is scary and challenging, yet essential, to cross the “gulf or chasm” (p. 42) away from primary identification and narcissistic dependence toward authentic selfhood. Should that journey become disrupted—or, in my patient's case, actively interfered-with—the child, in Fairbairn’s view, may eventually withdraw libido from the external world and redirect it toward internalized part-objects, i.e., a fantasy-breast that will always accommodate his “sucking” urges (pp. 29–31). The literally-abandoning mother of my patient's early childhood was followed by the psychically-abandoning/retaliating parents of his later developmental years. Ferenczi (1928) called the “breaking off from childhood itself into the adult way of life” among “the biggest traumata of childhood” (p. 65). Many psychoanalytic writers naturally tend to focus on early development, but many also caution against over-privileging preoedipal and latency periods and thus missing “unfolding dynamics of the life cycle” (Gerson, 2018, p. 340). In a sense, John’s dual, successive parental abandonments contributed to a “sucking” defense, a compulsive and perpetual seeking-out of a breast as a fantasied substitute for a mother who could not see him and his sister as whole, differentiated beings with autonomous personhood.

In Kleinian terms, it could be that John’s emergent pre-adulthood triggered a paranoid-schizoid regression in his mother when in fact she needed to assume a depressive position associated with letting him be his true self and tolerating the grief that might ensue (Steiner, 1992). I imagine John’s mother had not been permitted a journey toward selfhood in her own adolescence, akin to Masterson’s (1976) assumption that the borderline’s mother reproduces her own developmental trauma: “Having been unable to separate from her own mother, she fosters continuance of the symbiotic union with her child, thus encouraging dependency to maintain her own emotional equilibrium” (p. 37). One hopes that if Masterson had been writing today, he would consider the difficulties of motherhood in a late-patriarchal economy that tends to atomize and under-resource individual families. Additionally, more recent, feminist-oriented writers have begun to consider that women have their own unique needs in the mothering process, apart from creating the expectable “product,” i.e., an “adjusted and achieving child” (Gerson, Alpert, & Richardson, 1984, pp. 434–435).

The near-perfect joining that is possible between child and parent, especially a parent with their own unhealed, developmental lacunae, can devolve rather quickly into an irreconcilable conflict of selfhoods as the child-object becomes an emergent adolescent/adolescence-in-family system. It is my contention that the fight over the sanctity of the fetus and its right to subjecthood is in fact a displacement of some anxiety about the inevitability of the unthreatening/unblameable, eminently-joinable child becoming an at-best differentiated and at “worst” rebellious or transgressive tween and adolescent, a youth capable of emotionally bruising others and inflaming facture-points in others’ egos. The adolescent is capable of narcissistic assaults which the child-ego can almost never perpetrate. The “child,” therefore, can and must be defended, and any actions taken to do so are thus intrinsically defensible. The adolescent, on the other hand, can fight back, their seeming disloyalty (which is in fact normative) renders them less worthy of protection. (One might consider current restrictions on trans teens' medical care in this light.) This child is the adored pawn; the adolescent, the prospective fifth columnist.

Anxiety over the adolescent’s self-directedness may become aimed and projected onto women who wish to control their sexual/procreative autonomy. It is significant, for example, that Justice Byron White, in his 1973 Roe dissent, worried about women ending pregnancies out of “convenience, whim or caprice” (Goldman, 1982, p. 236). If we can’t stop the “proximity”-seeking child (Bowlby, 1988, p. 27) from morphing into the psychically and behaviorally noncompliant teen, one who is subject to “shifting loyalties” (Jacobs, 2000, p. 136), then we must protect the perfect and perfectly-dependent fetus against mother’s arbitrary, selfish will.

Thus, a wish for the object-of-care to be not just submissive and dependent but perfectly needy and perfectly forgivable is transplanted into and given new life via a strenuous defense of the unborn child in abortion’s discursive, (i.e., propagandizing) realm. Indeed, this fantasy-object, the protectable fetus, can mutate into an eternally-existent-yet-never-born person, one whose life always consists of material and psychic attachment to, and reliance upon, the parent. The unborn-child imago possesses something like the “frozen quality” which Gerson (2018, p. 248) sees in some patients’ idealized memories of their parents. The psychic pain my patient had inadvertently triggered in his mother during his developmental years may be a close ally of the emotions and drives, many unconscious, one discerns in the anguished strains and accusations of antiabortion partisans. It is notable that John’s mother was not only a strenuous defender of Donald Trump but, my patient reported, grew rageful when a normally solicitous cable news channel which formed the center of her media ecosystem occasionally criticized him. Mother could not bear what she perceived as the network’s (rare) teenage rebellions and transgressions against the wished-for, perfectly-protective father who will tolerate no disloyalty and seems psychologically allergic to humility, an exemplar of Horney’s “arrogant vindictive” character type (Horney, 1950, pp. 197–213). Indeed, as Bottici (2019) has written, Trump and his followers notably worship “America,” an idealized, vague, ahistorical unity, rather than the “United States,” a complicated, dynamic assemblage of shifting and developing polities comprised of “all those people who currently reside within it” (p. 93) and their diverse narratives. The undifferentiated, unquestioning, unblameable, unborn child is an analog of “America.” Freed from any shame but ever in need of fatherly rescue, the child requires a godlike “sovereign” patriarch (p. 95) in John’s mother’s psychic reckoning, or so it would seem.

John’s mother was indeed a consistently prolife voter, part of which may have been informed by watching or imagining other women terminating pregnancies while she remained unable to conceive, feeling helpless and ashamed. It is noteworthy that, while John moved to New York (worse yet, to Brooklyn) after completing a master’s program, mother and father steadfastly refused to visit him in “that city,” words uttered, according to John, with fear and disdain—perhaps the ultimate embodiment of a messy “United States” rather than a cleanly singular “America.” For the parents, New York was a city of protest, hatred of the beloved father, and so much else associated with teen rejection of the dominant order and its demands for hegemonic “respect.”5 Because John’s personality turned out to be not “a good match” for his parents’/mother’s, his personality came to be framed as fundamentally alien, disordered and “pathological” (Schechter & Combrinck-Graham, 1991, p. 289), or at least suspicious, as did the city he eventually chose to call home.

The Emergence of Psychic Adolescence and the Family’s Role

Sigmund Freud outlined the first modern, psychological conception of human life as a series of interdependent developmental stages, from birth to sexual adulthood (Freud, 1905). For Freud, the emergence of procreative maturity signified the end of significant development, with a “preponderantly autoerotic” drive now “find[ing] the sexual object” without (p. 604), not just outside the self but outside the family too. As his daughter later ably summarized (A. Freud, 1958), with “sexual life in its final shape,” now genitally-focused and seeking satisfaction with “sexual objects outside the family,” psychosexual development, and therefore development itself, was complete with the culmination of puberty (p. 256). It would fall to subsequent generations of thinkers, notably Erik Erikson (for a good comparison to the Freudian model see: Greene, 1991, pp. 107–109), to conceive of maturation as a lifelong process of “psychosocial” development (Erikson, 1956, p. 56), with many more stages and conflicts to be resolved and worked-through along the way. As one summarizer has put it, Erikson above all else fostered the idea that “personality development does not end with [sexual/biological] adolescence” (Allen, 1994, p. 148). (One has to keep in mind that Sigmund Freud theorized about development at a time when modern notions of childhood and adolescence had not yet fully emerged. Indeed, at least one historian recognizes a modern, distinct “culture of boyhood” and adolescence only beginning to take shape toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth [Rotundo, 1993, p. 262].)

Erikson’s work paved the way for later psychoanalysts to parse adolescence into yet finer substages, each with their respective characteristics and nuances (Ritvo, 1971). Working along such lines, theorists of adolescence have observed cycles of “regression and progression” (p. 241), back toward family-centrism, thence toward individuation, back again, and so on. Since genital maturity has putatively been reached, the middle and latter stages of adolescence must be discerned psychologically and psychosocially (Blos, 1967). This is a time of “psychic restructuring” (Blos, 1968, p. 246) in the microculture of the family (Blos, 1972).

Group-vs.-individual conflicts continue as the young adult enters the larger family or clan known as society or culture, with its intricate webwork of agreements, rules, oppressions, and power imbalances, all of which affect and are affected by the individual superego, ego ideal, and other functions of mind (Settlage, 1972). During adolescence, the “acting out remains within the family” (Freud, 1958, p. 271) for the most part, even when it finds extrafamilial cognates or masks (e.g., transgressions against outside authority figures and sociocultural norms). It is no doubt challenging for caregivers to adequately tolerate these regressions and progressions, with their characteristic sound and fury, seeing them for what they are and doing their best to build a salutary container, one that may involve a therapist as a para-parental resource (see: Britton, 1992). As Ferenczi (1928) reminds us, the family must adapt itself to the needs and characteristics of the child, walking a middle ground that offers safety, structure, and containment, without resorting to compulsive rigidity or enforced loyalty. Ferenczi even acknowledged that peers might find the very title of his paper, “The Adaptation of the Family to the Child,” to be “rather … unusual” in its suggestion. As we know, Sándor Ferenczi faced great challenges in bringing his own, unique ideas to the field, finding scant acceptance of an “alternative approach” that would later be taken up in part by John Bowlby. Bowlby, of course, also faced “a mainly hostile reception” (Bacciagaluppi, 1994, p. 97) until becoming widely admired and influential—and in so doing, aiding resuscitation of Ferenczi’s ideas. The psychoanalytic family was not yet ready to fully adapt itself to Ferenczi. But with Bowlby’s and others’ help6, it has been gradually assimilating his rich offerings.

Crucial to the shift-in-selfhood is the adolescent’s struggle towards authentic self-definition, versus a subjecthood intrinsically linked to parental and familial embedment. Kline (2009) refers to this as “decathecting the mental representations of the parents” (p. 170). This process is typically anything but smooth. Rather, it involves not only the more noticeable progressions-away-from and regressions-toward familial identification, but also chaos, vagueness, seemingly arbitrary paralysis and pseudo-hypomania, and modulations that may lead to a teen’s sudden disappearance from therapy if said teen happens to be in therapy.

The parents’ role is thus to allow the tween or teen their vicissitudes, disloyalties, and micro-revolutions while maintaining a good-enough frame of stability. This may be especially hard in a society which exacerbates family stress by making it difficult to obtain healthcare, education, childcare, and other vital resources. Somehow, the parent must actively allow the child’s journey from a “passive position in relation to the object,” which is to say, its self-understanding as an extension of family/parent, to an “active role” (Ritvo, 1971, p. 246) informed by authentic impulses from within and appealing influences from the community and culture at large. Ferenczi (1928), influenced by Freud’s theory of melancholia (Freud, 1917), may have been among the first to recognize that for such a fraught process to take place, parents must “understand themselves” (p. 62; emphasis in original). The parents’ own dissociated, disavowed, and unmetabolized psychic material will invariably relocate itself in one way or another into the child, as clinicians well know. When that happens, there may be severe disruptions in the child/teen’s interactions with the family and/or other spheres of engagement. These conflicts in turn yield opportunities for passed-along, unmetabolized psychic material to be recognized and resolved—or not. In John’s case, it took his constructive willingness to seek out a second attempt at psychotherapy, prompted by a crisis that nearly destroyed his own emergent family unit, to allow the working-through process to occur. In childhood—at the moment of his and his sister’s initial abandonment, and then again at the time of transplantation into a family that met their needs until adolescence, John (and his sister) had found helpful adults. With me, he found a collaborative partner to help him respond more adaptively to wounds long numbed but never healed.

What John’s parents had not anticipated—and it would seem, still have not realized—was how their own developmental traumas would be reactivated as their kids phased into adolescence. When children, teens, and even adult children make choices that deviate from the family script, it can provoke strong reactions in parents. On a conscious level, they may feel threatened by the very act of subversion of the familial code. If the parents understand simple loyalty as an “idiom” of bonding (Erdman & Crocker, 2019, p. 154), then disloyalty (i.e., individuation) reverberates as a rejection or a tearing-apart of the fabric of proximity or what Bowlby (1970) might have termed a “disruption of affectional bonds” (p. 75).

At a less-conscious level, a teen’s rejection of family norms can trigger their parents’ own regret, grief, and even rage at choices they did not make, or could not allow themselves to realize they could make in the face of social and psychic pressure when they were younger. Levenson (1966), for example, has noted that the college dropout is labeled a problem not because they are likely to continue failing in life but rather because their “malfeasance” is actually more “authentic and vital” in nature than many of the parents’ own life choices. The dropout can activate a parent’s buried awareness of their “unlived life”; the self-guided-ness of the youth constituting “an immense threat to the equanimity and a spur to the discontents” (pp. 189–191). The fetal imago—the “unborn child”—will, by definition, never individuate nor behave in ways that may activate parental anxieties related to the parents’ own unconsciously-conditioned limitations and impositions. It is agency-less and inculpable. In fact, while prolife advocates often use evidence of a fetal heartbeat as a powerful signifier of “life,”7 rarely do they speak of or refer to mental activity, not only because it cannot be known and documented in the same way but also because it would indicate that a separate psyche has not in fact been “born” yet. A psychically-separating soul, in our case an adolescent, can reflect a parent’s own “flaws and failures” (Barth, 2010, p. 336), particularly unintegrated and highly psychoactive ones, in a way that the perfectly-needy child/baby/fetus never will.

As noted, my patient who sought treatment for his extra-relational sexual patterns had a mother who could not tolerate his or his twin sister’s (or, later, their adoptive younger sister’s) modulations toward an identity which, for the parents, had a disconcertingly sui generis quality. John’s shift from understanding himself as an extension of the family-subject, which may be pleasing to couples engaged in their own “narcissistic collusions” (see: Gerson, 2001, p. 333), to one who was an object-without-the-family, could not be properly integrated by his mother (and, separately, his father, though the father’s tendency to dissociate led to different symptoms and coping patterns). The mother sought to salve her pain by denying herself to her children, locking herself in her room and refusing to answer, perhaps replaying her unmet need to know she was genuinely loved and that her parents “genuinely accept[ed]” (Fairbairn, 1941, p. 39) her love, free of narcissistic terms and conditions. Significantly, mother did not know, or did not permit herself to know, that treatment was possible to help unfreeze her trauma and reduce her suffering. Mother’s coping mechanisms, from hunkering down behind a locked door to refusing to visit her son in New York—a famously therapy-friendly culture compared to her own Midwestern setting—reflected an “unmediated immediacy and reactivity” (Gentile, 2016, p. 168), a symptom of the paranoid-schizoid position which recognizes only a closed universe between subject and idealized, unchanging/unchangeable object. Effective treatment, on the other hand, might have involved mother and a therapist’s co-construction of what Ogden (1994) has famously termed an “analytic third” (p. 3), a space co-created by clinician and patient which allows for psychic roominess, nuances, and three-dimensional models of self and other(s). If mother/patient relates to herself and others in a flatly dyadic way, a therapeutic “third,” as its name suggests, potentially opens up a triadic, psychically three-dimensional space of becoming. Similarly, couples or family therapy might have permitted John and/or his parents to disentangle themselves from entrenched “personifications” and grow into separate entities, like unique characters in a multi-person drama (Gerson, 2001).

Without such intervention or something like it, mother was forcing her kids, John and his twin sister in particular, to repeatedly declare, “We still love and need you, mom. Don’t take yourself away from us.” What mother imagined or felt was lost, the symbiotic pleasure of intrinsically compliant children, could not be properly mourned. It is unsurprising that as the twins left preoedipal life, the parents “collected” another child. I have a friend whose older brother and his wife adopted a number of children, usually from distressed parts of the world, one after another, in a what my friend once termed “hoarding kids.” For this couple as well, the incoming children—really, the forthcoming child/parent symbioses—may have provided anesthesia against anxieties triggered by each child’s progression into adolescent ego-hood. The grief of watching a child grow out of childhood is uncomfortable but necessary. The intolerable feelings of giving up a “completely dependent” (Fairbairn, 1941, p. 47) child for an inherently differentiated adolescent may necessitate defense against melancholia. Melanie Klein (1935) suspected that such a defense might be marked by a kind of crude “omnipotence” and hypomania. Child-collecting seems a perfect way to act-out those feelings, perhaps imagining that each new child will remain forever needy. If not, the adopting caregiver may undertake maladaptive efforts to make it so. Such parents fail to realize they are not so much adopting a child as taking on a human life to shepherd into separate adulthood.

The fantasied fetus, then, like the quasi-fetal child which famously appears toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s (1968) movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, can be a powerful salve to a parental ego that cannot tolerate, or at least senses distressing anxiety at, not just the expectable rebellions and protestations of the adolescent but emergent selfhood and its inherent, interpersonal dissonances. In return, the fetus/child is appreciated for its immunity to blame and shame. The fetal child must be protected at all costs, held up like an idol in imagery and rhetoric; it becomes just “a symbol and an abstraction” admits even one conservative opinion columnist (Douthat, 2021, np). To identify with the inherently blameless, the compliant child, is to eternally ward-off shame—or that is the wish, anyway. Hence the power of Trump posing himself as a bully against those who would harm or “rip” the fetus from its proper place in the actual (and psychic) womb of the fantasied mother. He will protect people from shame and other emotions he refuses consciously to feel. He will protect people from disloyalty. These are effectively the same thing in his social and psychic economy.

Finally, it might be argued that John, the individual whose case has been cited herein, is unique because of his own pre-adoption trauma and the fact that his adoptive parents/mother did not experience with him (and his twin) the classic “separation-individuation” of infanthood and toddlerhood described by Mahler (1972, p. 533). But in a sense, John and his twin sister, and later, their younger sister, had all been psychologically carried to term in their parents’ minds; that is, mother and father had long been psychologically pregnant with their adopted children, which means the relationship between parents and children had begun before they ever actually met. In their psychic gestation, the children were accorded separate subjectivities but only up to the point that they would need to return to their parents for an allocation of an experience of self.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ABORTION: CONSIDERATIONS AND PROBLEMS

This paper has offered psychoanalytic insights that may be helpful in understanding the abortion debate at a deeper level, clarifying what could be going on in individual and group consciousness. Recognizing and addressing unconscious or ill-formed wishes is crucial for engaging in constructive dialogue and discourse around this highly activating subject and others like it. Psychoanalysts are in a good position to consider core emotional and psychic drivers of political and cultural debates (hopefully) without resorting to hyper-individualized, ahistorical, or context-less explanations. It will come as no surprise to many an analytically-minded professional that unconscious, repressed, and diverted wishes can take the form of public policy and vice-versa. W. R. D. Fairbairn wrote in 1935 that psychoanalysis’s “explanatory principles” made him feel “justified in attempting to interpret sociological no less than psychological phenomena” (Fairbairn, 1935, pp. 233–234). As such, we are entering (another?) era of potentially fruitful/difficult “political Freudianism” (Zaretsky, 2015, p. 78). Some would say that the very act of constructive self-investigation must inherently include an interrogation of the larger political, economic, and social distortions which control and condition both individual and group mind (Martín-Baró, 1994). There is no individual neurosis without social neurosis, just as a family-systems therapist might say there is no symptomatic individual without a symptomatic family (Grinspoon, 1988).

With abortion rights at an inflection point, and also serving as one of the most visible correlates of present-day partisan politics, psychoanalysts will hopefully have more to say on the matter and on related topics such as gender, contraception, and domesticity. Some in the analytic community have seen a need for greater direct engagement. As early as 1968, five years before Roe, Hilda Abraham (Applebaum, 1969) commented on the “paucity of psychoanalytic literature” reflecting perhaps “an active wish among psychoanalysts not to think about” abortion, especially given the field’s “much studied issue of women’s strivings toward motherhood” (p. 265). Along similar lines, Pines (1990) noted what she saw as a relative absence of literature on abortion and miscarriage, while Remeikis observed “minimal discussion” (p. 231) of abortion per se in her 2001 review of the literature. As psychoanalysis grapples with its patriarchal past and assumptions, it must not only consider what “abortion” means in the minds of various political affiliates but also how individual women may think of and fantasize about children, gestation, terminating pregnancy, birth, and so on in the respective contexts of their material lives. As women experience greater political and psychological freedom to imagine and construct (Bottici, 2014) social life and culture, psychoanalysis can permit them, and everyone, deeper access to unconscious material which has been hitherto occluded. As early as 1978, for example, Bloch wrote about the surprising commonality of infanticidal fears and fantasies held by child and mother, respectively.

Other analysts have observed changes in analytic framing amid historical and sociopolitical shifts. Drescher, Glazer, Crespi, and Schwartz (2005), for example, have interrogated “the transferential sway of cultural maternal imagery” (p. 97) propagated within a heteronormative society, especially as other models of motherhood/parenthood—queer, nonbinary, nontraditional (e.g., technology-assisted conception), etc.—fight for legitimacy. What I want to stress, and what analysts will need to consider both conceptually and in clinical practice, is: What kind of parent-child dynamics, or parent-fetus dynamics, does a given culture permit its inhabitants to think about? Whether developing in a family culture to which we must be attuned to have our survival needs met, or doing similarly in society at large, what we may envision—including aspects of our supposed “natural tendency[ies]” (Ferenczi, 1928, p. 38)—hinges greatly upon context, situation, power, resources, and available introjects. Bottici (2014) describes an “imaginal” (p. 41) politics in which distinct, bespoke ideas of the self and other are cocreated within one’s social ecosystem. Chodorow (1995), like other post-structural feminists, has already suggested the inseparability of our self-understandings—as man, woman, straight, mother, etc.—from our culturally available ideas and models, and vice-versa. Indeed, it has been perhaps the main effort of queer theory to broaden and de-ossify both the content of identification and the hierarchical structure of identity itself, allowing for psychic relief and material freedom. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1999), for instance, envisions a culture in which “meanings and institutions can be at loose ends with each other,” one in which everything need not “line up” (p. 540), thus making room for adaptively-fluid subvariants of identity, family/ecosystem, and lived experience. As inherently-gendered psychoanalytic paradigms of parenthood, which take for granted, for example, an unproblematic notion of “the father” or “the innate maleness of the boy” (Benedek, 1959, pp. 399–400), are problematized or fall away, more space is made for understandings and experiences of motherhood which may have been dissociated or thwarted. As Raphael (1975) notes, for example, the Polynesian Tikopia peoples declare “a woman has given birth,” compared to the common western pronouncement, “a child is born” (p. 65). For Raphael, we may focus on the development of a mother’s “matrescence” (p. 66) rather than only or largely considering how she is or is not serving the infant. Strands of this thinking in fact already exist in our literature. Pines (1990), for example, suggests that in addition to its procreative function, pregnancy can constitute “an important phase in a woman’s life-long task of separation and individuation from her own mother” (p. 301; also: Pines, 1982). What is certain is that the battle over the meaning(s) of pregnancy, childhood, and parenting are likely to see greater upheaval and amplification, and that psychoanalysts can play an instrumental role in addressing the psychic impulses driving and being impacted by it all.

Notes

  1. 1

    Andrew Erdman, PhD, LCSW, is a psychotherapist, author, and independent scholar living and working in the New York City area. His research focuses on the intersections between individual psychology and public culture. His writings have appeared in other psychoanalytic and humanities journals, and he is the author of several books including Queen of Vaudeville: The Story of Eva Tanguay (Cornell University Press, 2012), the first-ever biography of a legendary entertainer who struggled personally as she triumphed on the popular stage. Andrew's next book, Beautiful Man: The Story of Julian Eltinge, America's Greatest Female Impersonator, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. For more please visit: www.AndrewErdman.com.

  2. 2

    I would like to thank Ali Shames-Dawson, Ph.D., for her helpful insights.

  3. 3

    A number of important details have been altered to protect the identity of the person in treatment without altering the substance of the case material.

  4. 4

    It is possible that John’s co-enactment avoidance in his prior treatment, in which the therapist and he managed never to talk about his sexual compulsivity, may have in part been influenced by the fact that John’s previous therapist was female. I should say that John was one of my early private-practice patients. At the time, I knew enough to foster curiosity in the treatment room about the fact that his sexual patterns “never came up.” Were we working together today, I would likely have further explored certain aspects of his prior treatment including its gender dynamics.

  5. 5

    Recently, Donald Trump was indicted by the office of the District Attorney (a Black man) of New York County, setting up a remarkable superego-reckoning by a limit-setting parent in the form of a nonwhite adult whose duty is to “that city.”

  6. 6

    The publication of the Clinical Diary of Ferenczi (Ferenczi, 1932), first in French in 1985 and then in English in 1988, catapulted Ferenczi into the psychoanalytic consciousness after many decades of denying his influence. Even before that there have been authors who acknowledged Ferenczi’s work (for example, Balint, 1968; Haynal, 1988; Thompson, 1944, and others). The work of organizations, such as the Sándor Ferenczi Center at the New School in New York (https://www.newschool.edu/nssr/centers-special-programs/sandor-ferenczi-center/ ; also see Aron & Harris, 1993), the International Sándor Ferenczi Network of many psychoanalytic groups all over the world (https://www.sandorferenczi.org), and many Ferenczi conferences since 1991 ushered in the recent decades of the “Ferenczi renaissance.”

  7. 7

    In Roe vs. Wade, Harry Blackmun stated that the U.S. Supreme Court would not try to “resolve the question of when life begins,” largely because “those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus” and didn’t seem likely to do so any time soon (Goldman, 1982, p. 235).