My heart is taken by you
and these mornings since I am a horse running towards
a cracked sky where there are countless dawns
breaking simultaneously.
(Two Horses, Harjo (2008), p. 64)
(Part I introduced Kohut's ideas of self-psychology and explored self-psychology’s application to the human-animal bond. Part II applies Kohut's self-psychology to the human-animal bond by examining of the relationship between a prison inmate and a wild horse as told in the 2019 movie titledThe Mustang.)
Part II: Self-Psychology and the Human-Equine Bond
Brown and Katcher’s (2002) valuable research paper investigating the human-animal bond identified a discrepancy between their subjects’ success as students training for responsible nursing positions and the psychic trauma they believed these women revealed.* However, Brown’s intuition that the human-animal bond psychologically stabilized highly attached people and that its calming effect may indicate a non-human self-object function seems important.
Kohut and Self-Psychology
Self-psychology and self-object relations arose out of neurologist and theorist Heinz Kohut’s (1978) work as a Freudian psychoanalyst. Kohut discovered that if he could empathically attune to his most isolated patients—those tormented by extreme sensitivity to failure and wildly fluctuating self-esteem—his emotional support made psychological stability, vitality, and self-worth available to them. Based on this experience, Kohut postulated that the quality of the emotional bond between a mother and her baby affected self-esteem in adulthood, and that the adult relationship between a psychoanalyst and an patient could, in some respects, compensate for this.
Kohut already knew object relations theory from his training as a Freudian psychoanalyst. Object relations recognizes that internalized representations of important people (often parents) become a core aspect of the self, and names the inner image an object. Kohut intuited that newborns were born without a sense of self and instinctively adopted a primary caregivers’ psyche as a mimic (self-object). The experience of someone else’s psyche as a controlled extension of their mind and body helped infants develop the psychological cohesion and stability they needed to function independently. Kohut later extended his theory beyond mothers and infants and described three main categories where self-objects function: 1) supporting a sense of personal importance (the grandiose self) through mirroring, 2) providing an idealized, internalized parental image to look up to (the parent imago), and 3) creating a feeling of belonging through twinship (Palombo, Bendicsen, & Koch, 2010, p. 263). Kohut believed that mature relationships like psychoanalysis could address unfulfilled self-object needs later in life.
Decades later, arising out of research performed with her co-investigator Katcher (1997, 2002,) Doctor of Psychology, researcher, and clinical therapist Dr. Sue-Ellen Brown (2004) recognized that companion animals, under certain conditions, appeared to match the psychological necessity of human-based self-objects. She theorized that self-psychology might enhance our psychological understanding of the human-animal bond and that self-objects might model different types of animal attachment in humans. Brown also postulated that exploring the human-animal bond as a self-object could provide further insight into self-objects in general (p. 67). Brown also believed that understanding the human-animal bond through self-object theory would help others empathize with people who rely heavily on their companion animals or deeply mourn their loss.
Self-object Functions: Mirroring, Idealizing, and Twinning
Mirroring. When a parent excitedly responds to a child’s success, Kohut (1978) theorized that their praise, fulfilling the child’s need to be seen and wanted, also acts as a self-object mirror for the child (p. 2). In addition to feeling accepted by the outside world, the child experiences a parent’s enthusiasm as internalized self- acceptance. (Corbett, 1996, p. 27). Brown (2004) proposed that companion animals could serve a similar function, and in The Human-Animal Bond and Self-psychology: Toward a New Understanding, Brown uses an example, presented by an earlier researcher in a paper titled The Child-Pet Bond (Alpert, 1993), to demonstrate self-object mirroring with a companion animal. In Alpert’s example, a young girl reads to a dog who wags her tail and gives her mistress a lick on her face (p. 74). Alpert and Brown both interpret the feeling the girl gets from her dog as praise for her newfound capacity to read, but Brown is the first to identify this interaction with Kohut’s self-psychology and mirroring.
Idealizing. When a child experiences a parent as perfect and all-knowing, the parent functions as an idealizing self-object. This allows a child to internalize wise, powerful, and protective energy as their own. Brown (2004) finds evidence for Kohut’s idealizing function of the self in the child-pet bond in another example by Alpert (1993) involving the same child-pet pair. This time, the girl feels power and pride in the dog show ring as the audience admires her and her dog, who she trained herself, willingly accepts her direction and control (p. 73).
Twinship. A third self-object function, twinship, names the psychological experience of feeling another as if they are oneself (Kohut, 1978). This need is often experienced as an intense longing to be understood by someone “like me” (Mitchell, 1995, p. 161). In its destructive form, a person cannot distinguish between themselves and another, and Brown (2004) also recognizes the twinship self-object function as potentially activated in the human-animal bond. She uses a female owner and her cat as a destructive example when the owner feeds her cat the same vegetarian food she eats, ignoring the reality that as obligate carnivores, cats must eat meat to survive.
The Human-Equine Bond
Brown and Katcher’s two studies (1997, 2002) focused on college students’ attachment to their dogs and cats. However, Brown’s (2007) paper further exploring Kohut’s self-psychology and companion animals adds horses to her list of domestic animals who, through the human-animal bond, can function as self-objects for humans. Brown postulates that horses’ capacity to illicit human feelings of power, calm, and protection, enables their function as idealizing self-objects. Brown tells of a woman’s grief at the loss of her three beloved elderly horses in the same year. Indicating her horses’ function as self-objects, she seeks solace through replacing them with two foals.
The Mustang: A Film Example of the Horse as Self-object
In this section of this paper, I use a movie to further explore the human-animal bond, self-psychology, and horses. Based on real stories of inmates and horses, the 2019 movie The Mustang (Goldman, 2019) focuses on the relationship a prison inmate named Roland and a wild horse he is given the opportunity to gentle for sale at auction. Roland names the stallion Marquis and, in a series of scenes, I propose that the movie depicts Marquis acting alternately as mirroring, idealizing, and twinning self-objects for Roland.
Mirroring. Near the beginning of the movie, Roland starts trying to tame Marquis, who refuses to let Roland halter him. I understand this scene as a portrayal of the mirroring self-function. Roland gets mad, trying to control Marquis with loud yelling and threatening gestures. Marquis mirrors him with flattened ears and bared teeth and, expressing his own power, turns his hindquarters toward Roland. Roland has met his match, and no matter how loud he threatens, he cannot argue with a wild horse’s flying hooves. Despondent and defeated, he sits down in the middle of the arena. However, Marquis immediately rspeonds to the change in energy, turning around and gently placing his muzzle on Roland’s shoulder. Roland feels accepted by the horse, and man and horse connect; in the reflective quiet, Roland begins to understand the relationship between frustration, anger, and loneliness. The horse’s warm touch opens his frozen heart, and he begins a journey toward his later recognition that, although his uncontrolled anger has alienated the people he loves, perhaps all is not lost. A change in his own attitude may change the situation overall. Many scenes later, through his connection to Marquis and his compassion for another living being, Roland feels seen and wanted. Likely, he also feels he’s done something meaningful for another being he cares about. I argue this also allows him to care about himself enough to accept responsibility for the wrongs he has inflicted on others. Although she, understandably, cannot forgive him, he apologizes to his estranged daughter for his heinous crime toward her mother and his wife.
Idealizing. I also see evidence of Marquis acting as an idealizing self-object for Roland. As Marquis responds more and more positively to Roland, Roland feels Marquis’ tremendous equine power internalized as his own. Roland trains Marquis to be ridden in his own auction and astride the previously untamable wild stallion, Rowland sits proud and strong. The positive effect of the deepening human-animal bond between man and horse gives Roland enough courage to invite his estranged daughter to the auction and to reveal how desperately he wants her there. Although she can’t forgive him enough to attend, Roland’s capacity to ask reveals his gradual psychological healing and inner strength enabling him to face his daughter despite the pain he has caused and his lack of control at her response.
Twinship. The connection between Marquis and Roland also indicates a potential twinship self-object function for Roland. As the movie begins, before being allowed to work with horses, Roland is drawn to banging he hears coming from inside a shed. The wild horse is showering his hooves on the wall, and Marquis’ fury means no one want to train him, trapped by his own anger at lost freedom. Roland’s anger has caught him too, but he longs to know this wild mustang in a shed. Perhaps the unconscious similarity of their predicament kindles Roland’s desire to be allowed to work with the horses, and his attraction to Marquis gives him energy toward making the changes needed for that to happen. Marquis’ twinship with Roland appears again during the auction near the end of the movie. Marquis injures Roland in a way that recalls Roland crime of beating his wife. Terrorized by an approaching storm, Marquis’ instinctual fear overwhelms him and he throws Roland from his back. Striking Roland’s face with his hooves, the auction is suddenly over for both of them.
As The Mustang finishes, Roland realizes Marquis’ violence means he will be euthanized. That he still feels loves the horse who has badly injured him indicates Roland’s growing psychological maturity and his differentiation between instinctual and premeditated action. Perhaps his persistent compassion also allows Roland to being to forgive himself. Roland realizes that although he can release Marquis back into the wild, he must jeopardize his own freedom to do so. Solving the impossible tension between the forgiveness he needs in his own life and his violent unforgivable act against his wife, Roland frees the horse. The final scene fills with the ache between horse and man longing for each other from opposite sides of a wire prison fence. Although it seems unlikely that Marquis will ever reconnect with Roland, the human-animal bond has granted each more meaningful freedom: Marquis can gallop the wild plains while Roland has won transcendent freedom from inner hatred and alienation.
Conclusion
This paper reintroduces self psychology as an under-explored theory of the self-object nature of the human-animal bond. In exploring the relationship between a man and a horse in the movie The Mustang, this paper demonstrates the application of self-psychology to the human-equine bond. Further investigations assessing the possibility that companion animals successfully fulfill self-object needs in traumatized human psyches may enhance our understanding of the psychological healing potential in our ancient relationship with animals.
*As far as I know, links between pet attachment, self-reported dissociative patterns, and psychic trauma have not been established in female veterinary technicians and these findings should be interpreted cautiously.
References
Alpert, L. S. (1993). The child-pet bond. In A. Goldberg (Ed.), The widening scope of self psychology: Progress in self psychology (Vol. 9, pp. 257-270). Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
Brown, S.-E. (2004). The human-animal bond and self psychology: Toward a new understanding. Society & Animals, 12:1, 67–86.
Brown, S. E. (2007). Companion animals as self-objects. Anthrozoos, 20(4), 329–343
Brown, S.-E. (2011). Self-psychology and the human animal bond: An overview. In C. Blazina, G. Boyraz, & D. Shen-Miller (Eds.), The Psychology of the human-animal bond (pp. 137-149). Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299533956
Brown, S.-E., & Katcher, A. H. (1997). The contribution of attachment to pets and attachment to nature to dissociation and absorption. Dissociation: Progress in the Dissociative Disorders, 10(2), 125–129.
Brown, S.-E., & Katcher, A. (2002). Pet Attachment and Dissociation. Society & Animals, 9(1), 25–41.
Goldman, A. (Producer), & de Clermont-Tonnerre, L. (Director). (2019). The mustang [Motion picture]. United States, France, Beligium: Focus Features.
Harjo, J. (2008). She had some horses. Norton and Company.
Kohut, H., & Wolf, E. S. (1978). The disorders of the self and their treatment: An outline. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 59, 413–425.
Palombo, J. Bendicsen, H. & Koch, B. (2010). Guide to psychoanalytic developmental theories. New York, NY: Springer.
Kommentare