Cover photograph by Anton Biletskyi-Volokh.
John Steiner on psychic retreats, the comfort of psychological captivity, and why we sometimes prefer familiar suffering to the possibility of change.
Not every prison has walls.
Some are built from resentment.
Others from superiority, endless waiting, destructive relationships, or the comforting conviction that one day everything will somehow be different.
And the strange thing is that we don't necessarily want to leave them.
In Psychic Retreats, psychoanalyst John Steiner described defensive psychological structures that offer refuge from unbearable emotional experiences.
In Kleinian terms, the retreat protects against both the persecutory anxieties associated with the paranoid-schizoid position and the pain, guilt, dependency, and loss encountered in the depressive position.
Inside the retreat, neither has to be fully faced.
The price is stagnation.
The retreat protects us from suffering by protecting us from change.
The many rooms of the same refuge
Resentment and revenge.
An injustice may remain alive for years. The person nurses the grievance, preserves the moral superiority of being wronged, and refuses to let the story end.
Letting go would mean acknowledging that the loss is final.
Sometimes resentment is the last remaining relationship with the lost object.
Turning a blind eye.
Steiner explored this mechanism through Oedipus and Jocasta: the peculiar ability to know and not know simultaneously.
The partner whose infidelity is somehow never quite acknowledged.
The troubling medical symptom that will be examined someday.
The truth isn't necessarily unavailable.
It simply isn't allowed to become emotionally real.
Superiority and contempt.
I'm above all this.
These people are primitive.
I don't need anyone.
Underneath the apparent independence may lie a desperate defense against dependency.
Intellectualization can become part of the retreat: everything is understood, explained, and classified.
Nothing is actually experienced.
The sadomasochistic relationship.
Two people suffer together, but neither leaves.
The suffering itself becomes a form of attachment.
Separating would require mourning.
Genuine intimacy would require vulnerability.
So the relationship remains suspended between the two.
Neither close nor free.
The internal gang.
Steiner developed the idea of pathological organizations of the personality, drawing on Herbert Rosenfeld's descriptions of narcissistic and destructive internal structures.
Sometimes this organization resembles a mafia offering protection in exchange for absolute loyalty.
Only I understand you.
The others are dangerous.
Don't trust anyone outside.
The apparent protector may become the very structure that prevents recovery.
The fortress, cave, or island.
Psychic retreats sometimes appear in dreams and fantasies as enclosed spaces.
A bunker.
A castle.
An isolated island.
A glass bubble.
Everyday analogies might include endlessly postponing decisions, escaping into fictional worlds, or living in a permanent state of not yet.
Of course, enjoying games, television, or solitude doesn't automatically make them pathological. The question is whether retreat has become the only tolerable alternative to emotional contact.
The omnipotent promise of later.
When I lose weight.
When I become successful.
When they come back.
When everything is finally right.
Then life can begin.
The fantasy protects against time's irreversibility.
Ageing.
Missed opportunities.
Death.
The possibility that some things will never happen.
As long as the future can supposedly repair everything, the present doesn't have to be mourned.
Addictive numbing.
Substances, work, sex, or compulsive activity may sometimes be used less for pleasure than for emotional regulation.
Not to feel good.
But to avoid feeling too much.
A carefully maintained numbness between anxiety and grief.
These are not eight formally defined diagnostic categories. They are different ways of illustrating the same psychological function.
Something painful is kept outside awareness, and the person pays for that protection by becoming stuck.
Why leaving can feel more dangerous than staying
The therapeutic difficulty is that the patient may not experience the retreat as the problem.
The retreat is the solution.
It protects against something felt to be worse.
So when the therapist begins to approach the defensive structure, the patient may experience this not as help, but as persecution.
You want to take away the only place where I feel safe.
Sometimes the unconscious invitation is not for the therapist to help the patient leave.
It is for the therapist to join them inside.
To confirm the grievance.
Accept the contempt.
Participate in the fantasy.
Or agree that nothing can change until the world finally becomes different.
This is why Steiner emphasised the importance of understanding the patient's experience of the analyst, rather than simply confronting the defenses.
An interpretation might concern the fear that the therapist wants to force the patient out of their refuge.
Not:
You must leave this place.
But something closer to:
It may feel as though I'm trying to take away the only protection you have.
Recognising that fear can make the retreat less necessary.
And only then might something else become possible.
Grief.
Dependency.
Guilt.
Shame.
Contact with another person.
The ordinary, painful reality that something has been lost and cannot be restored through omnipotent fantasy.
The paradox of safety
A psychic retreat can preserve an unbearable situation indefinitely.
The person doesn't collapse.
But doesn't grow.
Doesn't fully lose the object.
But doesn't really have it either.
Doesn't face reality.
But cannot escape its consequences.
And perhaps the most difficult part is that leaving the retreat may initially make things feel worse.
Not because the retreat was healthy.
But because the feelings it kept away are finally becoming accessible.
Sometimes the place that has protected us for years is also the place that prevents us from living.
And the first step out isn't necessarily courage.
It may simply be discovering that the world outside the retreat is no longer quite as unbearable as we imagined.
Theoretical context: John Steiner, Psychic Retreats: Pathological Organisations in Psychotic, Neurotic and Borderline Patients (1993); Seeing and Being Seen: Emerging from a Psychic Retreat (2011); and “Revenge and Resentment in the Oedipus Situation” (1996).
The examples extend Steiner's clinical ideas into everyday situations. They are interpretive illustrations, not diagnostic criteria.
Related Psychology Notebook entries
- If It Meant Nothing, I Don't Have to Grieve
- The Same Story, Different People
- If I Destroy You and You Survive, You Become Real