Psychic Retreats (2016 Rerun)

[Rerun] Dr. Kirk Honda talks about the psychoanalytic concept called psychic retreats.


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September 5, 2025

The Psychology In Seattle Podcast ®

Trigger Warning: This episode may include topics such as assault, trauma, and discrimination. If necessary, listeners are encouraged to refrain from listening and care for their safety and well-being.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, deserving listeners. I thought I would talk about the
psychoanalytic concept called psychic retreats. I know that it sounds
like a retreat for psychics, you know, like a bunch
of psychics who can talk with the dead. They all
get together at a resort somewhere near some water and

(00:23):
they you know, they do trust falls and and that
kind of thing. But so psychic retreat is not that,
it's actually something else. But I'll get into that. All right. Well,
this is the Psychology and Seattle podcast. I'm your host,
doctor Kirk Honda. I am a professor and a therapist.
So psychic retreats came to my attention for the podcast

(00:45):
because Patron Charlotte wrote in, if you want your emails
to be read online, people, you got to become a
patron of the podcast because patrons get preferred treatment when
it comes to this sort of thing. But anyway, so
patron Charlotte wrote in, she says, ah, I am a
student at a university in Bristol, UK studying the to

(01:05):
be she's studying professional doctorate of Counseling psychology. I worded
that very wrongly, but anyway, she says, I recently had
a lecture on psychic retreats, which is a pathological organization
named and identified by John Steiner. I wondered if you

(01:26):
knew anything about this and could you talk about it
for a bit. I must admit I found the whole
idea a little brain frying, brain frying. Yeah, it's psychoanalytic
ideas are all frying of the brain, so you know,
and I can absolutely relate to that. Yeah. So John

(01:49):
Steiner first wrote about it in the nineteen nineties. I
think he was writing about this idea of psychic retreat
meaning that your mind retreats or withdraws, you know, you
try to withdraw from other people, You try to withdraw
from reality as a way of coping. So try to
think of it that way. It's a it's a defense

(02:11):
mechanism or or a defensive constellation of things, or a
pathological organization of the personality to deal with difficult reality.
Steiner is incidentally, just one author slash slash clinician in
a long series of other author clinicians who write about

(02:36):
the way that our early childhood development can affect our
adult personalities and defenses. You know, it goes all the
way back to Freud and there's thousands of people who
have talked about very different concepts, and John Steiner is
but one of those many many people who have written
about this. Steiner didn't really invent this idea, but but

(02:59):
was Perhaps you could say that he was one of
the people around the time that was trying to help
everyone understand why some patients seem to resist therapy, particularly
borderline people. I think he was trying to help us
to empathize with them, and I'll get into more of

(03:21):
that later. So the concept of the psychic retreat can
be briefly explained as this. When someone is denied proper
love and attention as a child, they might develop a
pathological style of defense to protect the self from the
pain of abandonment or abuse or some other mistreatment. So,

(03:45):
because they're being mistreated, or they believe they're being mistreated,
they develop a pathological style of defense mechanisms to protect
themselves from that knowledge that the world is a bad
place and that they're not being treated well. And sometimes
people will develop a particularly rigid style a defense. And

(04:09):
this is a rigid style in response to particular extreme mistreatment,
shall we say, And when this person comes to therapy
later on, in their life. Their defenses might be particularly
difficult to treat because they are so rigid, and then
the therapist starts to get frustrated with this because the

(04:31):
patient is not responding very well in a way that
other patients seem to be responding more rapidly and more readily.
These patients are quote unquote resistant to therapy, and Steiner
is trying to explain this as a potentially the result
of psychic retreat. Freud actually called this the negative therapeutic reaction.

(04:56):
I did a whole podcast on that, so it's you know,
I won't go into that, but anyway, people call a resistance,
people call it by a lot of different names. But
the psychic retreat is basically, like I said earlier, a
psychic withdrawal, which offers a temporary, elusive escape mechanism from

(05:17):
the pain of being emotionally harmed by others. But this
retreat or withdrawal leads to very weird, rigid, paranoid ideas
about other people. It's this sort of propaganda that the
person starts developing about the outside world. It's like, oh,
you can't really trust others, and this all leads to
isolation and loneliness. Naturally. In simple terms, patients engaged in

(05:43):
a psychic retreat while they're in session are very sure
of themselves, even though they could benefit from input from
the therapist. Steiner worked a lot with borderline clients, who
often will become rigid in therapy, and so his concept
emerged from that work. People who suffer from borderline might

(06:05):
truly believe that no one can be trusted, even though
they desperately want to trust other people, And they truly
truly believe in various propaganda that everyone will abandon them
eventually because they have, you know, they have experienced chronic abandonment,
particularly at a young age. Steiner wrote about how patients

(06:27):
develop this, you know, like I said, rigid propaganda that
helps them defense against being emostly harmed by others, and
some used some have used this concept of Steiner's to
explain various different weird behavior in people. For instance, the
nine to eleven attacks, some people write about how the

(06:52):
men who flew the planes into the World Trade Center
did so because they rigidly believe their own propaganda. And
when people have written about this in particular, I don't
really understand what they're saying. I have to admit, But
if I was to extend what I do understand what
they're saying into what I understand about the psychic retreat,

(07:13):
I would say that perhaps, you know, you could hypothesize,
although there's no way to know that these men who
flew the planes into the World Trade Center, they might
have been shamed and hurt as children, and they retreated
into a world of fantasy in which there was an
all bad America and an all good Islam. This is

(07:38):
actually evidence, and you know, shows how the psychic retreat
concept is related to Kline and Fairburn and all these
other people that came before Steiner, in that there's the
good breast and the bad breast, or the good mother
and the bad mother, and splitting, and how early the

(08:00):
infants have difficult have a difficult time bringing together the
fact that the mother can be, you know, both wonderful
and nourishing and loving and also just not be there
or even be abusive and angry at times, that the
infant can't reconcile those two people, and therefore will split

(08:24):
those two people into an all good mother and then
an all bad mother, and they have this sort of
fantasy that they're two different people and will see when
the all bad mother presents herself, she is hated, and
the baby, the infant will want to destroy that mother,
and you know, might even hit the mother and I

(08:44):
hate you, Get away from me. And then when the
mother is the all good mother, then the infant or
young child can't even conceive of the mother ever being bad,
because the baby needs to believe that there's an all
good mother because they don't have the ability yet to
see gray areas. They only see black or white. And
so as that child develops, they move on from that's

(09:09):
the paranoid skezoid position. They move on to the depressive position,
where they suddenly realize, wait a second, my mother is
but the good mother and the bad mother are the
same mother. And that's sort of depressing to think about,
because what that means is that the all mother doesn't exist.
There's no such thing as an all good mother. There's

(09:31):
a mostly good mother who actually is a dick sometimes,
and that's sort of depressing to children. And that's why
client called it the depressive position. And it's this, it's
this mature acknowledgment and real felt sense that other human
beings are basically good, but also you can't really depend

(09:55):
on other people all the time. You have to be
you have to depend on yourself sometimes. You know there's
going to be times when no one's going to be
there for you, and that's depressing, but it's realistic, is
the thing. And so as perhaps these men, you know,
again just total speculation, and someone else pointed this out,

(10:15):
and so I'm furthering that analysis to try to understand it.
But these men might have had that early development and
developed and stayed in the paranoid skezoid position of black
and white thinking, in which there's all good mothers and
all bad mothers. And when you have that black and
white sort of way of thinking, you tend to see

(10:36):
politics in the same way. You know, Trump is all
bad and Hillary Clinton is all good, or vice versa.
And this kind of thinking is pathological and that you
can't see the gray. You can't see that like, well,
Trump has good and bad qualities and Hillary Clinton has
good and bad qualities. You see. Actually, so just going

(10:58):
on this road for a little bit. Politics are a
good opportunity as a litmus test to see how mature
someone is. The more black and white they are when
it comes to politics, the more evidence you have of
the fact that this person, in all likelihood was denied
the sort of nurturing and emotional nurturing that they deserved

(11:21):
when they were young, at a stage when they were
still thinking about the world in this black and white way.
When you're denied love and emotional nurturance during early life,
when you're in that splitting mode of seeing the world
as seeing your mothers as either all good or all bad,

(11:42):
when you're denied the necessary emotional safety to develop into
the depressive position. You stay in that mode of seeing
things in a black and white way, and you will
see politicians in a black and white way. You'll tend
to like movies and stories that have definite evil and

(12:04):
definite good guys, like in you know, in hero movies,
where there's a there's a good guy and there's a
there's an evil villain. Those are are very titillating and
very satisfying to people who are splitting. And we all
do it. We all like to regress to that earlier
phase because it's comforting to think about the world in

(12:24):
that simplistic way. But anyway, so these men might have
grown up in I think they grew up they are
Saudi Arabian and they might have you know, been in
this black and white way of thinking because of being
mistreated as children, and then they see America as all

(12:46):
bad and where they're from is all good, and they
want to destroy America and then they proceed to you know,
fly a plane into the World Trade Center. So anyway,
moving on from that, when when someone has a complex
around humiliation and narcissism and shame, they you know, they

(13:12):
retreat psychically. So when you're when you're a child and
you're being shamed and humiliated and you need to be
narcissistic in order to hold on to some level of
self esteem, it's difficult place to be, and you'll retreat psychically.
You'll you'll, you know, you will engage in psychic retreat

(13:34):
as a way of avoiding being truly seen as a
way of hiding your vulnerabilities, as a way of upholding
your sense of superiority. You know, you have to you
have to pull away from the world in order to
have a fantasy that you're superior to other people. And
you do this as a way of avoiding further humiliation

(13:54):
and shame. The further you are from other people, the
more you're divorced from reality. The less likelihood you're going
to be hurt and shamed and abandoned and made to
realize that you're part good and part bad. That you're
mostly good, but you also have bad qualities. So not
only you know as the good mother and the bad

(14:16):
mother of interest, but a good self and a bad
self is also of interest because you're always interjecting and
internalizing all these things. And so this knowledge that wait
a second, so I'm not all good. I'm mostly good,
but I also have a lot of flaws. That's also
a marker of maturity that is facilitated by good parenting.

(14:39):
When you have bad parenting, you emerge from childhood often
with either an overblown sense of your own awesomeness or
an overblown sense of your own of your own faults.
People as adults who are over who beat them solves

(15:00):
up too much, are seeing themselves as all bad and
seeing other people as all good anyway, So again, this
is a psychoicritreat is a learned defense from early life
in response to tremendous anxiety and pain. They will sometimes

(15:21):
when people as adults, when they are engaged in psychic retreat,
ongoing they might complain about it. They might say to you,
I just feel like I'm always pulling away from other
people and I never give people a chance, and I'm
always lonely and this sucks. But other people will say
that the reason why they're pulling away is because they're

(15:45):
being unfairly persecuted by other people. So they'll be angry
about it, so they won't be sad about it. They'll
just be like, you know, other people suck, and that's
why I'm lonely and the world is against me, and
that's why I feel so lonely. And then you'll find
other people that And this is perhaps the most pathological

(16:07):
version of this, is that they actually will idealize their
own isolation and their own psychic retreat. They you know,
let's say, like, I'm independent, I don't need other people.
Other people who depend on others, they're fools. Why would
they depend on others? You know, you can never really
depend on others. And look at me, I'm so great
because I don't need people and I never have and

(16:28):
I never let anyone in and I always keep secrets
because those are powerful, and I will never even if
someone is very nice to me, I will never ever
let them see me. And you know, according to Steiner
and others, this is this is all different versions of
ways of observing the self and the state of psychic retreat.

(16:52):
And this is all to say from Saner that if
the therapist is going to help these sorts of patients,
the therapists must pay attention to the patient's sensitivity to
shame and humiliation and being seen. When patients have been
hurt as children emotionally and abandoned and shamed and humiliated,

(17:12):
they develop a complex around that. And so if you're
going to when you run into resistance on behalf of
the patient because they're refusing to allow themselves to be
in the room as they start to reveal themselves, you
have to be very careful about humiliating them, even in
ways that you don't think would humiliate them. You know,

(17:33):
a borderline patient starts talking about their own difficulties and
instead of pouncing on them and saying like, see, you
do have something wrong with you. I mean, I'm exaggerating,
but you want to just be very careful around shame
and humiliation, and Steiner tried to emphasize that. Steiner also

(17:55):
wrote about the use of countertransference with patients who retreat
as a way of discovering the patient's use of projective identification.
This puts John Steiner in again a large group of
authors and clinicians who would talk about the use of
projective identification to learn about counter transfer or to learn,
you know, to pay attention to Essentially, you pay as

(18:18):
a therapist. You pay attention to how you feel and
the different inducements that and emotional reactions you're having to
the patient as a way of trying to learn the
internal life of the patient. Because as the patient uses
projective identification, the patient will induce you, the therapist, to
feel certain things and have certain urges. And when you

(18:40):
really pay attention to your counter transference, you learn what
they're trying to make you feel, and then you learn
about more about their inner world. And Steiner was one
of thousands of people that were saying such a thing now,
because the patient often defensively retreats from interpretations of the

(19:02):
patient because you know, so as the as the therapist
starts to comment on the relationship style of the patient,
the patient will will retreat and that's and will resist
that and will make the therapist frustrated. Because the client's like,

(19:24):
you know, say, for instance, you you know it's it's
Session twenty. Patient comes in and says, well, it happened
again another another friend of mine abandoned me and and
didn't do anything to you know, it didn't didn't do
good by me. And the therapist says, okay, well tell
me what happened. And then the patient as well, you know,
I called up my friend and I told her, you know,

(19:46):
why haven't you called me? You know, you're you never
call me? And then that friend got upset at me
and said I should go to hell, and now I've
lost another friend. And the therapist is like, okay, well,
let's really look at this. It sounds like you were
upset and you called your friend and yelled at your

(20:07):
friend and accused them of something, and maybe they felt
that was unfair, and that's why they are rejecting you.
It's so you know, it's you, it's not them, And
that can be so humiliating and shame shameful and shame
inducing for the patient that they will resist that. If

(20:28):
you say that to a non borderliner, a non personality disordered,
or a differentiated mostly differentiated patient, they'll say, oh yeah,
you know what, maybe that is on me. Maybe maybe
that's my fault. Maybe I should have done that, and
many clients of mine, we'll do that. But people who
have been routinely and pathologically shamed and humiliated their entire

(20:50):
life and abandoned, they're so sensitive naturally to being criticized
and rejected that when you comment on their relationship patterns
in that way, they might consider it to be a
slight criticism, and that is threatening to them and triggering
to them because they believe that after criticism comes abandonment,

(21:12):
and so they will be hurt and then they get
really angry because they actually, deep down think that this
is the beginning of the end of your relationship when
it's not. But so so what Steiner would say and
other clinicians what did this to at the time is
he said, instead of commenting and interpreting the patient, you

(21:36):
allow the patient to interpret you as the as the therapist.
So as a therapist, you might say, what do you
think I'm thinking? You know, so I'm the therapist and
I stay to my client, what do you think I'm
thinking about this? You know? So the client comes in,
talks about all the you know, the friend and how
she called the friend and said you never call me

(21:58):
and and you never pay attention to me. And then
the friend told me that she didn't want to hang
out with me anymore. And instead of commenting on that,
you say, well, so you've just told me the story
and I'm listening, what do you think I think about that? So,
or you might ask how do you think I feel

(22:19):
about that story? Now, this is a very interesting thing,
and it's very psychodynamic, very psychoanalytic work. But what Steiner
saying and others would say this too, is that it's
a less threatening way for the client to explore something.

(22:39):
So instead of the client, instead of the therapist commenting
on the client's behavior and giving some some interpretation, the
client is is commenting on the therapist, which so the
therapist is putting themselves up for scrutiny in the patient's eye.

(23:00):
And this is of course much more tolerable in all
likelihood for a patient than the other way around. So
you know, the patient might say something like, well, I
think that you think that I'm I did the right
thing or I did the wrong thing. Okay, tell me
more about that. And so Steiner believed through experience, and

(23:22):
he wrote about this, that that motive therapy is much
more tolerable, much more safe, much less threatening to the patient.
And when you do that, you will be much less
likely to provoke a psychic retreat or a psychic psychic
withdrawal on behalf of the client. And it also allows

(23:45):
for the patient to play around with the depressive position
of wondering about the gray zone. So anyway, and by
the way, Steiner thought that all of us will engage
in psychic retreat from time to time, and for more

(24:06):
disturbed individuals, with more disturbed personalities and pathological organizations, they
will engage in psychic retreat much more often and with
much more intensity. But we all engage in occasional psychic
retreat because it's a normal defense mechanism in the same
way that we all engage in projective identification and displacement

(24:29):
and all those things. It's just a matter of how
often and how rigid are they and how intense are they?
All right, Well, I hope that answers, or you know,
satiates your desire, Patron Charlotte for me to talk about
psychic retreats. I hope I didn't make it even more confusing,

(24:50):
because it sounds like the presentation that you saw was
confusing to you, or at least, as you said, it
fried your brain. All right, well does it for that
episode of Psychology and Seattle. Thanks for joining me out there.
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(25:11):
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(25:33):
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