Individual presentation:
• Rose Gupta: Binding Oneself:
Unintegrated States and a Frantic Search for an Object, Any Object
(60 min)

Abstract:

When people experience profound internal fragmentation, they urgently seek something or someone to hold them together. As psychoanalyst Esther Bick observed, “the need for a containing object would seem, in the infantile unintegrated state, to produce a frantic search for an object which can be experienced as holding parts of the personality together. The more acute the fragmentation, the more desperate the search for cohesion, regardless of the cost.”

This binding can take two forms. When the cohering presence is attuned and responsive, the relationship fosters emotional regulation, empathy, and psychological growth. But when the binding force is damaged or exploitative, the price of psychological survival becomes domination and submission. Lifton’s work on thought reform and totalism helps illuminate this dynamic: in conditions of stress and dislocation, people may become vulnerable to totalist systems that promise certainty, closure, and absolute meaning. In a later interview, Lifton described this vulnerability as a human search for “fixity and definiteness and absoluteness” (Lifton, 1961). Such external structures may appear to hold the self together, even at the expense of autonomy.

This paper argues that managing unintegrated states is not merely a developmental task of infancy but an ongoing challenge throughout life—one with profound implications for understanding both individual pathology and collective behavior. In clinical work, the therapeutic task involves recognizing these fragmented self-states and identifying the internalized binding forces (whether nurturing or negating) that operate beneath conscious awareness. Similarly, understanding this dynamic at a collective level illuminates why populations experiencing historical trauma or social dislocation may submit to authoritarian systems or rigid ideologies: the promise of psychic coherence overrides other considerations, including freedom.

By bringing language to these pre-symbolic experiences of fragmentation and binding, both in the consulting room and in the historical arena, we create possibilities for liberation from unconscious submission to cohering forces — whatever their cost.

Keywords: authoritarianism, binding, fragmentation, historical trauma, psychohistory, psychic coherence, submission, unintegrated states

Short Bio:

Rose Gupta, LCSW, PsyD, is a psychoanalyst. clinical social worker, instructor, international speaker and consultant with a diverse, multi-cultural private practice spanning the tech industry in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Her papers focus on negation trauma, intersubjectivity, unrepresented states, and internal objects without representation.

She is a graduate/member of PINC (Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California). She has presented her work at conferences and seminars at IPA, IARPP, International Sandor Ferenczi Network, International Psychohistorical Association (IPhA), Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology (NCSPP), and The Psychotherapy Institute, Berkeley. She can be reached at .