An invincible force impelled me to get rid of my existence, in one way or another. It cannot be said exactly that I wished to kill myself, for the force which drew me away from life was fuller, more powerful, more general than any mere desire. It was a force like my old aspiration to live, only it impelled me in the opposite direction.
—Leo Tolstoy, Confession
In this chapter I will be arguing that the developmental theory of the psychoanalyst-philosopher Hans Loewald is the most intensive elaboration of the speculations that led to the introduction of the death drive and that it is possible, through Loewald’s work, to formulate a demythologized version of the dialectic of death and mastery examined in the previous chapter, i.e., a more reasonable ontogenic version of Freud’s phylogenic fantasy.
1 The connection is far from obvious. Though generally unafraid of tackling Freudian metapsychology to illuminate psychic development, nowhere does Loewald systematically work out his thoughts on the death drive—a fact that could be related to his aversion to the topics of hatred, aggression, etc. In fact, he goes so far as to deny that the death drive is anything particularly novel in Freud’s work,
2 despite hinting in certain places that it touches on key concepts in his own. In a circuitous remark from a short book review, for instance, he writes: “If you say I am talking here not so much of a death instinct in Freud’s sense, but more of an urge toward the bliss and pain of consuming oneself in the intensity of being lived by the id, you may be right.”
3As the relation between Loewald’s work and the theory of the death drive has largely gone unexplored, my aim here, in brief, is to provide a selective introduction to his developmental theory using the lens of the metapsychology examined in the previous chapter.
4 My hope is to bind Freud to Loewald with the aim of lifting the former’s speculations from the pit of biological anachronism, but it is also further to bind Loewald to Freud and thus to stave off the notion that there could ever be a “Loewaldian” school of psychoanalysis. Loewald’s work is not a development of Freud’s but, for better or worse, a
nachträglich re-presentation of the original. As I present it here, it is itself a work of
Eros.
5The Primordial Density
In the “traditional” psychoanalytic understanding of mental development, the infant’s psyche, under the duress of an unforgiving reality at odds with its wishes and fantasies, develops a stable protective structure called the ego that mediates between outer and inner worlds. The ego, in this view, “is the outer, cortical layer of the id and has as such become different from the inner stratum. The influence of external reality, which has brought forth the ego, is seen as essentially threatening and hostile. Correspondingly, the predominant function of the ego is a defensive one, not only against reality but also against the inner world of the id, which disregards reality.”
6Buried underneath this official narrative, hidden away in the most questionable sections of Freud’s most speculative work,
7 Loewald finds a different story, one in which the ego does not develop as protection against an already existent, objective reality but rather
coemerges with reality: “in other words, the psychological constitution of ego and outer world go hand in hand.”
8 If, however, reality is not the external menace Freud makes it out to be—that is, if the conflict between ego and reality is not baseline—what prompts psychic development? In Loewald’s view, it is the “infant’s repeated experience that something, in his original feeling a part of him, is not always available, this repeated experience of separateness” that first fractures the “primordial density” from which id, ego, and external world eventually blossom.
9There is, biologically and psychologically, an increasing emancipation from the mother that leads to an ever-growing tension. The less mother and child are one, the more they become separate entities, the more will there be a dynamic interplay of forces between these two “systems.” As the mother becomes outside, and hand in hand with this, the child an inside, there arises a tension system between the two. Expressed in different terms, libidinal forces arise between infant and mother. As infant (mouth) and mother (breast) are not identical, or better, not one whole, any longer, a libidinal flow between infant and mother originates, in an urge towards re-establishing the original unity.
10Just as in Freud’s account of the genesis of life, a tension arises that leads to an urge back to a tensionless state. Loewald describes this urge (what Freud would call the death drive)
11 as a desire to rid oneself of separateness and to return to a state where boundaries are lacking “and therefore there is no distinction between [id, ego, and environment].”
12 Since the child’s first “reality” is a “global situation” that has resulted from a fracture of the primordial density, Freud was wrong to have portrayed reality as fundamentally threatening: in Loewald’s words, “reality, understood genetically, is not primarily outside and hostile, alien to the ego, but intimately connected with and originally not even distinguished from it.”
13 Far from wishing to fend off the threats of reality, the infant wants nothing more, at this developmental stage, than to be rid of the burden of separateness and to “return to an enclosure that effectively forecloses the anxious possibility of a hostile external world.”
14How do we get from this first stage, in which “inner” and “outer” are separate but still components of a larger whole that the child wishes to reintegrate (I will call this the tension-within position), to the next, where id, ego, and reality are clearly distinct entities (the tension-between position)? Here Loewald invokes the idea of a “dread of women,” first articulated by Karen Horney but more convincingly explained by Dorothy Dinnerstein,
15 to move his story along: at the same time that infants wish to maintain the wholeness of the tension-within position, they are also, he quizzically asserts, terrified of that same possibility. More concisely, “the positive libidinal relation to the mother is understood as consisting of the two components: need for union with her and dread of this union.”
16Although this move perfectly parallels Freud’s (one and the same “environment” signifies both a longed-for origin and a dreaded threat), it is not immediately clear what Loewald is proposing here. One might guess that he is offering something like Melanie Klein’s theory of the “paranoid-schizoid” position, where one and the same object is split into “good” and “bad” parts. However, unlike Klein, who posits an inherent tendency within the psyche toward splitting, Loewald thinks that infants have a very good, if unfortunate, reason for their dual mindset, one rooted in their dual condition: on the one hand, far, far away from anything resembling independence and theoretically indistinguishable from their environments and, on the other, all too aware of the stark fact of separateness, inescapable in moments of parental absence.
Turning away from the reality of this impossible situation, the fragmentation of the child’s tension-within world is managed psychically in fantasy: I am not my caretaker in reality, but I can nonetheless fantasize
being this powerful and terribly needed person,
17 I can recreate a “confusion of subject and object” by
identifying with the “other,” thereby satisfying the urge to union in fantasy.
18 Immature as an imitative “erasure of difference” may be, Loewald believes that it is the first step toward real differentiation: by “imitating in order to be” their caretakers so that they do not need to be there themselves, by establishing their presence in their inner being, infants are able to build and further reinforce the psychic structures of their own “internal world.”
19 “Identification,” in other words, “is a way-station to internalization, but in internalization, if carried to completion, a redifferentiation has taken place by which both subject and object have been reconstituted, each on a new level of organization.”
20 When this redifferentiation occurs, the loss of the primordial density has been successfully “mourned,”
21 and the child comes to experience the separation “not as deprivation or loss but as liberation and a sign of mastery.”
22 In short, “the road leads from depression through mourning to elation.”
23 It is this process, and not conflict with an objectively hostile reality, that leads to the genesis of the ego.
“Dread of union”
follows, in Loewald’s view, from successful coping with separation: elated at their newly acquired mastery and eager to maintain and further the ego boundaries they have so doggedly worked to construct,
24 children begin to perceive their caretakers as impinging, here and there, on their emergent autonomy. Caretakers in the tension-within position become sources of threatening domination in the tension-between position. If, as Adam Phillips writes, “the first world we find outside is, in part, a repository for the terror inside us,” it must be added that that terror
coemerges with the externality of the world.
25 From the vantage point of this new world, the possibility of returning to the tension-within position appears as a threat “to engulf the emerging ego into the original unity” and thereby reverse the painstaking accomplishments of internalization.
26 While it is undeniable that Loewald gravitates toward the positive aspects of the primordial density,
27 he avoids the trap of what Jonathan Lear has called a “secularized version of the fall” in emphasizing that it is also the primary source of dread.
28I should here make an important terminological clarification: Loewald often fails to distinguish reality in its primordial form from the person of the caretaker, and, as a result, “hostile reality,” in Freud’s sense, from the “dreaded other” in his own (perhaps, out of a fidelity to the metapsychological narrative outlined in the previous chapter). It is clear, however, that a distinction is necessary for Loewald’s story to work.
29 I thus propose the following: the caretaker (I will use the marking “other,” other in quotation marks) is the condition of and most important part of the infant’s primary tension-within reality, in which a fluid, continuous relation between ego and world prevails. As this primary reality is sundered, a less continuous, more bounded relation between ego and reality comes into being through internalization. From the perspective of this new “tension-between” reality, the “other” toward whom the child bears a now partially repressed urge to union is transformed into the dreaded
other that threatens engulfment of the ego and thus to destroy tension-between reality (I will use the marking
other, other in italics, to designate this aspect of the caretaker’s reality).
30For perfectly understandable reasons, then, having to do with the trials of dependence rather than any primordial “split” in the psyche, children acquire a schizoid relation to their caretakers and to reality. How are helpless parents to navigate this impossible situation? Should they quickly ferry their children out of the tension-within position, thus helping them along toward autonomy and avoiding, to the greatest degree possible, their fate as dreaded
other? Although it is true that the infant gains a certain independence through this painful separation process, Loewald is not the kind of moralist who encourages training to the harsh realities of disappointment and loss: the “other’s” absence, the inability properly to respond to the child’s needs, and all the rest of the ingredients that go into the mourning process are inevitabilities, givens of our finite and flawed existences. The parental task is less to facilitate structure building than to prevent what might be called an “overbuilding” of structure in the face of lack, an overreaction resulting in what Loewald calls “ego rigidity.”
31 The kind of intervention that minimizes the “discrepancy between the individual [child’s] needs and the support of the environment” preserves the “wholeness” in the world reminiscent of the lost intimacy from which the ego is slowly severed.
32 Without this support, which responds and adapts to the emergence of autonomy, the child loses the fluid relationship with reality characteristic of the tension-within position and comes to see it as exclusively external and hostile.
33This outcome of failed mutuality is more than just one form of neurosis. Indeed, for Loewald, it is definitive of modernity:
Freud as well as many others before and after him have been profoundly influenced in their way of experiencing life, and therefore in their thinking, by the overwhelming and increasing impact of social, political, economical, and cultural changes on the individual. The high degree of differentiation and complexity of our civilization, which seems to have run away from its human sources and foundations and to have taken a course all its own, seldom mastered and understood, has led to the view that culture and reality as a whole is basically and by definition inimical to the individual. The estrangement of man from his culture (from moral and religious norms that nevertheless continue to determine his conduct and thus are experienced as hostile impositions) and the fear and suppression of controlled but nondefensive regression is the emotional and intellectual climate in which Freud conceived his ideas of the psychological structure of the individual and the individual’s relationship to reality. It is also the climate in which neurosis grows—and here we hark back to our exposition of the neurotogenic conflict situation. The hostile, submissive-rebellious manipulation of the environment and the repressive-reactive manipulation of inner needs, so characteristic and necessary for man who cannot keep pace with the complexity of his culture and for a culture that loses contact with its human origins, is the domain of neurotic development. It is the above-described discrepancy situation repeated and re-enacted on a different level.
34Out of sync with civilization, individuals are forced into defensive maneuvers and come to substitute a cold, oppositional reality for a more primary, dynamic one.
35 Alan Bass calls this rigidification
fetishism—lacking the care structures supportive of a nondefensive psychic organization, the fetishist substitutes a “static, finished thing” for a “difference that overwhelms him or her,” thus providing “the illusion of control of what is inside and what is outside, at the cost of a hostile relation between the two”—though one could just as well use
alienation: in Rahel Jaeggi’s formulation, alienation is an “impoverishment of the relation to self and world” effected in the act of relating to self and world, a mastery lost
in the very pursuit of mastery.
36Born of alienation, then, “psychoanalytic theory has unwittingly taken over much of the obsessive neurotic’s experience and conception of reality and has taken it for granted as ‘the objective reality.’”
37 In other words, in positing a fundamentally hostile and disappointing reality, Freud universalized an “overbuilt” defensive psychic structure, one that suffers from a discrepancy between individual need and environmental support.
38 Loewald’s criticism is all the more devastating in saddling psychoanalytic theory with the same diagnosis that Freud had made of the religious believer.
Superego and Eros
To sum up: wanting nothing more than to be cared for immediately, without delay and without distance, infants are inevitably thrust into situations where that care is absent. In the terrifying and devastating pain accompanying this loss, they explode, unable to stand this gratuitous threat to their being. Eventually a strategy is unwittingly devised: “The ‘other’ might not be here, but I can be this person, and thereby not really be without care” (and it must be kept in mind that this fantasy performatively creates the “I” it posits). When the “other” leaves again, the loss is not as severe. There may be moments of weakness, in which the newly solidified identification is not yet able to bear the necessary weight, but on the whole, as identification quietly morphs into internalization, separation slowly becomes an easier ordeal.
Yet the partial satisfaction of the urge to union—that is, its satisfaction in the fantasy constitutive of the ego—is at odds with the urge to union itself (in slightly different terms: identification is a gratification in fantasy of the death drive that is at odds with actual death drive gratification): “I am, after all, not the ‘other,’” and cruel reminders of this fact abound. The child is thus forced into a schizoid existence, rent between the need to be cared for and the equally strong and opposing need to be able to bear parental absence, to be independent. Urge to union, need for independence: the primary conflict of childhood according to Loewald, and an opposition structurally analogous to the Freudian antagonism between the death drive and the drive to mastery.
Thankfully, this is not the end of the road. The internalization process, wherein infants “take in” pieces of their absent “others,” inevitably reaches a critical point. Separate and proudly so, able to do a great deal themselves thanks to the imitative practice of “being the ‘other,’”
39 children still cannot shake that first urge, and every once in a while their confident autonomy melts away in tears and frustration. The lure of the primordial density is too much; the schizoid push and pull between need and dread too difficult to bear any longer. They wish they could do away with everything standing between themselves and the primordial density so that they could enter it and
be it once again, but they also understand that the actualization of this wish would amount to utter catastrophe for their own existences. Freud called it the Oedipus complex.
40In the standard telling of this story, the child’s drives are conquered, beaten back and held under the tight lid of repression. If, however, repression involves a split between thought and affect, an expulsion of the thought from consciousness and the redirection of its associated force elsewhere, where does the force of the urge to union go with the waning of the Oedipus complex? How is the child able to stand finally giving up on that first drive? As Loewald very concisely explains, the primary urge to union is transformed at the height of oedipal struggle into a secondary “synthetic” drive that aims to restore, “on more and more complex levels of differentiation and objectivation of reality, the original unity.”
41 Though both increasingly removed from the tension-within position and also cognizant of its “perfectly hellish” aspect, children do not give up on attaining its “wholeness”:
within the world of the tension-between position, they now seek to synthesize a totality resembling the primordial density from which they have departed, only in such a way that its pursuit does not eliminate self/other distinction.
42 In this way, the overwhelming desire for and fear of reimmersion in the primordial density is abandoned for the goal of reassembling its “wholeness” on a higher level (the
arche become
telos).
43It is this sublimation of a past fantasy into an ideal achievement,
44 Loewald contends, that animates a new psychic agency, whose task is to oversee the ego’s progression toward this goal. This new agency, which “functions from the viewpoint of a future ego, from the standpoint of the ego’s future which is to be reached, is being reached, is being failed or abandoned by the ego,” is, of course, the superego, the ego’s guide on its path to secondary unity.
45 In transferring the contractive energy of the primordial density toward the synthetic activity of Eros, the superego, in effect, hijacks the urge to union toward aims that are not its own. Like the Greeks for Kierkegaard, children approach “wholeness” as “the past that can only be entered backwards”;
46 but with the birth of the superego, they come to experience this same wholeness as something to be achieved in the future, thereby acquiring the “fullness of time.”
47If I am correct in identifying Loewald’s urge to union with Freud’s death drive, then we have here a novel (but already foreshadowed) take on Freud’s instinctual “dualism:” Eros and the death drive are not, on this account, opposing drives, but two admittedly contradictory manifestations of one and the same force.
48 Both threaten to undermine the ego’s stability, but whereas the death drive/urge to union is at odds with growing autonomy, constantly threatening to tear down ego boundaries and reimmerse the psyche in utter dependence, Eros is only in healthy tension with the ego, forcing it to push beyond itself toward a “vital ego-ideal” without threatening extinction.
49 The accomplishment of Eros is thus
the transformation of a drive to ego-destruction into one of ego-transcendence. One might say, then, that, with the waning of the Oedipus complex, the conflict between id and ego, which wreaks havoc on our early lives, is internalized in the more manageable tension between superego and ego, which is also to say that the ego comes to stability by appropriating for itself the very method of its own construction.
50The birth of the superego is thus, in Loewald’s view, an overcoming of primal ambivalence, a repression of the urge to union (a primal repression, as I called it in
chapter 1), but also a new avenue for the expression of this drive in the secondary process. One is tempted to call it a
sublation, and the implicit Hegelianism here has already been noted by Joel Whitebook.
51 Like Hegel’s
Geist, Loewald’s Eros brings contradictory tendencies into harmony, channeling a regressive force toward a progressive aim.
52 The psyche thereby reaches something of a dialectical resolution to the opposition of the tension-within and tension-between positions: guided by the superego, it is possible to accept the destabilizing effects of striving for wholeness without at every turn fearing the erasure of the accomplishments of individuation.
The Language of Eros
Loewald does a great deal to highlight the novelty of Eros in Freud’s work as well as to expand and clarify its meaning, but one might still legitimately wonder what it is to bind into ever greater unities,
53 as Freud says, or to seek secondary unity, as Loewald himself does. Abstract metapsychological concepts in general often suffer from a lack of a sense of how they are to be applied concretely, and it is Loewald’s great strength to have articulated, very precisely, how his developmental model is also a theory of language acquisition and thus how we should understand the relation between drive theory and the psychoanalytic process.
One of the primary characteristics of the tension-within position, for Loewald, is a fluid relationship between “word” and “thing” (Sache), taken to mean not merely a thing but a “state of affairs, event, circumscribed action, etc.”:
Thing, in this wide sense, and words, in the early stages of mentation, in primary process—insofar as words come into play—are not separate. Words here are, on the contrary, indistinguishable ingredients of global states of affairs. The mother’s flow of words does not convey meaning to or symbolize “things” for the infant—“meaning” as something differentiated from “fact”—but the sounds, tone of voice, and rhythm of speech are fused within the apprehended global event. One might say that, while the mother utters words, the infant does not perceive words but is bathed in sound, rhythm, etc., as accentuating ingredients of a uniform experience.
54Like Walter Benjamin, Loewald thus posits a primordial “language as such” in which there is “an absolute relation between name and thing.”
55 How do we proceed from this “global state of affairs,” where word and thing seamlessly flow together, to one where words are clearly separate from and designate “things” in the child’s external reality?
The key event, predictably, is separation,
56 but more specifically the role that vocalization plays in managing that separation. In his view, the
parental voice and speech take on a special significance for the child insofar as they come to convey the parents’ closeness at a distance, their presence in absence. When the child is alone, cannot see or touch and smell the parents, hearing their voice tends to render them present in a somewhat remote and less global fashion. The parental voice, responding to the child’s crying or other vocal utterance, for example in the dark, gives him a sense of their presence. Thus the child’s utterances may conjure up parental presence, even if the parent does not visibly or tangibly appear.
57The child’
s own articulations simultaneously play two roles: on the one hand, they are employed by the urge to union
actually to summon parental presence; on the other, they bear a unique capacity to conjure a “presence in absence,” to maintain a parental presence in a “remote and less global fashion.” I take this to mean that vocalization is a medium of internalization: by “taking in” the parental voice, infants (from
in-fans, or “without language”) are able to better manage separation, even if their utterances do not immediately bring their parents near. Vocalization thus plays an important role in the “mourning process” whereby the ego comes into being.
58 Perhaps this is another way of interpreting Freud’s claim that the death drive is “mute”: only when the primordial density is broken do drives begin to find a voice.
59In
chapter 1 I highlighted Freud’s recourse to the strange idea that the living vesicle “deadens” part of its outer layer in order to provide protection for itself from a hostile “external” reality. Loewald has already put his finger on the truth perhaps unintentionally expressed in this idea of partial death
qua protection—that life in its primordial form is way too much, that its “bliss and pain” would lead to its own end were it not tempered by the deadening weight of the ego
60—but this proposal finds even more concrete expression in his assertion that words distanced from “unconscious thing-presentations,” words that acquire a “degree of autonomy” through internalization, become “lifeless.”
61 When isolated from the global experience of the parent-child “field” (what he calls our “poetic-unconscious origin”), words become “deficient in experiential meaning”; in excessive isolation, insulated in “ego rigidity,” they deteriorate “to more or less hollow echoes.”
62Inasmuch as this linguistic “deadening” aids the individuation process, it serves a protective function and thus constitutes an act of mastery; but in addition to providing insulation from the lows of fragmentation, it also shuts out the highs of the tension-within position. For this reason, Loewald’s internalized cluster of “deficient word-presentations,” like Freud’s stimulus barrier, must allow the infant to strike a “viable compromise between too intimate and intense closeness to the unconscious, with its threatening creative-destructive potentialities, and deadening insulation from the unconscious where human life and language are no longer vibrant and warmed by its fire.”
63 The linguistic
Reizschutz must thus be neither so weak and unformed as to be overtaken by the unconscious nor so rigid and fortified as to deaden psychic life completely.
As long as words remain a means of conjuring up a lost unity, however, there is an inherent limit to language acquisition: unwilling to stray too far from the unconscious fire, language can only remain in stunted form. The emergence of the superego represents a decisive step forward in terms of linguistic capacity: instead of seeking the primordial density directly, instead of attempting to recreate unity
with language, the child comes to seek unity
within language,
to cathect language itself with the urge to union.
64 As the Greek
symbolon indicates both a sundering and the promise of a new union, Lacan’s notion of an “entrance into the symbolic” seems apposite here.
65 To enter the symbolic is to raise up and cancel the contradiction between recreating unity and managing separation that is endemic to early language acquisition into a new tension between ego and superego, between language in its capacity a) to provide a stabilizing mastery and b) to point beyond the ego’s present configuration.
Neurosis, in this view, is a function of the ego’s resistance to superego pressure. Haphazardly constructed and responding to crises of the moment without a grander architectural vision, the ego is an entity interested in immediate stability. When challenges arise, it is more likely to find stopgap solutions than to entertain more involved renovations. Thus, when a thing arises that poses a threat to its coherence (say, the deferred realization of infantile sexuality), the ego chooses to invest a great amount of energy into preventing the thing from being named, from finding a “word” for it; in Samuel Weber’s formulation, “repression denies the translation of one kind of identity (object-cathexes) into another (word-cathexes).”
66 Similarly, when words lack a reference in the world (happiness, freedom, etc., what Lacan calls “master signifiers”), the ego prevents investigation into why these words lack things and how it might be possible to bring “things” into existence.
The task of analysis, to put it in disarmingly simple terms, is to find words for things and things for words; in other words, to bring about a greater linguistic unity, to follow Eros. This goal is accomplished, in Loewald’s view, in two steps: in the first, through free association and regression, the analysand’s words are “reabsorbed into that old memorial formation where thing and words are not yet distinguished as different.”
67 In the second, interpretive phase, the analyst aims to reestablish differentiation “in such a way that renewed linking can be achieved;”
68 that is, in such a way that words are found for the previously-unprocessed “things” in the analysand’s world and things are found for “deficient word-presentations” so that they become more than “mere sounds without meaning.”
69 We should understand the term
find here in the same sense as we understand the term
discover in the sentence “Freud discovered the primal scene,” that is, as involving not an encounter with an already existing reality but rather a process of creative reformulation wherein words and things are placed in a “new configuration.”
70Loewald thus sees no necessity in the analytic journey: the process of finding words for things and things for words is an interminable one, which can most certainly overcome particularly stubborn obstacles and reach certain plateaus, but can never find eternal rest until the body does. Indeed, taking into account the modern predicament of estrangement he invokes to explain Freud’s universalization of obsessional neurosis, it is an inevitability today that all analyses will end in at least partial failure: in Loewald’s view, an individual analysis can only proceed to the point of realizing that there will inevitably be “deficient word-presentations” in the modern world.
Urge to Union? Primary Undifferentiation?
My work thus far has been primarily expository, an attempt to show rather than to defend. Before concluding, however, I would like to address two objections to Loewald’s developmental theory, one pertaining to the idea of an “urge to union,” the other to the postulate of a “primary undifferentiation.” In so doing, I will engage two psychologists, John Bowlby and Daniel Stern (representing, respectively, the contemporary fields of attachment theory and interpersonal theory), in an attempt both to defend and to highlight the distinctiveness of Loewald’s theory.
In a seminal paper that would foreshadow his grand trilogy,
Attachment and Loss, Bowlby claims that “the theory of Primary Return-to-Womb Craving,” that “infants resent their extrusion from the womb and seek to return there” (a category within which one might include Loewald’s “urge to union”), is “both redundant and biologically improbable”: the former because his own theory of attachment better makes sense of the caretaker-infant bond than does the “return-to-womb” theory (represented, in his mind, primarily by the Kleinians) and the latter because “it is difficult to imagine what survival value such a desire might have.”
71 For Bowlby, infants are not libidinally tied to their caretakers by their nostalgic desire to return to the prenatal state but by the need “to ensure that [they obtain] parental care sufficient for [their] survival.”
72 The ways in which they accomplish this task (“sucking, clinging, following, crying, and smiling”)
73 need not “invoke hypothetical instincts of sex and self-preservation as causal agents”;
74 they are present, rather, because of the “survival value” of the “child’s tie to his mother.”
75Given its ubiquity today, everywhere from Dr. Sears’s “attachment parenting” to Judith Butler’s “passionate attachments,” the language of attachment may seem like a better way to describe preoedipal relations than that of drives. Why, then, retain drive theory instead of opting for the postulation of “component instincts” that regulate “attachment systems?” My answer has simply to do with the partitioning of domains: the
psychologically relevant fact about human infancy is not that the infant must form attachments for survival but that one is removed from the tension-within position and forced to endure failed attempts to recreate it at the same time that one must struggle, slowly and painfully, for one’s own (partial) independence. Bowlby unsurprisingly spurns talk of “dependence” in order to differentiate attachment and drive satisfaction,
76 but that dependence, and its attendant horrors and comforts, again seems the
psychologically relevant fact about the neonatal state.
No doubt the various activities of “attachment” have “survival value,”
77 but “survival” cannot serve the same centrally organizing function in psychology as it can in biology.
78 Indeed, the challenge of psychology is to explain why human beings do much more than survive and why they even do things that imperil their survival. In Adrian Johnston’s words, drives, as opposed to instincts, are “beyond biological rationality.”
79 The psychological relevance of the attachment behaviors that ensure the infant’s survival is thus that they are
also expressions of drive formations that lead to more than evolutionary benefits.
80 Bowlby had good reason to reject the “return-to-womb” hypothesis, taken literally, but not, on those same biological grounds, to dismiss the idea that there is something very attractive about the early care state that children seek to recreate and struggle to give up.
81Although Bowlby rejects the “return-to-womb” theory, he seems to allow the legitimacy of the idea of “mother-child undifferentiation.”
82 For many today, the work of Daniel Stern has definitively laid this hypothesis to rest: according to Stern, “infants begin to experience a sense of an emergent self from birth. They are predesigned to be aware of self-organizing processes. They never experience a period of total self/other undifferentiation.”
83 He argues further that “undifferentiation” is in fact an adult projection on the child’s universe: “Only an observer who has enough perspective to know the future course of things can even imagine an undifferentiated state…. The traditional notions of clinical theorists have taken the observer’s knowledge of infants—that is, the relative undifferentiation compared to the differentiated view of older children—reified it, and given it back, or attributed it, to infants as their own dominant subjective sense of things.”
84Admittedly, Loewald does assert, without much nuance, an initial undifferentiation of mother and infant, one that I cannot affirm, being in agreement with Jessica Benjamin that the distinction between undifferentiation and separation is a form of splitting that reinforces gender domination in leaving only “the alternatives of [feminine] irrational oneness and [masculine] rational autonomy.”
85 The heart of Loewald’s work, however, lies less with the distinction between undifferentiation and differentiation than with the two psychic states that I have called the tension-within and the tension-between positions, the conflict between which captures what Benjamin calls the “real ambivalence of the maternal relation.”
86 In one, “inner” and “outer” are components of a larger situation still experienced by the child to be relatively whole (note that one could concede to Stern that the neonate bears a limited sense of differentiation in this state).
87 In the other, that situation has been fractured by an overwhelming experience of separateness, and in this fragile state the child works to develop a protective psychic structure that clearly delimits id, ego, and reality. It is the conflict between these two positions, and not in psychic undifferentiation, that is at the center of Loewald’s theory. Thus, though Loewald himself posited an “undifferentiated phase out of which id and ego develop,” Alan Bass is right to assert that he would have done better with an “originally differentiated stage, in which differentiation itself is not understood in internal-external, subject-object, memory-perception terms”—something akin to what Bracha Ettinger calls “
jointness-in-differentiating” or what Michael Eigen calls “dual union” or even what Stern himself calls “core relatedness.”
88With all of this in mind, I would like to be clear about how I am conceiving of the urge to union/death drive and thus how I will be employing these two terms (taken to be synonymous) in what follows: while it would be possible to affirm the existence of a drive toward a state of undifferentiation without doing the same for that undifferentiation itself, I find it less problematic to say that the urge to union is a drive to reverse the differentiating process of separation and individuation. This reversal constitutes a drive toward “death” inasmuch as its pursuit constitutes an all-out assault on that entity that we call “I.” What I want to emphasize in this conception of the urge to union/death drive is that it implies a certain
world that the drive aims to maintain, a world where we are not off on our own, where we
belong as one component of a larger “system,” one “characterized by soft boundaries between self and other,” a world that is experienced from what I have dubbed the tension-within position.
89As a final note, while I hope to have assuaged this concern pertaining to undifferentiation, I am not thereby acceding to the truth of the interpersonal/intersubjective framework in which it is couched, which I find to be an overreaction to the theory of primary narcissism, to the idea that infants are primarily self-centered, autistic creatures that must be forcibly brought into the social world.
90 This classical psychoanalytic idea is surely mistaken,
91 but no less so than that infants are “naturally social” from the beginning, that they are subjects from the very first moment.
92 Infants may interact with their environment much more than the first generation of psychoanalysts thought, but this does not mean that they do not have to go through a difficult ordeal on their way to becoming subjects. Eliding the yawning gap between the neonate and the linguistic subject transforms a qualitative difference into a quantitative one. More important, however, it turns the clock back on one of Freud’s basic discoveries: that the subject is a
nachträglich phenomenon, a linguistic “overwriting” of nonlinguistic forces. For Freud, the subject is not born, and it does not progress along a linear path to maturity. It rather
comes to be where it was not and in such a way as to erase its own past. It is in this disjunctive repression that psychoanalysis gains its unique purchase.
What Is Mastery?
By connecting late Freudian drive theory to the developmental struggles of infancy and the acquisition of language, Hans Loewald produced a lucid understanding of the psychoanalytic process based in the work of Eros. At the center of this vision is an ego both necessary and dangerous: as is clear from the transposition of Freud’s metapsychological narrative into developmental terms, the ego is akin to the “dead” outer layer of Freud’s living vesicle. It is but an “inorganic” shell protecting an “organic” inner core. While certainly a crucial developmental accomplishment, in that the process of its erection goes hand in hand with the child’s
mastery over its environment, this “crust of indifference” can be as much of a poison as it is a gift, as too much structure building leads to the entombment of life.
93 Loewald’s understanding of psychoanalytic health is thus “between two deaths,” to purposefully misapply a phrase from Lacan: on the one side, there is death by ego fragility, where one’s “boundedness” is swept away, a state that is both desired and feared; on the other, death by ego rigidity, where boundedness itself becomes a form of suffocation, where one loses contact with the environment from which springs vitality; and in between somewhere, in that delicate and liminal space as elusive as it is fleeting, mastery.
94For Loewald, the emergence of the superego represents a decisive victory in the pursuit of this end: unity is no longer sought in itself, and thus the urge to union—the instinctual foundation of human relatedness—need not threaten the child’s individuation. The primary conflict of infancy does not, however, thereby disappear. It is rather internalized in the tension between ego and superego: instead of playing out the conflict between the urge to union and dread of that union in the world, instead of alternating in a bipolar fashion between the tension-within and the tension-between positions, the child slowly begins to take in the antagonism between self-reinforcing and self-negating tendencies, to make an “external” tension an inner tension, to make a play of forces “outside” the self the primary dynamic of the self. And this is achieved, Loewald asserts, when language itself becomes the stage of instinctual struggle.
With this in mind, we might distinguish preoedipal mastery, which pushes the tension between need and dread of union to a breaking point as it grows, from postoedipal mastery, the pursuit of which is allowed by the cathexis of language with the urge to union. The emergence of the superego is itself an act of mastery inasmuch as it is the condition of the possibility of achieving mastery without generating both nostalgic longing and environmental dread. Preoedipal mastery, generated against a “hostile” and “external” world, is attained
in spite of an ambivalence that threatens to tear it down, postoedipal mastery by
harnessing this ambivalence in the tension between ego and superego, a tension that allows us to see the world as neither wildly insufficient nor all-threatening. If the deadened ego is the precondition for relating to the world in a nonprojective manner and to others as separate centers of intentionality,
95 it is the reanimating superego that makes this deft and open relatedness a live possibility.
96At this point, one might wonder what happened to that old “cruel master” that could become a “pure culture of the death drive.”
97 It is true that the negative aspects of the superego have thus far been set to the side, a result, to some extent, of Loewald’s avoidance of the topic of aggression (an issue that will be taken up in the next chapter and the last). That being said, it is far from “unorthodox” to hold up the superego as, at least in part, a positive agency whose strength coincides not with the “weakness” but with the health of the ego.
98 Without launching into a full defense of Loewald on this point, I want simply to point to two attractive features of his conception of the superego, both of which I will take up in
chapter 4: first, the superego is for him less a sublimate of the father than it is that which allows a successful mediation of tendencies traditionally reified in association with mother (union) and father (differentiation). Indeed, it is precisely the excessive distancing from the primordial density that supposedly issues from the father’s influence that is
weakened by the emergence of the superego, inasmuch as it prevents the overbuilding of psychic structure. Second, with regard to the therapeutic task of psychoanalysis: if the superego is a solely negative entity, the enforcer of a crushing guilt that is relieved in the analytic space, then the task of psychoanalysis is “integration,” the reduction of the power of the superego as a whole and the absorption of this “grade in the ego” back into the ego itself. If, by contrast, psychic health means a strengthening of the good parts of the superego, then the goal of analysis is to maintain and reinforce a lively “tension” between ego and superego. I believe that the “integration” model, in encouraging a kind of psychic streamlining, lends itself to an ideal of “adaptation” that the “tension” model resists. Despite Loewald’s ego psychology credentials, he clearly prefers the latter model to the former,
99 advocating as he does a difficult and dynamic interplay between the “agencies.”
100The next chapter will examine a theory of a particularly stubborn obstacle on the way to this “inner tension.” Its author, coincidentally, claims that it too makes some sense of the “enigmatic signification Freud expressed with the term ‘death instinct.’”
101