CONTEMPORARY FREUDIAN REVISIONISTS: OTTO KERNBERG, ROY SCHAFER, HANS LOEWALD, AND JACQUES LACAN
There is no absolutely specific and static Freudian essence. Nothing lies beyond any one writer’s rhetoric and thus beyond the realm of implicit and explicit dialogue.
—Roy Schafer
Freud regarded his own genius as having a wayward potential. He loved to develop grand, speculative theories about the broadest and most universal questions that occupied philosophers, historians, and anthropologists. Because it was so much fun and so easy, Freud feared that these speculative flights might draw him away from the hard, tedious work of clinical research and scientific theorizing. He therefore allowed himself only brief intellectual vacations from his major project of mapping the unconscious and building models of mental processes.
On one of these vacations, eventuating in the book Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud developed an anthropological fantasy, a kind of myth of origin for the human race. His clinical research and theory-building had been proceeding at fever pitch. His shift in 1897 from the theory of infantile seduction to the theory of infantile sexuality had opened up a dazzling array of conceptual and technical avenues, and he had been pursuing many of them: drive theory, infantile sexuality, transference and resistance, neurotic conflict and symptom formation. The Oedipus complex was the hub of them all. So when Freud took time out to allow himself some unrestrained intellectual wandering, he found himself speculating about how the Oedipus complex, which he had come to regard as the centerpiece of mental life, might have come into being.
In Totem and Taboo Freud envisioned the original human social group as a “primal horde,” with one powerful male dominating and possessing all the females and their offspring. This primal father was a major stumbling block for the young males as they came to maturity, because he denied them access to both power and sexuality. In examining totem mythologies of non-Western cultures that anthropologists of his day were collecting, Freud found evidence that the primal fathers were murdered by collective groups of sons. Afterward the sons were overcome by guilt and fear, and, Freud argued, many of the rituals of “primitive religions”—the prohibitions, the worship of powerful animals that are killed and ceremoniously eaten—are symbolic reenactments of and expiations for this prototypic crime of patricide. Thus the Oedipus complex that Freud envisioned residing in the unconscious mind of each of us, that dominates everyone’s childhood, is a recapitulation of the actual oedipal murder of the fathers of the human race.
Although not very sound as anthropology, Freud’s speculations about the primal horde have provided a rich framework for thinking about generational strife as a universal human experience.1 How does the increasingly vital younger generation appropriate the power of the decreasingly vital older generation? The generational transfer of power and authority has been one of the greatest challenges for all human cultures and subcultures.
Generational succession within the psychoanalytic subculture has been complex and varied. The many sons and daughters of the primal father have dealt with Freud’s legacy and their accession to their own maturity through many different strategies. On one end of the psychoanalytic continuum have been those descendants who have remained devoted to Freud’s texts in their pristine form. Orthodox (or “strict”) Freudians try to preserve Freud’s own concepts as a sufficient and exclusive basis for current clinical practice. On the other end of the continuum are those who have found it most compelling to assimilate many of Freud’s clinical insights and discoveries into their own emerging body of thought, often replacing Freud’s basic theoretical concepts with fundamentally different alternatives (as did Sullivan, Fairbairn, and Kohut, for example). To update our image of the primal father, we might picture the father of psychoanalysis, after his death, as having left to his heirs a Victorian mansion on a hill. On one end of the continuum of legatees are those who want to preserve the mansion in its original, landmark condition; on the other end are those who want to raze it and erect a more modern structure on the same lofty site, integrating some of its salvaged components (a stained-glass window here, a chaise longue there) into a wholly contemporary look.
Between these two extremes are the Freudian revisionists, who want to preserve Freud’s concepts yet, at the same time, alter them in fundamental ways—to keep the old building, but find a way to modernize it and make it functional as a contemporary abode. There are many ways one might go about such a project; we will consider the four very distinctive approaches of the most creative and influential of the Freudian revisionists: Otto Kernberg, Roy Schafer, Hans Loewald, and Jacques Lacan. We will consider them in this order because, from Kernberg to Schafer to Loewald to Lacan, Freud’s texts become increasingly stretched beyond the ways his contemporaries (and Freud himself) seem to have understood them.
From Freud’s day on, a rich cross-fertilization has taken place between psychoanalysis and other intellectual disciplines: literature, anthropology, comparative mythology, the visual arts, history, philosophy, and sociology. These relationships were based on the classical Freudian system and shaped by devotees of that system. Thus, until recently, the version of psychoanalysis cited in most interdisciplinary efforts was Freud’s biologically grounded drive theory. Over the past two decades, the relationships between psychoanalysis and other disciplines have been largely reshaped; the most productive and stimulating ideas are now drawn not from the classical Freudian system but from contemporary psychoanalytic authors, many of them taking revisionist approaches to basic Freudian concepts. It is for this reason that any honest attempt to address the place of psychoanalysis in modern thought, either appreciatively or critically, must look beyond Freud to the ways Freud’s ideas have become revised and transformed in the hands of current analytic authors and clinicians.
OTTO KERNBERG
Kernberg has been the systematizer extraordinaire of contemporary psychoanalysis. His fundamental project (1975, 1976, 1980, 1984) has been to bring together, in a genuinely integrated and comprehensive fashion, major features of traditional instinct theory and Freud’s structural model, the object relations theories of both Klein and Fairbairn, and the developmental perspective of Freudian ego psychology, particularly Jacobson’s work on pathological forms of early identifications. At the same time, Kernberg’s concerns have ranged from the most detailed and concrete clinical problems of severely disturbed patients to the most abstract dimensions of metapsychology. He has maintained a steadfast commitment to the classical clinical principle of the centrality of interpretations in generating meaningful change; yet he has also been a key figure in the exploration of the analyst’s personality and the relevance of the analyst’s passionate experiences in the analytic process.
Although the technical density of Kernberg’s language makes him one of the least accessible of contemporary analytic authors, his basic frame of reference has been consistent throughout, and once grasped, it provides the necessary conceptual map on which his forays into various areas of human experience can be charted. In the broadest terms, Kernberg’s contributions are all locatable, and only correctly understood, in the context of his hierarchical integration of three quite different visions of the development of human experience, those of Freud, Jacobson/Mahler, and Klein.
Recall the general features of Freud’s developmental perspective: We are born with an array of bodily based impulses, sexual and aggressive, that unfold sequentially over the course of early childhood. These impulses reach their crescendo in the genitality of the oedipal phase, where their incestuous and patricidal goals are experienced as highly dangerous. The mind becomes organized and structured for the sole purpose of channeling these dangerous drives so as to maximize the satisfactions they provide while keeping hidden and/or diverted their antisocial intents.
Edith Jacobson, consolidating the contributions of many in the field of ego psychology, including Margaret Mahler, proposed that our psychological birth is not coincident with our physical birth. A distinct and reliable sense of individual selfhood emerges only gradually over the first eighteen months of life, from an earlier mode of being in which there is no independent sense of self, but rather a diffuse, symbiotic merger with the mother, as conceptualized by Mahler. The mother’s cognitive capacities and physical resources are, for an extended period of time, experienced as inside the boundaries of the child’s self, Jacobson believed. Only gradually is a separate self articulated, during the process of separation-individuation, as the child’s own ego capacities mature and develop, making possible a psychological differentiation from the mother.
In Melanie Klein’s vision of the essence of human experience, we are born with two powerful, primitive, passionate modes of relating to the world: an adoring, profoundly caring, deeply grateful love and a horrifyingly destructive, spoiling, intensely envious and spiteful hate. Our love creates the possibility for caring, reparative relationships with others experienced as good and nurturant; our hate creates aggressive, mutually destructive relationships with others experienced as evil and dangerous. All humans struggle throughout life, from the first few months until their death, to reconcile these two modes of experience, to protect good, loving experiences from hateful, destructive feelings, to knit together the affective polarities within which they operate.
Although sharing some common ground, Freud, Jacobson, and Klein each propose a quite distinctive vision of the psyche, its origins, its fundamental nature, its tensions. Disregarding theoretical boundaries, Kernberg sensed the potential complementarity among these different visions, drawing together their contributions concerning the pathology of internalized object relations, an issue he felt was of particular relevance to an understanding of severe personality disorders. To some extent, Kernberg stacked these three models hierarchically on top of each other, thereby creating an elaborate and complex framework for understanding emotional development and psychological conflict and for locating psychopathology according to level of severity.
A Developmental Model
In concert with Jacobson and Mahler, Kernberg envisioned the infant during the first few months of life as sorting out experience on the basis of its affective valence, and thus as moving back and forth between two strikingly different affective states with very different qualities: pleasurable, gratified states and unpleasurable, painful, frustrated states. In both states, there is no distinction between self and other, between the infant and the mother. In one situation, the satisfied infant feels merged with a gratifying, pleasure-giving surround; in the other, the frustrated, tension-filled infant feels trapped in an ungratifying, painful surround.
The first major developmental task, in Kernberg’s scheme, entails psychic clarification of what is self and what is other (a separation of self images from object images). If this is not accomplished, no dependable sense of self as separate and distinct emerges, no reliable boundary can develop between internal and external, no clear distinction between one’s own experience, one’s own mind, and the experience and mind of others. A failure to accomplish this first major developmental task is the central, defining precursor of psychotic states. All schizophrenic symptoms—hallucinations, delusions, psychic fragmentation—derive from a fundamental failure in differentiation between self and object images.
The second major developmental task is the overcoming of splitting. After self and object images are differentiated from each other, they still remain affectively segregated: the good, loving self images and the good, gratifying object images are held together by positive (libidinal) affects and are separated from the bad, hateful self images and the bad, frustrating object images, which are themselves joined by negative (aggressive) affects. This developmentally normal splitting is overcome as the infant develops the capacity to experience “whole objects” that are both good and bad, gratifying and frustrating. Simultaneous with the integration of the object images is the integration of the self images; now the self is felt to be of a piece, experienced as both good and bad, loving and hating. This integration allows a concomitant integration of basic drive dispositions. Because good and bad feelings are combined, the singular intensity of loving or hating is tempered. A failure to accomplish this second developmental task results in “borderline” pathology. In contrast to the psychotic, the borderline personality is developmentally able to distinguish between images of self and others, but defensively retreats from the capacity to knit together good and bad affects and object relationships.
Thus Kernberg established developmental tiers that correspond to levels of psychopathology. In the first tier are varieties of psychosis, people who have been unable to accomplish the first major developmental task (as envisioned by Jacobson), the establishment of clear boundaries between self and others. In the second tier are varieties of borderline personalities, people who experience clear boundaries between self and others but who have been unable to accomplish the second major developmental task (as envisioned by Klein), the integration of loving and hateful feelings into a fuller, ambivalent relationship with complex others. Freud’s classical theory of neurosis as structural conflict is Kernberg’s third tier, reflecting psychopathology with higher-level personality development, where self-object boundaries are intact and self images and object images are integrated.
In the beginning, in Kernberg’s system, there are no drives. Over the course of early development, the infant’s diffuse good and bad affect states become consolidated and shaped into libidinal and aggressive drives. Subjectively registered good, pleasurable, satisfying interactions with gratifying others consolidate, over time, into a pleasure-seeking (libidinal) drive. Similarly, subjectively registered bad, unpleasurable, unsatisfying experiences with ungratifying others consolidate, over time, into a destructive (aggressive) drive. The child wants to maximize pleasurable experiences with good objects and to destroy bad objects who provoke unpleasurable experiences.
The libidinal and aggressive forces that emerge from the powerful affective states that dominate early object relations are themselves conflictual in Kernberg’s account, just as in Freud’s. Libidinal impulses, because they are infused with childhood sexual aims, are experienced as potentially antisocial and dangerous. Aggressive impulses are dangerous (once splitting is overcome) because they are directed toward the very objects that are also loved. Thus, the third tier of Kernberg’s developmental hierarchy of psychopathology is neurosis. Individuals who have achieved the separation between self and others and overcome splitting qualify for the kind of neurotic conflict between impulses and defenses that constituted classical Freudian theory of psychopathology.
What Kernberg did, in concert with Jacobson, was to broaden and deepen Freud’s drive theory by deriving drives from a complex developmental sequence centered around early object relations. Drives for Freud were given, inborn; drives for Kernberg are still dependent on constitutional predispositions, but are ultimately forged in interaction with others and are thus developmentally constructed. Kernberg stacks theories.
By excavating and erecting new scaffolding beneath classical drive theory, Kernberg was able to preserve Freud’s basic understanding of neurosis as generated by instinctual conflict, and, at the same time, employ Kleinian theory, object relations theories, and ego psychology in understanding more severe psychological disturbances.
Character and the Pathology of Love Relations
Kernberg’s revisions of Freudian theory seem quite abstract, but they make an enormous difference in the understandings they generate of what people are most fundamentally about. In classical Freudian theory, the centerpiece of personality is the predominant mode of instinctual gratification. For Kernberg, the centerpiece of personality is the developmental level of internal object relations the patient has reached. A comparison between the ways Freud and Kernberg categorized different types of personalities reveals just how far Kernberg’s revisions moved Freudian theory.
By 1920 Freud (in collaboration with Karl Abraham) had classified types of people according to their level of instinctual organization. As the libido moves through its phases of development—oral, anal, phallic, genital—it is always varied and diverse in its aims and objects (polymorphously perverse), but at each phase one libidinal aim becomes predominant and assumes a kind of hegemony over the others, Freud speculated. The kind of psychopathology that emerges later in adulthood is determined by the libidinal fixation point, the particular phase of childhood sexuality that had the strongest valence. Thus, for example, Freud and Abraham believed that depression results from an oral fixation (from a longing for nurturance and a sense of abandonment) and obsessional neurosis from an anal fixation (see chapter 1). People within the normal range can also be classified by their predominant libidinal organization: oral characters, anal characters, phallic characters, and, the paragon of mental health, the genital character.
What does it mean to be an oral, an anal, a phallic character? Experience can be organized and processed in an infinite number of ways; according to classical theory, the predominant libidinal fixation provides any given individual with a central set of bodily based metaphors around which all experience comes to be organized.
Consider an excerpt from Abraham’s description of the obsessional (anal) character:
The anal character sometimes seems to stamp itself on the physiognomy of its possessor. It seems particularly to show itself in a morose expression . . . and surliness. . . . A constant tension of the line of the nostril together with a slight lifting of the upper lip seem to me significant facial characteristics of such people. In some cases this gives the impression that they are constantly sniffing at something. Probably this feature is traceable to their coprophilic pleasure in smell. (1921, p. 391)
In the Freud/Abraham system, even the most mature character type is no less grounded in body parts and processes; the central organ and activity have merely shifted to a different libidinal component. Wilhelm Reich (1929) offered this description of the genital character:
Since he is capable of gratification, he is capable of monogamy without compulsion or repression; but he is also capable, if a reasonable motive is given, of changing the object without suffering any injury. He does not adhere to his sexual object out of guilt feelings or out of moral considerations, but is faithful out of a healthy desire for pleasure: because it gratifies him. He can master polygamous desires if they are in conflict with his relations to the loved object without repression; but he is able also to yield to them if they overly disturb him. The resulting actual conflict he will solve in a realistic manner. There are hardly any neurotic feelings of guilt. (p. 161)
Kernberg’s contributions on the nature of and capacity for love are among his most important, and it is here we can see most clearly the radical renovations he has made in the classical mansion.
The most severely disturbed individuals in Kernberg’s schema of love relations experience love and sexuality in the context of their inability to establish and maintain stable boundaries between self and other. For them, relationships with others do not occur on a continuum from privacy to intimacy; either there is no relationship, or there is total, confusing, often terrifying merger.
Robert, for example, had given up sexual experiences with actual others in midlife. He described his earlier sexual contacts as cataclysmic encounters; he experienced sexual arousal as a terrifying state of dangerous excitement. His mother was clinically depressed; his father had died when he was three, and he spent long stretches of time in isolation as a child. When on a date with a woman he was attracted to, he felt compelled to push for sexual intimacy almost immediately. The excitement itself felt unbearable; it made him totally vulnerable to the woman, whom he desperately needed to possess to regain a sense of control and integrity. If he did not succeed in bedding the woman, he felt shaken for days afterward. If he did succeed, he felt a strong need to be rid of her, spending days afterward in a well-protected isolation in which he felt he did his best, most creative work. Robert’s lust had an undifferentiated quality; the women rarely seemed distinguishable to him as people. Their most important feature was the dangerous arousal they generated in him. By early middle age he had given up sex with all women except prostitutes, because the control he could maintain in those encounters made them less disturbing and dangerous. Finally, only the total control of masturbatory fantasies provided Robert the protection he needed from the precarious fissures in his self-integrity that sexual desire opened up.
In Kernberg’s account, individuals in the borderline range experience love and sexuality in the context of their inability to integrate good and bad object relations into a single, complex relationship. For them, sexual desire is often keyed to a highly particular scenario whose perverse, often violent qualities are too disturbing to integrate into the tender, intimate side of their relationships.
Joyce, a writer in her twenties, could experience sexual arousal in a wide set of circumstances in relation to different types of men, but she could achieve orgasm, either with a man or in masturbation, only if she conjured up a fantasy of being brutally treated and punished. Both her parents were remarkably self-absorbed, narcissistic people who had tended to ignore and abandon her for long stretches of her childhood; when they were involved with her, they often teased her cruelly. Analytic inquiry suggested that she felt really connected to a man only when he was focused enough on her to punish or abuse her, which also enabled her to feel her own destructiveness was safely contained through identification with the man’s sadism. Although she sought relationships with men she felt were loving and kind, she secretly believed all men were abusive; if they were not abusing her now, then they would shortly. To allow herself to surrender to orgasm in the context of love and tenderness was unconsciously felt to be impossibly dangerous; the love would inevitably be destroyed by either her own aggression or the man’s turn toward destructiveness. Only by evoking images of mistreatment she knew, understood, and would not be surprised by could she feel safe enough to let herself go sexually. Ironically, Joyce’s relationships with men lasted only a short time. When she decided they were not kind or interested in intimacy (i.e., when she felt they actually corresponded to her required sexual fantasy), she broke off the relationship to search for a man she could be close to.
A similar kind of radical splitting characterized the sexuality of Harold, whose actual relationships with women tended to be largely asexual. Although he had a rich fantasy life, he became involved in essentially platonic relationships and felt retrospectively worried that he had been too aggressive and coercive when he had had sex with women in the past. One of these largely platonic relationships was with a woman who had chronic vaginal pain and wide-ranging sexual inhibitions and phobias. She would allow Harold to have sex with her once or twice a year, but only if he applied antibiotic ointment to his penis, inserted it very gradually, and withdrew quickly.
In Kernberg’s framework, the experience of sexuality for Joyce was organized into her borderline world rent by the polarization of good and evil, love and hate. The passions of sexuality were infused with meanings having to do with aggression and violence; love and tenderness were unintegratable with sexual desire. Thus, Joyce could allow herself sexual release only through a compromise arrangement in which sadomasochism was played out in fantasy, and Harold could allow himself sexual intercourse only if he offered himself to serve as a human medicine applicator, therein relying on an external ritual to contain and control his expected aggression.
Neurotic-level issues involving love and sexuality are understood, in Kernberg’s system, in terms of classical impulse–defense conflicts. Neurotic patients have established self–object differentiation and have overcome splitting. They relate to whole objects with an integrated self, and their difficulties concern conflicts over impulses (in contrast to irreconcilable rifts between mutually dissociated versions of the self). Kernberg would understand Gloria (discussed in chapter 1 in terms of Freudian theory) in much the same way as did Freud. Her relationships were whole object relationships compromised by oedipal conflicts and subsequent inhibitions.
Thus, Kernberg’s synthesis has preserved much of Freud’s system by recontextualizing it within a broader frame of reference and by deriving Freud’s drive psychology from a prior developmental progression of ego differentiation and object relations. In this revised Freudian theory, sexuality still plays a central but no longer a causative role. The meanings of sexuality itself are derived from earlier and deeper structures composed of self–object relationships. As Kernberg stresses, “It is the world of internalized and external object relations that keeps sexuality alive and provides the potential for ‘eternal’ sexual gratification” (1980, pp. 294–295).
One of the most interesting ideological battles in the psychoanalytic literature of recent years has been between Kernberg and the self psychologists. It is worth noting some of the issues that divide the two camps, because they reflect the difference between a revisionist position, like Kernberg’s, that nevertheless remains loyal to certain basic features of Freudian thought and a more radical position, like Kohut’s, that left Freud’s drive theory more completely behind. Kernberg views Kohut’s self psychology as deemphasizing the body, sexuality, and, especially, aggression. For Kernberg, the central dynamic struggle is between love and hate, and these manifest themselves necessarily in the transference to the analyst. As we noted in chapter 6, Kohut regarded aggression as well as impulsive sexuality as byproducts of narcissistic injury. In Kohut’s model, people strive for self-organization and self-expression. In Kernberg’s model, people are torn by powerful passions of love and hate. Kohut saw the narcissist as attempting to protect a brittle self-esteem. Kernberg sees the narcissist as contemptuous and devaluing. Kohut thought the analyst should empathically reflect the narcissist’s self-experience so that a more consolidated, more robust self could develop. Kernberg believes the analyst should interpret the narcissist’s underlying hostility so that more integrated object relations could develop. The tension between these two approaches, often mirror images of each other, has had an invigorating effect on psychoanalytic theorizing and broadened the range of clinical options for practitioners.2
ROY SCHAFER
Roy Schafer has explored many areas of psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice and has had an enormous impact on the shaping and development of contemporary psychoanalytic thought. Because of their range and variety, Schafer’s contributions can be approached from many different perspectives. Among his innovations are an analysis and redefining of classical Freudian terminology (1968); a philosophical critique of psychoanalytic language, grounded in the analytic philosophy of Wittgenstein and Ryle and having important clinical implications (1976); and, along with Donald Spence, the introduction of hermeneutics and the concept of “narratives” into psychoanalytic discourse (1983, 1992). Simply establishing Schafer’s place in the field of current analytic theorizing is difficult to do. In some respects, he is one of the most persuasive spokespersons for the Freudian sensibility; in other respects, he has been one of its most trenchant and devastating critics.
Agency
The relationships among Schafer’s varied and far-ranging contributions can be grasped most easily through an appreciation of his struggle with one basic, recurrent issue: the problem of agency. To understand why agency became such a nettlesome and also highly productive struggle for Schafer, we have to return to Freud once again, from yet another vantage point.
Freud demonstrated convincingly that his contemporaries had a vastly oversimplified understanding of the nature of mind, which they took to be transparent to itself and of a single, integral piece: “I am what I know about myself, and I am in control of what I am.” Freud demonstrated that mind was not integral but composed of many different motives and intentions in conflict with one another: mind is not transparent to the knower but contains a great deal that is opaque and inaccessible—an immense array of unconscious processes.
In developing this much more complex vision of mind, Freud drew on the scientific understanding of his day, borrowing from Newtonian physics the idea of the universe as an intricate system of mechanisms composed of matter and forces and applying it to the mind, envisioning it as a psychic apparatus composed of structures and psychodynamic forces. Freud demonstrated that the subjective sense of self as an omnipotent agent over one’s experience and actions is an illusion. Consciousness is merely the tip of an iceberg; thoughts and feelings are actually (psychically) determined by unconscious forces not accessible to self-reflection. One often does not, in fact, know what one is really doing. Consequently, in Freud’s system the person as agent is dispersed. A conscious sense of agency is illusory; the conscious self is more correctly depicted as a puppet. The strings are being controlled elsewhere, in the unconscious, by psychic agencies (id, ego, and superego) and by dynamic forces (instinctual impulses and defenses).
Kleinian theory and various British object relations theories inspired by the work of Fairbairn and Winnicott brought about in the 1950s and 1960s a population explosion in the psychoanalytic world of unconscious quasi-agents. Not only were the strings of mind seen as being controlled by Freud’s puppeteers (impulses, defenses, id, ego, superego), but to these were added all sorts of personifications: internal objects, introjects, identifications, incorporations, part objects, and many more. Analysts had begun to write and speak in a fashion that assigned both intentionality and power to these internal agents (e.g., “His maternal introject attacked him mercilessly”).
Schafer’s first extended psychoanalytic work (1968) can be understood as a response to this proliferation of quasi-agents in psychoanalytic discourse. In the style of his mentor, David Rapaport (who had attempted to systematize, codify, and empiricize psychoanalytic theories), Schafer undertook the task of more precisely and clearly defining basic psychoanalytic concepts and terminology. The thread running through these redefinitions was the struggle to reestablish the person as the agent of his experience—to reassemble the subject that had been dispersed in the creation of psychoanalytic understandings. Schafer felt that it had become crucial to clarify just who was doing what to whom.
By the early 1970s, Schafer had abandoned what might be considered Rapaport’s project, his attempt to rescue traditional psychoanalytic language. The problem was deeper and more pervasive, Schafer decided; what was necessary was a whole new way of talking. There was something fundamentally misguided about the way psychoanalytic ideas are understood and communicated; it is at odds with the basic nature of the analytic process, he believed.
What actually happens, in broad strokes, over the course of an analysis? The patient comes into treatment with a set of convictions about herself and the world she lives in: I am damaged because my father crushed me; the world is a dangerous place in which people are after me. Over the course of the analysis, these convictions change—they come to be experienced and understood in a very different way. What is the nature of that change?
In Schafer’s account, the basic transformation that takes place in the analytic process is the patient’s gradual assumption of agency with respect to previously disclaimed actions. The patient initially considers her beliefs about herself and her world to simply be true. She has been crushed; the world is dangerous. These are taken as givens, objective facts. In analysis, the patient comes to see that these “facts” have actually been created by her; even though she suffers greatly because of them, she both needs and wants to see herself and the world in just this way. She comes to understand that she derives secret satisfactions from these beliefs; they generate unconscious pleasures, and they provide her with a sense of safety and control. She comes to see that even though she hates thinking about herself and the world in these ways, she systematically refuses to have it any other way. She is committed to these beliefs and experiences. Her objectionable experience of herself and her world is not simply given or discovered; she is dedicated to keeping both herself and her world just this way. She is the agent of her world, the designer, the builder, the interpreter, yet she disclaims her agency and thereby feels herself to be at the mercy of her situation and her fate. As the analysand comes to understand and experience herself as the agent of her (internal and external) world, it becomes possible for her to imagine herself making other choices, acting in the world and organizing her experience in a more open, more constructive fashion.
From Schafer’s point of view, the problem of agency, at first disclaimed and then gradually reclaimed, has been at the center of clinical psychoanalysis from its inception and is at the heart of each truly analytic process. Yet because of Freud’s disagreement with Victorian notions of an omnipotent will and because of the scientism of his age, Freud constructed a language to speak about psychoanalysis using terms of impersonal forces, a language that, like the neurotic, systematically leaves out the agent herself.
Schafer then asks us to consider more closely the language Freud chose to describe psychodynamic processes. Drives build up autonomously “inside” the mind, pressing for discharge. If they are not discharged, they become dammed up and grow toxic. This language, Schafer points out, is the language of primitive bodily processes, of urination and defecation. Freud was describing the mind as if it were a body, with clear boundaries, interior spaces and substances. Not only is this not an adequate language for depicting the way the mind works, it is riddled with the same misunderstandings and fantasies that neurotic patients need analysis to clarify, Schafer argues. Freud bequeathed us a language for understanding neurosis that is saturated with neurotic fantasies and infantile misunderstandings. And, ironically, the most widespread omission in traditional psychoanalytic language is, precisely, the person as agent, the central focus of clinical psychoanalysis as it is actually practiced.3 So in A New Language for Psychoanalysis (1976) Schafer attempted no less than a broad translation of the basic principles and concepts of psychoanalysis from the language of forces and structures to an action language of agents and intentions.
Narrative
The Wittgensteinian action language proposed by Schafer in 1976 proved awkward both in clinical process and in theoretical discourse and has not found wide acceptance. But Schafer’s critique of the underlying ideas about the mind that pervaded classical concepts had an important impact, and by the 1980s he had found a much more compelling device for conveying his innovative understandings: the concept of narrative.
Mind is not the end result of impersonal forces, as Freud had described—mind is generated by actions, particular kinds of actions; mind is generated by and organized according to narratives, Schafer proposed. Drawing on the burgeoning interest in hermeneutics in the humanities and the social sciences, Schafer began to present traditional psychoanalytic concepts not as scientific principles but as interpretive storylines. (The broader implications of hermeneutics for psychoanalysis will be taken up in chapter 8.) Schafer’s original alternative to Freud’s field of dynamic forces, the agent of actions, was now depicted as the narrator of stories. And this narrative approach has served as a robust context in which Schafer has assimilated into a basically Freudian clinical framework many of the innovative features of self psychology (in The Analytic Attitude, 1983) and Kleinian theory (in Retelling a Life, 1992).
Schafer’s revision of psychoanalytic concepts and language is anchored in broad, abstract philosophical concerns but has enormous practical implications for the way clinical material is thought about and worked with.
Consider the dream of a patient, Ronald, who had been in psychoanalysis for three years. At the point when the dream appeared, Ronald was feeling he had gotten a great deal out of the analysis, although he was periodically gripped by profound doubts that anything would ever really help him.
Ronald initially sought treatment because of a long-standing depression and sense of paralysis. He had been quite successful in many ways, but always had a feeling of unreality about his activities and achievements. Even though he generally seemed to be passionately involved in whatever occupied him at any time, he would suffer waves of doubt and confusion about the meaning of everything. He had an image of himself as an outsider, as not really alive, as going through the motions. Whatever activity he had chosen was not really the right activity for him; whatever woman he was with was not really the right woman. Ronald often felt as if the depression and deadness he had felt as a child were the only real things about him, as if everything else was simply playacting.
Analytic inquiry had shed considerable light on Ronald’s depression, which had originated and seemed closely bound up with his relationship with his chronically ill mother. She had suffered with cancer throughout his early childhood and had been hospitalized many times. She finally died when he was twelve. Ronald’s father, a prominent politician, dealt with his wife’s illness by withdrawing from her and hiding the family’s difficulties from the community. Outside the home he was charming and outgoing. Inside the home he was either remote or enraged. Ronald, an only child, felt abandoned by both parents; he felt that his father had left his mother to him. He felt very much chosen by her, but the responsibility for being her companion and her nurse was overwhelming.
Ronald had come to understand a great deal about the relationship between his early childhood experience and his current struggles. He had felt his father’s public personality was a fake and a lie, that the shameful, secret reality of his mother’s illness and the family’s problems was the ultimate truth about his parents and about himself. He felt he had been damaged severely by the emotional deprivation of his childhood, which he, by imitating his father, had learned to cover over in public.
Ronald felt deeply emotionally involved with the analyst and the analysis. As he and his analyst explored his childhood despair and dread and his current conflicts and doubts, he felt cared about and connected to in a way he had never felt before. In the course of treatment Ronald had begun to feel more able to commit himself to whatever it was he was involved in. He had begun to have a sense of himself as living in a community of other people, as inside the circle of human activities, rather than as the desolate outsider he had always felt himself to be. It was at this point that he had the following dream:
I am looking out the back window of (the graduate school he attends). I notice this blob that is moving toward the building. It progresses slowly, devouring everything in its path. When it gets near something, like a chair or a bush, it at first becomes like that thing, only a giant version of it. After a few seconds, the thing itself is gone and the blob loses its shape and becomes a blob again. It is moving closer and closer. Your chair is out there, and the blob is starting to become a big version of that, but then I woke up.
Although the dream at first seemed odd, Ronald soon began to feel that the dream graphically caught something of his typical inner sense of himself. The blob was his depression, shapeless, formless, menacing. Whatever he tried to do, whatever he became involved with, seemed real and vivid for a while, but then it would dissolve; the meaning would be lost, and he would be only a blob once again. Now the analysis had become important, larger than life. But it too, Ronald feared, would dissolve into meaninglessness. No matter how hard he tried, the blob was inescapable. The dream seemed to vividly capture his tortured experience of what it was like to be him.
Consider some of the possible ways of understanding the blob: The blob is an expression of anal sadism, the instinctually driven wish to bury and destroy everything he is connected to (Freud); the blob is his true self, inchoate and unformed, seeking conditions for possible growth (Winnicott); the blob is a representation of his malformed, structureless interior, lacking in stable identifications and regulatory mechanisms (ego psychology); the blob represents the state of his self, portraying the aborted development of his sense of subjectivity or personhood (self psychology).
The problem with all such interpretations of the dream, from Schafer’s point of view, is that they leave out the dreamer’s activity. For Schafer, the dream is a creation, a narrative construction in which Ronald has organized his experience along selected lines for specific purposes. There is no singular correct interpretation; rather, the dream, like other narrative constructions, such as poems or novels, lends itself to various understandings. When the meaning of the dream is approached from this angle, the emphasis shifts to the functional utility of different narrative approaches, both for Ronald, in dreaming the dream, and for Ronald and the analyst in their efforts to use it.
What purpose does it serve for Ronald to represent himself to himself as a blob? From Schafer’s point of view, the blob is not Ronald’s anal sadism; Ronald has borrowed anal imagery and bodily metaphors to represent his destruction of the value of his experiences. The blob is not Ronald’s true self, his ego structures, or his subjectivity; Ronald has portrayed himself to himself along these story lines for a variety of purposes. They might include such dynamics as: maintaining a powerful unconscious tie to his mother in her sickness and withdrawal, defeating the father and his model of living in the outside world, preserving a fantasy of oneness and infinite potential that transcends public and private, and so on.
What purpose does it serve Ronald and the analyst to understand the dream in one way or another? For Schafer, the value of an interpretation of a dream lies not in its objectivity or correctness, but in its potential for opening up new forms of experience and allowing the dreamer to claim a deeper and broader sense of his own activity.
Thus Schafer’s most important contribution has been to recontextualize the traditional content of Freudian analysis. Schafer has asked us to consider the anachronistic features of Freud’s very understanding of what he was doing when he developed a psychodynamic approach to mind. The scientistic underpinnings of that understanding are no longer persuasive. But if Freud’s work is reset into a contemporary hermeneutic framework, Schafer suggests, not only does it work better, its interpretive power to elucidate clinical process is more fully revealed.
HANS LOEWALD
Of all the major figures in the contemporary psychoanalytic world, Hans Loewald (1906–1993) is perhaps the most difficult to position. Loewald came to the United States in the early 1940s after studying philosophy with Martin Heidegger. He worked with Harry Stack Sullivan and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann during his analytic training in the Baltimore area. But his abiding passion was Freud. He has carefully and lovingly found places in Freud’s theory to root all the features of his own; yet his own thinking has blossomed into approaches to mind and the psychoanalytic process that are powerfully unique and visionary. His prose is scholarly, extremely dense and closely reasoned, yet he describes and evokes experiences that are extraordinarily rich and deeply sensual, seeming to call for a mystical transformation. His reading of Freud appears offbeat, at some points stunningly fresh and at other points strained; it is always at odds with the way Freud has been understood in the American ego psychology mainstream. Yet Loewald’s revisionary and revitalizing approach to Freud has had extraordinary impact on how Freud is being read today by those who draw their inspiration from classical theory.
Loewald’s contributions span nearly forty years in which he has struggled over and over with the same central problems, now one facet, now another, now from one angle, now from another. This concern has been with the most fundamental assumptions of psychoanalytic theory-building, our most basic preconceptions about the nature of mind, reality, and the analytic process.
Loewald on Language
Language has always been a central feature of psychoanalytic theorizing, from Freud’s early contributions on dreams and slips of the tongue. Leowald approached language from a perspective that is unique among analytic theorists. Consider a one-year-old child who sits at the breakfast table, singing, babbling, playing with sounds and with her food. She has recently been uttering words that are recognizable and even, on occasion, stringing two or three together. Orange juice is a big favorite of hers, and today she asks for more by saying something like “Numa numa numa numa joooooose.” Her parents are delighted. They meet her request, saying as they do: “More juice?”
Experiences like this one constitute a crucial developmental bridge. On the near side of the bridge, the child is embedded in an idiosyncratic world of distinctly personal experience, accidental connections, autistic reveries. She has powerful connections with others in her preverbal world, but they are unique and exclusive connections, based on shared private meanings, dependent on intently attuned caretakers. On the far side of the bridge, the child is entering a social world of consensual experience, agreed-upon meanings, abstract and general understandings. Communications and connections with others will become generalizable; experience will become much more easily and reliably shared.
Different authors have broadly varying attitudes toward this crucial developmental transition. At one extreme, Sullivan regarded preverbal (parataxic) experience as idiosyncratic and distorted; language creates the possibility for shared (syntaxic) experience, established with others through consensual validation, and becomes progressively stripped of its idiosyncrasies, thereby providing for the child a wonderful vehicle for escaping isolation and self-absorption into a world of clarity, shared experience, and meaningful connection. The consensual, shared use of language is an unmitigated blessing, Sullivan believed.
Daniel Stern, a contemporary researcher who has written both technical and popular books integrating empirical infant research into a vision of infancy and childhood, feels that a sensual, sensory richness of preverbal experience is sacrificed in the packaging of experience into language. The gain in clarity is accompanied by a loss in variety. Language for Stern is a mixed blessing.
What Sullivan and Stern have in common is that they both see a gulf between preverbal and verbal experience. (Although for Stern, earlier forms of experience are maintained in the perpetuation throughout life of “preverbal senses of self” alongside a verbal sense of self.)
Loewald takes a very different approach. The use of language that both Sullivan (happily) and Stern (regretfully) take for granted is, for Loewald, a debased, shallow, disembodied form of communication. He envisions the beginnings of language not as a translation from sensory experience, but as a form of sensory experience. “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” (1980, p. 187). As development proceeds, the words also take on meaning as signifiers, referring to things beyond themselves.
Loewald terms language in the first, embedded, embodied mode “primary process,” in the second, generalizable, differentiated mode “secondary process.” (Here Loewald is retooling Freud’s distinction of channels of energy flow to refer instead to forms of experience.) What is crucial for Loewald is the connection or lack of connection between these two modes of experience. This issue of rupture and/or reconciliation between levels of organization is the central problem Loewald returns to again and again throughout his writings. Language and other forms of secondary-process experience that have been ruptured from their original primary-process density, from the global, sensual experience out of which they emerged, are pathological, he believes. Mental health is contingent on the richness of experience that is generated by open channels between primary process and secondary process, primitive and sophisticated thinking, lower and higher forms of intellectual organization.
The child’s request for more juice embodies in itself a tension between the abstract meaning of the request and the sensuality and playfulness of generating the sounds “numa numa numa numa joooooose.” From Loewald’s perspective, what is crucial to the richness of her subsequent experience is that the increasing clarity and generalizability of her verbalizations are not accompanied by a loss of the sensory and sensual pleasures of her experience of playing with food, gestures, and sounds at the breakfast table with her parents. For Loewald, pathological development entails a split between primary and secondary process, between the sensual and the abstract, between fantasy and reality, between past and present. Healthy development is characterized by a perpetual reconciliation and interpenetration between these different dimensions of experience.
The Unitary Whole
The traditional reading of Freud assumes a material reality “out there.” The baby, containing various biological resources and propensities, is born into that material reality. Among the baby’s constitutional givens are a set of instinctual drives, urgently pressing for discharge, which inevitably clash with the social environment. Mind is the apparatus built up to channel and regulate the drives, necessarily negotiated between the baby and the environment. Other people, “objects” of the drives, serve as both vehicles for drive discharge and an aid (through internalization into the superego) for drive regulation and control.
Loewald challenges all these traditional premises, positing instead an original, unitary whole composed of both the baby and the caregivers as a starting point for psychological development. In the beginning, there is no distinction between self and other, between ego and external reality, between instincts and objects. Everything that traditional psychoanalytic theory takes for granted as basic and irreducible, Loewald regards as secondary and derivative of dichotomies that emerge from this original unity. One of the central implications of this perspective is that there is nothing in the developing child which was in the baby from the start (neither instincts nor a “true self” in Winnicott’s sense). Everything in the developing child, and later the adult, is a product of interaction.
Loewald’s radical interactionalism is a far cry from Freud’s drive theory perspective. Yet Loewald is adept at wresting new meanings from Freud’s language and images. One key strategy in Loewald’s reinterpretation of Freud is his claim that Freud himself underwent an abrupt shift in his thinking about the drives.
In Loewald’s view, Freud really had two different understandings of the nature of the drives, before and after 1920. The earlier theory, drive as discharge-seeking, is generally taken to represent Freud’s thinking in general. This earlier theory, Loewald argues, was wedded to nineteenth-century scientific materialism, and based on hydraulic and machine metaphors of Freud’s day. In introducing the concept of Eros in 1920 (in Beyond the Pleasure Principle), Freud was radically altering his view of libido as a drive, Loewald believes, no longer discharge-seeking but connection-seeking, not using objects for gratification but for building more complex mental experience and for reestablishing the lost original unity between self and others.
Loewald’s revision of Freud’s drive theory demands a radical reformulation of virtually all traditional psychoanalytic concepts. Consider, for example, Loewald’s reworking of Freud’s “archaeological simile.” In Freud’s theorizing, the id is understood as never in contact with external reality. Its discharges in the real world are mediated through the ego. The id operates beneath external reality, expressing the archaic heritage that is present at birth. The digging of the archaeologist takes him deeper into the past; the interpretations of the psychoanalyst enables him to sift through the surface, daily interactions to uncover the deeper, inherited primal fantasies.
Loewald asks us to consider this simile more closely. The ruins of the ancient cities may bear no relationship to current political and economic processes in the modern countries they are buried under. But the ancient cities were surely built in close connection and interaction with the political and economic processes of their time. It is only in relation to the current, surface culture that the relics seem remote and disconnected.
Similarly, it is a serious mistake to assume that the ancient remains uncovered by the psychoanalytic archaeologist, just because they may be unrelated to present-day activities, were unrelated to the external environment, the interactional context, of their day. The id deals with and is “a creature of ‘adaptation’ just as much as the ego—but on a very different level of organization” (1980, p. 232).
What Freud finds in the past are, ultimately, primeval forces, which rule current experience from their remote depths. Loewald finds discarded relics that were generated by ancient civilizations which once dominated the scene. Freud’s id is an unchanging biological force clashing with social reality. Loewald’s id is an interactional product of adaptation rather than a constant biological force. Mind does not become interactive secondarily, but is interactive in its very nature. Loewald sees life as beginning in a union between the baby and the mother; the mother’s handling of the baby, the mother’s image of the baby, the mother’s sensual experience of the baby all become essential dimensions of the baby’s own experience of himself. Whatever “drives” come to motivate the developing child are shaped through interaction with the mother; they do not preexist and find the mother as their object.
Loewald portrays the mind as extremely rich in internal connections between past and present, inside and outside, infantile and mature, self and other, fantasy and actuality. He understands these distinctions as richly interpenetrating dialectics, not sharp dichotomies. Thus Loewald suggests that infantile, oedipal love detracts from and interferes with adult love when childhood experience is repressed, too strictly separated from adult experience. Then the loves of childhood operate like ghosts who, according to legend, have been improperly buried and haunt the living in their effort to find peace.
When the experiences of childhood are released from repression, accepted and worked through, they have a very different relationship to current experience. One doesn’t have to choose, Loewald suggests, between childhood love and adult love, past and present. Experiences with early love objects are not best thought of as relinquished, but as refound and re-created with adult love objects. The new love is neither wholly different from nor merely a stand-in for the old love. The new love is both new and old, providing new experiences within which are found resonances of old experiences. Early love objects, like ancestors, provide guidelines to new experiences; when they have been properly buried and revered, they have continual access to the present and no longer have to dominate it from their anguished seclusion, seeking the “blood of recognition” (1980, p. 249).
Sublimation and Symbolism
Freud’s early contributions on symbolism and its function in the formation of dreams and neurotic symptoms has had a profound impact not only on psychoanalysis but on many other intellectual disciplines. Body parts and bodily processes, as well as various disturbing facets of personal experience, become represented in dreams and symptoms in disguised forms. A snake in a dream or a phobia, for example, is a stand-in for the penis. The snake symbolizes the penis and performs a delicate double function, both revealing and concealing, representing the repressed image, but in a camouflaged form.
It was a short step for Freud and others to perceive similar symbolic processes as working in culture at large: in anthropology and sociology, in art and literature, and, eventually, in politics and history as well. The application of Freud’s understanding of symbolism was greatly broadened through his use of the concept of sublimation. Symbolic representation makes it possible for instinctual impulses to find disguised, socially acceptable forms of gratification, not as satisfying as direct physical pleasure, but a reasonable compromise with necessary social constraints. Thus the snake charmer, and the architect of skyscrapers and the violinist, have found symbolic masturbatory equivalents. In fact, Freud became convinced, all of culture is built on sublimation, the disguised gratification of infantile sexual and aggressive impulses.
In the conventional application of psychoanalytic interpretation, both to clinical data and to cultural phenomena, the symbol is a substitute for the symbolized (the snake for the penis). In the act of interpretation, the snake is revealed as a camouflaged equivalent of the penis; its disguise is exposed; its real meaning unmasked. Traditional psychoanalytic interpretation is reductive: the symbol, once revealed, collapses into the symbolized. The snake is nothing but the penis, deceptively packaged.
The traditional psychoanalytic understanding of sublimation and symbolism opened up a whole new world of interpretive possibilities; it also created some serious problems for many psychoanalysts, including Loewald. Is all culture—the arts, the creative achievements of human civilization—best understood as disguised versions of infantile sexual and aggressive conflicts?
In the preceding chapters we have noted various solutions to this and other closely related problems. The neo-Freudians (Sullivan, Fromm, Horney) and the more radical of the object relations theorists (Fairbairn, Bowlby, Guntrip) abandoned Freud’s drive theory altogether. Thus they didn’t regard the higher pursuits of culture as being derived from Freud’s dual-instinct theory. Hartmann and other ego psychologists took a different route, maintaining drive theory but using the concept of drive neutralization to legitimate motives other than sex and aggression. Culture could be seen as being derived from the ego’s autonomous motives for mastery, functional expression, and so on.
Loewald wasn’t happy with either of these solutions. For Loewald, Freud’s discovery of the pervasive power and significance of infantile bodily experiences was one of the great discoveries of Western intellectual history. Loewald wanted to maintain Freud’s emphasis on sexuality and aggression, and he didn’t want to separate the ego’s motives from the id’s (like Hartmann did). For Loewald, the concept of neutralization watered down and threatened to negate what was most precious and powerful in Freud’s vision.
Loewald’s characteristic approach was to try to find a way to reconcile rather than choose between modes of experience, levels of organization. He saw higher-level mental processes, creative cultural pursuits as always connected with, yet never simply reducible to, lower mental processes, primitive infantile experience. The snake or the skyscraper is always a penis, but never just a penis. Further, the penis, once represented by the snake or skyscraper, is no longer simply a penis, but has become transformed and enriched through the symbolic process. Symbolism is not a process of camouflage, but of mutual transformation.
Thus the symbol for Loewald is not a disguised version of something that already exists; the symbol creates a novel experience. As in the relation between fantasy and reality, past and present, childhood and adult love, the symbol gives new and enriched life to the symbolized. Culture is a representation of infantile experience, but not only a camouflaged equivalent. Culture is a re-presentation and reconciliation of childhood experience on a new, expanded, and enriched level of organization.
Because he understood drives as prehuman residues, essentially antipathetic to human culture and civilization, Freud’s most optimistic vision was of infantile sexuality and aggression drained of their intensity and harnessed, through sublimation, for other purposes. Freud (1933, p. 80) invoked the image of the Zuider Zee to portray the appropriation by civilization of the power of natural forces. “Where id was, there ego shall be.”
Loewald understands “drives” as fully human residues of previous interactions and interpersonal integrations. For Loewald, the draining of the sea for purposes of civilization would be a disaster. Reclaimed, unrepressed infantile experience enriches rather than detracts from adult experience. The sea is always there, powering, enhancing, resonating through more complex, higher-level experience, in which it finds new life.
JACQUES LACAN
The place of Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) in contemporary psychoanalytic thought is unlike that of any other author. He reigned over French psychoanalysis for decades, and his work is a dominant presence in psychoanalysis both in Europe and in South America. Although his influence on English-speaking psychoanalysts has been minimal, his impact on academia, particularly literary criticism, has been considerable. An enormous industry of explications and commentary has grown up around him; yet there is a complete lack of consensus about what his dense and difficult contributions really mean. His more enthusiastic followers consider him the most important French thinker since René Descartes (Lacan was continually grappling with traditional philosophical and epistemological problems) and compare him favorably to Nietzsche and Freud; his critics consider him deliberately obscurantist, an outrageous showman and stylist with little substance. (It is not uncommon to hear detractors quip about the way in which the psychoanalytic world has been la-conned.)
Lacan entered psychoanalysis through the unusual double route of medicine and surrealism. He lived in Paris, where his friends included many prominent surrealist painters and writers (he was closely associated with André Breton), and he contributed influential essays to early surrealist journals. French psychoanalysis, like so much in French cultural life, was decimated by World War II, and Lacan was at the center of the intense power struggle among the small group of French analysts that reconstituted the Paris Psychoanalytic Society after the war. Lacan had been experimenting with short, variable sessions (as opposed to the dependable routine of scheduled analytic hours), which became the focus of great opposition to him in both French and international psychoanalytic circles. He eventually left the Paris Psychoanalytic Society in 1953. At several different points, the groups he was associated with were denied admission to the International Psychoanalytic Association, consolidating Lacan’s reputation as renegade. Further splits and splintering ensued, and in 1964 Lacan founded the Ecole Freudienne de Paris. By then he had become a major figure in French intellectual life; until his death, his public seminars were major cultural events, drawing spellbound and enthusiastic students of all intellectual disciplines from around the world.
Any discussion of Lacan’s ideas necessarily begins with a consideration of why they are so difficult to understand.4 Several factors are important. First, for the non-French reader, there is the problem of translation. Lacan approaches psychoanalysis through linguistics and literature, and his highly idiosyncractic style of writing and speaking is much more poetic than expository. (Commentators such as Mehlman, 1972, and Turkle, 1978, have suggested that his style was modeled on Mallarmé’s.) According to some commentators, Lacan’s central concepts, like good poetry, are simply untranslatable (Schneiderman, 1983, p. 92).
Second, Lacan was a creature less of psychoanalysis as a clinical discipline and international movement than of French intellectual life. There is no better example than Lacan’s work of the way psychoanalysis in different countries takes on a distinctly national character. Lacan’s presentations were spectacles, filled with the conceptual and verbal gamesmanship characteristic of the French intelligentsia: sweeping philosophical, political, and literary references and allusions, a contemptuous, combative posturing (the title of Julia Kristeva’s novel depicting the intellectual world in which Lacan lived is, tellingly, The Samurai), and a complex blend of authoritarian fiat and antiauthoritarian defiance. These translation problems, both of language and of milieu, have left many readers interested in psychoanalysis content to remain, with respect to Lacan’s contributions, among the uninitiated.
But there is more to it than that. Lacan’s mode of presentation was intimately connected to what he was trying to teach about psychoanalysis. He was deliberately obscure, elusive, provocatively difficult. He did not want to be easily understood, at least not in the usual way we understand one another’s communications.
The surrealists adapted from Freud the vision of an unconscious that is directly accessible and expressible through startling imagery and unguided language (such as automatic writing). Lacan’s manner of presentation, some commentators (e.g., Oliner, 1988; Plottel, 1985) argue, was designed to embody the surrealist/Freudian unconscious. He repeated conundrums (the unconscious is the discourse of the Other; man’s desire is the desire of the other; the unconscious is structured like a language) not to convey understanding but, like the Zen master’s use of koans, to break up conventional thought patterns, provoking a grappling with deeper meanings. His words slide around, their meanings tumbling and reversing themselves, to demonstrate the way the mind plays with language, linking and unlinking words through puns, jokes, associations of sounds, meanings, and proximity. According to the most accessible of his interpreters, reading Lacan conveys “less clearly an impression of what Lacan thinks than how” (Muller & Richardson, 1982, p. 415).5 In this sense, the purpose of Lacan’s presentations is not the lucid communication of ideas but a Socratic sabotage, designed to push the reader into a novel, disconcerting kind of experience. (Both Sullivan and Bion, each in his own fashion, were similarly concerned with being easily understood or misunderstood; both, like Lacan, are very difficult to read.)
Lacan and Language
Lacan anchored his contributions in a reading of Freud (advertised under the banner of a “return to Freud”). Lacan shared a common starting point with some other contemporary interpreters of Freud but ended up moving in a unique direction. What Lacan has in common with many other important interpreters of Freud is the claim that Freud’s most original and important innovations were obscured and compromised by his efforts to embed psychoanalysis in biology and thereby to scientize his vision of the psyche. (Habermas, Loewald, Schafer, and Guntrip all make similar arguments.) The differences, however, concern what Freud’s central, innovative contribution is understood to be. For Lacan, the essential Freud was the pre-1905 Freud, whose concerns were the interpretation of dreams, neurotic symptoms, and (Freudian) slips. Lacan argued that Freud’s understanding of all these phenomena derived from a revolutionary way of understanding language and its relation to experience and subjectivity. According to Lacan, an appreciation of Freud’s real meaning is impossible unless one is grounded in the turn-of-the-century linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure as well as the contemporaneous (to Lacan) linguistics of Roman Jakobson and the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, all icons in Lacan’s French intellectual milieu. Both ego psychology and object relations theories are based on fundamental (and complementary) misreadings of Freud in which the ego and object relations are given priority, Lacan believed; the determinative dimension in human experience is neither self (i.e., ego) nor relations with others, but language.
The “Imaginary”
Lacan’s concept of the “imaginary,” which is essential to his continual, scathing critique of other analytic schools, was developed along two recurrent lines. The first was his portrayal of the prototypical experience of the imaginary, the mirror stage. In Lacan’s account, the child between the ages of six and eighteen months undergoes a powerful, transformative experience when she notices and then becomes captivated by her own image in a mirror. The child’s experience up to that point is discontinuous, fragmented, disjointed. She has incomplete control over her limbs and movements and no superordinate organization for integrating her various mental states. But reflected back in the mirror is a quite different creature: a whole, integrated, coordinated image. This image, which the child can control through her own movements and gestures, is an idealized version of herself. The mirrored image becomes the central node of an increasingly complex nexus of thoughts and feelings about what she is like, the core, the “Urbild” of the ego. Lacan wanted us to understand the mirror stage not in specific, concrete terms, but as an “exemplary function” (1988a, p. 74), representative of the way the ego is built around illusions, images, which then become the basis for the imaginary (image-inary).
The second grounding for the development of the imaginary was Lacan’s analysis of the nature of human desire, which he saw as different from needs. The child has many needs in relation to the mother, who is able to satisfy those needs, but desire, the wellspring of passion, is more encompassing than the pursuit of satisfaction and the quelling of need—it is ultimately necessarily ungratifiable, Lacan believed. In desire, the child wishes to be totally captivating, to be everything for the (m)other. To truly be everything for the other would be to embody everything the other desires. Thus, for Lacan, the child comes to desire above all else to be the completing object of the (m)other’s desire.
The following example strikingly illustrates Lacan’s notion of desire as desire of the other.
Michael, a young man in his late twenties, entered psychoanalytic treatment because he could not reconcile his life with his goals for himself. He had grown up poor in the inner city and with effort had attained a considerable degree of professional and personal success. He wanted a committed relationship and a family. He frequently made progress in this direction by becoming involved with women with whom he was able to attain substantial intimacy. The problem was his passionate addiction to a different sort of woman, with whom he spent time dancing in nightclubs, a world that seemed incompatible with the domesticity he was seeking.
Michael frequented clubs that catered to dancers so elaborately and provocatively dressed that they were almost in costume. Michael was so well known and so accomplished as a dancer that he was a recognized “character” at these clubs. His style of dancing was highly erotic and romantic. He loved to dance with at least several different partners each night and was in great demand. This experience gave him a powerful charge that he could not do without.
What did Michael want? What was his desire? In analysis he came to understand that what he sought was neither to satisfy any needs of his own nor to develop an intimacy with any particular woman or dancer, but to occupy a central place in the minds of these women, to be wholly captivating to them, to be the total object of their desire. Of course it was not his real self occupying that place, but rather the character he had fashioned himself into, designed precisely for the purpose of sweeping women off their feet. In Lacan’s sense, Michael lived in a world of the imaginary, organized around images of himself (the character he transformed himself into) and images of others (transformed into pure desire for his character).
Life in the realm of the imaginary (which, in Lacan’s view, is where most ordinary, conventional living takes place) is experienced in a hall of mirrors, organized around mirages. The self each of us generally takes himself or herself to be is as much a social creation as Michael’s character, constructed out of reflections of the perspectives of others.6 We strive to be characters we are not, with various intense needs in relation to other characters who, because they are also social creations, also are not.
If the object is only ever graspable as a mirage, the mirage of a unity . . . every object relation can only be infected with a fundamental uncertainty by it. . . . The object, at one instant constituted as a semblance of the human subject, a double of himself, nonetheless has a certain permanence of appearance over time. (1988a, p. 169)
The patient who enters the consulting room is fully embedded, in an unself-conscious fashion, in this alienated world of images and illusions, reflections of reflections. “The ego is the sum of the identifications of the subject . . . like the superimposition of various coats borrowed from what I would call the bric-a-brac of its props department” (1988b, p. 155).
From Lacan’s point of view, the big mistake (and it is a very big mistake) of all other schools of contemporary psychoanalytic thought is that they take the imaginary to be real: Ego psychology, by focusing on the ego, its defects and its development, is the psychology of a social construction, a mirage mistaken for a reality (1977, p. 238); object relations theories, in their focus on the real and the fantastic relationships between the self and others, is a psychology of interpersonal fictions. Lacan believed that these trends degraded psychoanalysis and buried what he took to be Freud’s fundamental contribution: the discovery of the (linguistic) unconscious beneath the petty, everyday concerns of the patient and his social relations with others. The ordinary subjectivity of the patient, the character he takes himself to be and acts like, is precisely what needs to be subverted and dispersed in analysis to a deeper connection with the transpersonal, “transindividual” (1977, p. 49) unconscious and a more creative, revitalized life.
In chapter 1 we suggested that Freud regarded the secret of dream interpretation as his greatest discovery because the dream is a metaphor for subjectivity in general. The real, latent meaning of the dream is disguised in the manifest content, which, through the process of secondary elaboration, has been shaped into a distracting little story. In Lacan’s view, it is not just dreams but conscious subjective experience in general that is organized into distracting little stories, and it is the folly of ego psychology and object relations theories to have bought into the disguises offered by secondary elaboration, to have taken the illusory stories as real, rather than covers for an underlying sense of loss, absence, castration. “The subject,” Lacan suggested, “doesn’t know what he is saying,” and the task is “to get the subject to shift from a psychic reality to a true reality” (1988b, pp. 244–245).
The idea that the analytic process is concerned with the dispersal of ordinary subjectivity is shared by other important contemporary psychoanalytic authors. For example, Thomas Ogden, in Subjects of Analysis (1994), decenters subjectivity and relocates it within a complex matrix of dialectical tensions among various modes of experience. And Bromberg (1991, 1993) has explored the emergence in analysis of discontinuous, dissociated states of mind. What distinguishes Lacan’s approach from these closely related projects is his claim that the ordinary subject of experience is wholly illusory, not in a dialectical relationship with other modes of experience. This “ever more radical depersonalization of the subject” (Muller & Richardson, 1982, p. 416) is grounded in Lacan’s understanding of language and its relationship to experience.7
Lacan’s approach to language (which paralleled other recent French intellectual trends, such as structuralism, deconstructionism, and postmodernism in general) assumed that language predates and largely shapes individual experience. “The child,” Lacan stressed, “is born into language” (1977, p. 103).
Much as Marxism regarded the subjective values and ideas of the individual as the vehicle for class position and economic forces, Lacan regarded experience as linguistically embedded in cultural fads (the “imaginary”) and social laws (the “symbolic”). The conventional individual subject, the patient as he ordinarily experiences himself, is dispersed in the analytic process so that unconscious meanings, the linguistic meanings that preexisted him and struggle to speak through him, can be clearly heard. The distinction between speech and language is very important here. The analytic process endeavors to make it possible for a more authentic voice to break through the ordinary constrictions of language.
For Lacan, Freud’s greatest methodological contribution, free association, made it possible to see through ordinary conversation, the intended content in the patient’s mind (which Lacan called “empty speech”), to the deeper symbolic structures operative in the unconscious (“full speech”) (1988a, pp. 50–52). Free association unhinges the patient’s speech from ordinary subjectivity, ego concerns, needful attachments to imaginary others. “We try to cut off the moorings of the conversation with the other” (1988a, pp. 174–175). It is this dispersal of the conventional subject that allows the unconscious Subject, the Other, to speak through the patient. In this way something deeper than the ordinary awareness of the subject finds its distinctive voice.
At times Lacan seems to reify language, granting it a kind of transpersonal agency. The patient as presented becomes a puzzle, to be disassembled, so that the real meanings are revealed. The analyst provides “a qualified and skilled translation of the cryptogram representing what the subject is conscious of at the moment” (1988a, pp. 13–14). This translation or decoding is required if the subject’s own voice is to be present in speech in the face of the cultural reification of language (John Muller, personal communication). Thus psychoanalysis for Lacan is neither the uncovering of instinctual conflict (as it is for most Freudians) nor the transformation of a relationship (as it is, for example, for object relations theorists), but an exegesis of the unintended meanings (the governing signifiers) in the patient’s speech.
The analytic process transforms the patient’s relationship to language. The patient is jarred by the analyst’s general unresponsiveness and unexpected reactions into an appreciation of the otherness of language, the realization that he is not creating the language he is speaking, but, rather, that language predates him and shapes his experience. Language operates in an “ensemble” that is “anterior to any possible link with any particular experience of the subject” (1977, pp. 63–64).
Since the patient has no privileged position from which to understand the meanings of her speech, it is up the analyst to decipher those meanings. Words carry symbolic meanings that continually shift around, grouping and regrouping according to different principles of combination and selection.8 In Lacan’s approach to language, meaning is found in the relationship of important key words to each other, rather than in the relationship between those words and what they signify. Lacan’s understanding of symbolism is in sharp contrast to Loewald’s, which proposed a dialectical and mutually transformative relationship between the symbol and the symbolized (for example, the snake and the penis); for Lacan, the symbol or the signifier (the snake) becomes unhinged from the symbolized (the penis), and groups of signifiers (for example, phallic symbols) take on a life of their own. Thus language can be analyzed into underlying chains of signifiers, words grouped around common, intersecting nodal points, which link them to other word chains. Part of the impenetrability of Lacan’s work in the decade before his death is due to his use of set theory and topological structures—the increasingly technical, mathematical, and abstract ways he understood language to operate, images such as the Mobius strip and Boromian knot that play, paradoxically, with problems of beginnings and endings, insides and outsides.
The Oedipus Complex and the “Symbolic”
The essential concept through which Lacan connected Freudian psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, and Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology was his rereading of Freud’s account of the Oedipus complex. Lacan portrays the infant’s original state of being with the mother in paradisiacal terms, mediated through needs the mother is able to gratify. But this early seamless unity is soon broken by the beginnings of awareness of the separation between self and mother. This disconnection from the mother and the disjointedness of the infant’s experience of his body and his mental states reflect what Lacan considered a basic disjuncture fundamental to human experience, a congenital gap. “In man . . . this relation to nature is altered by a certain dehiscence at the heart of the organism, a primordial Discord” (1977, p. 4). This gap gives rise to Desire, by which Lacan meant much more than sexual impulse or demands for the satisfaction of needs. Desire is ultimately insatiable, because desire is born of the longing to heal the gap, to repair the disjuncture, to attain an impossible (imaginary) recollection, to be at one with mother and nature once again.
The first desire for each of us is the longing to be the phallus for the mother. Phallus here refers not to the literal penis but the object of the mother’s desire. The child wants to be everything for the mother; the child desires to fulfill, by himself the totality of the mother’s desire. What stands in the way of this fulfillment is the father. The father lays claim to the mother; the father has the phallus that is the object of the mother’s desire; the father lays down the Law that severs the union of child and mother and regulates their exchange. The child cannot be the mother’s phallus, and, therefore, he or she is castrated.
In this retelling of the Oedipus story, desire is only minimally concerned with the sexual impulses Freud emphasized; Lacan used desire to refer to a longing for a kind of existential reparation, perpetually unfulfillable, “eternally stretching forth towards the desire for something else” (1977, p. 167). Castration is the underlying state for both sexes, unrelated to the possession or lack of a literal penis. The renunciation of the child’s sexual ambitions and dyadic unity with the mother is established through the father’s presence, which stands for the regulating, organizing, symbolizing functions of language itself. Lacan is speaking not just of the actual person of the father, but the “name of the father.” By naming the father, the mother ruptures the imaginary union between the child and herself and establishes the “symbolic” order. Through the naming of the father, the child becomes informed of the presence of the father and his phallus that preceded the child, that, in fact, made the birth of the child possible; the child is thereby inducted by the mother into the lawful social order of regulations and symbolic relationships.9
Lacanian Analysis
What is the product of a Lacanian analysis like? Because of Lacan’s elusiveness and because of his central concern with the seductive dangers of compliance with the analyst’s own ideals and values, this question is more difficult to answer than with other schools of psychoanalytic thought. Certainly, a Lacanian analysis would not aim at removing symptoms, improving relationships, or consolidating a more coherent and resilient sense of self. Yet Lacan did provide occasional hints at what he expected to be accomplished.
First, the analysand would live in a state philosophers describe as “being” or “existence” rather than in the ego-consciousness with which he began.10 His ego, while not exactly withering away (as in some varieties of Eastern enlightenment), would seem less substantial, more transparent, less a self-conscious focus of concern.
For the subject, the uncoupling of his relation to the other causes the image of his ego to fluctuate, to shimmer, to oscillate, renders it complete and incomplete. So that he can recognize all the stages of his desire, all the objects which have given consistency, nourishment and body to this image, he has to perceive it in its completeness, to which he has never had access. (1988a, p. 181)
Second, the analysand would have a very different sense of his relationship to language. Rather than experiencing himself as the creator and agent of the language he generates, he would experience himself as a vehicle through which speaks his unconscious and the linguistic matrix of which he is a part. He learns that his own lines are simply a portion of a larger text (the “Discourse of the Other”).
This passion of the signifier now becomes a new dimension of the human condition in that it is not only man who speaks, but that in man and through man it speaks . . . that his nature is woven by effects in which is to be found the structure of language, of which he becomes the material, and that therefore there resounds in him, beyond what could be conceived of by a psychology of ideas, the relation of speech. (1977, p. 284)
The surrealists, who shaped much of Lacan’s experience of the unconscious, were interested in phenomena such as automatic writing, whereby one surrenders oneself to writing without conscious control or intent, and meaning emerges. Analogously, Lacan seems to have envisioned a kind of automatic living, in which unconscious gestures and speech emerge directly, bypassing the distorting effects of ego and object-relatedness. Lacan’s own flamboyant, theatrical lifestyle (see Schneiderman, 1983) was taken as a prototype by his disciples for a creative, heroic subjectivity, released from its conventional constraints through the analytic process. “Creative subjectivity has not ceased in its struggle to renew the never-exhausted power of symbols in the human exchange that brings them to the light of day” (Lacan, 1977, p. 71).
Third, the analytic process as redefined by Lacan would result in a different relationship between the subject and his own desire. Desire is not renounced in favor of a more rational and mature perspective; rather, by being named and recognized, desire is more fully owned. Analysis does not generate freedom—one remains caught in the constraints of the symbolic order and one’s own particular history and destiny. Analysis makes possible a fuller embracing of one’s destiny as one’s own. Thus a Lacanian analyst would not push the patient Michael toward a more adaptive or consistent approach to women or marriage, but a realization that what drives him is the power of his longing for recognition as the object of desire for the Other. Eventually, love (as distinct from a desire to be loved) may be possible, but this would require, Lacan hinted, a renunciation.
Man can adumbrate his situation in a field made up of rediscovered knowledge only if he has previously experienced the limits within which, like desire, he is bound. Love, which, it seems to some, I have downgraded, can be posited only in that beyond, where, at first, it renounces its object. (1978, p. 276)
Lacan and Feminism
Lacan has played a crucial and, in some sense, deeply ironic role in the relationship between psychoanalysis and feminism. One way of reading Lacan would render him almost a caricature of the most phallocentric features of classical Freudian thought. Lacan placed the highest value on the phallus as the signifier extraordinaire, the centerpiece of the symbolic order. Although he was generally careful not to equate the phallus with the literal penis, he believed men and women have a very different relationship to the phallus, which “signifies what men (think they) have and what women (are considered to) lack” (Grosz, 1990, p. 125).
Another reading of Lacan (and, through him, of Freud) regards him as freeing psychoanalytic concepts from the destiny of anatomy and making it possible to understand gender in purely cultural, linguistic terms. Thus Juliet Mitchell argues, following Lacan, that Freud was not prescribing but describing the patriarchalism that saturated the language of Western cultures; in this reading, Lacan’s interpretation of the pervasiveness of underlying symbolic gendered meanings in language becomes the most effective basis for a radical, feminist critique of Western culture. Some of the most important contemporary feminist writers have built on Lacan’s analysis of language and the imaginary and symbolic realms. Some (like Juliet Mitchell) have stayed within the bounds of Lacan’s depiction of the inescapability of patriarchy; others (like Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray) have attempted to work from Lacan’s analysis to generate more directly feminine forms of experience and meaning.
CONCLUSION: VARIETIES OF REVISIONISM
In their efforts to preserve and revise Freud’s contributions, Kernberg, Schafer, Loewald, and Lacan each developed a distinct strategy. To return to the metaphor with which we began this chapter, it is as if Kernberg has taken Freud’s mansion and found ways to greatly expand and extend it. The living quarters of the original structure (drive theory, psychosexual development) have been preserved intact, but new wings (borderline and narcissistic phenomena) have been added alongside, and a new foundation (primitive object relations) has been dug underneath.
Schafer has divided Freud’s mansion between those rooms that are hopelessly out of date (drive theory metapsychology), to be preserved as a museum, and those rooms, the central living spaces that were used most frequently (the basic clinical concepts), to be modernized and redecorated. Unlike Kernberg, who has preserved Freud’s drive theory by regrounding it in a different foundation, Schafer has set up partitions between what he regards as the dated, anachronistic features of Freud’s metapsychology and its vital, clinical core.
The approach taken by both Loewald and Lacan is as if the new heir, in rummaging through the closets, discovered that his benefactor had a passionate, secret hobby no one really knew about. The mansion, which everybody had regarded in only the most obvious ways, actually served to house a very different set of interests and purposes. So Loewald and Lacan, each in his own way, went about redefining and fundamentally realigning the realms and structures of Freud’s system to reflect more accurately its true purpose (for Loewald, an elegant and intricate theory of object relations; for Lacan, the discovery of the linguistic nature of the unconscious), which they regard as having been there all along.
Through these various means, Kernberg, Schafer, Loewald, and Lacan each were able to maintain their identifications as Freudian, but assimilate a good deal of the innovation generated in the schools that defined themselves more radically: interpersonal psychoanalysis, Kleinian theory, object relations theories, and self psychology.
A key common element in several of the major revisionist Freudian strategies has been the debiologizing of Freud. In contrast to Kernberg, who attempted to modernize the biological underpinnings of psychoanalysis, Schafer, Loewald, and Lacan all translated Freud’s quasi-biological concept of drive into other terms. In the hands of these theorists, all of Freud’s basic clinical concepts (such as the Oedipus complex) were recontexualized and understood in quite different terms: for Schafer, as a story line, a narrative form; for Loewald, as a rich account of the dialectical interplay between past and present relationships; for Lacan, as an exposition of the determinative role of language and socio-symbolic structures in shaping experience.
These debiologizing, revisionist accounts of Freud have made Freudian theory more relevant and interesting vis-à-vis developments in other intellectual disciplines. Classical psychoanalysis claimed too much for itself. By assuming that it was tapping the biological bedrock of the psyche, psychoanalytic interpreters of other disciplines often presented their understandings in what contemporary philosophers call “foundational” terms, as if psychoanalysis could see into the deepest, underlying meanings of all human productions: literature, history, the arts, and culture in general. Contemporary psychoanalytic commentators tend to make more modest claims for psychoanalysis, as one way to tell the story of human experience, as one way through which the meanings that are generated in the lives of individuals and cultures can be traced, understood, and appreciated.