Let us admit that psychoanalysis, for the time being, is a rather untidy discipline, still finding its way.
—Hans Loewald
In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of a defeat: but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards a victory. This is one great reason for the utmost toleration of a variety of opinion.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Critics often dismiss psychoanalysis as if it were an integrated, homogeneous point of view. To the casual observer, psychoanalysis may indeed appear to be a more or less singular school of thought, alongside other comprehensive psychological traditions such as behaviorism, existentialism, and so on. And surely, there are beliefs and principles to which virtually all psychoanalytic theorists and clinicians do subscribe: the complexity of the mind, the importance of unconscious mental processes, and the value of a sustained inquiry into subjective experience. However, as the preceding chapters have demonstrated, contemporary psychoanalysis has become quite complex and varied. Rather than a cohesive school of thought, contemporary psychoanalysis might be more accurately characterized as a university unto itself, with many different theories and areas of knowledge coexisting in an intricate and complicated relationship with one another.
In fact, at present it is very difficult to find any psychoanalyst who is really deeply conversant with more than one approach (e.g., Kleinian, Lacanian, ego psychology, self psychology). The literature of each school is extensive and each clinical sensibility finely honed, presenting a challenging prospect to any single analyst attempting to digest it all. To complicate matters, cross-disciplinary courses have not been popular at this university. Psychoanalytic ideologies tend to inspire deep passions among their adherents that have sometimes impeded a constructive exchange of ideas. These controversies are inspired by political issues (which institute using which theory can lay claim to be truly psychoanalytic?), issues of clinical efficacy (which theory inspires a therapeutic application that is deeply curative?), and issues of loyalty (competing allegiances to different founding mothers and fathers). Only recently has “comparative psychoanalysis” emerged as a field of study in its own right.
The preceding chapters have explored the diversity of psychoanalytic ideas theory by theory, considering each school in terms of its own history, basic principles, and clinical applications. En route, we have briefly noted some of the general issues that cut across the different schools. In this chapter and the next, we focus on these controversies themselves—some of the basic problems that all psychoanalytic systems have had to struggle with. This perspective will highlight the interrelationships of the various schools and the way the internal debates within psychoanalysis tend to reflect larger battles and currents in Western intellectual history. We will see that these common issues have both unified and divided the various schools of psychoanalytic thought, creating puzzles that have been explored through continually deepening dialectics of contrasting ideas and emphases.
TRAUMA OR FANTASY: WHAT IS THE CAUSE OF PSYCHOPATHOLOGY?
If we had to select the controversy that has most divided psychoanalytic theorists and clinicians, the single issue that has given rise to the most impassioned, strident, and sharply contrasting beliefs, there is only one candidate, and there are no close seconds. That issue concerns the cause of psychological disorders: Is psychopathology the result of trauma, healthy development thrown off course by destructive events and actual experiences? Or is it the result of the misinterpretation of early experience due to the warping impact of early childhood fantasy? Psychoanalysts are not alone in struggling with this problem. The psychoanalytic debate between proponents of trauma and proponents of fantasy is a reflection of the much broader philosophical debate concerning nature vs. nurture that has raged throughout the history of Western thought.
In tracing the controversies currently dominating psychoanalytic discourse, one often finds both sides of the debate in the different positions Freud argued, often with great incisiveness and certainty, at different points in the development of his thinking. Freud’s momentous shift in 1897 from the theory of infantile seduction to the theory of infantile sexuality began to define the debates that are ongoing among current analytic theoreticians.
Freud’s first approach to psychopathology, the seduction theory, emphasized the causative impact of nurture—the shaping of the mind by experience. Given the average range of expectable experience, Freud believed, the mind does not become embattled and generate the hysterical and obsessional neuroses that plagued the early patients he treated. Trauma creates affects and thoughts that simply cannot be integrated. The adult who had a normal, nontraumatic childhood is able to contain and assimilate sexual feelings into a continuous sense of self. The adult who experienced a precocious sexual seduction as a child suffers with memories and feelings incompatible with the central mass of thoughts and feelings that constitute his or her experience. Psychic disorders are a direct consequence of experiences that cannot be assimilated.
Freud never subsequently denied that some children are abused and that some neurotics were abused as children. But in 1897 he did abandon the seduction hypothesis as, in itself, a causative account of neurosis, and thereby shifted from an emphasis on nurture to an emphasis on nature. This became the definitive “Freudian” point of view. All adults suffer from conflictual sexual impulses, Freud decided, not just those who had been molested as children. Sexuality does not become problematic only when introduced precociously; there is something in the very nature of human sexuality that is problematic, generating inevitable, universal conflicts. Actual experiences never became unimportant in psychopathology, but their role shifted for Freud from the causative agent itself to a factor that either aggravates or ameliorates a problem predating all actual experience: the conflictual nature of the drives themselves.1 In this view, psychopathology is not an intrusion from the outside but distortion of what is inside. This view of mental disorder emphasizing nature—the universality of conflictual drives and the Oedipus complex—dominated classical psychoanalysis, and is often mistakenly identified as representing contemporary psychoanalysis in general.
Freud’s exploration of infantile sexuality and the classical emphasis on the inevitable conflictual nature of instinctual drives eventually provoked a whole generation of relational theories that swung back to the other side of the dialectic, emphasizing experience once again.2 The key feature of this shift was the redefinition of “trauma” from a single, cataclysmic childhood event (like a sexual molestation) to parents’ chronic failure to meet the psychological needs of the developing child. The importance of this redefinition can be seen dramatically in Winnicott’s concept of impingement, and we will consider it as a prototype for a way of thinking that has characterized this entire generation of psychoanalytic theorizing.
The delicate beginnings of personal experience in the infant can be sustained, Winnicott suggested, only in the protective “holding environment” created by the solicitous attention of the ordinary “good-enough” mother. By meeting the infant’s needs and actualizing his spontaneous gestures, the mother buffers him from all intrusions, both external and internal. He is free to do what he needs to do—float along in the state of “going-on-being” and await the spontaneous emergence of personal impulses. The mother can fail the child in many ways: by allowing external stimulation to reach painful levels, by intruding into the base state of drifting quiescence, or by allowing the child’s internal needs to build to frustrating levels. In Winnicott’s terms, all these failures result in impingement—the failure to protect the delicate state necessary for psychological growth and health.
Winnicott’s understanding of the way experience can become traumatizing is quite different from Freud’s. Trauma for Winnicott is not just the introduction of something dramatically negative, frightening, and noxious (e.g., precocious sexual stimulation); it is most fundamentally the failure to sustain something positive—the necessary conditions for healthy psychic development. Thus M. M. R. Khan (1963) termed Winnicott’s theory of the disturbing impact of a lack of good-enough mothering a theory of “cumulative trauma,” resonating with Freud’s earlier seduction hypothesis, but in a different fashion.
This shift back to the nurture side of the dialectic has been characteristic of the broad spectrum of postclassical theorizing: object relations theories (Fairbairn and Guntrip as well as Winnicott), ego psychology (in the increasing emphasis on maternal care from Hartmann to Spitz to Jacobson and Mahler), and self psychology (in the traumatizing impact of empathic failures).3 In all these models, elements of Freud’s original pre-1897 seduction theory have been revived in a new and much more subtle and sophisticated form. The child is not traumatized by a sexual event, per se; the child is traumatized by parental character pathology. Because of the parents’ inability to provide what is necessary, because of the interfering impact of the parents’ own difficulties and anxieties, the child is distracted from the delicate project of becoming a person. Instead, attention becomes prematurely diverted to survival, to the parents’ needs, to self-distorting adaptation to the external world.
In intellectual realms outside psychoanalysis, the traditional stark polarity between understandings based on nature and those based on nurture now seems simplistic. The very concept of “nature” is understood by many as a human (and therefore cultural) construct (cf. Butler, 1990). What is regarded as given or natural by one society may be regarded as taboo by another. Even animal “nature” is understood differently by succeeding generations. It is argued that our ideas about the natural world, like all our ideas, need to be understood as constructions and reflections of our current social context. Conversely, “nurture” can no longer be regarded in the omnipotent fashion of previous centuries. The intractability and ubiquity of human misery despite impressive technological progress, the backlash of ecological disaster despite campaigns to conquer nature—these developments suggest that human fate is not entirely within our control, that we are bound by our physiology, the limitations of our current perspective, the constraints of the world in which we find ourselves. Nature and nurture are now generally regarded less as distinct, separable causes and more as interactive, mutually created sets of processes.
Similarly, although the dialectic between trauma and fantasy, between an actual past and an invented past, still shapes much of the debate in current psychoanalytic literature, the polarity of the positions has softened and their interrelationships are more complexly conceived.
On the nature side, Freud initially developed the concept of instinctual drive (in its particular psychoanalytic form) when he lost faith in the reliability of his patients’ memories of seduction. Not all these memories were true, he came to believe. If these events had not actually happened, the psychic reality of these memories must have been generated autonomously, from within the mind of the child. Thus the drive concept was designed specifically to locate processes independent of actual, external events; drives are autonomously arising, internal pressures. Freud depicted the id, the repository of the drives, as actually sheltered from the external, interpersonal world and never in direct contact with it—all contact between the id and the outside world is mediated through the ego.
Contemporary drive theorists (modern psychoanalytic authors who have chosen to build on Freud’s metapsychology) regard the drives as very much affected by the external, interpersonal world. Contemporary Freudian theorists such as Loewald and Kernberg (see chapter 7), and Jacobson before them (see chapter 2), regard the drives not as simply acting on the external world, but as originally shaped in interaction with the external world through the parents’ manner of caregiving, providing gratifications, frustrations, and so on. In this way, nurture is seen as built into nature from the beginning.
On the nurture side, the original formulations of relational theorists like Sullivan, Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Kohut tended to attribute psychopathology almost exclusively to external factors—varieties of parental inadequacy. Whatever was natural to the infant was portrayed as good, as the “true” self which, if encouraged and not interfered with, would develop in an integrated and nonconflictual fashion. The causes of psychopathology were located squarely in failure of nurturance (in Winnicott’s phrase, “environmental insufficiency”).
Contemporary relational theorists (modern psychoanalytic authors who have chosen to build on relational rather than drive concepts) tend to take inherent, internal factors much more into account, not regarding them as drives per se, but as temperamental traits such as excitability, sensitivity to pleasure and pain, and so on. These more recent authors (e.g., Daniel Stern, Joseph Lichtenberg) depict early development less in terms of a healthy infant either facilitated or failed by parents and more in terms of complex interactions through which children and caregivers either fit or do not fit with each other. Individuals are seen as having differing sensibilities and rhythms. A parent whose caregiving style might be quite effective with one child might encounter enormous difficulties with another. Parenting, in this view, is shaped in the context of the inherent temperamental features of both parent and child. In this way, nature is built into nurture from the beginning.
The nature–nurture controversy continues to stimulate new thinking in the psychoanalytic literature; each side of the fantasy–trauma dialectic has been challenged and enriched by the other. And important differences still remain. This has been well demonstrated recently in the positions taken around the reemergence of interest in the very problem that originally led Freud to first propound his seduction theory: childhood sexual abuse.
Contemporary Freudian approaches grant much more importance than Freud did (after he abandoned the seduction theory) to the impact of actual abuse itself. As the title of Leonard Shengold’s book Soul Murder (1989) suggests, the actual abuse and subsequent obfuscating disclaimers are regarded as having a pernicious and destructive impact on development. Yet, consistent with Freud, the mechanism through which the actual abuse is understood to be so traumatizing is in its augmenting and exacerbating the preexisting sadomasochistic impulses connected with the Oedipus complex and primal scene fantasies (of parental intercourse), naturally arising in all children. Cure, for Shengold, rests ultimately on the release from repression of the child’s own fantasies and wishes.
Treating Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse (1993), by Jody Messler Davies and Mary Gail Frawley, provides an overlapping but distinctly different approach to the same problem, from the relational side. The most important issue for these and other relational authors is the actuality of the experience itself and the difficulty patients have in knitting together their necessarily dissociated experiences, their wrenchingly discrepant identifications with parents they both loved desperately and were tormented and terrified by. Davies and Frawley also differ from more popular authors such as Jeffrey Masson (1984), who regard survivors of abuse through the simplistic lens of victimology and deny any importance of active fantasy altogether. Davies and Frawley believe that while the child may be a passive victim of the original sexual abuse, the child’s subsequent active elaboration of his or her situation through various fantasies, including reparative longings for magical helpers and identifications with the abuser himself, is also a complex aspect of the problem.
For Shengold, psychological cure and freedom lie in acknowledgment of the wish “I wanted this to happen and secretly enjoyed this.” For Davies and Frawley, psychological cure and freedom lie in the articulation, containment, and eventual integration of discordant relationships and self-experience: “The father whom I loved (and became like) was also the father who cruelly abused and exploited me (in the way I in turn often abuse others).”
For Shengold, the starting assumption is that incestuous fantasies are universal and incestuous relationships largely imagined; the burden of proof is on the patient to convince the analyst that abuse took place. The greatest danger is for the analyst to validate and thereby collude in what are the patient’s fantasies. For Davies and Frawley, the starting assumption is that abused children are most fundamentally damaged in the destruction of their reality-testing and capacity to deal with their experiences in a coherent and integrated way. The analyst begins with a readiness to believe the patient, unless she is given reason not to. The greatest danger is for the analyst to invalidate, and thereby collude in the patient’s denial of, her own experience. An additional danger is posed, however, by the analyst’s simply declaring that the patient was abused, encouraging a premature foreclosure of the patient’s struggle to come to a personal resolution by sorting through confusing, often contradictory images of self and other, fantasy and reality, that are the outcome of trauma. The goal is for the patient to come to believe in the integrity of her own mind.
Fantasy or trauma? Although both are increasingly taken into account by most contemporary theorists, the choice between the two still provides an alternative set of emphases, different centers of gravity, for current analytic thinking.
Freud’s vision of nature “red in tooth and claw” played a central historical role in the creation of modern consciousness by toppling the traditional view of human beings’ having been specially created by a designer, in his own image. Freud’s postulation of a raw, primitive wellspring of human intentions was inspirational to generations of artists, social scientists, and social critics in the first half of the twentieth century, in their efforts to break out of the confining, ethnocentric features of established Western thought, with its Platonic-Christian emphasis on rationality and control.
By positing a primitive, instinctual core within each of us, Freud provided a powerful hedge against adaptation, social convention, and compliance with traditional norms. Thus, the cultural historian Ann Douglas, in her study of modernism, Terrible Honesty (1995), argues that Freud was the most important intellectual presence in the crucible of modernist sensibility generated by the convergence of white and black subcultures in Manhattan in the 1920s. The sense of primitivism evoked by Freud’s instinct theory, a fascination with beasts as reflective of a naked, pulsing natural force, provided the conceptual scaffolding for the revolt against Victorian conventions both in the arts and in social mores more generally. And from the very beginning of psychoanalysis, the quest by the individual for his own deeply personal meaning, his own authentic voice, has been at the heart of the clinical process.
However, from our current perspective, the very vision of nature that Freud established as an antipode to social and historical convention was itself a social and historical convention of Freud’s own time. The images of animals that Freud and his contemporaries generated in the flush of the Darwinian revolution, creatures driven by rapacious sexuality and aggression, do not much resemble animals as understood by contemporary zoologists. In part, Freud used animals as a projection screen for a portrayal of human frustrations and rage in a society that too often squelched individual energies and twisted them back against themselves.
Post-Freudian psychoanalysis proposes a less definitive account of nature. The infant’s experience is understood as powerfully impacted upon from the very beginning by the rhythms, values, and personalities of the caregivers. Views of nature and our nature are presumed to reflect, themselves, the social and historical context in which we live. However, post-Freudian psychoanalysis is no less fundamentally subversive vis-à-vis social conventions than Freud’s psychoanalysis was. As we have seen, essential to the contributions of object relations theorists such as Fairbairn and Winnicott, post–ego psychologists such as Erikson, revisionist Freudians such as Loewald and Lacan, and Kohut and subsequent self psychologists, has been the centrality in the analytic process of the development and emergence of the analysand’s authentic, personal voice from the internalization of social forces and significant others.
CONFLICT OR ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT: WHAT IMPEDES HEALING?
What is it that impedes psychological growth and healing? Why are people stuck, in their symptoms and in their relationships, with the painful experiences they encountered early in life? Two basic conceptual models, and the creative tension between them, have dominated psychoanalytic thinking about the tenacity of psychopathology; they derive, in part, from the dialectic we have traced between trauma and fantasy in understanding the cause of difficulties in living.
Paul, a young man in his twenties, sought treatment for a cluster of problems he had suffered with from early childhood. He was the only child of a fearful, clinging mother and a sickly, distant father who died when Paul was six years old. Although extremely competent and resourceful, Paul was often tortured by a lack of confidence, a sense of continually finding himself in a world he was totally unprepared for. Although Paul had a long history of successes in school and professional pursuits, he felt himself to be an impostor, always in imminent danger of being exposed. A similar dread stalked him socially and sexually. He was able to establish and maintain rich friendships and sexual relationships, but was often at a total loss to know and really feel what others found attractive and valuable about him. Paul was tormented by a sense of sexual inadequacy and had occasional, fleeting bouts of impotence. He often fantasized about other men—stronger, more forceful, with bigger penises—who, he imagined, could suavely perform all the activities with which he struggled shamefully.
The traditional model of psychopathology that dominated classical Freudian psychoanalytic thinking was centered around the concept of conflict. Neurosis was seen as the product of mental warfare, the psyche at odds with itself. The mind is rent by internal conflicts because different aspects of psychic life are not compatible; impulses deriving from childhood sexual and aggressive drives are in conflict with each other and with repressive forces. When this conceptual strategy is applied to the kinds of difficulties presented by a patient like Paul, the following hypotheses are quickly generated:
Paul suffers from pervasive inhibitions regarding sexual and aggressive impulses. He stops himself out of guilt (superego) and anxiety (ego); he doesn’t allow himself to know how powerful and effective he really is. He is afraid of what he will do. This material lends itself to a traditional, oedipal narrative: Paul fantasizes himself as an oedipal victor; he won his mother with the death of his father, and this victory left him terrified of his own sexual and aggressive ambitions. He is afraid his sexuality is deadly and systematically disclaims it in order to render himself harmless. He is afraid his aggressiveness and ambition are lethal and systematically disclaims them to make it safe for others to be with him. Through this massive disconnection from his own conflictual powers and energy, he empties himself of any possible sense of self or inner resources. This positive oedipal constellation, a clinician working within a classical framework might speculate, is accompanied by negative oedipal longings; beneath Paul’s obsessive fantasies about stronger, bigger men is a passive homosexual longing to assume a feminine position in relation to a powerful, paternal figure. He is not only afraid of his own dangerous powers; he also fears that allowing himself to claim his own potency would necessitate a loss of his longing to be loved by a more powerful man.
In this traditional model, Paul’s difficulties in living, his psychopathology, are a consequence of unconscious conflict. He cannot continue to develop as a person and overcome his problems, because his conscious experience is determined by underlying, depleting struggles that he doesn’t have access to. What will be of help is the lifting of repression, allowing him to see and understand the underlying conflictual forces generating his psychological paralysis. The awareness of his unconscious conflicts and their origin in his childhood experience will set him free. He will come to understand that his sexuality and his aggression are not as dangerous as they appeared in his fantasy-dominated child’s mind; he will come to renounce his childhood longings for both parents as inappropriate to adult, mature love.
The alternative model of psychopathology that has dominated postclassical psychoanalysis proposes the principle of arrested development rather than conflict as the root of difficulties in living. In this view, Paul’s fundamental problem is not that he is at (unconscious) odds with himself, but that his early development was thwarted by the absence of certain crucial parental provisions that are required for psychological growth: someone to look up to, someone who enjoyed Paul’s way of being a boy, someone who gave his blessing for Paul to become a man in his own right.
This approach to Paul’s problems is actually closer to Paul’s own conscious theories of his own difficulties. Paul spent his childhood longing for a father he could count on, who could teach him to play baseball and other ways to be a boy and, later, a man. He had the sense that he was different from other men because he had never received whatever it is that boys get from their fathers—a model of masculinity and a paternal blessing to become a man of one’s own, opportunities for identifications that would fill out his image of who he was. Paul had never realized, until being in analysis, that the macho figures he compared himself to unfavorably in his fantasies were symbolic representatives of the father he longed for as a boy. In the arrested-development model, Paul’s psychological paralysis is seen not as a result of unconscious conflict but of insufficient conditions for growth. What was missing in Paul’s developmental past is still missing in him as an adult.
Different postclassical theorists conceptualize this kind of developmental insufficiency in different ways: An ego psychologist might emphasize a deficiency of paternal identifications that offer no outside anchor to aid Paul in an already difficult separation–individuation process; an object relations theorist might highlight a lack of experience of freedom to be and discover himself without the need to be alert to and comply with the wishes of others; a self psychologist might point to a lack of developmentally sustaining relationships in which others were emotionally attuned to and excited about Paul’s own emerging self. These are all complex, multidimensional theories. Their common element is the assumption that what underlies Paul’s difficulties in living is not conflict but the thwarting of a natural developmental process due to environmental insufficiency. What will help Paul is not insight per se (although all these approaches pursue understanding) but finding a different sort of experience in the analysis itself. None of these theories regards analysis as actually fulfilling parental functions (Guntrip comes closest in describing analysis as involving “reparenting”); rather, the analytic relationship is seen as offering experiences that are analogues of parental provisions, close enough to revitalize stalled developmental strivings and to make possible an awareness and mourning for what was missed earlier.
These are two very different, seemingly incompatible, accounts of the origin of psychological difficulties. Like the choice between trauma and fantasy, they have created a dynamic tension within contemporary analytic theorizing. The most recent analytic literature reveals movements in the direction of a more complex synthesis. Authors who think primarily in terms of conflict increasingly note that a life crippled by long-term conflict results in a paucity of important experiences. Sexual inhibitions based on conflicts, for example, may result in a phobic avoidance of sexual situations and a loss of normal adolescent opportunities to learn about the negotiation of sexual needs in the context of an intimate relationship. Thus conflicts result in missing developmental experiences. Lifting repressions and creating insight may not in themselves be sufficient to generate new experience.
Conversely, some authors (e.g., Mitchell, 1988, 1993) regard developmental arrests as preserved not just because of a lack of necessary parental provisions, but also because of conflicts over loyalties to parents (Fairbairn’s ties to bad objects) and reparative fantasies based on limited childhood options.
For example, Paul’s longing for masculine power and a paternal blessing can also be regarded as a reparative hope for a magical, good father, generated out of the severity of Paul’s childhood circumstances. He longed for the day that this father would return to initiate him into manhood, a hope that became precious as a magical solution to all his difficulties. One might further view Paul’s minimizing self-reproaches as operating in the service of preserving that hope. If Paul were able to connect with his own power and resources as a man, the fantasied father would no longer be necessary; in fact, it would be difficult to preserve the belief in the possibility of such a larger-than-life paternal figure. He would have to accept his status as a separate individual, grappling with life’s experience as an ordinary mortal. So the inhibitions and constrictions Paul suffered consciously might also be regarded as the price he paid for preserving a set of conflictual unconscious fantasies. In the words of songwriter David Bromberg, “You’ve got to suffer if you want to sing the blues.” In this view, conflict and arrested development are not independent processes, but continually interactive dynamics: original developmental deficits lead to longings and fantasies that become conflictual; those conflicts in turn result in major obstacles to attaining necessary developmental experiences, which in turn generate more conflictual fantasies.
The central defense in the classical conflict model is repression. Drive-based instinctual fantasies inevitably come into conflict with one another and the regulating functions of the ego. They are necessarily barred from awareness, denied access to action, and buried within the psyche. The arrested-development model is often presented in concert with an understanding of defensive processes centered on dissociation rather than repression. Instead of a horizontal split between consciousness and buried impulses, developmental theorists envision a mind rent by vertical splits between different self-states that have not been integrated with one another.4 Some developmental needs or longings might be understood as operating in the mind in some dissociated form, like a Winnicottian true self split off from a prevailing false-self organization; others might exist more as undeveloped potentials that have never been provided an appropriate facilitating environment. Other theorists (Bromberg, 1993; Davies, 1995; Mitchell, 1993) have developed the notion of dissociation among multiple self-organizations and self-states, created not by unmet developmental needs but by unintegratable, sometimes traumatic, early interactions with significant others. Jody Messler Davies suggests that this shift from drive theories emphasizing repression to relational theories emphasizing dissociation leads to a very different vision of the unconscious:
Not an onion which must be carefully peeled or an archaeological site to be meticulously unearthed and reconstructed in its original form, but a child’s kaleidoscope in which each glance through the pinhole of a moment in time provides a unique view; a complex organization in which a fixed set of colored, shaped and textured components rearrange themselves in unique crystalline structures determined via infinite pathways of interconnectedness. (in press)
As with the nature–nurture controversy, the polarity between conflict and arrested development still constitutes two distinct centers of gravity in theorizing, but has begun to yield more complex syntheses.
GENDER AND SEXUALITY
There is no realm in which theoretical controversy within psychoanalysis has more dramatically reflected larger intellectual currents and cultural changes than in the area of sexuality and gender. Freud’s understanding of sexuality and gender was very much a product of his time; in the decades following the introduction of Darwinism, it was extremely compelling to think about human sexuality in the larger context of the evolution of species, natural selection, and the survival of the fittest. Similarly, post-Freudian understandings of sexuality and gender are very much a product of our time; feminism, the gay rights movement, and postmodernism in general have all had an enormous impact on the way sexuality and gender have been reconceptualized both outside and within the psychoanalytic literature.
But the lines of influence are more complex. Psychoanalytic thinking about sexuality has been influenced by the broader intellectual and popular culture, but psychoanalytic thinking about sexuality has also had a great deal to do with shaping popular understandings. Freud’s theory of sexuality became the dominant, popular understanding of sexuality in Western culture (Simon & Gagnon, 1973); much of the current feminist thinking about gender and sexuality, both within and outside psychoanalysis, was defined in reaction to Freud’s classical theorizing.
Freud had a great many different things to say about sexuality over the course of several decades; a full treatment of these ideas would require a book in itself. However, certain basic, consistent elements of Freud’s views came to dominate Western thinking about and experience of sexuality in general. For Freud, sexuality was a wholly natural phenomenon—the most deeply natural phenomenon in all of human experience. Civilization has transformed our lives in many complex ways, but civilization is always working against the dark, bestial pull of our persistent animal nature, dominated by sexuality.
In our time, the distinction between sexuality and gender has been the topic of much discussion. The great emphasis in recent decades on the cultural origins of gender may make it difficult for us, from our current vantage point, to appreciate how fundamental and unchangeable Freud and his contemporaries took gender to be, precisely because of what he understood to be its biological roots. Since Freud took gender so much for granted, as “bedrock,” he wrote very little about it as such. Anatomy, as Freud put it, was destiny, and for Freud, gender development was merely a corollary to the development of sexuality.
In Freud’s account, boys value their penis above all else, as the instrument necessary to achieve drive gratification. They assume all humans have penises, and the shock involved in the discovery of the anatomical difference between the sexes organizes their major fear throughout life: their fear of losing their penis (castration anxiety) and hence becoming feminized. That fear underlies much of subsequent neurotic conflict. Girls, in Freud’s view, similarly assume everyone is alike and, like boys, take the boy’s anatomy to be the basic bodily model. The shock of discovering the anatomical difference between the sexes leaves them feeling castrated and inferior. Women, in Freud’s view, long for penis substitutes (in the healthiest circumstances, a baby) and only with great difficulty can accept their biologically dictated gender role and its psychological sequelae.
Subsequent analytic theorists have added to and, in many ways, dramatically transformed most features of Freud’s understanding of the nature of sexuality and gender. Because loyalty to Freud’s libido theory has always served as a political litmus test, however, the radical nature of many of these changes often went unacknowledged. Consider, for example, the place of sexuality in Klein’s system.
In chapter 4 we traced the ways Klein substituted a developmental sequence of “positions,” organizations of internal and external object relations, for Freud’s libidinal phases. Sexuality for Klein remained a powerful, natural force, but she saw it as emerging in the context of the child’s struggles to integrate love and hate within the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. For Freud, whose thinking was grounded in the physical, sexuality was about tension reduction and was pervaded by oedipal struggle. For Klein, the body was also important, but as a source of symbolic meaning, represented in the mind. Sexuality, for Klein, figured primarily as yet another avenue for the expression of what she felt was the basic human dilemma: the integration of loving and hating feelings in the hoped-for demonstration of the reparative power of one’s goodness. For Freud, reproduction was an expression of phallic intactness for the boy and narcissistic compensation for the girl, made possible by her acceptance of her fantasied castrated status. For Klein, reproduction offered proof that something could survive and grow internally despite destructive feelings; pregnancy reflected the viability and goodness of one’s internal object world.
As broader features of Klein’s theoretical system changed, her understanding of the meaning of sexuality and of gender-related roles of sexuality was also transformed. Freud regarded personality as forming around sexuality as its natural, preexisting latticework. Klein and subsequent relational theorists regarded personality as forming around early relationships with others; sexuality inevitably emerges, but it is largely unformed and takes on its meaning within that context.
The past several decades have witnessed a vast and burgeoning literature critiquing and directly challenging Freud’s understanding of gender development, proposing alternatives, both psychoanalytic and nonpsychoanalytic. One common element in these diverse and heterogeneous revisions and critiques is the contemporary rejection of Freud’s presumption that both sexes assign a higher value inevitably and universally to masculinity, and that one’s image of masculinity should provide the baseline in reference to which femaleness is considered. Once these two basic premises were challenged, a fuller reconsideration of gender, in fantasy, in psychological makeup, and in social processes, became possible.
Contemporary psychoanalysis is rife with accounts of gender development and the very nature of gender itself. They can be roughly grouped according to conceptual strategies.
The counterpart to Freud’s classical biologizing was the classical culturalism that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s in the work of Karen Horney, Clara Thompson, and other interpersonal authors. Prefiguring contemporary feminist literature, they saw gender as most fundamentally a cultural creation—roles were established by the assignment of social meanings to biological differences. Thus, for Thompson, a woman’s wish for a penis was best understood not as an expression of inevitable, anatomically mandated inferiority; such a wish “is but demanding in this symbolic way some form of equality with men” (1942, p. 208), who occupy the dominant position in the culture.5 In a fashion that prefigures some of the psychologist Carol Gilligan’s widely read empirical work (1982, 1992), Thompson saw the most problematic phase for girls not at the oedipal period, in the perception of anatomical differences, but in adolescence, in the perception of differences in social constraints and power. Gender characteristics, in this model, reflect cultural conditions. Thus, Thompson suggested, because of economic disparities and the use of seductiveness as an understandable compensatory commodity, “woman’s alleged narcissism and greater need to be loved may be entirely the result of economic necessity” (p. 214).
A very different approach to gender has surfaced in recent years based on what might be considered a neo-biological model. In contrast to the pure culturalists, these authors revive Freud’s strategy of deriving gender from universal fantasies about anatomical realities. They believe Freud was right about anatomy being destiny, but that he simply misread the way anatomy destines us.
Janine Chassequet-Smirgel (1988) and other French Freudians, for example, argue that Freud’s phallocentrism was not just wrong, but a motivated error, defending against a deeper universal truth: the dread and denial of the fantasied preoedipal mother and her cloacal, devouring vagina. This dread provides the deeper explanation for the pervasive appearance of oedipal issues. Penises are valuable because they allow escape from the enveloping threat of the preoedipal mother. The classical concept of castration anxiety is thus most deeply understood not as a dread of losing the organ itself, but of succumbing to engulfment. Girls fantasize obtaining a penis through oedipal intercourse; they will steal the father’s penis. The anatomical possession or lack of a penis thus destines an individual to one or another set of options and resources in dealing with a common preoedipal dread.
But the game of reading destiny from anatomy can be played in many different ways. Erikson (1950), for example, regarded male genitalia as orienting boys to external space and female genitalia as orienting girls to internal space. Boys build towers to explore the productive and reproductive expansion and penetration their body is destined for; girls build protective enclosures to explore the productive and reproductive containment and nurturing their body is destined for. In contrast to Freud, Erikson assumed that the little girl experiences her internal space as a fertile presence rather than an absence. Irene Fast (1984) claims that both men and women are destined by their anatomy to envy the prerogatives of the other: girls will envy a boy’s penis, and boys will envy a girl’s child-bearing capacity.6 Thus the body has been invested with many more meanings than those Freud proclaimed as “bedrock.”
In contrast to these biologically based views, a kind of developmental essentialism has been developed by writers like Gilligan, Jean Baker Miller, and Judith Jordan, who are particularly concerned with the underrepresention of female gender in developmental studies. Here the origins of gender differences are stressed less than the fundamentally different sensibilities that are believed to correspond to them. Freud, again using his conclusions about men’s moral attitudes and functioning as a baseline, had decided that women lack a strong superego and hence are deficient in moral values. In Freud’s account, the male superego is established under the threat of castration anxiety, which forces the boy to abandon his oedipal ambitions, but little girls experience themselves as already castrated, and thus have less motivation to keep infantile instinctual impulses in check; consequently they have less energy available for the sublimation that fuels higher-level organization and pursuits. Gilligan’s (1982) groundbreaking work rescued what she argues is a distinctively female set of values from what had been regarded as simply an insufficiently developed male consciousness. And Miller and Jordan suggest that women are, because of temperamental and developmental factors, more attuned and related to other people. “Women typically demonstrate more emotional/physical resonance with others’ affective arousal than do men” (Jordan, 1992, p. 63).
A closely related but also quite different strategy results from what might be termed a developmental constructivist model, which regards gender differences, pointedly, not as essential, but as an artifact of social structures, most particularly inequalities in male–female participation in child rearing. Thus, the feminist writer Nancy Chodorow suggests, “gender difference is not absolute, abstract or irreducible; it does not involve an essence of gender. Gender differences, and the experience of difference, like differences among women, are socially and psychologically created and situated” (1980, p. 421). Chodorow feels that in many ways, the primacy of female caregivers has made things easier for girls, because they do not have to renounce, as boys do, their primary identification with the mother in developing a gendered identity. Yet Chodorow stresses her belief that these differences are artifacts of cultural inequalities, not essential to male–female differences.
Similarly, Jessica Benjamin (1992) argues that essentialists like Jordan have simply reversed the values in the culturally created polarization of gender, by elevating femininity and deprecating masculinity. Benjamin advocates a creative tension between assertion (which comes more easily for boys in our society, with its female caregivers) and connection (which comes more easily for girls).
One of the most constant features of theorizing about gender is the perpetual dialectic between biological/essentialist accounts and cultural/constructivist accounts. The former roots gender in some notion of nature or the natural. The latter is based on the postmodern premise that no tension exists between nature and culture because nature, as such, is purely a socially constructed category (Gagnon, 1991, p. 274).
Many of the issues concerning gender in the contemporary psychoanalytic literature are also reflected in the recent intense controversies regarding sexual orientation.
Freud regarded sexual orientation as largely constitutional.7 In many cases, Freud thought, homosexuality was not primarily defensive or psychodynamically derived and, consequently, changing a patient’s sexual orientation was not a proper goal of analytic treatment. This attitude toward sexual orientation was one of the few features of Freud’s ideas that the American psychoanalytic mainstream virtually disregarded. As psychoanalysis was taken up into American society, with its prominent homophobic currents, a different kind of biological determinism was established. In the 1950s and 1960s the position that dominated the American psychoanalytic literature was that everyone is constitutionally heterosexual and that homosexuality is a pathological, defensive, phobic retreat from castration fears. Homosexuality was viewed variably in terms of preoedipal fixation, arrested development, narcissistic dynamics, binding mothers, detached fathers, and so on. Analysts were urged to employ a directive/suggestive approach (Bieber, 1965; Hatterer, 1970; Ovesy, 1969; Soccarides, 1968), insisting that homosexual patients renounce their sexual orientation and actively directing the process of conversion to heterosexuality. It is a reflection of the passion of those who shaped this position that the distance it took them from Freud’s own views on sexual orientation and the central analytic ideal of nondirectiveness seems to have gone unnoticed.
Since the mid-1980s, the directive/suggestive approach to sexual orientation has been discredited in many quarters of the analytic world. As with gender, neo-biological accounts of sexual orientation have also surfaced. There has been considerable recent interest in the neurophysiology of sexual orientation, with some controversial early studies suggesting differences in brain structure of homosexual and heterosexual males. Richard Isay has been prominent among those who have argued that sexual orientation is fundamentally constitutional and not subject to change, and some radical feminists argue that all women would be naturally bisexual or lesbian if not for compulsory heterosexuality.
On the other hand, most contemporary authors tend to regard sexual orientation, as well as gender, as complex psychological and social constructions, not at all a simple extension of either our anatomically based reproductive capacities or our brain physiology. Once sexuality is unhinged from both constitution and reproductive function, the stark pathologizing of homosexuality is no longer feasible. Conversely, heterosexuality can no longer be regarded as a natural blossoming of human biology, but as something to be explored and explained as well.
EMPIRICISM OR HERMENEUTICS?
Over the past several decades, a great ferment both within scholarly disciplines and popular culture has surrounded the very nature of thinking itself. The heterogeneity of the contemporary world, the proliferation of sensibilities and points of view, the rapid shifts of ideologies and understandings have all contributed to the profound sense of turbulence, relativism, and flux that is often associated with the depiction of our contemporary world as “postmodern.”
Even science, the worldview Freud believed in devotedly and that housed all classical psychoanalytic theorizing, has changed in ways Freud could not have predicted. Many philosophers of science are now thinking about the very nature of scientific knowledge differently from the scientists of Freud’s generation. For Freud, science was the progressive, incremental accumulation of knowledge, bringing us closer and closer to a complete understanding of and control over nature. For many contemporary philosophers (e.g., those influenced by the work of Thomas Kuhn), science has provided a series of different, discontinuous worldviews, paradigms for solving problems relevant to a particular culture and historical time. There has been considerable debate about whether scientific paradigms are upheld or rejected wholly on the basis of rational choice and empirical evidence, or whether they constitute belief systems of a different sort. Given all this ferment, it is not surprising that the psychoanalytic literature has also been filled with intense debates about the best ways to think about psychoanalysis as a clinical treatment and an intellectual discipline.
What sort of knowledge do psychoanalytic practice and psychoanalytic theorizing generate? One answer to this question is Freud’s original answer (1933): Psychoanalysis is an empirical discipline; it produces scientific facts that are testable through clearly defined procedures. Freud always regarded psychoanalysis as a branch of science and the psychoanalytic situation itself as a kind of laboratory environment. The psychoanalytic method was, for Freud, one that allowed an objective investigator (the analyst) access to a realm of nature (the underlying structures and forces in the mind of the patient). Just as competent microscopists looking at a slide should all see the same data, Freud assumed that clinicians properly trained in the analytic method would all arrive at the same interpretive understanding of a patient’s free associations. Further, Freud believed that the patient’s response to an interpretation provided proof pro or con about its correctness (Freud, 1937b). The immediate verbal agreement or disagreement does not count for much, but a correct interpretation, Freud believed, should lift repressions and thereby open up fresh unconscious material: new, rich associations, confirmatory dreams, insights, and so on.
Freud also believed that psychoanalysis was, in principle, subject to confirmation through empirical evidence outside the analytic situation. He began his career as an experimental neurologist, interested in the physiological correlates of psychological processes. He always believed that physical substances eventually would be discovered corresponding to the psychodynamic concept of libido, anticipating the later discovery of sex hormones. Freud was also optimistic about other kinds of extra-analytic experimentation.8
Many contemporary analysts share the belief of Freud and his contemporaries that psychoanalysis is best thought of as an empirical discipline. Because of advances in the philosophy of science, however, the problems of empirical validation for psychoanalysis are now approached in more sophisticated terms. The philosopher Adolf Grünbaum has influenced current analytic discussions of these issues by pointing to the problem of suggestion in the analyst’s looking for validation of her interpretations from the patient. Because the analyst herself is now understood to be so embedded in the process (in influencing it both directly and indirectly and also in terms of understanding what is taking place), it is difficult for current scientists to regard the analytic situation as a kind of laboratory or the analyst as simply a neutral observer. Thus, those who regard psychoanalysis in empirical terms tend to look to other kinds of data for confirmation of analytic hypotheses.9
Alongside the empirical approach has arisen a very different view that represents the impact on psychoanalysis of the turn toward hermeneutics in other intellectual disciplines. As an introduction to the issues involved in thinking about psychoanalysis in hermeneutic terms, consider the way hermeneutics works in the study of history.
Historians of previous generations believed they were simply providing accurate renderings of “what happened.” The Roman empire collapsed. Why? Many hypotheses were possible, and good history consisted of collecting data and finding the hypothesis that best fit the facts. In this sense, history operated as a social science, using facts to confirm and disconfirm hypotheses. Each generation of historians had a different understanding of many historical situations (such as the fall of the Roman empire), and the assumption was made by each current group that their understanding best fit the facts and was therefore the most historically accurate.
In recent decades, historians and philosophers of history have begun to find it implausible that these succeeding versions of history represent a closer and closer approximation to some objective truth. It began to become clear that the way history is understood and written has a great deal to do not just with historical facts but also with the current context the historian is operating in. Different ways of understanding history (in terms of economics, social forces, aesthetic sensibilities, power, and so on) are arrived at by succeeding generations of historians, and the way history is understood at any given time seems very much a reflection of what that particular generation of historians is like. History is now understood by many as not a simple uncovering and assembling of facts, but as an active process between past and present, involving a selection and arrangement of some facts, from an infinite set of possibilities, to produce one among many possible understandings.
What happened toward the end of the Roman empire? The number of facts are infinite. What is happening this very day in Washington, D.C., or Paris or Tokyo that might affect the fate of nations? It is impossible to generate understandings of historical processes without becoming brutally selective and reductive. One simply cannot look at everything, and what one looks at is greatly determined by who, where, and when one is and what one is looking for. Historians who study the distant past have less data, and the extant material may be largely random or tendentiously preserved by surviving protagonists; it cannot be assumed that the surviving data is the most important in any objective sense.
It is very important to note that the hermeneutic approach to history (interpretive systems rather than an accretion of objective knowledge) does not collapse into relativism. There are many possible interpretations of the decline of the Roman empire—they are not all good history. Good history has to fit with our current understanding of the world and how it operates. Good history has to be consistent with whatever facts have been generated and not contradicted in any clear way by them. Good history has to persuasively account for a great deal of what is known; the more it accounts for, the more compelling the history. Historical explanations for the fall of the Roman empire resting on economic, social, and political dynamics are better history (at this point in time) than explanations relying on extraterrestrial invasion. Thus, there is a big difference between historians and fiction writers. To see history as interpretive rather than simply uncovering does not detach it from reality; rather, it regards reality as knowable through different possible understandings that are partially constructed by the knower.
Thinking about psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic discipline is similar to thinking about history that way. What actually happened in a particular patient’s early life? What is actually happening now, both in the session with the analyst and in the patient’s life outside the sessions? The answers to these questions are infinite. The facts are infinite. What areas are most important to consider? Which among the innumerable bits of information are most relevant? In many respects the psychoanalyst is in a position analogous to that of the historian or the contemporary political analyst. She confronts an infinite array of possible data and seeks an understanding that, if it is to be helpful at all, must be highly selective and reductive.
An appreciation of the hermeneutic perspective was introduced into psychoanalysis primarily by the philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Paul Ricoeur and the psychoanalysts Donald Spence and Roy Schafer. Spence argued that psychoanalysis deals more with “narrative truth” than with “historical truth.” The patient’s free associations do not simply contain expressions of underlying dynamics; the patient’s associations have to be constructed in some fashion. They are generally assembled, Spence demonstrated, according to the analyst’s preconceived theoretical commitments. Spence’s answer to the ease with which the patient’s associations are infused with the analyst’s preconceived ideas has been a kind of radical skepticism, a suspension of theorizing and conclusion-drawing, until much more comprehensive data from actual sessions is made available for study and public argumentation.10
Schafer has applied hermeneutics in a very different way. In his view, all psychoanalytic understandings are necessarily reductive and operate along what he has termed “narrative storylines.” Each theory has its own preferred way of viewing reality, understanding life; each preselects its own villains, heroes, curative journeys. Psychoanalytic understanding, for Schafer, is fundamentally a narrative process, and unavoidably so. This does not make analytic interpretations random, relative, or fictional. As with good history, good psychoanalytic interpretations must also make sense, pull together as much of the known data as possible, provide a coherent and persuasive account, and also facilitate personal growth. Psychoanalytic narratives are developed in communities of clinicians and tested for their clinical utility over time. But ultimately, competing psychoanalytic interpretations are not going to be adjudicated on purely rational or empirical grounds.
Yet another approach to these issues has been developed by Irwin Hoffman under the label “social constructivism” and by Donnel Stern employing Gadamer’s (in contrast to Habermas’s) version of hermeneutics. The analyst’s contributions, in this perspective, are generated largely in the dense, dynamic interactions of the transference and countertransference. Continual clinical choices and interpretive understandings arise from the pushes and pulls of the analyst’s affect-laden participation with the patient; theory does not operate as a largely independent factor (as it does for Schafer). Theory generally permeates the analyst’s experience and sometimes comes later as a post hoc explanation.
Thus, in a fundamental sense, contemporary psychoanalysis has been a method in search of a rationale. Some believe that an updated empiricism can still provide that rationale; others have turned toward hermeneutics for a different kind of framework. Still others have argued that psychoanalysis ought to establish its right to exist as a unique discipline unto itself, without having to ground itself in any other frame of reference (see Greenberg, 1991, chap. 4; Schwartz, 1995). Charles Spezzano (1993, drawing on Richard Rorty’s critique of “foundationalism”), for example, has argued that psychoanalysis has generated demonstrably useful understandings of human experience that stand on their own terms. Such a view does not necessarily diminish the importance of empirical findings of various sorts as a source for fresh ideas and relevant considerations, but it does eliminate empirical validation as the ultimate adjudicator of psychoanalytic truth.