In his summary of Kohut’s theory and in his case example Paul Ornstein offers an answer to the question: What, in a patient’s psychic material, must be recognized by the analyst in order for an analytic process to take place?
The patient’s compulsive sexuality and the lack of direction in his life are repeated in the analysis through what the author calls the mirror transference, that is, the craving for a gleam of approval in the mother-analyst’s eyes. Another transference involves the idealization of the analyst, in which the patient partakes of the omnipotence and omniscience that he attributes to the analyst and can thereby internalize a sense of values and a capacity for tension regulation. In the dynamics of the treatment this magic enables Dr. Ornstein’s patient to tolerate, in a manner different from his sadistic sexual acting out, the alternation of omnipotence and severe depression that had previously governed his life outside of his awareness.
In a kind of dream evoked by the context of the treatment, the patient says that he feels like a splat on a wall, like hot rubber that sticks when thrown against a wall, like an octopus that clings to the wall with its suckers and fears the rumbling of the wall because it might not survive if it can no longer remain attached. As he brings into the transference the issues involved in his frenetic activities, the patient gives a shape to his anxieties and can therefore cope with them.
But this is to assume that the analyst understands these disintegration experiences in and of themselves, without measuring them against a presumed normative condition of instinctual drives. The novelty of his approach as compared with previous psychoanalytic reference points lies in its abandonment of the practice of interpreting images and dream reports as phases in drive integration. The analyst no longer has to interpret transferential aggression as a resistance connected to defenses against a genetic process of oedipal maturation. He accepts the patient’s material in the register in which it is presented, and as a result the patient can bear the threat of disintegration that forms the counterpoint to his sadistic fantasies and to the erotic and transferential dependence that he was at first unable to tolerate. Repetition in the transference (which the patient no doubt feels able to risk because of the quality of the analyst’s listening) gradually allows these threats, which had been enacted in the patient’s extra-transferential erotic life, to become linked to transferential reveries and eventually to dreams. The compulsion to act out is thereby modified.
As an analyst who was not trained in the analysis of defenses or in the formation of the ego, nor in the theory according to which drives have to find whole objects in a process of normative development ending in genitality, I find this clinical presentation easy to follow in one sense: it would seem that Kohut and Lacan, though taking different paths, both distanced themselves from an overly simple genetic concept of sexuality. But in contrast to the interpretative method Freud originally established, the inner world became objectivized in an attempt to make psychoanalytic theory scientific. The theories of drives, of the ego, and of defense mechanisms are part of this objectivization, and the analyst is transformed into an observer who stands outside the manifestations of his patient’s intrapsychic life. Normativity of analytic listening in regard to drives is a further entailment of this objectivization, since analyzing a patient’s defenses implies viewing his material as a refusal to attain the “adult” sexual ideal supposedly represented by the analyst himself.
In Kohut’s (1979) “The Two Analyses of Mr. Z,” the analyst asserts that in the first treatment he was unaware of what was really at stake in the clinical material precisely because he viewed Mr. Z’s dreams and his dependency on his mother in terms of an unwillingness to confront his oedipal rivalry with his father. The analyst was considered to represent the adult sexuality towards which the healthy part of the patient’s ego was striving, and Mr. Z’s pregenital sexuality was a resistance to be overcome via the transference. In the second analysis, on the other hand, Kohut emphasizes the fact that his patient’s identity was bound up in his mother’s pathology and that his struggle centered around his inclusion in maternal fantasies. The analyst now supported the so-called archaic sexuality and no longer sought to bring it into a normative line. Mr. Z became able to reevaluate his relationship to his father not by means of access to genitality, nor by the working through of oedipal rivalry, but because he discovered that he had had a father after all. Now that the analytic situation facilitated such a discovery, he reinvested certain memories of his father that had lain dormant until then.
Kohut also emphasizes that this discovery was a kind of creation within the transference, that is, that the points of commonlity that Mr. Z “discovered” between the father of his childhood and the analyst were like inventions of his, or at any rate were connected to the initiative of which he became capable at this point in the second treatment. This aspect of transferential invention, made possible by the way the analyst listens to so-called archaic material, is also very apparent in Dr. Ornstein’s clinical example. And this work that takes place by virtue of the transference reminds me of Lacan’s (1964/1981) observation in Seminar XI that the unconscious has to do not with the unreal or with the derealized, but with the non-realized,1 a point also made by Freud (1895) in connection with the diphasic nature of sexuality, with the belated primary memories of which symptoms consist, and so forth.2
But then we must ask whether, in this case example, we are really dealing with pathology found in specific patients called borderlines, or whether what we call archaic material is not the material of every analysis.
As for Lacan, he did not attribute to Freud the genetic theory of drives that he wanted to distinguish from his own position. In Seminar XI he makes it clear that drives are the speaking being’s modes of relating to otherness, orality corresponding to the demand addressed to the Other and anality to the Other’s demand. Thus it no longer makes sense to refer pregenital sexuality to the archaic. In clinical practice, he says, the patient tends to lose himself in the idealization of the Other, as happens with falling in love. If this idealization, accepted by the analyst, is in one sense what allows the analysis to take place, in another sense it represents a hindrance that the analyst must mitigate by bringing the patient back to what, in the vicissitudes of his drives, makes his existence unique in a way that cannot be reduced to any totalization of an object.3
In contrast to Paul Ornstein and Kohut, Lacan does not throw the baby of drives out with the bath water of defense analysis. Nor does he use the term empathy; that is to say, he does not criticize Freud’s objectivism by appealing to notions that seem to him to accord little importance to the asymmetrical setup of the treatment and to the way in which theory is able to account for it. Empathy, introspection, access to the other’s inner life—all these terms seem to Lacan to be a legacy of nineteenth-century psychology. To go beyond Freud’s objectivism it is not enough to return to a subjectivism that is its counterpart. We must, instead, conceptualize in a new way the division of the subject that is called for by psychoanalytic practice.
But this debate of Lacan’s with terms inherited from pre-Freudian psychology must also be set in the context of postwar French philosophy. Lacan separates himself from phenomenological and existentialist concepts of intersubjectivity on the grounds that they are part of a philosophy of consciousness that Freud had shown to be unworkable.4 This is why an analyst influenced by Lacan encounters some initial difficulty in situating self psychology, even if his own practice shares some of its elements.
The terminological differences that reveal both differing cultural contexts and, undoubtedly, divergent views on the theory of treatment have implications as far as technique is concerned. A Lacanian analyst finds it hard to accept the need to work with a mirror transference, since for Lacan the model of the mirror has an entirely different meaning. It refers to the fact that every identification entails a degree of illusion that, in the life of every desiring subject, perpetuates the original mirror situation. When the child recognizes his own mirror image at an age when he does not have motor autonomy and is still an in-fant (literally, unable to speak), this identification with his own image is in part a decoy, a lure. Although it gives him the reassuring illusion of autonomy and thus has a positive effect on his maturation, especially in the area of language, it also implies that any desire for wholeness necessarily involves a threat of disintegration.
To the extent that an analysis is more a locus of truth concerning the processes of desire than it is a locus of maturation understood in the genetic sense, an analysand—like the patient Dr. Ornstein describes—must confront self-representations in which he does not coincide with himself. The patient’s reverie makes use of the analyst as a mirror reflecting back to him the part of his image that is unacceptable to him, that is separate from him and yet at the same time constitutes him in his relations with other people. The analyst is a good mirror not because he accurately reflects the patient’s image as mirrors ordinarily do, but precisely because, in the sequence of oral, anal, and, as Lacan says, invocatory drives (for there are sonorities in this reverie),5 he reveals what it is that cuts the patient off from himself. For a Lacanian, in short, it is also in the register of the partial drives themselves that the impossibility of wholeness, of the complete fulfillment of our sexual desires, must be analyzed. Neurosis is connected with an over-eager dream of completeness that spares the subject the experience of anxiety that inevitably emerges when the corner of the veil is lifted from the enticing illusion that is involved in our identifications. This is why it is so important, in Dr. Ornstein’s case example, that images produced in the transference enable the patient to tolerate the threat of disintegration so that he no longer needs to spend his life averting it by means of acting out. Such images serve as a container for the patient’s psyche.
To return to the details of the case in order to compare the terms in which Dr. Ornstein describes his work with the ones I myself would use, I would certainly not say that in his two related dreams about fishing the patient is seeking to arouse the analyst’s admiration and respect in the context of a mirror transference. For, as the author himself makes clear, the analyst here is being summoned up not as a person but as a persona in the Latin sense of the word, a theatrical type containing within itself the relationship between various psychic figures: in these fishing dreams the patient, supported by his attribution of certain traits to the analyst, replays his relationship to his father.
What is really important here is not the person of the analyst, nor only the person of the father as it appears in the patient’s memories, but rather this psychic figure that is woven in the relationship between analyst and patient. Since the actual father in the patient’s history left his actual mark on his memories and on his formation as a subject of desire, this weaving together enables the patient not to invent a father for himself in the analysis, but to reopen the way to what had remained unrealized in his relationship to a psychic figure from whom he expected recognition. The patient’s frantic search, at certain points in the treatment, for his analyst’s agreement and approval can be understood as the beginnings of the search for what Lacan calls the symbolic, precisely because it does not coincide with any specific figures but is created in the space between patient and analyst by virtue of the transference. Because the analyst’s desire6 gives substance to this intervening space composed of the relation among several scenes, we would not say that he understands his patient. Understanding would prevent the patient from constituting this space as a space and would confine him in the relationship that Lacan, contrasting it with the symbolic, calls imaginary, a relationship in which the patient would have contact only with real people who, as they usually do, would block his access to his own anxiety.
But even if the Lacanian concepts of Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real invite us to use other terms in describing the transference, it is clear from Dr. Ornstein’s account that he did not confuse himself with the imaginary figures that he agreed to represent temporarily in the transference.
As far as the clinical material is concerned, the reader could wish for a fuller account of the connection between the patient’s symptoms, the contents of his transferential fantasy (the octopus on the wall), and those of his dreams that have a reorganizing function. What was the signifying connection between the images that were evoked at the beginning (the octopus-suckers stuck onto the analytic screen) and the two dreams with similarly aquatic content? What is represented by the sea, fishing, and the sea creatures in the patient’s family history? Isn’t the signifying material the trace, the matrix of the interweaving of the traumatic and the erotic that constitutes the failures in the formation of a self?
A final question arises about the meaning of this “self” as contrasted with the Lacanian notion of the subject. If the drives can be conceptualized otherwise than in the context of a genetic theory and the analysis of defenses, why is it necessary to oppose the self and the drive? Dr. Ornstein tells us that the self must be allowed to become cohesive for the first time in the patient’s life, but it is difficult to see what this cohesiveness would involve if not the capacity, acquired thanks to the analysis, for tolerating a certain incoherence that the patient must not reject but, instead, recognize within himself. Should we really separate from the drives this pole of identity that Ornstein calls the self? But then again, we might ask the Lacanians how they would connect the subject with the drives, in view of the fact that Lacan says that drives are acephalic….
Freud, S. (1895). Project for a scientific psychology. Standard Edition 1:281–397.
Kohut, H. (1979). The two analyses of Mr. Z. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 60:3–27.
Lacan, J. (1964/1981). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. J.-A.
Miller, trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Norton.
1. “Non-realized” refers to what awaits realization in the child’s sexual development, since sexuality is established in two phases: the infantile period and puberty, separated by the latency period. In the context of treatment the realization that remains in abeyance is the patient’s ability to formulate his desire and the analyst’s ability to recognize it. The unconscious is the inexhaustible storehouse of what remains pending—of dreams, for example. This is more important for Lacan than the common view that the unconscious is unreal (that is, imaginary) or derealized (delusional).
2. Freud is referring to the fact that the events triggering the formation of a symptom (especially phobic symptoms, as in the case of Emma) are not in themselves pathogenic. They become so only by virtue of an associative link to the memory of a traumatic childhood event that remained in abeyance for the subject until puberty.
3. See Lacan 1964/1981, pp. 167f., 181–184, 194. According to Lacan, the object of desire is not primarily the object that brings satisfaction but instead the object around which the drive turns. In the metaphor of the circuit of drives, the trajectory begins at a place on the erogenous body of the subject and goes towards an object on the body of the other. The way out and the way back on this trajectory are not the same and do not “capture” the object, which, consequently, does not fulfill the narcissistic need of the lover.
4. Lacan worked and wrote at the same time as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, but for him the division of the subject cannot be conceptualized in an approach that privileges consciousness and meaning; what is needed is a structural model of the unconscious and of consciousness.
5. For Lacan the invocatory drive invests te voice of the subjuect who is seeking to adress another subject
6. The analyst’s desire is his initiative, his taking responsibility, as he urges the patient’s desire to express itself in words.