Self and Motivational Systems

Towards A Theory of Psychoanalytic Technique

Joseph D. Lichtenberg, Frank M. Lachmann, James L. Fosshage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317758112
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Interpersonal Relations in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this sequel to Lichtenberg's Psychoanalysis and Motivation (TAP, 1989), the authors show how their revised theory of motivation provides the foundation for a new approach to psychoanalytic technique. The approach in Self and Motivational Systems emphasizes a finely honed sensitivity to moment-to-moment analytic exchanges and an appreciation of which motivational system is dominant during that exchange. Throughout, the authors stress the creative power of psychoanalysis as a joint effort shaped by the intersubjective context of a particular analysand communicating and interacting with a particular analyst. At the heart of the analytic relationship is the analysand's expectation of evoking a vitalizing selfobject experience from the analyst and the analyst's expectation, in turn, of evoking a selfobject experience of efficacy from his or her work with the analysand.

1

Motivational Systems and Other Basics

 

 

 

We believe that the theory of the self and motivational systems calls for a revised theory of technique. Based on the concepts formulated in Psychoanalysis and Motivation (Lichtenberg, 1989a), this book provides a foundation for a psychoanalytic exploratory technique. Through clinical examples, we indicate the forms and methods of a technique based on self and motivational systems.

Reconsider briefly the theory offered in Psychoanalysis and Motivation. Psychoanalytic theory is, at its core, a theory of structured motivation. Five systems designed to promote the fulfillment and regulation of basic needs were delineated. Each system comprises distinct motivational and functional aspects. Each system is a psychological entity (with probable neurophysiological correlates). Each is built around a fundamental need. Each is based on behaviors clearly observable, beginning in the neonatal period. The five motivational systems are: (1) the need for psychic regulation of physiological requirements, (2) the need for attachment and later affiliation, (3) the need for exploration and assertion, (4) the need to react aversively through antagonism or withdrawal (or both), and (5) the need for sensual enjoyment and sexual excitement.

During infancy, each system contributes to self-regulation in mutually regulatory interactions with caregivers. At each period of life, the fundamental needs and the wishes, desires, aims, and goals that derive from those needs in each motivational system may be rearranged in different hierarchies indicated by different conscious and unconscious preferences, choices, and proclivities. From moment to moment, the activity of any one system may be intensified to the point where it provides motivational dominance of the self. The “self” develops as an independent center for initiating, organizing, and integrating motivation. The sense of self arises from experiencing that initiating, organizing, and integrating. Experiencing has an active (agent) and passive (receptor) mode.

Why do we need a new theory of motivation? Isn’t the vitality of motivation guaranteed in the human by instincts or instinctual drives? [We] argue that motivations arise solely from lived experience. Based on the particular lived experience, motivations may or may not achieve optimal vitality. Whatever biophysiological urgencies and innate neurophysiological response patterns underlie psychological motivations, the vitality of the motivational experience will depend initially on the manner in which exchanges between infants and their caregivers unfold. Later, the development of symbolic representation enhances the potential for flexible, self-created reorganization of lived experience. A psychoanalytic theory of adaptive and maladaptive motivational functioning is about lived experience throughout life. Lived experience is about how we human beings consciously and unconsciously seek to fulfill our needs and desires by searching in potential events for affects that signal for us that experiential fulfillment [pp. 1–2].

The five motivational systems were derived from a host of empirical findings. They represent a way of clustering these findings so as to make sense from the vantage point of dynamic psychoanalysis. The five systems depict our vision of human motivation. We may ask, is that all there is to human motivation? Do these motivational systems capture the triumph of Liza Doolittle when she “got it?” Do they capture the agony of Richard Nixon when he “lost it?” Do they capture the ecstasy of an orgasm or the loneliness of the long distance runner? Our response is a modest “yes,” but we would quickly agree that when motivations are looked upon with a cold, empirical eye they may not pack the wallop of Freud’s rider-on-the-horse metaphor.

Follow our exploration of the motivational systems, and among your rewards will be an affiliation with a psychoanalytic community that values small, logically, observationally, empirically derived steps. We are not averse to the exciting metaphors of seething cauldrons or armies that leave provisions behind in case of retreat. But for us psychoanalysis is best understood and participated in when one’s physiological requirements are quiescent and explorations are conducted into the affectively rich subjective life of the analysand. Then the uniquely individual imagery and metaphors, the unconscious fantasies and beliefs, the model scenes, are discovered and formed jointly by analyst and analysand. Descriptions of the moment-to-moment analytic exchanges in which these joint constructions occur lack the grandeur of Eros and Thanatos or other broad metapsychological speculations. In our pursuit of the specific determiners of the experience of motivation and their implications for psychoanalytic theory and practice, the feet of the empiricist may seem sometimes to stand on the soul of the poet.

As you read the chapters that follow, you may be surprised to find that familiar terms like unconscious, defense, conflict, and resistance have been redefined to be as close as possible to what can be experienced. With these terms redefined and the pillars of the tripartite structural hypothesis (dual drives, id, ego, and superego) removed, then, unlike the little boy in the famous story, we are saying, “The clothes have no emperor,” This book represents our ongoing effort to provide clinical psychoanalysis with a democratically elected “new emperor,” an empirically, developmentally derived model of motivational systems.

We want to speak to the psychoanalyst-clinician and offer a way of moving between theoretical models and clinical phenomena without losing the rigorous constraints of the former or the empathically derived riches of the latter. We believe the terms we use to facilitate the back-and-forth interplay of theory and phenomena–systems, dimensions, perspectives, and regulation–are relatively neutral and are unlikely to shape technique into their own imagery. What is lost in the evocativeness of our language we believe the clinician can more than make up for through the creative discoveries of idiosyncratic subjectivity stemming from the analysand’s associations, memories, and model scenes.

The five motivational systems are not a rock-bottom concept. The inferential steps between them and the analytic situation can easily be detailed. We propose, however, that the five systems all function to develop, maintain, and restore the cohesiveness of a self or self-organization. In delineating our understanding of the reciprocal relationship between motivation and the self, we are carving out the conceptual pillars that may eventually hold up a theory. This is our psychoanalytic-philosophical belief. We propose it. We cannot demonstrate it empirically. But, we hold, it provides a useful, overarching clinical perspective. The five motivational systems might conceivably fit into another psychoanalytic-philosophical system, but that is not our main concern. We are not advancing a new psychoanalytic theory. For that matter, we are not proposing a theory in any final form although we have proposed its motivational underpinnings. We are working toward a theory of technique, specifically a theory of technique that will provide the practitioner with a conceptual ally in the moment-to-moment work of psychoanalysis.

In the course of our explorations, we frequently confront theoretical constructs that are currently in vogue or backed by an accumulation of theory-derived treatments. In such instances, for example in our discussion of unconscious fantasy and interpretive “depth,” we challenge existing propositions and advance our own perspective in combination with its clinical implications wherever we can. But our focus accents the clinical rather than the metapsychological aspects of theory.

In our more detailed discussions of the five motivational systems we provide the psychoanalytic clinician with a conceptual tool that both offers a set of primary motivations and leaves open the possibility that any motivation can be used in the service of limiting awareness of any experience to which the person is averse. For example, sexuality or attachment motivations may be used to avoid experiencing isolation and loneliness that are stirred up by exploratory possibilities. The five systems leave the relationship among the systems to be worked out uniquely and specifically in each case. With sexuality and aggression no longer as basic, irreducible drives or their pathology as always a product of a breakdown of the self, analysts can follow the patient’s narrative freely without having to adhere to a preconceived and empirically unsubstantiated hierarchy of motives.

The debate among the adherents of the various psychoanalytic theories can be understood as a debate about which motivations are primary and which ones are derived or secondary. When the findings of the empirical infant researchers are sorted out, the hierarchies of motivations as proposed by various theories cannot be supported. All five systems operate at least from birth on, and all five interact and are instrumental in shaping experience and hence eventuate in the shaping of the sense of self. These findings make moot some of the acrimony found in theoretical disputes. We are prompted to claim that the clinical findings of any psychoanalytic theory should be explainable through the five motivational systems and the cohesiveness of the self. In addition, our proposal should provide the clinician with a vantage point through which explorations previously closed off by theoretical assumptions can be opened and explored. Our emphasis on organizing principles and themes and being open to our patients’stories maintains an ambience of exploration, investigation and the joy of discovery.

The clinical prescription that follows from this freedom is that the analyst’s empathic-introspective stance can be more consistently maintained. The analyst’s interventions, however, will shift from the language of impulse-defense, wish-resistance, and need-frustration to an explication of themes, organizing principles, interpretive sequences, model scenes, and motivations in relation to self-cohesion and the pursuit of self object experiences.

Although we claim the mantle of the empiricist, we do not neglect the poet. Just as nature inspired the Romantic poets’ use of metaphor, alliteration, and onomatopoeia, the clinical exchange draws our attention to the dynamic creativity of analyst and analysand at work. Both poet and analyst and analysand working together draw the origins of their creativity from those magic moments in childhood when, through symbolic play, a stick “becomes” a spoon and the teddy bear becomes the self being fed by the mother-self. In our rendering of the construction of model scenes, the unraveling of “unconscious” fantasy, and the elaboration of attributions of the analyses attitudes and values as perceived by the analysand, we recognize the creative power of the collaborative effort. In the active process of communicating and listening, as one person speaks to the other, directs wishes to the other, we identify the subject–object dimension of the exchange. This points us to the individual subjectivity of analyst and analysand. We hold that what has generally been thought of as having been organized solely intrapsychically inevitably bears the stamp of the intersubjective context of assumed responsiveness and motivations of the other. Thus, we place the analysand’s expectations of evoking a selfobject experience from the analyst at the center of the organization of the analysand’s associations and communicating; we place the less often considered analyst’s expectations of evoking a selfobject experience from the work with the analysand at the center of the organization of the analyst’s associations and communications.

We have an opportunity here to address an important but often neglected issue. The analyst’s endeavor when optimal is a product of the exploratory motivational system. When exploration is infused with aversiveness, the analyst’s adherence to an empathic mode of perception cannot be maintained. Then the exploration may become side-tracked as the analysand’s motivation is no longer attended from the analysand’s point of view. Explicit or implicit accusations of resistance often follow, with the effect that the analysand feels put off and communications become limited. Any motivational system may coopt the exploratory endeavor of the analyst. The analyst’s alertness to these shadings and nuances in the encounter with the patient provides a built-in signal to disruptions in optimal responsiveness.

Our plan for the book makes for a challenging presentation. Principles of technique, such as model-scene construction sequences of interpretation disruption–restoration sequences, the path to awareness, and the empathic mode of perception will alternate with presentations of research findings and conceptual frameworks that provide the foundation for the technical recommendations. We offer the reader recommendations about the methods we espouse mixed with theoretical underpinnings to these recommendations. Methods of approach have in the past had to be intuitively related to a dual-drive theory that we believe is outmoded. Because we regard motivations to be organized in five systems that form in response to basic needs, we are forced to ask new questions about technique and suggest new answers. Our suggested answers to questions about technique oscillate with proposals of developmental principles that are in keeping with our motivational hypothesis. The developmental principles, in turn, lead us to reexamine a long list of familiar psychoanalytic concepts: unconscious mentation, conflict, defense, values and morality, and transference. We also extend an ongoing exploration of the development maintenance, and restoration of self-organization. In a chapter that is a cornerstone of the book, we present our view of the central importance of the pursuit of selfobject experiences and the link this understanding provides to the treatment of addictive disorders. We suggest that the traditional method of exploring any clinical finding from an intrapsychic or intersubjective perspective is inadequate unless equal significance is afforded to an assessment of state. The importance we place on an assessment of state derives from our study of dreams and particularly self-psychological studies of self-state dreams, state transitions in infancy, and state alterations in pathological conditions. We apply the concept of state to describe the optimal mind set of analysand and analyst during an analytic session and to the pathological conditions of disturbed self-cohesion, panic, abuse, and hatred.

By taking as our starting point the conceptualization of self and motivational systems, we are compelled to explore developmental events through the intrapsychic organizing principles of self-organization self-stabilization, dialectic tension, and hierarchical rearrangement. Our view that intrapsychic development is intrinsically intertwined with an intersubjective perspective requires us to place considerable emphasis on the analyses contribution to the therapeutic process. We will provide the reader with a detailed presentation of verbatim exchanges that depict interpretation as a sequence of interventions made or not made by the analyst. This clinical presentation illustrates the process by which sequences of interpretation integrate patterns and relationships. We emphasize neither the analysand’s associations nor the analyst’s interpretations but rather the back-and-forth exchanges that coexist with the analyses and analysand’s alternating uncertainties and growing awareness.

How the analysis is deepened is a concern that runs throughout our book. Deepening of the analysis is inextricably dependent on the application of the empathic mode of perception and entry into the state of mind of the analysand. Deepening of the analysis requires the analyst to sense the motivational goals of the analysand that are dominant at any given moment. The focus on motivational goals directs us to an appreciation of affects as guides for our empathic perception and to the state of self-cohesion as recognized from a perspective of regulation and resilience (self-righting). The application of this focus expands self-experience and increases self-knowledge. Our discussion of unconscious and conscious mentation, the path to awareness, and changing symbolic representations or schemas of self and others provides the conceptual and empirical underpinning for our clinical focus. The analyst, as perceived by the patient, is the most significant “other” for the patient’s deepened awareness of the pursuit of self object experiences. Thus, we stress the technical importance for analyst and analysand to construct (often by way of model scenes) the vision of the analyst that the patient experiences.

Our book is for the curious, self-reflective clinician. We believe that at times we pursue questions and challenges that have long been present but dormant in the analytic community. At other times we raise less familiar questions that need to be asked. We hope that we are opening psychoanalytic inquiries into areas hitherto closed by fidelity to early theoreticians and the sense of certainty derived from adherence to familiar theories. If we can challenge readers to challenge us in return, we will have found adherents and adversaries combined in the spirit of psychoanalysis at its best.

2

Model Scenes

Implications for Psychoanalytic Treatment

In the course of psychoanalytic treatment analyst and patient construct model scenes to organize previously puzzling information, further integrate previous understanding, and initiate further exploration of the analysand’s experience and motivations. The model scenes that analyst and patient construct and modify during the course of analytic exploration convey to each, in graphic and metaphoric forms, significant events and repeated occurrences in the analysand’s life. The information used to form model scenes is drawn from the patient’s narratives, unfolding transference configurations, or role enactments. Model scenes highlight and encapsulate experiences representative of salient conscious and unconscious motivational themes. Constructed within the patient-analyst interaction, model scenes convey and experience as a “picture” and thus are “worth a thousand words.”

“Model scenes” (Lichtenberg, 1989a, b) refers to three constructs: (a) a conception that analyst and patient form that epitomizes significant communications from the analysand about his or her life; (b) a conception that analytic theoreticians and infant observers form that epitomizes significant developmental experiences; and (c) a conception (unconscious fantasy or pathogenic belief) that the analysand has that epitomizes significant past problematic lived experiences.

In this chapter we further develop the concept of model scenes as (1) a means of conceptualizing experience of any age; (2) providing a valuable clinical tool for moving from the general to the specific or particular experience of an individual patient; (3) providing a theoretical construct that includes the contributions of recent developmental advances in psychoanalysis; and (4) an analytic illustration through which past and present, foreground and background; and empathic entry into transference and analytic responsiveness can be integrated.

A critical juncture in the history of psychoanalysis occurred when Freud recognized the Oedipus complex as a model scene in which the little boy possessively and erotically desires his mother and experiences intense rivalry with his father. We tend to think of the theoretical significance of the oedipal scene as a ubiquitous developmental vicissitude whereby Freud (1900, p. xixn) established the existence of infantile sexuality. We need to remind ourselves of the excitement of discovery when Freud recognized in his clinical work that associations and dreams of his own and his patients’ could be understood through the pattern of relationships and desires in the myth of King Oedipus portrayed by Greek dramatists. Previously puzzling fragments of verbal associations, dream images, and transference configurations in particular coalesced into an explainable whole.

Freud’s analogy to the drama of Oedipus lay not only in the depicted triangular relationship but in the fact that the “action of the play consists in nothing other than the process of revealing, with cunning delays and ever-mounting excitement….” (pp. 261–262) elements of Oedipus’ history. From these elements, both Oedipus and the audience could piece together the mystery of his past and his destiny. Freud noted ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1/Motivational Systems and Other Basics
• 2/Model Scenes: Implications for Psychoanalytic Treatment
• 3/Model Scenes and the Search for Clinical Truth
• 4/Human Development and Organizing Principles
• 5/Unconscious Mentation
• 6/The Path to Awareness
• 7/The Interpretative Sequence
• 8/The Selfobject Experience
• 9/Defense, Conflict, and Abuse
• 10/Values and Morality
• 11/Toward a Theory of Technique
• References
• Index