Object Relations, Work and the Self

David P. Levine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135191047
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Industrial & Organizational Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this book, David P. Levine applies psychoanalytic object relations theory to understanding work motivation and the meaning of work. Drawing on the writings of authors such as Donald Winnicott, Otto Kernberg and Melanie Klein, he explores three factors central to our effort to understand work: guilt, greed and the self. Special attention is paid to the factors that determine the individual's emotional capacity to do work that engages the self and its creative potential and to the related matter of impairment in that capacity. Chapters include:

• 
  
  

• the problem of work
• greed, envy and the search for the self
• skill, power and authority
• work and reality.

Object Relations, Work and the Self will be of interest to psychoanalysts and organizational consultants as well as anyone concerned with what determines the quality of life in the workplace.

Chapter 1
The problem of work

Imagined reality

If the characteristic activity of the young child is play, the characteristic activity of the adult is work. We distinguish between work and play according to their differing relationships with reality. In play, we suspend what Freud refers to as the reality principle, while in work we acknowledge that principle. We might assume that the different relationships of work and play to reality suggest that they are driven by different motivations. I think, however, that we can learn something important about work and play by assuming instead that the goal is the same in both cases. If we make this assumption, then we might also assume that the necessity for work arises due to the limits of the imagination as a vehicle for achieving that goal, since by suspending the reality principle in play we subsume our activity into the sphere of imaginative construction or fantasy. Why might our imagination fail us?

We will easily enough arrive at one answer to this question if we assume that our end is the satisfaction of a physical need. This would lead us to focus attention on the limits of the mind as a mechanism for satisfying the body. We might imagine ourselves eating when we are hungry; but so long as all we do is imagine ourselves eating, our hunger remains. Yet, however important satisfaction of our physical need may be, it hardly accounts for the variety and intensity of our work; it does not account for either the kind of work we do or the kind of need our work is meant to provide us with the means to satisfy. Because of this, even in light of the power of physical need, it hardly provides an answer to our question.

If it is not the body that we seek to satisfy through work, then it must be the mind. But to what do we refer when we consider the mind the end to be satisfied? The usual answer to this question refers to something we call the self, which is mind viewed not as a repository of memory, thought, and idea, but as agency. Motivations such as self-seeking and self-interest suggest that work has been put in service of mind structured as agent. The self understood in this way is, in the words of Heinz Kohut, “the basis for our sense of being an independent center of initiative and perception” (1977, pp. 176–7). While agency cannot exist in the absence of memory, thought, and idea, it is not their mere presence that constitutes agency; something more is also implied, which is the something we refer to as the self. Through work we seek primarily satisfaction of the self, which for some reason we cannot achieve simply by the exercise of imagination.

In a way it is odd that we cannot, given that it might reasonably be argued that imagining is the characteristic activity of a self in that it directly expresses the sense of and urge to agency we refer to by that term. In imagination we are the ultimate agents; we create and control a world dedicated to nothing other than sustaining our sense of ourselves as subjects. In imagination, we conceive the self in action, seeking and finding satisfaction. In a sense, our capacity for imagination is our capacity for agency, and it is in the active exercise of imagination that we find the living spirit of agency that is the self. Thus, being a self begins when we imagine that we are. In our imagination, we exercise the capacity to create reality and to create our selves there. It is then the presence of the self that poses our question in the following form: Why is imagination not enough when it is the presence of imagination that indicates the presence of a self?

To begin to answer this question, let me consider briefly the matter of limits. The body has its built-in limits, and the satisfaction of bodily need is a finite journey with a well-defined endpoint. These limits do not apply in the world of imagination, where we know no limits; or, at least, we know only the limits of what we can imagine. We will understand better the relationship between work and play if we first understand the nature of the limits placed on what we can imagine. These limits arise first because our imagination must have material to work with, material with which it can construct the image of a reality suited to it. Thus, the infant can only imagine itself feeding at its mother’s breast if it has had the experience of doing so. This does not mean to suggest that the baby has no inborn impulse to seek the mother’s breast. Clearly, it must. But, having the impulse to the breast and being able to imagine the experience of feeding there are not the same thing; and it is the difference between the two that concerns us here.

The experience constructed in imagination differs from actual experience along two dimensions. First it is entirely internal; second, it reconstructs the mother and her breast to accord with the infant’s desire rather than with the reality principle expressed, for example, as the absence of a nurturing breast. Admittedly, the difference will not seem so great, since it might be said that in this case external reality dominates imagination by providing for it all the material it has to work with in its attempt to assert its freedom and therefore agency. Still, the most primitive difference between the internal and external world is important since it is the first expression of creativity and therefore of freedom. Nonetheless, freedom cannot amount to much if all it calls upon is our capacity to replicate in imagination an experience once had in reality but no longer available. Real freedom requires that we establish a more substantial difference between the experience itself, the memory of the experience, and the imaginative construction.

Our dependence on experience to provide imagination with its raw material is ultimately a dependence on the mental appropriation of experience. Mental appropriation (as image and thought) gives experience a form appropriate to the inner world. By creating an internal world, mental appropriation of experience creates the difference between what is internal and what is external.¹ We use the term internalization to refer to the process that creates this difference. If it is possible to overcome the limits placed on imagination by the actual experience it must be due to some quality of the internalization process. This means that if we are to conceive imagination as the locus of the self as subject, then we can only do so through conceiving the internalization of experience as a process that establishes a significant degree of independence from external reality, a process that goes well beyond the simple replication of experience as image or thought. To see what is involved in this development, we will need to consider the matter of internalization more closely.

The original and most primitive form of internalization is to incorporate. Otto Kernberg (1976, p. 29) describes incorporation in the following way:

It is the reproduction and fixation of an interaction with the environment by means of an organized cluster of memory traces implying at least three components: (i) the image of an object, (ii) the image of the self in interaction with that object, and (iii) the affective coloring of both the object-image and the self-image under the influence of the drive representative present at the time of the interaction.

One thing to note that is important for our purposes is how little work incorporation does to reshape the object other than to give it that form appropriate to its mental appropriation. Thus, in describing incorporation, Kernberg refers to the reproduction and fixation of an interaction in the environment. Both terms suggest that what emerges in the mind is wholly dominated by what we find outside. Yet, even at this primitive level, work of a sort must be done. This is implied in Kernberg’s description of the process as that of forming a “cluster of memory traces” (1976, p. 29). That is, incorporation is to be distinguished from memory by the work done to bring together memory traces into a single representation. In doing so, incorporation produces something, and in this sense can be considered a kind of work. But, the representation, which is the product of incorporation, remains closely tied to the memories out of which it is constructed and takes us only a limited distance beyond them. This means that incorporation creates a mental object hardly different from the image and memory of the experience with the external environment. Because of this, incorporation operates at the most concrete level consistent with mental appropriation. The result, in the words of Melanie Klein, is that the internalized objects are felt to be “live people” existing inside the body (1992a, p. 345). Conceiving the products of internalization in this way does not take us very far in the direction of agency because it tends to establish the domination of the internal world by the external.

How can internalization move beyond memory and image tied to the concrete experience of the external and already existing object and create the difference between internal and external worlds that is the essential element in constituting the self as subject? The answer to this question has to do with an aspect of the internalization process not yet considered, which is the rule under which the memory traces are clustered together. In describing the process of clustering or integration, Kernberg emphasizes what he refers to as the “fusion of introjections of the same valence” (1976, p. 30). This means that clusters of memory traces are divided into those having a positive and those having a negative valence, or, in other words, those representing in the mind experiences in the environment that are good (gratifying) and those representing experiences that are bad (frustrating). This work of integrating clusters and attaching an appropriate emotional charge to them creates what is referred to as an internal object.

The integration of self and object representations into distinct units moves the internal object away from mere representation and in the direction of what I will refer to as an idea. It does so by bringing into play, in however primitive a form, the capacity for abstract thinking, which is the capacity to abstract from experience as represented in memory and produce a mental construct with attributes not immediately present in the experience or the memory of it. To create an idea of the object, we must do work that takes us beyond incorporating it. This movement beyond incorporation takes us to the more advanced forms of internalization.

Kernberg introduces what I refer to as abstract thinking and the use of ideas in the language of the “role aspects of interpersonal interaction” (1976, p. 30). To hold in the mind not a representation of an actual concrete person but a role that might be occupied not only by that person but also by the self is to make an abstraction and replace the “live people” with ideas.² Indeed, even if all we do is conceive the concrete person as a role we might occupy, this marks a transition because it makes the person not this particular person, but the symbolic representation of an idea. Kernberg draws our attention to this vital element when he suggests that the experience of the mother comes to be understood as an experience within which the mother actualizes in a particular way “the socially accepted role of mother” (1976, p. 31). This notion becomes important because it draws our attention to something essential about the use of ideas, which is that they define ideals for conduct, ideals that any given experience may or may not live up to, or in Kernberg’s words “actualize.”

When I use the term idea here I have in mind a complex construction existing at different levels some of which are accessible to awareness, others of which are not. I do not have in mind a simple hypothesis about the world consciously held in the mind, though such a hypothesis might express an idea as it becomes consciously known to us. But our conscious knowing of ideas is only a partial knowledge of them, as the consciously known idea is only a part of the complex system of thought (conscious and unconscious) I have in mind in using the term.

Of special importance in shaping this complex system of thought is the connection between idea and fantasy.³ The term fantasy refers to a wish-invested narrative of the self that engages the internal objects in their denning interactions.⁴ Fantasy gives a concrete shape to powerful impulses. Fantasies form an important dimension of ideas, the dimension that represents their power to shape conduct. It is in the link to fantasy that ideas carry the power of our imagination. But they do so in a way that also separates the underlying impulses from the specific objects to which in primitive fantasy they remain connected. Put another way, fantasy carries the meaning that ideas invest in our experience, a meaning that starts out inseparably bound up with internal objects in their most concrete forms, but in becoming an idea takes on a more abstract form. Thus, as suggested above, mother understood as idea is not the memory of an event or even a sequence of events, nor is it the fantasy of an experience of a particular mother. Rather, it is the more abstract carrier of the meaning that we attach to events, and that shapes conduct and relating.

To create the idea we must remove ourselves from the sequence of experiences, from their simple mental appropriation as memory and thought, and from their organization into a fantasy. This removing ourselves from experience and its mental forms is what I mean by abstraction, or by the process of thinking abstractly. This process creates the basis for independence from the external object. This is because once experience has been mentally appropriated and exists in the mind, it is subject to control. In other words, it is now possible to move from remembering to imaginative reconstruction, from image to fantasy to idea. This movement from fantasy to idea sets the emotional foundation for work since to work “one must be able to alter the fantasies within the idealized self in such a manner that they become ideals” (Czander 1993, p. 85). So far as this movement takes place, we also move from a state in which we exist as a passive experiencer of memories to a state in which we exist as the active creator first of fantasy and then of idea.⁵

The exercise of imagination leads to the production of something new in the mind, which, in the case considered above, is the idea of the mother. In other words, the infant now conceives a mother. Whatever the specific differences involved in it, the act of conception can be understood to express a capacity and an impulse: the capacity to imagine a world, and the impulse to find satisfaction there. This combination of impulse and capacity forms the basis for work, and for that reason I have treated the imaginative construction of an object as the first step in the direction of work.

It will be useful, I think, to consider this capacity more closely. Considered in general, what this capacity brings into play is the separation of the idea in the mind from the memory of an actual experience. This separation is facilitated so far as the infant has a varied experience, which then suggests to it how objects in its world are not fixed in form and function, but vary. And this suggestion can lead in a specific direction, which is toward conceiving an object that might itself take on varying qualities. The integration I considered earlier as the process that forms internal objects here advances a step further because it involves not simply bringing together clusters of memory traces having the same valence (good or bad), but the integration of the resulting clusters into a single object that is, or at least can be, both good and bad. This integration is a further step away from the concrete particular object of experience and memory because it demands an abstraction and thus employs the capacity for abstract thinking. The infant may have good experiences with the mother and it may have bad experiences. But, to have a mother with the capacity to provide both kinds of experience requires the production of something new in the mind.

This new object in the mind that might take on different concrete qualities can be said to exist as the potential to do so. This potential is the concept or idea produced by the work of abstraction. Making this abstraction is possible so long as the young child can imagine that its different experiences up to this point coded as different memories can be integrated into a single mental object, which is that object that has the potential to provide different experiences. The work of integrating experience that forms an object in the mind creates something different from memory because it invests the experience with a new quality, which is that of a potential. This potential is what I refer to by the term idea, and the construction of this potential is what I mean by abstract thinking, which is the work of conceiving an object in the mind. While infants and young children can hardly be described as thinking abstractly in the full sense of the term, in the absence of any capacity to make an abstraction they will be unable to develop a self in the sense of a locus of agency.

Ideas are potentials, and this quality connects them to the investment of meaning in experience. As I suggest above, meaning guides conduct and indicates the presence of an agent who seeks to shape relatedness so it will accord better with wish-invested fantasy. Mother conceived as idea is the potential to foster an experience. When we understand mother in this way we can play a role in shaping experience to accord with fantasy by doing those things most likely to realize the potential to provide the gratifying connection. The kind of internalization that fosters agency, then, is the internalization of the external world not as memory but as idea.

The original meaning invested in experience through the use of ideas is the idea that the satisfying object provides satisfaction at its will. In other words, the move in the direction of an idea is marked not merely by the conception of the source of gratification as potential, but by the attribution of will to that source. The goal then becomes to secure that control over gratification that makes it a matter not of the will of an external object, but of our own. To do this, we must internalize the mother not simply as the source of milk or breast, but as the subject that controls both milk and breast.

By its nature, however, what must be internalized to establish the self as subject is not the capacity to provide satisfaction, but the capacity to withhold it. So long as our idea of the external source is one that provides for us according to our need, it is not will that secures gratification, but need, and we therefore remain outside the world of subject, agent and self. Indeed, so long as we do not experience the source of the means for satisfaction as having a will, we do not really form an idea at all, but at most a memory. When we receive satisfaction according to our need, the source of satisfaction can have no will to exercise and therefore exists not as subject, but as a passive object, here the breast as container of milk rather than the mother as subject in her own right. It is in the exercise of her capacity to refuse provision of a breast that has milk and can satisfy that the mother becomes for us a subject.

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Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The problem of work
• Chapter 2 The group at play
• Chapter 3 Greed, envy and the search for self
• Chapter 4 Life and death at work
• Chapter 5 Reparation, empathy and the public good
• Chapter 6 Skill, power and authority
• Chapter 7 Work identity
• Chapter 8 Work and reality
• Chapter 9 Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index