Rosenfeld in Retrospect

Essays on his Clinical Influence

John Steiner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135249632
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

How has Herbert Rosenfeld contributed to psychoanalysis today?

Rosenfeld in Retrospect presents original psychoanalytic papers showing the influence of Herbert Rosenfeld on psychoanalysis today, and reproduces some of Rosenfeld's most important clinical writings.

In the first part of this book, The Conference Papers: Contemporary Developments of Rosenfeld's Work, the editor brings together papers and discussions by Rosenfeld's well-known contemporaries, Ronald Britton, Michael Feldman, Edna O'Shaughnessy, Hanna Segal and Riccardo Steiner who explore his contribution to psychoanalysis. John Steiner demonstrates the importance of Rosenfeld's classic papers, and critically surveys the more controversial developments in his later work. Part II contains four papers by Rosenfeld, chosen by his colleagues to be his most significant and original contributions.

This collection conveys Rosenfeld's liveliness and influence, and will be of interest to all of those attracted to his work.

Part I
The conference papers Contemporary developments of Rosenfeld’s work

Chapter 1
Intrusions

Edna O’Shaughnessy

In the first paper in his book Psychotic States, Rosenfeld writes of a patient that her ‘central anxiety was a fantasy of the persecuting analyst forcing himself into her to control her and rob her, not only of her inner possessions, for instance, her babies and her feelings, but her very self (1947:22). Persecutory anxieties about an invading analyst, following on the patient’s phantasies of intrusion, is a theme that runs through Rosenfeld’s pioneering papers of the forties, fifties and sixties. He describes the whole syndrome: the infantile anxiety and greed that impels the intrusion, the new identity the patient obtains by this type of projective identification, which carries with it fears of ego-disintegration in addition to anxieties of being trapped in and confused with the object, and how, in order to keep the analyst out, the patient does not speak about events that might arouse interest, withdraws and negates interpretations. If these things are now not new, it is because Rosenfeld, foremost among others, made them familiar.

At the time Rosenfeld was writing these papers Melanie Klein was still alive. ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’, where she named projective identification, appeared in 1946, and Envy and Gratitude in 1957. These works greatly influenced Rosenfeld, as they did all who followed Klein’s new thinking. It was a time of fertile Kleinian development. Rosenfeld was investigating psychoanalysis as a treatment for schizophrenic and severe borderline patients, as were others, notably Bion and Segal. Bion proposed new hypotheses about the psychotic personality and Segal made the important differentiation between symbols and symbolic equations—both areas in which Rosenfeld also made contributions. He focused on the impairment of the psychotic ego, not from Bion’s angle of the fragmentation and projection of the ego to form bizarre objects, but from the perspective of the impairment of the ego that results from an intrusion into the object, also the angle from which he approached the loss of symbolic functioning. He writes for instance

whenever verbal contact was disturbed, through the patient’s difficulty in understanding words as symbols, I observed that his phantasies of going into me and being inside me had become intensified … For it is the quantity of the self involved in the process of projective identification that determines whether the real object and its symbolic representation can be differentiated.

(Rosenfeld 1952:77)

Rosenfeld is here making an important clinical point: there are degrees of intrusion into the object; intrusion is not always ‘all the way’.

As we know, Herbert Rosenfeld has had a huge influence. John Steiner’s (1989) essay records the wealth of observations and measured assessments and the original conceptualisations that are to be found in Rosenfeld’s papers. Rosenfeld was not afraid of mental illness and he eschewed what a patient of his called ‘the bluff’—the bluff of transference peace. He had an extraordinary capacity to be where ill patients were, in schizoid, manic and depressed places, to understand their compressed utterances and interpret in strong plain words, often making what he called an ‘integrative interpretation’ of their total situation.

Rosenfeld’s work on intrusions into the object, i.e. invasive projective identification, is invaluable when trying to work with patients like Mr B, who omnipotently take themselves into the analyst, mostly not going all the way, so that they are in, and at the same time out of, the analyst.

Mr B came for analysis in a desperate state. He was depressed and anxious and complained he had no memories of his parents, both dead, and that he was insecure about his gender. From the start he was in a double world. He tried to talk and to listen, and at the same time was anxious he was in a void and just as anxious that I might communicate with him dangerously so that he quickly withdrew, sometimes into sleep. What he managed to hear he was cautious about, often detaching it from me, so gaining ‘pieces of knowledge’. Our verbal contact was anyway thin and experiences of communicating to me and being understood were weakly internalised. To protect himself from his huge anxiety Mr B gave most of his attention to sensations: of snuggling into a soft place, of feeling himself to be a girl with breasts, or feeling remote like a superior phallus. Sometimes his sensation world collapsed into being only a lavatory world of urine and faeces.

These sensations were based on projective identifications consequent on omnipotent phantasies of intrusion that began before his session. Mr B arrived early in my vicinity, concretely for him the psychoanalysis area; he went into the Heath for a walk to the pond, and then came out of the Heath to walk to my house for his session, where, in another mode, he repeated his two journeys. On first seeing me, unable to wait or stay separate, he went omnipotently inside me with his eyes, and then on the couch some of him came back with anxiety to the reality of being outside. The phantasies of being inside were idealised as offering a pleasurable ‘other reality’ that was meant to free him from unwelcome knowledge and all anxiety. However, they never quite succeeded in freeing him from anxieties of entrapment, weakness of self, of being watched and disparaged by a pathological super-ego and, in addition, of a pervasive guilt about withdrawing and keeping me out.

Thus, objects entered Mr B’s mind in an imbalanced way: incorporations that followed upon his projective identifications predominated over identifications that were a sequel to introjections, with the result that Mr B enacted identities, acting out and ‘in’, far more than he was mentally active. Segal (1991) has examined the opposition—so significant for clinical work—between acting out and mental action.

Freud (1911) describes the ‘momentous step’ of the setting up of the reality principle as requiring a heightened awareness of attention and memory, a system of notation, and a passing of judgement to decide whether a notion is true or false. All these ego functions were interfered with—I think from a young age—by Mr B’s divided way of being which distorted his relation to reality. His attention is largely engrossed with a sexualised watching of his objects’ insides, so that his notation is predominantly from a sex and bottom world that he ‘sees’ in his voyeuristic phantasies. Feeding might be noted as shitting, talking misconceived as sex, and so on, and he makes no assessment of the truth or falsity of these confabulations. John Steiner describes how ‘in most retreats reality is neither fully accepted nor completely disavowed’ (1993:88), which was exactly so with my patient. Steiner’s theory of psychic retreats (1993) which is based on Rosenfeld’s theory of narcissistic organisations has been of much help in trying to understand Mr B.

It was difficult to make contact with Mr B. I had to take account of the variations in his capacity for symbolic thinking and not miss his meagre attempts at communication which came almost unaccompanied by emotional projections, all the while being provoked and pressured by Mr B to involve myself with the details of his erotised sensations and phantasies. Had I done this last, it would have been, in Rosenfeld’s phrase, to ‘lose my very self’. Despite Mr B’s annoyed protests that I kept ignoring his gender problems, I focused not on their details but on their invasiveness and function.

At first my main focus was on their defensive function, against the anxiety of waiting, separateness, or being with a narcissistic and self-preoccupied analyst who was not attending to him, or was trying to force her way into him. Later the hatred that drove his intrusions was more prominent—the degradation of the imagos he forced on and into me as being my identity, though he knew, if dimly, since he was not in a total state of projective identification, that these images were false perceptions.

Of course all this was interpreted piecemeal as it emerged. With time and analysis Mr B revealed unambiguously that the target of his hatred was knowing. He tilted himself backwards, stealthily bent his knees up, swayed his bottom over the couch, and consciously fantasised about undressing girls with his eyes, or feeling his ‘breasts’ on his chest, or awaiting a homosexual overture from a male friend known twenty years ago with whom he had never had sexual relations. He was perversely playing with troubling themes familiar to him from his analysis with contempt for an analyst who did not prohibit his excesses of erotised distortion on the couch. We began to realise that Mr B, in the mode Betty Joseph (1982) describes, was not so much playing as addicted to these phantasies. The realisation that he was enslaved to conscious fantasising that turned analytic thought into rubbish was very distressing to Mr B, but then his initially painful insight was turned into ‘sexy slave phantasies’ in which he was a slave forever rowing an ancient vessel, and, in due course, ‘sexy slave phantasies’ were continually intruding into his mind and plagued him.

The accessibility of such a cycle was part of a significant change taking place in Mr B. With the resolution of some of his anxieties, where previously he had split and dispersed some of the elements of his psychic life he was now tending to gather and assemble them. Mr B was more present and mentally active and some days I was astonished by his liveliness and capacity for thought. Some significant memories of family life returned. His earlier mental configuration in which to the fore were erotised dyads of soft girls, brute phalli, and bottoms, while in a recessive area were remote parents far apart with so little life or character they were almost spectral, was changing.

I come now to the period I present in detail. Mr B had left for the summer holiday in good spirits, notably freer from his usual anxieties and erotised preoccupations. In the new term he obtained a new contract which he told me about saying ‘I got that job by the way. I explained to them I couldn’t start early on some mornings’. His evident pleasure in his success, and his direct manner with me and with his new employers, were in good contrast to how he would previously have been very anxious about a clash of times between analysis and work, feel I was invading his career, try to exploit my guilt and act out to alienate his employers—once losing a prospective job in this way. There was a sense of separateness and difference.

Yet, along with his new directness the old destructive intrusive acting out continued. An ongoing example was a philosophy course he had begun that year. In several sessions just before those I report he came with his head full of books he was reading: Aristotle’s Ethics, Boethius etc., etc. told in a way so that I wondered (as I often had) if he knew I had been a philosopher once, and/or that my husband was a philosopher still, teaching at the very university he was attending. I felt he knows, is watching me, ‘reading me’ from inside, and yet, of course, it could be a co-incidence. I felt invaded, and made impotent in analytic function. When I drew his attention to how he felt his eyes were inside me watching me not knowing what to do, he became again direct, and moreover was distressed by the inconstancy of the way he sees me.

MONDAY

Mr B started quickly, as though to pre-empt me coming in about my weekend, saying he had had a busy week-end. The chief event was that he had gone to a theatre to see a play with a group of people. After the theatre they had all gone to a restaurant. There were nine of them. It was late and he was hungry. The man who organised it, who should have ordered the main course right away, did not. Instead he ordered drinks. And after that, he ordered starters. It got very late so that by the time they left the restaurant it was after 1.30 AM.

During his lively telling, Mr B made me curious—I wondered: How does one find a restaurant in London these days that stays open so late? There had been pauses in Mr B’s account, yet each time I wanted to come in, he said ‘No’, and talked on, giving me a taste of how it is to be a child refused entry to, and made curious about, night-time goings on, which eventually, when he let me, I interpreted. All so far had been straightforward.

Then Mr B repeated what he had said about the restaurant and the man who organised it and made the main course so late, going over it all, talking for a long time. I noticed how there were no names of the people, the theatre or the restaurant they had been to. There was a silence. Then Mr B said, ‘There is something very annoying. I don’t know what to do. Somebody is wanting a reference’. He stopped. I thought: Yes, I want a reference. I don’t know what this is about or what is annoying. He broke the silence with more of the same about his week-end and then said, ‘There was a review in a Sunday paper about…?’ (he left his sentence incomplete). ‘By Kathy…?’(he left the name incomplete). I did not complete his sentences or supply what most likely was the missing information—it so happened there had been an article that week-end in a Sunday paper in which some analysts, among them myself, were mentioned. Even this was tricky—it was an article not a review, and the writer’s first name was not Kathy, though there has been a Kathy O’Shaughnessy writing reviews in Sunday papers, but not for a while now. Mr B waited, mentally inside my mind, I thought, watching to see how he had organised me. When I stayed quiet, he talked again about his week-end, sounding angry and isolated. His legs came up and he swayed his bottom in his usual way for a brief spell as he said he thought he might do some more philosophy even though there was no course he really liked and the group he’d organised had collapsed.

During these prevarications, which so evidently were prevarications, the atmosphere had quite changed. At the beginning of the session we had been straightforwardly engaged about issues of curiosity and exclusion on the week-end. Now, in place of curiosity there was an intrusive voyeurism aimed at preventing a continuation of a straightforward ‘main course’ to the session, although even as he persisted in trying to organise me into opening myself to his invasions he knew and was angry that he wasn’t succeeding.

I eventually made a rather long interpretation. I hope it was of the kind Rosenfeld might call ‘integrative’. I spoke about how he had let me see his two selves: one straightforward about the difficulty of feel...

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The conference papers Contemporary developments of Rosenfeld’s work
• Part II Four papers by Herbert Rosenfeld
• Index