Progress in Self Psychology, V. 4

Learning from Kohut

Arnold I. Goldberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134879694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The fourth volume in the Progress in Self Psychology series continues to explore the theoretical yield and clinical implications of the wok of the late Heinz Kohut. Learning from Kohut features sections on "supervision with Kohut" and on the integration of self psychology with classical psychoanalysis. Developmental contributions examine self psychology in relation to constitutional factors in infancy. Clinical presentations focusing on optimum frustration and the therapeutic process and on the self-psychological treatment of a case of "intractable depression" elicit the animated commentary that makes this volume, like its predecessors, as enlivening as it is instructive.

V

Applied Psychoanalysis

Chapter 12

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman: Lessons for the Self Psychologist

Howard S. Baker

Margaret N. Baker

A melody is heard, played upon a flute. It is small and fine, telling of grass and trees and the horizon. The curtain rises” (Miller, 1967a, p. II).¹ So begins Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s play about Willy Loman and his family of failures. The play ends, as well, to the same plaintive sound. Willy Loman’s father played the flute, took his family wandering across America, and earned a living by selling his handmade flutes. Before Willy was four, his father abandoned the family to make his fortune in Alaska. Willy’s older brother, Ben, soon followed, leaving Willy behind, alone with his mother. These events help account for the tragic flaws in Willy’s character, flaws that bring about his human failure and help create a family where the other members are also destined to become failures.

Death of a Salesman is a recognized literary masterpiece, but it can also serve as an extraordinary case study. In treating Miller’s characters as if they were real people, we do not claim to explain the “meaning” of the play. To do so would rest on very risky assumptions (Holland, 1966). Our purpose is heuristic: The play can serve as an excellent device to teach basic principles of self psychology. All the “clinical” data is available for the student to examine. The interchanges are clear, and using video or audio tapes of the play gives direct access to human interaction and pathogenesis that is experience-near, intellectually accessible, and easily discussed and debated. A close examination of the characters demonstrates many points of clinical interest, and it is beyond the scope of any single chapter to discuss the multitude of issues presented in such rich literature. We shall concentrate on six areas that we find to have greatest saliency in teaching residents, graduate students, and colleagues: (1) the particular nature of certain human interactions that constitute failure in self-selfobject relationships; (2) any one person’s ongoing selfobject needs may lead him either to meet or to fail to meet selfobject needs of another and, in so doing, to facilitate or even to overtly interfere with growth and structure building by the other; (3) certain selfobject failures may lead to the absence of intrapsychic structures that are necessary for vocational or academic success; (4) some aspects of selfobject failure may lead to suicide; (5) symptoms that appear to result entirely from unresolved oedipal conflicts may in fact be based on fundamental selfpathology; and (6) traditional conflict dynamics are intertwined with self-pathology in ways that prevent resolution of either set of difficulties. While considering these points, the reader can, of course, go to the “case material” (the play) for an independent examination of all the available “clinical” data.

The material helps demonstrate, in a clear way, that when the selfobject needs of one or more family members are exceptionally strident and difficult to meet, significant empathie ruptures occur throughout the family network. This system is likely to continue a locked-in pattern of interactions that may preclude the maintenance of a coherent and stable self in some or all family members. At the developmentally appropriate time, or belatedly, the parents and children may be unable to develop endopsychic structures that would enable them to: maintain self-esteem in the face of expectable failures, have sufficient drive and ambition to pursue interests and appropriately compete, enjoy creative and productive efforts that are an expression of the nuclear program of the self, calm the self, channel and regulate the drives, set meaningful goals that are possible to achieve, maintain a sense of connectedness with others, develop talents into usable skills, and so forth.

The play portrays people who are encumbered with significant structural deficit in each of these areas and who are, therefore, excessively dependent on others to fulfill selfobject functions. Because their intrapsychic deficits are so great, it is not possible for the Lomans to gain enough selfobject support to maintain satisfactory self-cohesion and vigor, let alone to belatedly reinstitute derailed development of self-structure. Their intrapsychic needs cannot be met through compensatory interpersonal solutions. Moreover, their unresolved oedipal conflicts create further resistances to the establishment of the intimacy necessary for effective self-selfobject relationships. For the Lomans, all these factors combined to create a witch’s brew of conflict and deficit that yielded a father who was a failure and eventually committed suicide, two sons who were academic and vocational failures, and a mother who was lost in a quagmire of useless placating and denial.

In writing about Death of a Salesman, Miller (1967b) stated that he was trying to show us “the inside of a man’s head” (p. 23). Thus, events in the play often follow a stream of consciousness, with sudden shifts between reality and hallucinations of Willy’s past. In the following summary of the play, brackets enclose the hallucinations.

In the late evening or early morning, Willy, age 60, unexpectedly returns from a selling trip, exhausted, unable to control his car, and having sold nothing. His two children, Biff, age 34, and Happy, age 32, are home. Hap lives nearby, works as a marginally successful salesman in a large store, and has frequent, loveless sexual affairs. Biff has returned from the West, where he was working as a ranchhand. He was, in fact, a drifter and had been jailed for petty theft. He returns almost every spring, supposedly to settle down. Disagreements with his father impel him to leave after only brief stays.

Willy initiates numerous arguments with his 50-year-old wife, Linda. In their bedroom, the boys are awakened and discuss their father’s deteriorating condition and how he upsets their mother. They lay grandiose plans for their joint success. (At the same time, Willy loses himself in a hallucinated fantasy about how great life was when Biff was a high school football star. Biff was the captain of the team and of Willy’s psychic life. Although Biff occasionally stole things and was in serious academic trouble, these problems were ignored or even glorified because Biff was “well liked.” Biff used his admirers and bluffed his teachers while his classmate Bernard was scoffed at for being too serious and scholarly.) A neighbor, Charley, Willy’s only friend and Bernard’s father, hears the commotion and comes over to calm Willy down. (Willy’s older brother, Ben, appears to Willy, who showers Ben with admiration for his success in African diamond mines and Alaskan timber. Willy confesses to his brother that he is unsure of himself and of the way he raised his boys.) The scene shifts, and Linda and her sons are alone, discussing Willy’s problems. She tells them she knows Willy is very upset and is contemplating suicide. Linda implores Biff to settle down and be good to his father. Willy comes in and starts an argument with Biff, accusing Biff of being a failure to spite him. Hap stops the argument by telling of their patently unrealistic plans for Biff to go to an old employer, Bill Oliver, to get backing for a business venture. Willy and Linda find the plan wonderful, are momentarily delighted, and retire to bed, relieved.

The next morning, in Act Two, Willy goes to his employer, Howard Wheeler, to ask for work in New York, since he is no longer physically able to travel. Instead of reassignment, he is fired. He goes to Charley’s office to beg for money, as he has often had to do recently. Charley’s successful son, Bernard, is there; and Willy is obviously jealous and wonders where he and Biff went wrong. Charley offers Willy a job, which Willy contemptuously refuses. Willy then goes to a restaurant where he and his sons were to celebrate his transfer and Biff’s new job. Biff has met with no success. Humiliated, he has stolen Oliver’s fountain pen. He wants to tell his father that he loves him but hates the life of a salesman. His father cannot hear Biff, and another argument ensues. Willy goes to the men’s room. (He lapses back to the supposedly decisive moment in Biff’s life. Biff flunked math, preventing his high school graduation. He rushed to Boston where Willy was on a business trip, hoping his father could persuade the teacher to pass him or perhaps just looking for reassurance. He entered his father’s room and, finding a half-clad woman, fled in despair.) Biff leaves the restaurant, with Hap and the two women Hap has picked up in hot pursuit. Abandoned by his sons, Willy is defeated and desperate. He leaves the restaurant, buys some garden seeds, and wanders home to plant them. When the boys return home, Linda is wild with fury because they walked out on Willy and because they consistently disappoint him. She wants them to leave forever, fearing they will destroy Willy. Biff tells Willy why he finds peace in working as a ranch-hand, why he can never be the monied urban success his father wants him to be. Although not genuinely understanding what was said, Willy at last feels and accepts his son’s love. Willy has already decided to commit suicide so Biff will have the insurance money to start in business. He does so, and a brief final scene takes place at his grave with only the Loman family, Charley, and Bernard present. The crowd of people Willy claimed as friends and admirers never appears.

These unhappy people have received surprisingly little examination in the psychoanalytic literature. What has been written did not consider how the Lomans all seem to be encumbered with fundamental self-psychopathology or how this prevents them from using one another to meet essential selfobject needs. Concentration has been primarily on oedipal competition and patricidal impulses (Schneider, 1967). The play provides data for this interpretation. Tolpin (1978) has noted, however, that serious difficulties in the development of the narcissistic sector of the personality will preclude successful resolution of oedipal challenges. Self-pathology will inevitably result in oedipal-like symptoms that may obscure the fundamental etiology of the person’s difficulties, namely, developmental failure in forming basic endopsy-chic structures that maintain self-cohesion and vigor in the face of stress. Careful analysis of the play clarifies Tolpin’s point, showing that below the oedipal theme lies selfobject failure and self-pathology, that shortcomings in self-self object relationships have occurred over three generations, in the early development of Willy and his sons and in the ongoing family and environmental milieu. Students can observe how self psychology enriches family/systems approaches and how neo-traditional psychodynamics interdigitate with supraordinate selfpathology. In our teaching experience, these are crucial lessons. Particularly for residents and psychology doctoral students, not understanding these relationships often seems to create substantial resistances as they work to understand self psychology.

Writing before the development of self psychology, Schneider (1967) describes the second act as “sheer murder of a father by ‘all his sons.’” Willy is:

told by Biff [at their dinner meeting] that Biff has just compulsively stolen the fountain pen (genital) of a man who, Willy imagined, might have started Biff on his hoped-for rehabilitation. It is at this point that the father has to rush to the bathroom ... in castration-panic; and the panic in the father is matched by the younger son’s promotion of a date with two “babes.” The meaning of this episode can hardly be missed. It is the ultimate act of father-murder; instead of the totem-feast in which the sons recognize the father’s authority and sexual rights, there is no dinner. There is only abandonment. [p. 254]

The sons’ actions may indeed reveal some unconscious patricidal or castration wish against father and father figures. All the items that Biff has stolen are obvious male symbols: lumber, a suit, balls (basket and foot) and the fountain pen. Happy specifically delights in deflowering other men’s women, but he specifically chooses the women of men who he experiences as arrogantly humiliating.

The boys blatantly pathological behavior, however, will become “understandable only when . . . considered within the matrix of the empathie, partially empathie, or unempathic responses from the side of the selfobject aspects of the environment” (Kohut, 1977, p. 230). This inter subjective viewpoint sheds essential light on why a son might indulge in castrating behavior toward his father and authority males. Biff and Hap, in this view, have been burdened throughout life with being their father’s primary archaic selfobject. Willy’s need for constant affirmation from his sons (particularly Biff) has obfuscated their needs for a strong, dependable, responsive mirroring and idealized paternal selfobject. Consequently, they have not been able to develop sufficient endopsychic structures to maintain a cohesive self; so they remain ambivalently yolked to Willy, unrealistically hoping that he will eventually function in a way that will enable them to use their father as a selfobject. But, to have Willy function as a selfobject, the children must first function as their father’s selfobject. If they could do that, then Willy might experience enough self-cohesion to be an adequate parent. They, however, cannot provide sufficient selfobject support for Willy, because Willy’s needs are too great and because they (consciously or unconsciously) are enraged at a father who chronically demands something that they, as children, cannot provide. They cannot be Willy’s flute-playing father who abandoned him. They cannot fill the boots of Willy’s absent older brother, Ben.² They cannot be satisfied with the lives they have built by default rather than choice. Encumbered with narcissistic rage, to some extent, they prefer to get even with their father rather than help him.

Revenge and failure should not be understood then as merely a consequence of either sibling rivalry or the conflicted libidinal drives of the oedipal conflict. Those feelings are elicited by what is experienced as an unempathic environment. When Biff steals Oliver’s pen, for example, he has been kept waiting for six hours. He wasn’t given the courtesy of being told an interview would be impossible, and he is too desperate to see Oliver to realize that waiting six hours is absurd. When Oliver does leave, he does not recognize Biff and ignores him, forcing Biff to realize, “How did I ever get the idea I was a salesman there? . . . And, then he gave me one look and—I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been ... I was a shipping clerk” (p. 104).

Maintaining that lie is essential for Biff. Earlier that morning his mother reminded him that Willy is “only a little boat looking for a harbor .... Biff, you’ll save his life. Thanks, darling” (p. 76). His father’s psychological and physical life depend on Biff’s doing something or being someone that is either impossible for him or very much in conflict with his own interests, with the nuclear program of his self. Fearing how he will feel if he fails, Biff tries to rescue Willy and is humiliated (castrated?) for his efforts. He must confront what he really was to Oliver, not what his father built him up to be. The helpless rage precipitated in such circumstances is so intense that for some it is disorganizing and must be repressed. It can, of course, present a serious resistance to the establishment of an effective self object transference.

Although revenge toward the father is obvious, there is but little data in the play itself that points directly to intensified competitiveness with the father for the mother’s affections. Given the persistent selfselfobject failure in the family, however, we do not see how the oedipal period could be traversed without the boys’ developing significant and persistent oedipal conflicts (Kohut, 1984). Seriously failed preoedipal self-selfobject relationships lead ineluctably to a developing selfstructure too weak to traverse that period successfully, leaving the child with both fundamental underlying self-pathology and secondary oedipal pathology (Tolpin, 1978).

While both conflicted oedipal material and self-pathology are present and salient in the sons, if one of the boys were a patient, a therapist would have to make important tactical decisions regarding the timing of interpretations of oedipal transferences or of selfobject transferences (see Stolorow, 1986). This decision is important, since either set of interpretations risks disrupting the establishment of the other type of transference. For example, if drive-based oedipal/castration interpretations were offered to Biff or Happy when their experience-near feelings we...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I: Supervision with Kohut
• II: Integration of Theories
• III: Development
• IV: Clinical Papers
• V: Applied Psychoanalysis
• Author Index
• Subject Index