The Origins and Organization of Unconscious Conflict

The Selected Works of Martin S. Bergmann

Martin S. Bergmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317373711
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

The Origins and Organization of Unconscious Conflict provides a comprehensive set of contributions by Martin S. Bergmann to psychoanalytic theory, technique, and its applications. Following a general approach, Bergmann synthesizes Freud's major contributions, the development of his thinking, the ramifications to present day psychoanalytic theory and practice and finally, discusses unresolved problems requiring further work.

In these selected papers, profound meditations are offered on love and death, the leap from hysteria to dream interpretation in Freud's intellectual development, the genetic roots of Psychoanalysis in the creative clash between Enlightenment and Romantic ideas, old age as a clinical and theoretical phenomenon, the death instinct as clinical controversy, and the interminable debate about termination in psychoanalysis and how to effect it. Crucial clinical and theoretical questions are constantly addressed and the challenges they pose will engage and enlighten the reader. Bergmann was a philosopher of mind as much as he is a psychoanalyst and the range and scope of the ideas in these selected papers is impressive, instructive and illuminating.

Bergmann deals with psychoanalysis as a science, and with an ideology, referring to psychoanalysis as a "Weltanschauung", a philosophical basis for psychoanalytic theory. He presents an original, penetrating analysis of Freud's inner struggle, about empirical research, validation and related to five other sciences; about irrational forces that constitute major motivators of human life, and require taking an existential position regarding their implications, the search for the meaning of one's existence.

The Origins and Organization of Unconscious Conflict is an exciting intellectual journey of the scientific and ideological aspects of psychoanalysis and the study of love. It will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychologists, philosophers and both undergraduate and postgraduate students studying in these fields, as well as anyone with an interest in mental health and human behaviour.

Part I

Theory

Chapter 1

Psychoanalytic observations on the capacity to love¹

From the Greek tragedians and the Roman poets, the Western world has inherited the idea that love is an overwhelming and dangerous emotion that reduces the mind to a state of inconstancy and childishness. The destructive power of love is described with particular force by Euripides in Hippolytus. That play, it will be recalled, records the gradual disintegration of Queen Phaedra’s superego and ego under the impact of her love for her stepson. Euripides lets the nurse say to Phaedra, “The love queen’s onset in her might is more than man can bear,” and the chorus implores Aphrodite: “O never in evil mood appear to me, nor out of time and tune approach” (Coleridge translation). Sophocles lets the chorus in Antigone sing:

Love, unconquered in the fight, Love, who makest havoc of wealth, who keepest thy vigil on the soft cheek of a maiden; thou roamest over the sea, and among the homes of dwellers in the wilds; no immortal can escape thee, nor any among men whose life is for a day; and he to whom thou hast come is mad.

The just themselves have their minds warped by thee to wrong, for their ruin …

(Oates and O’Neil 1938, p. 445)

In a similar vein, Menander treats love as a sickness, and Plutarch regards love as a form of madness. With the notable exception of Ovid, the poets of antiquity feared love because it induced regression; and they were dimly aware of a relationship between love and infancy.

By contrast, Shakespeare’s dominant attitude toward love is ambivalence:

The bitter-sweet character of the food of love is emphasised by Shakespeare as by no one else. It is luscious and bitter, sweet and sour, delicious and loathsome, “a choking gall and a preserving sweet.”

(Spurgeon 1958, p. 147)

The metaphors with which Shakespeare expresses love are strikingly oral: “Love surfeit not. Lust like a glutton dies.” And of Cleopatra it is said, “other women cloy the appetite they feed, but she makes hungry.” And Juliet, the heroine who embodies love as few of his heroines do, declared, “My bounty is as boundless as the sea. My love as deep.” Plato expressed the ambivalent feelings toward love by a myth. Eros is described in the Symposium (p. 203) as the Son of Plenty (Poros) and Poverty (Penia). From his father he has inherited the sense of plenty that accompanies love; and from his mother, the distress that lovers feel.

Finally, there is a third group of poets and philsophers who affirm love without reservation. Bertrand Russell (1930) once quoted an anonymous poet who wrote that “Love” was greatly wronged by those who called its sweetness bitter, when in fact the richness of its fruit was such that nothing could surpass its sweetness. And he himself adds:

not only is love a source of delight, but its absence is a source of pain … it enhances all the best pleasures, such as music, and sunrise in mountains, and the sea under the full moon. A man who has never enjoyed beautiful things in the company of a woman whom he loved has not experienced to the full the magic power of which such things are capable.

(p. 40)

The three basic attitudes have in common the conviction that love is an overwhelming emotion which fundamentally affects the mental stability and the outlook on life of the person who is “in love.” We intuitively recognize that a relationship is not love when a radical change in mood has not taken place or when the beloved is painlessly exchanged for another.

We speak of selecting a mate as we speak of choosing an occupation, and we know that both decisions are the result of a complex interaction between conscious reality-oriented considerations and unconscious wishes. However, when the mate is chosen on the basis of realistic considerations, we suspect prudence rather than love. We speak of “falling in love,” and earlier writers spoke of being smitten by love, and evoked the mythological image of the blindfolded Amor. Other languages maintain a similar distinction, as the German distinction between “lieben” and “sich verlieben.” In the vocabulary that Federn developed, we may say that love can be experienced with active or passive ego feelings (Bergmann 1963). Thus, Robert Browning:

How say you? Let us, O my dove,

Let us be unashamed of soul,

As earth lies bare to heaven above!

How is it under our control

To love or not to love?

(Two in the Campagna)

In keeping with these passive feelings, lovers are prone to stress the accidental and unpremeditated nature of their meetings. Love, however, cannot simply be equated with a selection of a mate based on unconscious rather than utilitarian reasons. Psychoanalytic experience demonstrates that it is possible to have a relationship which is monogamous and tenaciously adhered to, and yet devoid of the experience of love. Such mates often stand for parental figures that were more hated than loved, or for repudiated aspects of themselves.

Before Freud, love was the domain of philosophers and poets. Freud drew heavily upon this Western tradition, but these philosophers and poets did not have a genetic psychology at their disposal. They therefore could not discern how one form of love could be related to another, nor could they gain insight into the psychic forces that promote or retard the development of the capacity to love. By contrast, Freud approached the mystery of love through a path that had never been tried before – infantile sexuality. From this vantage point, psychoanalysis could make its unique contribution to the understanding of the origin of the capacity to love. I hope to show that today we can go further than Freud did in this understanding, since we have at our disposal not only his insights but also the findings of Mahler and her co-workers, observations that I believe have special relevance to the genesis of the capacity to love.

On the subject of love, classical thought from Hesiod to Lucretius remained firmly rooted in the mythopoetic point of view. Hesiod saw Eros not only as the god of sensuous love, but also as the power that binds the separate elements of the world. This view was taken over by the pre-Socratic philosophers. To Parmenides (fragment 13), love was the force that made men live and thrive. To Democritus (fragment 78), it was the desire for all beautiful things (Bowra 1957, p. 196).

Freud (1937a) acknowledged his indebtedness to one of the pre-Socratic philosophers, Empedocles, when he said:

I can never be certain, in view of the wide extent of my reading in early years, whether what I took for a new creation might not be an effect of cryptomnesia.

(p. 245)

Freud (1925a) acknowledged his indebtedness to Plato, at least indirectly, when he said:

what psycho-analysis called sexuality was by no means identical with the impulsion towards a union of the two sexes or towards producing a pleasurable sensation in the genitals; it had far more resemblance to the all-inclusive and all-preserving Eros of Plato’s Symposium.

(p. 218)

It is possible that Freud was also influenced by other Greek philosophers, since we know (Eissler 1951) that Gomperz’s Greek Thinkers was one of Freud’s ten favorite books.

In keeping with the mythopoetic view, love and hate were to Empedocles quasi-natural and quasi-mythological forces.

when the elements combine to form animals or plants, men say these are born, and when they scatter again men call it death … Never will boundless time be emptied of these two [fragment 16].

In Anger all are diverse and sundered, but in Love they come together and are desired of each other. For out of these are born whatever was and is and will be – trees, men, women, beasts, birds and water-feeding fishes, yea and long-lived gods highest in honours [fragment 21].

To Empedocles, Aphrodite was not only a goddess residing on Olympus, but she literally entered men.

she it is who is acknowledged to be implanted in the limbs of mortals, whereby they think kindly thoughts and do peaceful works, calling her Joy by name and Aphrodite.

(fragment 17 [Guthrie 1962])

I have quoted the Greek philosophers at some length because I wish to stress that the Greek concept of love was indeed a broad one, and Freud’s idea of sublimation is at least implicit in their writings. It becomes explicit in the writings of Plato, who believed that all arts and sciences sprang from some longing or desire and therefore had their origin in Eros. “Touched by love, every one becomes a poet even though he had no music in him before.” Not only the “melody of the muses” but also “the arts of medicine,” the “metallurgy of Hephaestus,” and the “weaving of Athena” are inspired by Eros (Symposium, p. 197). I have shown elsewhere (Bergmann 1966) that Plato also anticipated Freud’s topographic division when he described the emergence of oedipal wishes in dreams, “when the mild and rational soul is asleep.” To Eros, Plato assigned the task of bringing together the two natures of man, the divine self and the tethered beast in him (Dodds 1951).

Aristotle quoted with approval Euripedes’ statement, “Parched earth loves the rain and stately heaven, when filled with rain, yearns on the earth to fall” (The Nichomachean Ethics, Book 8). Browning, in the poem quoted earlier, used the same language, but to him the embrace of heaven and earth was a poetic metaphor, while to Aristotle it was a scientific explanation that illuminated the deeper origins of love.

This mythopoetic view of love as a cosmic force is beautifully expressed by Lucretius in his evocation of Venus (Lucretius de Rerum Natura, English translation, W.H.D. Rouse, Book 1, Verse 1–50).

O goddess, from thee, the winds flee away, the clouds of heaven from thee and thy coming; for thee the wonder-working earth puts forth sweet flowers, for thee the wide stretches of ocean laugh, and heaven grown peaceful glows with outpoured light.

… the herds go wild and dance over the rich pastures and swim across rapid rivers, so greedily does each one follow thee, held captive by their charm …

For thou alone canst delight mortals with quiet peace, since Mars mighty in battle rules the savage works of war, who often casts himself upon thy lap wholly vanquished by the ever-living would of love …

The image evoked by Lucretius became popular in the Renaissance in the many paintings depicting Venus as holding the sleeping Mars in her arms and thus assuring peace. Freud’s idea of taming aggression by fusion with libido leans upon a long mythopoetic tradition. Greek philosophers also raised a number of the questions which Freud (1914d) dealt with in his study of narcissism. They wondered whether love arose from the need for an unlike complement or whether like was attracted by like. Aristotle even asked whether it was possible for a man to “feel friendship for himself.” He went on to add, “devoted attachment to someone else comes to resemble love for oneself” (The Nichomachean Ethics, Book 9, chapter 4).

In the context of this essay, it is of interest to note that Aristotle defined love as an intensification of friendship, “an emotion of such high intensity that it can be felt only for one person at a time” (The Nichomachean Ethics, Book 9; see also Hazo 1967). Freud (1930) derived aim-inhibited love from sensual love (p. 103). Aristotle also recognized their affinity but, unlike Freud, derived love from friendship. Here I will be concerned only with love as defined by Aristotle and leave aside the manifestations of aim-inhibited libido.

Plato intuitively comprehended an aspect of love that psychoanalysis learned to appreciate only after Mahler illuminated the significance of the symbiotic phase in human development.

In the well-known myth told in the Symposium, man was originally a double. As punishment for his rebellion against the gods, he was cut in half, and the two halves forever yearn to be reunited.

For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover’s intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment. Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are lying side by side … and said to them … “Do you desire to be wholly one always day and night to be in one another’s company? for if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together …” there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsment
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part I Theory
• Part II Technique
• Part III History of analysis
• Part IV Applications
• Bibliography
• Index