Commitment and Compassion in Psychoanalysis

Selected Papers of Edward M. Weinshel

Robert S. Wallerstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134909933
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Over the course of his distinguished career, Edward Weinshel has been a moral and intellectual force in contemporary psychoanalysis and an outspoken opponent of current trends in and out of the field toward dehumanization and deindividualization.
Commitment and Compassion in Psychoanalysis, under the editorship of Robert Wallerstein, brings together 14 of Weinshel's major papers. The six clinical papers reprinted in this collection address the kaleidoscope of common personality organizations and propensities which, in their extreme variants, motivate individuals to seek psychoanalytic assistance, covering topics that include "neurotic equivalents" of necrophilia, negation, lying, "gaslighting" (brainwashing), perceptual distortion during analysis, and inconsolability.These clinical expositions are supplemented by eight theoretical papers in which Weinshel gives expression to the metapsychological paradigm of ego pyschology as it existed in the 70s and 80s. Four of the papers from the early 70s cover "the ego in health and normality, " the transference neurosis, and various aspects of the training analysis. The remaining four papers, published between 1984 and 1992, chronicle Weinshel's notion of resistence as the clinical unit of the psychoanalytic process, his elucidation of specifically "psychoanalytic change" as it grows out of the psychoanalytic process, and his affirmation of modern conflict theory in the face of theoretical pluralism.Carefully edited by Robert Wallerstein and including an introductory essay by Leonard Shengold, Commitment and Compassion in Psychoanalysis brings to contemporary debates the voice of a principled exemplar of the psychoanalytic calling. Balancing intellectual acuity with a profoundly caring temperament, and augmenting respectfor the psychoanalytic tradition with a flair for original ideas, Edward Weinshel speaks to all who wrestledaily with the burdens, challenges, and healing promise of the impossible profession.

Part 1: Clinical Papers

Introduction to Part 1

Clinical Papers

Of the half of Edward Weinshel's literary corpus that is properly labeled clinical papers, six have been selected for this volume. Of those, two are from the quarter of his output that was coauthored with Victor Calef, his closest long-time professional collaborator and one of his closest personal friends. Actually, their constant intellectual discourse is implicated as well in the majority of each of their papers that was separately authored over the more than two decades of their close professional collaboration; but those that appeared in the literature as actually coauthored were the product of their being jointly talked through idea by idea, and word for word, though from a close knowledge of the writings of each of these two colleagues of mine. I would tend to assign the actual language construction, the writing style, of each of these joint creations, primarily to Weinshel.

As was true of the propensities of both men, these clinical papers stand squarely in the British, more than in the American, psychoanalytic tradition, that every clinical paper should carry a theoretical proposition, should try to make a point widely applicable to the clinical work of the psychoanalytic reader, and that, conversely, every imputed theoretical advance should derive solidly from within the matrix of clinical experience, should not reflect just abstract (armchair) theorizing.

And in distinction to all too many of the clinical contributions that fill our literature, where the clinical descriptions—whether an extended case report or a succession of briefer vignettes—agglutinate into a homogenized mass of "average expectable patients," meaning with properly traumatized upbringings and properly neurotic (or deeper) illness structures, where each patient blends into the common mass without distinguishing characteristics, the patients in this Weinshel collection are each described felicitously enough and distinctly enough as to emerge as clearly individually recognizable case histories—and life histories. They come alive in the reading.

The six selected here span two decades of writing. The first, written with Calef, published in 1972, "On Certain Neurotic Equivalents of Necrophilia," was presented at the International Psychoanalytical Association Congress in Vienna in July 1971. It deals with common enough fantasies—both the attractions and the fears—of sexual involvement with the passively receptive, even masochistic, helpless and inert, perhaps sleeping, and even (psychologically) dead sexual object—dead in the same sense as in André Green's signature article on the dead mother. It is the common neurotic equivalent of the extremely rare perversion of actual necrophilia, active sexual involvement with the physically dead. The fairy tale of Prince Charming and Sleeping Beauty is the mythic embodiment of the marker theme. The article comprises a whole panoply of possible psychodynamic meanings of this fantasy structure, and is built around an extended case report of a married woman who relatively early in her analysis described a lifelong fantasy of making love to a dead man, as well as briefer accounts of several other patients with widely varying manifestations of this organizing fantasy, in more or less disguised versions.

The next paper, "'I Didn't Mean It': Negation as a Character Trait" (1977), by Weinshel alone, had actually been presented at a special meeting of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society in 1959 with Anna Freud as the formal discussant, and Edith Buxbaum, Kurt Eissler, Merton Gill, and Rene Spitz contributing from the floor. It deals with negation, or denial, or disavowal as a replacement at a higher level (within consciousness but with its accuracy or meaning denied) for a failed repression. The article is built around one long case description where this phenomenon—negation—was built in as a pervasive and deeply enduring character configuration, a married woman who came to define herself during the analysis as "living with the brakes on," a constant inhibition of content and affect, a life of enforced self-denial and self-control, of offering almost everything in terms of uncertainty, ambiguity, of not realizing its context or meaning, and so on, altogether a (very generalizable) example of how a particular defensive propensity could embrace and dominate an entire character structure. It is all encapsulated in the title phrase, "I didn't mean it."

The third paper, again by Weinshel alone, "Some Observations on Not Telling the Truth" (1979), was presented at the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine (the Columbia Society) as the 21st Sandor Rado Lecture in March 1977. It is a many-sided discussion of the ubiquitous issue of lying, from which no one is immune, at least not on certain occasions or in certain contexts, let alone the universal phenomenon of "white lies," social lying, etc. One of the cases described here is of a young woman, given very frequently to the not uncommon statement from the couch, "I have nothing to say," and tracing the various meanings of this statement within the analytic discourse, centering around repressed sexual fantasies and secrets, often transferential in nature—with the defensive charge often made against the analyst that he would withhold from the patient his own (in keeping with her father's own) sexual interest in her. Over several case descriptions Weinshel describes (and gives particularized meaning to) small or trivial lies as well as outrageous lies, and by and large in the context of morally upright individuals who were not characterological liars. As can be expected, the plea is to not equate lies with moral lapses, but rather to see them as screens to be used as sources of informative analytic data. The ironically felicitous title of "Lying on the Couch" had been suggested to Weinshel as apt for this article.

The fourth in this series of clinical papers, "Some Clinical Consequences of Introjection: Gaslighting" (1981), this one again with Victor Calef, was presented at a September 1978 meeting in San Diego in honor of Leo Rangell, under the sponsorship of all the Western psychoanalytic societies within the American Psychoanalytic Association. It is justly probably the best known (and most cited) of Weinshel's clinical contributions. The first of the four patients described is prototypically a woman whose dynamics as they unfolded psychoanalytically consisted of the manipulation, often in a sadomasochistic manner, of herself and her children by a coldly controlling husband, and usually in ways of which she was consciously not aware. The title, "gaslighting," comes of course from the very popular Broadway success in 1939, "Angel Street," and has by now become part of our colloquial lexicon. What is of particular interest in the description of this phenomenon by two deeply committed adherents to the ego psychological paradigm, architected by Heinz Hartmann and his collaborators, is how as early as 1978—long before it became widely known and popular within mainstream American psychoanalysis—Calef and Weinshel delineated the very Kleinian concept of projective identification, albeit not by that name, embracing it under the rubric of the vicissitudes of introjection. Within the analytic situation, "gaslighting" can of course work in both directions and across almost the entire spectrum of psychopathological disorders. Indeed, since it is a matter of influencing and being influenced, it can be—at least to some degree—ubiquitous and inevitable in every close interpersonal relationship.

The fifth paper in this clinical sequence, "Perceptual Distortions During Analysis: Some Observations on the Role of the Superego in Reality Testing," appeared in 1986 in a volume (Richards and Willick, eds.) published in honor of Charles Brenner. Three patients are described, all women, and all three with a generally phobic-hysterical character structure, who each in different ways, in the course of the analytic work developed an illusional perceptual distortion, in each instance a reflection of a fantasied threatened sexual advance by the analyst. Although these women could generally be described as avoidant, inhibited, and even "mousey," the florid underlying exhibitionistic-voyeuristic conflicts could well be brought to light in the analytic work. The fear of being crazy surfaced with the uncovering of awareness of the illusional distortion of reality testing that was involved, as well as of all the imbricated ego and superego interdictions. In all three instances, there was a difficulty, going back to childhood problems, in separating ego injunctions against dangerous impulses from superego injunctions against (morally prohibited) "bad" impulses.

And the sixth and last of this series of clinical papers, again by Weinshel alone, "On Inconsolability" (1989), was actually presented in different versions on a number of prior occasions, as the Freud Anniversary Lecture at the Psychoanalytic Association of New York, at the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Society, and as a keynote address at the Annual Scientific Colloquium of the Anna Freud Centre, in London. It was published in a volume of essays honoring Leo Rangell (Blum, Weinshel, and Rodman, eds.). This paper deals with another common enough clinical condition, those patients who stubbornly hang on to their lifelong feelings of misery, their seeming enduring inconsolability in the face of whatever—and however mild—adverse circumstance. This was manifest in the described patient's constant distress and inconsolable status in the face of whatever misunderstanding arose in the course of the analytic process, this together with her lifelong difficult relationship with her spoilsport mother. And she was constantly fearful of her inevitably disconsolate reaction to whatever in the analytic interaction could be construed as a broken (even if only implied) promise. Dynamics of oral greed and of penis envy were implicated throughout the course of the case. In this last of the clinical cases, as in the whole array of them, a particular dynamic is highlighted and proved central to the analysis, that to a lesser degree is so widely prevalent here in the whole array of pessimistic characters who so regularly gravitate to the conception of the glass as half-empty.

Altogether the entire sequence of six clinical papers to follow (two of them coauthored with Victor Calef) present a kaleidoscope of common personality organizations and characteristics, exacerbated in these particular patients to a discomforting enough prominence in their personality organization to play significant roles in their decision to seek the help of psychoanalytic therapy.

Chapter 1
1972
On Certain Neurotic Equivalents of Necrophilia

Victor Calef and Edward M. Weinshel

The theme of the 'Sleeping Beauty' who is brought back to life, as it were, by the love of a Prince Charming is one which has fascinated both story-tellers and listeners for hundreds of years. It is our impression that not infrequently we hear, from our analytic patients—primarily via various denials—this same theme and its disguised wishes. We are referring to those patients who complain that their spouses go to sleep before them and before sexual activity can be initiated. It is our experience that, at least in many of these individuals, this complaint is an attempt to hide the fascination and attraction for the sleeping sexual object and the wish to make love to that object.

Further, it is our hypothesis that this wish is the central organizing force for a group of fantasies which involve a series of necrophilic equivalents and which play a not insignificant dynamic role in a variety of behavioural patterns. We are not concerned with necrophilia as a perversion per se; we have not had any first-hand clinical experience with this clinical entity which we believe to be relatively rare and probably is observed only in relation to extremely severe psychopathology. The neurotic equivalents and derivatives of necrophilia,¹ however, we believe to be quite ubiquitous and do not necessarily denote the same kind of malignant psychopathology. We will attempt to describe some of the dynamic and genetic aspects of these fantasies and to illustrate at least some of their clinical manifestations. Perhaps one such illustration will best permit us to delineate some of these factors.

Relatively early in her analysis, Mrs L. described a life-long fantasy of making love to a dead man. Mrs L. was in her mid-20s when she began analysis because of a severe agoraphobia, and the necrophilic fantasy could be traced to some point between the ages of four and five, at least roughly parallel with the time that her mother was pregnant with the patient's younger sister. As might be expected, Mrs L.'s memory of the childhood fantasy was a rather diffuse and amorphous one; her concept of what constituted 'love-making' was vague, but the idea of a dead man (later the object could also be asleep, drugged or otherwise helpless) was from the beginning vivid and central. As the fantasy-imagery crystallized, fellatio became its most conspicuous and consistent erotic activity. Somewhat later—although the patient has never been absolutely certain of this, she feels that it began in mid-adolescence—the necrophilic fantasy became commingled with an equally vivid voyeuristic fantasy in which an unidentified man carries on violent sexual activity with some woman.

Limitations of space preclude anything but the briefest résumé of the pertinent dynamic and genetic factors in this complicated and fascinating case. It will come as no surprise to the analytic clinician that an essential root of the patient's agoraphobia was connected with her very strong and conflicted exhibitionistic impulses; throughout her life she struggled with intense sadomasochistic wishes which gradually emerged in the course of the analytic work; she demonstrated what at times appeared to be a sexual insatiability and at the same time an intense fear of being damaged during the sexual act; her fear of not getting enough sexual gratification was paralleled by a comparable anxiety in regard to being deprived of food and oral gratification in the broader sense. She was exposed to frequent primal scene situations, a good deal of precocious sexual enlightenment, and an inordinate amount of highly-sexualized physical abuse from a two-year older brother. The birth of the patient's sister proved to be one of the critical events in Mrs L.'s psychological development; the devastating impact of the disappointment she experienced vis-à-vis both the mother and father played a crucial part in Mrs L.'s subsequent neurosis and in her particular character formation.

The principal constituents of Mrs L.'s necrophilic fantasy can best be delineated by sketching out in a rather schematic and fragmentary fashion some of the clinical material which came up in the course of her analysis. Although these data will be presented as if they emerged in a linear, chronological fashion, we should point out that what we are presenting has been systematized for convenience and emphasis; nevertheless, our editorial licence has resulted in only a partial distortion of what actually occurred. For a long time she bemoaned the fact that she must be such a dull and lacklustre patient. She could not imagine the analyst would in any way find her interesting or attractive, particularly as a sexual object. Time and again, Mrs L. condensed her complaints in the phrase that the analyst must be 'bored stiff'. It also became clear that this repetitive lament was a defence and a resistance against her wishes to be interesting and to be attractive to the analyst and to be the object of his sexual love. As this resistance was exposed together with her frustration and anger at being the woman-scorned, the 'You are bored stiff rather quickly changed into the almost obsessive thought that the analyst was 'a bored stiff', with the emphasis on the 'stiff'. This could readily be analysed in terms of her angry wish to have the analyst dead, a 'stiff', who, because he was dead, could not attack her sexually. Again, as the analytic work progressed and her fears of sexual attack and penetration could be dealt with, a third adage entered the lists. (The very complex and admittedly delightful facility of utilizing these 'plays on words' obviously were in themselves a source of considerable gratification and resistance for the patient. It can only be stated that very early in her life, she became entranced with words, became an omnivorous reader, and derived a good deal of hidden scoptophilic pleasure from her reading. One of the relatively early and obvious manifestations of this was the preoccupation with finding so-called 'dirty' words in the dictionary. She also developed a rather extraordinary facility with languages, a gift she could not 'show off' because of the inhibition of her exhibitionism.) She now perceived the analyst as a 'stiff board', whose phallic qualities she admired and desired as an instrument of sexual satisfaction, albeit never without a good deal of anxiety.

Gradually there was a shift in the material; and, particularly, what could be observed was a return to the 'bored stiff' phase. At this period in the analysis, it was the patient who was bored stiff, or more often 'a bored stiff'; and it was during this period that we were able to recover and understand a good many of her primal-scene experiences and the impact that these experiences had exerted in the p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Edward M. Weinshel: A Mensch for All Seasons
• PART 1 CLINICAL PAPERS
• PART 2 THEORETICAL PAPERS
• BRIEF NOTES On Being a Legacy
• Index