Sex, Death, and the Superego

Updating Psychoanalytic Experience and Developments in Neuroscience

Ronald Britton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000176643
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This second edition of Ronald Britton's personal reappraisal of psychoanalytic theories is based on further clinical experience, further study of current neuroscience and continued reflection on the relationship of brain and mind, selfhood and self-awareness, belief and knowledge, and certainty and uncertainty.

Divided into three parts – "Hysteria, " "The ego and superego, " and "Narcissism" – this new edition adds content on brain, mind and self, the death instinct and a discussion on the biological, psychological and sociological basis of gender. It suggests that our increasing knowledge necessarily produces a dissolution of our coherent concepts of mind and brain, and that during this phase of creative dissolution we need to reassess what we know and what we don't know. Fundamental to the book is the notion that human beings have to live with probability but that we long for certainty, and create it for ourselves.

This book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts in clinical practice and academia, as well as other mental health professionals and those with an interest in psychoanalytic theory.

Introduction

PS(n+1)

The first edition of this book was a personal appraisal of psychoanalytic theory in the light of clinical experience. There were three parts to the book: the first was about hysteria, sexuality and Spielrein’s notion of a death wish. The second part was about the ego and the superego, the relationship that dominated Freud’s writing from his middle period onwards. The third part was on an area of psychoanalytic preoccupation of the recent decades: narcissism and narcissistic disorders.

Sixteen more years of clinical experience have passed since then and this second edition gives me the opportunity to update my ideas. Added to my clinical experience, my knowledge and interest in current neuroscience has increased. It is clearer to me now that the scientific context from which biology, neurology and psychoanalysis first emerged has changed radically in the last fifty years and that psychoanalysis needs to take account of it.

I conceived of the term PS(n+1) from Bion’s equation of PS< >D; this was his notion that the transition from Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position was reversible and recurrent and his formula resembled a chemical reversible equation. This seemed too static to me; in my version (n) denotes the current state of what is a lifetime of successive cycles of integration and de-integration. As life moves on and (n) increases in cycles of PS(n)>D(n), new knowledge means abandoning coherence, D(n), for a period of accumulating facts and formulations that are un-integrated, what I call PS(n+1). It is a phase characterised by accumulating new facts encompassed in D(n) and that are, as yet, not coherently integrated.

Anyone familiar with Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions will recognise PS(n+1) as resembling his “post-paradigm state” of science, when the assumptive organising system, the paradigm, is discredited and not yet replaced. As it was in physics when the Newtonian paradigm was discredited around 1900 and the quantum mechanics system was not fully established until the 1920s, a new paradigm of quantum mechanics, the Uncertainty Principle, was described by Heisenberg and Dirac.

We are, I believe, in a PS(n+1) post-paradigm position in our psychoanalytic theorising and it is in that context that this second edition of my book is written.

The model of the brain that developed in the first part of the twentieth century was changed radically in the latter part of the century, and new findings continue. The brain is seen as a more active organ than previously: one that constructs as well as construes what is perceived as reality. And it is clear that information internally from the soma is constantly updated in feedback systems. The neuroscience view of the brain based on the “core sense of self” is now emerging in very interesting ways when put alongside our psychoanalytical familiarity with mental development. There is a discussion of this in a new additional chapter, “PS(n+1): brain, mind and self”, in this edition.

Freud mainly based his original metapsychology on his unpublished “Project for a Scientific Psychology” of 1897 in an addendum to a letter to his professional confidante Fleiss. Freud put it aside as he turned his attention to his clinical analytic work and his exploration of dreams. But it forms the basis for his thinking of Chapter 7 of the “dream book” and re-emerges virtually unchanged in 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. As a neurological treatise of its times it is innovative and ingenious – Freud was a great neurologist – but it is fundamentally wrong. We need to start again; to prepare for a day when our understanding of the brain and our understanding of the mind can meet; we are not there yet. In the meantime, we need to put our house in order to be ready.

When I began reviewing my ideas on the need to reconstruct the underlying metapsychological assumptions of psychoanalysis, I thought of myself as taking a new path, but I soon found that I was stepping into the footsteps of an earlier pioneer, Ronald Fairbairn. As I have done, he stated that Freud’s system was based on redundant physics:

[his] view that libido is primarily pleasure seeking follows directly from his divorce of energy from structure … By contrast if we conceive of energy as inseparable from structure, then the only changes which are intelligible are changes in structural relationships and in relationships between structures: and such changes are essentially directional.

(Fairbairn, 1952, p. 126)

This was part of his contention that the libido was not pleasure seeking but object seeking; the centrality of his theory was of object relations as the source of psychic energy and not a directionless, impulse-driven force. Melanie Klein’s discoveries of internal object relationships had greatly stimulated his ideas:

[her] views seemed to me from the first to represent an important advance in the development of psychoanalytical theory … however … in certain important respects, she had failed to push her views to their logical conclusion … she continued to adhere uncritically to Freud’s hedonistic libido theory.

(Ibid., p. 154)

Fairbairn tried to join in the famous Controversial Discussions between Klein’s followers and those of Anna Freud (1941–1945), with a very brief statement of his theory in writing. It was concise, clear and enormously relevant to the discussions. It was ignored completely and his opinions subsequently were not taken up. Perhaps since the discussions were a sort of trial of Melanie Klein as a psychoanalytic heretic, it was not a good moment for her to join him in his dismantling of Freud’s libido theory. She did accept his ideas on ego splitting and in acknowledgement added his term schizoid to her own to define her schizo-paranoid position (Klein, 1946). But the neglect of his critique and subsequent modification of Freud’s structural model may have more to do with his being in Edinburgh, far from London, than their content. In this respect he has this in common with his most illustrious predecessor of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, philosopher David Hume. Hume’s ground-breaking work, Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1758), was met with complete disregard in London whilst exciting great interest in Paris and Germany. Ernest Jones’ patronising preface to Fairbairn’s book (1952) testifies to that: “Dr Fairbairn’s position in the field of psychoanalysis is a special one … living hundreds of miles from his nearest colleagues, whom he seldom meets” (Ibid., p. v). It at least protected him from the “psychoanalytic gang warfare”, as Bion described it (personal communication), that gathered pace in London. Fairbairn’s concept of the “internal saboteur, the libidinal ego and the central ego” is discussed in the chapters on the ego and the superego and narcissism in this edition.

But Freud started psychoanalysis with hysteria, not schizoid states, and it was in studying that disorder that he first delineated psychic reality as differing from objective reality in the demonstration of their pseudo-anatomical disorders. Together with Babinski, at Charcot’s instigation he compared the pattern of hysterical motor and sensory afflictions with the neuro-anatomical patterns of physical afflictions and found them to be quite different. They were evidently based on the mental picture of their bodies; what we might call “the mind’s body”. This led him to his central concept of psychic reality as opposed to material reality.

This second edition, like the first, begins with “Hysteria”. Chapter 1 begins before the dawn of psychoanalysis with the case of Anna O. This is a story about Bertha Pappenheim and her doctor Josef Breuer. The treatment took place more than ten years before Breuer was persuaded to write the paper that begins Studies in Hysteria (1895), his collaboration with Freud. Thanks to recent research in hospital records, Freud’s correspondence and other information, we are in a better position now to reconsider the events of that treatment and the effect it had on Freud’s thinking.

The second chapter on hysteria has as its main case Sabina Spielrein, Jung’s first analytic patient. She qualified as a medical practitioner whilst being a patient in the famous Burgholzli psychiatric hospital thanks to the encouragement of Bleuler, the medical superintendent, and continued onwards to become a psychoanalyst. She was Jung’s patient, colleague and mistress, and wrote the first paper that described a death instinct, which she presented to Freud at the Vienna Society. Though what she described was a romantic death wish characteristic of hysteria, rather than the multiform “death instinct” that has become a cliché in the psychoanalytic literature of the last hundred years, it was probably her paper that prompted Freud to think of it. I have added as an afterthought to Chapter 2 a review of the concept of the “death instinct” from Freud onwards.

Chapter 3 is unchanged, but Chapter 4 has been rewritten under the title “Phallic idealisation in women”. It concerns itself with women whose self-identification is as “forever father’s daughter”, citing from mythology Athena and Antigone: one was born from her father’s head and the other identified as her father’s eternal support in his deterioration. It does not enter into current controversy on gender difference but presupposes three personal identifications of most women: as a daughter, as a sexual partner and as a mother. These are fluidly traversed identities in optimum circumstances that co-exist psychically: Chapter 4 focuses on situations where there is a fixed self-identification as “father’s daughter”.

The second part of the book, “The ego and the superego”, is substantially revised and has four chapters beginning with “The concept of the ego”, the unfortunately Latinised version of Das Ich. Knowledge of the relationship of the ego to the superego emerged from psychoanalytic practice, and though it sounds abstract, it has in practice the great advantage of being clinically accessible. In Chapters 5 to 8 this relationship is explored. One potential area of conflict is between experience and authority. Judgement based on experience is the business of the ego. Through its belief system and its function of reality testing, it speaks with the authority of the individual’s own experience. The superego in contrast claims authority by virtue of its position and its origins. It is claimed on the basis of the principle of parental authority bolstered by ancestral authority. It is “the voice of the herd”, as Wilfred Trotter described the internal representative of our group instinct since we evolved as pack animals (Trotter, 1915). This he saw as opposed to “learning from experience” (Ibid.), written in 1908 well ahead of Freud’s development of the concept of the superego. This theme, of the difficulty for the individual of learning from experience when it runs counter to the established beliefs of the group, was later taken up by Bion. He was greatly influenced by Trotter, who was his mentor when he trained in medicine at University College Hospital, London before training in psychoanalysis.

Chapter 6 concludes with my assertion that realistic self-observation is an ego function and not a superego function. The ego observes itself in a realistic light; the superego judges it in a moral light. The ego can wrest the position of arbiter from the superego and become the judge of its own actions, just as a child can become an adult who takes over from the parent the function of self-assessment. This requires that the ego makes a judgement on the superego, like a child on a parent and a patient on an analyst. This is the thrust of the discussion in Chapter 7 using The Book of Job and a clinical example to illustrate what I mean by the emancipation of the ego.

In Chapter 8 I discuss what Bion and Edna O’Shaughnessy called an “ego-destructive superego”, at the same time that Rosenfeld was describing a “narcissistic organisation” in the personality that was opposed to the object relations of the self. I now think that Fairbairn’s notion of a split-off part of the ego is attached to a rejecting, internal object that he called “the internal saboteur”. This fused identity is opposed to any object relations of the ego to the other; it is an aspect of the self that is xenophobic and potentially xenocidal. I suggest that there is a position in the psychic organisation of the superego, an internal judgement seat that has moral power. This position may be occupied by kindly, parental figures, tyrants or even ego-destructive figures. The thrust of the argument in Chapter 8 is that therapeutic benefit can follow from deposing a cruel, tyrannical, internal object from the throne of the superego; it may remain as a bad object, but with less power.

Chapters 9 and 10 are a review of the concept of narcissism and how it is used in the psychoanalytical literature, including a discussion of the so-called narcissistic disorders. I argue that it is profitable to distinguish between libidinal and destructive narcissistic disorders. The former could be described as a defensive withdrawal from loving attachment to a separate person, whereas the second is fundamentally an “anti-other” hostile object relationship of a xenophobic nature. This latter corresponds with Fairbairn’s model of the internal saboteur.

My assertion that psychoanalysis needs to emancipate itself from Freud’s outdated model of the brain that lingered from his 1897 “Project” is an echo of that put forward by Fairbairn more than sixty years ago. He suggested that object relations were the source of motives and not amorphous drives; in other words, an object-attached ego was the source of psychic energy, not an object-less id.

In the final chapter I try to bring together continuing developments of mental models derived from psychoanalysis and developing models of the brain from current neuroscience.

Part 1

Hysteria

Chapter 1

Hysteria I

Anna O: getting in on the act

It is now more than a century since Freud published Studies in Hysteria jointly with Josef Breuer. They concluded that “in so far as one can speak of determining causes which lead to the acquisition of neuroses, their aetiology is to be looked for in sexual factors” (Breuer & Freud, 1895, p. 257). How, more than a hundred years on, do psychoanalytic practitioners regard the significance of sexuality in the neuroses? Their answers would be various but none would discount its importance. When Freud reviewed this question himself twenty years after Studies in Hysteria (Freud, 1914a), he returned to the first case that had prompted his theories. This was not one of his own but Breuer’s patient, Bertha Pappenheim, whom Freud decided to call “Anna O”. The more we know of what was not disclosed about that treatment, the clearer it is how much it influenced Freud in later years. The story as it was known to Freud is not fully told in Breuer’s case study of Anna O. What we know about it now makes better sense in terms of modern psychoanalysis. I want to emphasise that the details that are not included in Breuer’s account were known to Freud and that he knew the subsequent development of Bertha Pappenheim’s life as his wife was a friend of hers. At the time of their joint publication in 1895, both Breuer and Freud knew she was reasonably well and in Frankfurt.

In November 1882, when he was a newly qualified doctor of twenty-six, Freud heard clinical details of this case from Breuer, five months after the treatment ceased. If this had remained his only knowledge of the case, it would have provided him with the material he needed for his early theories of unconscious mental life, repression and conversion. However, we now know that on one hot summer evening in 1883, whilst he and Breuer dined alone together in relaxed mood, he was told another much more unbuttoned, informal and intimate account of the case. This revealed the erotic psycho-drama that took place within Breuer’s treatment and potentially gave Freud raw material for his theories of the Oedipus complex, identification, transference, counter-transference, repetition compulsion and acting out. Freud in his summarising part of Studies in Hysteria makes his first published statement on the phenomenon of “transference” (Übertragung): “the patient is frightened at finding that she is transferring on to the figure of the physician the distressing ideas which arise from the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction PS(n+1)
• PART 1: Hysteria
• PART 2: The ego and the superego
• PART 3: Narcissism
• References
• Index