Self Psychology

Comparisons and Contrasts

Douglas Detrick, Susan Detrick, Arnold Goldberg, Douglas Detrick, Susan Detrick, Arnold Goldberg

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317771647
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Psychology
• Thema: Applied Psychology

This collection of "comparisons and contrasts" explores Heinz Kohut's self psychology in relation to a wide-ranging group of modern thinkers, both inside and outside of analysis. Separate sections analyze self psychology alongside Freud and the first generation of psychoanalytic dissidents; British object relations theorists; and contemporary theorists like Kernberg, Mahler, Lacan, and Masterson.

PART I

Freud and the Historical “Dissidents”

1

A Comparison of Freud and Kohut

Apostasy or Synergy?

MICHAEL FRANZ BASCH

What was for many psychoanalysts Kohut’s divergence from Freudian psychoanalysis did not begin with the introduction of what has come to be known as self psychology (Kohut, 1971), but much earlier, with what he often told us was, as far as he was concerned, his most important contribution, namely, “Introspection, Empathy, and Psychoanalysis” (1959). In that essay, Kohut outlined the historical and epistemological evidence showing that the essence of psychoanalysis lay in Freud’s discovery of the psychoanalytic method, the investigation of human thought and motivation through the cooperative venture in which the deeper meaning of a patient’s verbalized introspections came to be understood through the analyst’s immersion in the patient’s psychological life, which led to empathic understanding.

Although that paper was presented in 1957 as the plenary lecture celebrating the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, it, as Kohut told me, was accepted for publication only through the intercession of Maxwell Gitelson and over the objections of several other influential leaders in the field. The latter recognized that in the paper, by making the case that its method and not its theory was the foundation of any science, Kohut indirectly challenged the supremacy of Freud’s instinct theory for psychoanalysis. Kohut was quite innocent of any such intention; it was years before he (1977) reluctantly concluded that the manifestations of unintegrated infantile sexuality and aggression in the analysis of psychoneurotic patients did not represent biological bedrock, as Freud had thought it did, but, instead, was a byproduct of deeper, further analyzable self pathology. However, the self-appointed guardians of Freud’s legacy were quite right to object to Kohut’s empathy and introspection paper. Resting as it does on simplistic and long-since falsified biological speculation and on an epistemological fallacy (Basch, 1975a), the instinct theory was (and to some extent still is) supported only by belief grounded in convention—any threat to that belief could bring the whole house of cards tumbling down. So, in making a comparison between the contributions of Sigmund Freud and Heinz Kohut, one has to ask, which Freud are you comparing Kohut with? The Freud in search of a scientific psychology on a footing with other natural (physical) sciences, or the Freud who almost incidentally discovered the psychoanalytic method for the investigation of the unconscious motives behind human behavior? A historical appraisal shows that the method of psychoanalysis, along with the clinical findings to which it gave rise, and the theory of the mental apparatus that Freud developed to explain those clinical findings are not of a piece. Only by clarifying the difference can one judge whether Kohut’s work enhances or undermines Freud’s contributions.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Freud came to study the neuroses quite by accident (Jones, 1953). In 1885, at that time a 29-year-old Viennese neurologic researcher, he had gone to Paris to further his interest in pediatric neurology by studying children’s brain specimens at the Salpêtrière Hospital. Though he was disappointed in the pathological laboratory there, he soon became very interested in the weekly lectures given by the chairman of that department, Jean Martin Charcot.

Most doctors of that day, frustrated by their inability to cure neuroses by talking common sense to patients and exhorting them to use willpower to overcome imaginary problems for which no anatomical basis could be found, blamed neurotics for their own suffering and wrote them off as malingerers or frauds who deserved no further attention. It was unusual, but in retrospect certainly fortuitous, that Charcot, the preeminent neurologist of his day, thought he could discover order where others saw only chaos and became convinced that neuroses were after all a form of illness attributable, he suggested, to the effect of emotional trauma on a hereditarily weakened brain and, therefore, worth studying, classifying, and treating. Charcot would demonstrate to his audience how a hypnotic trance could be used to regress a patient in time until he relived the forgotten trauma, often a life-threatening shock like a railroad accident, for example, that had precipitated his illness and to which his symptoms, unbeknownst to the patient, referred. Freud started to investigate such patients himself, corroborating Charcot’s findings, but soon disagreed with his teacher’s explanation for the origin of these problems. Charcot, taking for granted the Cartesian doctrine that reason and consciousness were identical, postulated that, since the origin of the neurotic symptom was not known to the patient, the symptom had to be the result of other than rational thoughts produced by the cerebral cortex. He suggested that, as there was no anatomic evidence of cortical damage in the autopsied brains of deceased neurotic patients, the cortical damage must be an as yet unknown physiological impairment that at certain times precluded the cortex from discharging strong emotions through reason, leaving the resultant emotional charge or energy free to agitate the lower centers of the brain. It was this agitation of the subcortical, nonreasoning part of the brain that created the symptoms of hysteria, obsessions, compulsions, or anxiety states. These symptoms made no sense in themselves and were to rational thought what the sounds produced by a child’s banging on piano keys was to real music.

Freud, however, was apparently not subject to these preconceptions and soon saw that far from being brain damaged, his neurotic patients were, if anything, of above average intelligence. Their symptoms, once understood, proved to be extremely cleverly reasoned and designed to deal, in disguised fashion, with a conflict between need and morality; the symptoms, like a game of charades, portrayed both the nature of the forbidden desire and its gratification, as well as the punishment the patient expected to be visited upon him for his transgression. Furthermore, as a neurologist, Freud (1888) could see no reason why consciousness had to accompany the cortical problem-solving activity that we call thought. Eventually, as is now well known, Freud came to realize that evidence for reasoned thought unaccompanied by consciousness was to be found in everyone once the motives behind dreams and such errors of everyday life as slips of the tongue, forgetting, and mistaken actions were studied and deciphered.

After his exposure to Charcot’s work, Freud combined Charcot’s hypnotic investigative method with the cathartic abreaction of traumatic emotional experiences that he had heard about from another of his teachers, Josef Breuer. This technique became the basis for both treating and studying neurotic pathology and provided the precursors for what was to become the psychoanalytic method of therapy (Breuer and Freud, 1893–1895; Basch, 1983b).

THE ORIGINS OF THE PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY OF THOUGHT FORMATION

The goal of establishing a general scientific psychology led Freud first to create what Andersson (1962) has called the “brain mythology” of the “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (Freud, 1895a) and later to attempt its transmutation into the various versions of the nonanatomical mental apparatus (Basch, 1975b, 1976a, 1983a). These included the so-called picket fence model (Freud, 1900); the topographic model (Freud, 1915a), with its division into unconscious, preconscious, and conscious mental states; and the final version of ego and id (Freud, 1923).

To understand what makes all these models of brain functioning and thought processing operational, we have to go back to a work that was never included in the various collections of Freud’s psychological writings, On Aphasia (Freud, 1891). In this book Freud first adopted the model for thought formation that remained throughout his lifetime the basis for his theory of cognition and that he repudiated only in one of his last publications (Freud, 1940). His hypothesis was that thought was made possible by a union of sensory images with the words that appropriately describe them and, per contra, that without words sensory images were blocked from both consciousness and participation in cognitive maturation. He attributed motivation for action to the amount of instinctual force attached to a sensory image. Conflicts would spring up between the need to discharge instinctual tension and the restrictions placed on uninhibited behavior by conscience and convention. Unable to control the strength of the instincts, which were somatic givens, the brain or mind would withdraw the speech associations from forbidden sensory images. These images were then isolated both from thought, which precluded their maturation, and from consciousness, which blocked their direct fulfillment in action. This theoretical construct corresponded to the conflict Freud saw in his neurotic patients, whom he cured by helping them to find the words to express their hidden desires and fears so that they could then either dismiss or sublimate them. For Freud, neurotics were essentially functional aphasics, and he made the error of thinking that the success of his therapy established the validity of his hypothesis regarding the development of thought. Unfortunately, Freud was studying the one psychological illness that seemed to corroborate his theory. In the long run, this success prevented the full implications of psychoanalysis from being appreciated by either Freud or the analysts that followed him.

It should be emphasized that none of the foregoing hypotheses is part of psychoanalytic theory, although they have come to be known as such. They were all formulated before Freud discovered the significance of dreams, psychic reality, and the transference and before he deciphered the code of the preoperative (Piaget and Inhelder, 1969) or presentational (Langer, 1982) symbolism that he termed the primary process (Basch, 1977). Because Freud never published the “Project” and because the significance of “On Aphasia” went unrecognized until recently, analysts did not know the origin of these concepts. They assumed, as Freud’s later writings had led them to believe, that these conclusions had somehow been reached through psychoanalytic investigation (Basch, 1983a).

THE ORIGIN OF THE PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY OF MOTIVATION

To understand Freud’s theory explaining human motivation, one must realize that it too was a hypothesis and did not come out of his clinical observations, but, rather, was derived from other fields in an attempt to explain those observations. Between 1885 and 1900, when most of Freud’s basic theorizing about mental processes took place, was the time in biology when hormones were discovered. The discovery that there were in the blood powerful chemical forces with which one part of the body influenced the activity of another part—for example, that the brain secreted a chemical (hormone) that influenced the thyroid gland to produce its secretions, which stimulated growth—was a revolutionary explanation, and it is not surprising that Freud drew on it to try to explain what he observed in his work with neurotic patients.

What intrigued Freud was the power of neurotic ideas—they could overcome common sense and literally paralyze an otherwise perfectly healthy person. Where did they get this power from? Clinically, Freud discovered by hypnotizing and age-regressing his patients that sexual experiences and/or fantasies of childhood were responsible for laying down the basis for what later became neurotic phenomena. He put this clinical finding together with a biological speculation: Testicular secretions either chemically or mechanically, by stretching the connective tissue around the testicles, send messages to the brain, which then energize sexual ideas present there. Freud could not explain the mechanics of this transformation—he called it the “mysterious leap” between the somatic and the psychic. In any event, it was this somatic sexual secretion converted into sexual energy that provided the motivating power for behavior. Neurotic ideas were so strong because they attracted more of this power to themselves than did other ideas and motives and therefore dominated mental life (Freud, 1895b, p. 108).

This very primitive, purely speculative, and long-since disproven notion is the basis for Freud’s instinct theory and the idea that sexuality is the basis for all motivation.

At first Freud postulated that there were two basic instincts or drives:¹ the self-preservative and the species-preservative, or sexual. Later (Freud, 1933) he changed this to sexual and aggressive drives, with the sexual drive being responsible for both self-and species preservation, the aggressive drive being attached to a “death” instinct that worked in opposition to the sexual drive. Freud never made it clear what the somatic source of the self-preservative, or ego, instinct and, later, the aggressive drive might be. (It is hard to believe, but this is really the foundation on which rests this theory that has dominated the field for 100 years.)

Once Freud had established in his mind the correctness of this hypothesis of the sexual basis for motivation of behavior, he modified it in various ways, giving rise to the tension-reduction theory of motivation, also known as the pleasure-unpleasure principle. Again, this is a very simplistic idea: the body keeps producing sexual stimulation, which in its raw form seeks blind expression in sexual behavior. The culture, first in the form of parents, later as society at large, cannot permit such purely selfish expression and imposes barriers to discharge. This constraint creates tension as the sexual excitation builds up in the brain or mental apparatus. This tension is experienced as unpleasure. The part of the brain or mental apparatus that is attuned to the needs of society—what Freud first called the reality principle, later the ego—tries to find compromises that will let the sexual excitation be discharged without incurring punishment. The best way is through sublimation, that is, finding substitute outlets for sexual energy in work and play that will be rewarded rather than punished by society. If this does not work, the defenses try to repress the instinct, pushing it into the unconscious and not letting it get entrance to the preconscious, reasonable, reality-oriented part of the mental apparatus. Once repressed, these forbidden ideas, because they still have an instinctual force attached to them, continue to exert pressure and seek forbidden fulfillment. If they should escape from repression, a second line of defense is the formation of a neurotic symptom—a form of discharge that both gratifies the wish and punishes the patient for having it. So, for example, a hysterical woman can release her tension in quasi-sexual “fits,” but at the same time is punished for her underlying ideas by being invalided by her sickness and prevented from finding a man whom she might marry—and so on.

So the mental machine that Freud devised is one in which there is a basic source of power (sexuality) that accumulates in a tank (the brain) and requires venting when the pressure gets too high. Actually, there were not one but two tanks. One was the system unconscious, later called the id portion of the unconscious, in which the raw instinct poured and got connected with nonverbal perceptions. The second was the system preconscious—conscious, later called ego, in which the modified, neutralized instinctual energy could be used for work and love in an acceptable way.

Freud himself made it explicitly clear that his theories about drives and instincts were biological speculations that he adduced to explain his clinical findings. As he said, these ideas were imposed upon rather than derived from psychoanalytic observations (Freud, 1915b). He acknowledged that these hypotheses were vague and unsatisfactory at best, and he referred to the instinct theory as the “mythology” of psychoanalysis (Freud, 1933, p. 95). Freud anticipated that eventually his theory of the libido and the nature of instincts would have a proper organic foundation, but in the absence of a definitive theory of instincts he felt justified in speculating about their biological substrate on the basis of psychological findings (Freud, 1914). Now, it is true that when Freud found them useful, the initially tentative nature of extra-analytic speculations tended to be forgotten, as if repeated usage had made these hypotheses more factual (Basch, 1976a). So it was with the theories of instinct and drive.

THE ORIGIN OF THE PSYCHOANALYTIC METHOD

Psychoanalysis as an investigative method began when Freud realized that (1) much of what adult neurotic patients advanced as memory was actually childhood fantasy; (2) when it came to influencing later behavior, psychic reality was as significant as external reality; and (3) the attempt to transform childhood fantasy into adult reality by projecting into the present situation what the patient had wished or feared was an ongoing process that manifested itself in the relationship between doctor and patient. In his practice, it was brought home to Freud that it was the interpretation of this transference that led to the resolution of the neurosis. It is the reliving of the old trauma in a new edition with the analyst that engages the emotional as well as the intellectual life of the patient and ultimately proves t...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword — Arnold Goldberg
• Part I Freud and the Historical “Dissidents”
• Part II Existential-Humanistic Thinkers
• Part III English Object Relations Theorists
• Part IV Contemporary Contributions
• Part V Summarizing Reflections
• Author Index
• Subject Index