Freudâs model of the mind is a dynamic one â that is, it envisages the mind as being in a constant state of flux and conflict between impulses arising in one part of the mind and defences against these impulses. His first model of the mind had been based on repression. What we cannot stand to think or remember, we learn to repress from consciousness. The unconscious â usually metaphorically conceived of as a deeper layer of the mind â exerts constant pressure to bring this material back to light. It comes up again in dreams, jokes, forgettings, âFreudian slipsâ, associations of ideas. Ideas are smuggled across the repression barrier in various forms, and in various ways we continue to forget and deny. This simple model, of repression, and the return of the repressed, is still a perfectly adequate way of describing many mental manoeuvres. Much psychic pain can be relieved by enabling people to remember what happened in a context where they feel safe. One of its virtues is to remind us that if we have to repress a lot, we lose a great deal of mental energy in the process. Psychoanalysis should enable us to accept ourselves more and thus release some of the instinctual energy which makes experience more vivid and life more enjoyable.
Quite soon, Freud came to realize that it was not just a question of getting people to remember. So many of his female patients ârememberedâ sexual advances from their fathers that he came to believe that in at least some cases the memory was an unconscious fantasy, prompted by the universal and intolerable wish that we could have a sexual relationship with both our parents. It was this development of the theory which was to make Freud, and psychoanalysis, notorious. The idea that babies and children had sexual desires, even if they were expressed via oral and anal images and ideas, was unbearable. Persistent attempts were made to get him to redefine the sexual basis of our interest in each other as love; and some argue that attachment theories come close to doing the same thing. Freud was adamant. He wanted to keep the link between psychoanalysis and the body, and the promptings of the body, although he also wanted to maintain that unconscious fantasy about the body was distinct from physiological reality. Conversely, he has frequently been accused of avoiding the fact that some adults really do act on their sexual impulses towards children; that this is not the patientâs childish fantasy but memory. It is clear that he always knew that sexual abuse of children by adults was possible, but here too there is continuing indignation at the idea that children might have spontaneous sexual and aggressive fantasies as well as being subject to those of adults. The object-relations tradition has laid more emphasis on their aggressive fantasies.
Freud then began to visualize the mind less as composed of layers â as in his favourite archaeological metaphor â than as being made up of agencies or structures; the ego, the super-ego and the id. The id is the reservoir of instinctual impulses; the superego the fiercely irrational, unreasonable half-instinctual force which suppresses them; and the ego the rational part of the mind which is in touch with the external world, and which tries to mediate between our desires and reality so that we can stop insisting on what is impossible, and settle for what is. From the beginning, these terms were problematic. The German terms are simply the âIâ, the âabove-Iâ, and the âitâ. Freudâs translators, Alix and James Strachey, wanted to keep these ordinary words; so did John Rickman; but Ernest Jones wanted a more abstract and formal terminology (Meisel and Kendrick 1985). In consequence, the terms have too often been reified; they have come to be seen not as metaphors for mental processes but as real entities.
Perhaps because the terms seemed so barren and far from experience, the next step was to reconceive of these processes less in terms of the structural model than of object relations. (The most systematic attempt by a British analyst to rewrite Freudâs metapsychology is probably still that by Ronald Fairbairn 1952.) The unconscious mind contains the history of how each one of us has been influenced by and conceives of the people who are important to us; how we have taken our versions of them into ourselves, where they support us, attack us, quarrel with other bits of us, and so on. Patients can often express this quite concretely: as in the man who described a little man sitting on his shoulder, talking in his fatherâs voice, telling him what to do and not to do; or the woman who felt that her mother took up the whole of her insides, so that she was just a thin skin on the outside. English psychoanalysis became less concerned with models of the mind than with the ghosts within the mind.
In Chapter 1, Catia Galatariotou gives a lucid description of the idea of mental defences, showing how Freud conceived of them as defending the equilibrium of the mind against disturbance from both internal and external factors. As Freud did, she gives a central place to repression, but goes on to describe the further work done by Freudâs daughter Anna, and by Klein on defences, in which they linked them up to inner objects. She makes it clear that, although she is describing the defences separately for the purposes of explication, in real life we use many simultaneously. It is easy in psychoanalytic writing to reify concepts, use concrete thinking, forget that our ideas are just models by which we hope to describe psychic internal reality, and have no actual existence.
The terms that Galatariotou describes and defines â amongst them regression, repression, disavowal, identification with the aggressor, projection, introjection, false self, etc. â constitute most of the basic vocabulary of psychoanalysis. Very often these terms are used without awareness that they belong to a theoretical framework, that of the analysis of the defences. The chapter shows how, from ideas which are conceptually quite simple, a subtle and powerful way of understanding mental processes can be built up. The basic approach, âdefence analysisâ, is often seen as more characteristic of North American ego psychology, but in fact it underpins the Kleinian and object-relations approaches as well. It describes the mechanisms which the mind uses to maintain its equilibrium and avoid psychic pain, rather than the specific unconscious phantasies which may result.
The next two chapters, by Betty Joseph and Priscilla Roth, show how the idea of a defence against psychic pain was developed by Melanie Klein into the concept of a position, something between a habitual set of defences which are the basis of unconscious phantasy (âfantasyâ is spelt âphantasyâ to denote that it is unconscious, i.e. not a daydream) and a developmental stage. The idea of two positions, between which we all oscillate, moves us away from Freudâs more developmental linear theory, with its forward and regressive movements, to the idea of a perpetual alternation between two states of mind. Joseph has developed a technical approach (1989; Hargreaves and Varchevker 2004) which depends on the close observation of the movements of analystâs and patientâs minds during the session, and here she describes the paranoid-schizoid position: normal and ubiquitous, indeed healthy, in babies.
Klein had developed the view, taken up by Freud in a late paper, that the ego not only suppresses what is unacceptable: it may split if it feels intolerably anxious (Klein 1946; Freud 1940). There are similarities between the young childâs defences, adult psychosis, and what happens to us all under conditions of great pain, anxiety or fear (a theme taken up by Caroline Garlandâs in Chapter 16). At the psychotic extreme, this can result in deeply divided personalities, Jekylls and Hydes; in everyday experience, we all know people who seem to be triggered by certain situations to show a different side to their personalities. Jungians speak of âthe shadow sideâ. Again, splitting is only a metaphor for a particular kind of mental manoeuvre which differs from repression in that the personality itself seems more divided, and gets rid of painful aspects of itself by attributing them, âprojectingâ them, onto others.
In Chapter 2, Joseph focuses on a particular kind of splitting known as projective identification, and the way in which it can be used as a defence against various intolerable feelings. Sometimes analytic patients cope with painful feelings about their analysts by a fantasy of incorporating them; they unconsciously adopt their voices, opinions, ways of behaving, and so on. Joseph pays careful attention to how we get rid of painful thoughts and feelings, including those created in analysis, as our psychic defences begin to shift, and the way in which, having got rid of them by attributing them to someone else, we then experience ourselves as rather empty and hollow.
In Chapter 3, on the next stage of development, the âdepressive positionâ, Priscilla Roth describes the stage of mental development that evolves from that of the paranoid-schizoid position. Klein described this as a particular set of anxieties, and defences against these anxieties, which begin when a child is about four months old as a result of neurological maturation of the brain. In her view, the baby becomes able to develop a complex, three-dimensional view of his object which supersedes the earlier feeling that it is either ideally good or wholly bad. The consequences of this development are profound: dread lest his hate for his object should have been too strong for his love for it, and guilt at having damaged it, which can lead to a realistic appraisal of the object, respect for its separateness and an urge to repair it. This represents the arrival of a moral universe and the basis of creativity. Roth shows how painful and precarious this development is, and how difficult it is for anyone to bear for very long. We all use defences â typically, manic defences that devalue the object, or regression to more primitive states of dividing our objects into perfect and wholly bad ones â against this pain. The two âpositionsâ oscillate in our minds throughout life. The normal paranoid-schizoid position is essential for maintaining healthy discrimination between good and bad, and for what could be life-saving responses of fight and flight in the face of danger. It gives clarity, intensity and vividness to experience.
Klein may have been the first psychoanalyst to discuss envy, but as Kate Barrows reminds us in Chapter 4, it is hardly something new in human life. Envy as a conscious emotion is painful, but it is part of our capacity for admiration to try to do better. It can represent both hatred and, in a less destructive form, âemulatory envyâ, in which we can admire and learn from others. It is when it is destructive, and above all unconscious, that it is truly damaging. It is the most intractable obstacle to successful relationships, including those with analysts and therapists. Freud first described it as the negative therapeutic reaction, or the process by which a patient is compelled to undo and deny any good which he feels he has been done. He saw it more narrowly, in the context of penis envy, but in a late, great paper, âAnalysis terminable and interminableâ (Freud 1937), he broadened the concept to something resembling the Lacanian concept of lack, and confessed to feeling defeated by the intractability of envy. Barrows argues that the concept is often used too restrictively; more broadly, envy represents a hatred and intolerance of difference.
Klein described one defence against the operations of envy as a kind of projective identification; a process whereby we get rid of our unwanted feelings by attributing them to other people, or being critical of them, in order to conceal our shameful envy. She showed vividly how the attack on goodness and creativity in the other leads to its destruction within the self, and to a terrible sense of hopelessness and worthlessness. She saw human beings as oscillating between a split up, fearful and suspicious state in which bad things happening are somebody elseâs fault, and a state in which we can acknowledge that part of it is our fault, bear our guilt, and do what we can to make things better.
Another defence may take the form of attacking ourselves, trying to avoid showing our real or imagined superiority to others, in order not to attract their envy, since we unconsciously feel its malign power. Barrows discusses this as a peculiarly English trait; such envy is restrictive and damaging, but can also be the basis of âfair playâ. The impact of envy on other people has always been felt as inexplicable, almost demonic. In the many societies which practise witchcraft, the impact of such projective identification is seen as being due to spirit possession.
There is a major difference in emphasis in clinical psychoanalysis in Britain at this point: do we lay more stress on innate guilt and destructiveness, or on the tragedy that has led someone to feel so depleted because of the painful and difficult circumstances of their upbringing, which have left them without much sense of inner or outer goodness? Stephen Mitchell (1993) points out that the division between those who think that aggression is innate in man and those who see it as reactive and defensive has been perennial throughout the history of psychoanalysis, but it is hardly surprising that we have been unable to resolve it: the problem has long been familiar to moral philosophers and psychologists. Just as in England the Kleinians and Independents tend to vary on this issue (see Riley, Chapter 14), in the United States classical Freudians disagree with Kohutians and self-psychologists.
References
Fairbairn, W.R.D. (1952) Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, London: Tavistock.
Freud, S. (1937) âAnalysis terminable and interminableâ, Standard Edition, vol. 23, pp. 209â54, London: Hogarth Press.
ââ (1940) âThe splitting of the ego for the purposes of defenceâ, Standard Edition, vol. 23, pp. 271â8, London: Hogarth Press.
Hargreaves, E. and Varchevker, A. (eds) (2004) In Pursuit of Psychic Change: The Betty Joseph Workshop, London: Brunner-Routledge.
Joseph, B. (1989) Psychic Equilibrium and Psychic Change: Selected Papers of Betty Joseph, M. Feldman and E. Bott Spillius eds, London: Routledge.
Klein, M. (1946) âNotes on some schizoid mechanismsâ, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 27: 99â110. Revised version in M. Klein, P. Heimann, S. Isaacs and J. RiviĂšre, Developments in Psycho-Analysis, London: Hogarth Press, 1952, pp. 292â320. Reprinted in The Writings of Melanie Klein, vol. 3, pp. 1â24, London: Hogarth Press, 1975, Virago 1997.
Meisel, P. and Kendrick, W. (eds) (1985) Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, New York: Basic Books.
Mitchell, S. (1993) âAggression and the endangered selfâ, Psychoanalytic Quarterly 62: 351â82.