Tragic Knots in Psychoanalysis

New Papers on Psychoanalysis

Roy Schafer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367106409
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429923159
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This is a collection of published and unpublished papers on clinical, theoretical and applied aspects of psychoanalysis that take up various aspects of unconscious mental processes and conflicts and their expression in the clinical transference and countertransference. These expressions are evidenced in frustration, gratitude and benevolence, competing feelings of being cared for and coerced, disturbed and expanded bodily pleasure, cruelty and forgiveness. Included in this book is a brief history of the author's odyssey through several major contributions regarding the language of psychoanalysis and its narrativity, and the convergence of these with contemporary Kleinian modes of thought.

Part I
On Basic Concepts

CHAPTER ONE
The reality principle, tragic knots, and the analytic process

Tragic knots: definition and discussion

The concept tragic knots emerged within the long history of critical thought about the dramatic genre tragedy, the Weltanschauung known as the tragic sense of life, and the diffuse rubric derived from them— the tragic. To bring tragic knots into line with clinical psychoanalytic thought, I will modify the conception of tragic knots put forth by Scheler (1954), to be mentioned shortly.

Definition: Consciously or unconsciously, a person must confront a recognizably fateful situation that is insufficiently under his or her control. In this situation, that person must choose a course of action while knowing or sensing that the anticipated benefits of each choice will be compromised by painful consequences. However great its potential advantages, achievements, and gratifications, each course of action will involve suffering, impairment, or loss for the self, of the self, or in the lives of loved others. Adding to the gravity of the situation is the person’s realizing that many consequences cannot be anticipated. The action chosen may be taken through physical behavior, in speaking out, or silently, as in adopting a consequential emotional position relative to unfolding events. And there is no way around acting; even remaining inactive is making a consequential choice. I will regard this kind of situation and action as tragically knotted.

In a recent paper (Schafer, 2005a), to give just one example, I described as tragically knotted the situation of Cordelia depicted by Shakespeare at the beginning of his play King Lear. That analysis shows her to be choosing to refuse to yield to Lear’s desperate demand that she dissemble extravagant love for him and total devotion to him; her sisters had already pretended to submit and had been handsomely rewarded for doing so. Her choice sets in motion a course of events that is simultaneously adaptively self-affirming and growth promoting, extremely dangerous and painful, and ultimately disastrous for herself and her beloved father.

Scheler (1964), my source for the specific concept tragic knots, defined the concept differently. Having been concerned primarily with metaphysical universals, he proposed that the assertion of a value necessarily implies and leads to the destruction of that value. In this conception, each value is tragically knotted from the moment it comes into being. For analytic purposes, however, I believe it sufficient to claim only that it is useful to foreground clashes of values when considering tragic knots, and specifically to emphasize that the assertion of a value may, and often enough does, entail dreadful risks. I mean such risks as unforeseen, painful consequences that undermine the beliefs and hopes associated with a value or that create new situations which threaten to undo the good that has been done in the name of that value, thereby shaking one’s confidence in upholding it. For example, a person who values altruism might have to cope with his or her demoralized reactions to such consequences of an act of generosity as shocking and infuriating ingratitude and envy or relentless and depleting dependence.³

By steering clear of Scheler’s totalistic generalizations about the tragic and tragedy, we avoid getting caught up in age-old debates over the idea of tragedy itself: what is a tragedy or a good tragedy; the necessity of reserving the terms of tragedy for situations involving a great hero or a great fall; the acceptability of a tragedy’s having a happy ending; the possibility of a Christian tragedy; the question of whether a sense of the tragic require a cosmos that includes a god or gods of some sort; the claim that there cannot be a modern tragedy or a tragedy about the suffering of common humanity; and so on. It would be impossible within the confines of this essay even to try to sketch the vast literature on these topics; some general coverage of it can be found in Williams (1966).

I believe that analysts gain an advantage by going along with Raymond Williams and other modern scholars who emphasize that the designation tragedy has been used variously over the centuries and in different contexts, as has the word tragic. These critical thinkers have concluded that tragedy should not be treated as set once and for all by the great Greek and Shakespearean plays or as a self-defining entity the true nature of which we can only debate—endlessly. The key terms of tragic discourse being no more and no less than words, names, or phrases over which we can remain master, we remain free to use tragic in the sense that helps develop a potentially useful view of a realm of subject matter.

Nor would it be to the point in this essay for me to engage the vast literature on the broad topic of values. The term values will be used here in its popular sense as taking in, with no aim at precision, that which is desired, aimed at, hoped for, and held up as an ideal. To proceed this way in the context of this essay with its special focus does not seem incompatible with ordinary psychoanalytic discourse. An introduction to some major aspects of these complex matters will be found in Hartman’s discussion of moral values (1960).

Some important questions hang over my invoking the idea of tragic knots. What is their relation to the interpretation and working through of conflict, most of all within the analytic relationship? Is the idea of irreconcilable conflict already adequate to the purpose? Does the concept tragic contribute to recognizing those moments when applying the analytic method may not be appropriate? Is it useful in coping the ambiguities that always accompany termination of analysis.

To avoid basing my argument simply on flat assertions, I must take up, even if only briefly, a number of major topics; the continuity of my winding way forward will, I hope, become increasingly clear to you.

Next, I will present the broad context within which I will consider in some detail three major but diverse realms of life experience. That context is how I construe Freud’s final conception of the reality principle as an inclusive analytic attitude toward the unavoidable and seemingly insoluble dilemmas of life. These dilemmas are not adequately expressed by the idea of the ordinary miseries of life. The three illustrative and diverse realms of life experience I have chosen are coping with having been victimized, approaching intimacy with others, and maintaining privacy.

The reality principle

My use of the concept tragic knots has its place in the reality principle as described and largely implied in Freud’s monumental essay “Civilization and its Discontents” (1929). In the past, I, like many other readers, understood this essay to be expressing a gloomy, if not pessimistic, outlook on contemporary Western civilization and its inhabitants. Now, however, I read it as a primarily positive demonstration of what in 1929 were recent advances in clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis.

True, Freud was arguing convincingly that the virtual ubiquity of neurotic suffering and interaction testifies to the great emotional costs of modern life. True, too, that others have made a good case for regarding the grim aspects of Freud’s overview as having been heavily reinforced by his well-documented, troubled personal history: losses of loved ones, professional and cultural disillusionments, and painful and life-threatening physical symptoms. But a reading too slanted toward the essay’s presumably personal, expressive aspect fails to recognize that Freud was actively engaged in synthesizing and exploring further implications of the significant theoretical and clinical contributions he had added to his psychoanalytic oeuvre during the period that extends from World War 1 through the nineteen twenties.

To mention only some of these outstanding and certainly familiar contributions: the psychology of loss, depression, and mourning (1917b); a vastly consequential dual instinct theory (1920); situating the individual in the social order in a way that promotes understanding of affiliative tendencies, identifications, and ideals (1921); also, a new structural-functional conception of the human mind that advances and integrates interpretation of genital and pregenital dynamics, unconscious guilt and need for punishment, and the role of internalization in perpetuating both personal ties and cultural traditions (1923a); There is still more from that period: a better account of attaining gender identity and the consequences of this development (1923b, 1924, 1925); then, a full treatment of the continuing sense of danger situations emanating from the internal world (1926), and finally an illuminating set of infancy-oriented formulations concerning humankind’s sense of its small, helpless, frightened place in the vast universe and its resulting readiness to generate and maintain soothing illusory beliefs about providential realities (1928).

Freud never failed to strike a balance between emphasizing civilization’s darker aspects and its achievements and rewards. Nothing could diminish his profound appreciation of civilization’s cultural and scientific accomplishments. Not only do these benefits offset the high emotional costs of civilized life, in large part they derive from or are enriched by them. That darkness and enlightenment are tied together inextricably does not call for gloom and doom; nor does it call for inertia. For Freud, this entanglement challenges one’s fidelity to the reality principle, that is, one’s steadfastly facing squarely, actively, and adaptively the limitations and dilemmas that pervade existence. Freud’s essay on civilization includes his response to that challenge.

In his early systematic writings on reality, Freud maintained sharp distinctions between internal and external reality. So it seems, for example, in his 1911 essay on the two principles of mental functioning. Soon, however, he began to introduce propositions with a more modern cast, that is, propositions that did not favor binary distinctions. Thus, his 1915 emphasis on the timelessness and omnipresence of unconscious mental processes bestowed formal recognition on what had long been presupposed in clinical work, namely, a blurred distinction between past and present (1915d). The distinction between self and object, also taken to be blurred in clinical work, received formal recognition in Freud’s emphasis, in his 1915 paper on the vicissitudes of instincts (1915b), on the infant’s use of splitting and projection to establish and maintain the purified pleasure ego, and again in his emphasis in his 1917 essay on mourning and melancholia (1917b), on incorporative identification. And so on through his subsequent essays, most notably those on group psychology (1921) and on the ego and the id (1923a).

And so, by 1929, Freud had paved much of the way toward establishing for psychoanalysis a modern conception of reality and humankind’s place in it. To progress further in this direction Freud had to reformulate his earlier (1911) general perspective on development in, and adaptation to, external reality. The sharp division between internal and external that he had presupposed at that early time would no longer do.

In his 1929 essay, Freud’s thinking was moving still further beyond the either/or mode that sharply separates subject and object and now and then. As mentioned, he was edging further away from his leaning toward hard-edged binary propositions. Being consistently psychoanalytic meant remaining programmatically inclusive, as for example in not requiring choices between the originary primacy of external trauma and present unconscious fantasy. More and more, both/and was replacing either/or.

By advancing this far, Freud had secured for himself and other analysts a clinical position from which they could define and study the interpenetration of the dilemmas presented by life in society and unconscious fantasy. Now that far-reaching inclusiveness had become the order of the day, truth telling—always a guiding value— had become more complex and demanding. The scope and tone of this change is nowhere more evident than in Freud’s 1937 majestic work, “Analysis terminable and interminable,” a work he published not too many years after his essay on civilization.¹

Conceptual advances of this sort inevitably implied changes in perception and method. Analysts confronted fresh ambiguities, limits, and opportunities in their work. To develop this point, I will now move on to the three areas of life experience I mentioned earlier.

Coping with having been victimized

Recently, many analytic writers have focused their attention on the intrapsychic consequences of victimization. They have dealt extensively with effects of sexual and other abuse, and of terror and sudden loss: how they disrupt the capacity for personal growth and attachment to others, and, clinically, how these and other effects shape and limit the transference and thus the entire course of analysis. I will discuss two sequelae of victimization: first, the guilt that so often, if not inevitably, follows on the heels of victimization along with the need to make reparation, and second, the rageful wish for revenge. Both sequelae are tragically knotted.

Guilt. Dispassionate analytic work with patients who, from early on, have been abused by blows, insults, sexual exploitation, or neglect invariably highlights the child’s belief that he or she must have caused what has been suffered, must have wanted it, deserved it, didn’t deserve any better, or at least did not do enough to avoid it or successfully fight back. Those who are racked with grief after a painful loss are usually found to be blaming themselves similarly. Adults’ acute reactions to current trauma are likely to have been reinforced not only by their reviving earlier experiences of victimization but also by this subsequent infantile guilt.

Analysts have explained these guilty beliefs as deriving from implicit acknowledgement of concurrent, unconscious, forbidden wishes or fantasies and “deserved” punishment for them; or if not these or in addition to them, as deriving from attachment to “bad objects,” that is, the victim’s depending on and perhaps finding relief and even some pleasure in the experience of exciting contact with an emotionally involved but pain-inducing figure (parent or sibling figure, usually). That contact is felt to be preferable to utter neglect, and the bad object is often idealized as well as hated and feared. Through idealized attachment the victim may be trying to protect this object, sensed or imagined it to be basically fragile and in need of veneration. I will not try to exhaust the list of self-deforming possibilities. In every such instance, the analyst may expect to encounter persistent, often subtle efforts to provoke him or her into enacting or actualizing the abusive relationships of the past; other defenses against relinquishing this mode of relationship also make their appearance.

Here, there is a fertile source of countertransference doubt and distress. So my self-observation and supervisory experience suggest. All of our desires to bring goodness into the analysand’s painful life—a life that analysts might too readily identify with by projecting their own “abused self” into it—renders them excessively sentimental and then impatient or resentful. Analysts crave collaboration in feeling good about their analytic efforts and themselves. After all, psychoanalysis is a helping profession, isn’t it? In part, that’s why we are in it. Well, yes, but first of all it is a psychoanalytic profession, and on that account they are obliged to think analytically and practice containment, and ordinarily we can do so. And anyway, the fact that our well-meant efforts are often rebuffed helps keep in our place (Schafer 2005b).

Thus, a set of tragic knots have been tied in the testing of internal and external reality: knots in representing the self as abused and rageful or attached; in finding and relating to good objects while simultaneously avoiding them; in envisioning a life in real time rather than in repetition while pulling for timelessness; and in being able get through the barriers to collaboration with the analyst, especially collaboration in analyzing the transference. These knots may allow only limited or very, very slow change in the severity, fixity, or depleting effects of victimization.

Revenge. To remain focused on tragic knots, I will not review the recent panel report (Beattie, 2005) on revenge and the paper by LaFarge (2006) beyond saying that both contain many interesting and valuable insights into revenge and anticipate many of the points I will be making. However, insufficient attention has been paid to certain revenge aspects of jealousy, rivalry, rage, and hatred. Common targets of these feelings are offending parents and other family members and their many surrogates. No matter how much family members may be loved, honored, and needed, they are also, in psychic reality, oedipal offenders of the first rank, and are so in more than one “heartless” way. They must be made to suffer in return. Revenge is justified. And so we find it in the oedipal aspects of the transference. Not that the oedipal transference is the only context in which revenge occupies a prominent place.

And if vengefulness can be found in the transference, then at least reactively, if not spontaneously, it will make its countertransference appearance in a well rationalized tendency to even the score; interpretation can be used for this purpose. Recently (2005b), I described how analysands often experience the analyst’s professionally responsible, relatively neutral conduct and benign interpretive efforts as coercive and uncaring; on this basis among others, resentment develops and fuels a vengeful transference—perhaps expressed as spite or paying back in kind (“If you won’t talk, neither will I!” etc.,); or the conscientious analyst might be mocked in a display of malicious envy and ingratitude. In either case, these otherwise understandable responses can at least momentarily, though sometimes enduringly, drain the analyst’s empathic resources and increase his or her desire for payback. The result: entanglement in the knot being analyzed.

Freud did not underestimate the topic of revenge. He gave the talion law a prominent place in his analyses of unco...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PREFACE
• PART I: ON BASIC CONCEPTS
• PART II: THE INTERNAL WORLD OF CONFLICT AND PHANTASY
• PART III: CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF THE ANALYTIC RELATIONSHIP
• REFERENCES
• INDEX