Identity, Narcissism, and the Other

Object Relations and their Obstacles

Jean Arundale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367103934
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429914713
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Practitioners of psychoanalysis find three central themes to be recurrent and ubiquitous in every analysis; firstly, issues around identity, the struggle to know the self, to understand the self and to be the self in an authentic way. Intricately entangled with self-identity is the problem of narcissism, essentially viewed as a defensive retreat to a mental state characterized by an unconscious belief in the special value of the self and the diminution of the Other. However, there are a multitude of inherent anxieties involved in close and intimate relationships. As Freud pointed out, even in our most intimate relationships there is an element of hostility. Threats to both the self and other, and various anxieties around libidinal contact, will be examined in this book using case material, and the relationship between these three important themes, identity, narcissism and the other, separate but interconnected, will be explored.

Chapter One
The way to identity: an auspicious method?

Arobust “sense of self” or self-identity is not a given; there are many ways the self can be lost, deformed, split into parts, or falsified. If one is fortunate, a central identity is formed through the vicissitudes of growing up from infancy into adulthood, meeting each stage as it comes, withstanding the developmental challenges and inevitable traumas that occur. Psychoanalytic theory, begun with Freud and developed by Klein, Winnicott, and many others, provides a coherent roadmap of human development, firmly based on a theory of mind, applicable as a method of treatment for a range of disorders, as well as providing an abundant and rich catalogue of difficulties on the journey to an “identity”.

Psychoanalysis is particularly suited to the task of finding or refinding the self and establishing an identity if that has not developed or has been lost, fragmented, or become unreal. Some of the pitfalls in establishing self-identity that will be addressed in the chapters of this book will include battles between conflicting parts of the self, splitting the self into parts, excessive projection of parts of the self into others or introjection of parts of others into the self. There can be a surfeit of identifications, playing out roles assigned by parents, or performing other roles that aren’t authentic. Feeling oneself to be unreal or false, estranged or out of touch with oneself, or disconnected from others, is discomfiting, to say the least.

So what does psychoanalysis have to offer in establishing an identity? In the first instance, it offers a place to reflect on experience and particularly self-experience, a space to focus on internal psychic reality and to discover meaning, a space in the analytic setting and in the analyst’s mind to project and process emotional pain, malaise, or disturbing questions; to understand and to think about oneself; to put words to emotions and to find one’s values and what one believes in, one’s ambitions, and aspirations. In the unconscious are hopes, intentions, and imaginations about the future, in a constant dialectical relationship between the conscious and the unconscious.

The capacity to reflect on experience can be a neglected skill or perhaps never achieved, but it is important. Research by Fonagy et al. (1991) at the Anna Freud Centre has shown how possession of this capacity in childhood, probably but not necessarily fostered by the mother, affords a degree of resilience against the damage of neglect or trauma. The first clinical vignette I will present below is of a man who began analysis having entirely lost the capacity to reflect upon his experience and lacking a sense of who he was.

While philosophers may question whether or not the self can actually be said to exist (see Kirshner, 1991), I maintain that it can, and it is free association, the very activity on which Freud originally based psychoanalysis, that activates and creates a self. Free association is the method of allowing spontaneous utterances of feelings, fantasies, thoughts, and beliefs to arise from moment to moment from areas deeper in the mind than might occur in everyday life. Free association can be difficult to do. It is the business of allowing oneself to say freely and without purpose whatever comes to mind regardless of the sense or nonsense, the relevance or irrelevance of the utterance. It is not as easy as it might seem to speak without filtering. It requires letting go of control and the strict requirements of logic and reason. Some patients characteristically resist giving themselves over to it (Joseph, 2005). Abraham (1919) observed that certain patients, notably narcissists, find it difficult to expend themselves on free associations, to actually put themselves into the process. Requesting the analysand to free associate sets up a tension between his wanting to explore his unconscious and an opposing force that resists knowing. The analyst’s task is to enter the ring, to engage with the patient, to understand and interpret what is going on; the patient’s task is to attempt to be as honest as possible. As he listens to the patient, the analyst practices a special kind of listening, “free-floating attention”, waiting for the unconscious to speak. The analysand may experience anxiety in the face of the unknown, fears of judgement or censure or losing his bearings or losing control, so that his unconscious resistances will need to be worked with and modified. Analytic patients are evasive; they can begin on an associative train and veer off when they sense something ahead that is not to their liking, throwing the analyst off the trail. It is in the subtleties of free association that the unconscious is intimated and its patterns can be discerned. In the analytic dialogue the analyst is trying to meet with the patient’s unconscious, linking with unknown parts of the self, thus working to establish a more authentic and whole sense of self or identity.

As the patient tells the story of his life, together with the ever constant work to overcome resistances to free association and self-reflection, the stage is set upon which the work of analysis is conducted and can deepen. Psychoanalysis, it must be said, is not a method to reconstruct the past in and for itself, to create a narrative and fill in the gaps of memory, as Freud first suggested, but rather a unique method of interaction between patient and analyst in the present time, in the here and now, in which the capacity for emotional contact will be found and developed. A growing focus in the analytic dialogue on what is happening in the room between the patient and analyst allows both to feel more anchored and connected, while also relating to the patient’s everyday life and past history, both of which are present in the background and held in mind. Observing the movements in the patient’s mind and what they mean constitute the analytic work.

Important keys to developing a sense of identity are rooted in unconscious beliefs and phantasies that emerge in the analytic process. Beliefs are ideas that are held to be true until they are examined, held up to scrutiny, judged or tested as true or false, and then kept or discarded. Similarly, fantasies will need to pass the reality test. To clear the mind of outworn beliefs and psychic debris is part of the process. It must be said, a stable, once-and-for-all establishment of a self-identity is clearly a fiction, as the constantly shifting network of associations, emotions, and thoughts, like a kaleidoscope, are context-dependent and are related to the nature of the object relations activated; the self is approximate yet known through an act of recognition or intuition, a perception that “this is me or mine”, integrated in the process of the analytic work. Out of the melange appears the outline of the individual’s unique identity.

The analytic process is formative of identity but inevitably in this process past selves will appear, will interfere and colour the present; the patient’s associations will bring up memories, traumas, or repeating patterns from the past that will need attending to. Processing the spectres of painful experiences and disturbances from the past, as well as being able to value good, helpful experiences, are an important part of the analytic process. In my view, the past exists in the present in the form of the patient’s internal world of objects, the others in one’s life, past or present, alive in the here and now; past experiences with others or past selves appear and animate or haunt the present. Links with the past and the future, where we come from and where we are going, are certainly part of our identity, but only the present time is alive with potentiality for contacting the self. We need to be aware of the past and the future but not to live in them, aware as if through a permeable wall, a window or a partly opened door, with no necessity to enter unless something intrudes, asking for our attention. The present, the here and now, is our workroom where thinking, linking, and associating takes place, connecting with elements of identity and the other.

The analytic process evolves through the medium of the transference, which was Freud’s (1912b) ingenious discovery of the way we relate to others in the present by unconsciously repeating patterns of relationships from the past. Klein termed the transference “memories in feeling”, communicated to the analyst by means of projection, consisting of hidden, unconscious scenarios from the near or distant past, or from the current relationship with the analyst. A paper by the Sandlers (1987) on the present and the past unconscious, interpreted in the relationship to the analyst, is a helpful way of viewing the often chaotic projections and of discriminating the present from the past. Regarding technique, Klein held that before linking with the past or with extra-transference material, first the emotional pattern should be apparent in the present in relation to the analyst. Klein was clear that a complete interpretation consists of linking the transference with the past and with current life in a back-and-forth interplay to reveal the “total situation” (Klein, 1952, p. 54–56).

Mr P

The first clinical material I would like to present is from the opening stages of Mr P’s analysis, as he learned to self-reflect and free associate.

Mr P was a man in his forties who had spent the majority of his life aiming at professional success and achieving a top position in his demanding profession, leaving him too busy to reflect on or pay any attention to himself. Instead he had developed a collection of activities and routines that he carried out in an automatic way to deal with relationships and daily life, and that excluded all but the minimum of his own needs and desires. Centred on pleasing and seeing to the needs of his various family members, his current girlfriend, and his clients at work, submitting to their wishes, he operated principally at an unconscious level. It emerged that he believed, omnipotently, that he was responsible for everyone in his extended family, that only he could look after them, and keep them alive. For example, he spoke to his parents several times a day, sorted out their problems, large and small, and travelled home each weekend to make sure they were all right, while covertly enjoying his mother’s solicitous care. He left to his girlfriend the conduct of their limited social life and free time, while he looked forward to going back to work on Monday to more of his fourteen-hour days. Identifying with a selfless mother, who gave herself over to the needs of the family, and a workaholic father, he had no sense of self and gave no thought to his own individual needs; he was completely spilt between a brilliantly capable work self and a social self that was, as he told me, “emotionally retarded” and out of touch, which I felt in the transference as an absence of emotional connection. Having no notion of what he wanted for himself, other than a vague idea of wanting a family, he focused on what others wanted, so that it was excruciating for him to make decisions of any kind, especially whether or not to marry. His omnipotence had been given a large knock when a family member became seriously ill and he could do nothing to help, and he had retreated to bed with an overpowering depression in the months before contacting me.

Mr P took to free association readily and felt surprise when his self-reflections showed he was out of touch with himself and had no idea of who he was or what he felt or wanted. He felt shocked by this. He recalled a time in his childhood when this was not the case, when he had had a sturdy sense of who he was, could have fun, even, at times, be naughty and not so compliant. As he began to speak of his feelings, I could see what a very sensitive man he was, so vulnerable to being hurt that he had withdrawn from emotional contact with women after his first girlfriend of three months at university had left him. He had been heartbroken and had shut off from his emotions, and he did not allow himself to feel deeply or to fall in love with any of his subsequent girlfriends. He went through the motions but didn’t really let them in, and he had never lived with a woman. Not having noticed before starting analysis that there was anything very awry in him, Mr P became aware that he was observing himself from a distance, as if outside himself. He illustrated this by noting that when he awoke in the morning he found himself saying, “Someone is getting up,” or thinking, “Someone is hungry.” He was shocked to see that he had become a spectator to his own life, not a participant.

In the analytic relationship, his attempts to please me were immediately apparent and I interpreted this to him, along with examining with him what he actually felt about each association that he brought up. As he got more in touch with his feelings, he began to see that he felt no pleasure in his life; it was as if he had given up on himself. He soon became aware of a consistent underlying anger that plagued him. He asked himself: Why was he always doing things he did not enjoy or want to do? Why did he feel he constantly had to please others? In the transference, I pointed out the sense I had that he came to sessions to please and to look after me, instead of focusing on himself. As I began to speak about his needs and his belief that he didn’t have a right to a life of his own, he began to wonder about lost parts of himself and what he wanted; he made space to think about what his spontaneous feelings might be, inside and outside the sessions. He said, “I don’t want to be told what to do like all my girlfriends have done in the past; I’ve always gone along with things. If I could say ‘no’ I wouldn’t be so worried about the future.” He was sure he wanted to have children but the thought of marriage, which was what all his girlfriends had wanted and his present girlfriend was pressurising him to do, put him into a quandary about what he felt, terrified of making a mistake and marrying the wrong woman. This was a central, conscious conflict that had brought him into analysis but was only the tip of the iceberg of his unconscious beliefs and patterns.

Mr P’s compliant transference, brought into play as a repetition of past relationships, entailed agreeing with whatever I said and telling me what he thought I wanted to hear, which I pointed out frequently. As I said how he found it hard say “no” to me when he didn’t agree, how it appeared that he was afraid I would become annoyed with him if he dissented from my views, he began to question his automatic compliance with my views or his girlfriends’ plans (a situation that quite suited her) and to think about his own needs and desires and how they might be negotiated. He told me, “I put too much weight on what others think and I lack belief in my own judgement, so I must think about myself and just get on and do things.” As I reflected on his neglect of himself, he said, “I don’t know why I haven’t thought of these things before. I have avoided knowing who I am all my life, avoiding anything diffi-cult, putting things off.” I understood that the passivity he displayed in his emotional life, which was linked to how he avoided making choices and tended to procrastinate, was due to his lack of a firm identity and the capacity to reflect on experience.

In one session Mr P told me, “Suddenly I had an image of what I wanted to do and I texted ten friends I haven’t seen for years to ask to meet for a drink, and booked five of them.” He was delighted at how much he enjoyed seeing them. He began to look forward to weekends; to slow down from his usual frenetic pace and take walks around London. He decided with difficulty, wrestling with many pros and cons, to go with colleagues to a conference on the Continent instead of following his girlfriend’s wishes, as usual, and was amazed at what a good time he had. He took his girlfriend to the opera, negotiating the choice with her for the first time, beginning to speak up for himself instead of retreating into passivity.

Through encountering himself and his analyst, Mr P began to see himself differently; he had begun to question his fixed position and incorporate a new view of himself, my thoughts of him. He appeared to enjoy the process of self-reflection, of finding himself and different aspects of his identity, re-finding his emotions, his needs and desires. However, my attempts to connect with him in the transference at this early stage were deflected or denied as he kept his distance. An example of this was my interpretation that he, while valuing my comments, kept himself apart and ignored my presence, as if I were a function not a person. This led me to believe his compliance was superficial and a case in point of the way he dealt with others: keeping them separate and apart while he got on with his own purposes. This reflected the way in which he split off his emotional life from his professional work, keeping his emotional life barren and going his own way in conducting his rich professional life. This, and other moments when he would brush off my comments summarily, wanting to be in charge of the work, showed me the arrogant and omnipotent aspects of his identity that he hid from himself as much as anyone else.

As I attempted to take up what he felt towards me, and particularly aspects of negative transference, he would respond with varieties of idealisation, such as: “Oh, I think you’re great. You’re wonderful. I used to pour scorn on therapy; I was against coming and only got in touch with you two years after I got your contact details, when I was in extremis. Therapy has been mind-expanding; it doesn’t give solutions but gives the wish to find one’s own. It’s not rocket science but it is something intriguingly clever.” This showed to me that idealisation of his object was linked to his ideal self, the two of us doing something clever together, echoing his idealised relationship with his adored, clever, perfect mother who met his every need. No woman could measure up to her and he was startled when he realised he was waiting to meet a woman like his mother before he could marry. In idealising his mother, all of his aggression was split off and expressed in his highly charged career; however, signs of anger towards his mother began to appear as he could see her part in clinging to him and keeping him a child, in her harsh punishments when he was little, and in her ferociously aggressive arguments with his father that frightened and disturbed him, putting him off marriage. Accompanying awareness of his anger was a great amount of anxiety around possibly hurting her or displeasing her, the adored mother he so ardently protected.

Anxiety and aggression

Crucial to being human is the capacity to deal with anxiety, not to simply get rid of it by repression or splitting and projection, and a crucial function of the analytic process is to enable patients to bear, contain, understand, and modify their anxiety. Klein (1932) believed that dealing with anxiety was the greatest task in the development of the child, never fully achieved, and she maintained that the main purpose in analysis was to focus on and interpret the greatest anxiety, the “point of urgency”, at any given moment. When the patient’s very worst fears are put into words, it is felt they can be faced, appraised as to their reality, and understood. This serves to bring attention to and to “resolve a certain quantity” of anxiety (Klein, 1932, p. 51), from the past, present, or future, including anxiety arising due to the analytic situation itself. Klein demonstrated how the sojourn of conscious and unconscious anxieties as they pass through the mind of the psychoanalyst calms and restores the patient on the journey to identity.

Mr P’s greatest anxiety was that his parents would die: he hadn’t accepted that this was inevitably going to happen at some point, a fact of life. This and the other sources of his anxiety, the frightened child, the angry son unable to marry, the descent from omnipotence into helplessness and retreat to bed, were uncontained and overwhelming to him. Entering analysis, Mr P found the containment he needed to be able to think about his anxiety and himself. Containment is Bion’s (1962) concept based on the mother/infant model that plays a vital role in psychoanalysis, the way in which the mother takes in, holds in mind, and modifies the “nameless dread” projected by the infant, returning it in a less toxic form. Bion’s m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE The way to identity: an auspicious method?
• CHAPTER TWO Otherness and the other
• CHAPTER THREE Narcissism and unconscious phantasy
• CHAPTER FOUR From omnipotence to ordinary potency and identity
• CHAPTER FIVE Non-consummation: a narcissistic organisation
• CHAPTER SIX The other as alien: psychic atopia
• CHAPTER SEVEN Sexuality in psychoanalysis
• CHAPTER EIGHT Negative therapeutic reaction re-examined
• CHAPTER NINE Symbol formation and dreams: the art of Odilon Redon
• CHAPTER TEN Dreams as access to the primal scene
• CHAPTER ELEVEN Arrested development: notes on a case of paedophilia
• REFERENCES
• INDEX