Independent Psychoanalysis Today

Paul Williams, John Keane, Sira Dermen, Paul Williams, John Keane, Sira Dermen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429914836
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Independent Psychoanalysis Today is a book that shows how contemporary Independent psychoanalysts think and work. There are three themes to the book: Independent thinking including the theory of technique; exploration of clinical concepts and demonstrations of ways of working by some of the most prominent Independent clinicians practicing today; finally, the evolution and enduring impact of Independent ideas and the influence of past Independents on present ways of working.

Part I
Orientations

CHAPTER ONE
Reflections on the evolution of Independent psychoanalytic thought

John Keene

Many psychoanalysts outside and inside the UK have been puzzled, if not frustrated, at the failure of the Middle Group, later the Independents, to function as a group or school in the way that the Kleinians have been seen to have done. In contrast, in spite of the effort of Gregorio Kohon (1986) and Eric Rayner (1991)¹ to put the Independent approach together in their books, the Independent Group can appear diffuse and unco-ordinated. This quality of the “group” can really only be understood in relation to the political processes which led to its formation and which have frequently drawn attention away from the Independents’ key role in the development of the object relations approach in psychoanalysis which was pioneered by Balint, Winnicott, and Fairbairn in a prolonged dialogue with Klein’s and her followers’ technical and theoretical innovations. I suggest that the domain of Independent thinking is better defined as the elaboration of an underdeveloped assumption in Freud’s theorising which seriously overestimated the capacity of average maternal care to satisfy an infant’s needs. This line of exploration was largely pioneered in Europe by the Hungarians, led by Ferenczi, and by their counterparts in the British Psychoanalytical Society, who were eventually largely concentrated in the Independent Group. I believe it is helpful to set out the organisational political context in which the group’s theoretical thinking developed, because philosophical and organisational issues at times were as important as the theoretical stances which were taken up by most members of the group.

Politics, history, and ideas

I see the particular ambience of the Independents as following from the role that those who became Independents played in the history of psychoanalysis in the UK. This has left them operating more as an association of fellow travellers rather than a tightly knit “school”. The Middle Group, which changed its name to “The Group of Independent Psychoanalysts” in the 1960s, was the container for two groups of people whose interests and grounds for becoming Independents derived from distinct preoccupations, often, but not necessarily, overlapping. The first motivation can be designated broadly as political. Psychoanalysis in the UK developed with the benefit of Ernest Jones’ powerful personal connection to Freud. However, London, in its island kingdom off the European mainland, was sufficiently far away from the heartland of psychoanalysis to pursue its own interests without undue concern for the questions of orthodoxy that preoccupied the continental societies. For this reason, Jones felt Mrs Klein would have an easier time in Britain. From her arrival in 1926, a lively debate about her ideas took place between those who regarded themselves as her followers and those who were merely interested in working out how far her ideas could be incorporated into their own work and thinking. This debate about the validity of her theoretical and technical innovations was gradually complicated by anxieties about influence, patronage, and dominance in the British Psychoanalytical Society that focused on Klein and her followers, anxieties that were exacerbated by the lack of democratic structures in the society. An atmosphere of suspicion and rancour grew, powerfully fuelled by the animosity towards Klein of her daughter, Melitta Schmideberg, and Melitta’s analyst, Edward Glover. Outside the society, the doubts of Viennese colleagues increased about the compatibility of Klein’s and Freud’s ideas. These two concerns became acute with the arrival in London of Anna Freud and her father and a number of European colleagues in 1939. Anna Freud objected to her students of psychoanalysis being taught theory and technique that differed significantly from her father’s views. The emotionally heated “Controversial Discussions” which resulted, and took place in London between 1941 and 1945, started as a three-cornered debate between staunchly pro-Klein and anti-Klein members with a third “non-aligned” group who approached Klein’s work with a questioning and analytical stance (in the ordinary sense of the word). The three-sided nature of the discussions did not last until the end of the series of meetings, as Anna Freud and her supporters mostly withdrew to Hampstead, while Edward Glover, who had wished to follow Ernest Jones as president, resigned from the society.

This left the later discussions more or less to the Kleinians and the interested remainder of the society, who were then referred to as the “Middle Group”, as had been the case before relationships within the society turned rancorous. This remainder included Sylvia Payne, who was elected President rather than Glover, and formulated the “Gentleman’s Agreement”. This would have been better called the Ladies’ Agreement, as it was concluded between Payne, Klein, and Anna Freud, and it kept the British Psychoanalytical Society in one piece by devising a two-stream structure for training within the Society. This allowed Anna Freud to control what was taught to her students on her alternative training, which was known as the “B” Course. Its graduates were, for a long time, referred to as the “B groupers” before most identified themselves as “Contemporary Freudians”. The original course became the “A” Course and continued as before, being taught by a mixture of Kleinians and the remainder, generally called the “Middle Group”. This middle group, under Payne, led the democratisation of the society with the introduction of regular elections for key posts within the society. These revolutionised the previously autocratic, if not tyrannical, actions of the presidents of the society.

Alongside Payne throughout the discussions were Marjorie Brierley and Ella Sharpe. Lesser contributions to the discussions were made by analysts who would come to prominence in the post-war period, John Bowlby, Ronald Fairbairn, and Donald Winnicott. These were not regarded by Klein as members of her group, and a process began in which the Kleinians became more and more clearly separated out from the remainder.

A separate political reality lay behind a further wave of recruits to the Independents. The wish to remain free of the partisan and controlling nature of the Klein and Freud groups as organisations and distaste for their groups’ often dismissive attitude towards others was a powerful reason for some influential Kleinians to opt for the intellectual freedom of the Middle/Independent group. Here, there was no “party line” as to what theoretical or technical approaches were acceptable. By the middle 1950s the “A” course was more sharply delineated into a “Klein Group” and the “Middle Group” remainder. This was made emphatic by Paula Heimann’s leaving the Klein Group for the Middle Group, as John Rickman and Thomas Hayley had done. Heimann’s departure was most significant as she had been such a key player in the exposition of Klein’s views in the Controversial Discussions. She proposed the name change to the Independent Group, although the ambiguous character of the group remained unresolved. By that, I mean that the people who became Independents for reasons of aversion to the unpleasant behaviour of the polarised groups had varying degrees of overlap with those who remained outside the Klein and Anna Freud camps, mainly on the basis of their theoretical preoccupations.

Key lines of development in independent thinking

Some commentators, such as Rayner (1991), have put great emphasis on the above antiauthoritarian, antihierarchical stance and the freedom to use ideas that are found to have value from whatever source (the essence of the scientific method, of course) as a defining characteristic of the Independent Group, along with its commitment to democratic procedures. Rayner sees the Independents as combining the best features of romanticism and empiricism in European thought. It is, therefore, not possible to pick a single individual as the defining figure or leader of the group. Even Winnicott, who is an emblematic figure of the group, and was quintessentially an Independent from a theoretical point of view, was never actually a member of it, since he eschewed groups in every guise and would not accept membership of even a group of “Independent” psychoanalysts.

I think that such philosophical and attitudinal characteristics, important as they are, are not the most crucial definers of the Independent tradition, and frequently divert attention away from the group’s contribution to the development of object relations theory and its technical consequences. In this, it is more productive to concentrate on the interrelated clinical and theoretical issues that have been extensively pursued by workers in the Independent tradition. These are highly interwoven and need to be approached from a variety of angles. They emerge from a particular set of tensions within Freud’s own contributions and with the way that theory and practice were evolving between 1910 and 1939. Freud himself embraced two contrasting stances in his work. On the one hand, he never lost the reductionist approach of the Project for a Scientific Psychology (Freud, 1895), with its wish to furnish a psychology that is a natural science with psychical states represented as quantifiably determinate states of specifiable material particles. On the other hand, his clinical and theoretical writing is so acute and preoccupied with explicating nuances of meaning and emotion.² Freud’s ambition would have been realised much more easily had he been working later, when the contributions of general systems theory and communications theory would have been available to him. The tension is expressed in a number of competing dualities within psychoanalytic thinking: cause and instinct as contrasted with meaning and affect; internal vs. external sources of anxiety and trauma; the derivation of psychic structure from the instincts or from object relationships. Freud’s thinking was constrained by his lifelong belief that he needed to provide an account of development, conflict, and psychopathology derived from a fundamentally dualistic opposition of two biologically based groups of instincts.³ In this period, there is a move to much greater emphasis on the processes involved in both the psychological development of the individual and in psychoanalytic treatment, as against the early stage of describing and delineating novel unconscious content. Similarly, while quantitive considerations remain of great theoretical interest, it is the centrality of affect in organising mental life and the need for defences against unbearable feelings that become predominant. In the same period, while Freud’s theorising contains essentially internal—”one body”—accounts of behaviour within the individual, the increasing attention to interaction, process, and communication moves the theoretical and technical focus on to aspects of the relationships within which the defences are formed and development takes place. The move to thinking more explicitly in terms of interaction and conscious and unconscious communication in the impact of one psyche on another also helped to develop a better account of instincts and drives. The shift from Freud’s “one-person psychology” to a two and multi-person psychology of interaction can be attributed particularly to the Hungarians. With their interest in ethology and observational studies of the earliest relationships and behaviours of infant humans and other primates, they drove the change towards the study of process in relationships and in psychoanalysis and a more interactive model of earliest developments than the standard model of the time.

From the viewpoint of the development of British psychoanalytic thinking, it is notable that Klein had her first analysis with Ferenczi, who encouraged her to work with children. Later, Jones felt that her work would flourish better in the growing psychoanalytic culture in London, so that both Klein’s devotees and her generally enthusiastic questioners had similar interests. The English analytic scene was enlivened from the start by its association with the Bloomsbury Group and the assumption that a medical training was not an inevitable prerequisite to becoming an analyst. Thus, the intellectual milieu included those with interests and training in the arts, education, psychology, literature, and philosophy, and these disciplines contributed, as Rayner pointed out (1991), to the approaches taken to the analytic endeavour, both theoretically and technically.

I suggest that the most illuminating and unifying of the threads in the Independent tradition, which can seem diffuse, is afforded by Ferenczi’s and Winnicott’s responses to Freud’s (1911b) “Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning”. This sketch of the infant’s need to shift from the “pleasure principle” to the “reality principle” rapidly prompted Ferenczi to describe in detail how this shift might be achieved. Ferenczi’s 1913 paper, “Stages in the development of a sense of reality”, provides a properly interactional account of the stages the infant passes through as it develops its ways of getting its needs met from its first encounter with people in its post-natal world to adulthood. Unsurprisingly, but slightly paradoxically, it is Winnicott, the rejecter of groups, who points to what I regard as the heart of the Independent tradition in his 1960a paper, “The theory of the parent-infant relationship”. In the main text of Freud’s 1911b paper, Freud suggests that the baby starts out by hallucinating the satisfaction of his desires without having to concern himself with the demands of reality. Only in a footnote does Freud acknowledge that no infant could survive on this basis. Freud argues that the employment of a fiction like this, which he calls “the pleasure principle”, is justified “when one considers that the infant – provided one includes with it the care it receives from its mother – does almost realise a psychical system of this kind” (pp. 219–220). Winnicott knew from his extensive knowledge of mothers and babies, gained through his work as a paediatrician, how many things could ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• PART I: ORIENTATIONS
• PART II: INTERVENTIONS
• INDEX