The Psychodynamic Image

John D. Sutherland on Self in Society

Jill Savege Scharff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317724155
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Psychodynamic Image is the first selection of John D. Sutherland's major papers. It provides an overview of the development of his thought on self and society and reveals the extent of his contribution to the field of mental health.

Jill Savege Scharff introduces Sutherland's most important and influential essays. These reflect his range as a theoretician, moving easily from the intrapsychic to the interpersonal level, building bridges between points of view and integrating psychoanalytic and social theories. Sutherland's work calls for changes at the individual level through understanding conflicts and unconscious processes as aspects of parts of the self in interaction. He inspires respect and understanding of the self and its drive toward autonomy.

These papers push the boundaries of psychoanalytic thinking and succeed in demonstrating the relevance of psychoanalysis to the wider society. They will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors and social workers.

Chapter 1

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Becoming and being a person

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Editor's introduction

In this lively discursive piece, adapted from a lecture, Sutherland shows the breadth and depth of his thinking but the weight of what he is saying is lightened by his easy delivery, his personal sense of conviction, and his typical Scottish humor. He admits to his total preoccupation with developing a theory of the self, and looks beyond the pluralism of psychoanalytic theories emphasizing instinctual energy and individual psychic structure, to consider the impact of society on the developing mind. He thinks of instinct as an obvious necessity, and attachment as a precondition, for the development of the loving relationships that are essential to the creation of the self. Drawing from ethology, evolutionary biology, and holograms, Sutherland makes the case that this self operates in an open system, responding to feedback within the social context, adapting in the light of experience, and looking to find its shape and maintain its wholeness. The self is separate from others but communicates with them to express will, find identity, make choices, share values, and commit to long-range goals for the common good.

In recent years, I have got rather obsessed with the problem of the self because of what I feel to be the clamorous need for a new paradigm in psychoanalytic theory. So I've chosen as the title for my theme: On Becoming and Being a Person. The agency of human motivation and conduct is the self, and we've got to understand more and more about its nature, its origin, and its functioning.

One of the unfortunate features of psychoanalysis is the awful subservience to the tablets the master brought down from the mountain. Nobody dares say anything that would criticize Freud – he was regarded as the last word. I think it's terribly unfortunate that there isn't more openness. I believe, and many have remarked, that classical metapsychology has failed to do justice to the essential personal quality of the individual in its account of human nature. Moreover, I believe that it is the failure to give an acceptable theoretical basis for the personal level of behavior that has created the most prominent feature of the current psychotherapeutic scene, namely, a pluralism in theory and practice, with consequent confusion and uncertainty in those trying to appraise its various claims. This development has been of concern to analysts in recent years. They've become concerned lest their work and its importance for society become discredited.

Some years ago the president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, Dr. Robert Wallerstein (1988), entitled his presidential address “One Psychoanalysis or Many?” – in which he provided a masterly survey of this aspect of the current scene. There, Wallerstein considers the anomaly of very different theoretical ideas being associated with comparable practice by analysts remaining within one professional body, the International Psychoanalytic Association. So they must feel that there is something common that keeps them and holds them together, and that can be recognized and evaluated. The anomaly of this situation, with different theor-etical ideas associated with comparable practice, led him to put forward some ideas based on thoughts from Joseph and Ann-Marie Sandler. In the early history of analysis, challenges to his theoretical principles led Freud to exclude the prominent dissidents from the psychoanalytic movement, because their views were associated with clinical work that abandoned what he deemed to be the essential core of psychoanalysis. Yet, in Freud's view, any line of investigation that recognized the two facets of psychoanalysis, namely transference and resistance, and took them as the starting point of its work, even though it arrived at results other than his own, had a right to call itself psychoanalysis.

That was fair enough. Proceeding from his own metapsychological principles, Freud formulated his structural theory of the personality, which brought a period of outstandingly productive cohesion. As in all scientific work, developments inevitably exposed theoretical limitations, and in psychoanalysis these were plainly in the understanding of the ego. Anna Freud, followed by Hoffman and his colleagues, in a surge of fresh thinking, filled out a conspicuous gap in the structural theory with her creation of the psychology of the ego and so, in some measure, introduced a more holistic view of the person. Preserving much of Freud's metapsychology nevertheless, this line of thought was widely adopted as part of what has become known, certainly in the United States, as the mainstream development of Freud's work.

A different fate befell the work of Melanie Klein, despite her repeated emphasis that it, too, was evolved directly from Freud's theory of the instincts, especially his later concept of the death instinct. Her findings proved so disturbing that there were early reactions to them as not falling within the scope of psychoanalysis. Thus, the suspicion arose that inclusion within the analytic field was to be determined by theoretical conformity to Freud, rather than by the careful appraisal of new data, even though these were gleaned by the psychoanalytic method.

Now, the impact of Fairbairn's papers, published during and immediately after the War, was minimal, and this disregard has continued increasingly in the United Kingdom, though progressively less so in the United States. It's particularly striking that it was Fairbairn who introduced the term object-relations theory to describe views that challenged Freud's theory of the instincts radically. Many factors contributed to the neglect of his contribution, despite the fact that he was a devoted and highly sophisticated adherent to psychoanalysis as Freud had wished it to be. Indeed, it was soon after his first paper appeared that the term he introduced for his views – namely, an object-relations theory – was being used widely, for example, to cover the work of Balint and Winnicott as well. The views of Klein, who in her earlier writings stressed the importance of the influence of relationship, were also regarded as coming within the object-relations theory category. For myself, I believe the neglect of Fairbairn has been a serious loss in the development of psychoanalysis because of overlooking the closer links his views made with the person, links that he felt strongly were required.

Let me return to Wallerstein's address. He suggested that the anomaly of these different views being associated with acceptable practice could be resolved in large measure by the adoption of the Sandlers' suggestion that we distinguish a present unconscious from a past unconscious (Sandler and Sandler 1984). The present unconscious includes the derivatives of the past unconscious that are closer to experience, for example, the mechanism of defense. We deal with the past unconscious when we deal with the infant that is hidden by the infantile amnesia within the person. The nature of the past unconscious is inferred from its perpetual intrusion in fantasy and transference in the analytic situation. The Sandlers point out that the understanding we gain about this part of the personality rests on creative acts of reconstruction. They make the further suggestion that in fashioning a general theory of infantile development, the different accounts are couched in metaphors, rather than in the real realities. When a metaphor captures enough realities, then dynamically similar factors can follow from very different metaphors.

Wallerstein is somewhat pessimistic about achieving a widely acceptable general theory of development because the true factors lie too far beyond the realm of empirical study and scientific progress. He grants that this position will change, but he is not optimistic about achievement in the near future. The use of metaphors, Wallerstein reminds us, is common in all scientific endeavor at certain states, when they are virtually indispensable, but the great danger they introduce, especially in the human sciences, is that the metaphorical factors all too readily become regarded as realities. When they're felt to fit aptly and closely with the phenomena, they gain a powerful grip, both from their heuristic value and from unconscious sources.

Now, when confronted with the growing mass of new clinical data, along with the fact that modern evolutionary biology has advanced understanding to a point where the Newtonian principles of the science of Freud's day can no longer be regarded as a tenable foundation for comprehending the phenomena of living organisms, then Freud's metaphoric base for the understanding of human nature and motivation must be reappraised, despite the extraordinary tenacity with which the id metaphor has persisted. In his last contribution, “An Outline of Psychoanalysis,” Freud (1937) opens his chapter on the instincts with the statement that the power of the id expresses the true purpose of the individual organism's life, namely, to satisfy its innate needs arising from the force of the instincts.

The Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1987 started from Freud's paper, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937). Exemplifying the tenacity of the id metaphor, André Green (1987), the French analyst, in his paper at this conference, expresses the view that it is Freud's concept of the instinctual nature of the unconscious that has given rise to significant reservations, both in regard to the specific instincts postulated and their mode of functioning. Yet there is a great reluctance to face up to this issue. When he lists some of the alternatives proposed, he selects, first, those who radically reject the concept of instinct in favor of the theory based on object relations. He then names primarily Fairbairn and Guntrip.

It seems to me that Green's way of putting things is totally misleading. Fairbairn regards instinctive endowment as an obvious necessity in accounting for development. What Fairbairn rejects is Freud's concept of the instincts as somatic energies that, in his phrase, give the ego a kick in the pants to get on with some activity, as a means of arousing action to discharge tension, rather than as an innate potential motivating an organism to seek relations. The subsequent proactive transactions between organism and environment – that is, between the infant and mother primarily – give rise to the dynamic structures required for the organization of experience. They, thus, constitute the embryonic ego; for no learning can take place without such structures being involved from the very start. The arguments of nature versus nurture, of instinct theory versus object relations, to me are thus largely irrelevant, as is also the adversarial relationship between society and the individual stressed by Freud. Instinctive endowment only becomes identifiable through its realization in the object relations it meets and seeks.

The viewpoint of modern evolutionary biology is radically different from the science available to Freud. In his day in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the organism was described from a paradigm taken from mechanistic engineering in which the preservation of the structure is of foremost concern. The primary concern is how it maintains its equilibrium as a basic condition for achieving this, and the answer is found in homeostasis as the cybernetic mechanism. In the mid-twentieth century, in the theory of open systems for conceptualizing every living organism, the dynamic phenomena of development and maintenance of life are conceived as permanent processes in which positive feedback is characteristic – not negative feedback, but positive feedback – that is, not coming back to the previous equilibrium, but breaking out of the boundaries of that to evolve new structures. From the original state of wholeness and order within the innate components that initiate the appropriate transactions with the environment, the organism undergoes self-adaptation in a self-organizing whole, which preserves its identity, despite constant transformation. Such living systems cannot be built up from the aggregation of parts, but start from their living progenitors. Each organism contains an organizing principle that determines the potential shape of the adult organism.

I found myself many years ago using the idea that the organism's innate potential has some shape and characteristic activity. Activity, which is the constant motivation of the organism, ensures that it reaches outward until it meets in the environment something that fits the shape. Two sources support my view of the organism reaching toward a shape: Tustin's book on autistic children and the theory of holograms. Frances Tustin (1972) describes the dreadful, tragic situation of children who have failed to make a relationship with the mother or caring figures, and so fail to develop a self. It's very striking that these autistic children have an intense interest in shapes, and circles appeal to them greatly, perhaps because a circle signifies a mother figure. Holograms within the central nervous system demonstrate that shapes of the holistic form of the organ and of the structure can be contained in a potential form that permeates the whole structure. So my old idea of the potential having shape is not such a fanciful notion after all. Indeed the whole mind/body problem has changed radically since the days when Freud tied his theory to the prevailing science of chemistry and physiology.

Evolutionary biology

Development within an organism, which is an open system necessarily, demands an autonomous urge to maintain this wholeness of the shape; otherwise, the organism dies. A threat to the autonomy of the organism is tantamount to a threat from a lethal predator. To survive it has to assert itself autonomously at all times with varying degrees of force, up to the point of maximum ferocity. Paradoxically, its resources for doing so, however, have to be developed – and to an increasing extent as we ascend the evolutionary scale – from its relatedness with the adults. The organism's life becomes the dynamic process of preserving its autonomy within the heteronomy of relatedness with its social group and the psychical environment.

In summary, the first principle to start with and grasp firmly is that the living organism has this inherent shape and that it is an open system. It grows with organizing principles forming its interactions with the environment and transforming these into the shapes needed so that the adult form of the organism is reached. Resources for achieving this potential have to be developed.

It's characteristic that, as we go up the evolutionary scale, the innate potential has more and more plasticity, more of a potential, rather than an inherited specific pattern. And the potential to reach adult development has to be realized within the framework of relationships with adults. The lower down the evolutionary scale we go, the more the behavioral patterns that mediate survival are ready-made. The tadpole can get off, swim away, and feed itself, and so on. It doesn't need a great deal of support from the adults. Dinosaurs are said to have done something similar, and recent evidence rather suggests that adult dinosaurs did do more than just protect the young. They could communicate to the young how to anticipate dangerous situations of a non-manifest kind.

Based on the findings of human evolution, I conclude that the innate potential has to be highly complex and plastic because the human organism has become a social animal and its survival takes place only within social groups. In the lower levels of the evolutionary scale, the cohesion in the group is fairly largely concerned with protection, and so the group is tied together by attachment to the dominant male. In the human group things are very different. It seems here that to provide for the plasticity the human race requires to exploit the environment – and, indeed, as evolution has gone on, the capacity to make our environment – we need very different resources.

The evolutionary value of a social approach to human development is evident; for a human group, a social group that got established in a certain environment, naturally needs its young to grow up with knowledge of and familiarity with the features of that environment. There is an immense need for communication, and so capacities for thought develop, with the associated requirement for language. The relatedness of the individual is increasing in depth, as well as extent, all the time.

Freud's method of reaching his views about the instincts was to make inferences from the neuroses of individuals; and, hence, sex and aggression were taken to be the dominant drives in man. But human nature was thus conceived as derived from forces internal to the organism, rather than through creative structuring from the interaction of a plastic potential with the environment. From experience of encounters with the environment, the ego was created on the surface of the id, as Freud originally put it, although he later saw that id and ego could not be differentiated in the earliest stages of development. With greater importance attached to the role of the environment and to the importance of aggression, investigators find that the instincts appear to be much more complex and holistic – not so much a matter of ethologically proscribed behavior, but striving towards and reaching an end state, rather than following specific behaviors. I doubt whether any valid generalizations about instincts can be made from clinical data, simply because the history of the environmental influence upon indi-viduals is completely unknown.

All embryologists, when starting their work, prepare themselves with a thorough knowledge of the adult or the mature organism to which development is headed. So if, rather than looking at the individual as Freud did, we take the view of ethologists looking at what happens in species, then we ask what are the behavioral characteristics that large groups of animals have in common. If these can be shown to be relatively free from environmental influence, then they are not the products of training, and presumably we are dealing with innate potentials that underwrite those broad clustered features of behavior. It's only when you've got a population to study that you can eliminate the specific features of individual experience.

Yankelovich and Barrett, two notable philosophers, one a social scientist as well, in their book Ego and Instinct (1970), a remarkable critique of the basic principles of psychoanalysis, took such social studies as were available – namely, those of Cantril (1955), the social psychologist – of more than a dozen utterly different cultures, and they asked what were the common features of people in the groups. Rather than seeing individuals whose motivation is founded on instinctive forces of a totally impersonal kind driving the organism to seek pleasure, they found from the study of the social group quite a different collection of patterns that lead to a different theory of human motivation. What Yankelovich and Barrett found in all thirteen cultures were characteristically human features that go beyond individual requirements, as follows: the quest for satisfying the needs for food, shelter, territorial security and for an individual security, and the procreation security for the future; a need for order, certainty and form to give assurance that experience could be repeated; a need beyond adaptation to the environment by a search for new experiences and a hunger for knowledge; the capacity to make choices, the freedom to do so, and the responsibility for acting upon the decision made.

Yankelovich and Barrett go on to enumerate other characteristic features of humans: a need to feel their own security and identity, and to have it maintained within the culture – that is, to be valued by others; the hope that the future of society ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Biographies
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Becoming and being a person
• 2 The conceptual model
• 3 British object relations: Balint, Winnicott, Fairbairn, Guntrip
• 4 Advances in understanding small groups
• 5 Treatment in the postindustrial society
• 6 The self: a challenge to psychoanalysis
• 7 The self and personal relations
• 8 The psychodynamic image of man
• 9 The autonomous self
• References
• Index