Transcending the Self

An Object Relations Model of Psychoanalytic Therapy

Frank Summers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317771227
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Despite the popularity of object relations theories, these theories are often abstract, with the relation between theory and clinical technique left vague and unclear. Now, in Transcending the Self: An Object Relations Model of Psychoanalytic Therapy, Summers answers the need for an integrative object relations model that can be understood and applied by the clinician in the daily conduct of psychoanalytic therapy.

Drawing on recent infancy research, developmental psychology, and the works of major theorists, including Bollas, Benjamin, Fairbairn, Guntrip, Kohut, and Winnicott, Summers melds diverse object-relational contributions into a coherent viewpoint with broad clinical applications. The object relations model emerges as a distinct amalgam of interpersonal/relational and interpretive perspectives. It is a model that can help patients undertake the most gratifying and treacherous of personality journeys: that aiming at the transcendence of the childhood self. Self-transcendence, in Summers' sense, means moving beyond the profound limitations of early life via the therapeutically mediated creation of a newly meaningful and authentic sense of self.

Following two chapters that present the empirical and theoretical basis of the model, he launches into clinical applications by presenting the concept of therapeutic action that derives from the model. Then, in three successive chapters, he applies the model to patients traditionally conceptualized as borderline, narcissistic, and neurotic. He concludes with a chapter that addresses more broadly the craft of conducting psychoanalytic therapy.

Filled with richly detailed case discussions, Transcending the Self provides practicing clinicians with a powerful demonstration of how psychoanalytic therapy informed by an object relations model can effect radical personality change. It is an outstanding example of integrative theorizing in the service of a real-world therapeutic approach.

Chapter 1

One Case, Three Views

This study is a clinical application of an object relations concept of psychoanalytic therapy. Because the emphasis throughout is on the clinical process, it is fitting to begin the investigation with a case study. My analysis of Dexter provides a clinical basis for introducing this object relations approach by comparing it to two other broad psychoanalytic paradigms, the ego-psychological and the relational. Via this comparison, I hope to show the differences among these three approaches and, ultimately, through the course of this volume, to demonstrate the utility of the object relations framework for the conduct of psychoanalytic therapy.

Dexter entered analysis to resolve two major problems: chronic, destructive verbal battles with his wife and, most important, a chronic history of struggling in his work and underachievement. A third issue that bothered him, although he did not regard it as central, was a recent tendency to have extreme emotional reactions to seemingly trivial events. For example, a coworker recendy brought him coffee, and he found himself tearing up as he thanked her.

The middle of five children with two older sisters and two younger brothers, Dexter grew up in a middle-class suburb. His mother was a homemaker, and his father held a position Dexter described as “the lowest level of management.” His mother often discussed with him her dissatisfaction with the father’s income and lack of education. He entered treatment feeling that he loved and respected both parents, but he had especially fond memories of his mother, including taking walks with her while she devalued various neighbors and friends (they would laugh together at her sarcastic remarks).

In high school, Dexter began to play sports, but he was injured and never returned to them. Until that time, his social circle consisted of other athletes, but, after discontinuing, he felt he did not belong with them and felt more socially isolated. Inexplicably, his academic performance also declined markedly at this point. In college, he developed a pattern of going to school part-time and dropping out frequently until his graduation, which required 10 years. During this period, Dexter was married. At the beginning of the analysis, he continued in the same job he had secured after graduation and was about to begin a part-time program for an advanced degree. His wife had ceased working since the birth of their child about one year before.

Despite his stable employment, Dexter felt that his career was languishing because he had not made any vertical moves and was not fulfilling his potential. He was prone to making careless, forgetful errors, and he was afraid this pattern was hurting his professional growth and ambition and could even jeopardize his job security. Also, although there had been tension throughout the marriage, in recent years and especially since the birth of the child, the couple had been engaged in increasingly explosive verbal battles, typically stimulated by Dexter’s feeling that his wife had been verbally abusive to him. At times, these disputes reached the point that Dexter was fearful he would strike her. On one occasion, he had to drive off the expressway, park the car, and get out because they had become so enraged at each other that he feared for both their safety.

The analysis began with many memories of Dexter’s relationship with his mother, especially discussions alone with her. It became clear that he felt he had a special relationship with her and that she looked to him as the child with the most academic potential. Believing that his mother was beautiful and smart with unfulfilled intellectual ambition, Dexter recalled her frustration and disappointment with his father because of the father’s limited education, lack of success, and limited income. Dexter believed that his mother was dissatisfied with her lot, and, early in the analysis, he realized that he had unconsciously felt the burden of his mother’s unfulfilled ambitions. In recognizing that he had been feeling chosen by her to become successful intellectually and financially (as his father had not), Dexter also became aware of his feeling that he could not please her. He became conscious of a new view of his mother—a view he called the “ice princess.” Unlike his conscious feeling for his mother, this image was of a beautiful, cold, implacable, rigid, and unsatisfiable woman whom he could not please. This realization brought to light his unconscious anger toward his mother for her narcissistic exploitation of him.

Once he became aware of his negative feelings toward his mother, he felt a sense of burdensome guilt. His feeling that she believed in him and his intellectual potential—and her recent death—made the awareness of negative feelings especially guilt invoking. Nonetheless, he could repress neither the anger at her for what he now felt was her exploitation of him nor the negative image that coexisted with the positive.

The realization regarding his mother tended to produce material about his relationship with his father. When he discussed his mother’s dissatisfaction with her husband, he had two reactions to his father. The more conscious response was his empathy for his father, who worked hard to support a wife and five children, only to be the object of his wife’s dissatisfaction. However, his heretofore unconscious feeling was anger at his father for not being more successful and ambitious, a perception that evoked a burdensome sense of guilt. Underneath his conscious feeling of empathy for his father’s situation were his desire to outdo him and his anger at his father for not being more successful. As he became aware of the latter, he realized he was identified unconsciously with his father, a feeling that he was limited intellectually and should not be educationally or financially successful. He was also angry at his father for not confronting his mother. As Dexter became aware that his father’s limitations angered him, he realized that he equated his desire to be successful with his wish to outdo his father. His intense longing to be successful where his father was not was another source of guilt. If he succeeded, he would surpass his father and simultaneously do for his mother what his father could not. In his experience, pleasing his mother put him in direct conflict with his father, and he felt the burdensome guilt of injuring him.

All of this was eventually seen in the transference. He believed that I needed him to be a successful analytic patient, but he also idealized me as a representation of all he wished he were: intellectually, educationally, and financially successful without struggle or conflict. This idealization was decidedly ambivalent: He found himself in frequent, intense, competitive battles with me in which he tended to feel he came out on the “short end.” Continually comparing his intelligence, education, training, and profession with mine, he felt, for example, that whereas he had struggled to achieve a modest education, I had easily completed an advanced degree program. However, in other arenas he claimed “victory”: Believing that I had no children, he felt that, being a father, he was “ahead.”

The intensity of the aggressive competitiveness with me was clearly shown in a dream in which he was riding a tricycle as fast as possible in a race with a figure who was physically similar to me; the analyst-figure unfairly had a better vehicle and was pulling ahead, so Dexter pushed the analyst-figure off the road and over a cliff. This dream provoked Dexter’s angry and competitive feelings toward both his father and me. Dexter’s negative transference had components from both parental relationships. Not only was he reenacting his desire to surpass his father and its attendant anxiety, but also he was becoming aware of his perception of the analyst as an implacably demanding figure whom he desired deeply to satisfy. The analyst had become the ice princess, and his anger at this image was growing.

Dexter’s perception of analytic rigidity and his anger at it became a focal point of the transference. Convinced that nothing he did was good enough for the analyst, Dexter felt that I believed he was neither smart nor articulate enough and that he was not doing the analytic work properly. He was so burdened by these fantasized expectations that, during one session, he slumped deeply into the couch, put his hands over his eyes, and pleaded loudly, “Please leave me alone!” This reaction carried an emotional intensity so powerful that he was shocked into realizing that the burden and criticism he experienced were within him and had led to his perception of the analyst as impossible to please.

During the time he felt burdened by my expectations, Dexter enacted his anger at the analyst-mother ice princess by “forgetting” to do the analytic work. He began to pause rather than free-associate and avoided material in a more sustained way than he had before. He immediately associated these experiences to his careless errors at work and his frequent lapses in concentration; whereas before he had thought his erratic and self-defeating work pattern was solely a repetition of his competitive conflicts with his father, he now saw that it had more to do with his mother’s perceived implacable expectations. His anger at the ice princess being so intense, he sought to defeat her. This anger had two primary components.

1. He believed that no matter how successful he became, the ice princess would never be satisfied. He was enraged at the sense of inadequacy he inevitably felt in conjunction with her expectations and, out of frustration, frequently withdrew into a state of dysfunction. In the analysis, this dynamic manifested itself in the feeling that he was not doing the analytic work properly, would never meet my expectations, and in the subsequent despair that his analysis could never be successful.

2. If he were to become successful, the ice princess would benefit and rob him of any credit. To be successful was to do her bidding and therefore implied submission to her exploitation of him. Similarly, if the analysis were to succeed, I would receive all the credit, and Dexter’s role would be submission to my exploitive need for self-enhancement. To defend himself against such exploitation, Dexter attempted to defeat the analyst by “careless errors” in the analytic work.

For the first time, Dexter became aware of the anxiety of retaliation. At this point, he had a dream of a snake ready to bite his head off, to which he associated memories of his father’s responses to his academic success. When Dexter was a high school sophomore, his father could no longer help him with his mathematics homework, which seemed to upset the father. Dexter’s mother remarked that he had reached a level of education beyond his father’s achievements. He could now trace the precipitous fall in his academic record to this event. His mathematics grades quickly tumbled, and his other grades soon followed. His academic performance never recovered. He realized now that he was afraid he had hurt his father and that he would be in danger of incurring his father’s wrath if he had continued academic success. There was little evidence of the father’s anger but many indications of his withdrawal in response to Dexter’s achievements—a reaction that evoked anxiety in Dexter. For the first time, Dexter saw the depth of his retaliatory anxiety for success.

He was now able to reinterpret his quitting sports in high school—an event he had previously attributed to his injury. Even though the injury ended his sophomore season, he could have played the next year. The reason for his withdrawal from sports now became apparent. He had been a starter on the freshman and sophomore teams, but the next year he would have been on the varsity team, and there was a senior ahead of him. Unable to tolerate being “second-string,” Dexter used the injury to avoid this experience. Despite his guilt over success, he regarded any experience of less than complete success as humiliating. This reaction reflected his unresolved ambivalence toward his father. Less than top performance, which he expected to have in football, was mortifying because he equated it with the shame of “losing” to a man who was devalued by his mother. Further, a less-than-perfect status threatened to confirm and make conscious the unconscious identification with his father that had already made him feel like a failure. Thus, he could tolerate neither success nor failure. His life reflected this ambivalence: He took steps toward success but continually stumbled and injured himself on the way. He wished the analysis to succeed, but he sabotaged the analytic work in an effort to ensure its failure.

At this point, he recalled two frightening, previously repressed adult memories. In the first, he was scuba diving and went down too far, neglecting the amount of oxygen in his tank. He began to feel giddy but was saved by a fellow scuba diver who went down to get him. In the second memory, he was working on a freight elevator when he accidentally raised it and was hanging by his fingers until he was again rescued. He now understood that these occurrences were not accidental, as he had thought, but part of his pattern of injuring and defeating himself, rooted in his excessive guilt over surpassing his father.

Dexter’s success anxiety had roots in his representation of both parents: his mother as the implacable, exploitive ice princess who desired his success for her self-aggrandizement and at whom he was enraged and unable to please and his father as the threatened competitor who would withdraw and retaliate if his achievements were equaled or surpassed. In the transference, he alternated between these positions, and each led to hostility and its enactment in the analysis. However, both parental transference images had two sides. As much as Dexter felt that I sought to exploit him by making him successful, his idealization of me was a way of exploiting me by enhancing his self-esteem via connection with an idealized figure. This awareness led to a new consciousness of the gratification in his mother’s selection of him as the child having the most potential. As angry as he was about her expectations, he felt gratified by the feeling of “specialness,” from which he obtained considerable narcissistic pleasure. It was no different in analysis: Dexter’s perception that I needed his success to bolster my self-esteem gave him to feel that he was a specially favored patient, a feeling that provided a great deal of narcissistic gratification.

The same two-sided relationship applied to the competitive father transference. Not only did he wish to outdo me, he assumed I was equally competitive with him and sought to win “victories” in our interactions. He construed many of my interpretations as efforts to “one-up” him and “put him in his place.” Although he was usually himself as the child (with the analyst the father), in this case the analyst was the patient, and the patient was the threatened father, fearful of being outdone. Both transference constellations were understood as reenactments of the most critical object relationships in Dexter’s personality makeup. The first included the exploiter–exploited poles with the patient enacting either side; the second consisted of “competitor” and “threatened, competed with,” with the patient on either side of this pattern as well. The transference constellations revealed the object relationships Dexter tended to enact in all meaningful interpersonal relationships.

Even after Dexter saw clearly the origins of the critical aspects of the transference in his relationships with both parents, he did not alter these perceptions. He experienced a split between what he knew to be his reenactments of early relationships and his stubborn experience of the analyst in accordance with those early relationships. This resilience in his experience of the analyst constituted the most stubborn barrier to the resolution of his neurosis.

Dexter could see that his attempts to please me and his perception of me as “unpleaseable” and exploitive hid his longing for a close, intimate bond in which the analyst and patient would “really know” each other, which he had believed had occurred between his mother and him. His evaluation of this experience now was that his feeling of specialness to her was not a genuinely close bond but a substitute for an emptiness he felt with her. He had defended against his longing for intimacy with her as he now did with the me: by feeling frustrated with and exploited by an unpleaseable object. As these feelings were interpreted as defenses, he was confronted with the possibility of an intimacy he had never before experienced. Now threatened with that possibility in his relationship with me, he felt disrupted and disorganized.

At this point, Dexter used the same maneuver with me as he had throughout the relationship: He returned to his view that he had a special relationship with me in which he was exploited. In this way, he maintained his anger and remained stuck in the same self-defeating pattern that he had with his mother: He forgot to do the analytic work out of anger at exploitation while experiencing the narcissistic gratification of specialness. Breaking through the old pattern threatened to lead him to a new relationship with me as someone with whom he wished to achieve a closeness he had never before experienced. He resorted to the internalized object relationships of exploitation and specialness that had paralyzed his life and from which he was unable to extricate himself.

Three Perspectives

How are we to understand Dexter’s symptoms and conflicts, and, most important, how are we to comprehend the analytic relationship in which patient and analyst find themselves? Is the analysis stuck, and, if so, what is the way out of the stalemate? These are the critical questions with which the analyst must grapple. Given the plethora of current psychoanalytic theories, there is a variety of viewpoints from which to answer these questions. The theoretical viewpoint set forth in this book is best highlighted not by enumerating a list of theoretical perspectives but by contrasting this viewpoint with the two broad psychoanalytic paradigms between which it falls. Let us look at how analysts from the ego-psychological and relational analytic paradigms would likely attempt to answer these questions and then proceed to address the same issues from an object relations point of view.

The Ego-Psychological Viewpoint

One cannot expect to propose a single formulation with which all ego psychologists would be expected to agree in all particulars. Nonetheless, broadly conceived, it is fair to say that contemporary ego psychology is a psychoanalytic paradigm that views human motivation as a compromise among the competing psychological pressures of drive, defense, anxiety, and guilt (e.g., Brenner, 1979; Wilson, 1995). Thinking in terms of compromise among these competing psychological forces and certain content themes (e.g., the Oedipus complex) is inevitably a centerpiece of any ego-psychological formulation, although its manifestation will vary with the styles of individual clinicians. What follows is a representation of thinking within the ego-psychological paradigm on the understanding and treatment of Dexter, recognizing that details would undoubtedly differ among analysts of this persuasion.

From the viewpoint of classical psychoanalytic theory, Dexter is struggling with conflicts over both libidinal wishes and aggressivity stimulated by the oedipal constellation. The special place he believed he had with his mother constituted an oedipal victory that excited his libidinal wishes, thus exacerbating his anxiety and increasing his burden of guilt. Furthermore, his aggression is inhibited due to the oedipal guilt generated by his wish to outdo his father and take his place with his mother. Although narcissistically gratified by this “victory” over his father, Dexter paid a dear price in the form of excessive anxiety leading to intensified defenses and burdensome guilt. Dexter’s potentially successful life experience to some degree represents this oedipal victory, a fact that evokes anxiety and guilt to the point that he sabotages his chances for success in life in a desperate effort at self-punishment. The lengthy, painful ordeals of his academic struggles, the precipitous decline in his academic performance in high school, and his self-defeating errors at work are all dire efforts to avoid the successful life experience that would symbolize an oedipal victory. Additionally, they are a means of self-punishment for his unacceptable oedipal strivings and aggressive wishes toward his father.

Nonetheless, less than total success is also intolerable to Dexter, a fact seen clearly in his quitting the football team rather than accept being second-string. Unconsciously, being second-string even for one year represents defeat and disappointment in the eyes of his mother. Although such a “defeat” might pacify his guilt, it also creates intolerable narcissistic injury because it promotes an unconscious identification with an inadequate father. Thus, anything less than perfect success symbolizes failing his mother as his father has done and triggers an unconscious identification with the father who was not good enough for his mother. His inability to tolerate anything less than perfect performance and the accompanying exquisite narcissistic sensitivity are rooted, from this viewpoint, in a deep anxiety generated by an unconscious identification with his father.

His ambitions are fueled greatly by the fear that his life is fated to follow in the older man’s footsteps. Failure to be at the top symbo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. One Case, Three Views
• 2. Self and Object
• 3. The Fate of the Buried Self
• 4. Transcending the Self
• 5. Fragile Self, Fused Object
• 6. Defective Self, Protective Object
• 7. Unworthy Self, Bad Object
• 8. Conclusion: The Art of Psychoanalytic Therapy
• References
• Index